Shining Threads (47 page)

His sister stood beside Joss Greenwood, erect, composed and quite, quite still, no sign of tears for her dead brother, though her face was paper-white behind her black veil. Her sister-in-law,
once Kit Chapman who had built the destroyed mill, wept quietly, more, one felt, for the passing of so young a man than in grief, clinging to her husband’s arm, not looking round at the
mourners nor the hundreds of operatives who jostled for a place to watch the burying of the man most of them had known only as their millmaster. The remaining four Chapman mills were closed for the
day in respect for Charlie Greenwood and the press of spinners and weavers was so great that the hillside on which the church stood was black with them.

His niece was impassive. Her eyes stared stonily at the coffin being lowered into the grave as she supported, or so it seemed to those nearest to them, the sad weakness of her husband and
cousin, Drew Greenwood. His behaviour was strange, or perhaps not, when one remembered him as a wild youth. Despite the efforts of his family to persuade him to his proper place in the business, or
so it was said in the valley, ever since his father had made it over to him this young and vigorous man had managed to live as though it had nothing at all to do with him. He had never been near
the factory, now gone, which was his inheritance, since before he and his equally reckless brother had ridden off to the Crimea. Even marriage to his cousin had not steadied him and at the age of
twenty-two he had not, to anyone’s knowledge, done a hand’s turn in his life and by the look of him drooping at the graveside, his hand in that of his beautiful wife, was not likely to
do so in the immediate future.

The mourners had gone and the six adults who remained of Charlie Greenwood’s family sat stiffly about the drawing-room wondering how soon they might, without giving offence, be allowed to
leave: Kit Greenwood eager to return to the comfortable solitude she and her husband shared in the sunshine of Italy, her son to get his wife upstairs and into the private world he and she wove in
their wide double bed and where he felt secure. The graveside had reminded him too sharply of that other one in Scutari, dark and silent and menacing. He needed sweet-scented flesh, pliant and
warm, soft-hued with life, the feel of silk and the smell of sensuality to reassure him that he was not dead, and only with Tessa could he find that.

Jenny and Laurel sat side by side on the pale velvet of the sofa, the stark black of their mourning quite shocking against its soft prettiness. For once they were united in their stunned grief,
not exactly leaning on one another but both conscious of the sympathy they shared. If she were honest Laurel would admit, only to herself, mind, that her sorrow was strongly laced with the fear of
what was to happen to Laurel Greenwood without Charlie to ease the awkward path she trod. What would be her position now in this house where she had been mistress for so long? She could hardly
picture her flighty cousin, Mrs Drew Greenwood, wanting to take over but at the same time could she, Charlie’s widow, continue as what would now be, with Charlie gone, no more than
housekeeper in Mrs Drew Greenwood’s home?

Kit clicked her tongue disapprovingly as her husband asked the question she had been dreading. Though she might be his mother, she was not blind to the . . . well, shortcomings was a mild way of
putting it, of her only son and there was certain to be discord which would only serve to distress Joss Greenwood further. Jenny was fifty-six now – or was it fifty-seven? – and how
much longer could she go on, particularly without Charlie? Kit felt she no longer cared. The mills which had once been her whole life could go to the devil, just as long as Joss took no harm from
it. Let them get on with it, Drew and Tessa, and run the damn place into the ground. All she wanted was for the few years she and her beloved husband had left to be peaceful.

‘Son, you will take Charlie’s place now?’ his father asked, but it was more of a command than a question, his manner saying quite plainly that, this time, there was really
nothing else for it and Drew Greenwood might as well make up his mind to it.

Tessa closed her eyes and waited. She could feel her husband’s hands clench over hers and his whole body seemed poised ready for flight. Already the day had placed a great strain on his
slender reserve of stability, surely his father could see that? She herself was only too well aware that someone must run the business but surely he knew after all these years that it would never
be Drew Greenwood? Never! They had been married for two years almost and in that time she had faced and learnt to accept what he was. Could not they? Providing no one obliged him to do anything
other than what he did so well and easily, which was to be a country gentleman with thought for nothing but the care of his guns and horses, the cut of his jacket and the paying of his gambling
debts, which he did quite without effort now, he would remain the pleasant, engaging husband she loved. But force him, if it were possible which she doubted, into the mill, and he would simply be
unable to face it.

