A Song Twice Over (16 page)

Daniel, from his perch just beyond their view, watched them idly because there was nothing else to look at, feeling no great stirring of interest in this prosperous Frizingley couple out for their moorland constitutional, the young lady for the good of her figure and her complexion, he supposed, the old man for his health, to balance the effects of his four square meals a day, no doubt, his vintage port and brandy; although limping a little, Daniel noticed, as if the gout were troubling him.

A large man, heavy by any standards, particularly those of Daniel Carey who had pared his own whipcord body down to the hard muscle and bone. A clumsy man, too, stumbling over the tiny, scattered stones, straying off the path into the tufted, spiky grasses and blundering there a moment in city-soft confusion, calling out to his daughter who had ploughed solidly ahead. Clumsy: until Daniel saw the agonized line of the bent back, the hand clutching the chest, the horror on the girl's face as she turned and ran back to him.

And although he felt no particular inclination to help them, although he was bitter with his own pain and had no pity to spare, or to
waste
on such as these, he made a grimace of annoyance – Lord, this was
all
he needed – and then, with a wry smile, a shrug, slid down from the rock and easily, swiftly, descended the slope towards them.

Bending over her father as he crouched, groaning and sweating on the damp ground, Gemma Dallam, who prayed only at the conventional hours of Sunday morning service and Evensong, could think of nothing to do but close her eyes in a request for Divine Assistance. For although she had been brought up to believe that all women were born with an inbred ability to nurse the sick she had never believed it, having had occasion to wince, herself, many a time, at the ministrations of so many medical amateurs. Therefore, being convinced that good intentions alone could never be enough, she prayed ‘Please help me to do the right thing.' And when she opened her eyes the young man was there, straight and direct as an arrow, asking her cheerfully ‘Is the gentleman not feeling well?'

‘No. Oh please – can you …?'

‘That I can.' She didn't know what she was asking but he, very evidently, had handled sick and heavy men before. Easily. Without panic. Without much effort either although he was neither tall nor broad nor obviously strong.

‘Here, let me be taking him. There's no sense in trying to hold him up, the weight he is. He'll be better on the ground. That way there's nowhere else for him to fall. And if that's a muff you have there, then it might go well behind his head.'

John-William Dallam's half-conscious, desperately struggling body – because
he
wasn't ready to die yet. And not here, God dammit – was large and unwieldy yet the young man laid him neatly on the ground, undid the starched linen at his neck and his waistcoat buttons, arranged him so that he looked almost to be resting rather than agonizing. If one could imagine John-William Dallam taking his ease on the bare ground. Help had come: although it made no real difference to the pinched, blue look around her father's lips, the sinking of those high-coloured, well-fleshed cheeks of his into mottled hollows, the grunting and labouring of his breath.

‘Thank you so much.' She was thinking a little more clearly now, her panic subsiding, but not entirely. For if her father was dying, as he might well be, then she was about to lose not simply a parent but the person upon whom her cloistered world totally depended. The architect and foundation stone of that world. And her mother's. A loving tyrant perhaps. But that potent blend of love and tyranny had, since her birth, built padded walls of warmth and certainty around her a mile thick. And the shock of their removal, she realized, would leave her – despite the independence of her spirit – feeling exposed and bewildered and cold.

‘We left our carriage about a mile down the road. Could we – is it possible to get him there?'

He got to his feet, smiling. ‘If I were Hercules, miss, then it might be. But since I can't carry him on my shoulder, why don't you sit yourself down with him and be keeping him company while I fetch your coach and horses?'

He set off, not running but walking fast, almost jauntily she thought; a mile of stony track to the place where they had left Williams with the victoria and then a mile back in the carriage. How long could it take him? How much time did they really have? She sat down to wait in the tufted grass, making the kind of foolish, female noises one made to frightened children – ‘It's going to be all right, father. There's no need to worry.' – to which he irritably responded by closing his eyes, having regained enough consciousness now to understand that he had no strength to waste in arguing with his daughter. No. He must keep very still now and very quiet, carefully guarding what vital forces he had left for the grim business of keeping his soul – to which he'd never before given much consideration – and his body in the same place, where they belonged.

