A Song Twice Over (12 page)

A sudden, sharp memory had stung her then, very hard, of Daniel Carey lounging on the pedlar's cart among the bales of calico, telling her that the man he had come to Leeds to see was in prison too. For printing dangerous opinions about ‘one man, one vote' and the payment of salaries to MPs.

‘For treason?' she said. Was it treason to interfere with the working hours of factories? To plug the source of cheap labour which had made so many fortunes in Frizingley and elsewhere? It sounded highly likely. But, once again, Luke Thackray had given her his unhurried grin.

‘No. For debt. He put all his savings into the Short-Time Movement. And borrowed more. So that made it easy, I reckon, for anybody who happened to want him out of the way. They sent him to the Fleet Debtors'prison in London just a few days ago.'

And Luke, noticing the flicker of sarcasm in her eye that said ‘Oh yes. Another idealist, this Factory King. Another who wants to save the world and can't look after himself,' had not told her that he had made over one tenth of his income as an overlooker at Braithwaite's mill – where small children were employed in droves, the smaller the better – not to church or chapel as many did, but towards the support of Richard Oastler's wife and family and the eventual repayment of his debt.

Instead, reaching the end of Market Square where he had to take the left hand turning and she the right, he had said, very calmly ‘Don't worry about your little lad. My mother won't turn him out. She walked those ninety miles to York with Oastler too, to save the factory brats. So she'll not send yours to the workhouse, if she can help it.'

‘You mean if
I
can help it.'

He had smiled again, not touching her although it had seemed to her that, without any physical contact whatsoever, he had somehow given her a handclasp of friendship and encouragement.

‘Aye. So I reckon.'

And thanking him, liking him – enormously relieved that he had not spoiled the ease of their relations with all the amorous nonsense she had so often to contend with – she had run off to Miss Ernestine Baker's, to spend her twelve hours double-hemming the cambric frills on another girl's trousseau and thinking about Daniel Carey, indulging herself, when Miss Baker's rule of total silence became hard to bear, with her few but infinitely precious memories of him.

She supposed she had fallen in love with him, not the pleasant, flirtatious loving she had known with Liam's father which, for all its awkward consequences, had left her a certain taste of sweetness, a faint murmur of laughter, but in the deep and dangerous manner of her mother, Odette. And if
that
was what it was then, having seen its effects at such close quarters, she must guard herself against it. Bending low over her work in case a flicker of all she was feeling might show in her face and be thus revealed to Miss Baker's watchful, waiting eyes, she acknowledged, fully and finally, that, left to herself, she would be ready to walk barefoot through the world with Daniel, to endure abandonment in tedious, troublesome places – as her mother had always done – and then go running joyfully to meet him at his call. Like Odette. Considering herself, in those moments of passionate reunion, the most fortunate of women. How terrible. If he called to her now she would lay down these empty lengths of cambric and leap through that window over there, if necessary, to get to him. Floating. Flying. Transformed by love. Exalted. Or she knew she would like to. Had there been no one else but herself to consider. But there was Odette. And Liam. And a part of herself, moreover, which still fought hard against him, seeing his love as tyranny, bondage. And not all of her wished to be bound. Very little of her wished to spend her life in the pursuit of grand ideals – no better than her father's rainbows – which would neither warm her in winter nor even thank her any too kindly for her self-sacrifice.
Very
little of her could feel any enthusiasm for that. None of her, in fact.

Yet she had been told often enough, by Odette, that true love comes only once. And having seen its intensity in her mother, having felt it now in her own far from trusting heart, she felt much inclined to believe it. Very well. If this was true love then it frightened her. It enchanted her too, of course, made her feel weak and foolish and aglow with a most ridiculous happiness when there was absolutely nothing to be pleased about at all. But mainly she was afraid. Of him. Of herself. Of what this wild and beautiful intoxication could do if she really let it take hold of her. If she allowed herself to need it and take the risk of becoming a wraith in a damp veil of misery without it. Like Odette.

