The Sleeping Sword Read online

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  Contents

  Brenda Jagger

  Dedication

  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

  Brenda Jagger

  The Sleeping Sword

  Brenda Jagger

  Brenda Jagger was a 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.

  Dedication

  To Marjory

  who was with me every step of the way

  Chapter One

  It would have been easier, perhaps, had my father’s wife been a truly wicked woman, in which case I could have detested her with a whole heart and a clear conscience. But her villainy was of a mild enough variety, the result, mainly, of her desire to be my father’s wife rather than the mother of his child. And, in all fairness, it must be said that I made no great effort to be lovable.

  Her name, when first we knew her, was Mrs. Tessa Delaney and she was a handsome woman of large proportions, very smooth and wise and persuasive; not virtuous, of course, in any conventional sense since she had first taken up residence in our thriving factory city under the protection of one of its most distinguished aldermen, the elderly, childless and reputedly self-indulgent worsted-spinner, Mr. Matthew Oldroyd of Fieldhead Mills. Yet their affair had been so discreetly conducted that even the Oldroyd relatives came to regard it on the whole as a good thing, the keeping of so sensible a mistress being preferable in their eyes and working out much cheaper than the greedy sixteen year olds to which his aging fancy had hitherto been prone.

  Indeed, the Oldroyd nephews and nieces who certainly expected to inherit his money would have been much inclined to offer Mrs. Delaney some material token of their gratitude at the end—allowed her to keep his watch or even the lease on the house he had taken for her—had not his last will and testament revealed that for the twelve secretive and shameful months before he died she had been no mistress at all but Mr. Matthew Oldroyd’s second and decidedly legal wife.

  Clandestine marriages, need it be said, did not suit the taste of our plain-spoken, strait-laced town of Cullingford in the County of Yorkshire, and there had been immediate talk of breaking the Oldroyd will. And even when the Oldroyd lawyer, my father Mr. Jonas Agbrigg, declared himself unable to place any legal obstacle in the lady’s way when she proceeded to move into the mill-house at Fieldhead, it was felt that she would not reign there long. After all, she had cheated the Oldroyd nephews—Cullingford men every one—out of their rightful inheritance and if the Law as represented by Mr. Jonas Agbrigg could not touch her then surely a Greater Law might be relied on to prevail? Surely—and Cullingford men were deeply moved by this—Fate could not allow any female so rapacious, so cunning, to actually enjoy her ill-gotten gains?

  But the proud, easy carriage, the clear skin and excellent white teeth we had seen in Mrs. Delaney continued to flourish in the new Mrs. Oldroyd to such a degree that my father, who had won a reputation for shrewdness rather than kindness of heart—although he was always kindness itself to me—married her as soon as he was able, thus making himself absolute master of her fortune and creating a scandal of a magnitude rarely seen in the cautious, conventional Law Valley.

  No-one thought any the worse of a man who married for money, since most men did so, and a widower with an eleven year old daughter to raise and whose ambitions had always been larger than his pocket, could not afford to be too romantic when it came to matrimony. But my father’s hasty union with Mrs. Delaney marked him not merely as a fortune-hunter but as a conspirator. And Cullingford had a thing or two to say about that.

  He had been Matthew Oldroyd’s lawyer, after all, and Cullingford well remembered how completely Mr. Oldroyd had trusted him. He had certainly been aware of the secret ceremony which had transformed Mr. Oldroyd from Mrs. Delaney’s lover, who might have left her a few hundred a year, to a doting husband who had bequeathed her everything. Even more certainly he had been aware of Mr. Oldroyd’s new will, signed in my father’s office on that furtive wedding morning, when the decaying bridegroom had virtually disinherited every one of his relations, his first wife’s family it was true, not his own blood kin, but decent Yorkshire folk just the same who had deserved better of him than that. And afterwards my father had moved quietly through Cullingford’s dining-rooms and drawing-rooms, a close-mouthed man accustomed to secrets, listening as the Oldroyd nephews hinted at their plans for Fieldhead Mills, for the railway shares and brewery shares, the coal deposits and bank deposits of which Mr. Oldroyd had been so amply possessed.

  He had listened without comment, without encouragement, but when the awful truth burst upon them the mere fact that he had listened at all was enough to condemn him. He was marrying the whore Delaney not for her money but for theirs; for the fortune which he, with his lawyer’s cunning, had helped her to steal from a bemused and senile man. They had conspired together—of course they had—Mr. Jonas Agbrigg and Mrs. Tessa Delaney, the cool, fastidious man of law, the mature and sensible Jezebel, and Cullingford did not intend to countenance treachery such as that. No Cullingford woman of any standing would ever receive the new Mrs. Agbrigg, at least so they said and probably believed, while Cullingford men would be interested to see what use the Cambridge educated Jonas Agbrigg might make of his Latin and his Greek in the spinning-sheds at Fieldhead.

