A Song Twice Over (18 page)

Yet, nevertheless, to his surprise, he said ‘I have no family. My father died in prison of a fever, when I was five. My mother was killed by a stray bullet during a food riot, six years later.'

How would she take it? He braced himself for the gasp of horror, the gush of consolation, already inwardly wincing. But when she turned to look at him her face was composed and compassionate, offering him no more sympathy than he could tolerate.

‘I'm sorry. I think – perhaps – you don't often talk about it, do you?'

How had she known that?

‘No. People don't like tragedy. It makes them feel awkward.'

‘Yes, of course. One feels so sorry without knowing how to express it. And the questions one would like to ask …'

‘Ask me the first thing in your head. Come now – the very first.'

‘Why was your father in prison?'

‘That's easy. He didn't like the land policy in Ireland. Do you know what it is?'

‘Not really.'

Ben Braithwaite or Uriah Colclough would have looked wise, looked
down
, and murmured ‘No need to bother your pretty little head over it.' John-William Dallam would have grunted, or thundered, according to his humour, a warning that it was no fit topic for a lady. Tristan may not have understood the ins and outs of it himself and would not have cared in any case. But Daniel Carey, easily, courteously, began at once to inform her, finding it perfectly natural, she thought, to speak to a woman as if she were a man.

‘Our land policy is based on the supreme power of the landlord and the total helplessness of the tenant. Evictions at will. No security of tenure, you see. No lease. So when the landlord wants his land back he takes it. He also takes, without compensation, any and all improvements the tenant may have made. And since, more often than not, there was nothing on the land but green grass when he took it, that means everything – the cabin he built for himself to live in, the shed for his livestock. Everything. So, you see, the Irish peasant who relies entirely on his plot of land to grow his potatoes to feed his family, has no guarantee of staying on that plot for so much as a full year. I suppose it doesn't help, either, that most of the landlords happen to be English. But – whatever the ramifications of that – the tenant lives in the kind of insecurity that doesn't encourage him to be thrifty. Nor too loyal either, since he may never have set eyes on the man who actually owns his farm. Just a stranger from over the water who wants nothing from his Irish estates but his rent money and employs an agent – who naturally wants
his
percentage – to get it. No tolerance, therefore, no leeway if the harvest is bad. Just the rent money – or out. Unless the plot is wanted for the landlord's whim or fancy, or just for somebody who can pay a little more. In which case he's out anyway.

‘And since the landlords have calculated that they can squeeze more profit per acre if they divide the estates up into dozens, or hundreds, of tiny holdings, then no single tenant ever has enough land to do more than live – pretty meagrely – from one harvest to the next. Everything he grows he eats or sells for rent money. No chance of ever putting anything aside for a rainy day. That's why a man who loses his land can be reduced – very quickly and easily – to digging himself a squat-hole in a ditch. That's why we come over here in our thousands and make ourselves unpopular working for what you call Irish wages. Often enough it's either that or dying of hunger in the ditches. Many do. My father saw the injustice and said so. He was a lawyer and so he knew how to be very eloquent about it and annoyed a lot of people. Landlords mainly. I don't know what were the exact charges against him but
that
was the reason. And our family had a bad reputation in any case. My grandfather was involved in the rising of 1798. They hanged him on Ballina bridge.'

She was, of course, appalled. It was the most shocking thing that she had ever heard. Yet this, after all, was a
real
conversation and, from the safe distance of her mother's drawing-room, she had always known reality to be shocking.

She rallied.

‘1798? That was forty-two years ago. You can't have known him.'

‘Certainly not. I'm twenty-three.'

‘I'm twenty-two.'

No lady
ever
revealed her age. No gentleman would ever dream of enquiring. It was ‘not done', could not
be
done without causing serious embarrassment and offence. Yet how easily and naturally they had just broken one of Society's strictest taboos. With no ominous rumblings of protest in the firmament, no indication whatsoever that the sky was about to turn faint with the shock, and fall.

‘I know little of Ireland,' she said. ‘Only what the English know.'