Far better never to see him again. Far safer and saner to content herself with the lesser emotions of liking, growing fond, the negative pleasures of
not
agonizing,
not
burning,
not
longing. Not exalting either, of course, but never sinking into the pit. Always in control. Bending a little lower she began to pray in the vague direction of any saint or angel who happened to be listening. ‘Please help me. 'Tis more often I can manage on my own than not. But you can't be expecting me to be strong about everything. Now can you? Well – how's this? If I don't trouble you about looking after Liam and my mother and about how to pay my rent can you just be helping me not to lose my head – or worse – over
him
?'

And that evening, released from bondage of a more familiar sort, with Miss Baker's parting instructions to conduct herself becomingly in the street, to walk close to the wall like a nun, ignoring the lascivious glances of men, above all to go straight home and to bed in order to equip herself for tomorrow's labours, she had murmured ‘Yes, Miss Baker,' and gone instead to make her arrangements with the landlord of the Fleece.

She had expected a raucous pot-house full of navvies and whores and local bullies like the Rose and Crown on the opposite side of St Jude's Square; or a sinister, pitch-dark cavern like the Dog and Gun – both these hostelries rumoured to belong to Captain Goldsborough – where stolen goods were thought to change hands in the furtive shadows, and unstamped radical newspapers were certainly read. Or the Beehive on the other corner of St Jude's, where they still matched fighting-cocks illegally on moonlit nights in the inn yard and held bare-knuckle prize-fights sometimes – in which a young lad, not long ago, had been killed. One of the other journeywomen at Miss Baker's, who seemed intimately acquainted with a sporting gentleman, had told Cara all about it during their short midday break. And she had been surprised – pleasantly, for a moment – with the low-ceilinged, oak-panelled bar-parlour of the Fleece, the wood black and rich with age, impregnated to its core with the odours of beer and spirits and tobacco which had caused her to blink for a moment in the gloom and then almost to gasp at her good fortune as her eyes focused on the man coming round the bar to meet her. No sinister usurer after all but a huge, amiable-looking man with the massive build and the scarred, knocked-about face of an ageing prizefighter who had perhaps not gained
too
many prizes. An Irishman too. What luck. A man whose eyes, sunk beneath their puffy, battered, lids, looked at her with the kind of longing-to-touch with which she was all too familiar, yet whose cordial strong-man's gentleness – the faint deference of a man who knew himself to be ugly – did not threaten her. A man who liked women and who could therefore be
managed
.

‘I'm Cara Adeane. Kieron Adeane's daughter.'

‘I'm Ned O'Mara.'

Her heart sank instantly, coldly. Of course, she should have known.

‘The captain's away,' he told her. ‘Don't ask me where. He comes and goes. He said if you come along and you was looking for work I was to give you some. We always need a barmaid. Ha'you done that afore?' She had.

‘All right then. I suppose he reckons that if you're not earnin' then you can't be payin'him. And he'll settle with you, as it suits him, when he gets back.'

So be it. ‘I can come just after six o'clock.'

‘Until midnight? Fourpence an hour and whatever the customers like to give you.'

It was riches. And when a man was taking pleasure in being generous and had that particular half-foolish look in his eye it was a time to ask for more.

‘And my dinner?'

He had shrugged. ‘There's always food here.'

She would need it. Twelve respectable hours with Miss Baker. Six more she would be advised to keep quiet about here at the Fleece. Fourpence an hour. And tips. And the incredible bonus of meat pies and suet puddings standing untended in the inn kitchen, finding their way into her never-quite-satisfied stomach and into her pocket for Liam. A mouthful, here and there, filched from the corner of a beefsteak or a mutton chop. Deep custard tarts rich with eggs and vanilla which crumbled easily – if one knew how to go about it – and so could not be served to customers. A jug of ale at suppertime which was safer than drinking water in these pestilential cities and would help to keep her strong. And a drop to take home for Odette, to put her to sleep and do her good. Nourishment. So that she could use her precious fourpences for other things.

‘I suppose you know that the Fleece is no place for a decent woman?' Sairellen Thackray had told her, with no real condemnation in her hard eye since decency – as they both knew – had rarely counted for much against the essential keeping together of body and soul.

‘I know, Mrs Thackray.'

‘Aye. I reckoned you would.'

And Sairellen had made no more than a token protest when Luke had taken Cara across the street, where the back-to-back cottages began, and showed her the empty two-roomed hovel – one up, one down – from which a family of twelve had recently been evicted for arrears of a not particularly modest rent, and sent to the workhouse.

