Shining Threads Read online

  ‘I asked her every time she came to me to let me speak to her mother, her uncle, or her cousins, or whichever male relative their class insist on, but she put me off. Mr Greenwood has promised me manager of the spinning mill at Highbank when old Fishwick retires at the end of the year, aye . . . me . . . a pauper child, a little piecer and scavenger to be manager at Highbank. There’ll be good money, Annie, and a fine house. There’s a plot of land out New Delph way that I’ve got my eye on. We could build . . . anything she wants. She loved me, Annie, else why would she . . . ?’

  His voice was harsh, no longer caring about any finer feelings Annie might have, nor of the children upstairs who could hear what he said, ‘. . . else why would she come to my bed? You’ve not loved a man yet, lass, but I reckon you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say that woman is my life and without her I’m nothing. Now there’s talk of her . . . of her making free with some chap up at the Hall . . . in a red dress and walking the moors dressed like a bloody lady, hand in hand with . . . but that I’ll not believe. Not even of her, wild as she is. Dear Christ, she was in my bed only a couple of months ago. It’s said she was . . . that he . . . that they are lovers . . . but she’d not do that, would she, Annie . . . ?’ Annie had shaken her head numbly, horrified to be the witness of such suffering, unwilling to be made a part of this turmoil and yet how could she avoid it, for they were both her friends.

  Now, the very next day, here was Tessa floating about on air, it seemed, over some haughty, self-opinionated gentleman of enormous superiority, an aristocrat of the highest order. Handsome, oh aye, and oozing charm and wit and, by God, Tessa was dazzled by it.

  But this Robby Atherton wanted to marry her she said and was to knock at the door of Greenacres tomorrow and tell her family so.

  ‘Is ’e thy lover an’ all?’

  ‘That is none of your business.’ Tessa was appalled.

  ‘I reckon it is when it were only a month or two back you were in Will Broadbent’s bed.’

  ‘Who the devil told you that?’

  ‘Will.’

  ‘He’s no damn right . . .’

  ‘It’s true, in’t it?

  ‘It makes no difference.’

  ‘It does if tha’s sharin’ thissen between this chap an’ Will.’

  ‘How dare you, how dare you?’ Tessa’s face was white with rage as she turned and strode from Annie’s cottage without another word. How dare Annie besmirch her love with comparisons to what she had done with Will? How dare she speak so coarsely about the miracle which was softly curled inside her, the feeling she held to her, within her, silent, sweet, secret? She was in love this time. Not in the way she had once loved Will for that had been strong and lusty, a pure, white-hot passion that in no way could be compared to the delicacy and fragrance of what she and Robby felt. She and Will had suited one another, she told herself, taken one another as one does a meal when one is hungry but he was not a man she could marry, for God’s sake. She wanted, as Robby did, to place her body against his in some private world away from this one, to discard the wrappings, one by one, of their clothing, to gaze with awe and rapture, to touch and hold and finally possess. Robby had not said so, naturally, not yet, but she had seen and recognised it in his eyes. But they were to be married first. She was to be his wife and one paid respect to the lady one was to marry by taking her virgin to the altar.

  She had agonised over this, her memory scalded by the touch of Will Broadbent, wishing with all her heart that she could have given Robby this gift which men seemed to set such store by but it was too late to worry about. She had not loved Will as she loved Robby, so surely it did not count?

  She was still seething with indignation, wearing she would not go near Annie Beale’s cottage again as she urged her mare up the slope towards a great outcropping of rock She crossed a shallow, slow-moving stream which, when it reached the bottom, would wind along the valley floor. She paused for a moment on the old wooden footbridge, then cantered along the narrow track before she moved on to the rough, uneven surface which led to Badger’s Edge. The bracken stood tall, nearly as high as her mare. There was a mist moving in the hollows below her, but the sky was a delicate pink on the hills shading to a pale blue vault above her head.

