A Song Twice Over (23 page)

Entering St Jude's Passage – her most direct approach to St Jude's Square and the old market place which would lead her to Miss Dallam's side of Frizingley – Cara was at once hemmed in by tall houses as sinister and insubstantial as shadows, tottering almost beneath a weight of sheer dilapidation and the load of displaced humanity they carried. Lodging-houses these, not of the ruthlessly spotless kind kept by Sairellen Thackray but terrifying places – even to Cara – where men and women slept twenty or thirty together on whatever mattresses or bundles of rags had been thrown down on the rotting floor, tramps, drunkards, lechers, syphilitics, crude young whores, wan little virgins turned out of charity-schools who would not be virgins in the morning, packed side by side in the dark and in a horrible proximity which made Cara shudder.

A terrible place, St Jude's Passage. Dark kitchens where men could purchase an hour or two on a chair by the fire and a tin mug of bacon grease and hot water. Cellars sprouting fungus from every dripping crevice, where those who could not even afford a place on an upstairs mattress paid a penny to sleep standing up like horses, leaning against a rope which would be simply untied the next morning when the landlord considered they had slept long enough. Narrow staircases, infested with mouse droppings, where those who had no money whatsoever huddled on the steps for shelter, coming like wraiths in the night when they were less likely to be turned away, and drifting off again in the early morning. Except for the few who tended, from time to time, to inconvenience the landlord by dying there, passing so imperceptibly that it sometimes went unnoticed for an hour or two, from a state which had not really been living at all.

For it was in St Jude's Passage that such corpses as were picked up in Frizingley – whether they had been reported missing or not – were usually found. Children, quite often, who were classed brutally but realistically as orphans and rarely identified. New-born infants, of course, more than somewhat. And, every now and again, their young mothers, since at least three old ladies in the neighbourhood of the Passage were well-known for their services to girls in trouble. An occasional man or woman who had been stabbed or beaten or strangled but who, far more often than not, had simply gone without food for a week or two, and given up.

Irish men – and women – not a few of them, but Cara had been long enough in Frizingley to know that the Irish had no monopoly on starvation, that good, solid Englishmen, handloom weavers, for instance, on the tramp for work and farm labourers from the south who had lost their farms due to land enclosures, could do it just as easily. For although there
was
work here, there had never been enough to supply the desperate horde which had applied for it, choking this ancient heart of the town to death with its demands for air and space and water, overwhelming its sanity resources, clogging its sewage channels, fouling its canal, draining its reservoirs. A fragile, breakable, disposable population, with no more than a toe-hold on life when trade was good and employment more plentiful; flicked off life's surface, almost without being noticed, when it was not.

And with so many work-hungry applicants to choose from, the millmasters had never felt obliged to pay very much.

A dreadful place, this Passage. The stuff of which Cara's worst nightmares were woven, night-images of herself crushed beneath twenty alien, naked bodies on one of these lodging house mattresses, struggling to get up because she had to find Liam and Odette, who would surely suffocate beneath all this bare, sweating flesh, without her. Dreams which turned her cold even now, when she was wide awake and full of her day-time urgencies, hurrying to make herself pleasant and useful and
necessary
, if she could, to Miss Gemma Dallam who knew nothing, as yet, of nakedness. One could be quite sure of
that
.

Hurry then, and leave this damnable place behind. Not that she was afraid of it. Disgusted, and contemptuous of it, certainly. Because
she
had never sunk so low, and never would. Cautious of it, of course, as one had to be in any den of thieves where pickpockets and cut-purses abounded. Good. St Jude's Square lay before her, level and familiar, flanked by its old taverns and the graceful iron railings of St Jude's churchyard where Luke still often waited for her; the square crowded and ebullient today with the stalls for the Friday market, with traders and dealers and pedlars of fancy braids and buttons, fans, feathers, bright little birds in cages, beads, sequins, second-hand dresses that could be unpicked and made over, second-hand bonnets that could be remodelled, old belts that sometimes had decent buckles, sugar sticks the colour of rubies and emeralds that would be a treat for Liam.

