Katie Mulholland Read online

  ‘Intimacy.’

  ‘Theresa!’ Agnes had her eyes wide open now. ‘We went into this a month ago. I gave you my advice. I…I told you to…’ She could not go on and at the same time look at her daughter, so she swivelled round to the dressing table again and began sorting some jewellery on a silver tray as if looking for a particular object, adding as she did so, ‘…to let Mr Noble have his way, just…just be submissive, do nothing whatever. I…I told you.’ She glanced now through the mirror at the pale face behind her. ‘One gets used to it; you…you think of other things while it’s going on.’

  ‘I’ll never get used to it. I hate it, loathe it. I can’t think of other things. I’m not putting up with it.’

  ‘Theresa!’ Agnes was now on her feet. ‘Stop this nonsense once and for all. Where do you think you will go if you leave Mr Noble’s house?’

  ‘I…I can come back here, I suppose, can’t I?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You mean you wouldn’t let me come home?’

  ‘It isn’t what I would do, it’s your father. Under no consideration would he allow you to leave Mr Noble.’

  ‘What if I leave him without his consideration? What if I just leave him? I’ve a hundred pounds a year of my own.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, child. How could you live on a hundred pounds a year after the life you’ve been accustomed to? Anyway, you’re under age.’

  ‘You seem to forget, Mama, that I’m a married woman; I no longer come under the jurisdiction of Papa.’

  Agnes drew herself up to her full height, all of five foot eight. She held her hands stiffly by her sides, the fists clenched. ‘Do you want to bring disgrace on us? You’ll set the whole county afire if you do this. And at this particular time, this crucial time…Theresa.’ She took in a long slow breath of air, then, bending slightly towards her daughter, her manner changing, she begged, ‘Please…please do nothing until after the wedding. Promise me, for if anything should happen to stop Bernard’s marriage it will be the end of your father; he’s relying on this liaison. In fact our whole future depends on our being joined to the Talfords. I …I told you weeks ago how things stood financially. Your father is a very worried man at the moment, so I beg you, if you are set on doing something drastic like this, wait. For my sake, wait.’

  For the first time since she entered the room Theresa took her eyes from her mother and, looking down, she said, ‘I’ll do nothing until after the engagement party, but I can’t promise to wait until they are married.’

  As Agnes Rosier stared at her daughter’s bowed head there came to her a strange thought. Her daughter didn’t look like a woman at all, there was nothing feminine in this creature before her. What, as Mr Rosier had said, had she bred him?

  With her four flounced petticoats making a sound like retreating waves on sand, she went swiftly towards the clothes closet, saying, ‘Leave me and send Stockwell in; I want to finish dressing…But, Theresa’—she swung sharply round again—’you won’t leave the grounds, will you? I mean…Well, you know what I mean.’ Her voice was harsh. ‘No going into Jarrow, or Felling…Remember.’

  To this demand Theresa made no answer; she simply bowed her head and went out of the room.

  She kept her head down as she went along the wide corridor that opened out into the gallery, and she did not raise it until she almost bumped into the first chambermaid.

  Florrie Green was coming from a side passage that communicated, by a door, with the servants’ staircase. She had a big wooden slop bucket in her hand and ‘Pardon, mi…ma’ am,’ she exclaimed, accompanying her words with a slight dipping of her buckets. There was no deference in the action; it was merely a habit. Nobody was very deferential to Miss Theresa, or Mrs Noble as she now was. Well, it was as Mr Kennard said, she didn’t keep her place. She spoke to you as if she was just like you, and it wasn’t right.

  Theresa paused on top of the wide oak stairway and looked down into the hall where Mrs Davis, the housekeeper, was bustling about, and Kennard, the butler, was supervising two of the maids, directing how they should move a long oak chest, but never putting his hand on it to assist them. She descended to the middle landing, where the stairs turned at right angles into the hall. She paused a moment looking to the left of her across the hall and into the drawing room. John Swan, the second coachman, and Albert Nash, the under-gardener, crossed her line of vision, one at each end of a long sofa. They were rearranging the furniture in the drawing room, making it and the dining room, adjoining and divided only by a portable partition, into a room large enough for the guests to stroll in and to eat and drink casually from well-laden tables lining the walls. Her mother had brought this idea of eating from London. It was, she said, called a buffet supper. The dancing would take place in the hall, and the musicians would be seated on a raised dais at the back; the gallery wasn’t wide enough to accommodate them and allow for the passage of guests. This fact about the construction of the house had always irked her mother, as had these stairs, which she would have had circular…One could never sweep down stairs that had a sharp bend; to do justice to a gown and a fine carriage one needed a circular staircase.

  This cynical thought seemed to speed Theresa down the remaining stairs and into the hall. Walking quickly across it, and not looking at Kennard, but thanking him merely with a slight movement of her head when he opened the stained-glass door into the vestibule for her, she hurried through this large, tiled and chilly entrance and out into the sunshine. Still hurrying, almost at a tripping run now, she went down the five broad stone steps on to the drive.

