Flint and Roses Read Online Free PDF Page B

decide just where those gifts could be best employed. She had to begin with planned to make a churchman of him, dreaming perhaps of bishoprics, archbishoprics—of herself installed as hostess in some ecclesiastical palace—until a certain tartness in his manner, a decided lack of saintliness, had inclined her to consider the law. And now having returned from the University of Cambridge, an opportunity had been purchased for him, with the help of Uncle Joel, in the legal practice of Mr. Corey-Manning, a neighbour of ours in Blenheim Lane, who was—according to Aunt Hannah—exceedingly fortunate and immensely grateful to have obtained his services.
    Jonas was a young man of twenty-four, pale and expressionless, a taller, better-nourished version of his father, although he had not inherited Mr. Agbrigg’s stooping shoulders and big-knuckled, work-scarred, hands. Jonas’s hands, on the contrary, were long and lean and perfectly smooth, with never so much as an ink-stain on his carefully—by Cullingford’s standards almost effeminately— manicured fingers, and, although he dressed plainly, he was at all times immaculate, and far too conscious of it for my comfort.
    I could, if I put my mind to it, understand that we had not always been kind to Jonas. During our early childhood, when the boys and girls of the family had been allowed to play together, my Uncle Joel’s sons, Blaize and Nicholas Barforth, had mocked him quite mercilessly for the care he took of his clothes, being completely careless of the damage they inflicted on their own. Their sister, my cousin Caroline, possessing from birth a fine appreciation of the social order in which a mill-manager’s son had no more importance than a groom, had often snubbed him and encouraged us to do the same.
    â€˜Oh, it’s only the Agbrigg boy,’ Caroline would announce. ‘He won’t want to play.’
    And Jonas, his long, uptilted eyes scowling, would walk off, making us somehow aware that in his view our games were infantile and each one of us a bore.
    Even now, although he was always scrupulously polite, he was not a comfortable young man, his return home each evening bringing a certain tension, which stemmed in part from the surprising coolness between him and his father, a circumstance of which Aunt Hannah herself seemed unaware.
    â€˜Good evening, sir,’ Jonas would say.
    â€˜Evening, lad,’ he would receive in reply; and, brought upon Aunt Hannah’s extravagant hopes for her stepson’s future, it astonished me that his own father should have no more to say to him than that. Yet Mr. Agbrigg, his thin face quite haggard in the lamplight, a faint odour of raw wool often discernible about his clothing, would eat his supper in silence every evening, his shrewd, narrow eyes registering nothing as Aunt Hannah requested Jonas to give us his opinion of the day’s news, expressing no opinions of his own and then, folding his napkin with those big, work-hard hands, would say simply, ‘I’ll be off back to the mill, then, to see the night-shift come on.’
    My Aunt’s ambitions for Jonas, of course, were of a far higher order than those she entertained for his father Mr. Agbrigg, self-educated but unpolished, his speech still retaining the broadness of the West Riding, could be pushed just so far and no farther. He was without doubt exceedingly well-respected in Cullingford’s Piece Hall, where men were more concerned with cash than with culture, and would be a popular mayor with our town’s largely unlettered population. But Jonas, with his academic distinction, his neutral accent, his chilly determination to succeed, could do Aunt Hannah credit in the eyes not only of Cullingford but of the world.
    She knew exactly what she wanted for him. To begin with, when his childless employer, Mr. Corey-Manning, decided to retire, Jonas must be in a position to take over the business. Then,