A Song Twice Over (10 page)

‘You were taking your horse to be shod, weren't you, Tristan? Shouldn't you be on your way?'

‘Oh – I say – is that all right? You don't mind?'

‘Not at all.'

He smiled back at her gratefully, charmingly, knowing that practically any other girl – certainly Linnet – would have expected him to dance attendance for the rest of the day. And if Gemma had wanted that then he would have done it, and with a good heart too, for although he knew himself to be a fortune-hunter and would cheerfully admit as much to any of his college friends or hunting friends – since what else was a fellow to do when the family coffers were empty, if he wasn't precisely a genius and wanted to keep up his standards? – he believed, nevertheless, that one had to be as decent as one could about it. After all, the girl – any girl – was entitled to a proper return on her money. And whatever Gemma wanted from him – and he wasn't fool enough to think it was due entirely to his good looks – then she must have it. He was a gentleman and a sportsman after all, and there was such a thing as fair play.

‘Do hurry, Tristan. Our blacksmith is a mighty man and hates to be kept waiting.'

He gave her another quite dazzling smile and left, whistling merrily enough to convince anyone who happened to meet him that he was a young man in love. Although Gemma herself had been grateful to him, half an hour before, when she had accepted his proposal, for not forcing upon her a display of emotion she knew he did not feel.

Not a few of Frizingley's young ladies would envy her. Her mother was still blissfully, volubly, in her seventh heaven. Her father, when he returned from the mill, would talk terms and settlements and, before giving his formal consent, would feel obliged to bring up the subject of Tristan's career, making it plain that a secretarial position with an obscure MP could not impress him. But Gemma knew that when all was settled to his liking about her trust fund and the allowances he proposed to make her as a married woman, she would soon persuade him to buy her mother the country home she wanted, and give this house to her.

Certainly he would never wish to dispose of it in any other fashion, for the purchase of this strange, dark house with its low ceilings and tiny mullioned windowpanes, the ancient seat of the Goldsborough family, lords of the manor of Frizingley for long generations, had been one of the crowning glories of his career. And he had never lost the deep glow of satisfaction afforded him on the day that he, John-William Dallam of no pedigree-whatsoever and precious little education, had brought his wife to be mistress of the Golds-boroughs' by then long-empty home at Frizingley Hall.

Not that she had ever liked it much, or so she now imagined, the history and nobility which so appealed to her husband – and to Gemma – being no compensation in Amabel's eyes, for the proximity of Frizingley itself. For the house, once set apart from the town on a slope of woodland and green meadows had been an early victim to industrial expansion, the Goldsboroughs not realizing perhaps, or not caring, when iron ore was discovered on their land, that the sale of the mineral rights to the first Mr Colclough entitled him to build a foundry which in turn, required workers who, in
their
turn, required row upon mean little row of cottages to live in, mean little shops in which to spend their wages, ale-houses in such quantity – since men who work all day with hot iron are famous for their thirst – that the first Mr Lord had come along to open his brewery, with more cottages, more clatter, more carts creaking up and down the hill, more heavy horses. More urchins collecting the manure for sale and paddling in the sewage channels. More mongrel dogs. More fleas. So that the Goldsboroughs, appalled at the desecration of their fields, the felling of their trees, the invasion of their lordly privacy, and having lost what little remained of their money by then in any case, had sold all they had left to sell – the manor – to Mr John-William Dallam, of Dallam's mill.

The Goldsboroughs had dispersed, married money where they could, taken refuge in the army, gone off to manage sugar plantations and tea plantations in hot Colonial places; in some cases – one heard – had gone to jail. And now all that was left of them was the faintly sinister, probably disreputable
Captain
Goldsborough – a claim fully substantiated by his sun-dried military look – who, turning up some years ago from nowhere he seemed much inclined to mention, had taken possession of the derelict city properties still attached to the Goldsborough inheritance, establishing himself at the Fleece. A gentleman by education, no one ever doubted, although he had made Amabel very nervous on the two or three times she had met him, entirely dispelling her first romantic notion that, as the last of the Goldsboroughs, he would make a fitting husband for Gemma.

