A Song Twice Over (37 page)

‘Beautiful,' said Gemma, the sketch in her hand. ‘Really, Mrs Colclough, I do not believe you could do better anywhere.'

‘Is it not – perhaps – just a little severe?' murmured Linnet, willing the enamoured but not
amorous
Uriah to remember her in the diaphanous draperies she had worn for Gemma's wedding; to think of her less as an angel and more as a bride.

And it was perhaps because he suddenly and most distressfully thought of her neither in lily-white satin nor feathered tulle but with no garments at all,
nude
and therefore, to one of his pious disposition, decidedly sinful, that he jumped to his feet and, in urgent need of distraction, began to peer out of the window, his equilibrium unmistakably disturbed.

‘What is it, Uriah?' his mother, herself very easily agitated, required to know.

‘Oh …' It would have to be something immediate and convincing. What, indeed? ‘Oh yes … Look here –'

‘At
what
, Uriah?' His mother's eyes were very sharp.

‘At that Chartist fellow – yes, that's it – and his rabble, coming across the square. They'll be walking past your window, Miss Adeane, in a minute or two, bold as brass. If I had
my
way I'd have them pushed off the pavement. I can tell you, and straight into the gutter where they belong. Candidate, indeed! Just come over here and see him swaggering …'

They came.

‘Why are such things allowed?' enquired Mrs Colclough, addressing herself, it rather seemed, to God.

‘What a terribly quaint little assembly,' said Linnet, her high, light voice reducing the Chartist candidate and his considerable crowd of supporters – far more than either Whigs or Tories could hope to show – to a few ragged children at a charity-school party, grubby and noisy of course, ill-mannered and ill-lettered, but who probably meant no harm.

Mrs Tristan Gage had no comment to make.

Nor had Miss Adeane, her eyes searching hastily through the crowd for Luke, her mind drawn far beyond her control to Daniel at the head of it, walking like a vagabond-king in his shabby green jacket, the same jaunty elegance in his step, the same hard, arrow-straight lines of him, the same slanting smile which, as he turned his head towards her window, caused her heart to thud so painfully that it seemed to bruise her chest.

She could see him plainly. She did not know how much if anything, he could see of her from the street, with the Colcloughs and Gages all around her. And so she had no way of knowing whether it was for her or simply a hostile, staring group of manufacturers that he paused, swept off his hat with a flourish and made them a dancing-master's bow that sparkled with impudence.

There came a roar of pure delight from the crowd as it closed around him and carried him on.

‘Such effrontery,' breathed Linnet as if she had been threatened and was inviting Uriah to defend her.

‘I'd have that one flogged at the cart-tail,' he said darkly, ‘if I had
my
way.'

Mrs Colclough was speechless. Mrs Tristan Gage too, although when Cara, badly in need of distraction, looked at her she seemed to be having some difficulty with the brooch on her lapel, an amethyst and diamond cat which had come loose and with which she was fiddling rather helplessly, thought Cara, in an attempt to pin it back.

‘Please let me do that for you, Mrs Gage.'

Standing taller than Gemma, her long hands sure and steady, she removed the amethyst cat entirely, carefully disengaging its pins from Gemma's velvet collar and then, having smoothed the material down, quickly replaced it.

‘Thank you, Miss Adeane. Most kind.'

‘Not at all. Perhaps you should have someone look at the pin, Mrs Gage. It may be faulty.'

‘Yes. I suppose so. I have had it rather a long time you see.'

‘All the more reason, then, not to lose it.'

‘Oh yes …' She sounded rather breathless, as if she had been running. ‘I did lose it once …'

‘Oh …?' Cara waited politely, without much interest, for the rest of the story, registering no particular surprise when it did not come.

‘Would you care to sit down again, Mrs Gage?' Her miscarriage, after all – Cara remembered – was only three months past and these middle-class women were brought up to be delicate. But Gemma smiled and shook her head.

‘Thank you, no. We must really be going. Linnet …?'

‘Are you not well, my love?' Linnet, at once, was at her most angelic.

‘Perfectly. It is just rather late.'

