The Sleeping Sword Read online

  I was as tall as my father when he came to Lucerne to fetch me home, my hair piled high and swept back in a cascade of curls, my skirts most fashionably tight in front, most fashionably and intricately draped behind, over a bustle I had learned to manage with style, having acquired by studious practice the art of kicking my train aside in order to turn smartly around, the equally precise art of sitting down. And as I demonstrated my knowledge of Italian and French and German Swiss, of painting and sculpture and as much philosophy as they had thought safe for a young lady—my flair for mathematics being considered quite unladylike—I found him far less exacting, an easier or perhaps just an older man than I remembered. I had gained not only an understanding of art and science but of humanity—or so I imagined—and now that my father was no longer the centre of my universe, now that I was the polished Miss Grace Agbrigg whose experiences had ranged far beyond the confines of Cullingford, I believed I could be at peace with him.

  ‘You see it all through such young eyes,’ Aunt Faith had said, but my eyes were kinder now—I thought, I hoped—while my tongue might even school itself, in the interests of domestic harmony, to call my father’s wife ‘mamma’.

  She was on the carriage drive to greet us, smooth, impassive, her gown of chocolate coloured silk drawn into a modest bustle, nothing but a fall of lace at neck and hem to relieve its housekeeper’s plainness. But the fabric itself was very rich, the cross at her throat was of massive gold, there were rings of great value on her patiently folded, housekeeper’s hands, her voice speaking its soft welcome, her eyes going beyond me to my father, wryly conveying to him, ‘So she’s home again. Ah well—we must make the best of it, you and I.’ And everything was the same, exactly as it had always been and as I had known it would be.

  There were great things astir in Cullingford. My cousin Blanche was to be richly married, which was the destiny Blanche Barforth had always envisaged. My other Barforth cousin, Venetia, was believed not for the first time to have involved herself with an unsuitable man. While as to myself, for all my new found philosophy and compassion, it was very clear to me from the hour of my return that the only way I could ever restore harmony to my father’s house was by leaving it.

  Chapter Two

  My cousin, Blanche Barforth, was married on a sparkling summer morning, her veil of gauze embroideries mistily revealing the silver and ivory tints of her hair and skin, her long, quiet hands clasping their bouquet of apricot carnations and white roses. She looked fragile and mysterious, passive as a lily, the prize men seek for their valour and expect for their cunning. A most perfect bride.

  She was not, of course, in love nor did she wish to be. She was merely following to its logical conclusion her personal and undeniably excellent strategy of doing the right thing at the right time and doing it magnificently. In the manner of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert she was marrying her first cousin and in true imperial fashion appeared to believe that her own role in the proceedings was simply to be looked at.

  For the past six months she had been ‘the fiancée’offering herself up tranquilly to the world’s admiration and envy while her harassed mother and her Aunt Caroline, who was soon to be her mother-in-law, arranged her wedding around her. Today she was ‘the bride’, offering herself once again with that air of cool serenity to a bridegroom who, by the untimely death of his father on the hunting field, had recently been transformed from a supercilious and, in my view, not entirely good-tempered young man into an extremely eligible if no better-humoured Sir Dominic Chard of Listonby.

  Without his lands and titles it would not have occurred to Blanche to marry him. Had she been obtainable to him in any other way he would not have married her, since a gentleman of only twenty-four summers with health and wealth and boundless opportunity on his side rarely feels the need to limit himself in matrimony so soon. But pale, silvery Blanche had her loveliness and her calm, infinitely challenging purity. Dominic had his baronetcy, his three thousand ancestral acres, his beautiful, quite famous ancestral mansion. There was no more to be said.

  ‘I am to be married,’ Blanche had written to me in Switzerland. ‘I am to be Lady Chard of Listonby, just like Aunt Caroline—except, of course, that I am taking her title from her. You are to come home and be my bridesmaid.’ And so, feeling the moment opportune, I returned to Cullingford to divide my time, as I had so often done, between my Barforth cousins, Blanche who was to be splendidly married and Venetia who would quite like to be married but would much rather fall intensely, no matter how unwisely, in love.

