Flint and Roses (27 page)

‘That is good of you, Miss Aycliffe.'

‘Indeed, it is not. But Dr. Ashburn, do sit down a moment, for you look quite done in. Will you take something—tea, or brandy?'

‘A little brandy would be very welcome,' he said, and fetching it myself to spare the harassed maids, I returned to find him leaning back heavily against the sofa cushions, a man who seemed younger, more vulnerable, than I had supposed.

‘I beg your pardon,' he said, half rising, taking the glass from me and drinking, as I had seen him do before, almost with need.

‘Are you quite well, Dr. Ashburn?'

‘Why yes—quite well, thank you. I have been up all night, that is all. And, to tell you the truth, I am always distressed by death, which may seem strange, since I see so much of it. I had hoped to grow accustomed.'

‘I am glad you cannot.'

‘Why do you say that?'

‘Because to grow accustomed would be the same as growing hard, I suppose.'

He leaned forward, drew a deep breath, of courage perhaps, and said rapidly, knowing the time ill-chosen but unable, it seemed, to prevent himself, ‘Sometimes you have been of great help to me.'

‘I? But what have I ever done?'

‘You have—been there, in Blenheim Lane—where I knew I could find you. The theory that the sight of beauty—of what a man finds to be beautiful—refreshes the spirit, I have found to be most apt.'

It's true, then, I thought. I am not beautiful at all, but he finds me so, which means he is in love with me. I wonder why? He is a clever man, sensitive and serious, distinguished in his way, and I have nothing in my head but fashion and small-talk and Nicholas Barforth. Why should he fall in love with me? And I understood that the happy patchwork I had woven for all our lives was falling irrevocably apart. Giles Ashburn—who could have been so happy with Prudence, I was sure of it, and she with him—loved me and Nicholas did not; and, wanting to spare him distress, hoping that when it came to it Nicholas would try to spare me, I began to murmur the remarks I had been taught to use on such occasions, and he to apologize for his familiarity, both of us talking quickly and saying nothing, until there was the sound of a horse, and Jonas came into the room.

He was, as always, immaculate, the sombre, neutral shades of the man of business, unruffled although he had ridden several miles from the station through a blustery evening, his face registering no surprise, no alarm.

‘Dr. Ashburn?'

‘Yes. Your son was born an hour ago, Mr. Agbrigg. Your wife has made a sufficient recovery, but not the child. I am truly sorry.'

‘Ah,' Jonas said, his eyelids lowering very briefly, and then: ‘I see. I am sure you did your best.'

‘I believe so.'

‘Shall I go up to her?'

‘Yes. She may need you.'

I went into the hall, handed Giles Ashburn his hat and cloak since there seemed no one else to do it, assured him that my mother would soon be here; waited in the open doorway to watch him drive away. And when I returned to the drawing-room Jonas was there before me, standing by the hearth, staring reflectively at the fire.

‘You have not been long, Jonas. Is she sleeping?'

‘No. She is not sleeping.'

‘What then?'

‘She is awake.'

‘Jonas—if you are telling me to mind my own business, then I must tell you that she is my sister—'

‘Yes,' he said, taking the fire-tongs and very deliberately selecting a piece of coal, breaking it neatly, without violence, into even segments and arranging them into a carefully contrived pyramid. ‘I will tell you then. She is awake. She has sent the nurse for a tray of tea. I went upstairs because I was told she needed me. I came downstairs again because she does not. Should she need me later, I will go up again. That is all.'

‘Jonas—please don't be impatient with her. I am impatient with her myself, often enough, but she is only seventeen, and it has been a—a shock.'

‘I?' he said, his eyes still on the fire, his intricate building of the coal. ‘I am never impatient. Quite the reverse. I have just been into the kitchen to make certain that her tray, when they take it to her, will be just to her liking. I have reminded them to use a white cloth and I have even held the cup to the light to make certain it is spotless and has no cracks. What more can I do for her, at this moment, than that?'

My sister's unknown little child was buried some days later, Jonas standing chilled but unapproachable at the graveside, my mother and his father shedding a tear. Aunt Hannah looking stern, since she disliked any kind of failure and, although she was sorry for Celia, was beginning to have doubts about her fitness as a future Cabinet Minister's wife.

Celia greeted us on our return from the cemetery, her face like a stone, her body still full of that strange, rigid anger.

