A Song Twice Over (77 page)

‘You've always despised every one of my ambitions, Daniel Carey.'

‘So I have. And you've always thought me a light-minded fool, Cara Adeane.'

‘And so you are.'

‘There now. Are we back where we started?'

Not entirely. Could either of them really want that?

‘Can I come and see you again?' he said, picking up his hat and gloves.

‘Yes. But use the back entrance and only in working hours.'

‘Ah – I see,' his eyes met hers, his glance easy and even roguish, hers quite blank. ‘So you can pass me off, at need, as a dealer in satin slippers? You have a jealous lover, do you, Miss Adeane?'

‘Yes,' she very crisply said.

‘The same?'

‘The same.'

‘It has been a very long time now, hasn't it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Almost a marriage.'

As near, she supposed, as she would ever come to it. More of a business association, at times, like many marriages, a matter of giving satisfaction and balancing the books. But always, even during his absences, his shadow at the back of her mind, reminding her that she had agreed to belong to him. And did belong. Financially and physically, her quick mind lapping up the shrewd commercial refinements he fed her, her body leaping to orgasm after orgasm in his arms. Money and sex. What else was Magda Braithwaite's marriage made of? Or Lady Lark's?

Or Gemma Dallam's? Quickly she closed her mind to that.

‘Yes. I suppose it is.'

She walked with him to the back door, no longer flimsy and unpainted like the one she had closed between him and her weeping mother on his last visit but a new very solid structure of polished oak.

‘Come and see me, then – when you happen to be passing.'

‘I will.'

He put his hand on her shoulder and they both looked at it for a moment in slight surprise as if it had somehow landed there like a moth in flight, the taffeta of her shop-gown feeling very smooth and cold to him, his touch very cold and sharp to her. She was the woman he had wanted more than any other, and never had. Could he have her now? He leaned towards her, her mouth only inches from his, the rise and fall of her breasts almost beneath his chest, the warm sweet scents of her, the silk and velvet and steel of her, that his body instantly and predictably told him he desired still.

But that had not been
all
he had wanted of her, surely? He had wanted to love her and be loved by her, to see no one but her and have her look at no one but him.

Certainly that was over.

And in what other fashion, without soiling that distant memory, could he take her now? What had he to offer her – or she him, perhaps – to compare with that?

He brushed his mouth along the line of her eyebrows, the tip of her nose, and withdrew his hand.

‘Yes. I'll come to see you.'

It might even be easier now, and better. They might even be friends.

‘Whenever you like, so long as you remember my situation …'

‘I'll be discreet.'

‘I doubt it.'

He laughed. ‘But I will. It won't be the first time that I …'

His voice broke off abruptly, memory striking him. And remorse. The same memory – of Gemma Gage – striking Cara. Although he did not realize why she stiffened and seemed, without actually moving away, to withdraw from him.

‘I suppose not.' Her voice was hard. Her eyes too. ‘And have you been to pay your respects to her yet, Daniel?'

‘Who's that, Cara?'

‘The widow.'

‘What widow?'

She saw that he had not heard the news and lowered her eyes, not caring to read the change it might make in him, whatever it turned out to be.

‘Gemma Gage. Her husband died six months ago.'

There was a silence. And then, in a quiet, neutral voice, he said, ‘How does a man like that die?'

‘Quickly, in his case …'

‘A fall from a horse?'

She shook her head.

‘You might think so. But no …' She folded her arms across her chest as if suddenly feeling the cold. ‘It was his wife's fault, according to his sister, who nearly lost her mind over it.
She
might have been the widow – at the funeral – So they said.'

‘Cara?'

‘Yes. They met an Irish family on the moor somewhere, trying to get to Frizingley because they'd heard about Father Francis and that there might be work here. Among the first who came. No soles to their shoes, or no shoes at all. Everything they owned in a broken-down handcart – which amounted to a couple of saucepans and half a dozen children. You know the kind.'

‘I do.'

