The Emma Harte 7-Book Collection: A Woman of Substance, Hold the Dream, To Be the Best, Emma’s Secret, Unexpected Blessings, Just Rewards, Breaking the Rules. Barbara Taylor BradfordЧитать онлайн книгу.
was beginning to show a little independence of spirit. Perhaps his mother’s sickly influence had not been so damaging after all. Adele. He should go up and see her. He had many matters to discuss with her, which, as usual, he had been avoiding for weeks. If he was honest with himself he had to admit that he was avoiding it now. He thought of his wife. Fragile, pretty, vain, brittle Adele. Smiling her sweet smile. That perpetual smile that had begun to horrify him. Adele with her iridescent blonde beauty that had so captivated him years ago. How quickly he had discovered it was a chilly beauty that camouflaged selfishness and a heart that was as cold as marble. It also apparently disguised mental instability as well. They had not had any real contact or communication for years. Ten years to be exact, when Adele had retreated gratefully into a shell of vapourish semi-invalidism. Smiling sweetly, as ingenuous as always, she had closed her bedroom door firmly, locking it pointedly against him. At the time Adam had been startled to find that he accepted her termination of her connubial duties with a resignation that bespoke his own profound relief.
Long ago, Adam Fairley had come to accept that his lifeless and loveless marriage was by no means unique. Many of his friends were bound in similar bleak and fruitless unions, although he doubted that they had to contend with disorders of the mind as well. With abandon, and without a second thought, his friends took solace in other comforting feminine arms. Adam’s fastidiousness, and his innate sense of taste, precluded casual affairs with women of easy virtue. For in spite of his sensuous nature, Adam Fairley was not essentially carnal or given to fleshly pursuits, and he required other attributes in a woman as well as a beautiful face and body. And so, over the years, he had learned to accept celibacy as a permanent condition, and it bordered now on asceticism. He did not understand that this was a state of being that held its own attractions for the women he came into contact with socially, who found him irresistible. In his misery with his life he was blind to the flurry he created, and if he had noticed he would not have cared.
Adam went to the window, parted the curtains, and looked out. The dark rain clouds had scurried away, leaving a sky that was a vivid light blue, and so sharp and polished it was like the inside of an upturned enamelled bowl, and the pale yet bright sun intensified the cold lucency of the northern light. The black hills were as stark and barren as always, but for Adam they held an overpowering and enigmatic beauty. They had been there for aeons before he was born and they would be there long after he was dead. Always the land remained, changeless and everlasting, the source of the Fairleys’ power and their strength. In the scheme of things, he was just a droplet in the vast universe and suddenly his problems seemed of little significance, and even petty, for he was just a transitory being on this rich and splendid earth and, being mortal like all men, he would die one day. And what would it matter then? What would it have all been about? And who would care?
His reflective mood was shattered by the sound of horses’ hooves, as Gerald drove rapidly across the stable yard in the trap on his way to the mill. Adam thought then of Gerald and Edwin. He had become aware of so many things this morning, not only about himself but also about his sons. By reason of primogeniture, Gerald would inherit the Fairley lands, the Hall, the mill, and all the other Fairley holdings, with the understanding that he would take care of his brother for his lifetime. But Edwin would receive nothing of real worth and would have to rely solely on the bounty of Gerald. Not a very pleasant prospect, Adam thought. He now recognized that it was imperative that he make proper provision for his younger son in his will. He determined to see his solicitor at the first opportunity. He did not trust Gerald. No, he did not trust Gerald at all.
The Fairley family fortune, now controlled by Adam Fairley, was founded on two sound principles – the acquisition of land and the making of cloth.
The land came first.
Adam Fairley could trace his lineage back to the twelfth century and one Hubert Fairley. A document drawn in 1155, and still in existence in the vault at Fairley Hall, states that Hubert was given the lands of Arkwith and Ramsden in the West Riding of Yorkshire by the Crown. The document was drawn in the presence of Henry II and signed by fourteen witnesses at Pontefract Castle, where the King used to stay on his visits to Yorkshire. With Hubert’s continuing prosperity and growing renown as a ‘King’s man’, Arkwith eventually came to be known as Fairley. It was Hubert who built the original Fairley Manor on the site where the present Hall now stands.
Succeeding Fairleys received more land and favours from their grateful sovereigns. Staunchly Royalist, many of them took up arms in defence of their Crown and country and were admirably rewarded. It was Henry VIII who granted to John Fairley the adjoining land of Ramsden Moors at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, for services to Henry during the King’s ecclesiastical reforms. Later Henry’s daughter Elizabeth Tudor sold ‘the valley of Kirkton on the banks of the river Aire to William Fairley, Squire of Fairley Manor and Hamlet’. Elizabeth I, always desperately striving to replenish the royal coffers, had long resorted to selling off Crown lands. She looked with a degree of favour on William Fairley, for his son Robert was a sea captain who had sailed with Drake to the Indies. Later his ship was part of the great English fleet, led by the intrepid Drake, which sailed into Cadiz harbour and defeated the Armada in 1588. Consequently, the Queen sold the Kirkton land at a fair price. It was the procurement of this particular parcel of land on the river Aire that was a decisive factor in the development of the Fairley fortunes, for the river was to be the source of power for the original mill.
Robert’s son Francis, named after Drake, had no seafaring or military ambitions and, in fact, from this time on there were no more military men in the family until Adam became, for a brief period, a cavalry officer in the Fourth Hussars. Francis, plodding, diligent, but not too imaginative by nature, at least had enough of the merchant’s instinct to foresee the growing importance of so basic and essential a product as cloth. He started a small domestic industry for the weaving of wool at the end of the sixteenth century. The local villagers continued to spin and weave in their cottages, but what had formerly been woven for personal use was now made for sale. It was from this modest beginning that the great Fairley enterprises flowered, and which were to make Francis’ descendants not only rich but the most powerful woollen kings in the West Riding. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Fairley was already a flourishing wool-manufacturing hamlet with a cropping shop, a fulling mill on the river, and a breached reservoir.
Francis Fairley had joined the cloth to the land.
But without the land there could have been no cloth. Fairley’s location in the West Riding, its geology, and its climate all contributed greatly to the success of the family’s wool-manufacturing business.
Fairley village is situated in the foothills of the Pennine Chain, that great range of interlocking spurs of hills that roll down the centre of England from the Cheviots on the Scottish border to the Peak in Derbyshire, and which is called ‘the backbone of England’ by those who live in its regions. The geology of the Pennine Chain varies. In the north of Yorkshire the hills are of white limestone rock on which grows sweet grass. But there are few springs in limestone country, and these abound with limestone, and limestone water is particularly harsh to fibres. Further down the Chain there is a sudden break called the Aire Gap, through which the river Aire flows towards Leeds. It is just south of Skipton and the Aire Gap that the West Riding begins. Here the Pennine Hills are now composed of dark and hard millstone grit, with a fringe of coal measure and coatings of peat or clay. Very little grows on millstone grit. Oats and coarse grass are its only crops. However, these are the crops that shorthaired sheep feed and thrive on best. Also, coal and grit country has numerous streams which rarely fail, for the moisture-heavy winds that sweep in across the hills from the Atlantic provide abundant rain the year round. The water in these rocky little becks contains no lime. It is soft and kind to fibres. Sheep’s wool and soft water are the two necessities for the making of cloth, and both are plentiful in the West Riding.
And so with these natural elements in their favour the Fairleys’ wool business grew, and especially so in the eighteenth century. But this amazing growth was also due to the enterprise and progressiveness of three Fairleys, father, son, and grandson – Joshua, Percival, and David. All were pioneers