Carrie

She hardly ever thinks about the house in Halifax, but tonight she can't sleep, and a sudden rattle of hail against the windowpane reminds her of the rattle and crash of the looms, and she remembers.

Louisa never mentions those days, before they moved to the house on Whernhow, before the Bingley Shuttle Arm, the Bingley Regulator, before Bingley and Acaster Worsteds. Charles is too young to remember, but she remembers. The noise of the looms at night as she lay in her little cot, the sound of the hands' clogs as they went in and out of the mill, Martha Mary snoring on the trundle in the corner. She remembers Father as a young man, sitting in the back parlour while Martha Mary made the evening dinner, bits of the Shuttle Arm lying on the table on sheets of newspaper, while she ate her pobs and listened to he explaining why it didn't work yet and what he was going to do about it.

And later, when they got the first little mill in the hills above Brighouse, she remembers sitting in the little back room Father called "the office", listening while he went over the books, explaining about the weights of the different wools, and how to price them and how Henshaw had tried to cheat him on the last consignment. She remembers the buyers coming back to the house with Father: big, hairy men with loud voices and hard hands who could still tell by their fingertips if cloth was sound.

She remembers the first days in Whernhow House, where they had none of them felt at home, when the house felt enormous and cold and unwelcoming, full of servants they didn't know and Martha Mary pensioned off, and Mrs Merrit the new housekeeper, stern and economical. They got used to it, but the first few nights they all climbed into one bed, even though Charlie wet the bed scared of the creaking of this new house, so different from the noise the old house made. She couldn't hear the looms any more except as a far off hum and it was almost a year before she stopped missing them.

She and Louisa went to a day school in the town but every night, when they got home, she went to sit in the room they all called The New Office and together she and Father looked at the day's returns. Cyphering always came easily to her, and she often spotted errors and mis-calculations; Father came to rely on her for that. And she wrote a good round hand, and he often let her write letters and enter them in the Correspondence Ledger. She could still see them, great stiff books with green leather bindings and marbled endpapers. She was a good copyist too, could make up the accounts from the rough workings from the mill, knew how the cloth changed with the seasons, knew about wool and worsted, twill and serge, mackado and mungo and what to do with the fents of all of them. She knew about the year the great drought slowed the water wheel and the smell of the dyes, and the way they turned the beck blue and green and red. Once he took her to the Halifax Piece Hall and she saw the dealers and merchants, dickering and trading in their little rooms about the huge courtyard, a building so big it didn't seem real to her. She knew so many things and she wanted to know more. Did it make sense to buy or rent the new mill? Was the Army contract worth bidding for? Send by road or canal? Upper, middle or lower wheel?

Then Mrs Merrit died, moaning despite the laudanum because of the pain in her stomach, and Auntie Arkwright, Mother's sister from Keighley came to run the house instead. She disapproved, of everything: of Father eating his dinner in his shirtsleeves in hot weather, of the day school in Halifax, of Charlie getting in bed with one of his sisters when he was frightened.

She remembers the arguments. "You're doing that child no favours, John Bingley. What good will it do her when she's grown up? No man is going to want a wife who knows more than he does about business. You've got money, she can be a lady and marry a gentleman but not if you've filled her head with the wool trade." And it all started to go wrong. There was a governess Miss Marshall and then the seminary and she learned to keep her mouth shut until she could hide the Yorkshire brogue. She became first Caroline and then Miss Caroline and then Miss Bingley and no one called her Carrie any more or asked her opinion about the profit and loss accounts or the broadcloth and superfine trade.

It was ladylike and comfortable and dull as ditch-water and the worst of it was watching Father trying to teach Charlie the trade and watching them both fail. It wasn't that Charlie didn't try , it wasn't that he was stupid, but he wasn't interested, it wasn't in his blood and bones like it was in hers and Father's. Eventually they both realised it wasn't going to work. Charlie would be a gentleman and buy an estate, and so he went away, first to school and then to Cambridge.

Then Father fell ill, and they were all called home to watch him die. Father who had once towered over her, who had once carried all three of them upstairs to bed at once, lying shrunken and pale.

They went into see him one by one. She doesn't know what he said to Lou and Charlie, and she's never told them what he said to her. "Tha' should have been the son, Carrie-love," he said, neither of them caring any more about the gentry-speak they'd both learned to use. "We'd 'a ruled the woollen trade, you me, there'd 'a bin no stoppin' us."

She'd known then she couldn't settle for a small gentry life, servant trouble and morning calls. She was made for bigger things. If she couldn't have the wool trade, she'd have a big house, an estate, something that took as much running as Bingley and Acaster, something as difficult and time consuming and just as respected.

It felt like she's been looking for years and now she'd found it.

She pulled the blankets up over her shoulders and settled herself to sleep, already dreaming of Pemberley.