A Song Twice Over (83 page)

It seemed unlikely they would meet again.

‘You'd better go,' she said. ‘The town is crawling with constables. You can't wait until daylight.'

‘No.' He looked at her. ‘There was no one else I could call out to, Cara.'

‘All right – it's all right.'

‘Have I put you in danger?'

‘How did you know you could trust me?'

‘It never occurred to me not to.'

‘Well –' she gave a high, cracked laugh. ‘Thanks for that much, at any rate. Now just go, Daniel –
go
– oh – with good riddance if you like – But
go
.'

‘Yes. I'm going.' But he was standing very still. ‘Cara – there's Gemma Gage.'

‘Yes? What about her?'

‘Would you tell her you saw me?'

‘Just that I saw you?'

‘Yes.' He shook his head like a dog coming out of water. ‘That's all. I couldn't be asking her to come here, now could I? A woman as – sheltered – as that …?'

‘No, Daniel. It's all right.'

He smiled, shakily she thought. ‘So now I'll be on my way, Cara my darling, never to trouble you again.'

‘It's no trouble. No trouble at all,' she told him, and burst into tears.

‘It was a long time ago, Cara,' he said.

Another world. A girl on the open deck of a cargo boat wearing a second hand dress as a queen might wear her coronation robe, a young man taut and slender as an arrow, wearing a shabby top hat and a light heart. They embraced each other now, that girl and that young man, in a hard, fierce hug; and parted.

‘Keep safe. Keep out of trouble,' she said.

‘I loved you, Cara.'

‘I loved you.'

The young man had become a disillusioned crusader, spiritually sickened and physically exhausted. The girl, no matter what other skills and sophistications she had acquired along her way, had never learned to love anyone else.

The door of their inner room opened. ‘Ah – there you are, Mr Carey,' a voice said and, with the most extreme horror she had ever felt in her life, she found herself looking straight at Christie.

He took no notice of her. She stood pressed against the wall and watched, in a sick haze, as the room filled up with men she knew to be special constables, moving deliberately and slowly, ponderously almost, yet everywhere, their menace seeping through every crack like floodwater. Christie's men, under his command, working at his direction.

‘Good evening, Ned,' she heard him say, ‘I told you I'd be paying you a visit one of these dark nights.' And she might have suspected Ned of treachery had it not been impossible to miss the snarling hatred in his face, the murderous grip of his hands on the bar counter.

Christie made a gesture and two young, burly, pink-cheeked men stepped forward and, twisting Daniel's arms behind his back with the roughness of inexperience, tied them with a cord. He did not move. Nor she. He did not turn his head to look at her. He looked at Christie, leaning against the edge of the bar, his black fur cloak falling to his ankles, a gentleman taking his arrogant, high-bred ease among low company, according no more than faint amusement to the scalding hate he was arousing in the barman behind him. Knowing quite well – she thought – how desperately Ned was longing to put a meat-cleaver into his back, yet dare not.

Not caring.

‘Take him,' Christie said. And she knew that was what they were doing exactly.
Taking
him. Daniel still arrow straight and hard but growing every minute more anonymous. Not really Daniel any longer but the Prisoner. The Victim. The Sacrifice.

She couldn't bear it. And yet she made no sound, continuing to press herself against that wall until she seemed to be growing there, or simply disappearing in her helplessness. There was nothing she could do. No choice but to stand grafted to the wall as they took Daniel away. There was nothing he could do but go with them. In absolute silence. Still not looking at her. Doing nothing, in fact, but stare into the distance beyond all of them, across that threshold of time, backwards or forwards she couldn't tell. But in another place. Already somewhere else.

Did he think, seeing Christie, that she had betrayed him? Could he possibly think that?

Reaching the doorway Christie paused, his long fur cloak swaying around him, his eyes blank, his mouth, although it was smiling most charmingly, very hard. ‘Thank you, Cara. I'll make it worth your while, of course,' he said.

