The Clouded Hills Read online

They were alike in many ways, big men in youth who turned heavy in middle life, vigorous and full-blooded, hearty of appetite, except that my father, being a copy of, the original mould, was somehow a little less, his needs more easily satisfied; and perhaps we all knew that it was my brother Edwin – taller, at twenty-four, than either of them – who held first place in my grandfather’s heart.

  ‘The Boy,’ he called him, in an entirely different tone from the one in which he referred to me as ‘the Girl,’ and it was Edwin who had gone to fetch the soldiers and the engineers and who had spent long hours in the sheds deciding, with my grandfather, where the new looms were to be placed.

  ‘The Boy knows what he’s about,’ my grandfather told Mrs Stevens, who, in her turn, made sure we all heard it, and when my brother concluded that nothing would suffice but the building of an entirely new factory, a stone temple of progress and profit, my grandfather chortled his delight.

  ‘We’d best knock this old heap down,’ Edwin announced, ‘before the new looms do it for us. No shoring up and making do. If we’re to do the job at all, then we’ll do it right.’ And as his vision began to extend to four storeys, six storeys capable of housing not merely the dozen looms on order but five hundred more, I saw my grandfather take on colour, my father fade, and I remembered that, somehow, it was always my father – never my brother – who would find his horse surrounded by muttering hand weavers, always my father who bore the brunt of some woman’s hysteria, who was jostled and threatened and asked if he would be satisfied when the hills were full of walking skeletons.

  ‘Ignore them,’ my grandfather said.

  ‘Ride them down,’ my brother advised.

  But my father could do neither, and there were times when I would have offered him sympathy, had I dared.

  ‘One can see their point of view,’ I had heard him tell my mother, speaking low in case my grandfather, from the Top House, should hear him; but unlike Mrs Stevens, who drank in my grandfather’s every word, my mother rarely listened to anyone and hardly ever to her husband.

  ‘Isabella,’ he said quite harshly, ‘does nothing trouble you?’

  Smiling vaguely, she murmured, ‘Why yes, dear,’ and went back to her embroidery.

  My mother was a beautiful woman, but beyond the facts of her dark, glossy hair, perfectly oval face, and startling grey velvet eyes, I knew little about her and had never found the way to ask. She was the scent of lavender through my childhood, by no means aloof, since aloofness is a cold thing, a positive thing, and she was far too elusive for that; a woman who gave no orders and made no demands, who always answered, ‘Why yes, dear. Of course, dear,’ but who was, just the same, as private and separate and elegant as a cat.

  My father had caused her portrait to be painted soon after their marriage, showing her in the narrow, Grecian-styled gown of those days, a silver ribbon casually holding her tumbled curls, a dark shawl draping her bare shoulders, her eyes half closed, languorous, her smile making promises it had evidently not been in her nature to fulfil. And standing before it as a child, I had thought her the most exquisite creature in the world and had been amazed that my father did not seem to love her as much as he could have done and that my grandfather did not love her at all.

  It is not given to many children to understand the reasons for their parents’ marriage, but I knew – because, being a girl and generally ignored, I overheard a great deal and assumed far more – that it was, perhaps, the sole occasion on which my father had gone against my grandfather’s wishes. Not that my mother had been in any way ineligible, for, as Miss Isabella Baxter, a master cutler’s daughter from Sheffield, she had had a little money and some gentility, and there had been others besides my father who had wanted her. It was simply that the Barforth wives had always been plainspoken, sensible women, useful rather than beautiful, the kind who knew and kept their place, dull perhaps but safe, their feet firmly planted on the ground, and my grandfather had given loud and quite ferocious warning that Miss Isabella Baxter could make no man feel secure. He, too, it seemed, had noticed the languorous smile, the gracefully leaning figure that could entice a man from his duty, encourage him to squander time and energy that should be given to business – the true purpose of a young man’s life – and not to pleasure, which should be left for later. But my father, properly enticed, had persisted, and even my mother, for perhaps the first and last time in her life, had made a stand, declaring that she would have no other, and had eventually gone to church to marry him in a cloud of silk gauze and lace that had shocked the Law Valley.

