A Song Twice Over (2 page)

Not an offer, of course. Not directly. But if work of the right calibre existed, with prospects, opportunities, high expectations of advancement, then who better than Kieron Adeane to seize them?

He packed his bags that very day.

‘I'll make you a queen in England, Odette my love,' he vowed, hand on heart, to his wife.

‘Yes, Kieron. I know.'

They both were compelled to believe it. Kieron Adeane because, without this faith in himself, what had he? Odette because, after these twenty precarious years, she was still in love.

‘I'll go forward, my darling, and send for you.' Four months later he had done so. And now, four months after that he had sent ship-money and train-money and wagon-money to Cara, urging her to forsake the mounting and painting of fans and to join her loved ones, his invitation sparkling with good spirits and good luck.

He had secured a managerial situation in a textile factory, he wrote to her, where, in view of the number of Irish immigrants employed, his services were fast becoming invaluable, his standing in the thriving Irish community very high.

(A clerk, translated Cara, reading expertly between his lines, adding and subtracting his ledgers for twelve cramped hours a day and making a little extra composing letters home to Ireland, sent by men who could not write to families who could not read.)

While Odette too, the letter went on, had found excellent employment with a local milliner, a spinster lady of an age to see in Odette the daughter she had always wanted, and who seemed, moreover, most touchingly to appreciate such advice on certain practical matters, as Kieron himself had been glad to offer. An elderly woman alone, after all …? Who knew? Great things might be expected in the fullness of time.

(A few years of servitude and spite, translated Kieron's daughter, dancing attendance on an old woman's whims and fancies just to find an unsuspected cousin or nephew at the funeral holding out a legitimately greedy hand.)

There had been ‘expectations'such as these before. And it seemed to Cara – the letter still held speculatively between her fingers – that fan-painting was not really such an arduous trade. Yet – and somehow she could not stop herself from reading the letter twice over – her mother and father appeared to be well-lodged in this northern town of Frizingley, this monstrously expanding industrial miracle, as much the creation of industrial machinery as the steam engines and power looms which caused it to keep on doubling and re-doubling its size. A town where gold could be found in plenty among the engine grease and grime, where one could sense it – as
she
could sense her father's excited desire for it – glinting through the ever present pall of factory smoke, illuminated by the sudden flare of molten iron from a foundry, its prevailing harmony being the hissing and belching of industrially harnessed steam.

Not a pretty place. But the Adeanes had good beds there – she had her mother's word for that – good coal fires, good bread, shop-bought meat pies,
opportunity
. And what a pleasure, wrote Odette, to see, through all the smoke and dust, so many fine carriages and high-stepping horses, so many finely dressed ladies in high-plumed hats. How
advantageous
, wrote Kieron Adeane to
his
daughter, to place oneself in such close proximity to the rich.

He had ‘sent for her'once again.

‘We are comfortably settled, my little love.' Well – possibly. But it had taken the feel of his money in her hand to convince her; and then not entirely.

‘Your mother misses you – and frets herself cruelly for our little Liam.'

Yes, of that much she was quite certain. And she needed no more than the evidence of her own eyes to know how much the child Liam was fretting for his
grand'maman
Odette.

And so since it was, after all, the summer time, the hungry time, with fans not much in demand and employment for a lone woman and child precarious at any season, she had packed her bags, her skills, her little son and set sail once again across the water.

Her expectations were not immense. But adequate. Realistic. A good bed. A meat pudding. Her mother's gently flowing affection which both she and Liam had been sorely missing. That much – surely? And beyond it, not riches, no fabled ‘money from America' or anywhere else, but, nevertheless, a view of herself to which her circumstances did not entitle her, a conviction that Fate had never really intended her to be poor. Had Fate blundered then? Her father had always believed so. She believed it too.

Yet, for the moment, here she was on the deck of a creaking cargo boat, sitting on a bale of sacking about whose inner contents she did not wish to enquire, her child, exhausted by the journey, hardly stirring beside her, silent, lethargic, unwilling to support his own weight on his own two legs since there was nowhere
he
particularly wished to go.

She had developed her own manner of never quite explaining his existence in the world.

‘A bonny boy,' some woman or other seemed always to be remarking, the inevitable question already half spoken.

‘Yes,' she would reply demurely smiling. ‘Thank you.'

‘And his father? Is he …
gone
?'

And with all the patiently controlled sorrow of a young widow – and there were many of those in Ireland – she would cast down her eyes and release a faint, resigned sigh.

‘Oh yes – gone. So young, too. Oh dear … I try to
accept
– isn't that right? … do the best I can?'

Not the truth, of course, but not entirely a lie since her lover had indeed ‘gone'although no further than his home in Donegal and then to America, parting from her before either of them had realized her condition. And if it struck her later that he ought to have taken the possibility into consideration then, in all fairness, so, she concluded, ought she.

‘I'll send for you, Cara.'

His words had been very familiar.

And when she had understood, from his letters, that the ‘New Life'he had dreamed of had nothing particularly new about it after all; that, just as in Donegal, he could barely keep himself in buttermilk and potatoes, much less scrape together the wherewithal to maintain a pregnant bride, it had seemed pointless even to mention it. What, after all, could he have done had he known, except worry and feel ashamed of himself? And she had chosen to spare him that.

Her own mother Odette had looked after her, welcoming the baby, Liam, like a rare jewel. Kieron her father, had sat with her through her long labour, telling her tales of Kings and Empires and high adventure, telling her she was beautiful. She needed no others. She had been sixteen then. She was nineteen now and had taken care ever since to preserve her virtue as the only means she knew of avoiding unwed motherhood again. For if once might be judged unfortunate and could be accommodated, twice must surely be seen as slatternly or dull-witted. And she was neither.

