A Song Twice Over (61 page)

‘I do love you, Luke,' she whispered desperately. ‘I do. In the way that I know – the way that I can –'

As much as she could. As much as she dared. Touching her hair and her eyelids and her cheek with his roughened, infinitely gentle fingers, he smiled at her.

‘And I reckon it would be enough to be happy on, lass, if I'd ever learned to want the life you want and the things you value. It's not in me, Cara. But I want
you
to have them. That's what loving means. Wanting the very best for the woman you love. And I'm not what's best for you, Cara. That's why I'm glad to go. And why I won't come back. It's been a hard lesson and I don't want to unlearn it. Which is why … Well – making love to you might seem a miracle tonight but it could only bring extra heartbreak tomorrow. For me, at any rate. I reckon I'd have the devil's job getting back my peace of mind. Maybe I never would. And there's Anna.'

She had been crying almost silently against him but now, remembering Anna, she gave a deep, painful shudder.

‘Don't!' he said sharply, the first command he had ever given her. ‘Don't grieve for what shouldn't grieve you.
Listen
– I don't want you to remember me as a man who loved your body – although I do love it – because any man with eyes in his head and blood in his veins would do that. I love
you
. Splendid, sharp-edged Cara Adeane, spiky as a hedgehog on the outside with a middle as soft as a newborn swan. That's how I love you. I love your decency, Cara, and your purity, because nothing you have ever had to do with your body – and I know as much as I need to know about that – has ever soiled you. The men who exploit you that way had dirty hands to begin with and no trace of it has come off on you. I'm not dazzled by you, Cara – as some men are. I don't recall that I ever was. I
know
you and I love what I know. The first time I saw you I started smiling and I've been smiling ever since in my heart. I don't expect to stop.'

He stood her away from him again, carefully as before, and taking her face between hard, lean hands, kissed her on the mouth, tasting her, drawing the heart from her and then, before emotion turned to passion, ending.

There was not the slightest doubt in her mind that he was saying goodbye.

There were a few more moments in which, the ticking of the clock getting inside her head, they spoke rapidly of luggage, wagons, trains, of taking care of oneself, of how a final break would be kinder, of brand new beginnings. They spoke of good luck and wishing each other well.

‘I must go now,' he said.

This time she did not detain him, although, at the door, he kissed her again, pressing urgently against her and she against him, both of them shipwrecked for a moment and clinging to one another, half-drowning.

But they had both learned – in murky and turbulent waters – how to swim.

‘God bless you,' she said and made the sign of the Catholic cross over his Protestant chest, smiling through tears at the thought of how horrified Sairellen would have been to see it.

Smiling too, he caught her moving, blessing hand and kissed it.

‘I've never seen you make the sign of Rome before.'

‘No. I dare say one reverts, in moments of stress, to one's beginnings.'

And there had been a great deal of stress lately.

He kissed her strong, competent, elegant fingers once again and then sniffed them, storing their fragrance in his memory.

‘There's nothing in my chapel education that I can give you in exchange for it. Except – aye – God bless you, Cara. And keep you. There's nothing in my life ever moved me more, nor ever will, than the sight of you, that bitter winter, in those two plush tablecloths. I'd have given you the shirt from my back, right gladly. And still would.'

Would she have taken it? She watched him walk away across Market Square towards St Jude's, his long, loose-limbed stride eating the distance, his head bare, the coarse straw-coloured hair the last glimpse she had of him as he climbed beyond her vision, up the hill.

Soon, very soon, she would have no reason to set foot in St Jude's again. Soon there would be no one there who knew her name.

She went back into the house and bolted the door, remembering even in extreme distress, to safeguard her property. And herself. Since who else – in this black-hearted world – would do so?

In the comfortable office-parlour only the dog was present, opening a baleful eye as she sat down in her armchair beside his basket. Both of them guarding the cash-box now. She would have a drink, perhaps. Why not? But the rich, strong Madeira with which Christie kept her supplied neither warmed her body, nor her heart.

