A Song Twice Over (36 page)

She sighed. ‘Sure and you'd better bring her to see me, then.' And this time his grin held a whole-hearted pleasure, a frank spirit of fun which was, in itself, her reward. He had not expected her to let him down. She had not done so. His faith in her had been justified. They smiled at each other now, Cara shaking her head with her final traces of exasperation, Luke not touching her but somehow conveying to her – as he so often did – the impression of a warm handclasp, a strong shoulder.

‘She's here, Cara – waiting in your back-yard.'

‘Yes. I rather thought she might be.'

Cara had made great and scornful play of her inability to distinguish one Rattrie from another but, in fact, she had no more difficulty in recognizing the girl who now came into the room as Anna than she had had in picking out the boy, apparently now employed in some indeterminate capacity around Christie Goldsborough, as her treacherous brother Oliver. Weasels, both of them, although taller than in the days when they had tampered with her water-barrels and annoyed her dog. Pale and thin and
furtive
, Oliver with his treachery, Anna perhaps only with shyness as she stood head bowed, hands folded, before Cara, looking no older than twelve as Luke had said, flat-hipped and flat-chested, her mouse-coloured hair parted in the middle and scraped back by a severe hand Cara recognized as Sairellen's, her skimpy dress – probably older than the girl herself – washed and scrubbed and mangled, also by Sairellen, beyond even the memory of shape or colour.

A drab from a workhouse or a charity-school, anonymous in her poverty and her humility who, having feared Cara in St Jude's, was so truly alarmed by her now in her rustling black taffeta and all her authority that there was nothing to do but conclude the matter briskly, settling everything to Luke's satisfaction and then sending for Odette whose hand, with workhouse-drabs, was lighter than her daughter's.

‘Anna is joining us as an apprentice.' She saw, without surprise, that it was no surprise to Odette. ‘So if you could just take her upstairs and get her started?'

What more did Luke want her to do than that?

‘Oh – and you'd better find her something to wear, mother.'

And
burn
those shapeless, Rattrie rags with that Rattrie odour still clinging to them, she thought. Although – because of Luke – she did not say so.

What else? Nothing, surely. She would feed the girl, teach her to sew, give her a few pennies to spend and a kind word or two whenever she remembered. Poor, sad little drab, scuttling timidly after Odette, more mouse than weasel until, reaching the doorway, she lifted her head for the first time, revealing huge, colourless, terrified eyes brimming over with tears as they shot a glance of naked adoration at Luke.

‘That girl is in love with you,' she accused him as the door closed behind her.

‘I expect she thinks so.' He sounded very composed about it.

‘So – well – just be careful, Luke.'

‘Of what? If I have a reputation for being reckless, particularly with women, then it's news to me.'

Yet suddenly he seemed extremely vulnerable to her, not innocent, perhaps far from that, yet likely to be used, exploited,
hurt
nevertheless – in full knowledge of that exploitation, almost by consent – because of his own refusal to deviate from his personal, simple creed of doing the best he could. A
good
man. She was unaccustomed to the breed, and her desire to give him a protection he neither sought nor particularly needed often soured her temper.

‘You don't see danger, Luke.'

‘Of course I do.'

‘Then you don't take the trouble to avoid it. You won't win any friends at Braithwaite's mill by helping Anna Rattrie.'

‘I wouldn't want the kind of friends who'd leave a girl in that kind of trouble because of something her brother did.'

‘All right. So you've rescued Anna by foisting her on me. And now I suppose you'll be after starting a fund for the families of the men her brother sent to prison …'

‘Very likely.'

‘And putting more of your own wages in it than you can afford …'

‘I don't drink. I am moderate with my pipe. Allow me some pleasures.'

‘Who'd do it for you, Luke?'

‘I expect you would, Cara.'

Suddenly she was flustered, very nearly and quite irrationally furious.

‘Don't be too sure. Although you'd have needed it, wouldn't you, if Oliver Rattrie had turned you in like the others? And if you hadn't been in bed with that fever his mother spread all over St Jude's, then he
would
have turned you in, you know.'

