The Clouded Hills Read online

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  Contents

  Brenda Jagger

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Brenda Jagger

  The Clouded Hills

  Brenda Jagger

  Brenda Jagger was writer of historical fiction, best known for her three-part ‘Barforth’family saga.

  Jagger was born in Yorkshire, which was the setting for many of her books including Barforth. The recurring central themes of her work are marriage, womanhood, class, identity, and money in the Victorian Era.

  Her work has been praised for its compelling plots and moving storylines as well as its exacting emotional descriptions. Her later novel A Song Twice Over won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 1986.

  Chapter One

  My grandfather, Samson Barforth, built himself a house on the hill above Lawcroft Fold so that on summer evenings, in the company of the woman who was not my grandmother and not entirely the housekeeper she claimed to be, he could look down on the valley he had made his own. And although a more patriotic Englishman never breathed, he was ready enough to admit that he had made a pretty penny out of Napoleon.

  He had lit a bonfire of thanksgiving, true enough, to celebrate the Duke of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo, but the long French wars, with the constant need for men and for uniforms of good Yorkshire cloth in which to clothe them, had brought prosperity to Barforth looms; and even as he had raised a glass of his best claret to drink the Duke’s health, he would not have been sorry, perhaps, to see hostilities start up again, somewhere else. And when the great Duke had entered Parliament and shown himself opposed to Free Trade my grandfather had put his claret away and said hard things about national heroes who, when the battle was over, could think of nothing to do but uphold laws which would keep the price of bread high.

  ‘They’ve got no place in peacetime, these generals,’ I’d heard him grumble to the woman who was not my grandmother, this shocking Mrs Stevens, half his age and far too pretty for anyone’s good. ‘No place at all. Why should a man suppose that because he knows how to win a battle he knows how to do anything else? Can you tell me that? No, no, of course you can’t. But I can tell you, Mrs Stevens, that if the price of bread goes up again there’ll be hunger in the cities. And I’ve noticed, time and again, that when hunger comes, trouble is never far behind.’

  And because, as everyone at Lawcroft Fold knew, my grandfather was always right, there was hunger – other people’s hunger – through those guarded years of my childhood, men clamouring in our mill yard for higher wages as the price of a loaf continued to rise, and the landlords – encouraged, my father insisted, by the Duke of Wellington and his aristocratic cronies – refusing absolutely to let in the cheap foreign corn that would make everything right.

  ‘Perhaps he doesn’t eat much bread, the great Duke,’ my grandfather snorted, too angry sometimes to be consoled even by the fluid, feline Mrs Stevens. ‘But he grows corn now, I reckon, since we’ve given him a two-hundred-sixty-three-thousand-pound estate to thank him for saving us from the French. So maybe we shouldn’t blame him for feathering his own nest. And what about those gallant redcoats of his, those veterans of Waterloo that he’s pensioned off, coming here with their two pounds in prize money in their pockets, looking for work and grumbling when they can’t get it or aren’t fit for it? What about them, filling my weavers’ heads with their fancy notions of liberty and equality that they learned in France?’

  But as I played quietly in my grandfather’s garden through my warm childhood summers, my sparkling, furcloaked winters, not even the prospect of those hard-eyed veterans hungrily prowling our hills had the power to disturb me, for what could a handful of soldiers do – how could the Duke of Wellington himself hope to prevail against Samson Barforth?

  My grandfather had been a merchant in his young days, travelling to Lincolnshire with a string of packhorses for the sheep shearing, choosing his wool with care to suit the requirements of the worsted trade, driving a hard bargain, and then coming home again through the deserted Pennine ranges to distribute his stock. First he would go to the combers, who would draw out the long fibres into the creamy coils necessary for worsted yarn; then to the spinners and weavers, working, each man at his own loom, each woman at her own spinning wheel, in their cottages. And, since he was a man who could always see where money was to be made, I suppose it struck him early on that instead of merely carrying the wool and taking his commission, it would be more profitable to retain ownership of it himself, through all its processes, and employ the less enterprising cottagers to weave it for wages.

  A hard life, certainly, with much of it spent in the saddle, since it took four spinners in those days to keep one weaver occupied with yarn, and the villages were not grouped companionably together but scattered in hostile, desolate places, stony tracks breaking off suddenly before outcroppings of rock, identical stretches of moorland and steep, faceless hillsides, where a man could wander, lost, for days on end and an injured man might never be found at all. A solitary life, too, both for him and for my grandmother, who could not accompany him on his rough journeyings, and since she knew quite well that many of the village girls were bold and bonny, and that travelling men were not famous for their ability to resist temptation, it may have been partly for her sake that he paused one day at the place called Lawcroft Fold to consider the old corn mill and the fast-flowing stream that refreshed the valley bottom.