  But somehow they had not been happy. Perhaps my father’s romantic impulse had not endured. Perhaps my mother’s expectations had been too high. Perhaps he had believed she would be changed, on her wedding night, by some mysterious alchemy into the uncomplicated, foursquare wife a Barforth really required, while still retaining her exceedingly complex charm; and his disappointment may have caused her to retreat from him, to become even less a Barforth as he, in time, became more. And although my father never spoke a word against her, growing merely a little more morose every year, my grandfather would tell anyone who cared to listen – and when had Mrs Stevens been unwilling? – that he found her lovely face and her skill at fine needlework poor compensation for her feckless, aimless ways and her sad inability to raise her children.

  My brother Edwin, it is true, had come roaring into the world like an infant Hercules, and I, despite my inferior sex, was no weakling, but between us and after us a half dozen little Barforths had lived a few sickly months apiece: and since such weakness could not possibly have come from him, my grandfather believed most fervently that it came from her.

  I went, often enough, to put flowers on that little row of Barforth graves: brothers Samson and William, sisters Isabella and Emma, Sophia, and a shadow called Lucy I could just remember and who had caused my grandfather to curse and grumble when he was told that her birth would be the last.

  ‘So it’s over now, is it?’ he’d said. ‘That’s the best she can do? Two out of eight and no more to follow. Small return, son William, I call it, for what she’s cost you. Well, one learns to make the best of what there is to hand, that’s the great thing, and at least there’s the Boy. Yes, I’ve got my stake in the future. I’ve got the Boy. And I reckon the Girl can be made to stir herself, when she’s an age for it, and bring us a good man into the house, somebody to stand by Edwin when we’re gone. And who knows, William lad, if your Isabella should really prove as delicate as they say – well, I reckon you’ll take a solid woman next time, one of our own kind who’d strengthen the stock, because there’s the mills to think of and we need every hand we can get.’

  There was no open quarrel between them, for my mother quarrelled with no one, while my grandfather was so habitually sharp-spoken that he often seemed angry with the world in general rather than with her in particular. But her sweet, absentminded smile caused the knotted veins at his temples to swell; her way of talking – very soft, very low, and saying nothing – brought the fierce, mottled colour to his cheeks, and it irked him greatly that my father would not join him and hate her too.

  ‘Aye, lad, it’s a bad business,’ he would say sometimes, heavy with sympathy, sly with complicity. ‘You’d best let the Girl come up to Mrs Stevens and see the proper way to go on, for she’s too quiet by half, your Verity. The Boy, now, he’s an open book, but it strikes me your girl could turn whimsical and deep. You’d do well to watch her, lad, for we can risk no more of it.’

  ‘She’s well enough,’ my father said, not altogether defending me, not absolutely denying his wish for a more comfortable wife, and I understood that, as my mother’s daughter, I was suspect too and that if I wished to be acknowledged as a Barforth, I would be obliged – unlike my brother – to prove my worth.

  They gave me gold earrings the day I reached sixteen, a fan on ivory sticks, white kid gloves, a puppy from my brother’s yellow crossbred bitch, a strand of coral, a tortoiseshell comb, to put up my hai
r; and that evening, in the midst of admiring my presents and instructing me on how the puppy should be fed, my brother casually, defiantly, told us it was time he took a wife.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ my mother said. ‘Naturally.’

  Edwin, who was more inclined to share my grandfather’s point of view than I, flushed angrily, stung by her roundabout but effective way of reminding him what a menace he had been, these past few years, to maids and mill hands, and to the farm girl over at Farncliffe Craggs who, last winter, had borne his child.

  ‘You have the young lady in mind then?’ my father said quickly, flushing, too, for Edwin had spent the day at the Top House, talking of power looms and weddings, it seemed, with his grandfather, not his father, missing a generation as he was far too apt to do. And as he saw his authority thus whittled away, my father’s bitterness escaped its fetters and found its tongue.

  ‘It’s a matter not to be taken lightly, and as I know your nature, lad, you’ll need a sensible, thrifty woman with her feet on the ground – a woman who wants what you want and understands why you want it – one of your own kind, Edwin. Romance is all very well but it’s not hard-wearing, and honeymoons are soon over.’

