A Song Twice Over (38 page)

And it was with that thought in her mind that she walked into the Fleece, reached the stairs which would take her to Christie, turned on the bottom step to look back into the bar-room again – she had no idea what drew her – and saw Daniel.

He was, of course, at the centre of a great, raucous, intensely joyful crowd of his supporters, spilling through the inn door and sweeping him along with them to show off their Candidate, their Champion, who would have been Frizingley's MP today by a majority, not of that puny, ridiculous four, but of many thousands had the people of Frizingley had the power to elect him. Next time, they were saying. Next time to victory. Leaping around him, jostling one another to get near him, pushing and shoving in a great, gaudy mass of colour and
movement
which ended abruptly and finally – or so it seemed to her – as he detached himself from it, every other person in the throng freezing into a great stillness, so that it was only Daniel and herself who lived and breathed as he shouldered his way to the foot of the stairs and she stood there, waiting for him.

‘Cara …?' he said.

She held out her hand feebly, into thin air, not expecting him to take it, and said, ‘Daniel …' What else? Are you well? Are you happy? Are you in danger? But the crowd, of course, had not really ceased its ebb and flow for so much as a moment. Other hands were still tugging at his sleeves and clapping him on the shoulder, still yelling their praises at him and making their ungainly bids for his attention.

She could barely hear her thought, much less his whisper and then her own replying to it, just a candle-flame of sound in that coarsely blazing din, which soon faltered. And it was on his face, through the abrupt fading of his smile and the narrowing of his eyes, that she read the presence of Christie Goldsborough on the stairs behind her.

‘Cara?' She experienced no difficulty whatsoever in hearing
his
voice. And without turning her head she felt him look at Daniel.

Was he in danger? Yes, assuredly –
now
– she believed he was.

‘I see you are acquainted with our Chartist candidate.'

‘No. Not really.'

So Judas had felt once, she supposed. But it was herself she was betraying, not Daniel, who, above all things, must not be looked at by Christie, must never, never, be brought to his notice. Never by her.

‘How the eye deceives,' he said. ‘One might almost have mistaken you for old friends.'

‘Lord – no.' She was smiling very brightly. ‘Just a familiar face – from somewhere or other.' And feeling as blind and dumb and disjointed as a marionette she picked up her skirts and continued up the stairs to enter the over-heated, often overpowering room, shrug off her cloak and make her curtsey – a most brilliantly polished marionette by now – to Christie Goldsborough's guest.

She had seen Ben Braithwaite many times before, waiting for his wife outside her shop with his showy, mettlesome roan horses. But neither of them cared to acknowledge it now.

She also knew him as the tight-fisted employer of Luke Thackray, the purchaser of Oliver Rattrie's cheap little soul, the lover who, having trifled with the affections of Linnet Gage, had jilted her for Magda Tannenbaum's dowry.

She did not acknowledge that either.

He knew her purely and simply as a superb piece of female flesh that he would have bought at auction, like his roan mares, and driven just as hard had she been available.

He knew of no reason to conceal it.

‘So you are the lady who costs us all a fortune in silk and satin?'

Smiling, she gave him her hand, feeling no embarrassment when his eyes fastened instantly on the white rose nestling among the black lace between her breasts. No surprise either since she had good reason to know – having measured and fitted her a dozen times – that his wife, from the waist up, could have been easily mistaken for a boy.

Let him look. It was easier than conversation. Not that such a man would have anything to say to a woman in any case. He would take his satisfactions in silence, she judged, frequently no doubt but rather fast, reserving his conversation for his own, superior sex as he was doing now, looking at her and talking to Christie about the election.

‘So we have much to celebrate, Goldsborough. Only a four seat majority, I admit. And no doubt the Larks will make much of that. But we won. We got in. You did well for us there.'

But he had not
voted
for them, had he, she thought? Nor for anyone else that she was aware of. No doubt he had prevented others from going to the hustings but he had not gone himself. He had neither converted that manufacturing majority of four into five nor reduced it to three, thus declaring himself an ally – as his birth dictated – of the Larks and Covington-Pyms.

