A Song Twice Over (51 page)

‘I hear.' But when she looked up, intending defiance and insolence if she had to, the rough sympathy in Sairellen's face, rather than the contempt she had expected, took her off-balance to a point where she could cry out in all sincerity, ‘He doesn't care what I do, Sairellen. He only wants me because I'm convenient, and because other men want me. He likes that. That's all.'

And thinking of those other men, Ned O'Mara, Ben Braithwaite, Oliver Rattrie – dear God – a dozen others, she shuddered.

‘Sairellen – he doesn't
care
.'

Sairellen sighed again. ‘Happen not. And it's not that I blame you lass. Maybe, in your place, I'd have done the same – except that I've never been a handsome woman, like you, so I've had neither the chance nor the temptation. And when you've never been invited to sin then I call it foolish to take credit for virtue. So I don't judge you. But, where my lad's concerned, I can't take a risk either. You say Goldsborough doesn't care. But the whole of St Jude's can testify to his queer temper. And how do I know – or how do you know – that he's not the same mad devil as his father? He surely looks like him.'

‘I don't know anything about his father.'

Nor did it seem to matter. But Sairellen once again gave a deep, hollow sigh and shook her head.

‘No. He'd not be likely to tell you either. I reckon he'd be glad to forget him, except that Frizingley was a smaller place in those days – much smaller – and everybody knew about Squire Goldsborough and how he'd have put chains on his poor lady if he could, for jealousy. I had a sister in service at the manor and she reckoned you could see that poor woman shrinking, day by day. From too much loving and wanting to make her all his own so that she couldn't breathe for him, or stir hand or foot without him trying to put a strait-jacket on her. I've seen her myself, sitting in her carriage, not daring to look left or right, with him beside her just looking at her –
eating
her with those pitch black eyes. Jealousy like that is a sickness. A madness. It was too much for any woman to bear.'

‘His son's not like that, Sairellen.'

‘Nor was the squire, until she came along. Just a roistering young buck like the rest of them, fond of his cards and his claret and not a maidservant safe from him if she was under thirty. Then – well – everybody knew what he did. Not that he ever paid for it.'

‘What, Sairellen?' Ought she to know? Might it be a help to her, even, the next time she wanted something from Christie?

‘No,
they
don't pay – the quality. They band together, close ranks, and hush everything up. One law for them, another for us. Him a Goldsborough and her a Covington-Pym. They forget that the servants have eyes and ears, and the word gets out.'

‘
What
, Sairellen?' Unease flickered briefly in her mind, warning her that Christie's secrets, after all, might be better left alone. But her mind looking back over a far distance, Sairellen seemed almost to be talking to her memories.

‘No, he never paid. And it didn't keep him from his hunting and his shooting and his wenching, either. Nor from selling off his land, in bits and pieces, to pay for his pleasures. If he was mad with jealousy before, then he was mad with drink afterwards – or guilt. Maybe that was his punishment.'

Cara swallowed rather nervously, no longer certain she wished for an explanation. Perhaps it would be better not to ask. Assuredly. She would wait until the haze had gone from Sairellen's eyes and then begin to talk of something else.

‘What did he do, Sairellen?' she said.

‘He killed her.' Abruptly Sairellen's eyes became sharp, grey chips of flint again, her voice curt, almost matter-of-fact. ‘They didn't call it that, of course – the Goldsboroughs and the Larks and the Covington-Pyms. But so it was. He couldn't live with how much he wanted her, my sister reckoned. So he killed her. His lady wife.'

Christmas passed. And, in the following February, Richard Oastler the Factory King, Champion of the Factory Children, was released from prison, sufficient funds having been raised to pay off his debts, his arrival at Brighouse Station being attended by a crowd of several thousand supporters of as many shades of opinion. Oastler's men one and all in their various fashions. Veterans of the Ten Hours' Movement who had made the Pilgrimage to York, like Luke Thackray. Campaigners against the New Poor Law and its evil new workhouses in which the poor were imprisoned, like the radical Parson Bull of Bierley and Luke Thackray. Dedicated Chartists who sought political freedom for the working-classes, like the radical landlord of the Dog and Gun, and Luke Thackray. Men of sensitivity from all walks of life who, quite simply, recognized Oastler's humanity. Like a minor Lark or two, a few fairly distant Braithwaite cousins, men of letters and law and medicine, men of vision. Luke Thackray.