  I had, of course, envied Blanche from time to time as most people did, not only for her looks, her composure and her placid, sometimes comic, belief that she could always get her way, but for the possession of so affectionate a mother as Aunt Faith, so generous a father as Uncle Blaize who was not, perhaps, the richer of the two Barforth brothers but certainly the more agreeable.

  ‘That child is the image of her mother,’ they had been saying in Cullingford ever since the days when a fragile, fairy-tale Blanche had first taken her daily airings in the Barforth landau, her gown a miniature copy of Aunt Faith’s, each silver ringlet bound up with silver ribbon, exhibiting even then a certain cool graciousness far beyond her years which came, perhaps, from an inbred knowledge that her abundant pale silk hair and startling blue-green eyes would be quite enough to open any door she might be likely to choose in life.

  And what she chose at the tender age of seventeen was to be Lady Chard of Listonby Park, a decision which had disappointed her mother who believed ardently in love and was saddened to see that her only daughter did not, and which had infuriated the existing, dowager Lady Chard—Aunt Caroline—who, having been the absolute ruler of Listonby Park for the past twenty-five years did not feel at all inclined to abdicate her authority, her keys, her place at the head of the baronial table to lovely, lazy, self-indulgent Blanche.

  So strongly, in fact, did Aunt Caroline Chard feel that, at the merest hint of an engagement she had despatched her son Dominic to London, hoping at worst that he would find distraction, at best the earl’s or the cabinet minister’s daughter she believed his breeding and her ambition deserved. For although Lady Caroline Chard had once, long ago, been Miss Caroline Barforth, a mill-master’s daughter just like Blanche, she had shed that commercial identity and very nearly forgotten it. Barforth money, indeed, had enabled her to shine at Listonby, her own share of Barforth energy, tenacity, the urge all the Barforths felt to pursue success had enabled her to place it among the most luxurious and hospitable houses of the North. The Barforth in her had caused her to break down, trample underfoot, or simply to ignore all obstacles in her path, but that same Barforth driving force, even as it had swept her on from triumph to social triumph, had, by some strange act of metamorphosis, converted her entirely into a Chard. And in her heart of hearts she did not believe that Blanche Barforth, who was beautiful and rich and her own brother’s daughter, could really be good enough for her eldest son.

  But Dominic had always been stubborn. Blanche had made up both his mind and her own, and here they were, an exquisite bride, a handsome groom, with myself and Venetia standing behind them in our bridesmaids finery of apricot silk, thinking, I suppose, that next time—quite soon—eventually—we would be brides and wives and mothers ourselves.

  Venetia was the daughter of the second Barforth brother, Mr. Nicholas Barforth, a gentleman whose restless ambition and overwhelming shrewdness had not allowed him to be content with the fortune his father had left him and which he and his brother had divided between them. Blanche’s father, Uncle Blaize, had taken good care of his money, making absolutely certain that it amply sufficed for the very pleasant life he enjoyed with Aunt Faith. But Venetia’s father had set himself, with a singleness of purpose rare even in the Law Valley, to increase his inheritance, had extended and diversified it to become the owner not only of the original Barforth mills of Lawcroft Fold and Low Cross where worsteds of the very finest quality continued to be wov
en, but of such gigantic undertakings as the Law Valley Woolcombers, the Law Valley Dyers and Finishers, and, more recently, a brand new structure of Italianate design built on the site of an old mill at Nethercoats where the weaving of silk and velvet was making Mr. Nicholas Barforth’s fortune for the second, the third, or even for the fourth time.

  Yet his acute judgment in the field of commerce had not extended to his private life and even his well-wishers—relatively few, it seemed, in number—were forced to admit that none of his personal relationships had prospered. He had quarrelled violently and unforgiveably with his brother and no hostess in Cullingford would have dared invite both Blaize and Nicholas Barforth to her table at the same time. He had quarrelled with all his mill-managers in turn, making no secret that although he paid high wages a man needed nerves of steel and the stamina of an ox to earn them. He was known to live in a state of bitter discord with his son, to have little time for Venetia, his daughter, while his relationship with his wife had been a source of gossip and speculation in Cullingford for many a long day.

