A Song Twice Over (34 page)

The shop was not large, for Christie Goldsborough had not showered her with ease and plenty or anything like it, his generosity being concerned far more with his own entertainment than with her peace of mind. And since what entertained him most was her determination to drag herself out of the mire, he had given her no more than the bare essentials with which to do it, along with his permission to be as determined as she liked.

So had she been. Determined. Hard. Frantic, sometimes. Occasionally strained almost – never
quite
– to her limits. For if she failed in this then there would never be another chance. If she fell down now she would never get up again. She was constantly aware of that. And so she must neither fall nor fail.

He had given her a small amount of capital which – no matter what else she gave him – would certainly have to be repaid, and her choice of the premises he had had available for rent. And needing good light above all things in her workroom she had chosen this building in Market Square, despite its derelict condition, for the height of the upstairs windows which, by letting in so much natural illumination, would – she had calculated – save not only lamp oil and candles but her needlewomen's eyesight. She had needed, too, a decent frontage, a decent or at least not a downright disreputable location where no lady would care to hazard her carriage, and this tall house on the very edge of the square, just before it became St Jude's – which would not have done at all – had seemed to have not certainties – since who could ask that? – but possibilities. Something to work on. A start.

It had been filthy, of course, having been used as a cheap squatting place for pedlars and tinkers – she preferred not to dwell on how casually Christie Goldsborough had evicted them all – and she had scrubbed out the ordure of their occupation herself, several times over, before hiring a scrubwoman to keep the rooms as clean and fragrant as she had left them.

She had painted her workroom walls a tranquil apple green – a colour guaranteed to induce calm, according to Odette – installed tables high enough to avoid the twisting of the spine one endured at every other workroom in her experience, including Miss Baker's; provided footstools which, by giving additional comfort to an embroideress would also enable her to remain at her work rather longer. She had divided the second upstairs room into an ironing-room, thus isolating the heat and steam of goffering and pressing which was famous for giving seamstresses the headache, and had kept her stock of fabrics and trimmings out of sight – largely because she had lacked enough to make a display – thus giving her premises an uncluttered look of which she quickly took advantage by laying out pattern books and fashion magazines, cultivating, rather by chance, a leisurely and – as it turned out – a pleasant atmosphere.

She had repaired her shop-front extensively, or rather had persuaded others to do it for her at a bargain price, causing Miss Baker to pinch her lips and raise pained eyebrows when the woodwork, painted a most frivolous pale blue – the colour of happiness – had acquired its gracefully curving lettering – in gold – spelling out the name of Cara Adeane.

She had pale blue hat-boxes too, with that same gold lettering, for the hats Miss Baker declared she would never sell, pale blue walls in the shop itself with little blue velvet chairs on which no self-respecting customers, in Miss Baker's opinion, would ever sit. While her shop-window, polished with lemon juice every morning so that even Miss Baker, from her far more advantageous position on the top side of Market Square – as far away as possible from St Jude's – could not avoid its gleam, was soon filled by bonnets on plaster heads that were actually painted like real faces – a practice which Miss Baker, without knowing why, felt to be thoroughly immoral – and with shawls, fans, embroidered gloves, lace caps and collars, the exquisite little snippets of temptation which might entice someone inside to order a gown.

She had taken immense pains with her window; changing it constantly – having little else to do in those early days – so that the eye of young Mrs Magda Braithwaite, for instance, which had been attracted by a cream silk gown displayed with a high-crowned cream straw hat, would find it replaced by a Mary Stuart bonnet with blue velvet ribbons when she passed by the next day. She would therefore be obliged to step inside if she wished to see the cream straw hat again, finding – if she did so – just the very shawl, in cream silk deeply fringed in a dark brown, which exactly matched the feather curled around the hat.

Eventually Mrs Magda Braithwaite came. And came again. Although Mrs Lizzie Braithwaite, her mother-in-law, remained loyal to Miss Baker. Mrs Amabel Dallam and Mrs Tristan Gage came too, and bought generously, although Cara knew that Miss Linnet Gage, who often made her own dresses, steered them towards Miss Baker's whenever she could. Young Mrs Jacob Lord, who had been Miss Amanda Braithwaite, still went where her mother took her and bought what her mother told her to buy, although Mrs Ethel Lord, Amanda's mother-in-law – perhaps in defiance of Mrs Braithwaite – had been one of Cara's first customers.