‘And Gemma Gage is tender-hearted. You'll know that too.'

‘Yes, Cara.'

‘So her husband ended up carrying two of the children into Frizingley. One on his back and the other – the one who turned out to have the famine fever – in his arms. The little girl – and she'd be no more than the size of a skinned rabbit – lived. And Tristan Gage died. They say his wife started her soup-kitchen in his memory.'

And when he did not answer she waited a moment and then suddenly flung at him, ‘But whether she did or did not, the fact remains – doesn't it, Daniel – that she's free.'

He did not go to see her at once as Cara might have expected. He did not even think it wise or right or honourable to see her at all. Merely polite. Yet eventually, about a fortnight later, at a moment when his election campaign was in full swing and he really had no time to spare, he walked up to the school-house, not intending to go inside but going in just the same past the line of paupers, not all of them Irish, waiting more or less patiently at the door where the girl pupils used to file in and coming out, with soup and bread, at the door once reserved for the boys.

The odour would have overpowered him had he not been so thoroughly accustomed to it. Hot meat and onions. Unwashed humanity. Rags stained with excrement and sweat and vomit. Foul, very likely infected breath. And Gemma Gage standing at a long trestle table with Mrs Ephraim Cook and several other women – not Linnet Gage, he noticed, and not Amabel Dallam – ladling soup into tin bowls.

Quietly he walked behind them, took a bowl and, without a word, began ladling himself so that he did not see either the exact moment she became aware of him, or her reaction. And when the soup was done and both doors closed, there were the vats and tureens and spoons to gather up and put away in the uncomplicated company of Mrs Ephraim Cook and her stalwart, cheerful friends, before he could exchange a significant word with Gemma.

She had known, of course, that he was in Frizingley. The Chartist candidate again.

‘Are you well, Daniel?'

‘Yes. Very well.'

Could he ask the same question of her, six months a widow? Hardly, when she would feel bound to declare herself desolate, whatever the true state of her heart. And since he had not the least idea as to what that state might be it seemed better and safer, more courteous even, to talk generally of the election, the famine and her splendid efforts to relieve its devastations in Frizingley.

‘One does what one can,' she said very politely, her hair escaping from her usually smooth chignon in untidy wisps, her forehead beaded with sweat, the voluminous cook's apron tied around her heavy mourning dress making her even smaller and sturdier than he remembered.

She took off the apron and put on her hat, a plain black widow's bonnet with a long veil and a funereal feather.

‘I am at the manor again, Daniel – if you would care to call? This afternoon, perhaps, at three o'clock?'

She was by no means certain he would come but, nevertheless, she ordered tea and waited, finding waiting no hardship, a task indeed for which she had considerable aptitude and had undergone a most thorough training. Waiting and solitude. Although there was nothing specific now for which she waited and she had rarely found solitude irksome. Only once, in fact, when it had meant the absence of Daniel Carey to which she had long been accustomed, living with that absence, it had often seemed to her, more closely than she had lived with the presence of others. With Linnet, for instance, who certainly hated her. With her mother, who no longer tried to understand her. Even with Tristan who had astonished her and then humbled her by his affection.

Two years and the half of another, during which he had tried hard not to burden her with his most surprising need, and she had tried just as hard not to be burdened by it. He had loved her in a way she had never expected and which she had done her best, in every way she could, to deserve. He had trusted her in a way she had sometimes found unnerving, although not always blindly, accepting her judgements with fond amusement at times and a certain wry shaking of the head, but accepting them nevertheless.

‘If Gemma says it's all right, then it will be.'

And so he had picked up those pitiful children, at her direction, and carried them easily, cheerfully, all the way to Frizingley, finding it no hardship, not even breathless when he put them down at Father Francis's door. Laughing and ruffling their lousy heads, she remembered, perfectly good-humoured and relaxed even when one of them had been sick on the sleeve of his new jacket. And when Father Francis had come to tell them that the child, and many others in those foul camping places around St Jude's, were sick with the famine fever, he had been even-tempered about that too, concerned because she was concerned, involving himself because she was involved in the collecting of money and food and blankets, pressurizing the Poor Law Guardians on her behalf – since it was unseemly for a married woman to speak out for herself in public – that a fever-shed be built to supplement the single ward of the workhouse hospital where otherwise healthy pauper-women were being forced to give birth to their babies in the presence of pestilence.

