A Song Twice Over (31 page)

Certainly there had been times when he had started to caress her and then, with a certain boyish sweetness, had turned lovemaking into conversation, letting the moment pass. But more often than not, whenever they were under the same roof together, he shared her bed and, now that her initial awkwardness had abated – for she had never seen a naked human being of either sex before and had always been discouraged from looking too closely at herself – he made love to her with a straightforward vigour she found attractive.

Perhaps he did not touch her very deeply but he did not shock her either, her body moving easily, without apprehension, beneath his; her mind remaining open to the possibility of sensation, observing his pleasure with affection – glad that he should have it – yet wondering more and more frequently if a similar capacity for such joyful sensuality lay concealed somewhere within herself.

Other women, who now spoke to her freely as a married woman among married women, certainly thought not.

‘You will find “all that” very wearisome, my dear,' Amabel had murmured, blushing like a girl, on her return from honeymoon. ‘But
do
bear it patiently. It is so important to the gentlemen. And when you have a dear little baby to show for it then I expect you will think it worthwhile.'

And she knew now that the worst accusation to be levelled against such women as Marie Moon was that they found ‘all that' much more than simply worthwhile.

They enjoyed it. The wantons. Like men.

Her own mother contemplated such depravity with sorrow, convinced that it could do the poor creatures no good. Her mother's friends, Lizzie Braithwaite and Maria Colclough and Ethel Lord were incensed by it, having used the act of sex all their wedded lives as something to bargain with, employing their very contempt for it as a punishment regularly meted out to husbands who lusted after the nasty performance far too much. And if one started to lust after it oneself, as much as the men – and let them see that one lusted – then what weapon had one left? So said Lizzie and Maria and Ethel, whose marriages had always been conducted along the lines of a pitched battle.

‘
Do
bear it patiently,' Amabel had continued to urge. ‘They do not mean any harm, you know. It comes quite naturally to
them
.'

Gemma was beginning to believe, contrary to all her expectations and her mother's teaching, that it might also come naturally to her.

‘What a rattling good sort you are, Gemma – absolutely first class.' Yes, that was all very pleasant. Very much, in fact, according to plan and she had no wish to complain. He had done everything she had asked of him. He had taken to life at Almsmead with all the enthusiasms she had hoped for. He had joined her, with all the whimsical mischief of a schoolboy, in her small conspiracy against her father with regard to the manor. He had never questioned either her motives or her decisions, allowing her a most aristocratic freedom of movement far beyond anything her middle-class upbringing in general and her life with her father in particular had encouraged her to expect. And if the only deep emotion she had ever seen in him had been on the day of Ben Braithwaite's engagement to Magda Tannenbaum, then she felt no right and no reason to be astonished at that.

He had taken his sister to town that morning, to Miss Baker's and Miss Adeane's where all the gossip would be flowing free and strong, and bought her a new hat and gloves and a flask of the perfume Miss Adeane kept hidden discreetly away for customers who wished it to be believed that they smelled naturally of lavender or roses. Two exquisite thoroughbreds, she supposed they had looked, chatting to one another in their high-pitched, well-bred, ‘London'voices, filling each shop in turn with their faintly tittering laughter, making Frizingley aware – whatever it chose to whisper behind their backs – that the dynastic alliance of one ‘trading'and therefore ‘common'fortune with another could mean nothing at all to them.

And that night when Linnet, face to face with her own reflection in her solitary looking-glass and the stark realization of how much it
had
really meant to her, had been unable to sleep, Tristan had walked with her for hours in the manor garden, Gemma watching them from her bedroom window as they paced beneath the chestnut trees, engrossed, almost entwined, like turning to like, intent wholly and exclusively upon one another.

So had she once walked and talked herself in that same garden – or so it now seemed to her – with the young Irishman who had recovered the amethyst and diamond cat which she still wore, very often on her collar and which she had longed – very badly, she remembered – to give him as a keepsake. She had been unable to do so. Tristan's arrival had prevented her and she would never have found the right words to accompany the gift in any case. It would have appeared to be charity and she could not have borne that. Yet, whenever she pinned the brooch to her dress, she remembered him, pleasantly, wishing him well, not in the least distressed by the absolute conviction that he would never once think of her.

He had been going to France, she recalled. Or Italy. Anywhere in the wide world which happened to call his name. And she hoped he had answered freely, fortuitously, and had found his heart's desire at the end of the road.

Whatever it had been.

While as for herself, surely she already possessed as much as it would be sensible for her to desire? And she had always set great store by common sense.

She had the manor and with it a great many pleasures which were negative perhaps but no less welcome for that. No need to gossip every afternoon away at Amabel's tea-table with Amabel's friends. No need to accept every one of the invitations which kept on being delivered because of Amabel's fear of giving offence. No need to be constantly laying down her book in case Mrs Braithwaite should catch her reading and name her ‘studious'again. No Mrs Drubb, or not for much longer. No need to go to bed when Amabel went because she did not like to keep the servants sitting up and had had nightmares, ever since Gemma's birth, about accidents with bedtime candles. No need to explain one's reasons for suddenly looking out of the window. The sheer, exhilarating wickedness of going out, if she had a mind for it, in the rain. The socially useless companionship of Mrs Ephraim Cook, the mill-manager's wife, a plain-faced, plain-spoken woman, who had aroused Gemma's interest in the mill-school and the somewhat ineffective spinster lady who ran it.