  He had noted the dampness of the grey moorland air, the grey-peaked hills that tore the rain clouds apart – a guarantee that no waterwheel, in this barren land, need ever be still – and laying down his packs and calling his horses to a final halt, he had purchased the entire property: the mill and the millhouse, the land and the water rights that went with it; he had swept out the dust of the miller’s last lean years and transformed himself into that new species of employer, a man who demanded that his wo
rkpeople should come to him – not he to them – at a given hour and should remain until they had his permission to leave.

  The hills around Lawcroft Fold – bare, brown uplands, waterlogged in winter, wind-raked at all seasons – were still alive in those years with a close-fisted, independent breed of men who lived hard and perhaps not too long but who lived as they pleased and had no mind to make changes. They had their handlooms and their spinning wheels, a weekly piece of cloth to be woven as and when it suited them and carted away every Friday to the Piece Hall in Cullingford and offered for sale. They had an acre or so of land apiece, on which to keep a pig and a cow and to grow such crops as could survive the raw northern air and the poor soil. To men like these, who took orders and wages from no one, my grandfather as an employer was not welcome. But perhaps, being as thrifty of emotion as of everything else, they only began to hate him when he introduced into the valley, with great secrecy and some danger, a number of the new machines which, by spinning an eventual eighty threads at a time instead of one, were destined to be the assassin of the spinning wheel.

  My grandfather had brought in soldiers to preside at the installation of his machines, while men with hammers in their hands had prowled outside his gates, determined to smash the fiendish inventions that would deprive their women – the spinsters – of work. There were many among them who saw the new spinning frames as a threat not only to earnings but to family life, since a woman who is anchored all day to her wheel, in her own house place, surrounded by her children, has neither the time nor the opportunity for mischief. But let her be idle or send her to a man like Samson Barforth who would put money into her hands, then neither husband nor child could ever know real peace of mind again.

  Everyone had heard about the gangs of women employed in the coal mines, strapping, brawling creatures beyond any man’s control, crawling half naked down the tunnels with a candle in their mouths and a chain between their legs, dragging a coal cart behind them, in the company of men who were not their husbands: the Law Valley was unwilling to expose its own women to such misery and such temptation.

  Samson Barforth was stoned one night as he rode across Cullingford Moor. His windows were broken. He was shunned by the local gentry, who resented his use of the river water to drive his mill wheel to the detriment of their own ornamental fountains; he was shunned, too, by the inhabitants of Cullingford, the nearby market town, who from self-interest and snobbishness followed wherever the gentry led. But my grandfather, being a Barforth, knew that right was on his side, and he experienced no difficulty whatsoever in overlooking abuse and even assault when there was a profit to be made.

  ‘They’ll soon see reason,’ I could imagine him saying to my grandmother, in the days before Mrs Stevens. ‘They can’t beat progress, and they can’t beat me.’ And so it was, for the weavers, momentarily encouraged by the abundance of mill-spun yarn which kept their own looms occupied, were slow to notice the expansion of my grandfather’s business, his use of the surplus yam to weave pieces of his own, so that quite soon he was able to describe himself not only as a spinner but as a full-scale manufacturer of worsted cloth. By the time it was realized that his pieces, being as good as anyone else’s but more plentiful and in more regular supply, had attracted the best customers, and that he had no yarn to spare, it was too late.

  The old corn mill grew and gave birth to other, sounder structures. A solid, stone house was built for my grandmother – an uncompromising, square-cut pile with a door firmly in the middle, two windows on either side of it, two windows above, and a stone-flagged kitchen, where my grandmother baked her own bread, trussed her own chickens, made soap and candles, and bullied her maids, and where my grandfather added up his accounts and learned to call himself a rich man.

  Labour, of course, was always scarce, for no Law Valley man would willingly submit himself to the prison of factory life, and so my grandfather, looking further afield, began to construct rows of cottages around the mill yard: identical two-roomed boxes soon filled by the mass of agricultural labourers who, driven off the southern farmlands by the loss of their free pasture, were drifting rootlessly North, and by the perpetually starving Irish, who would take any man’s wages. And when all else failed, it was always possible to strike a bargain with some parish priest or other who, only too glad to empty his poorhouse, would send pauper children by the cartload from as much as two hundred miles away – little abandoned mites too young, some of them, to remember their parents or their proper names, bound as apprentices for a term of fourteen years, boys and girls alike, at the end of which time my grandfather would give them a decent suit of clothes or a good gown and, if they had done well, employment as a free operative in his thriving enterprise.