  The sun was low since it was late and would soon be setting on this early summer’s day. The air was sweet, smelling and tasting as sharp as wine, and she dragged great mouthfuls into her lungs, leaning back in the saddle, allowing her mare to go as she pleased as she fell into a daydream.

  Her eyes were vague as she looked towards the trees carpeting the valley below her. As the shadows lengthened their shaded green turned slowly to a smudged and darkening grey. Her dogs padded silently beside her, accustomed to her changes of pace, ready to slow, to stop and doze or, almost beneath the mares belly, to race with the wind as she did. Soon, too soon, it would be high summer, then autumn with winter not far behind, the cruel Pennine winter which prevented only the most foolhardy from venturing out in it, but what did she care now? Long before that, long before the month of June was out, as she and Robby eased themselves further into the deep, soft-textured rapture of their new love they would move on to the next step in their delicate courtship. They would inform her mother and his family that they loved one another. Long before the snows came she would be married to Robby and living far away from here in Cheshire.

  But before then she would become his ‘fiancée’ and once she was that, she would be changed into the young lady Samuel Robert Atherton of Atherton Hall, a gentleman, was to marry. She would be a valued possession which must be guarded every minute of the day and night, a treasure which would be prepared, wrapped up in its wedding finery and given to him in the sanctity of the great wedding ceremony for all to see. A virgin bride in her white, his bride, and though it was himself who would take that virginity from her, until then, innocent. She was his lady and though she knew he was mad to possess her, his reverent love made him draw back. She was not to be treated like some obliging wench from his mother’s dairy and he would wait, as a gentleman should, until she was his wife.

  How she loved him. He was her ‘parfit gentil knight’, the man most girls dream of, so dashing, so gallant, handsome and strong but with a wit which delighted her, a mind which somehow had the keenness of her own north-countrymen, despite his upbringing. He had a contempt for the often shallow and superficial qualities of his own class which surprised her. He worked hard, he said, on his grandfather’s estate which would one day be his since his father’s older brother had died childless and his own father had died when he himself was a boy. He took it seriously, hunting and pursuing the activities with which gentlemen of his class amused themselves but only when his duties allowed, he told her earnestly.

  They loved the same things, shared the same interests. He was, in a way, her cousins all over again, rolled into one man, but without their wildness, quite amazingly appearing to know who the person inside Tessa Harrison was, and what she needed. He was the other half of her, fitting her and she him as though they had been made each to complete the other.

  He rose almost from the ground at her feet, making her mare shy so that for several moments it was all she could do to stop the animal from bolting. The dogs snarled menacingly and her voice was high as she called them to her. The alarm she felt gave her reason to be sharp and she was glad of it for the unexpected sight of him on this weekday evening badly frightened her.

  ‘Will, for God’s sake, you really should not leap out from behind a rock like that. You know my mare is nervous and the sudden . . . Why did you not . . . well stand out where you could be seen?’

  ‘Would you have ridden over to greet me or would you have turned round and pretended not to see me, avoided me as you have done these last few weeks?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Will.’

  ‘Silly? what does that mean, Tessa? But perhaps you’re right. Happen it is silly for a man to hang about hoping to catch a glimpse of a woman he thought had
some feeling for him.’ His voice was toneless, his face quite without expression but in his eyes was the flare of madness which comes to a wounded beast when the hurt is almost too much to bear. His face was drawn, looking older than his years. He had not shaved and his shirt was creased as though he had put it on several days ago and not removed it since.

  ‘I’ve not come to harm you, Tessa,’ he said at last, when the silence in which she fidgeted nervously seemed long enough, ‘so you can get down off that animal’s back.’

  ‘I . . . well, I really cannot stay, Will. It will be dark soon and well, Laurel is . . . another child, you know, and there is so much to attend to . . .’

  ‘And you are to attend to it, is that it?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  He sighed deeply and passed a hand across his pale, shadowed face. ‘Don’t lie to me, Tessa. Not now. Let us be honest for this one last time together.’

