A Song Twice Over (28 page)

‘Yes. I'm cold.'

At that moment it was
all
she was. Cold, and terrified of growing colder, so that when he opened his arms and put them around her, his musk-scented cloak coming with them, ample enough to cover them both, all she felt was the salvation of his warmth, his hard, hot body supporting her as she shook and shivered against him, that blessed, beautiful fur enclosing her as in a nest, muffling her from the killing storm.

A nest, of course, that had a huge, probably wholly malevolent, black-browed spider at the centre of it, King Spider himself warming her up for his dinner she supposed. But the cold had numbed her senses and all her ingenuity and she could think of nothing at all to do about that.

If she was going to be devoured, well then … She was going to be devoured. She closed her eyes.

‘So – Cara Adeane. Would you care to spend Christmas with me?'

What on earth was he saying? Why her? Surely he had women enough?

‘Ah yes.' And his breath too was warm against her cheek and down the back of her neck, making her spine tingle. ‘But my mistresses go home to their husbands for Christmas, and although I
could
stay at the Covington-Pyms and ride out with the hunt on Boxing Day morning, and call round at the Moons on my way back to cheer up poor Marie … I think not. Variety, you see … So – Miss Adeane? What do you say to Christmas underneath a warm fur blanket with as much to eat and drink and as many logs on the fire as you like? And anything else I decide to give you – or teach you. And there
are
things you really ought to learn, you know.'

She didn't know. Or care. She felt his hands on her back and her waist and could not manage to care about that either. Last time it had been for a length of dress material. This time it would be to stop herself from freezing, or starving, to death.

Only one thing had to be settled.

‘I have my little boy and my mother to think of.'

‘I know.' She had expected he would. ‘I see no difficulty. Your mother looks after your son, doesn't she? Perhaps a little money would make
her
festive season easier to endure. A cellar full of coal. A roast goose. And – shall we say – anything else you can steal in ten minutes from my kitchen and carry home? You'll enjoy that.'

It struck her – thinking of Marie Moon and Audrey Covington-Pym – that if she was going to sell herself, and it seemed she was, then it would be as well not to come too cheap.

‘My little boy has nothing to wear for the cold weather.'

‘Of course.'

‘And it's a decent doctor he needs for his cough.'

‘You may instruct him to send his bill to me.'

‘All right.'

She had agreed to it. She was a whore then? Sairellen Thackray had always said she had the makings of it, would come to it one day. So the day had come, and she was accepting it very calmly. Why not? She had seen it happen to others many a time. No one in St Jude's would blame her. No one who had ever stood on the edge of that abyss where she had been teetering for so long, that held hunger and cold, sickness that could not be treated for lack of a shilling, children one could afford neither to raise nor to bury, would have a harsh word to say. No one who had ever struggled in the mire as she had, could fail to understand.

It was not what she had wanted.
He
was not what she had wanted. But he would not keep her long. And in the meantime, since he had spoken of thingss she ought to learn, she would see if he could tell her just what it was that women like Marie Moon and Audrey Covington-Pym did to stop themselves from bearing child after child after child.

That would be worth knowing.

‘Poor little Adeane,' he said kissing her ear and her neck. ‘Women don't survive alone, I'm afraid. It entertained me watching you try. Shall I help you to try again?'

‘How?' She was growing warmer now, and more alert.

‘We might work out a formula – if the next few days go well, that is. If you continue to entertain me. What do you want out of life, Adeane?'

She sighed. How could
he
understand.

‘Peace of mind.'

‘Oh
that
.' She had known he would treat it with contempt. ‘You mean money in your bank, don't you. I can show you how to manage that. What else?'

She screwed up her eyes, feeling suddenly fierce.

‘Not being at everybody's beck and call.'

She felt his mouth smile against her forehead.

‘Well, so long as you remain at mine, I think the rest could be managed. Nothing else? Nothing beyond coal and candles and cough medicine – in this your one and only lifetime?'