‘So it is.' Mrs Colclough, who had not yet made up her mind about the wedding dress, was quick to see her excuse to get away. ‘Come Uriah. You know I am uneasy at being outdoors after dark in these unsettled times. And it must be almost seven o'clock. Come, Rachel. Gather yourself together. I will let you know tomorrow, Miss Adeane – or thereabouts.'

‘Whenever it suits you best, madam.'

Tomorrow? Polling day? Cara doubted it. Yet, as she sat behind her locked shutters the following afternoon, listening to the tumult at the hustings outside, she received a somewhat ungracious note to say that the wedding order was hers. Triumph. And richly deserved. She absolutely and utterly believed that. And with whom could she share it?

In order to avoid having her women molested in the street by men who had sold their votes for liquor she had closed her workroom for the day. Madge Percy, who had an ‘understanding' with the landlord of the Tory Rose and Crown had gone off to decorate his premises with blue bunting and serve strong ale – paid for by the Larks and the Covington-Pyms – to such ‘undecided'voters as were able to stagger across the street from the free barrel supplied by the manufacturing Whigs. Odette had taken Liam in search of fresh air to Skipton. Or was it Knaresborough? Anna Rattrie had slipped away at first light to help Sairellen brew tea and serve bread and lard to the Chartists.

Even the grocer next door, who rarely emerged from his dingy shop, had been occupied since early morning supplying over-ripe fruit and dubious eggs to the persistent and well-paid gangs of hecklers who – using either Lark or Braithwaite money – could afford to pay his prices. Nor could she hope to see so much as a solitary customer either, for the simple reason that no lady's husband would allow her to risk his horses, his carriage, or her reputation, in Market Square until the hustings were taken down and the poll over.

Who could she talk to? She would have liked it to be Luke Thackray. ‘Luke – I've done it. I've got the Colclough order. I've taken it away from Ernestine Baker.' But Luke had far more than his hands full, out there in the streets, with his justice and his freedom, which might lead him nowhere but prison. And Daniel. Whereas Christie Goldsborough, with whom she did not wish to share her glow of achievement but who would assuredly have understood it, had left town early that morning, so as not to declare his hand at the polls, she supposed; although she was to dine with him that evening when the votes would all have been cast and
somebody's
will had been done.

Only the dog remained, squat and ugly and almost reliably malicious as he came waddling across the room at her call, not in affection but to investigate what she might have to give him.

‘All right, damned dog. Come here and listen. I've just got the order I wanted. The best one of my life. Isn't that wonderful? Well – isn't it?'

His two baleful, bloodshot eyes offered her no encouragement.

‘Well it is, I'm telling you. The golden opportunity. And I'm going to make that gawky Colclough girl beautiful. That I am. For
my
sake, damned dog – not hers. Since
I'm
beautiful anyway. Don't you think so?'

Clearly he did not.

‘Well, you should – foul brute – since I feed you better than they feed their children in St Jude's.'

He lay down with a heavy thud, expressing total indifference.

‘And I took you in – didn't I? – when your master kicked you out?'

His master. And hers. Only rarely, these days, did she try to deny it. Miss Adeane. Dressmaker and Milliner. Woman of independence and authority in Market Square who, nevertheless, did not lose sight of the fragility of her position.

But had she ever been other than fragile, precariously balanced, her roots in shallow, treacherous soil that could so easily change to sand? She was accustomed to it. She had known worse. Seen worse. Could imagine much, much worse – dear God –
that
she could. And now, with the Colclough order in her hands and who knew how much more to come, surely her freedom from Christie Goldsborough – from any man – was not impossible. Why not? Holding the prospect on the tip of her tongue she savoured it, finding it ambrosial.
Why not?
So many things could happen. One day she might even grow rich enough to snap her fingers at him as she snapped them now at his dog. Or – if that seemed unlikely – perhaps he might lose all
his
money. Or somebody might put a knife between his ribs. Marie Moon, perhaps. Or Ned O'Mara. Or any one of a hundred others who had no cause to wish him well.