The door closed behind him. Behind Daniel. She had never known a room so empty. A wall so thin, collapsing on her, it seemed and pushing her forward as she fell against the bar counter, towards the bulk she only barely remembered to be Ned.

‘
Do
something,' she shrieked and went on shrieking until he caught her by the shoulders and shook her into silence.

‘All right. I bloody will.' She expected nothing from him, nothing from anybody, ever again, and he had to shake her very hard this time to quell the hysteria and make her listen.

‘What that bastard Goldsborough who thinks he knows everythin' don't realize is that there must be at least three dozen of the lads out there tonight, drillin'on the moor. If they can head him off … Aye – and gi'me ten minutes with him –'

She paid no need to that nor to any of the other threats and recriminations he muttered as she ran beside him over the rough ground, jarring her ankles on stones and spiky grasses but keeping on going, running headlong to anyone, anywhere, gipsies or vagabonds or thieves, who might help her. She was aware of pain without really suffering it. She had no time for that. She had several vital and most specific things to do. Get to Daniel. Set him free. Tell him she had not betrayed him. Kill Christie Goldsborough. And if Ned meant to kill him too, as seemed likely, then she would just have to make sure she got to him first.

But she had fallen some way behind when she saw the band of ‘physical force'men marching like a spectral battalion out of the dark, Ned falling in beside them and muttering urgently enough to make them change direction. They had agreed to go after Daniel, and she with them, desperate to keep them in view since she was completely lost by now in a night that was growing blacker and most unseasonably cold.

They were not heavily armed. Only sticks and pickaxe handles, rather than their home-made pikes, but it was enough to put the fear of death into the special constables – only young bank-clerks and solicitors'and merchants'sons after all, enrolled for the occasion – when they breasted the hill and came roaring down on them, yelling Chartist slogans and ‘Vive la République'.

Cara had seen enough violence to know that one never took in the whole of it, that it became fragmented, split, distorted, a raucous confusion lasting an eternity and over in moments, into which she plunged headlong as she had been doing all evening, regardless of the blows and curses thudding all around her, ready to walk through anything or anyone to get to Daniel and somehow getting there, to throw herself on her knees behind him and claw, with her strong, dressmaker's fingers, at the cord about his wrists.

Urgency was all that was in her now. The ‘specials'were giving ground, scattering, she could see that. But there might be others. Might well be soldiers somewhere nearby in the hills, a squadron of dragoons like the one used to such lethal effect in Bradford, coming at full gallop to ride them, and then to cut them down. Hurry then. Hurry with this damnable cord some nervous young idiot had pulled so tight. She could hear Daniel breathing heavily and felt a tremor of pain in him. Well, she was hurting herself too, splitting her nails and her fingertips so that when she finally tore the knot apart there was blood on it and on Daniel's shirt cuffs, blood on her hands. Both his and hers.

‘Run,' she yelled at him.

‘I didn't believe what he said about you,' he yelled back.

What did that matter now?

‘Run,' she shrieked. ‘
Go
. I'll be all right. Run.'

And when he caught hold of her hands to take her with him she wrenched them free. ‘No. I can't keep up with you. I'd slow you down. Go.'

‘Cara …'

‘For Christ's sake …' Putting her bloodstained hands against his chest she pushed him as hard as she could and ran away in the opposite direction stopping for breath only when she saw a knot of ‘physical force'men close in around him and disappear, all together, into the night.

They would know about the soldiers. They too would wish to move fast, not caring to go up against military sabres with their walking sticks. Having saved Daniel they would now, very naturally, set about saving themselves. Suddenly she was alone on an empty battlefield, the wind getting up, a weight of darkness falling around her until she came upon one of those hollow basins in the land walled in by high and always unexpected moorland stones, and saw, in a brief unveiling of the moon, that she had reached a killing-ground.