In Frizingley he was a man of power, a master of other men, of machines, and a great deal of money. Here, on this sparsely covered moorland hillside with the rain coming on, he was just an old man with a pain in his chest and a dizziness in his head, who might die here with no more consideration than a tramp without a penny in his pocket.

Very well. He accepted that. But if death wanted him, then there'd be a struggle. No doubt about it. And if it turned out that he had to meet his end here, alone with the girl, then all he hoped was that the shock of it wouldn't addle her brain and turn her silly. A sensible lass, Gemma, as lasses went. But one never knew with women. His wife Amabel, for instance, would have run amok by now, screaming and carrying on and very likely twisting her ankle on a stone or falling over one of these ledges and breaking her neck. Sweet, helpless Amabel. How he loved those qualities in her. Amabel, his luxury. His indulgence. What joy she'd given him. And what a gracious pampered, privileged life he'd given
her
. Amabel, as young at heart now as on the day he'd married her.
Twenty
years younger than he was, dammit. One day – if not today – she'd have to learn to live without him. Could she do it? Groaning, squeezing his eyes tight shut, he knew she couldn't.

‘It won't be long now, father,' said Gemma, just to remind him that something was being done, that she was there. ‘The young man seemed pleased to help. He could be Irish, I think.'

Inwardly John-William Dallam groaned again and bit his lip Irish? Whatever was the girl prattling on about? Of course he was Irish. He'd heard
that
turn of speech often enough in loom gates and navvy camps and road gangs – even in the discreet arms of a certain bold and black-eyed woman before Amabel – to recognize the hint of it on a man's tongue. He knew the Irish all right. He'd even imported whole families of them, piecemeal, from Mayo and Donegal, in his younger days, when he'd needed the kind of muscle to get his factory started that one didn't find too often in local men bred to the weaver's trade. He'd just written to the parish priest of some unpronounceable village and placed his order. Simple as that. Four families. Ten families. Passage paid. And even then it had worked out cheaper, paying ‘Irish wages'. Although they'd been scoundrels, every one. Like that handsome young devil who'd just gone off striding down the track – fit as an overstrung fiddle, damn him – and who most likely wouldn't bother to come back. Why should he? Particularly since the girl had forgotten to mention that she'd make it worth his while. No. He'd just go merrily on his way, whistling his damnable Irish jig, feeling young,
being
young, with all his life before him. Damn him to hell.

A lad in his twenties. Acutely, with an agony far more piercing than the pain in his heart, John-William Dallam could remember another lad like that, striding out into his future. Taking it by the scruff of its neck and squeezing out of it his ambitions, his dreams, his pleasures. No longer. And feeling the incredible spurting of tears – since when had
he
ever cried before – he turned his head away and concealed it, as best he could in the collar of his coat, thinking it unseemly that any woman, especially his daughter, should see him cry.

‘Yes. I expect he's Irish. Although he didn't look like a workman. Rather shabby, but well-spoken, I thought and polite. He didn't sound like a navvy.'

There she was, running on again. Talking and saying nothing. Like her mother. And how the devil did she know what a navvy sounded like when he'd taken good care never to let one get within a yard of her? Good God, what did she know about anything? Not much, he supposed. Which was perfectly right and proper so long as he was there to know it for her. She was a good girl. He loved her, dammit. If she'd been a boy he'd have been proud of her. But she wasn't a boy. And what he regretted now, with all that remained of his heart and the taste of ashes on his tongue, was his own softness in not forcing her to marry Ben Braithwaite when he'd had the chance. Not that he was particularly fond of young Ben –
old
Ben's eldest lad – who had a queer temper sometimes and a mean streak like his father. But he had a good, hard head on his shoulders, knew how to keep his house in order and how to look after his women. Like John-William Dallam. And now, because he'd been fool enough to think himself immortal, it looked as if he might be leaving Gemma, and Amabel, and the mill, to Tristan Gage who had no real harm in him but was a silly, posing fellow just the same, all very well in a lady's drawing-room making Amabel laugh, and looking very good on horseback or in evening-dress, which, John-William supposed, must have attracted Gemma. (Just like a woman.) But not much good for anything else.