The place had been a pigsty, of course, reeking with the stagnant memory of half a dozen incontinent children and as many cats, the floorboards moist and rotting, unpainted walls streaked with grime, the outer door off its hinges, the inner doors having been chopped up long ago for firewood. And not much chance that the landlord would offer to replace them. But the landlord in question was – as almost always, it seemed, in that area – Captain Goldsborough of the Fleece. And, in the Captain's absence, Ned O'Mara had let her have the cottage without an increase in rent. There was no indoor water supply anywhere in St Jude's, of course, except the taverns, and finding no stand-pipe turned on after three o'clock in the afternoon, she had begged buckets of hot water from Sairellen's fireside boiler which Luke had carried in tireless relays across the street, working beside her in an easy silence at an hour of the night which Sairellen not only considered immoral but dangerous, since it kept him from taking his hard-earned rest in bed.

‘That's right, lad. Stay up all night, and then we shall all be splitting our sides tomorrow when we hear about the overlooker – not the bairns – falling into the machines. Dead tired. Or – as I expect somebody'll be saying – dead drunk. Dead, at any rate. Like your brother Mark. And your brother Tim. But don't let that stop you.'

‘I reckon not, mother.'

And calmly he continued to repair the windowframes and the outer door while Cara and Odette had scrubbed and mopped and Odette, at least, had wept with fatigue into the pails of dirty water.

‘Charity begins at home,' Sairellen had reminded him grimly. ‘And even at home there's only so much to go around.'

And she had fixed Cara with a sharp, scathing stare which had warned her loud and clear ‘I've got your measure, my lass. He's a good man. And if you think all you have to do is flash those bright eyes to get the best of him, for as long as he's useful to you, then think again. Because
I
won't stand for it. He walked ninety miles for Richard Oastler with my blessing. But, mark my words, I'll make sure he doesn't walk an extra yard for you.'

But when Cara returned from the Fleece the following night, her head and her back, her whole over-strung body aching from her twelve cramped hours of needlework, her pert, brightly-smiling, footsore duty behind the bar counter, Sairellen and such of Sairellen's neighbours who owed her a favour had scoured the two rooms from top to bottom, made up the cracks in the plaster, blocked the mouse-holes, painted walls and windowframes, black-leaded the hearth, given her the bare, bleached framework of a home.

She begged a mattress from the lumber room at the Fleece and a pair of old barrels to stand outside her door to collect rainwater – often much cleaner than the cloudy stand-pipe brew – so that she could wash her hair whenever she wanted, and her son. Slowly, week by week, she had bought unredeemed chairs and rugs, pots and pans, odds and ends, from the pawnshops which stood so conveniently on every corner, running from one place of work to another like a fox with the pack at her heels, while Odette, from her store of fabrics and trimmings collected in better days, had begun to fashion the dainty garments of silk and lace, the marvels of embroidery, the dashing feathered hats which she was too timid to sell.

A life. The wolf still at the door perhaps but not by any means across the threshold. The rent paid. Bread in the stone jar above the sink. Odette's potato soup with whatever could be gleaned from the Fleece kitchens simmering on their own hearth in their own iron pot. Liam talking again, mainly to Odette and in French, clinging to her more than he should, perhaps, and getting himself laughed at by the neighbouring children who, left to their own devices while their mothers went to the mill, could be very rough. As she herself had once been. Not Liam. And it seemed foolish to complain about that.

A life. And not such a bad one when she remembered other lives, in other places. Nothing in pawn. Nothing owing; except the spectre of her father's debt which, in Captain Goldsborough's continued absence, she had pushed to a comfortable corner of her mind. To be dealt with later, perhaps never. No news from her father, but her own heart hardened towards him far beyond grief, her mother finding consolation – surely? – in Liam. A good friend in Luke – when he could spare the time from his lectures at the Mechanics Institute, his reading, his Sunday walking in the hills, his mother. A steady man, the only one she had ever known, who did not seem to desire her or, if he did, chose not to make it a burden. A friend of sorts in Ned O'Mara who seemed content, at present, to do her small services for which he had not asked – as yet – to be rewarded. A killing fatigue, of course, from time to time. But she was being paid reasonably well for it.