Introduction
This was the third North and South story I completed and I think, to date, it remains my own favourite. I'll post a new chapter every few days.
A slow-burn HEA story, it starts in canon at the Great Exhibition – Margaret runs after Mr Thornton to apologise/explain for Henry's rudeness – which sets their story going in a different direction.
First published on AO3
"When a plunge is to be made into the water, it's of no use lingering on the bank."
― Charles Dickens
-OO-
She caught up with him on the grassy bank of the Serpentine, but only because he had stopped there for a moment to look out across the water. He had left the Exhibition before her, whirling on his heel and storming out in a temper while she stayed to speak her mind to Henry - and then his long legs had takenhim on a faster pace than she could match in her skirt, and then of course she could not shout after him -
"Mr Thornton," she gasped, and he turned slowly, taking his hands out of his pockets as he saw her. Seeing him away from Milton, the place where their relationship started sour and turned worse, in this new context she was noticing his looks quite particularly and it was a surprise; what an eyecatching man he was with his arresting, long-nosed profile, dark and light in dress and nature: the brooding air, the sense that he was always one step away from dangerous, made him a man you wanted to look at but hardly dared.
She had been captivated by the way he spoke at the Exhibition, easily commanding the attention of his audience. Until he saw her. When he saw her it was as if he had spotted an enemy, he had stepped towards her armed, he had dropped everything to fight.
"Miss Hale," he tipped his head, a tiny gesture, his manner correct enough but with a chill about him that nearly took away her courage. She faltered. From the tight set of his lips and narrowed flinty eyes she could see he was still furiously angry.
"I – I wanted to speak to you. To apologise. I am sorry – Henry was so very rude, and for no reason."
His mouth twisted in a flash of a sneer as he echoed: "For no reason. Could it be that Henry is always rude when introduced to a man you claim acquaintance with?'
"I cannot answer that, Mr Thornton. I have acquaintance of so few," she replied.
Abruptly he knew there had been no call for that. She had meant well – offered him an entente cordiale - and he had dashed it aside to taunt her. Now she had forlornly withdrawn; her eyes, shining with sincerity as they lifted to his face, had cast downwards now as if he had slapped her.
It was time to lay down arms; and he did so. "You don't have to apologise for Mr Lennox's behaviour, but that you did gives me a chance to put somethin' right that was botherin' me. I will of course pass on your message to your mother, Miss Hale. It was rude of me to walk away the way I did."
"You had been provoked," she said, eager to meet him half-way. "I have been quite ashamed of my family's behaviour today. I almost wish I had not come at all, but the Exhibition was so wonderful I am glad not to have missed it, and my mother wished me to be here, she would so much have loved to visit herself." She knew she was speaking too much and too quickly, anxious not to set off another of his mercurial flashes of mood - why did he make her so nervous? He was listening with so much frowning analysis – ready to seize offence at any moment – she could not bear another battle – she should perform a farewell now.
His hands were back in his pockets as he said, "You will have much to tell her, no doubt. Did you 'appen to see the steam locomotive? Or the great hydraulic press, which – " looking at her face he headed his own enthusiasm off - "Perhaps, like my sister, you were more taken by the Koh-i-Noor? Although she apparently thought it disappointin' and would prefer something which sparkled more," one mocking eyebrow perfectly expressed his reaction to Fanny.
Margaret smiled a little. "I saw none of those things – though plenty of others. There was so much to look at, one could visit every day for a week and not see it all, I am sure. My aunt seemed to spend her time looking for statues to be offended by."
He said, just a little provocative, "I'll not be surprised to hear that one thing you didn't visit was the great industrial machines of cotton manufacture, Miss Hale."
"I confess I did not, Mr Thornton," she confessed, with a little sparkling smile.
"You have no need to, I suppose," he said. "You have a factory full of 'em not ten minutes' walk from your door." Bad move, Thornton. That had sounded like a hope that he could tempt her to seek him out at the Mill to admire his machines. Or had he meant it that way? Why did he find her so entrancing? He had been so angry with her, but already she had won him round with her gentle manners and that smile which lent her cheeks two sweet, fleeting dimples.
He realised he was staring at her and looked quickly away. She was saying, "I have some things to bring home to my mother – the nicest is a small glass, set in a – a kind of expanding card which gives a view as if through all the Exhibition scenes, one after another – I think she will like that – she will look through it, and it will be as if she were here - almost -" She had to swallow suddenly, thinking of how her lively mother's world had shrunk to a chair in a dark Milton parlour, sending her daughter out to see what she no longer could, looking through a tiny glass eye at a pop-up paper mock of this wondrous glass palace and its real treasures.
