A Song Twice Over (40 page)

He was instantly, predictably, belligerent. ‘And what has Lizzie Braithwaite to say to it?'

‘That I'm misguided – and peculiar.'

‘She'd better not let
me
hear her, Gemma.'

‘Oh no. She won't. Because she thinks you agree with her. She's going around saying what an oddity I am for employing Mr Carey but that there's nothing to worry about because you'll soon put a stop to it.'

‘Ah – she's saying that, is she?'

But in the end it was Linnet Gage and the Colcloughs who tipped the scales in Gemma's favour.

‘Linnet, my dear, I find this situation most awkward,' Uriah Colclough told her. ‘So much so that unless it should be speedily resolved then – at no matter what personal sacrifice – I would feel it my Christian duty to disassociate myself … For the sake of my sister, Rachel, you understand. A bride whose innocence should not be troubled – forgive me – by the strange behaviour of one among us who – well – must surely be aware of the error of her ways …?'

And Linnet, in something of a panic, knowing Uriah Colclough to have formed a highly personal relationship with a god he closely resembled, a prim and intensely shockable deity whose notions of ‘Christian duty' exactly matched Uriah's own, had gone at once and made a fuss to Amabel. Gemma, she insisted, must be protected from her own good nature, must be prevented, at all costs, from falling into the clutches of a scheming and, rather worse, a
common
man. And quickly too, before social ostracism overcame her. Before ‘everybody'in Frizingley began to snub her, to draw their skirts aside whenever she happened to pass as they did with Mrs Marie Moon. To make of her, and of all those closest to her, a band of outcasts, no longer to be seen at the Assembly Rooms or the Hunt Ball.

Social death. Could Amabel survive it? Amabel certainly did not think so. But, in reducing her to a state of abject terror, Linnet also revealed herself a little too plainly to John-William, who, although he might be ready to give her a certain amount of pin-money and put up with her as a companion for his wife, had not the least intention of allowing her to interfere.

‘Stuff and nonsense,' he told his weeping Amabel. ‘I'll not turn against my daughter for the sake of an old maid in breeches like Uriah Colclough. Nor for the sake of Miss Linnet Gage either. Because all that's bothering her is that he might not wed her. Which he won't – no matter what Gemma does.'

‘But John-William, Linnet and Uriah are absolutely devoted …'

‘So they are,' he said sourly, feeling far from well that morning. ‘Linnet is devoted to Linnet. And Uriah to Uriah. But they won't make a match of it. If he weds anybody at all then he'll go for money, like his father did. Like Ben Braithwaite. Like they all do. And
will
. And if Miss Linnet had her wits about her she'd settle for the curate or the doctor, before it's too late. It would be a kindness, Amabel, to tell her so. And while you're about it, you might as well mention that Gemma employed that Chartist fellow on my instructions. Well – he got me home from the moor that day, didn't he, when I had my attack? We owe him something. And I'd like to hear Lizzie Braithwaite questioning
my
judgement. Or that canting little Colclough.'

Amabel, who had no experience whatsoever of being spoken to so sharply, had wept and then submitted. If her John-William said it would be all right then it would be. And she would just have to be especially kind to Linnet when the time came for Uriah Colclough to jilt her. She wondered if a little holiday somewhere in a warm, soft climate might be the best thing to distract the poor girl's mind? But Linnet, aware that her only chance of getting Uriah to the altar lay in persistence, by dragging on their relationship so long and getting it speculated about so widely that neither he nor his god could shirk the ‘Christian duty'of marrying her, was most anxious to give him no excuse to break free. Not only must she herself remain blameless and angelic, so must everyone around her. She perfectly understood that. And, Gemma's father having failed her, she turned at once to Gemma's husband.

‘Tristan, you must learn to control your wife a little better, you know.'

‘Oh – is it really so desperate as all that, my darling? Just a storm in a stirrup-cup, maybe? The Larks and the Covington-Pyms aren't inclined to fret over it, I can tell you.'

She smiled at him, coolly but very patiently.

