Flint and Roses by Brenda Jagger Page A

into view, a man decidedly in a hurry, his neckcloth a little awry. Seeing us, he stopped, stared, his eyes narrowing as if it surprised him, did not altogether please him, to find his brother sitting there in such merry, easy tête-â-tête with me. But in the moment before I allowed myself to be flattered. I remembered that all their lives these two had wanted, instantly, anything which seemed to attract the other, had fought each other murderously for trifles, from the simple habit, bred in them by Uncle Joel, of competition, of proving, each one to himself, that he was first and best.
    â€˜Do I believe my eyes?’ Blaize said. ‘Brother Nicholas deserting his sheds in the middle of the day?’
    â€˜Aye, you can believe it, since I was there all night. And even I feel the need of a clean shirt after sixteen hours.’
    And as Blaize got to his feet and sauntered away, looking as if the mere thought of a sixteen-hour stretch at the mill fatigued him or bored him to death. Nicholas sat down in the exact spot his brother had vacated at my side.
    â€˜Blaize hasn’t been teasing you, has he?’
    â€˜Oh, no. He’s been teasing Caroline. He overheard her saying she didn’t care for manufacturers and then trapped her into admitting she’d be the best one in the Valley—if she’d been a boy.’
    He smiled, no sudden, luminous brilliance like Blaize, but a slow, almost unwilling release of mirth that tilted his wide mouth into a smile, soon over, as if smiles, like time and money, were valuable and should not be squandered.
    â€˜Maybe she would. Better than Blaize, at any rate.’
    â€˜Is he so bad?’
    â€˜Bad enough. He could manage all right if he wanted to. He knows how to go on. He just doesn’t care.’
    â€˜But you care? You like being a manufacturer, don’t you, Nicholas?’
    â€˜Ah, well,’ he said, leaning back against the red velvet upholstery. ‘I haven’t got my brother’s imagination. I’ve never thought about being anything else. It’s there—a good business ready and waiting—and only a fool is going to turn away from that and go into something else just for the sake of making changes. Blaize is no different when it comes down to it. He may not, want to be a manufacturer but there’s nothing else he wants to be either, and since he’s nobody’s fool I reckon he’ll take his share of the business when it comes to us. I’ll just have to make sure he does his share of the work.’
    And he smiled at me again, by no means a man flirting, but a man who was willing to confide in me his shrewd assessment of his brother’s character, his belief in his own good sense and ability, which would be enough, when it came to it, to bring Blaize into line.
    â€˜You’re all right are you, Faith—I mean, here, with us?’
    â€˜Yes, I’m very well.’
    â€˜I’m glad to hear it.’
    No more than that. He got up, offering only a half-smile now, his mind already returning to whatever problem had detained him so long in the sheds, leaving me alone on the landing sofa. The house was very still. Aunt Verity out visiting somewhere, a hushed, lamplit tranquillity settling almost visibly around me as the early winter dark came peering through velvet-shrouded windows, the distant crackling of a dozen log fires keeping the cold at bay. Nothing had happened, Nicholas Barforth had sat down beside me, had spoken a few unremarkable words, given me his slow, quite beautiful smile, not once but twice, his hair very black against the red velvet sofa-cushions, the handsome sullen boy changed into a handsome, hard-headed man, his voice still somehow or other in my ears. Nothing had happened at all. Yet I couldn’t rid myself of the belief that at last—without my father to frown at it, without Miss Mayfield to spy on it—my life was about to begin.

Chapter Three
    I was in