A Song Twice Over (65 page)

‘You'll need something to refresh yourselves, my darlings.'

He smiled at them all,
her
smile on a face she had never forgotten,
her
sea-blue eyes with her father's agile, feckless brain behind them.
His
charm flowing now into every corner of the room, far greater, she recognized, than her own. She understood why women loved him. She had loved him herself as much as any of them. She understood, too, that he not only intended to win her over but was sure of his ability to do it; quite certain that when their ship sailed in a day or two she would be there, on the dockside, waving them a loving farewell.

Let him think so.

‘Odette, my darling, why don't you take the child and show him where he'll be sleeping so that when night comes it won't be strange to him?'

He was really saying ‘Leave me alone with her for a while, this daughter of ours, and let's see what can be done.'

Odette heard him and smiling, nodding her head slightly, she took Liam by the hand and led him, unprotesting, away.

A boy with a pointed chin and huge dark eyes, still small for his age, still fragile, still with that wild, startled look about him of a woodland fox. Her son. She did not want to look.

‘Cara,' her father said, ‘won't you take off your hat and gloves?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Your dignity suits you, my darling. And it does my heart good to see you so fine and beautiful.'

He meant it, of course. She knew that. As he had always meant what he said at the time of saying it. The Enchanter's golden voice of her childhood, describing to her all the shimmering colours of the rainbow.
‘I'll make you a princess, my darling.'
Well – she had no need of his false promises, his broken rainbows. She would be a princess, ere long, of her own creation, in Market Square.

‘Cara, listen to me now for a little while …'

But she did not wish to hear his excuses, nor submit herself to his persuasions. She wanted to hurt him, to strike a blow at him, even if it made her fingers bleed and broke her heart. If anything, that is, could shatter this knife-edged rock she still carried in her chest.

She smiled at him, unpleasantly she supposed, since it clearly startled him.

‘Time presses, father, and although I'd love to hear all about it – well – we can't always have
just
what we'd like, can we now? There
is
one thing, though – before it slips my mind. You left a debt behind in Frizingley.'

‘Did I now?' He looked a little puzzled, a little rueful, his smile asking her would she not rather talk of wounded pride and broken hearts and how to mend them, of gilded royalty in New York's bakehouses than sordid old tales like this.

‘Yes father, you left a debt. And since we may not meet again …'

‘To Goldsborough?'

‘The same.'

‘I understood it had been cancelled.'

She shook her head.

‘No. Transferred to me. And I have not cancelled it. Fifty pounds.'

She held out her hand.

‘Is this some kind of test you're setting me, my darling?' He was smiling a little sadly now, no reprimand in him, no anger. Sorrow both for her and for him. A degree of enchantment it would, in a happier time, have been hard to resist. He was telling her he loved her and had always loved her, speaking to her of belonging and being together, of living all over again the warm magic of the past. Cara, my darling daughter, heart of my heart, light of my eyes.

‘Fifty pounds,' she said.

He sighed and shrugged his narrow, elegant shoulders.

‘Certainly. If that is what you want.'

‘It is.'

He counted the money into her hand and, her fingers closing around it, she swept out of the room, out of the house, and then, once safely alone on the pavement, fled as far and as fast as she could, anywhere so long as it was
away
from the tortured emotions he had aroused in her, away from the memories and the shattered trust, away from the magic circle of the family, ‘the four of us' from which she had been cast out, or had torn herself apart; she hardly knew the difference.

Hardship was no stranger to her. Hunger and cold and debt were enemies which, having met head-on and conquered, she would not be afraid to meet again. But she had never been alone before.

She had been trained, from her earliest youth, to act not as one but as three. Not even to think of herself in isolation from the others who completed her identity. The ‘three of us'. The handsome, clever, infinitely superior Adeanes against the world. A delusion, like everything else, it seemed to her as she walked in her blind and angry solitude through the streets of Liverpool. A game devised by her father for his own aggrandizement in which only one player – himself – could ever win. A shadow-dance, her whole life with
them
, and nothing more, false from its very beginning.