  My father’s own mother, my outspoken and unbending Grandmother Agbrigg and my grandfather, who had several times been mayor of Cullingford, would not attend the wedding and retired soon afterwards to Scarborough unable to tolerate their son’s disgrace. My mother’s mother, my dainty and sentimental Grandmamma Elinor, could not bring herself to attend either and she too, with a rapidity I could not help associating with these painful nuptials, soon lost her tas
te for Cullingford, exchanging her house in imposing but narrow-minded Blenheim Lane for a villa in the South of France. Only my mother’s sister, Aunt Faith, was present in the Parish Church on my father’s wedding day among the Fieldhead managers and their wives—proving they knew on which side their bread was buttered—and a handful of others, Mr. Septimus Rawnsley of the Cullingford Commercial Bank, Mr. Outhwaite, a local architect who could not afford to ignore the rumours of repairs and extensions at Fieldhead; a few ecclesiastical gentlemen who believed in the forgiveness of sinners, a few commercial gentlemen for whom the only real sin was poverty and who could detect no trace of it in the regal bearing of my father’s bride. While I, banished to the seaside for the duration of the honeymoon, felt my solid, reliable world turn suddenly to an uncertain angle and then start to slip away—as my grandparents, my home, my father’s good name, our shared and precious affection had slipped away—between my hands.

  My memories of my mother at that time were recent and uneasy for she had died only a year before my father’s second marriage and it was a matter of great concern to me that I did not really miss her. She had been an invalid since my birth, tense and timid and often very low in spirits, the tumult of her nerves demanding drawn curtains, hushed voices, a great walking-on-tiptoe on my part through her sufferings which oppressed me, sometimes annoyed me and then instantly filled me with guilt. And I knew two things about her relationship with my father; that he was not happy with her and that he had been lucky to get her.

  My father was the academically brilliant son of a man who had risen from great poverty to become a mill-manager, a rise quite astonishing in itself although never quite enough to satisfy the social ambitions of Grandmother Agbrigg who had decided very early to make at least a cabinet minister out of her son. And since a mill-manager can earn so much and no more and political careers are notoriously expensive, it had been essential for my father to marry well, his choice falling on my mother—Miss Celia Aycliffe—I suspect because she had been very young, exceedingly innocent, and so crammed full of romantic notions that she had been ready to fall in love with the first person who asked.

  She had brought him a substantial dowry for her father had been a master-builder, responsible for the erection of most of Cullingford and its environs, and he had left his widow—my pert little Grandmamma Elinor—and his daughters very well provided. But the dowry had been sufficient only for the purchase of a suitable house and a partnership with a local solicitor, my mother’s interests had all been domestic, her disposition retiring—not at all the stuff that cabinet ministers’wives are made of—and they had not been content together.

  Perhaps he felt she had given him less than he deserved. No doubt, in her view, he had received more than any man in his position could reasonably expect, for, money apart, she had brought him family connections worth their weight in gold. Her own family, the Aycliffes, were themselves people of enormous local consequence. Their cousins, the Barforths, were the most powerful industrialists the Law Valley had ever known, the Barforth brothers, Nicholas and Blaize—who had married Aunt Faith, my mother’s sister—appearing to own outright or to have a controlling interest in everything of value in Cullingford. While the Barforth sister, my Aunt Caroline, being unable to compete on the battleground of commerce on account of her sex, had chosen to devote her quite formidable energies to the pursuit of social advancement, becoming Lady Chard of Listonby Park, thus widening our horizons by allying us to the landed gentry.

  With connections such as these my mother was at a loss to know what else she could offer her husband. She concluded it should be a son, miscarried eight times to produce a daughter and devoted herself thereafter to the supervision of her servants—by no means so numerous as those of her sister, Aunt Faith—fretting over specks of dust, smears on silver, stains on linen, wearing out her nerves and my father’s patience until the day she died. And exactly one year later her well-dusted, well-polished house was sold to strangers, the daughter whose birth had cost her her health believed herself to be unwanted and lonely, while her husband was a poor relation of the mighty Barforths no longer but the master of Fieldhead.