When she thought of her lover now, it was none too clearly and without rancour. She
knew
she had loved him but could no longer quite remember the feeling. Nor was she consciously aware of any unusual degree of tenderness for her child. Did she make professions of love, after all for her own shoulder-blades or her elbows? Hardly. But she took good care, just the same, that they were well nourished and warm, and would make short work of anyone who threatened them with harm. Her solemn black-eyed Liam seemed as naturally a part of her as that. And he had his pretty
grand'maman
Odette, more often than not to croon to him and cosset him, to dote on him so exclusively that when he spoke at all, which was seldom, his accent was wholly, delightfully French.

Yet it was really on his account that she stood in such urgent need of a man's help in Liverpool.

Without Liam she could have gone ashore as freely as any of the country lads around her, as hardy and fit for work as they, to be seen by the port authority as another pair of hands for the loom or the plough, capable of fending for herself without recourse to charity. But a lone woman with a child in her arms might be required to convince some official person somewhere along the hard road to Frizingley that she was truly expected there, rather than simply making one among the two or three million Irish who came close to starvation every summer, fair harvest or foul; a growing multitude for whom no work existed, and who knew that if they could somehow scuttle aboard a ship for England then the English Poor Law – before shipping them back again – would be quite likely to give them a hot dinner.

And since Cara was not entirely convinced that the trains her father had mentioned really did run from Liverpool to Manchester and then to Leeds, nor by any means certain that, once in Leeds, she would actually find, at the address he had given, a carter willing to take her to Frizingley on the terms he professed to have arranged, she felt her need of a travelling companion to be great.

A man, young enough and presentable enough to match a woman in kid boots and a straw travelling bonnet with silk ribbons, strong enough to carry her two shabbily bulging yet infinitely precious carpet-bags ashore while she managed her son, so that anyone who might be watching – Poor Law Guardian, brothel keeper, sweatshop man – might see them as a couple and not trouble her. A man, best of all, who might have reasons of his own for wishing to avoid official scrutiny and so might be persuaded not only to put her on her train but to accompany her some part of her way. And if he expected to be amorously rewarded then she would make promises and break them with a clear conscience, it being her firmly held opinion – since the birth of Liam – that men, having nothing to lose from sexual encounters, ought only to ask such favours at their peril from women who most certainly did.

A man; not a gentleman, of course, since one did not encounter members of that particular species on the deck of a cargo boat, lounging among the baggage, but someone
likely
, who looked as if he might belong to her. Or she to him. Although she was not in the habit of regarding the relationship of man to woman in quite that fashion. And her practised eye had already seen him, last night as she came on board, leaning against the deck-rail above her, watching while she negotiated the shaky gangplank with her carpet-bags and her son, sure of her balance – precarious pathways being much as usual in her experience – her mind busy with her current necessities, her senses wary.

A man. She had looked up and there he was, young and lean and straight as an arrow, no bulk about him but a taut, whipcord strength promising toughness and the kind of well-paced, well-disciplined stamina she understood; a dark, clever face, a cool stare following her with an insolence and speculation to which she was no stranger; following her again this morning as she had picked her way across the deck – looking for
him
although he could not know it – positioning himself neither too close to her nor too far.

‘Good morning,' she had said crisply in passing, to let him know that he had stared long enough, speaking English words with only the merest hint of Ireland, a whisper of France, on her tongue. He had smiled, raised his hat, a little shabby she'd noticed – like her own – but at least a proper curly-brimmed beaver not a common corduroy cap, and sweeping past him, managing despite the carpet-bags and the stranglehold of Liam to make her skirts glide and sway with the weight of the half-dozen stiffened petticoats beneath them, she had installed herself on this bale of something reasonably soft and odourless and remained there, waiting for him.

He did not come at once. Others, indeed, came before him and were rejected calmly, pleasantly, in accordance with her policy of offending no one, since who knew what she might need before the day's end? But she had seen his interest and unless someone else should arouse more of it …? The brim of her pale straw bonnet shading her eyes from the brilliance of summer sky and sea she glanced swiftly around the deck, encountering no one among the women to challenge her. Just an unlettered country girl here and there and a few sad little wraiths of women, widows every one, draping themselves like empty shrouds over fretful children who, unlike her own drowsy, dreamy Liam, persisted, despite the perfect sailing weather, in wingeing and whining and feeling sick.

The young man in the beaver could have no use for these.

‘Good morning,' he said a half hour later, his voice as neutral as her own, a travelling man whose accent, too slight to be easily identified, would strike no false notes anywhere, and whose keen eyes, accustomed like hers to planning his route ahead while, at the same moment, guarding his back, had already measured her shabby, stylishly cut woollen dress against his own faintly threadbare but fashionable broadcloth coat and narrow trousers, the flamboyance of his scarlet neckcloth against the vanity – and the weight – of her flaring petticoats. And it seemed to him that a woman who would so overburden herself in these cramped and dangerous conditions for her pride's sake, was not to be despised.

Nor to be easily handled either. But if anyone watched for him, as they might, in Liverpool, they would be looking for a man alone, moving fast and light without baggage, not a man with a sleepy, heavy child, two carpet-bags, a woman with long black hair and sea-blue eyes. And in any case he was a young man in whom passion of many kinds was quickly stirred, impulsive by nature, taking risks for the pleasure they gave him; and from the moment he had first caught sight of her on the quayside dragging her burdens as if she rather pitied all those who did not possess them, he had understood two things. He would approach her because she could be of use to him and, even had it been otherwise, he would have approached her anyway.

‘My name is Daniel Carey.'

‘Cara Adeane.'

‘Where are you bound?'

‘Frizingley in Yorkshire.'

‘I'm going to Leeds.'

And they smiled at the same moment with the same satisfaction, the same self-congratulatory pleasure in having chosen right.