Doing as
she
did, because if Gemma did it then it must be the decent thing.

The guilt of his death had never left her for a single moment. She had never seen this yellow sweating fever before, never realized that the human body – particularly so superb an example as Tristan's– could melt as quickly as candle-wax, youth and vigour and that silver-and-ivory beauty reduced overnight to burned out ashes. While, in the cesspits of St Jude's, those human scarecrows with nothing on their bones to begin with but loose skin and sore patches, managed to cling on.

His end, the doctor told her, had been quick and merciful. Linnet had threatened to kill her for it. But Gemma had quietly accepted that, receiving the accusation of murder without comment and returning to sit at his bedside, enduring the questions in his stricken face, the blank, animal bewilderment in his eyes, while Linnet knelt sobbing in the doorway, dragged to the ground by her grief yet too afraid of his infection to come any closer. A madwoman at his funeral, clutching her hair and tearing at her mourning veil as if she'd been drowning.

Mad ever since, by fits and starts, it seemed to Gemma, bitter and wild-eyed and easily hysterical, a savagely pious church-hen at one moment muttering her prayers, a flaunting, prowling sophisticate the next: a bottle of brandy always hidden away in her bedroom, of which Gemma pretended to be unaware.

And although she hated Gemma she had no intention of leaving her, her presence a living accusation which Gemma bore for two reasons: because Tristan had loved his sister and would want her to be cared for, and because Linnet's spite, the trouble she caused, the gossip she spread seemed, to Tristan's wife, a fitting chastisement. Linnet was the hair-shirt Gemma wore in atonement for not having loved Tristan with the passion of which she knew herself to be capable, and for her part in his death. Linnet was her way of doing penance.

Linnet, of course, would know that Daniel had returned to Frizingley. And although she was safely occupied this afternoon with some function at the parish church she would know somehow or other that Gemma had invited him to the manor.

‘I hear you had a visitor, dearest,' she would murmur smiling across the dinner-table with her immense, cloying sweetness. And then, abruptly throwing down her napkin and her fork, upsetting something with a splash or a clatter, the hysteria would start, the clenched fists, the trembling, the shrill, hoarse cries. ‘How could you entertain that man in my brother's home? Not that it ever was
his
home – you saw to that.'

The scalding tears. The chair scraped back, sometimes overturning. The flight upstairs, to the brandy bottle perhaps. And then, the next morning, the letters she had written all through the sleepless night applying for posts as governess, companion, pourer of tea from other women's china in farflung outposts of the empire. A whole bundle of them placed conspicuously on the hall table, which she would never send.

The scene had been played many times over and Gemma knew she would never respond to it. She would not even glance at those accusing envelopes turned face up to show her the addresses of colonels'wives in those remote Indian hill-stations where Linnet – it clearly implied – would prefer to be buried alive, hacked to death by rebellious natives, succumb herself to yellow fever, or just to boredom, rather than remain with the woman who had ruined her brother's life and besmirched his memory.

No. She could neither put a stop to Linnet's tantrums nor pander to them. She would simply put on the black woollen mourning dress and the widow's bonnet which, despite Miss Adeane's best endeavours, suited neither her figure nor her disposition and go to work in the soup-kitchen as she had worked every day since Tristan's funeral, gaining not only a very precise knowledge as to where meat and vegetables and pearl-barley might be bought in bulk at competitive prices – matters which had never entered her head before – but a new freedom from the demands of ‘polite society'; few of Frizingley's ladies caring to visit her, and certainly not wishing her to visit them, while she was so regularly exposed to contamination.