A Song Twice Over (39 page)

‘Daniel Carey.'

There was no longer any point in pretending.

‘So it is. And I have a creature about me at present called Oliver Rattrie – as you know – who remembers him well. In particular he was able to recall for me a day when Mr Carey called to say goodbye to you in that cottage of mine where your mother still lives. The walls of those cottages are lamentably thin and Oliver, who was living next door just then, has sharp ears in any case. The episode, even now, appears to excite him. Certainly he tells it with great relish. Could Oliver be in love with you too, Cara, do you suppose – as well as the candidate?'

‘It was two years ago, Christie.'

‘Yes. And when you met again tonight, so romantically at the foot of my stairs, one could see in his face that to him it seemed like only yesterday.'

The lace had parted now, leaving her breast exposed, covered only by his square, stroking hand.

‘It seemed to me, Cara, that he loves you still. How does it seem to you?'

‘What difference does it make?'

Once again she felt his mouth curving with laughter against her neck.

‘My dear – that is entirely a matter for you to decide. You are a free woman. Nothing keeps you here – or anywhere else – but yourself. Would you like to go to him? Now?'

‘You wouldn't let me.'

And this time she could hear his laughter as well as feel it vibrating down her spine as he began to bite her nape and her shoulders very softly with his lips.

‘Cara – Cara – my dear girl –
of course
I would let you go. How could I
really
stop you? The door is over there. You have only to walk through it. After all, the poor man may still be sitting downstairs in the tap-room, in his agony – thinking of you up here, just above him, with me. Go, my dear. If you want to. A flight of stairs will take you to him. Do you really think I would lift a hand to stop you?'

She shook her head, his breath all over her, her whole body trembling in his hands with cold and the fear of certain hurt to come. She knew what he was about to do to her. She knew, too, that she would submit to it. She hated him. And herself. Bitterly.

‘So – having established your freedom of choice – what
would
I do, Cara? If you left me?'

Toss her back into the street, naked and hungry and unprotected as she had been before. As she had always been until he had given her this taste – this sip – of security and self-fulfilment to which all her instincts now clung as desperately as if she were drowning. Until, by showing her what could be hers, what her life might become, he had weakened her.

‘Tell me, Cara?'

‘You'd take my shop away.'

‘If you love the man, then that shouldn't matter. Should it?'

Her teeth were chattering, her tongue frozen somewhere and useless inside her mouth. She knew what he wanted her to say. How could she say it? Desperately she shook her head, trying to avoid the spoken words. But it did not suffice.

‘Come Cara – tell me. If you love him, then it shouldn't matter.'

‘No.'

‘So it follows, therefore, that you don't love him.'

She closed her eyes.

‘Cara?'

‘Yes. It follows. I don't.'

‘In fact, what you love – purely and simply and with a love surpassing all others – is my money.'

‘Yes. I do.'

Once again she felt his mouth smile against her skin.

‘Good. Then we understand each other. And you, my dear, would be well advised to learn to understand yourself. You are here, Cara, with me, because you want to be here. Not because I force you or threaten you but because your dependence on my support has become so great that you cannot do without it.
That
– dear little Adeane – is the truth and the sum total of you. Is it, or is it not?'

‘It is.' She had not even whispered the words but had stated them flatly, dully, knowing them to be true. He turned her around in his arms and smiled at her.

‘Very well. You pass the test. So come to bed with me now and if it should please you to close your eyes and think of the man you love – although not enough, of course, to leave my money for him – then you may feel free to do so.'

Even that?

‘It wouldn't trouble you, Christie? If I pretended you were somebody else while you were …'

‘No. Why should it? The benefit would be mine, after all. Not his.'

Absurdly perhaps, when he had already emptied her of illusion and of so many things she had deeply prized, it was too much.

‘You'll go too far one day, Christie.'

‘I dare say. You are not the first to tell me so.'

‘But you will. You'll play your cat and mouse once too often. You'll make somebody too unhappy or too ashamed – you'll strip somebody too bare. More than they can stand.'