And the Chartist candidate.

Daniel spent the eve of the great day with Gemma as he spent every evening she could be at liberty. Far more of them, in fact, than he had imagined possible or – to begin with – had even wanted. Although the wanting had changed both in its degree and its quality. Quite soon, it seemed to him although so gradually, so naturally, that he could name no precise moment at which the faint flicker of relief her absences at Almsmead initially afforded him had been snuffed out like a candle by the softer, infinitely more appealing sensation of missing her.

He told her so. ‘I miss you, Gemma.' He told her many things, whatever sprang into his mind, wasting nothing that might please her by holding it back from her. He talked to her. Teased her. Lectured her. Flirted with her. Listened to her. He desired her openly and happily with all the abundant, uncomplicated sensuality of his youth and health, all the delicacy of his imaginative razor-sharp mind. And, with regard to the days and nights they spent apart he never questioned her. Nor she him. She had been with her husband. He had taken – or not taken – such diversions as he thought fit. It did not seem to matter. She had said to him, gravely and sincerely, her small chin tilted at the pugnacious angle which so pleased and amused him, that she would have this measure of time, however short or long, for her own self. And then she would do her duty. This one measure, and no more. He understood and had made up his mind –
chosen
– to devote himself to her wholly and entirely, until the measure was full.

He did not even ask how long. Nor think of it. Whenever she was in Frizingley they were together. When her duty should recall her permanently to her mother's house and to her marriage, he knew she would tilt her chin once again to that resolute yet so vulnerable angle and tell him so. Whereupon he would resume the journey from which she had distracted him almost a year ago, would sling his bag over his shoulder, set off across the moor to Leeds and take a train, the first which seemed good to him.

Trains and roads and ships. His own life once more, so contrary to hers. A wandering man. And a motionless woman who would remain here on her lotus-feet which had been bound and crippled as securely, in their fashion, as her mother's, rooting her in this one place, this one soil which claimed her and diminished her. While he would continue rootless, swift and haphazard, settling nowhere.

But until then she held him. For if her one experience of love was to come to her through him – as seemed likely – then he wanted it, however imperfect, to be the best he had. Flawed of course and less than whole-hearted which seemed, he thought wryly, to be a fairly accurate reflection of himself, but unstinting, his admiration, his honest liking for her, his
pride
, it began to seem, in her integrity, her soundness, her worth, growing day by day.

She moved him. His life had never lacked affection but the truth was that no woman had ever loved him so generously as Gemma Gage. And, being moved, he told her that too.

‘You move me, Gemma.'

‘Heavens – that sounds uncomfortable.'

‘So it is.'

They smiled at one another through the dark brown shadows of the house in which they felt so perfectly at ease. A restless, reckless man held, almost calmly, almost in tranquillity, by a woman who showered him not with the material gifts it would have made him uneasy to accept, but with herself. A woman who was pure and honest even in her sensuality, who could walk naked towards him through these same dear dark brown shadows without any taint of wantonness, wanting his hands and his heart upon her in the same manner as she placed her own upon him, delicately, with a tenderness which, even in moments of deepest rapture, retained its innocence.

And her rapture in itself thrilled him by its depth and intensity, her excitement and the wonder it aroused in her generating his own, without either of them being aware of the sexual dominion she was attaining over him. He knew, simply, that he wanted her body. Opening sturdy, generous, loving arms she gave it to him and took his, loving him without shame or restraint while her time of love endured.

And here too he made certain that her measure was full.

‘I want you, Gemma.' He would send that message to her with his eyes whenever she visited him in his classroom, across the heads of his lethargically scribbling pupils, for the sheer pleasure of seeing the hushed, dreaming quality of her answering smile. And as soon as the children had piled up their untidy slates and gone, he would speak the words to her.

‘I want you, Gemma.'

‘Now?'

‘Absolutely now.'

