Flint and Roses (75 page)

‘So be it,' he said very low. ‘I'll have it on his desk when he gets back from London.'

‘Oh—he's going to London, is he?'

‘Yes, on the evening train.'

And, incredibly, he smiled at me.

There was a storm later that day, a cloudburst, it seemed, directly overhead, releasing a slashing torrent of rain that soaked my hapless laundrymaid to the skin in the two or three minutes it took her to empty her washing-line. And within half an hour the garden was water-logged, each pathway a separate rivulet rushing to its mainstream, which was the Cullingford road. I went to bed early, cold, beseiged by the weather, threatened all night by the growling of thunder, the spikes of lightning on the other side of my curtains, waking to an awareness of rain still falling, an uneasy sky.

And I was instantly embroiled in the kind of domestic drama which, that day, was not unwelcome. The fires would not light, the stove would do nothing but lower and sulk. Blanche, who had slept soundly all night oblivious of the tempest, was demanding her breakfast, and there was no breakfast to be had. There was no hot water; no milk had been delivered; and when a stable-lad was finally dispatched to the farm to inquire, his returning tale was one of pure disaster. The countryside had been reduced overnight to a bog, Cullingford itself was drowning; it was useless, the farmer's wife had said, to milk her cows when the end of the world was clearly nigh. Far better, it seemed, to spend the time remaining in prayer and so, while the lightning continued to flash across the sky and the rain to fall, they abandoned, in my kitchen, all attempts to boil water and draw fires, and went down on their knees, remembering that the wise-woman of Knaresborough, Mother Shipton, had long ago predicted this.

‘Nonsense,' I told them, not altogether certain of it myself. ‘She said the world was destroyed by water last time—which everybody knows—and that it would end by fire this time. I don't see any fire. I only wish I did.'

But the moaning and the sobbing, the ‘Our Fathers' from my Protestant cook and the ‘Hail Marys'from my two Irish housemaids, continued, and in the end, abandoning my crinoline for an old woollen gown and a few petticoats, I managed the drawing-room fire myself, having seen it done often enough in happier conditions, and huddled over it, reading stories to an indignant Blanche, until Prudence came.

Not one of her day-girls had arrived at school that morning. Her boarders were in varying states of disarray. Her competent teacher of mathematics had locked herself in the broom-cupboard and, in view of the panic she had been spreading, could remain there indefinitely so far as Prudence was concerned, telling her beads and muttering of sins which, in other circumstances, would have been most entertaining. Prudence herself had come only to check on my safety, at some risk to her own, and with a houseful of girls in her charge could not stay. And I suppose we were both aware that every stream in the hills with, which Cullingford was surrounded must by now have transformed itself into a fast-flowing cascade, pouring into the city streets; that by now, in the low-lying districts, every cellar, every warehouse, would be awash; that the level of the canal, encircling one half of the town with its murky waters, would be insidiously rising.

I put on the Cossack boots Blaize had brought me from Moscow and walked with Prudence to the end of the garden, determined that my courage should match hers, and returned, soaked and soiled and exceedingly apprehensive, to find a drowned apparition on my doorstep that was Liam Adair.

‘Well, I
am
your brother,' he said cheerfully, amazed at my concern, since I should have had the good sense to know that no lightning in the world could ever have the nerve to strike him, no thunderbolt could be strong enough to block his way. ‘I thought I'd best come and rescue you since Blaize is snug and warm in London.'

And even the fact that I had managed, so far, to rescue myself, occasioned him no dismay. He had been up before dawn, except that really there had been no dawn, and had had a fine time. Sheer panic, he told me, and what fun it had been to watch people splashing ankle-deep, knee-deep, in flood-water, cursing and struggling and yelling about their carpets and their cats and their grandmothers; what fun to see packets of raw wool come floating out of the Mandelbaum warehouse, the milliner, at the bottom of the river that was Sheepgate, baling out her shop like a boat, water, hat-moulds, feathers and all. He had rescued a litter of puppies from a cellar and almost been drowned for his pains. He had tried to right a brewer's cart in Market Square and had held any number of screaming horses. He had gone down to Low Cross mill, the only low-lying Barforth property, where his father and Nicholas were salvaging what they could from the sheds, and then, growing bored, had fought his way through falling tree-branches, a tidal wave of nameless dangers, to Elderleigh.