  Unlike his brother who had chosen Aunt Faith from the manufacturing middle-classes, Mr. Nicholas Barforth, following his sister Caroline’s lead perhaps, had married into the landed gentry. But while Caroline Barforth’s marriage had brought her Listonby Park and the title that went with it, Nicholas Barforth had received nothing but a fine-boned, high-bred, quite penniless lady and—it was rumoured—a great deal of trouble. For once, long ago in Venetia’s early childhood, her mother had run away from her father and had been brought back again—or so we believed—a mystery Cullingford had never solved to its satisfaction, the gentleman in the story being unapproachable, the lady well-nigh invisible.

  ‘How is your dear mamma?’ Cullingford’s matrons, unwilling to be cheated of so promising a scandal, were fond of asking Venetia.

  ‘Very well indeed,’ was her only reply. But the fact that her mother lived almost exclusively at her house in the country, the ancient estate of Galton Abbey with its few hundred scrubby acres and its decaying mansion—a far cry from Listonby Park—which had been in Mrs. Barforth’s family for generations, while her father resided permanently at his house in Cullingford, troubled Venetia deeply. And this pall of scandal hovering around her parents—for if they were separated then there must have been a mighty scandal indeed—had drawn us together; Venetia about whose mother strange things were whispered, nothing proved, and myself, Grace Agbrigg, motherless daughter of a man who, by his marriage to a rich and disreputable woman, had invited scandal and for most of the time managed to ignore it.

  Venetia was not beautiful like Blanche, her figure being of an extreme quite boyish slenderness, something sudden and brittle about her movements, an air—every now and then—that was both vulnerable and eager; for whereas Blanche had always known what she wanted from life Venetia quite simply wanted everything life had to offer, its joys and sorrows, triumphs and disasters, as soon as she could lay her hands on them and in double measure. She had a thin, fine-textured face, a delicate skin, eyebrows that flew away at a wide angle, hair the rich colour of a woodland fox, her pointed auburn looks owing nothing to her tough-grained Barforth father but coming entirely from her mother, the lady who had been the subject, or the cause, of scandal. And although Venetia herself had done nothing of a scandalous nature Cullingford believed, on the whole, in the saying ‘like mother like daughter’ and many would have advised Mr. Nicholas Barforth, had they dared, to get his daughter married while he was able.

  But today, standing meekly behind immaculate, triumphant Blanche, we were shielded from past gossip, being simply ‘the bridesmaids’, anonymous girls in pretty dresses provided like the icing on the cake, the lace frills around the bridal posies, simply to decorate. It was, of course, a lovely wedding, somewhat to the surprise of the bridegroom’s mother, Aunt Caroline, who, with her vast enthusiasm for entertaining, her twenty-five years experience of balls and dinners, house parties, hunting parties, parties of all shapes and sizes at Listonby had found it hard to leave to Aunt Faith the planning of so vital an event as the wedding of Listonby’s eldest son. But, despite her predictions that Aunt Faith would forget this and neglect that, nothing had been overlooked, nothing left to chance.

  The horses which brought the bridal procession to church were all high-stepping, glossy with good health and good grooming and—as Aunt Caroline had insisted was essential for a wedding—all perfectly, correctly grey. The carriages were lined with white satin, the church transformed into a flower-garden of white and apricot blossoms, the aristocratic Chards on one side of the aisle, a sprinkling of baronets and Members of Parliament, at least three bishops, half a dozen generals and one real duke among them; the manufacturing Barforths on the other side, millmasters, ironmasters, bankers, builders, although the differences between them were less marked than they had once been. A commercial gentleman of a generation ago might have felt a sense of achievement, of having breached a stronghold hitherto impregnable to men of his station had he succeeded in bestowing his daughter on a High Church, High Tory squire. But now, although all three of those Chard bishops still preached the doctrine that God, having called all men to the position he had selected for them in life wished them to stay there, the Barforths knew better than that, my manufacturing Uncle Blaize escorting his daughter to her noble bridegroom with grace and good humour, perfectly at ease among the ‘ruling classes’, especially nowadays when, in many cases, their power to go on ruling depended on the co-operation of his—and his brother’s—money.

