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.
business and, being astute, they recognized the importance of the new inventions coming into being, which would help increase production in the most efficient manner. Whilst some rival manufacturers in the West Riding at first resisted these technological innovations that were to change the social and economic structure of England, the Fairleys did not. They enthusiastically purchased these ‘newfangled machines’, as they were scathingly called by less progressive cloth merchants, and at once put them to advantageous use.
Gerald, heir presumptive to the immense fortune presently in the hands of Adam Fairley, had inherited one singular trait from his forebears, a trait totally lacking in Adam. And this was their love for the wool business. It elicited in Gerald the same intense passion evoked by money and food. When Gerald was on the mill floor, amidst the clattering machinery, he too was in his natural element. He felt completely alive, was filled with a pulsating strength. The strident noise of the rattling machines, which deafened Adam, were not at all discordant to Gerald, who thought they made the most beautiful music he had ever heard. And the malodorous stink of the oily wool, so noxious to his father, was for Gerald an intoxicating perfume. When Gerald saw the great stacks of hundreds upon hundreds of bolts of Fairley cloth, he thrilled with an excitement incomparable to anything he had ever felt in the seventeen years of his young life.
This morning, as Gerald drove down the lower road that cut across the valley from the Hall, he was thinking about the mill; or, more precisely, his father and Edwin in relation to the mill. He did not see the landscape or notice the weather or feel the biting cold. He was lost in the labyrinths of his own convoluted thoughts. Edwin had been neatly disposed of at breakfast. Very neatly indeed. And more precipitously than he had ever imagined possible in his wildest and most exigent dreams. Not that Edwin was a real threat. After all, he, Gerald, was the heir and by birthright everything was his under the law. Yet it had often occurred to him recently that Edwin might conceivably want to enter the woollen business and that he could not have prevented. It would have been an unnecessary nuisance. Now there was no longer any need for him to worry about Edwin. His brother was rendered powerless, and of his own volition. As for his father … well! There was something corrupt in Gerald and he was riven by an immense hatred for his father. Insensitive as he was, Gerald had only a vague glimmering that this feeling sprang from a terrible and consuming envy. He constantly tried to diminish his father in his own mind. He picked on a few of Adam’s traits, which in reality were insignificant and irrelevant, and blew them out of all proportion until they became damning and unforgivable faults. Parsimonious to a point of being miserly, narrow-minded, and parochial, Gerald fumed internally about the money his father spent on his clothes, his trips to London and abroad, and he became enraged and even violent when he contemplated the good hard cash his father was pouring into the newspaper.
Gerald was pondering on all of this as he drove down to the mill. Suddenly he laughed out loud as it struck him that his father’s lack of interest in the business and his attitude in general paved the way for him, and sooner than he had anticipated.
Now that he thought about it, he really had no alternative but to take matters into his own hands, considering the way his father was behaving. He determined to talk to the Australian wool man himself this morning. Wilson had told him yesterday that Bruce McGill wanted to sell them Australian wool. The way orders were pouring in for their cloth they might be in need of it and, in any event, it was surely worthwhile striking up a friendship with McGill, who was one of the most powerful and wealthiest sheep ranchers in Australia.
He also decided it would be a good idea to encourage his father’s penchant for protracted absences, instead of fighting it. Those disappearing acts would suit his own ends now. He could not wait for the day his father retired. It would not be soon enough for him.
Adele Fairley’s upstairs sitting room at Fairley Hall contained many individually beautiful objects, and yet, in spite of that, it was not a beautiful room. It was lifeless and oddly empty in feeling, a feeling that sprang from an all-pervading ambiance of bleakness, of utter desolation. Certainly this feeling did not emanate from a need for furnishings, for, on the contrary, it was teeming with possessions.
The sitting room was vast, large and square in its dimensions, with a vaulted ceiling that appeared to float up and beyond into infinity. This was lavishly embellished with plaster cornices and mouldings, and panels inset with oval plaques and cherubim, and entwining flowers and acanthus leaves, the whole expanse painted a stark and pristine white and from the centre of which dropped a gigantic and magnificent chandelier of shimmering crystal. Many windows, tall and majestic, intersected the walls, and an eighteenth-century Gothic fireplace of glacial white marble was an imposing counterpoint with its huge mantel and great carved columns and soaring proportions.
Almost everything in the room was blue: Pale blue damask sheathed the walls, rippled at the windows, slithered across the sofas and fragile gilt chairs, and even the antique carpet was a sweep of glistening blue on the dark oak floor. Mirrors, crystal ornaments, glass domes covering dried flowers and wax fruit, pieces of finely wrought silver, and priceless porcelain were all charged and glittered with cold reflected light that only served to underscore the icy sterility of the room. A fire blazed continually in the hearth, costly jade and porcelain lamps threw out rays of softening light, the antique furniture gleamed as pools of ripe dark colour, yet these did nothing to diminish the gelid atmosphere, and there was a sense of abandonment hanging in the air.
Weighted down as it was with possessions, it betrayed the pathetic efforts of a lonely and disturbed woman to find some solace in material wealth, an attempt to restore her damaged psyche by surrounding herself with things rather than people, as if they could give her the illusion of life. Few people who entered this room ever felt truly comfortable or at ease, and even Adele herself, the sole perpetrator of this monument of dubious taste, now seemed lost and adrift, a ghostly presence moving abstractedly through the multitudinous paraphernalia she had accumulated so acquisitively, so assiduously, and which she no longer seemed to notice.
This morning she came into the room tentatively, pausing cautiously on the threshold of her adjoining bedroom. Her eyes, large and beautiful but now filled with pinpoints of apprehension, flicked around the room hurriedly, and her aristocratic fingers clutched nervously at the silver-streaked white silk peignoir she was wearing. She pulled the filmy fabric closer to her body protectively, glancing around quickly, yet again, to reassure herself she was absolutely alone, that no servant was skulking in a dim corner, dusting or cleaning and intruding on her privacy.
Adele Fairley was tall and graceful, but so tempered of movement that at times she appeared to do everything in slow motion. This was the effect she gave now as she left the safety of the shadowy doorway and glided into the room. Her pale blonde hair was almost silver in tone, and it fell about her face in soft curls and delicate tendrils, and cascaded down her back in undulating waves to blend into the silvered snowy silk enveloping her body, so that the two seemed almost indistinguishable. She paused at one of the windows and turned to gaze out across the valley, a remote unseeing look in her eyes. The landscape had changed in the past few weeks. The dusty greys and sombre blacks had given way to the first signs of spring greenness. But Adele saw this only dimly, as if through a veil, lost as she was in her own thoughts and preoccupations. An inverted woman, isolated within herself, she lived quite separate and apart from the world around her, and she was curiously detached, curiously oblivious to externals. Her internal life had become her only reality.
As she stood, motionless, at the window, the sunlight struck her face, illuminating the smooth contours. In spite of her thirty-seven years there was a girlishness and a purity about Adele Fairley, but it was the purity of a perfectly sculptured marble statue that had been immured for years behind glass; which had never been warmed by love or pained by sorrow or moved to compassion at another’s suffering.
Unexpectedly, and with an abruptness that was most unnatural for her, Adele swung away from the window, suddenly intent in her purpose. She glided swiftly to a display cabinet on the far wall, her eyes glittering. The cabinet, a French vitrine, contained many exquisite objects that Adele had collected on her travels with Adam over the years. These had once been Adele’s