  Fieldhead mill-house was a square, sombre pile built at the start of the Oldroyd fortunes, large, high-ceilinged rooms, functional and plain, a vast, stone-flagged kitchen equipped with a strict eye to efficiency, no eye at all to comfort, not even a rocking chair by the hearth on the day I was invited to inspect this new setting for my life. ‘A very handsome house’the Law Valley called it yet the only concession I could see to beauty was the profusion of polished wood, each room oak-panelled, fragrant with beeswax and the winter hyacinths set out everywhere in copper bowls, a combination of odours which even now returns me to the afternoon I first stood there, tall for a girl of not quite twelve, long legs, thin shoulders that were too wide, dark brown hair Aunt Faith had brushed and plaited for the approval of my father’s wife, although for my part I could not see the necessity for that approval, feeling, I believe, that she should have been anxious to gain mine. And had I been old enough to cope with the hostility she at once aroused in me—for he was my father, mine, and not even my own mother had expected him to love her better than me—perhaps I would have admired her.

  They had called her the whore Delaney and now—Aunt Faith had explained to me—in order to be considered respectable at all she would have to be very respectable indeed. Her housekeeping, if it was barely to satisfy her ill-wishers, would have to be superb, her manners altogether beyond anyone’s reproach. She had far more important things to do, in fact, than cater to the whims of a green and awkward girl, having made up her mind to take the entire fortress of polite Cullingford society by storm. And when she received me that first time in the Fieldhead drawing-room she had not only the air of a woman born to these surroundings but of one at whose christening all the virtues—honesty, chastity, industry and the rest—had attended. She wore a dark silk dress, jet beads, narrow gold chains, her black hair smoothly parted at the centre and drawn down in two modest wings to frame a countenance of placid dignity. She walked erect and very slow, sat straight-backed, her large brown hands quietly folded. She spoke words of authority, her voice low, gentle, inescapable. She had presence and power and she was very handsome. I detested her and for the five years that remained to me before childhood officially ended and my upswept hair and long skirts proclaimed me a young lady my life was marred constantly and foolishly by our mutual resentment, the thoughtless cruelty of my youth, the anxious cruelty of her middle-age, which caused us to struggle for the same not always happy man.

  At no time did it occur to me that he might be fond of her. He had married her for money, only for money, I insisted upon that, and although privately I did not think it worthy of him I justified it all on the grounds of his frustrated brilliance, the long bitterness I knew he had felt on seeing other men succeed—the Barforth men, for instance—not because they surpassed him in intelligence or energy—who, I wondered, could surpass him in that?—but because they had been born to fathers who could pay. And although my faith in him had wavered I soon learned to be proud of him again. He had come late to the spinning trade, a soft-skinned lawyer in middle life, and the thoroughness with which he mastered each technical process, the determination which took him to the mill-yard at the grim morning hour of five o’clock and kept him there, often enough, until midnight won him not only my regard but the grudging respect of many who had firmly intended to despise him. Cullingford might never again consider him a good man. He was beyond question a fortune-hunter. He may even have tipped Mr. Oldroyd’s scales a little in the direction of matrimony and that scandalous will. But, very soon, he was making a profit and after a year or two it became the considered opinion of the Piece Hall and the Wool Exchange that much could be forgiven a man who did that.

  The new Mrs. Agbrigg, who had been the new Mrs. Oldroyd, who had been the whore Delaney, had won her battle and all might have been peace and contentment at Fieldhead had I
not been there to question her slightest command, to pick disdainful holes in her explanations, to neglect no opportunity of letting her know that the bond between father and daughter—or at least between this father and daughter—was of a far higher order than anything that might exist between a man and his second wife.

  ‘You see it all through such young eyes,’ Aunt Faith murmured once or twice, attempting—as my mother’s sister and therefore my closest female relation—to console and advise me. But youth is not compassionate and at fourteen, fifteen, even at sixteen when I found my eyes on a level with hers, I could see nothing in the new Mrs. Agbrigg to arouse my pity. She had wanted wealth and security. They were hers. She had desired, from the colourful remains of Tessa Delaney, to create a new woman of intense, heavy-textured respectability. She had achieved that too. Yet this same woman who assembled her servants each morning for prayers, who served tea and charity to this clergyman and that each tedious afternoon, had also retained a weapon I had not yet learned to call sensuality. Her sombre dignity, her suave piety stifled me, but the sight of her hand on my father’s arm at dinner time, the voluptuous curve of neck and shoulder she offered him through the lamplight aroused in me a prickly sensation I recognized as shame.

  ‘Jonas darling, it is late,’ and to avoid the hush that fell around them whenever she spoke those simple words I became an almost professional guest in other people’s houses, lingering with Aunt Faith and her daughter Blanche from Christmas to Easter, spending easy, if well-chaperoned summers at the sea with my other Barforth cousin, Venetia. A guest, a close friend, not quite a member of any family not even my own, so that growing sharp-eyed, self-contained, careful of how and where I might tread, it was no hardship to me to go abroad to Italy and Switzerland, to acquire the accomplishments thought appropriate to the heiress—no less—of Fieldhead.