The Sleeping Sword (28 page)

‘Of course it is.'

Light and quick in all her movements, she got up from the window-seat and slipped her narrow hand into mine.

‘Dearest, I am so sorry. Naturally I should have sent a message to Tarn Edge first of all, I suppose. But I did not. She cannot have heard, unless Mrs. Agbrigg—which seems unlikely.'

‘But she
must
have heard. Gervase will have let her know.'

‘Gervase?'

‘Of course. He went to the mill this morning and must have arrived in time to— he may even have gone by Tarn Edge, surely? And his father, or Gideon—or Mrs. Winch—'

And as my voice trailed off into those damnable, ridiculous tears, my mother-in-law looked, for just a moment, as if she might weep with me.

‘He did go to the mill, didn't he, Mrs. Barforth?'

‘Oh, my dear, he may have done. That is what he
said
. Grace, if it eases you to cry, there is no shame, you know—no shame at all. I will not look, and I will never tell.'

I slept for perhaps an hour, waking to a late afternoon sky black with rain, a wind, risen from the moor, howling in cold anger about the roof tiles. Mrs. Barforth was not there, my maid, Sally, sitting alone as close to the fire as she could, and for a long time I lay without speaking, staring at the small mullioned window and the desolate prospect it offered me of dark sky and naked, wind-raked trees.

I was alive and would apparently remain so. My personal danger was over, and with its passing there was now room inside me for the despair I had so far held at bay, the terrible realization that what had oozed so painfully out of me yesterday afternoon and evening had been a human life, an individual, unrepeatable being, deprived by me of the future.

Gervase might well blame himself for the distress he had caused me. I might blame him too. But I—who had known of my condition as he had not—had taken no care of it. I had attended the Listonby ball and had stayed up half the night, my body clamouring for rest, in order to demonstrate to Gervase that he had not succeeded in making me jealous. I had followed him here the next day in that bitter wind, enduring those bone-shaking miles, for the same reason. I had obeyed the demands of my pride and my self-respect, and in so doing had violated the most basic and most profound instinct of the bearing female. I had failed to protect my child. And grief for that child so overwhelmed me that I turned my face into the pillow and sobbed helplessly, dreadfully, releasing now the tears I had suppressed from all the other griefs of my life.

But my maid Sally was accustomed to finding me rational and calm, and had so little idea of how to manage me in this extremity that her alarm in itself restored my composure.

‘Oh, my!' she said, round-eyed with fright, ‘and Mrs. Barforth not here—'

‘Where is she, Sally?'

‘Oh—gone to Tarn Edge for Miss Venetia—or Mrs. Chard, as I suppose we must call her, although it never sounds right.'

‘Sally. She has gone to Tarn Edge
herself
—in this weather?'

‘So she has, ma'am, the weather being the cause of it, since nobody else could handle her horses in a storm, or should be asked to. That's what she said, ma'am. She'll be back before nightfall although its been night all day today, I reckon. Chicken broth she said you were to have for dinner. Shall I fetch it, ma'am?'

I heard the storm break half an hour later, a great crack of thunder that shook the lamps and set the candles flickering, and then a great lashing of rain as if some floodgate had been opened directly above us.

‘Here it comes, ma'am.' And there it was, the lightning flash that could induce panic in horses far less nervous and flighty than my mother-in-law's, the wind, the blinding rain, the pitch dark, the rutted, pock-marked roads. I had not liked her and had believed she disliked me. Perhaps she did. But it no longer mattered. She had seen my need, had understood that Gervase had not supplied it, and so, recklessly but quite suddenly, she had gone herself. I was terrified for her, proud of her, more than ever ashamed of my tears.

She would—or so I hoped—have reached Tarn Edge before the storm. Naturally she would not set out again but would spend the night there and return with Venetia in the morning. Even if she was foolhardy enough—magnificent enough—to make the attempt tonight, neither Mr. Barforth nor Gideon would allow it. And knowing full well that both mother and daughter were magnificent enough—mad enough—I prayed that my father-in-law had indeed been there to prevent them, straining my ears at the same time for the sound of their carriage.

‘She is gone in the cabriolet, ma'am.'

Dear God! such a light, flimsy equipage, a young man's carriage stripped down for sport and speed.

