The Sleeping Sword by Brenda Jagger

concerning myself as to the means by which my family fortune, my dowry and my inheritance were made. But watching the mill-girls file into the yard on many a cold morning wrapped in their blankets, clogs sounding painfully on the frozen cobbles, I knew that, had my grandfather failed in his endeavours, I might well have been among them; knew that, had I been a boy, I would already have been set above them as the ‘young master’ of Fieldhead.
    My father’s son would have been in no way subject to the interference of his stepmamma, escaping daily from her cloying world of manners and morals to the realities of work and responsibility, the challenges to which my father’s daughter felt equally suited to respond. My father’s son would have had his own horses by now and his own carriage, would have taken the train to Leeds or London when in his own judgement his circumstances required it. My father’s son would have had opinions, commitments, obligations, aims, would have taken risks and made decisions, would have suffered, perhaps, a diversity of blows and failures, but would have been equipped at all times with the glorious weapon of freedom.
    My father’s daughter, who may not have differed greatly from her unborn brother in temperament and ability, had but one obligation, to be virtuous and obedient; while the only real choice open to her was simply to be married or not to be married. And sitting in my father’s garden that day, the hushed, well-polished house behind me, the sprawling, unpolished town below, I rather thought I would be married.
    I cannot say that I was consciously looking for love, for although a barely acknowledged part of myself might have gone eagerly towards it, the side of my nature with which I was most familiar had acquired a cautious view of emotion. As a child, made solitary and serious by an invalid mother, I had adored my father, and although in his view he had not failed me—having given me riches, which in Cullingford were looked on as the very warp and weft of happiness—I had known desolate moments since his marriage, a loneliness far colder than my childhood solitude, which did not incline me to build my life once again around another person. Certainly I did not wish to make a marriage of convenience, but while I could appreciate, could almost envy, the rapture which was the breath of life to Venetia, it seemed to me so dangerous that I had small inclination to hazard myself in that direction at all.
    A marriage, then, neither of convenience nor of passion, but of mutual trust and liking, an ideal arrangement which in a recess of my mind I was forced to colour with gratitude since it offered me escape both from Mrs. Agbrigg and the limitations of spinsterhood. And if no suitable gentleman should immediately present himself, then I would not be foolish—or so I imagined—but would endeavour, within those iron bands surrounding a ‘young-lady-at-home’, to find some congenial occupation. For my father’s daughter was Agbrigg enough to detest failure, and what could be more humiliating, more destructive, more inescapable than a bad marriage?
    Not that I could have named, offhand, more than one or two that I envied. Mrs. Rawnsley, I knew, had married for the simple reason that at the age of twenty-three she had no longer been able to support the shame of remaining Miss Milner. Mrs. Agbrigg had married for respectability, Mrs. Sheldon from a desire not so much for the person of Mr. Thomas Sheldon M. P. as for his political standing. The girls I had met at school appeared with few exceptions to be scrambling into matrimony just as soon as they were able, some of them honestly finding domesticity and motherhood alluring, some of them because ‘what else was there to do?’, others quite simply to get away from ‘papa’.
    Yet, on the other hand, I saw nothing in the lives of the maiden ladies I knew best to inspire me with