The school, of course, had existed for some years now, ever since the Factory Act which her father could not mention without turning purple, had thought it advisable for factory children to be given some education, feeling that an hour or two a week per child, perhaps, of reading, writing and arithmetic, would not go amiss. Like the Braithwaites and the Colcloughs her father had not agreed with that. But being steeped, like them, in the philosophy that if one did a job at all one might as well do it splendidly – or at least a good deal better than the Braithwaites – he had built a very decent stone school with a walled yard and a tiny house attached for the use of the teacher, where anyone who paid him rent for his mill-cottages or any of his other employees who resided elsewhere might send their children – to suit the convenience of the teacher – free of charge. Not that many came on any sort of regular basis, much preferring the excitement of the streets to the acquisition of learning for which even the teacher herself, who had known far better days, considered they would have little use.

Mrs Ephraim Cook did not agree with her, believing that every child should learn to read as firmly as she believed they should wash behind their ears every morning and not relieve themselves, like dogs, in the street. While Gemma, who had never thought very much about it, her own education having come to her just as easily and plentifully as soap and hot water and extremely private sanitary arrangements, had found it something to think about
now
, when any new thought would have been welcome. Something useful. Something which could interest her without being thought so eccentric or so socially damaging that it would upset her mother.

Something to do. Particularly now when there was after all, to be no baby.

Better luck next time, everyone had said.

Yet it occurred to her now, as she lay quietly on her pillows, listening to the fire crackling in the winter chimney and her father peacefully snoring beside it, that such a time may never come. She had wanted her child. Badly, in fact. More, far more, than she had cared to show. Yet her body had rejected it so soon, with a firmness which had seemed quite final. Almost as if her body did not find it natural to bear a child.

‘Nonsense,' the doctor had muttered gruffly when she had attempted to explain her fears to him. ‘You ladies have strange notions at times like these. Well known for it. You'll be laughing, Mrs Gage, at the very idea – this time next year, perhaps. Or the year after.'

She had not believed him. She did not trust him either, considering him to be little more than a teller of comforting lies, her mother's doctor oozing reassurance from every pore. Yet she had smiled obediently, taken her tonic, eaten her nourishing broth, allowed him to earn his fee.

‘Yes, doctor.'

But her own body told her a different story which, lying here for the long days of rest which had been prescribed for her, she had heard clearly enough through the bird-twitter of Linnet and her mother, and Tristan's determined joviality.

Perhaps she would never have a child. Perhaps – in fact most certainly – it would be sensible to face the possibility. She faced it, therefore. Wept over it a little whenever her mother was safely out of the way. And then found her thoughts, which desperately needed a new direction, turning slowly towards the mill-school.

No child of her own. But there were other children. Ragged urchins, of course, sitting on those school benches on the occasions of her visits. Cleaned up for her inspection she supposed and even then many of them very far from tidy. But intelligence could not possibly be reserved for the washed and monied classes. Far from it, indeed, when one remembered Felix Lark who would have been thought half-witted had he not been a baronet, or Amanda Braithwaite who, no matter what her mother said, had never really learned to read.

Certainly in that plain, square classroom there would be bright, quick minds behind not a few of those dirty faces, and budding abilities,
potential
, which she – with so much leisure and ease and money – could surely discover? Some clever little girl full of hope and fun and joy of living as Cara Adeane, the Irish dressmaker, must once have been. And what would one have made of Miss Adeane, Gemma wondered, had her talents been properly nurtured from the start?

Any one of a dozen useful, exciting, challenging things. Just as there might well be a dozen little Cara Adeanes waiting up there.

Something to do. It was what she most urgently craved for.

‘Father –?' His moment of waking was often the best one, sometimes the only one, in which to approach him with any certainty of success.

‘What? … what is …? I wasn't asleep … Just resting my eyes …'

She was content to let him believe it.

‘Father, there is something I would like
so
much …' And she had spoken deliberately with the voice of Amabel.

Still half asleep he smiled indulgently, scenting a victory, since he had wanted to be generous all day and had been feeling mildly irritated with her for not giving him the opportunity. So now, after all, there
was
something she had set her heart on. He just hoped it would be difficult to come by and very expensive.

‘I would like full responsibility for the running of the mill-school.'

What
had the girl got into her head now?

‘Although I'm not sure you can do it, father …'

What was that? He could do as he liked with his own property, couldn't he? Who challenged him?

‘Mrs Ephraim Cook has taken it under her wing, father …'

The manager's wife? He'd make short work of
her
.

‘And I would so enjoy turning it into the best school of its kind in Frizingley. In the West Riding even. Because if a job's worth doing, then its worth doing well, father. Very well. That's what you've always told me, haven't you?'

‘Aye, lass.' And John-William closed his eyes again, squeezing them tight shut to force back the painful, incredible start of tears.

What a damn shame, he thought, what a tragedy that she was a woman instead of what she
ought
to have been. A useful, sensible, hard-headed man.

Daniel Carey returned to Frizingley as its Chartist Candidate entirely by chance, the gentleman who had originally been selected to fight the by-election having taken up a longish residence in jail on charges of plug-drawing and helping to demolish a workhouse near Rochdale.

A substitute had been required, therefore, in haste – and Daniel, who had never reached France or Italy after all but had spent the last two years at the London office of the Chartist
Northern Star
, had seemed as good a choice as any. Better than some, in fact, since he had once had West Riding connections and, as young political agitators went, possessed a relatively unblemished reputation, with not so much as a single term of imprisonment, as yet, to be used against him at the hustings.

A pleasant, very nearly a respectable, young man, it seemed, which was far more than could be said for the fellow they had put up for Bradford in 1841, an Irishman of the wilder variety who had served his apprenticeship to the political trade in such select establishments as Northallerton House of Correction and the castle jails of Lancaster and York.

Yet the disreputable William Martin had won an enormous following in ‘Worstedopolis', culminating in a mighty show of hands at the hustings which had left no one in any doubt that, had those hands possessed a vote apiece, he would have been elected overwhelmingly as a Bradford MP.