  The drive was wide and could take three coaches abreast. It was bordered directly in front by an ornamental privet hedge, not high enough to obscure the view of the gardens beyond. Yet the view was chequered by the contorted mass of sculptured trees. To the right of the house was the main drive; to the left, well to the left, was a high, ivy-covered wall, with an arch which led to the walks. Through this she now went. But she did not take any of the paths into the pleasure gardens; she walked by the wall which now became the back of the stables and courtyard. Beyond these the wall continued, covered with a mass of roses and clematis, and the scent of the roses was heavy in the hot morning air. She did not stop and bend towards their fragrance, as her mother would have done; she had no use for flowers. She did not like the garden; you cannot grow to love a prison, no matter how beautiful or sweet-smelling.

  The wall ended where a copse began. It stopped abruptly, the sharp ends of the sandstone sticking out here and there from the creeper. It was as if the builders had suddenly run out of material. She continued through the copse and into a green pasture that ran steeply uphill, and not until she reached its summit did she stop. And then she turned and looked over the way she had come. She stared at the scene before her for fully five minutes; then slowly she sat down on the ground.

  From where she sat she could see the whole of the back of the house, the stable yard, the courtyard, and the servants’ quarters, where the male servants slept; the women had their rooms in the attics in the east wing. The house, like the wall, was made of stone, except for the ornamental pieces at the front which were picked out in red brick. Theresa had always considered it an ugly house; impressive but ugly. It was not large, as country houses went, and from the time she had first become conscious of her home she had never liked it; but now she had the urge to hold out her arms to it and say, ‘Take me back. Please, take me back.’

  She had looked on her marriage as a way of escape from the narrowness and hypocrisy of her family, and their friends; escape from her plainness and the pain it had caused. She had wondered during the last few weeks if she would have possessed the awareness to gauge her mother’s real feelings for her and what went on behind her smiling face, and of those of the women who came to the house accompanied by loud, hearty-voiced men, if it hadn’t been for Ainsley. Likely, as she grew older, she would have come to judge for herself, but she doubted whether she would have come to her present w
ay of thinking at her age without the tutoring and guidance of her governess.

  Ainsley had been a forcing house, like the one over there near the greenhouses where Mr Wisden, the head gardener, performed miracles on plants with a stove-pipe. Ainsley had been her stove-pipe, and she thanked God for her. Yet, perhaps, without Ainsley she might have suffered this marriage…No, no, never. The thing that she couldn’t tolerate in this marriage had nothing to do with the mind…But hadn’t it? ‘Think of other things while it’s going on,’ her mother had said. It seemed to her that without the mind this thing in itself would be nothing, or at least something that was over so quickly it was nothing more than a purge. She plucked at the grass, then raised her head and looked towards the house again and tried to recapture the times she and Ainsley had sat on this very spot, laughing at it and all that went on inside, from the kitchen to the drawing room. The jealousies, the pettiness, the striving for place, the pomp. Ainsley had taught her to see things as they really were.

  She had been five years old when Ainsley came into her life. She could remember the day when she first saw the tall, thin woman and realised that Ainsley was plain-looking. That was before she became aware that she herself was saddled with the same complaint. Ainsley was thirty when she came to Greenwall Manor. She was forty-two when she left it, on the day following their secret, exciting visit to the meeting on the Newcastle Town Moor, when the cavalry came and rode into the thousands of people, and they had run with the rest and almost been trampled to death. It was there they had been seen by Mr Careless, a magistrate and friend of her father’s.

  Ainsley had been turned out in disgrace and without a reference. For who could give a reference to a governess who had corrupted a young mind? That’s what her mother had said. Her father had said much more and his language had been much stronger, for had not the woman made him a laughing stock by inveigling his daughter to attend Chartist meetings, and making her an open sympathiser with the rebels and scum in his own pit?

  Ainsley had refuted nothing her employer had accused her of, and she had dared to stand up to him and say that she was proud she had enabled one of his family to think for herself, and that he, too, should be proud that he had one intelligent person among the dunderheads in his household.

  She had known what it was to die when she saw Ainsley being driven away from the door. She hadn’t been allowed any word with her; she was locked in her room, but she had hammered on the window and Ainsley had lifted her joined hands towards her. They said, ‘Be strong. Be strong.’ She had tried to be strong, but it was difficult without Ainsley’s support. She had begun by proposing setting up a weekly class in the village to teach the miners to read and write. When her mother had recovered sufficiently she had said, ‘Child, do you think a miner would go down a mine if he could read and write correctly? Do you want your father’s business to collapse? Do you want us to starve? Never let such a proposal come to your father’s ears, it could cause him to have a seizure.’

  Then Mr Noble came on the scene.

  Theresa now experienced a sickness in the pit of her stomach; her whole body shrank inwardly, for even sitting on this hilltop she could actually feel his hands on her. He always wanted to touch her; wherever they met, even at the dining table, his hand would come out and touch her. But there was one thing that puzzled, even amazed, her about Mr Noble. It was the fact that he cared for her. Perhaps caring wasn’t the right word, but innately she knew she held an attraction for him. Was it just her extreme youth? It certainly wasn’t her looks, or her charm, or even her conversation, for she found she couldn’t talk to this fat, greasy-looking man, who had stubble all round his face if he didn’t shave twice a day, and whose lower lip was soft and moist and whose head was going bald, and whose stomach, without the support of his belt, bulged.