Well, thank God he'd found a good mill manager who could blind the likes of Tristan Gage with science any day of the week
and
tied up ample funds for Gemma in such a way that unless she took to wild speculation, which seemed unlikely, she'd never run out of money.

Not so Amabel.

And abruptly realizing what had always lurked in his mind as an obscure dread, that Amabel, if he died, would have her butterfly hands on large sums of money for the first time in her life, a despairing panic seized him. Somebody would have to look after Amabel. Somebody would have to steer her away from all the beguiling vultures in doves' and peacocks' clothing who would come flocking around her the moment he was gone. Ben Braithwaite, of course, being part vulture himself, would have done the job to perfection. Not Tristan. Did Gemma have it in her? Suddenly he believed so. And if he survived he'd show her the way to do it, re-arrange his affairs a little to give her the means.

‘Not long now, father.'

There she went again, telling him comforting lies as if he'd been a child – like he'd always treated her – when she must know as well as he did that even if young Master Paddy O'Riley or whatever his name might be managed to deliver her message to the coachman that they'd never get that finely-sprung, over-priced victoria – Amabel's favourite carriage – down this steep and narrow track. At best they'd have to leave it on the strip of flat land just below and carry him down the slope like a sack of flour. Well, they'd need Irish muscle for that since Williams, the coachman, a handloom weaver in his youth, had the bandy legs and narrow shoulders associated with the cramped, airless conditions of the textile trade.

The girl must have understood that.

She had. But her instinct still told her not only to keep him company but to keep him calm. Nor did she doubt for a moment that the young Irishman would return.

‘It won't be long.'

It seemed an eternity, her father hunched in his silent agony, the sharp moorland air growing cold and damp, unless it was the grief and fear which chilled her. But she remained as outwardly composed as if he had done no more than turn his ankle. And when the carriage came she had already measured the slope of the land, the ungainly, angry bulk of her father.

So had Daniel Carey. And, having once had a coachman of his own, no matter how long ago, he stood on no ceremony with Williams.

‘Here – take his feet. I'll take his shoulders. Then you go first – and go steady. You'll have to hold the horses, miss.'

She slid down through the rough grasses, feeling clumsy and inadequate, and held the restive animals steady, her head averted while the two men laboured to get her father to the carriage, Williams doing his share of grunting and groaning, the Irishman seeming scarcely out of breath.

They lifted him inside, wrapped a rug around him.

‘There we are. miss. You can go away home, now.'

Will you ride with us to Frizingley?'

Was she offering him a lift to town or begging the further security of his company? She hardly knew. But, still smiling, still cheerfully serene, as if to run a mile over stony ground and pick up a sixteen-stone man at the end of it was a mere trifle to him, he shook his head.

‘You'll be all right now. Put him straight to bed and call the doctor. You'll know what to do.'

‘Yes, of course. Thank you.'

Was there no more to be said? She couldn't believe it. Yet, unless
she
detained him she was in no doubt that he would simply disappear over the ridge whence he had come, whistling and smiling, and she would never even know his name. Not that it mattered, of course. But he
had
been kind.

‘I am Miss Dallam of Frizingley Hall.' Lord – how pretentious that sounded, how very much the lady of the manor being gracious to her social inferiors. She had never meant that.

‘Good day to you, then, Miss Dallam of Frizingley Hall.'

And realizing that he had deliberately increased the Irishness of his voice, she blushed.

‘What I mean … I am so very grateful to you. If you would like to call – later on – to enquire as to my father's progress – then – then please do so.' Floundering, coming lamely to a halt, she knew she had turned crimson now with her embarrassment. What on earth, she wondered, was making her so inept? And exactly what was she saying? Come to the kitchen door, my good man, to collect a guinea for your trouble? Good Heavens. Most certainly she did not mean that.