‘The Larks and the Covington-Pyms have different standards, Tristan. So, very possibly, do you and I. But if the Colclough's find Gemma's behaviour shocking, then I – my darling – have no choice but to be shocked by it too. Therefore I
am
shocked. Most deeply. It damages me, Tristan. Can you allow that?'

‘Good Lord, no. Absolutely not.'

‘Then do keep your wife in order, my love. For my sake, and your own. The Chartist candidate is a very handsome man, they say.'

Smiling easily, lazily, he threw an arm around her shoulders and hugged her tight.

‘No fear. I don't think Gemma goes in for that sort of thing, you know.'

‘I do know. But “knowing” doesn't matter, does it. It's what people are saying that counts. And until I'm Mrs Colclough we'll just have to be above suspicion, won't we? Even Gemma. So help me now, Tristan darling – as you know I'd help you.'

Of course he knew it. Dearest Linnet. Still the loveliest girl in the world.
He'd
never yet seen anybody to compare with her, at any rate. And when had she ever let him down? Never. She never would. But, when he saddled his new bay gelding and rode over from Almsmead to Frizingley Hall, his interview with Gemma came a day too late, producing nothing but a calm statement that the appointment of Mr Daniel Carey had been sanctioned, in fact suggested in the first place, by her father.

‘If you object so strongly, Tristan, then all I can tell you to do is have a word with him about it.'

‘Well – no. Perhaps not.' Tristan knew, none better, how futile that would be. ‘But you know, Gemma, I do feel … Well, shouldn't you have talked it over with me first? I mean, at least mentioned it, and given me a chance to speak my piece …?'

‘Would
you
really have minded, Tristan – one way or the other?'

Her eyes looked very clear to him, not unfriendly but with a cool,
knowing
look about them which not only made him uneasy but reminded him far too much of her father.

‘Dash it all, Gemma, of course I mind. You'll be getting yourself talked about. And that's one of the worst things that could happen to a woman – surely?'

She smiled at him, quite pleasantly, sitting well away from him, he'd noticed, in this strange little low-ceilinged parlour, made almost circular by its wide bay window, which her father had used as a smoking-room and her mother had called, for form's sake, his study. Gemma's study now, it seemed, with a gentleman's leather-topped, somewhat battered oak desk – a relic, he supposed, of the Goldsboroughs – placed solidly in the window, the tiny panes of glass making their coloured reflections behind her.

‘That's right, Tristan,' and her voice, too, was cool and friendly, rather as if she was explaining a joke she didn't even expect him to understand. ‘A woman should never get herself talked about. That's one of the first things I ever learned. My grandmother was so proud of her obscurity that she even had them put it on her gravestone. “Mary-Jane, beloved wife of Tom, who never drew attention to herself in any way.” But what they also taught me, Tristan dear, is the absolute obedience one owes to a father. And in the matter of the schoolmaster I am merely carrying out my father's wishes. Surely no one can blame me for that?'

Linnet, of course, could blame her – Tristan had no doubt about it – and did so, thoroughly and finally, when he rode back to Almsmead to report his total lack of success. Although she did not, of course, blame him.

‘Oh dear,' she said, smiling at him because she loved him and had always known he was not strong. ‘What a pity. Never mind, of course. Although you do realize, darling – don't you? – that, as her husband the law allows you to
compel
her – to ensure her obedience in just about anything you'd like her to do. Lucky for her you're not that kind of man.'

He smiled down at her, loving her too, wishing he had the whole world to lay at her feet, but knowing his own limitations. As she knew them.

‘Yes. Lucky for Gemma. Not so lucky for you, though, Linnet.'

‘I suppose not.'

‘I'm sorry. But I can't tackle that old man, my darling. And even if I had the courage to try – which I haven't – it wouldn't work. He'd out-fox me in the first five minutes flat.'

‘Of course.' She lay her cool, narrow hand on his arm and leaned against him companionably, as light and fragrant as a drift of lavender. ‘Because he's a horrid old money-grubber. And you're a gentleman. But one should take into account, of course, that poor Mr Dallam is an
old
man, and very far from well.'

He chuckled and dropped a kiss on her lovely, passionless forehead, her ‘angel's brow'as Uriah Colclough called it although he had kissed it only with his eyes.

‘That's right. Not well at all. So – it means you're ready to wait, then?'