His head tilted as he dropped his voice to a deeper tone, "Is your mother very ill?"
She nodded, suddenly unable to speak. She had to press her lips together to stop them trembling and tears were shining on her lashes.
"I am afraid she will die, Mr Thornton," and as she said it aloud, choked, she realised she knew it was true. Her mother, her dear mother, was going to die.
"I am sorry to hear that," he said. "Would you care to sit down here for a moment?"
It was such a beautiful day, warm, with white May blossom on the trees. Behind them reared the glass and iron of the astonishing Crystal Palace, a modern Wonder of the World, catching and reflecting rays of sun. Families were out and about; children running this way and that, shrieking, and nannies calling them back from the water's edge. John Thornton, a manufacturer from smoky Milton and quite out of place here but master of it anyway, showed Margaret Hale to a seat alongside the bank of the great pond, the Serpentine, and to the west of it, he named it for her, the Long Water.
"I've heard it's not a natural lake," he observed, to give her time to gather herself, "an' that the water's pumped in from the river. I would like to see the mechanics of it. It must be a fascinatin' engine." He heard himself and was astonished; how was it he, who could talk to difficult men with ease, was so poor in the skill of conversing with a woman? What interest was delicate Miss Hale likely to have in pumps and sumps and tanks and pipes?
She sat with a graceful little sideways bend of her knees, flicked out her skirt and looked out over the lake without seeing, not giving a thought to great water-moving machines, still closed inside her world of trouble. She burst out with, "My father will be so lost! Oh, I do not know what he will do, Mr Thornton. They have been so very close. It was truly a marriage of love."
He had seated himself beside her, a careful distance away. He said, "They have been lucky. That may be of little comfort now. But perhaps it might be in time. When there'll be only happy memories to revisit."
"It is true, not everyone is so fortunate as they have been."
He was silent, and, risking a glance at his profile and finding it utterly closed, she felt that had struck more resonant a note than she would have liked. She hurried on, plucking a subject at random:
"There are swans over there, Mr Thornton - those big white birds - do you see them? Have you seen swans before?"
He gave her a funny little look, "Oh, I believe occasionally they've made the long 'ard swim up North, though no doubt they've soon turned South again once they saw it."
She was covered in confusion, "I didn't mean – " but then saw from his quirked eyebrow he was only inviting her to smile with him.
"You're not far wrong. It's been a long while since I saw a swan," he continued, staring out across the water, "All I see is looms, shuttles an' spindles, most days."
"You work long hours."
"They mate for life I've 'eard. Same as robins, elephants, and some humans."
"I didn't know that." She gazed at the beautiful, snow-white birds gliding majestically past.
"Interestin' isn't it?" he remarked, following her gaze. "No visible means of propulsion. And under the water paddlin' away for all they're worth."
On the Lake, a pair of lovers passed in a hired rowboat, he pulling on the oars in a somewhat random fashion, the boat haphazard, she clutching the jerking sides and shrieking.
"They'll not get far like that," he commented. "He's not got the measure of it at all. He'd do better to set her beside him and take one oar each. Or - " as the boat rocked and splashed as she half-stood and wobbled as if to fall over the side "- maybe not."
"You sound as if you know a good deal about rowing, Mr Thornton," Margaret said, eager to make up for her swannish gaffe. The sun was a little too warm on her face; she should have brought a parasol.
"I'd not go so far as that. As a boy I made a raft from wood and a paddle of a coal scuttle, we used to set it in the river shallows where it runs slow, it amused Fanny a great deal till she turned dafter. Well, now it's my turn to make an ignorant assumption – you have never been in a rowboat, I suspect, Miss Hale? Or on a raft?"
"I have not," she said. "That was an informed assumption." For a moment, astonishingly, they were smiling at one another, eyes flickering across faces, sizing one another up.
He squinted up into the glare. "I'd offer you my hat to keep the sun off your face, but it'd not look well with your dress."
He was observant; he had noticed her discomfort. Margaret felt warmed by this Mr Thornton, anxiously unfolding before her his repository of interesting facts to try and divert her, for she had well understood that was what he was doing, sensitive to her sadness. She said, smiling, "I don't think I would look so well in it as you do, Mr Thornton," which earned a small silence which she rushed to fill.
"Are you taking the train to Milton today?"
