A Song Twice Over (32 page)

Could Daniel Carey do the same in Frizingley? Better even? Could he ruffle the smugness of manufacturing Whigs and land-owning Tories alike by reminding them of what hands such as these had done in France? Of the Liberty and Equality too long denied which had been so bloodily taken? Very likely he could. And so they had sent him North, not to win, of course, perhaps not even to poll a single vote, but to lay the Charter once again before the people, to let them know what
could
be done in a land where every man had his vote and the freedom to use it without intimidation, as he and he alone thought best.

To Daniel it was a battle worth fighting, an opportunity to be of service which he had long desired. And if he would have preferred it not to be Frizingley, to be, in fact, anywhere else but there, he managed to quell his initial misgivings by the grim reminder that he would be unlikely to know anyone in St Jude's now. No one at all. Two years had passed. A long time by any standards. Longer than ever by his – and hers.

She would not be there.

And even if he did find her what more had he to offer her than before?
What
, indeed, might he discover except ills that he still could not remedy, and wounds – both hers and his – that still could not be healed?

Better then – far better – not to look. Safer to close his eyes and his mind to her and give his entire concentration to the matter in hand; a resolution to which he firmly held, even when, after a tumultuous welcome at Brighouse – the nearest railway station to Frizingley – he was escorted, with an appropriate accompaniment of banners and Chartist hymns, to a lodging-house at the top of St Jude's street where the landlady, Mrs Sairellen Thackray, had offered to accommodate him free of charge.

He had expected to stay at the Dog and Gun, a tavern well known for its radical associations, where unstamped, illegal newspapers had always been laid out openly on the bar-counter for the perusal of anyone so inclined. But, when certain pressures had been brought to bear upon the landlord – Daniel had not been told why or from where – the redoubtable Mrs Thackray had come forward at once to make her contribution to the cause.

A good woman, someone had explained to him on the road from Brighouse, the widow of Radical Jack Thackray, something of a local hero, who had been cut down by a sabre at St Peter's Fields in Manchester, asking for rather less in the way of electoral reform than Daniel himself was demanding now. A woman who was afraid of nothing and who would feed him, starch his linen, give him peace and quiet in which to compose his speeches, until the campaign should be over. And it was not until Mrs Thackray's tall, craggy fair-haired son had shouldered his luggage and led him to the top of St Jude's Street that he had realized his peril.

Yet – just the same – she would not be there. And he had not come here as a lover, in any case. He had embarked on a serious and very likely dangerous undertaking which, until its conclusion, must precede anything and everything in his life. He was the Chartist Candidate for Frizingley. That was what he meant to Mrs Sairellen Thackray as she served him the first of her good dinners of boiled beef and potatoes and onions towards which the town's Chartists had all made their contributions. That was what he meant to Luke Thackray, her son, who was to sleep in the kitchen so that the ‘candidate'might have the privacy of his tiny but spotless room. And so it was as the ‘candidate'that he spoke to them, his accent so neutral by now that he could have come from anywhere and everywhere, his green broadcloth jacket still shabby but worn as jauntily as if it had been lined with ermine, his lean, dark face handsome enough to please the women and hard enough to reassure the men.

Young, of course. Or so he seemed to Sairellen Thackray who preferred her leaders to have the mature dignity of a Richard Oastler, whom she had followed on foot those ninety miles to York and back when they had been campaigning for the ten hour working day. But Richard Oastler was still in his debtor's prison, more than a thousand pounds short of the repayment of his debt, despite the money which Luke and thousands like him kept on collecting, week after week, from their wages. Nor had the ten hour day yet come to pass. And so when Luke had brought home a copy of the People's Charter and read it aloud to her she had listened; considered; believed.

‘If we could all vote, mother, then we'd get our way. And if this candidate they're sending should be more interested in Home Rule for Ireland than our Ten Hours' Bill then what of it? With the Charter we could have both.'