A fur cloak, she thought, like this one. Even a ride back to St Jude's in his phaeton would be something to begin with. But she doubted he would offer either.

She was quite right.

‘Very well then, Miss Adeane. I had better go now and pay my respects to the petty bourgeoisie. I shall see you tonight. In my seraglio. At eight o'clock, shall I? To make our arrangements?'

The wind, as he moved away from her, was like a knife.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘unless I freeze solid on my way back.'

He smiled, adjusting his cloak, drawing on his gloves.

‘Yes, the wind does have a raw edge to it, I must admit. May I advise you to hurry home as fast as you can.'

She walked with him to his carriage, the reckless high-perch phaeton she had seen often enough outside the Fleece, his horse held now by a wizened little urchin quite blue with cold, to whom he tossed a coin.

He mounted, settled his eddying fur comfortably around him, the reins loosely in his hands, the horse skittish – feeling the cold too perhaps – and ready to be off.

He looked down at her, smiling.

She looked up, clutching her inadequate plush tablecloths, the supple line of her body begging him for a ride.

‘Until this evening then, Cara.'

‘Yes.'

‘Hurry home, now – we can't have you catching a chill.'

‘I won't do that.'

‘Of course not – if you walk briskly, as I told you.'

He drew in his reins, raised his driving whip.

‘You haven't thought of anything else you'd like me to give you – by any chance?'

‘Yes.' And she had gritted her teeth to stop them from chattering. ‘Yes, I have.' A ride to town? That, surely, was what he was expecting. Please Captain Goldsborough – I'm so small and poor and
cold
. And when she had said it – when she had put so pathetic a value on herself – he would still drive off and leave her standing there, with those steep, chilly miles to go. To the devil with that.

Many things were becoming clearer to her now.

‘I'll have Miss Ernestine Baker's dress shop,' she said.

Shortly before the second anniversary of her wedding Mrs Tristan Gage suffered a miscarriage which kept her in bed for several cosseted days surrounded by every possible luxury and attention, including the embarrassed affection of her husband who had rather more idea how mares and hound bitches might feel at such moments than women, and the deep concern of her mother who, throughout her own twenty-six years of marriage had herself miscarried eight times.

And Gemma had not the heart to tell either of them how much they wearied her.

‘My dear, it is God's will,' Amabel kept on saying because that was the thing her own mother and her dear old nanny – both gone now – had always said to her.

‘You're looking simply splendid, Gemma. Isn't she looking splendid, Aunt Amabel?' Tristan kept on saying because that – surely – was what any woman must want to hear.

‘Oh, a little pale perhaps,' murmured Amabel, because paleness seemed essential to the occasion, although with dear nut-brown Gemma it was rather hard to tell. And she had looked so well since her marriage, so calm and composed and so … Well, not matronly, at any rate, as wicked Lizzie Braithwaite had suggested.
Noble
was the word which sprang to Amabel's mind. Regal, even. Although Queen Victoria, who had married just two years ago like Gemma, had produced the Princess Royal ten months after the wedding service, the Prince of Wales eleven months after that, and was thought on excellent authority, to be expecting again. And Victoria was even shorter in stature and a whole year younger than Gemma. Amabel, although hovering on the brink of tears, tried valiantly, in her own fashion, not to mind. Or not too much. For she had actually been engaged in the very pleasant task of deciding which room in her new house at Far Flatley might best be converted into a nursery when a messenger had come from Frizingley with the awful news.

And Amabel could not stop herself from thinking that this dreadful, dirty town must surely be to blame, that if Gemma had been less stubborn about remaining here, in this dark old manor, standing cheek-by-jowl with the brewery and the foundry and those hundreds and hundreds of unwashed, unlettered people who worked in them, then this tragedy would not have occurred.