‘Your mother said I was to go to Celia, but I thought I'd rather come to you. Celia's got Jonas, after all.'

But had she? Jonas, I knew, had gone to Manchester some days ago and I had not heard of his return, nor could I ignore the fact that Albert Place was not on high ground; was, indeed, constructed in a marshy hollow where water could collect. And there was not only Celia, there was Grace.

My coachman refused, rudely, explicitly, to get out the horses. He valued his job but had no mind to commit suicide for it, since there was no man alive who could control horses in this weather. And even when the lightning had abated, leaving only the perils of rutted tracks turned into bog and slime, branches and boulders and the incessant rain, he continued adamantly to disobey.

‘Do you think we can get there on foot, Liam?'

‘Well,
I
can. I don't know about you.'

But we set off together, my skirts a sodden encumbrance, my cloak so heavy that quite soon it served no purpose but to delay me, and I took it off, finding a strange exhilaration in this exposure to the tormented sky, the slashing yet somehow cleansing attack of the rain. I had never been outdoors without a bonnet before, but now, striding bare headed towards real issues, towards real danger, a lifetime of convention was discarded as easily as my cloak, tossed aside into the nearest puddle, leaving me clear-sighted and resolute.

Yet Celia, if we succeeded in reaching Albert Place, would not be so resolute. And although I had never felt stronger in my life, I knew I was driven mainly by determination, that my pampered body would not enable me to get back to Elderleigh with Grace in my arms. Nor could I put my sister and her child in a cart and pull them to safety as others were doing, women frailer in build than I, who, having laboured at the loom, were using that strength now, that gritty endurance, to make their escape.

A moment came when my chest seemed torn apart, my breath deserted me, whipped out of my body by the wind, and for an instant of sheer panic I knew my ability to breathe again was shattered. I was choking in cold air and rain-water, dying in some alien place, since nothing in these terrible streets was familiar to me, and had it not been for Georgiana I would have had no choice but to turn and struggle home again.

No man, my coachman had said, could control horses in this weather, but he had reckoned without a woman, for suddenly there she was, driving the Barforth landau, her drenched hair hanging like seaweed about her shoulders, her familiar green riding-habit black with rain, a trio of children clutched together on the silk cushions, three more like a tangle of kittens on the carriage floor.

‘Georgiana!' Liam called out, his face blazing with excitement and with pride. ‘Good old Georgie. I knew you'd do it.' And, setting her passengers down, dispersing them with instructions to run to the nearest house, she leaned her whole body against the wind and laughed down at him, her face beautiful as always with animation.

‘My God! there's no lack of water in Simon Street today. I've made a dozen trips already, and on the last one a woman almost gave birth right behind me. Come on, Faith, if you'd care to risk it, for these brutes are likely to bolt at any moment. They'll do one more journey, I think, before they're finished.'

‘But you're not finished,' Liam said, scrambling up beside her.

‘Oh no,' she told him, one rope of her seaweed hair blowing hard across her face, her hard, narrow hands firmly managing the reins.

‘Come on, Faith, they're rescuing wool down at Low Cross, which is all very fine, but I come from Galton and I reckon we're more inclined to rescue the sheep before the shorn fleece. Celia? Lord yes, we'll do something about her, and then let's have an adventure, shall we? Or break our necks. Either way it leaves them with something original to put on our tombstones.'

We took Celia and Grace back to Elderleigh—Celia cowering and silent in the landau, her eyes tight shut—deposited them with Prudence and then, Georgiana having exchanged her spent animals for mine, we set off again for the dips and hollows of Cullingford, where people well accustomed to living without water were now dying of its surfeit. Georgiana, at considerable peril to herself, somehow controlled Blaize's fractious horses, while I waded into the mean, porous dwellings my father had constructed—where Giles Ashburn had met the seeds of his death—and brought out those who were too young or too old to walk away, and when we were threatened by men and boys and strong, desperate women who saw no reason to walk when they could ride, Georgiana used her driving-whip as the best argument.