‘My darling, I see no alternative,' she said and, returning to the house, wrote a note to Gemma full of tea-parties and dinner-parties and ‘I do hope you are coming over on Thursdays to meet dear Mr Adolphus Moon who is bringing a musical friend to play the violin', followed by a rather longer note to Uriah Colclough in which she endeavoured to suggest that it would be a ‘Christian duty'indeed, and one very likely to score heavy points in heaven, should he attempt her rescue from this house of the ungodly, where her chaste warnings had fallen on such stony ground.

And within a week or two the scandal of the mill-school had effectively blown over, helped not a little by Rachel Colclough's agonized midnight revelation that she was destined not for the wealthy Rochdale cotton spinner and lay preacher they had found for her but to become a nun; Frizingley finding ample diversion in the attempts of her mother – and Miss Cara Adeane – to nip her sudden vocation in the bud.

The wedding-invitations had been sent out, after all. The wedding-dress ordered. The Colcloughs had spent money visiting Rochdale during the courtship, which had involved new clothes, gifts to the fiance's mother and sisters and a sizeable donation to the restoration fund at his chapel. And one could not allow such generosity to be thrown back in one's face by a hysterical girl's notion to enter not just a nunnery but presumably – since one did not find such establishments attached to Nonconformist chapels – the High Church of England.

Scandal indeed, particularly when it became clear how inextricably the pale-lipped, blank-eyed Rachel had confused her devotion to the Anglican Christ with one of His ministers, a golden-skinned young curate at the Parish church, the resulting Colclough horror providing enough entertainment to put Gemma Gage and her Chartist schoolmaster altogether in the shade.

Sending the amethyst cat to Daniel Carey had been the greatest act of daring in Gemma's life. The brooch, of course, was her own to do with as she pleased, a jewel of only moderate value which could have been given to a woman friend as a keepsake or to an obliging maidservant as a reward without arousing any particular comment. But to give it to a man who was not a servant implied a degree of intimacy which, irrespective of whether or not intimacy had ever taken place – since who cared for pale truth when one could have multi-coloured scandal – could have seriously damaged her reputation and, at the very least, caused him embarrassment.

Unthinkable, of course. A type of recklessness to which she had never been prone. But when she had seen him in the street outside Miss Adeane's shop her hand had gone at once to the little cat with its amethyst body and sparkling diamond eyes, her mind emptying of all the fussy conventions and proprieties with which she had been taught to fill it, remembering solely and acutely the day in the manor garden when other people's wishes and values – not her own – had made her clumsy about inviting him into the house and had prevented her altogether from giving him her brooch.

He could hardly have noticed her, she supposed, on the other side of the shop window, with silver-and-ivory Linnet on one side of her, the tawny magnificence of Miss Adeane on the other, the self-righteous fury of the Colcloughs all around them. He could have seen no more than a blur of faces and would have been unlikely, she concluded with realism but with not a trace of self-pity, to pick out hers. Yet she had thought of him very deeply and very seriously all the way home, her reverie effectively removing her during the carriage drive and for the rest of the evening from the posturings of Linnet and the Colcloughs who were coming to dine.

As they dined very frequently at the manor these days, she had reminded herself, in accordance with Amabel's policy of pushing ‘our two dear bashful little lovebirds'into the same nest.

‘We must really do all we can to help them along,' Amabel was always telling her. ‘Linnet is so devoted. And Uriah may look stern, sometimes, Gemma, I quite agree with you there, but not small-minded. No, dear. He is merely rather shy. She will be such a good wife to him. And one can tell with half an eye that he positively worships and reveres her. She is an angel from heaven to him, Gemma. You must see that.'

But what Gemma saw, that evening, was that beneath all his pious talk of angels Uriah Colclough was burning for the kind of access to Linnet's body which no one – except Uriah himself – could pretend to be other than acutely carnal. Whereas Linnet, despite the melting glances of encouragement she kept bestowing upon him and all the clever ways she had of sitting with her bare shoulders in a pool of candlelight, was not only revolted at the mere idea of his touch but, if she ever managed to become his wife, would do everything in her power, on every possible occasion, to avoid it.