Although only for small things, only for the extra gown or mantle, the extra half-dozen petticoats Mrs Lord thought it would be as well to have when she had ordered the bulk of her season's wardrobe from Miss Baker. Only the bonnet which she happened to see in passing, or those wicked lace garters – Mrs Lord being of a frivolous turn of mind – that sweet little beaded reticule, that lace-edged Spanish parasol.

Like the rest of them, playing safe and sound and giving their large orders, their real work, to Ernestine Baker. Until today, when she had been approached to do sketches for the Colclough wedding.

She would begin to crow with triumph about that. Quite soon. When this uneasy moment, full of Daniel, had safely passed. And then – she was quite sure of it – she would start to feel her excitement mounting to that spurt of honest, joyful exultation she always felt whenever one of her ruses, no matter how small, came to bear its fruit. When she'd run that supplier to earth, for instance, who dealt in those beaded reticules and Spanish parasols and persuaded him to sell to no one in Frizingley but herself. When she'd found the vague yet altogether biddable woman who made facial preparations from lemons and cucumbers to freshen the skin and herbal washes to lighten or darken the hair, which she'd put into fancy bottles and now sold discreetly, along with the little pots of rouge and powder and Odette's floral perfumes which she could always produce, without any husband being the wiser, from her bottom drawer. When two of Miss Baker's journeywomen had come knocking on her door to beg employment, which she would have given them had it meant the sacrifice of her own daily bread. When Lady Lark sailed through her door one day like an arrogant and exceedingly shabby galleon, looking for cut-price splendour for a hunt ball, which Miss Baker seemed unable to supply. When Mrs Audrey Covington-Pym, declining to enter the shop, had called her outside to show her wares at the Covington-Pym carriage step, and she had sent Odette who had managed, nevertheless, to take an order for a riding-habit. When Mrs Marie Moon – yet another of the Goldsborough stable of women – had draped herself languidly against the counter, blinking with absent-minded myopia as every length of silk and satin Cara possessed had been displayed – casually, of course, as if there had been at least a hundred more – choosing, at length, two evening gowns, one black, one white, one to be paid for, she'd murmured to Cara, by her husband, the other by ‘our mutual military friend'.

‘Colonel Covington-Pym?' Cara had enquired sweetly. ‘Or Captain Goldsborough?'

But Marie Moon, who was basically good-natured and often slightly drunk, had shrugged without rancour and wandered away, while Christie Goldsborough had been sufficiently amused by the episode not to question Cara's bill for the black dress which, by covering the bodice with jet beads, she had managed to make at least twenty per cent higher than the bill for the white dress which she sent to Adolphus Moon.

Marie, of course, had looked exquisite in them both. And exquisite without them. The captain had assured her of that, although he was very well aware that his continuing relationship with Mrs Moon caused not the least concern to Cara.

Why should it? No doubt he had both of them as and when he chose. Certainly Cara had never refused him, nor even considered it. When she received a note telling her to join him at the Fleece or anywhere else he named, she went. Without delay. Which was why she had kept the cottage in St Jude's for Liam and Odette and lived here with no other company but that damned dog, who would surely live forever, snoring all day by the fire and waddling upstairs to the workroom every now and then to snap at the journey-women's fingers as they fed him scraps.

Ugly-tempered brute. Like his master. Although she had learned a great deal from Christie. Some things which she had been most eager to know and others which often lay heavily upon her, making her feel brittle and weary and at least a hundred. Ancient in sin, that is, if not in wisdom. He had taught her how to calculate her profits, what to pay and what to charge, and she had lapped up his instruction like a greedy kitten at a cream pot. He had removed her fear of pregnancy by showing her how to set up an inner barrier of sponges soaked in vinegar – like Marie Moon and Audrey Covington-Pym and Queen Cleopatra of Egypt too she shouldn't wonder – a procedure so simple and which had been going on for so long that she often wondered why she had never thought of it for herself. He had taught her about wine and food, how to choose it and present it and savour it. He had taught her about appetite of another kind, how to arouse his occasionally jaded sensuality, how to please him in ways she most certainly would
never
have thought of; whore's tricks, she supposed, although she had come to terms, of necessity, with that side of herself.