  ‘What . . . ?’ Still she did not dismount and he smiled wearily.

  ‘Don’t fret, my girl. I’ve not come to hurt you though the devil knows you deserve it. I said last year that a good thrashing now and again in your childhood would not have gone amiss but I’ll not give it you, nor take, as you seem to think I might, what now belongs to another man . . .’

  ‘Will . . .’

  ‘Don’t Will me. The whole spinning room is whispering about you and that popinjay up at the Hall . . .’

  She sprang hotly to her love’s defence. ‘He’s not a popinjay . . .’

  ‘. . . and we all know what goes on up there amongst the gentry.’

  He straightened his back as though for the past few weeks it had been bowed with the weight of a heavy burden which he was about to throw off. His eyes were like granite now, cold, the smoky brown humour gone with his love. They were filled with his contempt for her. His lips curled and the expression on his face told her he despised her whole class which treated so lightly men such as himself. ‘It seems you have found some other man to warm your bed . . .’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘Aah, so you have not yet played the whore for him as you did for me . . .’

  ‘It’s not like that . . .’

  ‘Dear me, Miss Harrison, has he been able to withstand your charms as I seemed unable to do? Of course, he is a gentleman, they say, so perhaps he is made differently from the rest of us.’

  ‘Will, please . . .’

  ‘I don’t want to hear what you have to say, Tessa. I would have listened to you if you had come to me and told me honestly that you no longer . . . that you and I . . . that your feelings for this . . . him . . . were stronger. I might not have liked it, nor understood it, for I truly believed there was something line between us but I would have respected you for being truthful. I might not have given you up easily . . .’

  He bowed his head and she could see the tremble of his powerful shoulders and the working of the muscles in his throat. ‘You were so young but time would have remedied that and when it did I thought . . . hoped you would recognise what we could do together, where we could go together. I’m not a man to be content with the place in life the parson tells me God meant me to have.’ He lifted his shaggy head, uncut and unbrushed, and stared at her as he might at some creature which he had found beneath a stone. ‘I meant to move on and up and I would have done it with you since it would have been for you. But it seems I didn’t recognise you for what you are. How foolish I was! I could have enjoyed the simple and uncomplicated use of your body without the agonies of remorse I suffered after we had made love. I idolised you, could not believe my good fortune in having you love me. I did not realise that you were simply amusing yourself with me, passing time which must hang heavily on ladies of your class in the tedium of the day. Most paint water-colours, I believe, or do fine embroidery but it seems you like to . . .’ Here he used a word she had not heard before but whose meaning she instantly understood, an obscene word so coarse it was spoken only between men. ‘You are a whore, Tessa, and even that insults those who go by that name for they are at least honest in their profession. You are a liar and a cheat and I am saddened to think that I spent useless hours longing for you, loving you, weeping . . . oh, yes, I wept for you. So go back to your latest lover’ – his face jerked in pain but his eyes still dwelled on her face in contempt – ‘and tell him from me that I can recommend you as a splendid . . .’ Again he used a word she did not know but whose meaning was clear. ‘But your morals leave much to be desired. It’s a long and vexed road you tread, Tessa Harrison. I shall get on with my life now and you get on with yours, whatever it might be. And God help you when you fail to find what you look for, since no one else will.’

  He turned then and began to stride away across the springing turf, his own step light, as though he had freed himself from the load he had carried and laboured under for so long. He did not look back. His head was held high and proud, almost jaunty, and Tessa felt her heart move painfully beneath her ribs, aching with some strange and sad emotion in which shame and sorrow were mixed. Why had she been afraid of the steadfast man who now walked away from her and their brief life together? That was what had kept her from him, she realised now. She should have gone at once to him and told him of Robby since it was his right to know but the fear of hearing the words he had just spoken had held her back: the fear of seeing on his face the scorn and disdain he felt for her, the knowledge that he found her worthless. She had dreaded it, avoided it by avoiding him, and as she turned her mare towards Greenacres her face was wet with tears.