  But my mother, who was thought to hear nothing, notice nothing, and who certainly did not appear to think herself insulted, although I thought it and suffered for her, lifted her elegant head from her needlework and said lightly, ‘But he’s to marry his cousin, Hannah Barforth, surely? Isn’t that what he arranged with his grandfather – or his grandfather with him – long ago?’

  ‘Shall you dislike it very much, Mamma?’ my brother asked her, cooler, harder than my father, caring little for the whims of any woman, his cousin Hannah among them. And, my new comb holding my hair in the smooth chignon of womanhood, I was irritated suddenly, quite unbearably, by his smug assumption that Hannah not, only would take him but would be very glad to do it.

  ‘Well,’ I said, stiff-necked with the unaccustomed weight of upswept hair and tortoiseshell, ‘before we like it or not, we’d best know if you’ve asked her yet. She may not like it overmuch herself.’

  And I have never forgotten him, standing brown-skinned, brown-eyed in the sunshine, convinced beyond all question of his ability to take the future by the throat and force from it anything it should be foolish enough to deny him.

  ‘She’ll like it very well,’ he said, laughing me to scorn. There’s no doubt about that, or I’d not ask her at all. I’d give no woman in the world the chance to say she’d turned me down. I’ll ask her tomorrow, when the new looms come in, and you can dance at my wedding, Verity Barforth, if you can learn to keep your hair from falling down – and maybe you’ll catch yourself a husband while you’re about it.

  And because I knew he was as irresistible and indestructible as my grandfather, and because I was at an age when weddings were very much on my mind, I believed him and laughed too.

  Chapter Two

  They brought the looms in the night, a line of quiet, sluggish carts escorted by soldiers, my brother Edwin at the head of them, leading his army as bravely as any Iron Duke. And although there was a sullen crowd in the mill yard the next morning, they parted, muttering but cowed, to let my grandfather through when he rode down from the Top House to make sure his overlookers and that strange new breed of men called engineers were setting all to rights.

  ‘They’ll be in production by the end of next month,’ he announced bluntly as he strode back to his horse, glaring at anyone who seemed inclined to argue; hoping, perhaps, that somebody would. And that afternoon my cousin Hannah came to call, knowing, no doubt, that Edwin planned to speak to her and having her answer ready.

  She was very tall, my cousin Hannah, and very determined, a Barforth to her fingertips, clever, self-assured, and exceedingly handsome; and if she was still single at twenty-three it was only because she had made up her mind long ago to marry my brother, who, in fact, had always been willing, although my grandfather had not.

  No doubt my grandfather had dreamed of someone truly exceptional for Edwin, a girl who combined the practical good sense he had valued in his own wife with Mrs Stevens’s persuasive charms; a girl with money, too, and expectations – a millmaster’s only child, perhaps, who would inherit her father’s business and give it to Edwin. And while Hannah could not be faulted in looks or behaviour, she was something of a poor relation with a family history not unblemished, whose dowry, if there was a dowry, would only be small. Yet Edwin could be stubborn, and my grandfather was eager to see the start of a new generation, to which Hannah might well make a cheerful, sensible, healthy mother; and as she walked into the house that flowery May morning, rather more stately than she should have been in her dull, green gown with its narrow flounces, I had no doubt that she was soon to be my sister.

  She was not, strictly speaking, so nearly related to me as she seemed, being the daughter of my father’s cousin – another broad, brown-eyed Barforth who had once been in a reasonable way of business at Low Cross Mill not far away. But my uncle, Tom Barforth, who could have lived comfortably on the profits of his weaving sheds, had attempted to live grandly and had kept a mistress in Leeds, spending time with her when he should have been at his mill; quite naturally, he had not prospered. His wife, Aunt Hattie, had been a pretty woman and may even have been good-natured in her younger days, but the constant cheeseparing economy that had been necessary to support his extravagance, her having to wear her own petticoats to shreds while he continued to patronize an expensive Leeds tailor, had soured her disposition and lowered her spirits. With ruin staring them in the face, I had heard, neither she nor my uncle had fought too hard against the fever which had carried them off three years ago, leaving Hannah and her brother and sister to manage as best they could.