‘And what will happen then?'

‘I don't know. I suppose somebody might kill you.'

He laughed, ready to believe it, she thought, without the least sign of alarm.

‘I suppose somebody might. But not you, Adeane. Not before I give you the deeds of that shop, at any rate. And since I don't mean to do that, then my life must be very precious to you, Cara. You need me, in fact.
Do
remember.'

She would remember.

She was here, with him, because she wanted to be. He had given her leave to go and she had remained half-naked and trembling in his hands, pressed against him, turning as he turned her, moving as he wished to move her for his pleasure, no longer even struggling to be free. She needed him. She loathed him. He had held a mirror to her face and shown her a reflection she had no choice now but to acknowledge. Miss Adeane. Dressmaker and Milliner. For whom love might be one thing but money most certainly another.

It would be well to harden her heart now for she would not see Daniel again.

He would leave Frizingley now and never return.

Such indeed was his intention as he walked to the top of St Jude's Street that night, shaking off the several dozen new-made bosom friends who would have difficulty, he knew, in remembering his face tomorrow.

He had every reason to leave. None to stay. And it was entirely by chance that, turning up his collar and hunching his shoulders against the raw March cold, he thrust a despondent hand into his pocket, his fingers encountering – remembering – a sharp, solid object which had been delivered to him earlier in the day. A woman's brooch in the shape of an amethyst cat, along with a note reminding him of the day on which he had first seen it, and wishing him good luck.

The news that Mrs Tristan Gage had employed the Chartist candidate as master of the Dallam mill-school burst upon certain areas of Frizingley with the force of thunder and lightning.

Mrs Ethel Lord, the brewer's wife, being of a charitable disposition and inclining to a view of ‘live and let live'preferred not to believe it. Mrs Lizzie Braithwaite, whose daughter Amanda was married to Mrs Lord's son, spoke sharp words, in Mrs Lord's hearing, about foolish women who kept their heads in the sand, declaring herself more than ready to believe anything about Gemma Dallam who – particularly since her refusal to marry Lizzie's son Ben – had struck her as decidedly odd. The result, undoubtedly, of a girlhood spent poring over books instead of her sewing. Thank Heavens
her
daughter, Amanda, who was placidly pregnant once again, had shown so little interest in learning to read.

Mrs Maria Colclough muttered darkly of ‘possession' by evil demons about which her son Uriah – who increasingly had the look of a man wearing a hair shirt beneath his pure silk vest – appeared to know a great deal.

Lady Lark and Mrs Audrey Covington-Pym looked down their high-bridged noses with the uncomprehending scorn they accorded to all the vulgar goings-on of the middle-classes.

‘But the boy is beautiful,' said Mrs Marie Moon, although no one had asked her, considering that to be explanation, and justification, enough.

‘Yes, indeed. There is a great deal in what you say,' murmured Cara Adeane to each lady in turn, keeping her counsel as all shades of opinion began to be aired over the fabrics and fashion plates in her shop.

But Ben Braithwaite, it was felt, had expressed the collective view of Frizingley's gentlemen, had put the matter in its right and proper nutshell in fact, by declaring that the girl did not know what she was doing – what woman did? – and that her father, John-William Dallam, would soon put a stop to it.

He did not.

‘The position was vacant and Mr Carey is highly qualified,' Gemma told him, her voice as matter-of-fact as she could make it, very mindful, on the surface, of her dignity as a matron of almost twenty-five years old – no giddy girl by anybody's reckoning – who had been given responsibilities she considered herself well able to fulfil.

‘Aye, lass?' John-William, who had come from Almsmead on purpose to sort the matter out at his wife's urgent request, since she vowed she could face no one until he did, was in no doubt as to where
his
responsibilities lay. He had given his daughter the mill-school to play with exactly as he would have given her a pony cart. And now, if she seemed likely to make a fool of herself or to upset her mother, then he would take it away from her just as if the pony had turned out to be fractious or she had shown a tendency to drive too fast.

Twenty-five years old, married woman, or not.