‘Tea is just ready,' she said. ‘I expect you will be glad of it, since the day has turned cold.'

‘Thank you.' Jonas answered with scrupulous politeness, taking the cup she offered him, and then, excusing himself once more with great correctness, retiring to his study for the perusal of documents which would not wait.

‘I believe it will snow before morning,' Aunt Hannah said, to fill in the silence, to which we obediently chorused. ‘Yes, indeed.'

‘You are not looking well, Miss Aycliffe,' Giles Ashburn murmured, having looked in for a moment because he had seen our carriage.

‘Oh—I am quite all right, thank you'; but in fact I was unable to shake off the chill of the winter graveyard, my bones aching, my chest tightening with the start of an influenza which kept me in my bed longer than it need have done, had I been anxious to rise, thus causing offence to Caroline who wished to consult me about the length of her wedding veil. And even before I ventured downstairs again, it was no secret to anyone that Georgiana Clevedon, having taken more accurately the measure of Blaize, had turned her green woodland eyes and her sudden laughter on Nicholas.

He had danced with her the maximum permitted number of times—three, in fact—at an Assembly Rooms ball, where Miss Clevedon, in an evening gown which Caroline declared managed somehow to look like a riding habit, had given further offence by her complete disregard of the etiquette Cullingford required to see in its young ladies.

‘So these are the famous Assembly Rooms,' she had said on arrival, speaking to Julian Flood, but her loud, flat squire's drawl audible to several others. ‘My word! I never saw the inside of a counting house, but this must be it.'

While even the comfortable Mrs. Hobhouse, having been brought up like the rest of us to consider poverty a sin which, like adultery and associated vices, must be concealed at all costs, had been shocked to hear Miss Clevedon declare herself as poor as a church mouse.

‘Oh, I have but the one gown,' she had said when Mrs. Hobhouse, trying to be kind, had admired it, ‘so I have no bother at all in deciding what to wear—it is simply this one, or, if it is not fit to be seen, I cannot go out at all.'

‘Lounging,' Aunt Hannah told us, ‘at the buffet with the men—behaving, in fact, like a man herself. Thoroughly unbecoming, and I cannot believe any relative of mine could have thought otherwise.'

And so in fact it seemed, for at a town meeting some days later, called by Mayor Agbrigg to discuss the sorry state of Cullingford's sewers. Nicholas, as astonished as anyone else perhaps, to see Miss Clevedon sitting there, had offered her no more than a curt nod, a cool word, and had left before the speeches ended, making it clear that he desired no private conversation with anyone. Yet Miss Clevedon had remained on her chair, managing at least to keep from yawning—a feat beyond the powers of many—while Mayor Agbrigg had attempted to curdle the assembled blood with tales of overflowing swill-tubs in Simon Street, and Dr. Ashburn had put forward his much ridiculed theory that certain diseases, cholera not least among them, may be transferred not only by the touch or the breath of the sufferer, nor by contact with rotting garbage heaps—all of which could be avoided—but by the drinking of contaminated water, which could not. Cholera, Dr. Ashburn had declared—quietly, but with immense firmness, Prudence told me—had destroyed sixty thousand English souls only some sixteen years ago, confining itself largely but not exclusively to those areas where sanitation was haphazard, or where there was no sanitation at all. And unless something, in his view, was done about the open sewers of Simon Street, and the local habit of gathering water for domestic usage from any stagnant pool available when the stand-pipe ran out, then it was beyond question that the disease would strike again.

‘He was most emphatic in his warning,' Prudence told me, ‘and most courageous too, since I know how little he enjoys public speaking.'

And when Prudence refused, despite all my persuasion, to sink to the level of common gossip, I had to wait for Caroline to tell me that Miss Clevedon, having listened patiently to the end, had inquired, once more in that loud, flat drawl, ‘Now where is Simon Street? It sounds unlikely and most intriguing, and there is no doubt at all that one has a duty to help the poor. May one go and see it?'

‘I suppose you will be wanting tea?' Caroline had replied, compelled to make the offer, she explained, since the girl, after all, was cousin to Matthew Chard, but feeling the coolness of her tone sufficient to ensure a refusal. But Miss Clevedon, with her quick smile, her coltish tossing of the head, had accepted with evident gladness, returning in the Barforth carriage to spend the rest of the day at Tarn Edge.