How long could it be, in any case, before he took a fancy to somebody else? And, in the meantime, if she had to be his slave, then that – surely – was the lot of all women, one way or another, at one time or another; and if she could not break free, then she would employ a slave's weapons against him. She would cheat him whenever she could, wheedle out of him anything and everything she could get and steal the rest, which was no more than the system she had heard the Braithwaite and Colclough ladies telling each other they had always employed against their legally wedded husbands.

Why not? She was considering these possibilities with a certain relish as she let herself out of her house, making all secure behind her, and set off for St Jude's Square, a black velvet cloak thrown over a gown of black lace with a white watered-silk sash and a white silk rose tucked between her breasts, her hair coiled high and pinned with a scattering of jet butterflies and pearl beads. A conspicuous figure to be walking alone at night, even for the few minutes which separated her from the Fleece, had she not also worn the unseen protection of its landlord. Goldsborough's woman who must be left alone.

And so she passed unmolested through streets already growling with peril.

The day had been tense and bitter and – if one believed half one heard of it – exceedingly treacherous, the very air, now, brooding like approaching thunder with tales of electors prevented from coming into town or if they were in town already, ‘persuaded'to leave it without casting a vote, as Christie Goldsborough had done; although Cara could think of no ‘persuasion'beyond a sizeable cash payment, which would have carried any weight with him. Yet, nevertheless, despite all threats to life and limb and reputation, there had been crowds in plenty, brass bands, processions, banners, both sides – landed against manufacturing – assembling their relatives and dependents and old retainers. The Larks and Covington-Pyms had appeared with an escort of tenant farmers, huntsmen, gentlemen of leisure or of letters, elderly clerics and classical scholars dug out of their rectories and cloisters and lecture-chambers; the Braithwaites with their mill-managers, their lawyers and bankers, their engineers and builders and such tradesmen who understood the value of Braithwaite and Colclough and Dallam custom.

A mustering of men who, no matter how loyal and true, could not be called numerous, the electoral register of Frizingley containing little more than a thousand names from a population of over thirty thousand; the day's results, fiercely scrawled in red paint on a dozen stone walls, informing Cara, as she passed by, that although 526 men had voted Whig and 522 had voted Tory, at least ten thousand others had flocked to the hustings to raise hands and voices for the Chartist cause.

They had not polled a single vote, of course, since none of them had money or property enough to qualify as electors – Cara heard them shouting as much as she hurried past the open door of the Beehive – but those thousands of Chartist hands raised at the hustings had surely put the fear of God into Whigs and Tories alike. What they had seen today was the will of the people, and they were legion, unstoppable, triumphant. What they had seen, came the answer in the precise accents of Far Flatley, was an unwashed, ill-informed rabble.

‘Come on outside, lad,' Cara heard a gruff yet humorous voice invite. ‘And I'll inform you.'

Just let them keep away from her windows.

The crowd in St Jude's Square was as heavy as market day and just as drunken, men in their Sunday best milling around still singing their campaign songs; Tories who had only lost by four votes, drawing wild conclusions as to what had happened to at least five of their electors; Whigs making it their business to resent the implication and throwing out taunts that they could afford to lose at least ten of theirs; Chartists insisting, with a resentment as yet slow-burning, that they and they alone had been victorious. The inns, which had stood open since early morning, still offering their welcome to everyone, unlikely to close now until early tomorrow when the last of the customers and the debris could be swept away all together. And forgotten, she supposed. Since tomorrow – thank God – would be a working day like any other, leaving the publicans richer, the gentry back on their ancestral acres, the manufacturers in their counting houses, at least a dozen of these ‘unstoppable', ‘triumphant'working men in jail.

Crossing the square she saw a man in front of her pick up a loose cobble and put it swiftly in his pocket. Entering the Fleece she noticed, lounging in the doorway, a young, visibly intoxicated gentleman, a minor Lark she thought, or possibly a distantly related Covington-Pym, swinging a dog-whip in his hand. From the Dog and Gun on the opposite corner there came a sudden uproar from which she could pick out the one word ‘Justice'.

Yes. All very well. But what about her shop-windows? Would the man with the cobblestone in his pocket or the boy with the dog-whip, or all the rest of them with their pick-axe handles and their broken bottles spare a thought for
her
hard work and desperate effort for survival when they set about trying to slaughter each other? For their justice and freedom.