So be it. Although, despite her principles and her ingrained reluctance to compromise, she could not suppress a pang of gratitude even now – as she dished up her broth and herb dumplings for the candidate – that an attack of the low fever, caught as usual from terrible, tormented Mrs Rattrie who, this time, had died of it, had kept Luke in bed during that wild week last summer when the plugs had been drawn from Braithwaite's boiler and all Luke's brave young friends who had got into the habit of gathering to smoke their pipes and set the world to rights of an evening in her hen-run, had gone marching off to join their ‘brothers'from across the Pennines. And thence to Halifax where they had entered the town in their thousands, led by the women, Sairellen had been pleased to hear, walking four and five abreast, empty-handed and bare-headed as she had herself once walked to York, singing the psalm she too had sung on that day.

‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.
Serve the Lord with gladness,
Come before His presence with singing.
We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.'

And like sheep they had eventually been ridden down by soldiers as her husband had been ridden down at Peterloo, the crowd dispersed and then hunted over the open fields like running hares, so that of Luke's companions one had crawled into a hedge with a leg that might have been mangled in a bear-trap and had bled to death there; two or three others had taken refuge in haystacks and barns; two had been arrested and sentenced to hard labour. While those who had gone back to Braithwaite's mill had been picked out of the crowd by wild little Oliver Rattrie, the eldest Rattrie boy – nineteen or twenty she supposed he'd be by now – the twisted, crook-shouldered lad who had done more talking of pikes and pistols and bloody revolution than anybody else at the meetings in her back-yard. A betrayal which had secured their dismissal from Mr Ben Braithwaite himself who had branded them as troublemakers with no hope of employment anywhere in Frizingley again.

Not that it had done Oliver Rattrie any good, since he'd been caught the day after by those same Chartist women who had marched into Halifax singing the One Hundredth Psalm; sheep no longer but howling Furies who had seized him, puny little thing that he was, and thrown him in the canal where, in his struggle to keep himself from drowning, he had lost every last shilling of the blood-money in his pockets. Unless it was true, as he'd alleged, that the women had robbed him before tossing him in the stinking water.

Perhaps they had. With husbands in prison, or disabled, or thrown out of work by Oliver's treachery, who could blame them? But when he had had the effrontery to go whining to the constable, attempting to get back the money for which he had, after all, sold his twisted little soul, no one in St Jude's Street could remember seeing or hearing anything about the accident at all.

Sairellen herself had met the constable on her doorstep and kept him there, her arms folded across her impassive chest, her eyes like chips of granite. Oliver Rattrie? Had he fallen into the canal? Well – and what of it? He'd have been drunk, she supposed. Like his father. In
her
opinion anybody with any sense would let the matter rest there.

There it had rested.

But Sairellen knew all too well that had Luke not been delirious with fever that day he would surely have marched to Halifax; not with a pitchfork or a flail or a home-made pike in his hands, since he had never been a ‘physical force'man but
there
, just the same. A voice for moderation and good order – like many others – but his head as bare as the rest when the bricks started to fly, his body as vulnerable to sabre cuts as his father's, his countenance indistinguishable to those young and possibly nervous soldiers from the real ‘physical force'brigade they were supposed to be looking for, who had raised everybody's temperatures by ambushing and stoning a military escort at Salterhebble.

And if Oliver had betrayed him, as he had betrayed all the others, what would she have been able to do for the Chartist candidate then?

Was it even safe to be helping him now? But she would be a sheep indeed to be ruled only by that.

‘You'll take some treacle tart,' she told Daniel, the set of her pugnacious jaw warning him that she was not asking a question so much as issuing a command.

‘So I will.' He gave her a slanting, quite roguish smile, cleverly designed to appeal to her both as a woman and a mother. A charmer, she thought, although she had long passed the season for such things. And a wanderer, a political vagabond as she would permit no son of hers to become. An Irishman too which was not, in her eyes, the best of recommendations. What would he be likely to know or care of children worked half to death in English factories?

‘You'll be after Home Rule for your own country, I expect,' she said.