She would laugh her delight, take his hands. She was his, eagerly and joyfully. His friend and confidante who knew his moods and his mind, his great hopes and small achievements. His lover, rich with wisdom, who could pour herself over him like a healing balm, whenever healing was needed.

Gemma.

‘Let me look at you.' And, in the soft lamplight of her bedroom at the manor or by the light of his schoolhouse candle, she learned to think of herself – because he desired her – as a desirable woman. That much at least, he told himself, he had known how to give her. Not beauty as such but an illusion of beauty, a belief in her own power to attract, a confidence of movement and manner never to be found in women who considered themselves to be plain.

That much. Not enough, of course. But something to leave behind.

‘Look at me, then.' She did not say ‘Enjoy me', but it was enjoyment she offered, enjoyment he took in her smooth brown skin, her heavy breasts which were, nevertheless, so softly rounded, her strongly arched back which became supple at his touch, the brown oval of her face on the pillow surrounded by the fine brown hair which he had loosened from its prim confinement of hairpins and chignon to a disorder that had the scent of fresh lemons and the texture of silk.

Her clear brown eyes, the sharply questing intelligence behind them which, for all its keenness, did not and could not and must never know that the source of his own deepest emotions had been tapped and then scorched only once – by Cara Adeane – remaining dried up and dormant ever since. Leaving him with only the lesser capacities to like, to respect, to desire, to grow fond. Above all to grieve honestly and sincerely at his own inability to lose his head now over a woman who so thoroughly deserved it.

When their measure of time was over he would miss her, he knew that. But those trains and ships and broad highways would still retain their power to enchant him, while her memory would be no searing pain, like Cara's, but a lingering, altogether bearable, sweetness. She was the best woman he knew or would ever be likely to know. He would
enjoy
remembering her. On the night before Oastler's return to the West Riding, lying beside her in her huge, canopied bed, he realized how much he wished it could be otherwise. She deserved not only his love but his suffering and, the two going so inextricably together, he accepted, with bitterness, his inability to give her either.

‘Gemma, are you awake?'

‘Yes.' She rarely wasted the nights they spent together in sleep, finding a rich, deep pleasure in simply lying beside him in the dark listening to the living and breathing of his body, in the cocoon of this wide, elaborate bed where Tristan had left so little impression.

She rarely thought of Tristan or, at least, not at any level which troubled her. Not now, in this time she had chosen to call her own. Although she saw him quite often, of course, usually at Almsmead, where, from the start, she had found it almost unnervingly easy to persuade him to spend his time in doing, when all was said and done, very much as he pleased.

August, the month in which her love for Daniel had first declared itself, had also brought the start of the grouse-shooting season when Tristan had asked for nothing better than the excitements of the grouse-moor Mr Adolphus Moon had recently purchased from the Larks. Autumn and winter had offered him partridge and pheasant; invitations to shooting parties, some of them at a fair distance, from which Gemma had had no trouble in getting herself excluded; a deer-stalking trip to a Scottish castle which had been a cheerfully bawdy, entirely masculine affair; the thrills of the Far Flatley hunt. Long days in the fresh air, striding over ploughed fields with a gun, or in the saddle. Heavy hunting and shooting dinners followed by heavier nights of claret and cards and billiards with hunting and shooting gentlemen who, at this season of the year, preferred the pursuit of game-birds and foxes to the pursuit of women, so that when he did happen to stumble into her bed his embraces were rarely more than fraternal.

Yet, when he wished to make love to her she allowed him to do so, recognizing very clearly now, from her new and joyful depth of experience, how much he considered it to be his duty, accepting him no more and no less placidly than she had always done because she considered it to be her duty too. She felt no guilt. And if, occasionally, the calm and friendly manner with which she treated her husband surprised her, she had only to remind herself that she was continuing to give him everything he wanted, which had never included her passion. He had married her for this life, this ease, these sporting guns and thoroughbred horses, this carefree, mindless existence to which he seemed so perfectly suited. She had married him to gain her freedom from another man – her father – who loved her and was loved by her far more than Tristan. And, if adultery had formed no part of her original plans, her love for Daniel had no shame in it, nothing, in any shade or nuance, that had succeeded in making her feel like an adulteress.