Oh yes –
naturally
– a young wife needed a home of her own. A young couple in the first blissful days of their union needed to be alone together. Not that Gemma had actually said as much, although Amabel's tender heart had at once understood. But John-William had bought so much land at Far Flatley from Colonel Covington-Pym, a whole bank of his river and several fields beyond that there would have been ample room to build Gemma and Tristan a dear little nest. Although Almsmead, the house they
had
built, was big enough, she felt quite certain, for half a dozen pairs of newly married turtle-doves to lose themselves in delicious privacy whenever they chose.
She
would have been the last person in the world to interfere with that.

And Almsmead was her own dream come true, a medieval castle in pale, newly-quarried stone on the outside, spacious and high-ceilinged and fitted with every modern gadgetry within. Bigger, wider, grander in all its dimensions than the houses the Colcloughs and the Lords had built, since John-William had cleverly engaged the same architect and told him to produce something similar but much more splendid. And the dear, good man had designed Almsmead, in the centre of a green field; had surrounded it with a rose-garden; given her apple trees and a lily-pond; a trellised, covered walk down to the river with its clear, clean water in which she could see smooth pebbles and little silvery fishes instead of the slime and gas bubbles and dead cats one saw – if one had the stomach to look – in Frizingley's canal.

There were no rows upon rows of mean,
diseased
little cottages now to press upon her and worry her. As they
had
worried her. Enormously. No longer that terrible clattering of clogs in the street to wake her every morning and start her thinking about all those poor people and those ragged little children hurrying to the mill. Nor those dreadful factory hooters, Mr Colclough's from the foundry, Mr Lord's answering it, her husband's from the top of the hill, Ben Braithwaite's intruding as stridently as his mother's purple taffeta dresses from the other side of town, each one of them blasting out its five minute warning as to the pains and penalties of being late.

She could sleep now in peace and with her windows open to sweet air and silence, nothing to disturb her in the mornings but birdsong and the lowing of Colonel Covington-Pym's cattle, the barking of a dog that would most certainly be a pedigree animal bred for the retrieving of partridge and pheasant, as far removed from the yapping mongrel-packs of Frizingley as could be. And when her maids had got her dressed and done her hair and she had breakfasted by her tall windows overlooking her manicured rose-garden and a green, daisy-starred meadow, she had nothing to alarm her throughout the day but the possibility of a visit from the formidable Mrs Covington-Pym or the awkwardness, as she took her carriage-exercise, of encountering the wife of her dear friend Mr Adolphus Moon who had made himself so very agreeable. Particularly to Linnet.

The house, of course, had been long in the building. John-William insisting on having everything just so, Amabel herself taking time and immense delight in her choice of furnishings, living a dozen delightful dramas every day over Aubusson rugs and inlaid cabinets, the recklessness of silk damask on newly plastered walls, the sheer extravagances of crystal and china which Linnet – the dear child – had encouraged her to commit.

For years she had cherished Almsmead in her imagination. For ten months she had watched it grow, had chosen the textures and colours of her own personality in which to clothe it. For almost six months now she had known the joy of waking every morning in a brand new feather bed like a fluted, pale pink shell in which no other woman had ever slumbered.

It was the most exciting time of her life. The happiest. Or would have been had Gemma not insisted on remaining in the very centre of so much decay and corruption and ‘horridness', in Frizingley.

She had spoken to her about it, not sharply, of course – she could never do that – but with disappointment to which Gemma had calmly replied, ‘Mother, I told you all along that I didn't want to live in the country.'

‘Oh yes, dear.' Amabel's chin had quivered. ‘But I just never believed you. How
could
I?'

How indeed, when Almsmead was so much better in every way than this creaking old hall and the Goldsboroughs'possibly valuable but, in her view, horribly antique furniture which had come with it, held together, she often thought, by little more than the beeswax with which it was polished. And these tiny, mullioned windows in their deep embrasures which let in the light so strangely, shadows like dark brown varnish suddenly filtered through by thin beams of light which might be any colour from silver to amber. And the sickening clamour of street noises beyond the cloister wall, the sickening odour of those who made them. Amabel had worried that Tristan would not like it.