‘I'll be after justice and freedom for everybody, Mrs Thackray.'

‘Aye. I reckon you will.' She had heard those words too many times before to be impressed by them. ‘My husband died at Peterloo for that, my lad. Twenty-four years ago.'

Had it really been so long? Sometimes it seemed another lifetime. Sometimes no farther than yesterday. But Luke, she remembered, had been four years old, tall for his age but thin as a stick and pale with excitement, that day, at the journey to Manchester, the speeches, the exalted, psalmsinging atmosphere of the crowds. Was he outgrowing his strength, she'd wondered, as her other children had done, her vague fears of wasting fevers and rickety limbs vanishing to be replaced by incredulous horror as the soldiers on their tall horses had begun to charge. Why had she brought him here? She ought to have known there would be trouble. She
had
known it. There had simply been nowhere to leave him. And Jack, her husband, had had some high-flown notion of dedicating the lad to the cause. In blood, it seemed. ‘Damn you, Jack Thackray,' she'd screamed. ‘Now you've killed us all.' Even now, in the night, she was sometimes startled from sleep by the sound of those words; that scream.

She had thrown Luke to the ground, herself on top of him, and when the yelling and the thudding and the terrible, high-pitched howling of collective terror had been over, when the cavalry had charged through the crowd like a scythe through a cornfield and silence – such a silence – had fallen, she had opened her eyes and seen blood everywhere, in her hair and her hands, all over the stupefied, half-suffocated child. Jack's blood. Jack, who had thrown himself across them both and had died in her arms, an hour later, without speaking a word.

Radical Jack Thackray. Her last words to him had been a curse yet she had felt him at her side on the day she had marched to York with Richard Oastler. It was for him that she had raised Luke to be the man he was. It was for him that now she was entertaining this arrow-straight, dark-eyed young scoundrel who would be likely to repay her by seducing her daughter, she thought, if she still had one, and who would probably forget everything he'd ever heard about hunger in St Jude's, or in County Kildare for that matter, should he ever find himself well-fed in Westminster.

Handsome young rascal with hands that had never lifted anything heavier than a pen by the look of them. She would prefer to put her trust in a plainer, simpler, hard-handed man. Like Luke.

‘You'll like your tea strong.' Once again she had given him an order.

‘I would.'

And then, giving no sign of either self-disgust or self-betrayal, although he was feeling both in full measure, he very casually mentioned. ‘I knew an Irish family once who lived nearby. Just across the street from here, I think – although after so long I may well be mistaken. A mother and daughter and the daughter's little boy?'

He found, to his immense distress, that he could not persuade his tongue to pronounce ‘Adeane', much less the simple, lovely name of ‘Cara'.

Sairellen felt no such restriction.

‘You'll be meaning the Adeanes.' It did not surprise her. She had judged him, all along, as one of their kind.

‘Yes. That was the name. They will have moved on by now – surely …?'

And having asked the question it now occurred to him that with this woman's shrewd, sharp eyes upon him, he may be unable to bear the answer.

‘Aye, you'd think they'd have moved on, wouldn't you? Folks like that. But no. You'd be wrong.'

‘They're here?' He would have given a great deal to have sounded less incredulous.

‘They are. Odette and the bairn still across the street just where they used to be.'

‘And – Miss Adeane?' He still could not trust himself to say ‘Cara'.

‘Come up in the world. Or so the world calls it. She has a shop in Market Square. Miss Cara Adeane. Dressmaker and Milliner. Like she always said she'd be.'

‘Yes,' he said very quietly. ‘I see.'

Clearly, in fact. Beyond all possibility of error. For she could not have risen so far on her own. He
knew
that. It was a condition of life in St Jude's. A condition of life everywhere, to one degree or another, for a woman. And he would just have to learn, and quickly, to be glad of it. To accept that whatever she had done or promised or performed to maintain her position in Market Square then her choice could only have been
that
or the workhouse. Or the brothel. Or to become the pregnant drudge of a working man.