  The expedition to invade Sebastopol led by Lord Raglan reached the Crimea at last. He had been informed that a safe and honourable peace could be obtained in no other way. The nation thought so and the government thought so and he was not to delay his decision to attack. Despite the sickness of the troops and their complete lack of preparation for war, he set forth bravely to do as he was bid.

  The first mistake was caused by the misunderstanding between the systems of the French and British armies. The British, as Wellington had always done in France, were prepared to purchase at a fair price the carts and bullocks they needed, having brought no transport of their own, from the simple country folk who came into their camp. The French, on the other hand, believing that stores belonging to the government of one’s enemy are a fair prize, entered and plundered villages within the British lines, abusing men and even women, and like snow before the sun the supplies on which they had counted simply melted away.

  That was the first mistake but certainly not the last as Lord Raglan looked about him for the transport needed to carry the expedition consisting of 61,000 soldiers and 132 guns. Somehow it was accomplished and on a soft and sunny day a week later, they prepared to set off but, staggeringly, it was found that the British were not ready. They should have been in lines of seven and where was the delay, they were asked. No answer seemed to be forthcoming but at last they were prepared for the daring exploit of invading the Peninsula. They marched gloriously towards the banks of the Alma where a great battle was fought and despite the initial blunders, was won in triumph and the Russians were forced to retreat.

  Pearce Greenwood read the account of it in the newspaper and his eyes gleamed in his sun-browned face. He savoured phrases such as ‘irresistible vigour in all parts of the field’, ‘immediate advance’ and the words spoken by Brigadier Sir Colin Campbell: ‘It is better that every man of Her Majesty’s Guards should be dead upon the field than that they should turn their backs upon the enemy.’

  What splendour! What magnificence, the newspaper reports declared. Did it not describe exactly what every right-minded Englishman, if he had hot blood in his veins, which Pearce did, was thinking as he ate his bacon and eggs that morning? The names of the divisions of which the British army was composed were enough to make any man reach for his rifle and his horse and travel immediately to the Crimea to see for himself what was going on: the Light Division’, ‘the 2nd Battalion Rifle Brigade’, ‘the Grenadiers’, ‘the Fusiliers
’, ‘the Coldstream Guards’, ‘the Light Dragoons’, ‘the 11th Hussars’. They painted pictures of flags snapping in the breeze, the sun reflected on polished sabres and boots; the flare of the kilt above brawny knees; scarlet coats and sleek, well-bred horses and the roar of battle-hardened men, the cream of Britain’s finest, for surely that was what they were, as they whipped the enemy from the field.

  He sighed forlornly as he lowered his newspaper and looked about the room. Briggs and Dorcas, one of Mrs Shepherd’s clean, respectable and efficiently trained parlour maids, stood to attention by the sideboard, their eyes somewhere over his head, their faces expressionless. He wondered what the hell they thought about as they waited for him to tell them what he would eat for breakfast, if he would eat anything at all from the dozen silver platters which stood under their silver covers on the sideboard.

  He was alone at the table, Laurel ate breakfast in the peace of her own small sitting-room and his Aunt Jenny and Charlie had gone to the mill an hour ago, as he was only too well aware. His brother . . . well, God knows where his brother was at this moment. Some actress in Manchester, he had said vaguely, as he had ridden off into the night, and to expect him when he saw him.

  The door opened and the subject of his thoughts lurched across the threshold, dressed as he had been last night before he took the train to the charms, one supposed, of the actress. It was obvious to Pearce and to the servants that he had been drinking heavily, and alone, by the look of sullen oppression which hung about him like a mist. Pearce, in his own misery, recognised his brother’s, and the unhappiness was made worse by the knowledge that for the first time they could not share it. How could one console a man who suffered the same malady as oneself? In one way he did not care about Drew since his heart ached only for himself and yet, in this ludicrous situation, they were the same person.