  A long, low dwelling was built to accommodate them, right in the mill yard itself, and when Parliament, at the instigation of Robert Peel, himself the son of a calico printer, decreed that such apprentices should be taught their letters and numbers and a little religion, and that boys and girls should sleep separately and no more than two to a bed, my grandfather obeyed the law, as many others did not, by dividing his apprentice house in two, building a school and hiring a schoolmaster, whose duty it was – my grandfather being of the Methodist persuasion when he could be persuaded at all – to walk the children the weekly five miles to the Church of England the law had specified.

  My grandmother, a giantess of my childhood, her stern, well-creased face always surrounded by oddly contrasting butterfly caps of lace and satin ribbon, did her duty strictly by these parish children – valuing, no doubt, their contribution to her ever-increasing comfort – and saw to it that they had an abundance of hot oatmeal twice every day to sustain them through the boom times, when their labour was often required from five o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night. And, her favourite colour being blue, she dressed them identically for church on Sundays: dark blue gowns for the girls, dark blue jackets and cord trousers for the boys – even the schoolmaster, in a good blue coat – all of which must be removed on their return from divine worship, since Sunday was often a convenient day for the cleaning of machines.

  There were masters, of course, who were less gentle. There had always been tales in the valley of beating and strappings, of infants savagely mauled by the machines or by an overseer’s spite, of men who, when their businesses failed, drove their apprentices to the middle of some lonely moor and turned them loose like a litter of unwanted pups to fend for themselves. But my grandmother had always been indignant of such goings-on, my grandfather scornful.

  ‘Bad business,’ I’d heard him say. ‘Any fool can see that. Treat them right and they’ll work. Treat them wrong and they’ll run away, and then you’ll have to spend time and money catching them or fetching a fresh lot to take their place. And these parish priests drive a hard bargain. Bad business.’

  Even when my grandmother died – furious because she had let it be known she wasn’t ready and hated to be defied – there had been the sloe-eyed Mrs Stevens to call a doctor to a sick or injured child and to make sure that the ‘brats’ overseer’ was a man of Christian principle and not too rough. But the day of the parish apprentice was over now, for, since the steam engine had been tamed to take the place of the waterwheel and the mills were no longer tied to the banks of rivers, and since fresh famine in Ireland had brought yet another flood of hungry, hardy workers to our shore, the once pleasant town of Cullingford had spread like a giant weed garden, new streets of low, already grimy houses rushing outward to meet the fast-growing ring of factory gates, the black-belching stacks of prosperous factory chimneys; and there were free children in plenty to fill our sheds, kept in order and kept awake by their own hardhanded mothers. The ministrations of the Barforth ladies were no longer required, and although this new breed of factory children seemed smaller and paler than the ones we had fed and housed ourselves – living, as they did, in those mean streets where no Act of Parliament could compel their mothers to put them no more than tw
o to a bed or to teach them to be Christians – there were, at least, more of them, and the work was done just the same.

  Mrs Stevens gave her mind now to her pickles and preserves, my mother to her embroidery, and by the time I was sixteen, with Waterloo already far behind us, I was too secure, too convinced of Barforth right and might to be greatly concerned that once again there were soldiers in our mill yard, doing little, it seemed, but lounging and laughing and ogling the maids, but ready, at my grandfather’s command, to defend the installation of yet more machines, the new power looms that would force the last hand weaver from the freedom of his cottage workshop or would starve him to death.

  The introduction of these power looms, of course, to men like my grandfather, was entirely logical. Since we had spinning machines, it followed as naturally as night follows day that we must have a weaving machine of some sort to keep pace with the vast quantities of yarn we could now produce. But the hand weavers, already losing their struggle to compete with the factories, seeing their earnings cut and their standards falling, seeing their precious freedom eaten away, could not be expected to take so reasonable a view. And since the landowners had once again increased the price of bread and it was rumoured that the younger weavers had taken to drilling with firearms on the moor on warm nights – instructed, one supposed, by those reckless, penniless veterans of Waterloo – trouble was expected and, being looked for, might well be found.

  My father, I knew, would have delayed the coming of the new looms, for, never having known poverty as my grandfather had, he was often inclined to take an easy way and was less urgent, less fixed of purpose. But although the mills were now supposedly in his charge, my grandfather’s vision was still acute, his ambition still thirsty, and when he had stumped down from the Top House and ordered, ‘Get the looms in, and get the military,’ my father had not chosen to disobey.