‘Yes, Cara. I do know.'

‘And do you know what the little toad is doing now – in and out of the Fleece all day at Christie Goldsborough's elbow?'

‘That's up to him, Cara.'

It hurt her to speak Christie's name to Luke. It always had. Perhaps he didn't like to hear it. She couldn't tell. Yet, fired by anxiety for
him
– and to the devil with Christie – she rushed on, ‘Then I'll tell you what he's doing. He's creeping all over the town listening and prying and sniffing, and then running back to Goldsborough and Braithwaite and the rest with his tales of who the Chartists are and where they are and which ones need watching the most …'

‘That's what I supposed he was doing, Cara.'

He sounded so reasonable, so calm, that she could have slapped him.

‘Oh yes – yes – of course you did. And that won't stop you from going to the hustings on polling day, will it, and letting everybody see just where you stand …?'

‘No. It certainly will not.'

‘Luke.'
Inwardly she knew that she was wringing her hands in anguish. ‘Why do you take so little care?' He shook his head and, once again, without any need for touch, she felt his hard, steady hand in hers.

‘Nobody could call me a wild man, Cara. But I'm not a sheep either. And if safety is all you're thinking of, then sheep aren't even safe – are they?'

‘No. Only the wolf is that.' She believed it and could have slapped him again when she saw his grin.

‘He may think so. I expect he does. But wolves get caught in traps, don't they, and starve to death in hard winters, or get shot at and bleed to death – like everything else. And where's the sense in trying to hide what I feel and what I am – even if I wanted to – when my father was Radical Jack Thackray and my mother is giving bed and board to the Chartist candidate?'

More than anything else she had wished to avoid any mention of Daniel. She had found it hard enough to speak of him to Odette. Impossible, surely, to anyone else? Yet acknowledging the necessity, she said now with stiff lips and an ungainly, unwilling tongue, ‘I know. Daniel Carey. I met him once, years ago, on the boat from Ireland.'

‘So he said.'

And when the desire to ask ‘Is he well? Is he happy? Is he in danger?' became a need that was
almost
– never quite – impossible to deny she endured it as one endures physical pain until it had eased, receded, had almost – never quite – gone away.

Was it even necessary to enquire? He would not be happy because the capacity for true happiness was in neither one of them. He would be well enough. As she was.
Of course
he would be in danger.

Yet at least she had succeeded in speaking his name without any visible emotion, a knack for which she grew increasingly grateful with the approach of polling-day. Not that the by-election – or any election – was of much importance to Cara when compared, for instance, with her negotiations for the Colclough wedding. Although – as she set about persuading Mrs Maria Colclough of her ability to transform her awkward daughter Rachel into a bridal lily – her discovery that the Whig candidate had been selected, sponsored, bought, in fact, and paid for by the town's manufacturing interest, including the Colcloughs, did have the effect – so long as she remained in Maria Colclough's drawing-room – of making an ardent Whig of her.

An attitude she at once discarded, on her return to Market Square, when she found the truest of Frizingley's Tories, Lady Lark, awaiting her to be fitted for the accoutrements of several country-house visits.

The Larks, of course, were sponsoring their own candidate, along with the Covington-Pyms and the generous contribution of Mr Adolphus Moon who would have liked to stand for election himself had it not been for the handicap of his lovely but socially unacceptable wife. But a minor Lark cousin had been discovered, just as a minor Lark or Covington-Pym could always be found to do their duty as master of foxhounds or vicar of Far Flatley church, a gentleman who resembled Sir Felix Lark as closely as one Rattrie to another and whose wife – should she ever get there – would know exactly how to conduct herself at Westminster.

And it irked Lady Lark excessively that the desired result should even be in doubt.

