Flint and Roses by Brenda Jagger

said quite viciously, her jaw clenching with the effort to hold back her temper, ‘is not a tradesman. And I’d like to hear you call him so, Blaize Barforth, to his face. Not that you ever would, for with all your airs and graces you’re still afraid of him, and so is Nicholas. You can grumble, the pair of you—Nicholas thinking he knows more about cloth manufacture than father, and you pretending you don’t care—but you’ll always do as he tells you, just the same. And so you should, when you consider his position and everything he’s done for you.’
    â€˜Quite so,’ Blaize murmured, less mischievous now, although a slight smile still touched the corners of his lips. ‘He’s done a great deal for me. He’s made a manufacturer of me which is very splendid, provided that’s what like to be.’
    â€˜Like it!’ she snorted, the duchess giving way now to the child I remembered, who had never scrupled to use her fists—fierce and determined Caroline, with her belief, apparently by no means dead, that the Barforths were the greatest people in the world. ‘Like it? And what has liking to do with it? You’d better like it, for if you let him down I’ll never forgive you. He’s spent his whole life building Tarn Edge and Lawcroft Fold and Low Cross, and he’s entitled, Blaize—he’s entitled —’
    â€˜Entitled to what? My gratitude?’
    â€˜Yes, so he is. Your gratitude, and your labour.’
    And suddenly I saw a new Caroline emerge, or perhaps simply the old one, the real one, stripped of her genteel pretensions—a girl who, had she been born of an earlier generation, would have laboured herself alongside her men, a hard-headed, tough-fibred girl of the West Riding, who would have brewed nettles for food when times were bad, who would have endured and overcome as those older Barforths had done, and who surely in her heart must secretly despise the airs and graces of that class above her own to which she now aspired.
    â€˜My word,’ she muttered, ‘if he could pass the mill on to me I’d take care of it for him. I’d be down there every morning, just like he is, to see the hands arrive on time and make sure the managers don’t rob me. I’d—’
    And, as she paused breathlessly, painfully aware of her self-betrayal, Blaize smiled. ‘Dear Caroline—good heavens!—you’d be a manufacturer yourself if you did that. Can you mean it?’
    â€˜Damnation!’ she said, a word I had never heard on female lips before, clenching her fists in a gesture of total fury she jumped to her feet and swept away as regally as she could contrive.
    â€˜That was not kind of you, Blaize.’ I said serenely no stranger to Barforth tantrums.
    â€˜No—but then, she’ll forgive me, you know, since I am, after all, her favourite brother.’
    â€˜Are you?’
    â€˜Oh, yes—I do believe so. And it does her good to remember how proud she is of father. Poor father, I suppose he wishes she had been born a boy, for he declares I am not much use to him, and he cannot get on with Nicholas.’
    â€˜Is it true that you don’t like to be a manufacturer?’
    â€˜Gracious me!’ he said laughing. ‘You look as shocked as if I had declared myself a Roman Catholic or a Socialist. Do you know, I am not really sure whether I like it or not—and certainly I like the money it brings. My brother Nicholas likes it well enough. You wouldn’t catch him coming home in the middle of the day to change his clothes and slip over to Leeds, as I mean to do.’
    But here, it seemed, he was wrong, for as he lingered a moment on the sofa—asking me if there was anyone I had in mind to marry, asking how Prudence would manage to dispose of Jonas without being disposed of herself, most painfully, by Aunt Hannah—there was a step on the stair, and Nicholas came