Her body. So beautiful. So ardently desired. A hundred times more enticing than Gemma Gage, a thousand times more than Anna. Yet she was alone and they, most probably, were not. Nor was her mother, nor Marie Moon. All of them ready to throw away the world for love.

As twice now she had tried to do and failed.

And she did not like failure. Did not like defeat. Did not care for the speed with which both Luke and Daniel had found consolation. She did not like this hollowness she still felt in her limbs, this emptiness in her heart.

She did not like the dog, snoring and snuffling in his basket but here, at least, she could tell him so.

‘Damned dog. You must be the ugliest beast in creation.'

He opened one eye, glanced at her, and then closed it again with total indifference, not thinking her worth the trouble.

Yes. Without doubt the ugliest, the most ungrateful and ill-tempered and greedy, the most useless. No doubt about it.

But, smiling slightly, she realized she would make short work of anyone else who dared to say so.

August was intensely hot that year, airless and dry and exceedingly trying for a man of John-William Dallam's weight and age and disposition. A sultry, choleric month it seemed to him, full of prattling women and bored young gentlemen waiting for the start of the grouse-shooting; a permanent tea-party transferred from his wife's drawing-room to her garden where vast quantities of strawberries and cream were consumed among the roses.

And John-William Dallam did not care for eating his food outdoors. Nor, with any excessive enthusiasm, for flowers. Not at all for gossip. Not for country life in general, he had long since decided. And, most of all, he had no patience whatsoever, no respect, and not one half ounce of liking for any of his wife's guests.

Give him a good solid dining-table to get his feet under at tea-time, standing four square on best quality Axminster carpet instead of all this flimsy garden furniture set out on damp grass. Give him a counting house or a factory floor instead of these acres of roses and fuchsias and hollyhocks and God knew what – he could certainly never be bothered to learn their names – about which his wife's friends went into such raptures. Give him the Piece Hall in Frizingley, or even the tap-room of the Rose and Crown where at least men spoke a language he could understand of profit and loss, trade fluctuations, a decent prize-fight or a dog-fight even, instead of all these mincing social niceties which – and he made no bones about it – set his teeth on edge.

Give him neighbours, as he'd had before, who knew that these damned Tory Corn Laws were keeping the cities poor, closing the ports to cheap foreign corn for the benefit of these Tory gentlemen, now drinking his port and his brandy every evening, so that they could go on growing it and charging what they liked for it themselves.

One night after dinner, following a day of intense heat, he took issue – despite his wife's prior warnings – with Sir Felix Lark and Colonel Covington-Pym on the matter, both these gentlemen having dined well at his expense and made rather more use than he liked of his cigars. Nor did it suit him when, the ladies having withdrawn, Sir Felix Lark took the liberty of placing his lordly feet on John-William's table, an acceptable posture, perhaps, in sporting Tory circles – John-William had seen Christie Goldsborough do the same – but not at all to the taste of a man like himself who knew the cost to a penny not only of the inlaid table-top but of removing scuff-marks from it.

He therefore felt no compunction at barking out a command to ‘put those feet where they belong, lad', which, his voice easily reaching his wife through the open drawing-room windows, caused her considerable alarm.

But the matter did not rest there, Sir Felix, somewhat irritated – his mother, Lady Lark, never having objected to his heels on
her
table, even when they were booted and spurred – choosing to revenge himself by referring to the vexing question of factory reform which the Tories, in retaliation for Whig proposals to abolish the Corn Laws, were currently supporting.

‘You know nowt about it, lad,' John-William told him.

‘But my dear fellow …' Sir Felix batted artful, languid eyelids, ‘An absolute dunce could work it out. If the manufacturers are complaining that our corn monopoly is putting up the price of bread so that their workers can't afford to buy it, then the solution is simple. Pay higher wages, old chap.'

‘And reduce working hours while I'm about it, I expect? Is that what you're after?'

‘Why yes,' Sir Felix smiled sweetly. ‘One would hope so. And with Richard Oastler on the loose again one hardly sees how you industrial chappies can get away with it much longer. Damned decent fellow, Richard Oastler. Met him the other day and took to him like a duck to water. One has to take one's hat off to your workers, you know, for paying his fine. One supposes he'll set about rescuing them now with a goodwill from – what does one call it? – oh yes – the foul captivity of the mills.'