‘
Not
a marrying man,' John-William had said and she dated her dislike of the manor from the time of Captain Goldsborough's arrival, mainly because she had to date it from somewhere, although, in fact, she had been unhappy with these heavy beams and creaking floorboards ever since the Braithwaites had built their imitation Gothic castle, and the Colcloughs and the Lords had moved to high, spacious houses with wrought-iron balconies and a great deal of ornamental stonework a mile or so out of town.

And then, of course, she had become acquainted with the Larks of rural ‘Queen Anne'Moorby Hall.

But Gemma, intimidated neither by Captain Goldsborough in the flesh nor the portraits of his ancestors still hanging in the upstairs gallery, had always loved these dim, quiet rooms, cool and serene with age and full of unexpected light and shadow, the garden, rich with ancient trees and crumbling stone pathways, thickly enclosed by an ivy-clad wall, as hushed as a cloister on one side, a raucous city street on the other whose teeming life was a source of stimulation rather than offence to her.

She loved it. As a married woman she could – with a little contriving – live here as its mistress, ordering her life according to her own judgement. Yes. There seemed no doubt that if she handled matters correctly her life as a fully adult woman could now –
at last
begin.

‘Petticoats,' she heard her mother say. ‘And chemises. At least four dozen of each, wouldn't you think? Oh dear. I wonder how Miss Baker will ever cope with it? What with the bridesmaids' dresses and the evening gowns, and something decent to go-away in. And then all our guests will be ordering new things for themselves, I dare say. Such a heap of work for the poor woman – Easter bonnet time and Christmas rolled into one. I shall have nightmares, I do assure you, in case she lets me down.'

‘There are plenty of other milliners,' murmured Linnet. ‘Manchester, perhaps? Or London?'

Yes. Why not a trip to London for the trousseau? Linnet, with an eye to a trousseau of her own, would enjoy that and would certainly benefit, in the silk mercers'shops, from the overflow of Amabel's generous heart. But Gemma, her mind on her own well-charted future, feeling that she was more than half way to taking the reins into her own hands, suddenly remembered the Irish girl, still waiting, she supposed, with her heavy bag and her bravely painted hat-box, her sparkling chatter of French and Venetian lace, the failing eyesight of her rival Miss Baker, and her own triumphs in the fabled rue Saint Honoré.

‘Oh mother – by the way,' she said, speaking briskly so that Linnet might hear her authority. ‘A young woman has called to see me – quite a talented dressmaker, I'd say, by the things she showed me. She's waiting in the back parlour. And since we're talking of petticoats, I'll just fetch her.'

And hurrying along the passage – not quite the mistress of the house as yet but, there again, no longer
quite
its unmarried, dependent daughter – she opened the parlour door and said pleasantly ‘Miss Adeane, I have just become engaged to be married. You may congratulate me.'

‘That I do, Miss Dallam.'

At once Cara's eyes were swiftly, expertly measuring her, clothing her in bridal brocades and satins, a going-away dress for a winter honeymoon, feathered bonnets, embroidered, lace-topped gloves.

‘You'll be needing a trousseau then? A big one?'

‘I do believe so. Would you come into the drawing-room to discuss your part of it?'

Cara's smile, banishing all traces of exhaustion, was dazzling. ‘With pleasure,
madam
.' And to her surprise, the smile with which plain, sturdy, serious Miss Dallam answered her held a hint of mischief, the unremarkable brown eyes a most becoming twinkle.

‘Good. But I wouldn't mention your Madame Récamier. It may cause confusion. And as to the lace you showed me earlier, my mother won't know the difference between Chantilly and Point de Venise. But my fiancé's sister is there, and one has the distinct feeling that she will.'

Linnet Gage did not take kindly to Gemma's ‘Protégée'as she at once chose to call her, although her objections were no more than soft-voiced little hints as to the unreliability of strangers, addressed carefully to Amabel. ‘One can't help wondering where girls like that come from. Or, indeed, just
where
they go.'

