Free The Sleeping Sword by Brenda Jagger Page B

to hear at first hand those elusive, tantalizing ideals of liberty and fraternity which had been born in France a century ago. It would be fascinating to watch and to hope that this time, after so many years of bloodshed, so much pain and sacrifice, they had been able to get their formula right. But in the end I would be obliged to come home again, to find these same conflicts waiting for me unresolved, and catching sight of the mill below me, a charcoal sketch of rooftops around it, a damp, grey sky above, I knew that no matter how long or how frequent my journeyings I would always wish to return.
    I had seen splendid cities, the heart-rending, crumbling elegance of Venice, imperial Rome, the opulence of Vienna, sparkling Lucerne. I had seen towering blue-white mountains, the extravagant massing of southern flowers, the rich profusion of the summer vine. I had seen the outpouring of artistic genius in paint and in marble, the jewelled and silken interiors of churches and ducal palaces. And Cullingford had none of these. But there was something in these narrow, grimy streets climbing so tenaciously up hill and down which moved me; some force of energy and resolution, a blunt refusal to submit to blind authority, or blind fate, of which I felt myself to be a part.
    I knew there was injustice here, and oppression, knew that my father’s sheds were full of women who, labouring the ten hours a day which the law allowed, returned each night to hovels built back to back in dingy rows and the further drudgery of an everlasting maternity; I knew that in all the streets around Fieldhead, around Lawcroft and Low Cross and every other mill in our town, small children were turned out of doors in flocks and left to roam unattended from early morning until the murky evening hour when the factory gates were unlocked to release their mothers.
    Yet I was a part of that too, for if my Grandfather Aycliffe had made his fortune by building these hovels, my other grandfather, known to us all as Mayor Agbrigg, had lived in such places himself; my father had been born there, and the memory perhaps had been bred in me. Mayor Agbrigg had been a pauper brat, sent north by the overseer of a poorhouse at so young an age that he had no recollection even of his proper name, being called ‘Agbrigg’—since, like a dog, it was necessary to give him a name of some sort to answer to—by an overlooker of the mill where my grandfather had slaved for seventeen hours a day until he turned twenty-one, eating and sleeping on a pile of waste in the corner of a weaving-shed. Yet this remarkable grandparent of mine, who might never have reached that ripe old age of twenty-one, had not only survived but had prospered, had risen by the dogged endurance I so ardently admired to a position of authority, to be Mayor of Cullingford and to send a son to Cambridge. And he had survived, not bitterly and harshly, but with the compassion of true courage, a conviction that all men—and all women—were entitled to basic human dignities.
    Grandfather Agbrigg was a plain man, hard-handed, grey-visaged, blunt-spoken like Cullingford itself, yet his strength, to me, was magnificent and at the same time quite familiar in our steep, cobbled streets where so many of our men—our patient, labouring women—also possessed it. He had suffered and overcome, as not everyone could do, but I believed that Cullingford itself, which he seemed so accurately to personify, could overcome its blights, its cruelties, its greeds, could—now that the first mad fever of industrial expansion was over—grow graciously, kindly, with care for all. And that was the challenge—not the agony of the Paris barricades—in which I felt entitled to participate.
    Yet my participation, as I well knew, was hampered by three things: my sex, my single status, and by Mrs. Agbrigg. I had never set foot in the clamorous sheds of Fieldhead, prevented by my female gender from