And it was as she hesitated, thinking of Liam, touched as so often, and usually at the wrong moment, by the silence and sadness of him which so troubled her, wondering if a sugar stick would lighten it, that she felt herself suddenly surrounded not by the usual ebb and flow of the market day crowd but by something much more purposeful. Something which she, brought up in a crowded street, could not fail to recognize.

Her pockets, as she well knew, had nothing in them but the stray penny she was thinking of spending on Liam. Her bag! Instantly her hands tightened their grip. Her resolution tightening to match, so that they would have to cut her wrists, she thought, to make her let go. And since they could hardly do that in so public a place, these ragged youths half her size who were pressing around her, she was not really afraid. She'd just box a few ears, knock a few heads together like she did with the Rattries, and chase them off. Little vermin. Little weasels.

That was still the thought in her mind as she struck the ground, not knowing how she came to be there, as one never knows, having suffered a blow aimed from behind which came at her like a thunderbolt, felled her in the presence of a hundred indifferent spectators and left her prostrate, struggling as in those terrible lodging-house dreams, to get up, to breathe, while the weasel-pack fell on top of her, shrieking with laughter. Just another rowdy street game, a half dozen ragamuffins playing rough-and-ready with a woman who was probably a drunken whore, on market day. Very likely. Who cared?

No one. A strength that was not of her body but rooted in absolute desperation got her to her feet rising with the urchins still clinging to her and then shaking them off like the she-bears, once chained in this square for sport, had shaken off the baiting dogs. She knew her bag was gone. She had not seen the thief nor which direction he had taken. She saw only a half-dozen dirty, twelve-year-old faces grinning at her, a half-dozen skinny little bodies beginning to disperse, to lose themselves in the alleys where they would be indistinguishable from dozens more. She heard a madwoman howling – herself – but on market day, in St Jude's, with the taverns serving gin and strong beer from five o'clock in the morning, who was likely to be disturbed by a little howling? And madwomen, women in despair, in panic, at the end of their tether, were a common enough sight any day of the week.

Her only slight hope was to catch one of them, any one, and when she had him …? What? Time enough to think of that when it happened. Time now to run, to fix her eyes on that tow-headed lad with the green scarf around his stringy, chicken's neck and never lose sight of him, no matter who got in her way, to catch him and crucify him if necessary to find out where her bag had gone.

Little bastard. She was going to kill him and enjoy it. She could taste blood now on her lips where her own teeth had bitten them, could see blood flecking her vision, hear it pounding in her ears as she ran, propelled by the first hot rush of her panic so that when she collided with the rough corner of a market stall she didnot feel it, when she stumbled again and scrambled to her feet she was unaware of her grazed hands and knees; heedless of brewers' drays, the hooves of heavy horses; the outrage of the passers-by she pushed aside; the woman with the heavy market basket she knocked over.

She did not even realize her hair had come down and that she had lost her hat until she found herself leaning against a wall somewhere on the other side of St Jude's Passage, her lungs bursting, her temples and her pulses hammering out their distress, her whole appearance wild and dishevelled and attracting not the least attention in that place which – no matter what might have befallen her – had seen it all before.

She knew, although she did not know for quite how long, she had been running aimlessly. The boy was gone. She had refused to believe it at first, her mind so full of him that her eyes kept on seeing him, playing tricks on her, raising false and cruel hopes. But her eyes were empty now. He had gone. And with him had gone Miss Gemma Dallam's brown Chinese satin and every shred of hope Cara had cherished for the future.

Everything.

And so perhaps the time had come just to sit down somewhere on the ground and wait. Just that. Hands folded, head bent, to make it easier for the axe, when it fell.

‘All right, are you, love?'

A man, smelling strongly of spirits put a hand on the wall behind her head and leaned over her. No. She would never be all right again. But, pushing him aside, she gathered her cloak around her, made so bravely from those two old plush tablecloths, and began to walk downhill – the direction she happened to be facing – until she came to St Jude's churchyard where she sat on a gravestone, her head in her hands, and shivered.

No one came near her. She expected no one. For why should anyone involve themselves with a stranger when the one thing that everybody had in plenty was trouble? And what real help could anyone give her? With a calm she knew to be unnatural it struck her that her life was probably at an end. Yes. Very likely. And those six little gutter-weasels and their heftier accomplice who had pushed her over would never realize, when they sold Miss Gemma Dallam's valuable satin for a shilling or two, just what they had done to her.