‘I cannot think why Verity and Caroline encourage her,' Aunt Hannah said, coming to sit with me the following afternoon, genuinely concerned, I think, at my slow recovery. Yet Georgiana Clevedon, despite her poverty, was the daughter and granddaughter of landed gentlemen who knew of no reason why she could not visit a manufacturer's household as freely as the cottages on the Galton estate, as freely as Aunt Hannah herself entered the mill-houses at Lawcroft. She came and went as she pleased, appearing and disappearing to suit her fancy, not only in Cullingford but inside my head, so that I was never entirely without her, could never lose the impression of that pointed face, hovering somewhere behind my eyes, nor the sound of Blaize's voice telling us how easily even a stubborn man—and quite against his nature—could love her.

‘If they would simply leave the matter alone,' Prudence said when Aunt Hannah had gone, ‘then I believe it would be no more than a nine days'wonder. Blaize thinks so too. Men are prone to these fancies, and should be allowed, in their own good time, to grow tired of them. That is what Blaize says, at any rate, and since he has fancies enough for a dozen men, then I am inclined to think he is right.

But the sight of a gentleman's daughter displaying so marked a preference for the son of a manufacturer intrigued Cullingford. The suspicion that the young lady believed her social superiority too enormous to permit any embarrassment—that she was condescending rather than pursuing—gave much offence. And on the very day that I came feebly downstairs, having lost weight and colour, looking hollow, I thought, feeling as if I had dissolved, somehow, into a damp mist and could not take shape again, the drawing-room was full of ladies, half of them well pleased to sympathize with poor, dear Verity Barforth in her troubles, all of them eager to pry from my mother the information Aunt Verity would not give.

‘Faith dear, how very unwell you look,' they said to me, reserving my plight, only half guessed at, for later.

‘I am very well, thank you,' I went on repeating, my lips feeling stiff and cold, my smile an inward agony, for although my body was still limp, the congestion of my lungs not fully healed, my real sickness, I knew full well, was of despair.

The world had once been kind to me. It had placed me in a comfortable home far beyond the level of those who were obliged to labour. It had given me health and hope and an inclination to laughter; it had given me a nature which required to be loved, and now, without hope of the man I required to love me, I no longer knew what I was doing in the world at all.

‘You must take care, dear,' my mother's tea-time ladies told me, each one, on leaving.

‘Yes, so I will, thank you, Mrs. Hobhouse—Mrs. Mandelbaum—' And then, half rising and finding my legs quite fluid, my whole body slipping, somehow, from its direction, I murmured. ‘I am not well enough; mother, to go out just yet.'

‘No, darling,' she said, shaking her head, smiling at me, her voice fainter than I had expected, her face too near to mine and then too far away. ‘Go back to bed. Miss Mayfield will sit with you.'

‘He has not sent her a note, or a flower.' I heard Prudence mutter angrily, and although I wanted to defend him, I lacked the strength to tell her I had neither expected nor wanted it. For what could he possibly write?

Blaize had sent me flowers in profusion. Giles Ashburn had visited every day. Jonas had called once or twice with cheerful news of Celia, who had been carried downstairs now to her sofa and had even walked, with his assistance, to the window. Even Freddy Hobhouse, using any excuse to see Prudence, had brought me a jar of his mother's famous ginger marmalade to tempt my invalid appetite. But a few lines from Nicholas, saying ‘I am sorry to hear you are unwell,' far from reassuring me, would have told me that he did not greatly care. His silence indicated that he was troubled on his own account, guilty on mine, and, even in the weakness of my convalescence, the down-drooping of my spirit, I could not tolerate the thought that I might weigh heavily on his conscience. Whatever happened, I would not be an uneasy memory, to him or to anyone.

Yet hope was not entirely at an end. Nicholas, I heard, had declined an invitation to dine at Galton Abbey, had excused himself from showing Miss Clevedon his father's mills, leaving Blaize to escort her around the sheds, which, she freely avowed, had horrified and depressed her, the sight of so much close-confined humanity inspiring her to thoughts of revolution, the noise and the stench turning her stomach. He was behaving, in fact, like a man tempted, certainly—if the smouldering, brooding glances Amy Battershaw and Rebecca Mandelbaum described to me were anything to go by—but struggling to reassert his common sense. And knowing him to be sensible, I continued fitfully to hope, until the afternoon when Caroline burst in upon me to say that her father had forbidden him to see Miss Clevedon again, at which point I knew there could be little hope at all.