And in one thing only had she ever resisted him. She would give him pleasure as and when he demanded, but she would never allow him to please her. Never. It was her one furious and often self-tormenting cry of independence. It was the only thing she had which he could not reach. The only thing he could not inveigle out of her either by force or cunning. The only thing she could choose, and consequently did
not
choose, to give him. In the full knowledge that, as a sophisticated man with a fine appreciation of the bodies of women, it was something he wanted. Her orgasm. And whenever she felt that treacherous stirring at the pit of her stomach she had her own ways of dealing with it. Simply ordering it to go away, sometimes, driving it out by sheer effort of will. And when that failed she would just go on clenching her teeth and her muscles and wrestling with it until she had strangled it, not always quite at birth but usually soon enough; hating, at such moments, the female parts of her own self which, every now and then, eluded her control and began all their foolish glowing and vibrating, their
yielding
, which she could not tolerate.

Other women, like Marie Moon, might call it ecstasy. Perhaps, with another man, so might she. But now, although she would submit to the act itself, as many women did for one reason or another, and feel no shame, the enjoyment of it was an entirely different matter. The enjoyment which led to the need.
There
lay the degradation, as it had degraded lovely, passionate, Marie Moon who would have washed Christie Goldsborough's feet with her tears and dried them with her hair, stark naked in the middle of the square on market day had he taken it into his head to ask her.

She
would never become his slave in that way, begging for his caresses like a dog as she had seen Marie do more than once, and with no better result – she'd noticed – than to bring out the cruel, cutting-edge of his humour, never far below the surface in any case. Although Marie seemed to welcome even that, taking her punishment for the sheer pleasure of offering him her forgiveness, of which he felt no need, for some unkind word or deed of his which he assuredly did not regret.

Cara forgave him nothing. She went to his bed as an adversary. And not always the same adversary either. Sometimes cool and remote as a maiden in an ivory tower far beyond any man's powers of awakening. Sometimes playful and provocative, full of teasing little tricks which led to nothing, on her part, but laughter. A woman, sometimes, who seemed to be smouldering on the brink of fulfilment, exciting him – and regrettably herself – the better to disappoint him when her abandon evaporated and became a yawn, a murmur of regret.

‘There's no hurry, Adeane,' he would say to her. ‘We can go on – all night if necessary … If you are dissatisfied.'

But she came to regard it as proof of her superiority as a woman that she could indeed prolong her lovemaking for as long as she chose to do so, while he – a man – must eventually reach a climax which, no matter how pleasant, ended it. The victory, therefore, was hers. The only one she had. Nothing would make her relinquish it. And if, as often happened afterwards, her stomach tightened and knotted with cramp and there seemed to be a claw of fire scraping somewhere inside her head, then – for her victory's sake – she could bear that too.

But, in other ways, she knew she had little to complain of. For the first year he had given her the shop rent-free but now she paid him, promptly every quarter, what the property was worth with no reduction even for the cottage in St Jude's. And because she was known throughout the area as Christie Goldsborough's woman, or one of them, no one troubled her, or Odette, or Liam. No one stole from them or offered them the least annoyance. The butcher and the grocer were glad of their custom and happy to deliver. Not even the sharpest frost prevented the coalman from getting his cart to the top of St Jude's Street to fill
their
coal-cellar. No one tampered with the washing from their lines. No one threw stones at their windows or used the passage between Odette's house and the one behind it as a privy. No one poked fun at Liam on his neatly-dressed way to the dame-school where he had made no friends but appeared to be learning his lessons. And at least he was safe with Odette in a house that had a chair and sofa to match, a square of real carpet, good blankets on his bed.