‘Happy to be of service,' he murmured. She did not believe him. But Ben Braithwaite, she saw, did not care so long as he imagined that, whatever had been at issue, he had won.

‘Aye. Very likely. So I'll drink another glass of this good old Sercial with you and be on my way. Wouldn't care to intrude – after all.'

They drank. He clapped Christie fraternally on the shoulder, indulged himself with another lingering inspection of Cara's breasts, and went away well-satisfied.

‘Sit down,' said Christie, looking by no means disappointed himself. And, obediently and decoratively, she sat at his over-laden, over-magnificent table before his fire which burned too high, piled with enough logs, it seemed, to heat a baronial hall, drinking wine of a vintage she did not appreciate, served – to her greater discomfiture – by Ned O'Mara who still hated her, she thought, when his head was clear enough.

Poor Ned. Another glass of this rich, rather heavy wine and every man would be her brother, every woman her sister. She would be able to weep for the entire human race, as Marie Moon often did. Perhaps – tonight – it would be just as well. Yet it was not until they had finished the turbot and wild duck and syllabub, until Ned had gone and Christie Goldsborough, showing her to a chair by the fire, had put a glass of brandy in her hand, that she felt pert enough to ask him, ‘So what can a fine Tory gentleman like yourself have to do with a manufacturing Whig like Braithwaite?'

He smiled through the smoke of a large and certainly expensive cigar.

‘I can use him.'

‘It looked to me as if he thought he was using you.'

‘So much the better.'

‘What do you want from him?'

‘Money, Cara.'

Of course. She smiled at him, and shrugged. ‘Did you
really
help him today? To get his candidate elected?'

‘He thinks so. Because it happened to suit me, of course. He knows that. And – as that four seat majority shows – he had need of me. I expect there must be at least five good men and true among my tenants who, if left to their own devices, would have voted Tory.'

‘But you made sure they didn't.'

He inclined his head as if acknowledging a compliment. ‘Oh – nothing much to speak of. I merely did what any lord of any manor has always done – and will always manage to do. I instructed such of my tenants who have the vote how to use it. No more.'

‘You told them they'd be after losing their leases otherwise.'

He looked very much amused. ‘My dear – there was no need to make explanations. They already knew the penalties – believe me. After all, which one of Braithwaite's mill-managers could have expected to keep his employment had he not followed the Braithwaite line?'

‘And then you left town before the polling started and didn't use your own vote at all – to keep in with everybody.'

The fragrant cigar smoke curling all around him, the firelight darkening him, adding bulk to a body already quite powerful enough, he stretched himself easily, lazily, into the warmth, and smiled.

‘Ah yes. But – there again – where did I go? Ben Braithwaite certainly doesn't know, although Lady Lark just might. Perhaps I voted in another constituency.'

‘Could you?'

‘Of course. The vote is attached to a man's property not to his person. I am one man. But my holdings in land etcetera may be numbered in their dozens. So I can vote anywhere and everywhere I own sufficient property to qualify, so long as I can get there on the appropriate day. An acquaintance of mine is entitled to vote fourteen times in fourteen different places and would gladly do so – if he had wings. He usually manages five.'

And Luke Thackray, surely the most responsible man she knew, had no vote anywhere at all.

‘So you helped the manufacturers to win Frizingley and then went off somewhere else to vote for the gentry, I expect. For your own kind.'

‘I did.'

‘Why? I thought you despised the millocracy.'

‘Oh my dear – so I do – with an absolute contempt which makes the pleasure of taking their money all the keener, I find.'

‘How?'

In certain moods he would tell her nothing. But now, relighting his cigar, one leg thrown over the arm of his leather chair, the other stretched out at ease on the bear-skin rug before the blazing hearth, his heavy body dominating that prime area of heat and comfort with the same total self-indulgence as her dog, he seemed almost amiable.