‘In my younger days,' she said as Cara pinned her skilfully into a true blue dinner gown, ‘my father chose his member of parliament just as he chose his lawyer and his doctor, and that was that. One knew everyone personally, you see, who had the vote and one never dreamed of asking what they meant to do with it. One
knew
. So simple. So terribly
right
, somehow. One had the feeling that that was what the Deity intended. One knew one's leaders.
Oneself
, in fact. And there is no denying that ordinary people – most people – really like to be led. We looked after them, you see, as they knew we should. But now, Good Heavens, such chaos. All these new people and this new money which has been enfranchized. All this talk of opening our ports to cheap foreign corn which, apart from all the other foreign things which might come in with it, would absolutely ruin my brother – Lord Urlsham, my dear – who grows acres and acres of the stuff in Kent. Unthinkable. And really, although the Dallams and Braithwaites and Colcloughs have become one's friends, although one dines with them these days quite freely and so forth, one wonders –
quand même
– whether they really have enough experience of power? Without wishing to be unkind one feels bound to remember how very
new
they are and one would not wish to see them – well –
in error
.'

‘Make fools of ourselves, she means,' said the strident Lizzie Braithwaite to Lady Lark's departing back. ‘Well we won't. We'll win because we work harder. And she'll lose because her blue blood has gone thin. And if she wants an occupation for all those spare nephews and cousins of hers then she'd better put them in the army – since they're fit for nothing but fancy uniforms – and send them off to conquer a few more heathen countries to provide markets for our manufactured goods. But what we both have to do is keep the Chartists down – stop them from poisoning the minds of honest workers against people like us, who are in a position to look after them.'

‘Certainly, madam,' murmured Cara.

‘Give us a living wage,' said Daniel Carey from the hustings and Luke Thackray from the street. ‘Give us education. And opportunity. Give us the vote. And we'll look after ourselves.'

‘So they will,' said Christie Goldsborough across his silken pillows to Cara. ‘Until such of them who are shrewd and ambitious – and there'll be plenty – start using the others as a ladder to get to the top of the heap for their own ends. One wonders who they'll vote for then.'

‘I don't care,' said Cara, thinking of her shop-window which any stone – Chartist, Whig, or Tory – could just as easily splinter; remembering the drunken havoc of last polling day.

‘Should you feel the need of a guard,' murmured her lover, ‘I could hire some Irish muscle for your protection. No? Well then, if you don't care for that, take Oliver Rattrie.'

She declined. Coldly. One Rattrie being more than enough – although Anna, so quiet as to be almost invisible caused her no trouble, applying herself without much talent but with an almost painful diligence to the ‘apprentice pieces', the bonnet linings and trimmings, tedious hemming and tacking with which she was kept busy all day. A little shadow at night, making her bed in the workroom and mistaking it for luxury; denying, with a petrified shake of the head, that she was nervous of Cara's dog, although her face blanched with terror every time the animal approached her; ready to run errands at all times and in all weathers for Odette and Madge Percy; ready to lay down and die, supposed Cara, for Luke. Was she content with her lot? No doubt Luke would know. But little had the power to hold Cara's attention just then beyond the problem of having new, stout shutters fitted in a hurry, before polling day, and her sketches for the Colclough wedding which compared ‘adequately' – thought Mrs Colclough – to Miss Baker's so far as style was concerned, but not in price.

Could Miss Adeane cut her cost, rather considerably, without in any way skimping on the quality or ornamentation of her original designs? And even then …? Oh dear. Perhaps Miss Adeane
was
just a shade too young and daring, and had there not been some talk, once, about debts and lovers? And since – as every Colclough knew – there could be no smoke without fire, perhaps Miss Baker would be safer. As well as cheaper. Both safety and cost being of great importance to Mrs Colclough's son, Uriah.

‘Miss Adeane's designs are best,' said Mrs Colclough's awkward daughter, Rachel.

What was a poor mother to do?

She returned to Miss Adeane's shop on the eve of polling day accompanied by her son, the clerical Uriah, by his ‘angel' – not yet his fiancée – Miss Linnet Gage and by her sister-in-law, Mrs Tristan Gage, now well recovered, it seemed, from her ‘accident'in December. Miss Adeane, with her flair for knowing just what was required, at once invited them all to be seated – no mean achievement in itself in such a limited space – and produced an extra cushion for Gemma's back while judgement was passed on the proposed wedding dress.