The moon went in again and quickly, her own life perhaps depending upon it, she stepped back into the shadow of the most distant rock and froze there, her very breathing suspended, as she watched the half-circle of men close in upon their quarry. Ned O'Mara, former champion of the bare-knuckle boxing ring, and five others, big, gnarled men, every one of them, with the long arms and wide shoulders of manual labour, the blank half-mesmerized expressions of those about to perform an act of ritual slaughter. Not Chartists, these. Just men who had been branded as trouble makers and had allowed their grievances to fester. Men who hated authority, the millmaster, the landlord, and who had cornered themselves a prime member of the species now in Christie Goldsborough.

Six of them moving very slowly towards him and Christie moving just as slowly away until his back was against the rock. The moon came out again and she saw him in what – in that dark place – seemed almost a flash of light, saw the sudden white gleam as he smiled, the white of his shirt as he threw back his cloak and shrugged it off.

‘Gentlemen …?' he said.

Once again she could do nothing but press herself against cold stone and wait. For murder to be done, this time, there seemed no doubt of that. Murder which reached her ears as panting, hot and animal through the gloom as he went down beneath the first hammer blows of those dozen fists, striking in unison, to be trampled into the earth by a dozen booted feet. And then their six dark, intent figures crouching over him, mangling and mauling like hounds worrying a fox, inflicting a far more leisurely and lethal damage now as systematically, almost lovingly, they reduced the great landlord of St Jude's to a bundle of bleeding rags.

She had not the least conception of how long it lasted. Time, like her breathing, being held in suspension, put in abeyance until first one, then two of them, broke away from the circle of human sacrifice, blood-lust cooling to a point where it was no more than a common beating and they had had enough of it.

‘Come on, lads.' Somebody was calling to them from the brow of the hill. One of the ‘physical force'men she thought, for whom violence was strictly a political, never a personal matter and who, by his tone of voice, did not approve of this. He shouted something else she did not catch. Something more urgent. And even then Ned O'Mara launched a final kick from his studded, steel-toed boot before shambling away into the night, stumbling and cursing and needing a drink now, she supposed, far more than anything else.

Christie remained very still. So did she. ‘
Some day you'll go too far
.' How often had she told him that? ‘
Some day you'll strip somebody too bare
.' So it had been Ned.

Releasing her breath, almost learning to breathe again, she stayed a while longer in the shadows, doubting her ability to move had she even wished to try. Which she did not. Yet – eventually – she had to acknowledge that Ned might well come back again. And if he saw her here and had enough energy left, she thought he would probably rape her. What better way, after all, to round off his revenge? Christie dead on the ground. Christie's woman used and humiliated and then left to die beside him. She knew how much that would appeal to Ned. She had better get away, then. Quickly, while she could still tell herself, with conviction, that he
was
dead and beyond any help she could give him. While she could just tiptoe away without looking, without having to reproach herself later …? Could she? Damnation. Why not?

Emerging from her shelter she walked gingerly towards him, treading on eggshells, and knelt on the churned-up ground where he lay curled in what she knew to be an attempt to protect the most vital parts of himself against impossible odds, his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms around his head, trying to save his eyes and teeth and his brain at the sacrifice of his ribs.

But they had managed to kick him in the face just the same, she noticed, blood pouring – as the blood of dead men did not flow – from his nose, one cheek gashed to the bone, one eye blackened and closed, the other cheek embedded with grit, made hideous by torn and hanging strips of skin. His ribs were certainly broken. The tortured scrape of his breathing told her that. One arm too, she thought, by the awkward set of it. What else?

He was not dead. But if she left him to lie here she knew he would not last the night. For if the cold and damp failed to finish him off, and Ned O'Mara did not return, the hills were full of tramps and vagabonds who would make short work of him for the rings on his fingers and the money he would have in his pockets. Could she leave him long enough to fetch help? She thought not. Could she even be sure of finding him again, one stretch of moorland looking very much like another in the dark?

She would have her work cut out, she thought grimly, to find Frizingley itself, let alone a man huddled in the shadow of a rock. Where was it? Somewhere to the left – surely? – and then downhill? She hoped so. Dare she even risk the road? Glancing down at him she decided she would have to. He was a big, solid, well-nourished man. And heavy. Oh Lord – Dear Lord. What a farce life was. What a tragedy.