  She was on her feet again, looking about her, diverting her thoughts from her husband. There, far away to the left, she could see the headings of her father’s mine; and farther away still, where the land fell into the valley, another heading. That was the dead head of the Jarrow mine which had been closed down. To the side of it was the silver thread of the river Don hurrying towards the Tyne—the busy, bustling Tyne.

  She had not been along the banks of the Tyne more than half a dozen times in her life, but these brief visits had filled her with excitement. There was so much to see, for what had once been a mining village no bigger than the village attached to her father’s mine was fast becoming a town. Already the old salt pans were going, as were the coke ovens that spread along the river bank and whose waste heat had kept the salt pans working. A paper mill was now flourishing on the river bank, as also were three chemical works.

  Then there was the main industry on the river, the industry that made her wish at times she had been born a boy. This was Palmer’s Shipyard. She knew quite a bit about the Palmer brothers and their shipyard—at least her father’s opinion of them, for the Palmer brothers were like a thorn in his flesh, yet a thorn that he wanted to drive deeper, for he wanted, above all things, to be close to the Palmers, to be attached to them in such a way that whatever profits their new and thriving concern would make he would have a share in them. It was primarily because of this that her brother Bernard was marrying Ann Talford.

  The Talfords were very rich. They had a house three times the size of Greenwall; also James Talford had his fingers in all kinds of pies, including boat-building, and he was a personal friend of the Palmers. She understood from things that had been let drop, mostly from her brother Rodger, that James Talford didn’t like her father and had opposed this match with his only child. But, as Rodger said, Mr Talford had found himself thawed by two weapons, both used against him with effect. The first was he loved his daughter and would do anything to further her happiness; the second was the tenacity of her suitor.

  For three years Bernard had wooed Ann, and in so doing had apparently become a reformed character, for once there had been loud whispers about his escapades, and not only with regard to gambling; but now her brother was supposedly a steady, sober man of twenty-six, and James Talford, a strict churchman, could no longer put forward any arguments against the marriage.

  Today was Friday and on Tuesday the engagement ball was to be held, and in four months’ time, early in October, the wedding would take place. Could she suffer Mr Noble for another four months? Theresa shook her head slowly. Not unless she locked herself away at night. And she couldn’t do that either, for there were the servants; and whereas the servants in her old home did not exactly like her, the servants in her new home took no more notice of her than if she was one of her husband’s hounds. Were she to ask for a key to a room, they would, she knew, merely refer her to Mr Noble.

  Yet it wasn’t true that all the servants here didn’t like her; there were two who did, three in fact. There was Mrs Davis, the housekeeper; Katie Mulholland, the scullery maid; and Tatman, the head coachman. They liked her, and she liked them. But of the three, she liked Katie Mulholland best. Katie had been the only other young thing in the house that one could look at, and like looking at. It was strange the pleasure she had always got from looking at Katie Mulholland.

  As if her thinking had drawn the substance of it from out of the house, she now saw the unmistakably thin figure of Katie Mulholland staggering from the side door of the kitchen with a large wooden bucket in each hand. The door led to the attic stairs down which it was one of Katie’s daily chores to carry the maids’ slops. She watched the figure crossing the yard. Then she was lost to her sight for a moment until she emerged through the arch in the long wall. She watched her staggering to the bottom of the kitchen garden; then she saw her tipping up her buckets into the trough that led down to the cesspit. Her nose wrinkled and she closed her eyes for a moment. ‘The indignities that were heaped upon human beings.’ Those were Ainsley’s words, but they were her own sentiments.

  She now heard, from the far end of the drive, the sound of hooves and she looked away from the small sculle
ry maid to see her father’s coach racing up the drive. She wondered what had brought him back at this time in the morning. Trouble at the mine? More than likely; there was always trouble at the mine.

  Chapter Two

  George Daniel Rosier was a small man, at least two inches shorter than his wife. He had a swarthy dark complexion, thin grizzled hair, round eyes which could be likened to jet beads, and then his main feature, his nose, a large bony protrusion dominating his face. Physically he had no presence, but he made himself felt by his temper and his tongue, and both were feared by every member of his household, except perhaps his eldest son and his only daughter. He leapt straight out of the carriage and up the steps, pushing his butler to one side and crying, ‘Get Mr Bernard. And now!’

  He stormed across the hall towards the library door, but with the knob in his hand he turned round and cried to Kennard, ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I think he’s in his room, sir.’

  ‘In his room!’ The nose jerked itself upwards in disdain, taking the rest of the face with it, as he thrust open the door.

  The library was a long, high room, lined with books from floor to ceiling, and never in the thirty years that George Rosier had lived in this house had he disturbed one of them. At the end of the room were four tall windows which faced the drive, and in front of the middle two was a large bog-oak desk, covered with a disarray of papers and letters. To the right, in the middle of one long wall, was a huge fireplace, and although the day was warm, even hot outside, a wood fire was burning in the iron basket.