‘Would it not be wise,' she heard Miss Linnet Gage's light voice saying, ‘to have the work done
here
…?'

Miss Linnet Gage, who disliked Cara, had already hinted at her dishonesty. Was it prudent, she had really been suggesting, to put temptation in Cara's way? Miss Linnet Gage, therefore, would not believe and would not wish to believe Cara's story. And if
she
did not, then why should Amabel Dallam, who bent with every prevailing breeze? Or Gemma Dallam who had her wedding day on her mind? Or John-William Dallam who was known, in St Jude's Street, as a hard master who believed in keeping his operatives strictly in what
he
considered to be their place. Properly subservient.

They would not hate her, if she tried to sob out what would sound to them like a typical housemaid's melodrama. They would simply raise disdainful eyebrows and say what else could one expect of the lower orders; the Irish? At the very best they would dismiss her, as Miss Ernestine Baker had done, with an icy reminder that she must never expect to work in Frizingley again. And since they certainly would not pay her for the work she had already done on the trousseau, where else could she go? But at worst, and far more likely, they would simply hand her over to a magistrate as a thief. A necessary precaution – she heard a voice she imagined to be John-William Dallam's
say
the words – to discourage others of her kind from following her criminal example.

Of course. For she had learned long ago of the mistrust and fear these upper-class households felt for ‘her kind'with whom they were surrounded. Maidservants who had access to storecupboards and the family silver. Cooks who were being constantly accused of purloining cream and chickens, butlers of watering the claret. Tradesmen who might overcharge or who might tamper with locks and window-catches to let burglars in. Dressmakers who might prefer to sell a valuable piece of material rather than settle for the modest profit of making it into a dress.

A short-sighted profit. But such things
did
happen. Feather-headed serving girls who could not possibly hope to go unsuspected
did
steal from their mistresses. Milliners'assistants
did
take feathers and fancy buttons from their workrooms and told amazing tales when they were apprehended wearing them in their Sunday hats. An Irish dressmaker from nowhere, called Cara Adeane, might well try to make off with Miss Dallam's satin. John-William Dallam would give her credit for no more sense than that. Particularly when it was discovered – as it would be – that she was the mother of a bastard child, the daughter of a man who had left Frizingley heavily in debt, and had already been dismissed by Miss Ernestine Baker for her loose behaviour in a public street.

She could not defend herself against them. What magistrate would listen to her lame excuses, in any case, if John-William Dallam named her a thief, and Miss Ernestine Baker testified that she was a slattern?

They would take her to York castle, she supposed, and lock her up. For how long? She knew of a woman in Dublin who, for the theft of a few pounds, had gone to prison for five years. With hard labour. Or they might put her on a prison ship to Australia, as they'd done with two girls from St Jude's a couple of months ago, because – on those farms where the transported convicts worked all chained together – there was a shortage of women.

And if either of these things happened to her then Odette and Liam would be separated and taken away to the workhouse, Odette with her heart in pieces and her nerves in tatters, Liam retreating so far into that anxious silence of his that nothing would ever bring him out again.

A length of brown satin would have killed him. And Odette.

Leaning forward, still shivering, wanting to be sick yet unable to raise anything from her empty stomach but an acrid bile which made her retch again, she attempted to find a chink somewhere in the blank wall, growing granite upon unyielding granite, around her.

Finding none.

Her education had been sketchy, vague in the extreme, but she understood the law as she had always seen it in operation around her. John-William Dallam's law, according to which, had she committed an offence against ‘the person' – provided the person in question had been one of her own kind – then her sentence might well have been light; a leniency by no means extended to offences against ‘property'which must be strenuously, mercilessly put down. So that a knife in Mr Rattrie's feckless ribs would have cost her less in penal servitude, if she had not actually killed him, than Miss Gemma Dallam's satin. The Dallams and Braithwaites and Colcloughs and the rest feeling in no way threatened by skirmishes between one resident of St Jude's and another, yet closing ranks in a punitive fury when it concerned no matter how small a portion of their wordly goods.