‘They are saying in the kitchen, ma'am, that there is a tree struck by lightning on the Cullingford road—quite blocking the way, ma'am.'

‘They seem very well informed, in the kitchen.'

‘And if the river rises, ma'am, as it usually does, there will be no way to get across and every chance of her wheels bogged down in the mud.'

‘Sally, I don't really care to know what the kitchenmaids are saying.'

‘Will you take chicken broth, ma'am?'

‘Yes—and I would like anybody who is able-bodied in that kitchen to go out with lanterns to make sure she is not bogged down by the river.'

But there was no need for it. I heard the horses, the burst of welcoming laughter, the gruff voice of her groom trying to hide his thankfulness, those tears again—which I had determined to control—welling up behind my eyelids as the door flew open and the room came alive with the exuberance of Venetia, soaked to the skin and frozen to the marrow, but glowing once again with the simple, joyful excitement of being alive.

‘Darling, I am too wet to kiss you, for there is no sense in coming all this way just to give you pneumonia—and how lovely you look! That
must
be the wrong thing to say, but it is quite true. Oh dear, Grace—how terrible! How sad! The poor little baby! But I have come to cheer you, not depress you. Thank goodness father was not home from the mill when mamma came to tell me—nor Gideon. Well, now that I am here they may be angry with me for coming through the storm, but I am
here
and they can hardly fetch me back again. I shall stay, of course, until you are well.'

And, knowing the answer, I did not ask her when she had last seen Gervase.

There were more visitors the next few days than Galton had seen in years, my father the most frequent among them, although his visits were less satisfactory than I had hoped. My mother had miscarried, I remembered, several times before my birth and several times after, undermining her health in her determination to give him the son he had not particularly desired, and it troubled him so much to see me like this that he could hardly contain his distress. Yet, since Jonas Agbrigg had believed all his life in the rigid control of emotion, he did contain it, permitting himself to do no more than press my hand and say quite tonelessly: ‘There is no hurry, you know. You are still young enough, and for my part I cannot subscribe to the theory that a woman's worth is measured by her fertility. And as to this instinct of maternal devotion we hear so much about, I imagine a woman may lavish that kind of thing equally well on a dog.'

And because I knew he was really saying ‘I love you, Grace. For my sake, don't put yourself in danger again', I smiled and murmured ‘Yes, papa.'

Aunt Faith came often; Uncle Blaize, pleading the excuse of business, although in truth he was ill at ease at Galton, which was, after all, his brother's house, sent me out-of-season flowers obtained, I knew, at great effort and expense. Grandmamma Elinor, being in the South or France, was not informed, but my grandmother Agbrigg sent me pages of good advice, while my grandfather, the Mayor, came himself from Scarborough and spent a day at my bedside, entertaining me in his broad, West Riding accents with reminiscences of his younger days. Mrs. Agbrigg, whose visit I had not welcomed, came once, assured herself with her usual, smooth efficiency that everything was being properly done and thereafter, with unexpected tact, allowed my father to come alone, sending with him some nourishing and invariably delicious concoction she had made herself. Blanche came, accompanied by both Dominic and Noel, although her husband, who was easily bored, soon rode off on business of his own, leaving his brother—his natural second in command—to take Blanche home.

Aunt Caroline and her husband spent an hour with me, the Duchess jollying me along, telling me, in effect, to take my disappointment like a man; the Duke, with embarrassed kindliness, wishing me better luck next time. Mr. Nicholas Barforth looked in and instructed me in the curt tones which made his managers tremble to take care of myself. I felt surrounded by friendship and affection and was grateful—once again with those absurd tears—that my welfare should be of concern to so many. I ate up my broth, drank my chocolate and the red wine my mother-in-law insisted was good for me, and promised them all—when they required it of me—that I would get well.

Gervase, of course, came too, but contrived adroitly never to be alone with me for very long. I never learned where he had spent the day of the storm, except that it was neither at the mill nor at the Flood's, as became clear when they called to pay me their respects. He offered no explanations. I did not enquire, which was in itself a sure sign of danger and decay. Once—just a week or so ago—when I had believed he loved me and needed me, when there had been trust between us, I would have demanded to know his exact whereabouts and expected a quick and convincing answer. But now, when the trust had gone, I did not ask. For now—until I was stronger—I could not risk the truth. I was still too weak to quarrel, too weak to make demands or decisions and it seemed safer—while the weakness lasted—just to be polite.