  ‘Poor souls,’ Mrs Stevens had said mistily on her way-back from Aunt Hattie’s funeral. ‘Poor lambs. Whatever will become of them?’

  And, indeed, the situation had seemed so hopeless that Hannah’s brother, my cousin Joel, had been expected to sell out, salvage what he could, and take employment. My father, I believe, had even made a tentative offer to take him on at Lawcroft, although my grandfather, who disliked Joel, had declared gruffly – and very likely in Joel’s hearing – that Australia would be near enough. But my cousin Joel – who undoubtedly, in face and manner, was much like his father – was cast more truly in the Barforth mould and, taking off his own well-cut jacket, rolling up the sleeves of his fine cambric shirt, had set himself to prove the Law Valley wrong. Although Low Cross Mill as yet was far from prosperous, debts had been paid and men no longer avoided Joel in the street in case he should ask for credit, while Hannah, a far more efficient housekeeper, it seemed, than her mother, kept a good fire in their hearth and plain but wholesome food on their table, and saw to it that Elinor, the youngest member of the family, was as well turned out and well behaved as any girl should be.

  ‘Remarkable young people,’ Mrs Stevens often declared, thinking no doubt of Joel, who knew how to charm when it suited him. ‘They should be an example to you, Verity.’

  Yet, in spite of their admirable courage and tenacity, there was often a harshness about them both, a resentment of their own poverty, a certain contempt for those of us – myself and Edwin included – who had never known hard times, that made me ill at ease.

  My mother, had it occurred to her, could have sent her carriage for Hannah that morning, knowing that she and Joel would wish to see the new machines and that Edwin certainly wished to see Hannah, but my mother’s arrangements were as insubstantial as her smile – her feelings for Hannah perhaps more definite than she cared to show – and when she saw the sisters, Hannah and Elinor, coming through the gate from the mill yard and up to our door, she looked, for a moment, quite puzzled, as if she could not quite remember their names, except that it was Barforth.

  ‘Oh – yes, dear,’ she said. ‘How nice – really – how pleasant.’ And her voice, without in any way losing its sweetness, reduced Hannah – flus
hed with her expectation of being the future mistress of this house – to the level of a chance acquaintance who should really not have come in unannounced.

  But almost at once my brother Edwin, who had been on fire all day about the looms and had been longing for Hannah to come and tell him how brave and farsighted he was, strode into the parlour, the warm tones of his nature dispelling my mother’s coolness; and as he clasped Hannah’s hand eagerly in both his own and told her, ‘The looms have come,’ we all knew he was actually saying, ‘Now, at last, will you be my wife?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘they’ve come. And you had no trouble. I knew you would have no trouble, once you were determined and let them know it. Oh, Edwin, well done, Edwin. Joel has looked in at the mill to see how the engineers are progressing, and I wondered – could I, do you think, go and take a look, too?’

  ‘I came up on purpose to fetch you,’ he said, beaming broadly, immensely gratified by her interest and her praise. ‘We’ll go now, straight off, because I want to talk to you on the way. And then, Mother, if you’re agreeable, we’re all to meet at the Top House by three o’clock, to take a glass of something, and a bite of something, too, if I know anything about Mrs Stevens. If you’re agreeable, that is, Mother, and you’ve nothing planned for dinnertime – nothing that can spoil?’

  ‘Oh no, dear,’ she said, as if the thought of dinner, which we took regularly at four o’clock, had not so much as entered her mind. ‘What could I have to spoil?’

  But Edwin, determined not to upset his great day, took Hannah’s arm in a firm, possessive hold – glad, perhaps, to feel her so solid, so real – and with a nod and a half smile in my mother’s direction led her away.

  I walked up to the Top House some time later with my cousin Elinor, a girl of my own age, who, unlike the serious-minded Hannah, had few interests in life just then beyond ribbons and ringlets and the contemplation of her own delicate, china-doll prettiness, which did not come from the Barforth side of the family at all.