And now it had ended.

She knew him, through and through, her father. She did not know her son at all. Nor ever would. How had she come to this? At the entrance of a public garden a woman was sitting, an image of despairing Ireland, her children squatting around her, their faces as blank and beautiful as Liam's, the same damaged, offended souls looking out of their eyes as she had seen in his. They too – she could tell – had been dragged, from their birth, at the skirts of a harassed woman, absorbing through their fragile skins the adult fears she had no time at the end of her day's labours, her day's begging for bread, to explain to them. They simply knew she was afraid. As Liam had known. Fear stalking him too, never more than an inch away, the uncertain ground beneath Cara's feet, upon which she had known how to tread, becoming a quicksand to him.

And now she was childless, with fifty pounds in her hand.

For a moment she toyed with the idea of tossing the whole of it into this woman's lap. Why not? Except that a beggar-woman in rags carrying such a fortune would – in this evil-minded world – end up getting herself arrested as a thief. Or knocked on the head, in the back alley where she lived, and robbed. Prudently, knowing the ways of alleys and pawnbrokers and gin-shops, Cara gave a single gold coin – fortune enough – and walked on.

She was calm and brisk and almost painfully in control when she returned to Market Square that same evening, inspecting her premises with the eye of an eagle as Madge Percy assured her that no customers had been lost in her absence, no valuable materials damaged or gone astray, that however surprising it may seem – there had been no fire, no flood, no treacherous journeywoman running off with her designs to Miss Ernestine Baker.

‘Thank you, Madge. You can go now.'

What next?

Her body ached with the raw exhaustion of her early days in Frizingley, her head racing with half-thoughts, half-truths, a whirlwind of hurts and hopes and memories far too turbulent for sleep. If she tried she knew she would be pursued all through the night by dreams of wild and twisted things which would do nothing to improve her humour tomorrow. Better, then, to sit here a while longer with a glass of Madeira, closing her mind – if she could – to everything but the sheer physical ease of a good cushion behind her back and four solid walls around her. And tomorrow, at the very least, she would not have to endure the gradual drop-by-drop torment of her mother's misery.

She emptied her glass and poured another.

What
would
she do tomorrow? What would she think about, tomorrow evening, when the shop was empty and her women gone, when she had closed her ledgers and finished off the sketches needed for the following day? What did she know
how
to do, when it came down to it, except work and worry and pile up money to safeguard the future of those to whom she had felt bound by love or duty, or both?

Well, she had made it easy for them all to leave her. No one could ever say that she had held them back. She had sent off her mother royally, with a trousseau fit for a cherished bride. She had made Anna Rattrie almost pretty. She had made Gemma Gage look handsome enough on occasions too. And what was left to think of now, with Daniel safely out of Frizingley, with Liam's cough removed to the other side of the Atlantic where she could not hear it, with Luke married and making his own way in Nottingham; and her father, who had neither earned it nor deserved it, apparently even more comfortably off in New York than she was herself in Market Square.

What a farce life was, if one had the heart to laugh at it.

She had not. She drank another glass of wine instead and, with its assistance, was beginning to feel her eyes grow heavy, the lines of her body blur into the desired state of uncaring, when she heard a carriage crossing Market Square at speed and draw up suspiciously close to her shop front. No customer, of course, at this hour. The worthy husband, though – quite possibly – of one of them who might have mistaken her pleasant, professional manner for something else? It would not be the first time. In which case she would not answer the door. Unless it should be Marie Moon, running away from her husband? Quite possibly. Poor Marie, upon whom the hounds of legal and medical opinion, of brain disorders and asylums and declarations of her unfitness to manage money were swiftly closing. Yes, she would open the door to Marie.