I got out of bed after five days or so and into a chair, a feat considered unworthy of admiration by my village doctor, who informed me that a peasant woman or a mill woman would have been back in the fields or at her loom long ago. But soon graduated to the parlour sofa and almost immediately became available to the ministrations, the sympathy, the curiosity of Cullingford's ladies—Miss Mandelbaum, Miss Tighe, Mrs. Sheldon and the rest—who had felt unable to visit me while I remained upstairs. And, when all this feminine gentility began to cloy, there was Liam Adair, dividing his attention so neatly between Venetia and myself that not even the lady's husband—had he condescended to notice it—could have complained.

Liam had not, of course, grown prosperous, his flirtation with the
Cullingford Star
satisfying his instincts as an adventurer and winning him a certain notoriety which he frankly enjoyed, but by no means filling his pockets. The
Star
, for all his efforts, remained a shoddy and irregular publication, its continued existence depending largely on money borrowed from my Grandmamma Elinor, Liam having made the journey to the villa she shared with Lady Verity Barforth near Cannes on purpose to acquire her championship of his cause.

‘I coax what I can out of her,' he frankly confessed, ‘and she enjoys it. Better me, I reckon, than the casino or that black-eyed violin player she had about her the last time I was there. And when I printed that piece about the houses her first husband built being unfit for pigs to live in, she near died laughing. In fact she offered to put her own name to it to give it an extra dash of spice. I tell you—she enjoys it.'

I believed him, for if the air he brought into my sickroom was not precisely fresh, being too heavily laced with tobacco and Irish whisky for that, it was at least bracing and had a far greater chance of stimulating my still-flagging energies than Miss Fielding's gentle committees for the relief of the not-too-wicked poor, Mrs. Rawnsley's obsession with her neighbours'social and sexual peccadilloes, even Miss Tighe's oft-repeated conviction that the vote should only be given to women of property and militant virginity like herself.

Liam Adair was not much interested in the Prince of Wales's visit to India nor in the recent atrocities in far off Bulgaria, being more concerned with atrocities in the poorer areas of Cullingford, in those dingy streets and verminous dwellings which had made my Grandmamma Elinor's first husband his fortune. The Turkish empire, no doubt,
was
crumbling. The Russians, equally without doubt,
would
take advantage of it to strengthen their position—and weaken ours—in the East unless we sent a few timely gunboats to prevent it. But Liam, nonchalantly dismissing those gunboats as something designed to please the readers of the
Courier & Review
, was far more impressed by the astuteness of our admittedly very astute Prime Minister Mr. Disraeli in purchasing, before the ruin of the Turkish empire came about, a majority shareholding—177,000 shares out of 400,000—in the Suez Canal company, thus ensuring without bloodshed our passage to India no matter which empire—Turkish, Russian or British—should gain effective control of Egypt.

‘I believe Mr. Disraeli to have great influence with the Queen,' murmured Miss Fielding, who was uncomfortable with share manipulations but perfectly at ease with royal widows. And indeed the artful Mr. Disraeli appeared to show the same skill at coaxing the Queen little by little from her seclusion as Liam himself when it came to increasing his allowance from Grandmamma Elinor, although there were few in Liberal Cullingford with a good word to say for this exotic, imaginative Tory whose greatest claim on the affections of Liam Adair lay in his legislation to control the purity of our daily bread and of the butter with which—if we could afford it—it was spread.

The practice of increasing the bulk, improving the appearance or simply reducing the price of foodstuffs by the addition of odd and in some cases downright lethal substances was as long-established as the poverty of those who purchased them, and their need to fill the mouths of hungry children with anything that was cheap and could be made to ‘go round'. All my life I had been hearing whispers of brick-dust in cocoa, sand in sugar, flour whitened with chalk, red lead used to colour the rind of cheese. I had heard of brewers who added green vitriol or sulphate of iron to put the froth on their beer and improve, with deadly results, its flavour, while as a child I had been warned never to accept sweets from strangers, since these tempting little confections might well be coloured with copper and lead. One learned to purchase one's tea with care, for the green China variety
could
have been doctored with verdigris, the black Indian variety with black lead. All the world knew that water was frequently added to milk and no one expected a cow-shed to be clean.