‘Which is?'

She smiled at him, her quiet eyes suddenly aglow, for she knew, in fact, rather more about the male preserve of politics than she ought to know, more, indeed, than she had realized herself until it came flowing into her instantly alert and excited head. Would he listen to her? Would he
hear
?

‘Oh,' she said, ‘that whenever invasion has threatened us you have invited our enemies into your country so that they could attack us through our back door. As you did with the Spanish Armada in the days of Good Queen Bess.'

He smiled too. ‘So we did. We felt closer, you see, to the Catholic king of Spain than to your Protestant Elizabeth.'

‘I do see.' He
had
heard her. And now she heard her own voice going smoothly on, speaking rational words as easily as one who is permitted to be rational every day of her life. Easily and naturally and with a joy that might have risen to her head had it not been set so firmly on her shoulders. He – an educated man – was taking her seriously. And the greatest miracle of all was that it began to seem right and proper to her that he should.

‘But was it fair, Mr Carey, to let the Spanish Inquisition loose on us – as you tried to do – and have us burned at the stake as heretics?'

‘Oh – fair enough, I think, since your Good Queen Bess was not very good to
us
, you know – sending her pikemen to take our land and then giving it away as birthday presents, or whatever, to her court favourites – because we wouldn't join her in the Protestant Fold.'

‘Well –' and she was gravely, humorously considering, ‘perhaps it was too much to ask that you should join us, but you could hardly expect
us
to stand tamely by while you helped the Spanish Jesuits to conquer
our
country.'

‘And you didn't, did you?' His eyes were teasing yet as tolerant as her own. ‘You made a conquered nation out of us instead. Elizabeth brought us to our knees and then, at stated intervals, your Oliver Cromwell and your William of Orange finished us off.'

‘Did they?' But they were both aware that she already knew the answer. Daniel without any particular surprise, Gemma with jubilation.

‘Oh yes – in true Puritan fashion. No Catholic allowed to vote or sit in the Irish parliament or hold any other kind of office either in government or in the army or navy. No Catholic allowed to buy land. No Catholic father allowed to leave his estate to his eldest son unless that son became a Protestant. Otherwise the land to be divided up among all the children so that soon no Catholic owned any sizeable piece of land at all.'

‘I suppose
that
happened because when we threw out our Stuart kings you raised an army to support them, intending to overthrow William of Orange, the new king we had just chosen to govern us.'

‘Yes.
Protestant
William of Orange.'

Cheerfully, she was quite ready for him. ‘Yes. And the
Catholic
Stuarts who had every intention of forcing their Catholicism on us, a Protestant country.'

Serenely, he nodded. ‘So they had.'

‘And in 1798, when England was in grave danger from the armies of Revolutionary France, you let the French into Ireland, to stab us in the back again.'

He nodded. They both smiled.

‘We are a conquered nation, Miss Dallam. You allow us nowhere but the back to aim for. We are not even a nation at all since the legal Act of Union between your country and mine in 1801. Some said the loss of our national identity would be compensated for by a share of English trade. What happened was that England has used us as a dumping ground for surplus English goods. Some said that the loss of our own parliament would give us a greater voice in yours. I have yet to hear it. Mainly it was said that the Union would bring the discrimination against Catholics to an end. But your statesman Robert Peel got himself into very hot water, only eleven years ago, when he allowed Catholics to become MPs.'

She thought for a moment, deeply, seriously, with a greater awareness of herself as she actually was, as she
wished
to be, than ever before in her life.

‘How very sad. It seems that whatever is good for my country has always been bad for yours. And that in order to defend ourselves we have always been obliged to wound one another. How dreadful.'

‘So it is.'

‘Are you a Catholic, Mr Carey?'

That too was something one did not ask.
Ever
.

‘Yes. But I think I am also a little of everything else. Are you a Protestant?'

‘Yes. It suits me – which is not to say that it must suit everybody.'

‘What enlightened people we are, Miss Dallam. What a pity we are just two, and not a multitude.'