My arms may have ached, and my back. I was not aware of it. Nor would Georgiana permit me to be aware of it.

‘Come, on, Faith, we've got room for that little raga-muffin over there—we'd best have a look at the next street—Faith, that poor woman looks likely to jump out of her bedroom window if you don't restrain her. Come
on
, Faith—
noblesse oblige,
you know. I may not be good at paying my debts, but I do understand that I have to pay for my privileges.'

And so I half struggled, half swam through heaps of liquid foulness, up rickety, staircases and down again, a child on my back, another straddling my hip, and then, with an unlikely assortment of humanity crammed all around me, closed my eyes as Georgiana flourished her driving-whip and somehow forced those quivering beasts to move sensibly forward to the upper reaches of Blenheim Lane and Horton End, where Cullingford's more public-spirited ladies had opened their doors, their blanket boxes, and their soup tureens.

‘Come on, Faith. One more journey. When you reach the point where you know you can't endure, it really means you can endure just a little longer—that's what grandfather says.'

But the very moment she judged the horses were approaching their limits, she shook her head, shrugged her narrow shoulders. ‘That's it then. They're not people. One can't ask them to make sacrifices,' and drove carefully home.

And I was at once too exhausted and too exhilarated, too indescribably filthy, too much aglow with kinship for Georgiana, to have any time to spare for Celia.

The sky cleared, the waters receded, exposing an atrocious litter of splintered wood and broken glass, dead dogs and cats and rats, the dray-horses which had fallen and been shot where they lay, the old man who sold matches and drank gin at the bottom of Sheepgate, a young man who had been struck on the head, it was thought, by a falling beam and had drowned in an inch or two of rain.

Damage to property had been immense. The old warehouses on the canal bank behind Market Square had sagged, in some cases, like damp paper, while even the more substantial property of the Mandelbaums, in the same area, although it had kept its roof intact, had received its share of flood and cess water in the cellar, occasioning a total, loss of the bales there stored.

Everybody, in fact, lost something. Not a few lost all they had, and overnight the Workhouse and the Infirmary were bursting at their seams, every available church-hall overflowing with the homeless. Aunt Hannah occupied herself completely with the collection and distribution of food and clothing and medical supplies, her husband devoted himself with equal efficiency to the question of where these unfortunates were eventually to be housed when the churches reclaimed their halls for parochial purposes. Jonas, in pursuit of his civic ambitions, assisted him. Prudence and myself and even my mother had similar work to do. We were busy. Too busy even to glance at Celia.

Her house had not suffered irreparable harm. A half-inch of water had entered her front door, ruining her carpet and making a certain amount of decorating advisable, but her furniture, her china, her personal bits and pieces, had escaped damage, her upper floors were altogether unblemished, neither she nor Grace nor any member of her household had been hurt or even taken cold. And, in the midst of such appalling destruction, she found no one, including myself, with the patience to understand why she was so reluctant to return to Albert Place, remaining at Elderleigh long after the new paint was dry, the walls re-papered, a cheerful, busily patterned carpet laid in place, insisting that, beneath it, the floorboards still retained the foul, flood-water smell, while in her cellar strange things brought in by the deluge still lingered.

The cellar was swept clean, limewashed, swept clean again. She would not venture inside it. She could smell something, she insisted. Jonas, for all his thoroughness, had missed something.

‘Will you keep her another week or two?' he asked me, and the cellar was limewashed once more, to no avail.

‘It smells,' she said flatly. ‘And this carpet is the colour of slime. I cannot think what possessed you to choose it, Jonas.'

‘Largely because you would make no choice yourself, Celia. I will have it taken up and replaced.'

‘Yes—yes—do that. Two new carpets in two months, so that everyone will wonder where the money is coming from. Except that they will not wonder—they will imagine they know.'