‘Tessa . . .’

‘Yes, darling?’

‘I am . . . do you not think . . . there is something . . . the stables . . . ?’

‘Of course, sweetheart.’ She turned and kissed him on the cheek, just as one might a large child who has asked politely to be excused from adult company. ‘I know Percy wants to
check with you on the condition of your new hunter. But don’t be too long for your mother and father are to catch the train to London shortly.’

‘No indeed. Excuse me, Mother, Father, Laurel, Aunt Jenny.’ He smiled endearingly, his manners exquisite as he stood up. ‘I shan’t be but half an hour. This damned hunter
of mine has developed a cough and I said I would look in to see how he is. At the price one is forced to pay for a decent mount, one cannot afford to neglect it.’

There was a great and sorrowful silence when he had gone as the three who were most concerned contemplated, finally, the awful consequences of the Crimean War on the surviving son of the family.
This was the heir; the one who, as was proper, would take up the reins of the business; who should, five years ago, have been compelled with his brother to take up the reins of the business. Tessa
wondered at the naïvety of her aunt and uncle who, for some curious reason, had believed up until this very moment that he would. Could they not have seen, years ago, the weakness in
both
their sons? The lack of tough-fibred tenacity which every millmaster, whatever the size of his concern, needs to make a success of it? Joss Greenwood had had it, though he had
channelled it into another undertaking. His wife, Kit Chapman had had it, refusing, thirty and more years ago to let a man take over and run her business when her father was killed. And in the
veins of their sons had run their blood, the blood of the blunt, outspoken, stout-hearted north-countryman who would fight for his own bit of ground until they buried him in it. Her own mother, no
kin of theirs except by the kinship of love, was the same, and so, sadly, had been Charlie. Now there was only Jenny Harrison left to carry on the great tradition and how was she to do it without
her much-loved brother beside her? She was approaching sixty, a great age for a woman, and the task of rebuilding the mill at Chapmanstown, of organising into some semblance of order the huge
financial commitments, of handling the hundreds of their customers who would now have to look elsewhere for the piece goods and dress goods with which Chapmans had supplied them, the enormous task
of painstakingly putting together what the holocaust of the fire had smashed to pieces must now fall on her shoulders alone.

Jenny Harrison lifted her eyes from the pretty Meissen ornament she had been gravely studying and sighed. Her hollow-eyed face was a pale and dusty grey. Her flaunting mass of short curls was
covered by her black mourning bonnet and she looked extinguished, the guttering flame of the candle of her life gone out at last. She had lost her brother whom she had loved. They had shared so
much, she and Charlie, from the day when as a young boy nearly thirty years ago he had strode out manfully beside her to his place at the mill. He had suffered so much with her, even more than
Joss: the bitter hardships, the hunger, the cold, the brutality of the work he was forced to, the desolation of the ‘afflicted poor’, doing his best despite his tender age to be a man.
Now he was gone. She had lost her son, not only the memory of the merry-faced three-year-old who had been taken from her, but the haunted, hate-filled man he had become, who said he would never
forgive her for what she had done to Tessa, her daughter, and to him, her son. She would live with that memory until she died with no other to soften it. The two men she had loved more than any
other, both gone and, her expression said, she could stand no more.

‘I’ve had enough, Joss,’ she said simply, looking only at him.

‘Jenny?’ Her sister-in-law’s voice was unsteady.

‘You cannot ask it of me, Kit. If he . . .’ she jerked her head in the direction of the door through which Drew had just gone, ‘cannot manage, then you must sell it.’

‘We cannot sell what has been in the family for almost a century, Jenny.’ Kit Greenwood’s voice was anguished, her indifference of a moment ago regarding the mills’
future apparently fled away.

‘Your family, not mine.’

‘Dear God, Jenny . . .’

