Flint and Roses Read Free Page A

having no one of his own beside ourselves and the son of his first marriage, whose name I had never once heard on my father’s lips.
    I had been acquainted with wealthy and powerful men all my life—indeed my father had allowed us to be acquainted with no other—but it was generally acknowledged that my mother’s brother, Mr. Joel Barforth of Tarn Edge, of Lawcroft Fold, of Low Cross—the three largest textile mills in the Law Valley—was of a far higher order than any of these. For, rising above the legacy of debt and disgrace his father had bequeathed him, he had been the first man in Cullingford—perhaps the first man in the world—to see the advantages of the new, power-driven machines, and to possess the courage to exploit them.
    Following the slump in trade after our wars with Napoleon, when most manufacturers had been shaking their heads and keeping a tight hold on their purses—muttering that the ‘old ways’were best—Joel Barforth, then a young and reputedly reckless man, had filled his weaving sheds with the new machinery, turning a careless back on the hand-loom weavers who came to complain that he was taking their living away, shrugging a careless shoulder when they threatened his devilish innovations with hammers and his property with fire. He had spent money which the Hobhouses and other well-established residents of the Law Valley had considered criminal folly on a new breed of men called engineers and designers, purchasing their inventive and creative skills to make Barforth cloth not the cheapest, certainly, but the most efficiently produced, the very highest quality available, not merely in Cullingford but in the world. And because he had seen no reason to be modest about his achievements, because he had strolled into the Piece Hall in Cullingford as if he owned that too, and had greeted with no more than the tilt of a sardonic eyebrow the news that his competitors—with their faith in the ‘old ways’—were not all doing well, he had not been popular and many had wished to see him fail.
    But now, with scarcely a hand-loom weaver left in the Valley, Uncle Joel had passed far beyond the possibility of failure, his factory at Tarn Edge alone, I’d heard, capable of producing five thousand miles of excellent worsted cloth every year, his order books permanently full, his authority in the town of Cullingford very nearly complete.
    Yet, as I watched him that day sitting at ease beside his serenely elegant wife, too large a man for my father’s fragile, brocade-covered chairs, I somehow feared his influence less than that of his sister—who was my mother’s sister too—our Aunt Hannah.
    Uncle Joel was too splendid, I thought, too remote to concern himself in any great detail with the comings and goings of his orphan nieces, or, if he did, would do it with style, with the same breadth of vision he extended to all his enterprises. But Aunt Hannah had always been a source of authority in our lives, a woman of immense determination on whose judgment my mother frequently relied—a woman, we were given to understand, who deserved our respect and consideration because her life, unlike my mother’s, had always been hard.
    She had kept house for Uncle Joel during his early struggles, had sacrificed her youth to his convenience, and then, when neither he nor my mother needed her, had married late and somewhat unsuitably, reaping no advantage from her brother’s subsequently acquired millions. Yet her husband, Mr. Ira Agbrigg, who had been a widower with a half-grown son at the time of their marriage, was now the manager of Lawcroft Fold, perhaps the most important of the Barforth factories, a man whose quiet authority was acknowledged in the textile trade, and it was the long-held opinion of Mrs. Hobhouse and Mrs. Rawnsley that, if Aunt Hannah could learn to content herself with a manager’s salary, she would do well enough