But, as she hurried from her office and began to move through the darkened shop, knowing her way too well to need a candle, she could see the high-perch carriage through the window and hear the loud, unmannerly knocking on the door, the smart rat-a-tat made with the knob of a cane or a riding whip, by a man who simply did not care whether he woke the whole street from its hard-earned slumbers or not.

Who would dare to reprimand him, after all, if he did?

It could only be Christie.

She drew back the bolt and stared at him.

‘I am paying a call,' he said, feeling it unnecessary, although he had never visited her here before, to make any further explanation than that.

‘It's after midnight.'

‘I dare say.'

He strolled past her, a landlord inspecting his property, although, in the dark she knew he could see nothing beyond the vague, pale shapes of her models and hat stands. But, because it seemed unthinkable to take him by the hand and lead him through the shop to her well-lit parlour as she would have done with almost anyone else, she ran to fetch a lamp, shielding the flame with a nervous hand. What did he want from her now?

‘Have you been out to dinner somewhere?' she asked.

‘I have.'

Ben Braithwaite's, she thought, judging him too immaculate for Sir Felix Lark's where the ‘gentlemen'got up to such stupid horseplay, it seemed to her, after dinner, fencing with billiard cues, making bets as to who could shin up a tree the fastest, blindfold or with one arm tied, or some such lunacy; getting up on to the roof and running steeple chases over the chimney stacks; taking no care of their clothes whatsoever. She had seen him come back from the Larks with his expensive frilled and pin-tucked shirt ripped along the shoulder and half the buttons off, his white silk waistcoat ruined by random stains which she – with her precise knowledge of the cost of silk – had identified as soot, red wine, horse grease, and blood.

But he had done nothing more rakish tonight, she noticed, than loosen his cravat a little, his white lawn shirt and silver brocade waistcoat with no mark upon them, his black opera cloak thrown back, just as it ought to be, to show the red silk lining, a heavy jewelled ring – which the Larks would have considered vulgar – on either hand. Evidence in itself that he had been dining at an industrialist's table.

‘So this is where you live,' he said, taking off his hat and gloves and fringed silk scarf and tossing them in the direction of her table without even a sidelong glance to see how or where they landed, his eyes skimming over her possessions in a manner which seriously offended her since – whether or not he found them meagre –
she
had never lived so well.

‘And drinking alone, Cara, I see. I may join you – if you have another glass.'

Of course she had another glass. In fact she had two whole dozen of them. And decent crystal, at that, since she used them for serving wine – and
good
wine – to her ladies in the shop. Her indignation growing she brought one, filled it a little too full and gave it to him without a word, her eyes shooting sparks which she hoped – although it seemed unlikely – that he would notice.

This was his property, of course, she was only too well aware of it, but nothing obliged her to like him coming here, filling the only private room she had ever had with his bulky, overheated presence, his heavy scent of musk and tobacco getting everywhere, taking everything over.

Not even the dog had growled at him.

‘Good God,' he said, catching sight of it. ‘Damn me if that's not my old Caligula.'

Caligula? He had always been just ‘Dog' to her, or ‘Damned Dog'more often than not, lazy, ill-tempered, disobedient, eating his head off and biting the fingers that fed him – hers – whenever he got half a chance.

But. ‘Here, boy,' said Christie and, lumbering to his bandy legs the faithless beast, who only came to Cara's call when it suited him, trotted obligingly across the room and placed an adoring, docile muzzle in his master's hand.

‘You kept him, then?'

Yes, she had kept him. And now the treacherous beast was fawning like a day-old puppy at the feet of the man who had thrown him away. Ought she really to be surprised about it? But yes. She had kept him. It had never occurred to her to do anything else.

‘Tell me, Cara,' roughly scratching the dog's ears he was laughing, oddly pleased about something or other, ‘I know how much this breed of dog eats. And remembering that this one was always greedy – how did you manage to feed him? In your early days together, I mean?'

She smiled, rather pleased now in her turn. ‘Oh,
I
didn't feed him, Christie. You did. That's how I looked at it, anyway, when I was stealing meat for him from your kitchen.'