And although John-William strongly doubted whether Sir Felix had ever laid eyes on Richard Oastler and knew for certain that he had never, in his life, set foot in either a factory or a baker's shop, he nevertheless rose to his feet, his face an alarming shade of burgundy, and spoke at length, in far from temperate language, about meddlesome, overbred young men, still wet behind the ears, who, unable to run a few mouldy ancestral acres at a profit, had the effrontery to tell
him
– who had started with nothing and was proud of it – how to conduct his large and extremely lucrative affairs.

‘They'd make mincemeat of you, lad, in the Piece Hall. They'd have the shirt off your back and you'd never even notice. And as for stirring up my weavers with all this talk of shorter hours and higher wages, who's going to foot the bill? Not you, I reckon, since footing bills is not what your kind are best at. And once you've got the workers into trouble, once it gets out of hand or no longer suits your book, what you'll do then is leave them in the lurch. Aye – and they're not daft, my factory lads. They know that as soon as their wages go up you'll raise the price of your corn to suit.'

Sir Felix left, after exchanging some amused whispers with Linnet Gage about the truly quaint manners of these all-too-newly rich and John-William endured a restless night, troubled by indigestion, indignation, and a tearful Amabel who sat a full hour at his bedside grieving for her position in local society which he had surely ruined for ever.

‘I think we had just better pack up and leave,' she told him, her lips trembling, her whole face melting into tears like a newly released Spring fountain at his reply that nothing would please him more.

He did not like this house. He did not like these people. And even when Amabel trotted off to her own room he could not rest. He had bought this place, after all, to enjoy her company, to spend easy, tranquil days with her in the Autumn of his life. He had bought it for her benefit – dammit – and his own, not to suit the good pleasure of Miss Linnet Gage and his fancy son-in-law and their even fancier friends. Well, if this was what leisure and money and aping the gentry did for decent working folk then he'd had enough.
Enough
.

He fell asleep surrounded by green meadows and aching for the dust and grime of Frizingley, for the sound of a factory hooter instead of these damned birds which woke him just as early and reminded him, with their shrill twittering of Linnet Gage. And it was Linnet who fell foul of him the next morning, his stomach still heavy with last night's dinner, his head aching, his temper – as Linnet signified at once to Amabel with a quizzical little pout – decidedly uncertain.

The ladies were at the breakfast table when he reached it, daintily sipping and nibbling and exclaiming over the morning's correspondence, a somewhat conspicuous silence falling at his approach since he, of course, had formed part of their discussion; Linnet assuring her dear aunt that Sir Felix was far too large of mind and great of heart to take lasting offence; Amabel wondering with visible alarm how she was ever to face Lady Lark or the formidable Mrs Covington-Pym again.

But, her husband's arrival putting an end to her speculation, she was relieved when Linnet, who knew how to pass so smoothly from one issue, one state of mind, to another, began to talk of the latest attempts of Mr Adolphus Moon to rid himself of his wife. For what, after all, could there be in this continuing drama of the Moons to upset her admittedly very touchy John-William? Pouring his tea, fussing a little over his toast and marmalade, she was reassured to see him open his copy of
The Times
. No, Marie Moon could mean nothing to him. Nor to anyone else, it seemed, except foolish young Gussie Lark who had set all the other Larks so madly aflutter. And although Amabel felt a momentary unease when Linnet, in her amused treble, began to speak that provocative name, her husband appeared to take no notice.

It was, of course, a mighty scandal containing, as it did, all the essential ingredients of money and passion, a woman of ill repute, albeit of great beauty, who had snared a bemused millionaire – Oh yes, thought Linnet, Mr Moon's revenues from cinnamon and sugar and ginger certainly allowed him to be called that – into marriage. And who now – when no one in the world could blame him for having had enough of her – would not go quietly and with dignity, of her own accord, having absolutely refused the religious retreat and the income – perfectly adequate for a penitent, surely – which had been offered her.