‘It’s no good, Kit. I’m finished. I can take no more. I want to sit in the sun, as you and Joss do, all day long with no decision to make but which hat to put on or how to fill
the hours from breakfast to bedtime. It’s gone now, lass, the force, or the need, or whatever it was that drove me on. Merciful heavens, I’m fifty-seven. That mill’s had me since
I was a girl and now it’s taken Charlie . . .’

Laurel began to sob broken-heartedly, the thought of her future and that of her children looking more and more bleak with every word Jenny spoke. Dear God, if Jenny went, presumably giving her
share to Tessa, what would happen to them all? To herself whose world was tottering like a house of cards and to her children who were not only to be fatherless, but homeless and forced to manage
on the tiny share she would be entitled to if the other mills were sold?

‘Oh, be quiet, Laurel,’ Jenny said sharply. ‘There’s more than enough for you to set up house somewhere and give your boys a decent education, providing you’re
careful.’

Careful! Laurel sobbed even harder and Kit moved over to her, parting her shoulder carelessly, at the same time keeping an eye on her husband for signs of his distress.

Tessa sat quite still and waited for the blow to fall and when they all turned to look at her, as she knew they would, inside her something shrivelled and died away. She had a life that she
enjoyed with a man she loved and who needed her. There was nothing now that she wished desperately to do except to go on in the same pleasant way with no great joys and, more to the point, no great
heartaches, with her husband and companion, Drew Greenwood. Her heart began to race madly out of control and the palms of her hands became sweat-slicked and yet were icy cold. Nausea rose to her
throat. She knew exactly what they wanted, it was written in three pairs of eyes, since it meant they could all continue to drift through the lives they had chosen for themselves, as she had done
since she was a small child. They were to take her freedom away from her. That was what terrified her. They were about to beg her to do her duty, as women of her class and heritage were bred to do.
They were telling her they were entitled to her consideration. A sacrifice, then, and was she prepared to make it, three faces begged her to tell them. Her mother seemed to care neither one way nor
the other, staring vaguely out of the window as though, now that she had made her stand, she really could not be expected to take any further interest in the outcome.

But could not the mills be sold as Drew had suggested, she beseeched them silently. There must be insurance, a great deal, to be collected for the burned mill. As for the other four, as far as
she knew they were prosperous for had she not heard her mother say time and time again that the demands for higher wages by the spinners and weavers must, if it was at all possible, be met since
trade was great and expanding? Well, then, four thriving mills. Easy to sell, she would have thought, and surely her uncle, or his wife, who was a clever woman with many contacts in the textile
industry, could see to it? There was other property, land in Northumberland she had heard, shares in the railway, in mining and banking which would keep Drew Greenwood in horses and cravats for the
rest of his life, surely.

She said so.

Sorrowfully, they replied, that though this was so Joss Greenwood’s years in politics had not been without a price. The entertaining alone which was needed to keep a Member of Parliament
where he was most likely to be noticed, had whittled away his wife’s inheritance. And then there was the villa in Italy and years ago the enormous cost of knocking down Barker Chapman’s
old property, and building decent cottages in which their operatives might live. The mill at Chapmanstown had cost a pretty penny, expensive machinery, all paid for from the wealth her father had
left Kit Chapman. This house was naturally, unmortgaged, but if the profit from the mills were to dry up . . . well . . .

‘Tessa?’

‘No, please, you cannot ask it of me. Besides, I know nothing of cotton or the commercial world. I wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘We would advise you, dearest . . .’

‘From Italy?’

‘We must try, Tessa. Those mills were built by my grandfather . . .’

‘Your grandfather, Aunt Kit, not mine. You and I are not related, not by blood. The responsibility is not mine, in any case. And then there is Drew. I must be here when he comes home,
always.’

She glared angrily at his desolate mother and father, growing old before her eyes, since they knew only too well now what their son had become. ‘You do understand, don’t you? I would
. . . would willingly help but . . . I am all he has . . .’ Her voice petered out, the sharpness suddenly gone, and about her was the air of a cornered animal. When Briggs entered the
drawing-room, after first knocking discreetly, she jumped quite violently, her nerves frayed and painful, her head aching so dreadfully she could barely see him.