And had Amabel been slightly less enchanted by her new status as the mother of a bride she would have heard, drifting on the cool air behind Linnet's voice, the suggestion of squalid city tenements, immodesty, strong drink and – above all – the dread, ever present in Amabel, of disease conveyed in the hem of a dress, the sole of a shoe, the point of an embroidery needle as it pressed typhoid or cholera or the pox into the lace insertions of her only daughter's wedding lingerie; the four dozen petticoats, nightgowns, chemises and ‘everything' – Amabel knowing no word she cared for to describe that
other
undergarment – she had ordered as a trial from a girl Linnet had instinctively mistrusted because she was beautiful and because Gemma, rather than Linnet herself, had recommended her.

But, leaving the cloistered manor garden and hurrying back through the rows of brewery houses and foundry houses to the street called St Jude's, her carpet-bag and her hat-box feeling light with triumph in her hands, Cara remained untroubled by Miss Linnet Gage's hostility. She had sensed it, certainly, for it was her business to be aware of such things, forewarned and then forearmed, always careful, always guarding her back, which had been aching rather more than she liked these last few days. Nor did she underestimate the influence a penniless, clever woman like Linnet might come to have in a rich household, particularly over a woman such as Mrs Dallam who could surely be influenced by anybody. But, miraculously and for reasons she had no time to question, Miss Gemma Dallam, the young bride soon to be a young matron with her own household staff to clothe, her own money to spend, had taken a fancy to her. And what mattered was that after these three weary months of finding nothing but a bonnet here and there to be cheaply remodelled, an old evening gown to be laboriously unpicked and made over in the latest fashion, she was going home with some real work to do.

Not by her own hands alone, of course. In fact, thinking of the quality of the needlework which would be required to impress Mrs Dallam and pass the scrutiny of Miss Linnet Gage, perhaps not by her hands at all. But by Odette's, her mother's; a far finer craftswoman than Cara herself ever hoped to be. Although she had taken good care at the Dallams', not to mention that.

For if Odette had grown stronger –
looked
stronger, at any rate – since the night of Cara's arrival in Frizingley, she was still far too quiet, too reticent, too ‘dreamy'to make the right impression of flair and self-assurance on a customer.

Cara had found her mother soon after leaving Daniel that night in a state very much as she had expected, grieving inwardly and hopelessly, without tears, as Cara had seen the widow-woman grieving in Liverpool, sitting down on the ground to wait, with blank despair, to be comforted or condemned, to be locked up in official custody or left at liberty to starve; not much caring about either.

So too had been the face of Odette Adeane: beyond anxiety, quite ready to place her patient neck into the noose with dignity – the only coin she had left – and even a certain measure of relief, until Cara had hugged her and shaken her, reminded her of Liam, of how her grandson – and her daughter – loved her and needed her.

‘Mother, I love you.
Maman, je t'aime. J'ai besoin de toi.
So does Liam.'

Smiling wanly Odette had acknowledged her daughter's words to be true. And even then she had been reluctant to push aside the veil of damp air in which she seemed to have been moving since her husband's departure, a veil so heavy that although its dragging pressure had wearied her and slowed her down, it had also prevented her – as she stood very quiet and cold on its other side – from seeing anything too clearly, from feeling anything too sharp.

‘He has gone such a long way, Cara – this time.'

‘Yes, mother.' And Cara's hot words of blame and accusation had faded on her tongue, not worth the dissipation of her energy. He would not come back. Her mother knew that. Nor, while he remained dependent on his sister, would he be likely to send for her. She knew that too. And if Miss Teresa Adeane of New York made life sufficiently agreeable then he might, in his middle years entirely lose his appetite for chasing rainbows. In which case – as his daughter at least could grimly acknowledge – he would put those shimmering colours out of his mind altogether. And forget.

He would make a new life for himself without them.

So must they.

‘He was tired,' Odette had whispered. ‘And he was afraid.'

‘I'm not afraid, mother.'

But, as they had stood close together in the gathering twilight of an alien city, her courage had been a lie. It often was.

She
had
been afraid. Only a fool, she thought, would have been otherwise.