"At 4:15. It's a fair walk to Euston, but I fancied takin' the fresh air before returning to the smog of Milton." He pulled his pocket watch out on its chain and glanced at it. "In fact, I should go."
She rose and he with her. "And your sister and... Miss Latimer?"
"- will follow with Mr Watson when they've 'ad enough of shopping. They don't have so many carders to chivvy and spindles to untwist," he said with irony, "and are at liberty to stay longer - in search of exotic wallpaper, which Fanny tells me she is determined to have."
"I wish I were going home today," she sighed, suddenly homesick for her cosy Milton parlour with Dixon bringing tea and her dear Mother in her chair, looking forward to Margaret's return.
"What's stoppin' you?" He was standing there, almost leaving, his jacket slung from a finger over his shoulder; looking at her quizzically. It was probably the most human he had ever sounded.
She realised a blush was stealing up in her cheeks, as if he had intended that as an invitation, offering her the chance to take the train with him; which he most certainly had not. He seemed to realise the same thing and said, "You feel obliged to stay with your Aunt overnight no doubt. Otherwise you'd've been welcome to return with Fanny and Miss Latimer; they have a private compartment."
His emotions were distant and opaque to her; they always had been - after all, she had never for a moment guessed that behind his flares of temper and random moments of a natural, quite charming courtesy such as he had shown when he greeted her at the Marlborough dinner party were bubbling away violent feelings for her. Such strong feelings they had burst out in that sudden and unexpected offer of marriage - ! There had never been the smallest hint... What was he thinking now? She could not tell; his emotions, if any, were kept entirely hidden behind veiling dark lashes.
She inclined her head. "Thank you, Mr Thornton."
"For what?" he took two steps and kicked a wandering ball back towards the small owner chasing anxiously after it.
"For the offer of travelling home with your sister." She smiled at him; he had been so much less difficult than usual, she was glad she had found him here - the memory of Henry's discourtesy would have worried her all the rest of the day, knowing Mr Thornton had not deserved such random spite, and not only that, she had seen him more clearly today, he had opened himself to her a little. If she had ever seen this side of him before, then perhaps... she allowed her thoughts to wander along a troubling, but somehow exciting, path of ...and yet it was probably too late, far too late.
"Oh, I don't doubt the chatter of my sister and her friend would've become quite unbearable for you long before Milton," - with a smile which seemed to invite her in to a kind of intimacy, a shared superiority of mind.
"Yet your mother 'so greatly approves' of Miss Latimer." Whatever had prompted her to say that? She immediately wished it unsaid, feeling another blush flood her cheeks, burning hot. Hopefully he would think it was the effect of the sun.
He was looking at her curiously. "My mother does?"
"Your sister said so, do you not remember?" Of course he would not remember. He had been locked entirely on Margaret at that moment, all his anger focussed in and intensifying her like the lens in the concertina card, opening inner rooms, each one smaller and more distant than the last.
He handled it gracefully: "As a friend for Fanny, she perhaps seems suitable," and she wondered if she fancied a slight emphasis on all the words in that phrase which would deliberately withdraw the very particular sting.
But that could not be so. Even Margaret herself did not understand why Fanny's hint of a connection between Mr Thornton and Miss Latimer had bothered her as much as it did.
I didn't want him, I made that very clear to him; I could not be so unfair as to begrudge him someone else?
"All the young ladies of Milton..."
"Not all of them, surely," she had replied insouciantly, almost rudely, from a place of being very sure what she would never feel for this woman's arrogant son.
He said briskly, "I'll bring your mother some fruit tomorrow, Miss Hale, if there's some to be had. It may do her a little good at least."
"Thank you. You are so kind."
"My workers'd be surprised to hear that," he remarked dryly. "But I thank you, Miss Hale. Comin' from you, it means something."
He could see that had discomfited her, and in fact he had discomfited himself – it had sounded either too cold, or too warm, but anyway it seemed to have clanged discordantly - she was looking at him doubtfully, wondering how to take it.
Whatever door had opened between them now firmly closed, he took his leave of her with cool formality and set off walking around the lake, heading purposefully for the north-west corner of the park. She watched him go, the dark figure with its flared white sleeves, smaller and smaller till it became a speck and vanished. He looked back once, but he was too far away for her to make out what emotion might be represented there, if indeed there were any at all.
-OO-
Author's Notes:
If you like talking all things North and South – book, series, fanfic – if you read, write or just love John and Margaret – you would be very welcome at our lovely N&S discussion forum "The Mill at Milton" - always keen for new members! Link is in my profile xx