Enlightened? She hoped so. She had grown accustomed to thinking of her views as inconvenient, to be concealed both from her father who would feel it his duty to put a stop to them, and from her mother who would worry that she might be considered odd. Enlightenment was quite another matter.

‘And what do you plan to do with your life, Miss Dallam?'

He knew, as he spoke, that it was a foolish question, when he was well aware of how carefully her life must have been mapped out for her by others. What choice
could
she have?

‘I am to be married in December,' she told him quietly.

Of course. Girls like this were born to be married. What other alternative existed except the sorry captivity of middle-class spinsterhood which seemed unlikely in her case.

‘I wish you very happy.'

He meant it. Graciously, she inclined her head.

‘What do you plan to do, Mr Carey?'

Suddenly, for Daniel, the world seemed very wide, the wind, from that vast, pale, October sky, very fresh.

‘Oh – I may go to France. In a day or two. Or even Italy.'

Anywhere. Smiling, he filled his lungs with the clean, cold air, rejoicing in his own blessed if often far from luxurious liberty, neither his exaltation nor the shabbiness of his coat escaping the notice of Tristan Gage as he hurried along the path to retrieve his fiancée. Good Lord, Linnet was right, as usual. The ‘undesirables' were massing already. Not that Tristan blamed any man for having a damned good try at any and every opportunity as and when it offered. By no means. And this fellow talking to Gemma now, despite the poor quality of his coat, had a fair measure of cut and dash about him. In other circumstances Tristan would have been the first to wish him good luck. And even now he saw no point in delivering what would amount to ‘Sorry, old chap, she's spoken for,' other than in a perfectly pleasant manner.

But he'd have to make himself clearly understood, just the same, since he couldn't help but notice, as he waved and called out and came striding up to join them, that Gemma was not wholly pleased at his interruption.

Who
was
the fellow? Thank God for Linnet.

‘Oh Tristan …' and although not priding himself on his sensitivity he knew her welcome to be a shade or two less warm than she was pretending, ‘This is Mr Daniel Carey – the gentleman who helped me with father yesterday. Mr Carey, this is Mr Tristan Gage, my fiancé.'

The Irish knight-errant. Of course. Come to improve on the excellent impression Fate had helped him to make on the moor yesterday. Tristan, who would have done exactly the same, was extremely affable, exceedingly proprietorial, in his thanks.

‘Lucky you were nearby, old chap. Can't thank you enough for looking after them.'

‘Think nothing of it.'

So this was the fiancé. Handsome.
Very
handsome, in fact. A real gold-and-ivory drawing-room Adonis with a shallow smile and amethyst eyes which judged all men by their bank-balances and all women by their dowries. This plain, sturdy little cob of a girl was worth a dozen of him.

Did she know it? Struck by the conviction that she knew it very well he felt himself suddenly awash with remorse and pity. She knew it and therefore it followed that this was the best she could do. She had made up her mind that with
this
she would have to be content, for what amounted to the rest of her precious, unrepeatable life.

And if such a girl, with all her rich and powerful relations, had to settle for this mediocre destiny, then what would happen to Cara, who had no one to protect her? How long could she go on alone? With the taste of what he recognized as poison on his tongue, he acknowledged that it could not be long. What further exploitation awaited her? What old or what powerful man, crouched somewhere nearby like a spider in his web biding his time and knowing it would come? Dear God, it was hard enough sometimes to be a man. But to be a woman. Could there be a more pitiful fate than that?

He shuddered.

‘Are you cold, Mr Carey?'

At once she was solicitous, still open and friendly yet already retreating through that drawing-room wall.

‘I believe I am. I must be on my way now, Miss Dallam.'

‘Yes. Of course.'

The amethyst cat still lay in the palm of her hand and although she longed to give it to him as a keepsake, a token, she knew better – with Tristan looking on – than to make the attempt. And he would forget her in any case. She knew that. Just as clearly as she knew that she would always remember him. How foolish. And how very unlike her when she had no trouble at all in forgetting the faces of Braithwaites and Colcloughs and Larks the moment they were out of sight.