‘Quite easily. There is a thing called civic pride, my dear, which
I
certainly do not feel and which you may never even have heard of. But, nevertheless, I fully expect it to make me a fortune. Ben Braithwaite feels it, you see.'

Civic pride? She looked at him blankly. No. It meant nothing to her.

‘I am talking of Frizingley, my dear. Do you love it?'

What a ridiculous suggestion. This slag-heap? ‘No,' she said. ‘That I do not.'

‘Exactly. Nor – I must confess – do I. Possibly I have a few boyhood memories which retain their charm. But the town as it stands today –' He shuddered. ‘One might call it the last place God ever made, except that God didn't make it. The Braithwaites and the Dallams and the Colcloughs did that, with their mills and their muck-heaps and their pious cant. And they like it, my dear. After all, they've created it in their own image, so why shouldn't they? And, that being the case, the next step is bound to be civic pride. Just now all they can think of is setting themselves up as ladies and gentlemen, building themselves mansions in imitation – and poor imitation, at that – of what used to be mine. And improving their factories to astonish – well – if not the world then at least one another. But once that's done then somebody is bound to point out to them what a disgrace the rest of Frizingley looks compared to Leeds, say, or Halifax, or Bradford.
Somebody
is going to mention the magic words “Charter of Incorporation”, which means having a proper town council with a mayor and aldermen and a real town hall to put them in. And if they have a town hall then they'll need a whole set of other public buildings to go with it. A brand new Frizingley as a monument to the brand new middle-classes. And if the first mayor – Ben Braithwaite, I rather think – can manage to get the railway line in, then he'll need a station, won't he, and very likely a station hotel. Or two. All – my dear – in the centre of town. Which is the only flat land, and therefore the only decent building land, there is. St Jude's Square. And Market Square. And then, of course, the hilly ground beyond would come in handy for all the increased business premises the railway would bring in.'

He paused, and smiled.

‘Who owns all that, Cara?'

‘You do.'

‘I do. It may take ten years, of course. But when it happens I intend to be very certain that my relationship with My Lord Mayor will ensure me an excellent price. I shall probably go into the construction business, too.'

She smiled back at him, rather palely.

‘And what happens to the people who live here now?'

‘My dear …' He flung out an arm in a gesture of surprise. ‘How can I possibly have a notion? Any more than my father had when he sold the manor lands. Although my father, of course, was a mad fool, as everybody knows. I am no fool, at any rate.'

The heat of the fire suddenly incommoded her and getting up she crossed to the window for the simple coolness of the glass against her cheek, the hint of the March wind in the square outside. Yes. It would all happen as he had said. Ben Braithwaite would be powerful. And dignified. Christie would be rich. St Jude's would be levelled into broad thoroughfares and civic palaces, its ant-hill population scattered and gone. Where would she be then? And Luke? And Daniel?

She had just ten years, according to Christie's reckoning, to make her fortune and win her freedom. And, contemplating it, she felt a sudden and most uncharacteristic flagging of her energies. She would be very tired by then.

He came up behind her, putting one arm around her waist and slipping the other hand casually between the black lace of her dress and her bare breasts.

‘What is it, Adeane?' And she felt his breath as an intrusion, a small rape, down the back of her neck. ‘Are you looking for the Chartist candidate?
Do
confess. They say it eases the soul.'

‘I hardly know him, Christie.' But, because she had shivered with sudden cold and knew he had felt it, she added quickly, ‘We met once on the boat from Ireland.'

His broad hand had taken the whole of her breast now and began to caress it with a complete assurance which offended her, his other arm encircling her, pinning her against him so that the heat of his well-nourished heavily-scented, luxurious yet never indolent body seemed to scorch the whole length of her back.

‘I think not, Cara.' He put his mouth to the nape of her neck and even as he kissed it she could feel him smile. ‘It was, naturally, of interest to me to know whatever there was to know about all three candidates. Even the one who could hardly have expected to poll a single vote, and did not do so. His name – Cara? Come now, I
know
you can tell me.'