‘
Father
. The schoolmistress we had was ready to retire and she was hopeless in any case. She had been a governess for most of her life teaching ‘accomplishments'to young ladies and she had no conception at all of what these mill children need.'

‘And your Mr Paddy O'Riley has, has he?'

She straightened her back and folded her hands together, small yet resolute, her feet, despite their diminutive size, planted as firmly on the ground as her father's, a man who was ‘large' mainly in spirit, in grit and determination, in endurance rather than inches, himself.

‘His name is Daniel Carey. And the children's parents will not object to his politics since they are all Chartists already.'

‘Oh yes – and just what do you know about politics, my lass?'

As much as anybody, she thought. As much as
you
. But to say so, of course, would have been very unwise. She smiled, therefore, taking the edge from her voice, stating her case calmly, reasonably, with proper respect for his status and his seniority, not making the demand to which she felt fully entitled but making an appeal. Getting her way by stealth, in fact, as all the other women she knew did.

‘Don't think I made the appointment lightly, father. I did take his political persuasion into account and it seems to me that it could even work to our advantage. You built the school, after all, at great expense and our main problem has always been getting children to attend.'

‘No problem,' he said flatly, lighting one of the cigars his doctor had forbidden him and which Amabel's tearful pleading had banished at least from Almsmead. ‘How many children do you want? A hundred? Two hundred? Have a walk round the mill cottages and pick them out yourself as they take your fancy. All I have to do is say the word and every man in my employ will have his bairns on your doorstep tomorrow morning. You know that well enough.'

‘Yes, father.' She sighed and then, in an effort to cover her exasperation, managed to look perplexed. ‘But I want them to come because they want to learn, not because they're sent.'

‘That's idealistic twaddle, lass.'

‘All right. Then I want to feel we have something useful to teach them. Something more likely to stimulate their interest and their intelligence than Miss Wren's deportment and those dreary jingles she has them singing about “Waste not want not” and “We are happy, poor and humble …'”

She had made a mistake and realized it at once.

‘What's wrong with that?' enquired her father with a mildness which did not deceive. ‘If your Miss Wren has set herself to teach my employees' brats to be thrifty and to know their place then that's good enough for me. And good enough for them. Because there's nowhere for those brats to go, Gemma my lass, but the place to which God's wisdom has called them. My factory floor and St Jude's.'

‘So the Larks and the Covington-Pyms used to talk, father, about men like you.'

He grinned, puffing happily on his cigar since he knew she could not afford to betray him to her mother.

‘Ah – so you want to fill that classroom with a dozen like me, do you? Then there
would
be a revolution.' But he was rather flattered just the same – and deeply touched – that she should choose him as her model.

‘Hardly a dozen, father. But if I could find one like you and give him a start then wouldn't that be splendid?
I
think so. To me it would be immensely worthwhile.'

‘Aye.' He patted her arm awkwardly, remembering the doctor's embarrassed reassurances, too hearty for comfort that of course she'd have another child. Well, there'd been no sign of it yet. It struck him, with the force of a premonition – and he was not a fanciful man – that there never would be. Poor Gemma. Married to decorative, shallow, feather-headed Tristan it wasn't difficult to understand what that might mean to her. How she might need to reproduce her own kind; just as – married to Amabel – he'd always loved to catch a glimpse of himself in her.

‘Aye, lass.'

‘And I'd have a better chance of doing that, surely, with a proper schoolmaster, a man of real education and experience than with these faded spinsters, like poor Miss Wren? I'd thought of keeping her on to teach sewing and housecraft since obviously Mr Carey can't do that. But as for the rest, if we are to have a school, father, then why not have a good one instead of the run-of-the-mill variety that
everybody
has? Why not pick out our own bright little boys and teach them to be bright young men who can help Mr Ephraim Cook in the counting house one day? And how can Mr Carey possibly corrupt them when they are constantly hearing the same thing from their own fathers? One might almost call it fighting fire with fire – if one wished to excuse oneself to Mrs Braithwaite or Mrs Colclough, that is.'