  A lovely wedding. There was a flood of golden sunshine as we left the church, a cloudless summer sky, no need at all for the huge marquee spread like the palace of an Arabian prince on the lawns of Aunt Faith’s home in suburban Elderleigh. There were bowls of pale roses on every table, in accordance with Aunt Caroline’s oft repeated suggestion that in Aunt Faith’s place she would be lavish with the flowers. The menu-cards—printed in silver and in French—had the additional extravagance of silver lace borders. The cake, which Aunt Caroline had feared would never be big enough to conform to Chard standards of size and grandeur, was immense, intricate, surrounded by sprays of the same white roses and apricot carnations which made up the bridal bouquet and which would be distributed later to each female guest.

  There was champagne, violins concealed romantically by the swaying summer trees, curiosity, a little mild envy, a few sentimental tears. ‘A handsome couple’everyone was saying and so they were, Blanche looking more fragile than ever among the dark, large-boned Chards, her bridegroom and his two brothers with whom I was not well acquainted, for unlike the young commercial gentlemen I knew who had all been educated at our local grammar school, the Chard boys had gone away to school at an early age, returning at midsummer and Christmastime when I had found their loud, drawling voices irritating, their manners condescending. And they had looked so much alike—Dominic, Noel, Gideon—that they had seemed to me to be quite interchangeable; self-opinionated boys who would grow to be haughty men of the kind one encountered on the hunting field, in fashionable regiments and fashionable London clubs or half asleep on the benches of the House of Commons.

  Dominic’s future, of course, had been mapped out for him at birth for he was the eldest, the heir to his father’s lands and titles, Squire of Listonby, Master of Foxhounds, Chairman of the Bench of Magistrates, while his twin brother Noel—born ten vital minutes too late to claim the inheritance—and Gideon, 18 months younger still, were simply the extra sons who—unless some tragic fate should befall the heir—would be obliged to make their own way in the world, their father having no secondary titles, no spare estates to bestow on them. Following the family tradition of service Noel—it had been decided as Aunt Caroline first looked into his cradle—would go into the army, Gideon into the church where, having completed the preliminaries of promotion their mother saw no reason why they should not join the prosperous ranks of Chard generals, Chard bishops and make advantageous marriages while they w
ere about it. And Aunt Caroline had expressed these aims so often, with such total certainty, that in my half-attending mind they had become aims no longer but realities. Noel was a general, Gideon was a bishop so that I had been mildly surprised on my return from Switzerland to meet a very gallant Lieutenant Noel Chard and to hear some very strange rumours indeed in respect to Gideon.

  ‘I suppose one can feel for Aunt Caroline,’ Blanche had informed me airily. ‘For she has never liked her plans to be upset, and first there was Dominic who was supposed to be a bachelor until his fifties, or so she hoped, so she could go on queening it at Listonby. And now there is Gideon.’

  And when I had expressed a degree of interest I did not feel, she went on, ‘Yes, indeed. Poor Aunt Caroline. She had set her heart on making Gideon a bishop and he has turned her down flat. He says there is no money in religion, which surprises me since all the clergymen we know seem to live very well—except that I think Gideon means a lot of money and spending it on things clergymen don’t have, or shouldn’t have. I expect you are dying to hear what it is he means to do?’

  ‘I expect you are dying to tell me.’

  ‘He says he will go where the money is—heavens, I can picture Aunt Caroline’s face when he said that—and so he has made an approach to my Uncle Nicholas Barforth with a view to joining him in his mills. Yes, you may stare, indeed you may, for I stared too. A Chard in trade! Whatever next? The Barforth blood coming out, I suppose, and Aunt Caroline cannot bear to mention it—not to her London friends and her foxhunting friends at any rate. But since we all know the trouble Uncle Nicholas Barforth has with Cousin Gervase—although Venetia, of course, will not hear a word against her brother—well, I think he may be glad of Gideon. Poor Aunt Caroline, indeed. For if Gideon does well with Uncle Nicholas he will surely try to marry Venetia. Well, of course he will, Grace. In fact he must marry her in order to secure his position, for if he does not then someone else surely will. And that “someone”, if he has the sense he was born with, will be bound to cut Gideon out of the business. It absolutely stands to reason.’