A Song Twice Over (56 page)

‘You're a clever lass, Cara.'

‘So it might all be your fault …'

‘It might.'

‘Not mine at all – not altogether.'

‘Happen so.'

Sairellen sat down heavily at the other side of the well-scrubbed, well-bleached table, her gnarled hands resting on the wood, touching it, her sigh, when it came, very long and hollow and painful to both of them. A moment of grudging affection which could not be spoken. A certain unwilling respect. The acknowledgement, whether they liked it or not – and they did not much like it – that in many essential ways they resembled each other.

‘Where will you go?'

‘Nottingham. I have a brother there. And Luke thinks he can get work. The lodgers left this morning. Two of them in a hurry – being Chartist pamphleteers. We'll be gone by Friday. My brother can give us a roof for a night or two, I reckon.'

‘Have you any money?'

‘That's a question I've been brought up neither to ask, my girl, nor to answer.'

‘That means you haven't, I suppose – that you've given your savings to “the Cause”. Or one of them.'

But what savings had there ever been, she wondered? When one remembered the number of travelling ‘politicals'who had stayed here free of charge, the coal Sairellen had used to warm them after their cold and dangerous journeyings, the ample dinners she had set down before them to stave off the near starvation of the open road. When one remembered the pittance Luke earned and how much of it he had given to Richard Oastler, to waifs and strays like Anna Rattrie: to Odette and to herself in those far off days of near destitution when they had formed part of the multitude who needed it.

How much could possibly be left? The price of the journey to Nottingham, living expenses for the week which would be all Luke could allow himself to find work, and the week it would then take before his first wages? Little more than that. They both knew it. And so they sat face to face across the kitchen table throwing words at each other, kind words spoken tersely, sharply, to keep in its proper place – well hidden – their most grudging affinity.

‘I can help you, Sairellen.'

‘I dare say. But it's not needed.'

‘Yes it is.'

‘Nay, lass. I'll be the judge of that. Luke's a careful man, never one for putting his money across a bar counter. I saw to that. We've enough put by.'

‘Sairellen – I've done well lately …'

‘Your sort always does.'

‘So take advantage of it. You helped me once.'

Sairellen shook her head. ‘Luke helped you. I told you to take yourself off and leave him alone – which is what I'm telling you now. And if you had …'

‘Then you'd still have been housing the Chartists and the Oastlerites and handing out their damned pamphlets.'

‘So I would. And I'll have no bad language in this house, my girl – since it
is
my house, until Friday.'

Three days.

Cara got to her feet.

‘All right.
Be
stubborn.
Be
awkward.' And then, tears welling up into her eyes she burst out, ‘I don't know what to say to you.' She knew that the truth, if she could speak it, would be ‘I'll miss you. I can't imagine this place without you. I can't bear it.' But it would have been unwise, of course, to say so.

‘Then don't waste your words, lass. Just go about your business, look after yourself, and good luck to you. I doubt we'll be seeing you again.'

‘Sairellen …'

Sairellen shook her head.

‘No, Cara.'

She got up too, stiffly, as if her joints, once allowed to rest a moment, needed time and a little persuasion to get themselves started again. An old woman. Over sixty, supposed Cara, whose fighting strength – quite soon perhaps – must surely fade. How bitterly, when that day came, she would resent her own weakness. How bitterly Cara resented it now, on her behalf.

‘I'll tell you this, Cara Adeane,' she said. ‘Luke
wants
to go. He was born and bred here but now he wants to leave. Something here has started to unsettle him. Am I to blame for that?'

Dumbly, still close to tears, Cara shook her head.

‘So, when he comes to say goodbye to you – as I expect he will – you'll be a good lass, won't you, and make it as easy for him as you can. No letting him think he has something to come back for – when he hasn't, Cara. No filling him up with your blarney so that I have to watch him eating his heart out instead of getting on with what he
ought
to be doing. That's how you can help him – and me – if you'd be so kind. Don't hurt him.'

‘I wouldn't.'

Once again, for perhaps the last time Cara would see it, came the heavy, sardonic shrug.

‘Left to yourself, miss, there's no telling what you'd do. But my lad has a good head on his shoulders, the Lord be thanked. He'll take himself a decent, quiet wife one of these days – the sooner the better – And you'll be all right, Cara. You'll always do well, in your fashion.'

She opened the door. Cara went out into the street and walked away, hearing the door close firmly and – if Sairellen had her way – finally behind her.

She did not believe it.

For a few moments, walking down the familiar hill to St Jude's Square she felt bereaved, dispossessed, a hungry, harassed girl again dressed in two plush tablecloths stitched together against the cold, shivering as she had shivered then despite her cashmere shawl and the pale, uncertain sunshine of April. But it was not in her nature to accept defeat, or loss, so tamely.
She would not have it
. The injustice burned her. The absence of Luke was already gnawing a void inside her that not even fourteen times fourteen dresses could hope to fill. And she had walked through the door of the Fleece, as desperate in her way as on the morning she had lost Gemma Gage's brown satin, before she realized it. She had taken no conscious decision, laid no plans. She simply knew – as she had known on that other morning – that if Christie wanted to help her then he could. And, just as there had been a price then, she was in no doubt that there would be one now.

She would pay it. Gladly.

‘He's busy,' said Ned O'Mara, his unsteady bulk filling the passageway leading to the back stairs.

‘Tell him I want to see him.'

‘What's the good o'that?' Ned was grinning drunkenly, lewdly she supposed, although anything he did had ceased to trouble her. ‘If he was after wanting to see you – Miss Adeane – then he'd have sent for you. And since he hasn't …'

‘Who's with him?'

‘Wouldn't you just like to know?'

‘Not particularly.' She had learned, quite easily in fact, to be brusque with Ned, or anyone else who stood in her way. ‘So either you go and tell him I'm here or stand aside and I'll go myself.'

‘I'm not no message boy.' Ned's mouth had grown ugly, remembering, perhaps, the time when she had begged him, very prettily sometimes, for chicken legs and custard pies, for her little boy's supper, bones for her dog; and when possessing her had seemed by no means impossible.

That time was over.

‘No kind of a boy at all, Ned. Not any longer.'

Her voice had a cutting edge to it like a knife and, clumsy in his need to hurt her, he called out loudly, his thick voice reaching as many ears as it could, ‘Oliver, my lad – get yourself upstairs and tell the captain that his doxy's here abeggin'for him – can't wait much longer by the looks of her.'

‘Thank you,' she said.

He was, in fact, alone.

‘Did I say he wasn't?' muttered Ned turning sullen.

‘He says you're to go up,' Oliver Rattrie told her in his furtive whisper, not meeting her eye.

He was at his desk, a log fire blazing despite the mildness of the weather, going through what she recognized as building plans, drawings of hotels and banks and offices, the new Frizingley that was to make him a millionaire so that he could leave it – she hoped – and go back to Antigua or Martinique or wherever it was he had acquired his liking for constant heat.

Already the roaring fire and the firmly sealed windows, the deep reds and browns of the furnishings beneath a low ceiling, the air heavy with tobacco and the musky scent which clung to everything he wore, lingered in every chair in which he sat, upon every pillow on which lay his head, had started to overpower her.

‘What is it, Cara?'

No need to waste time on preliminaries. Indeed, she saw that it would be unwise to do so. He was busy with his plans to knock down the Frizingley he had inherited from his father and build it up again not at all to his taste but certainly to his advantage. Therefore she would do well to state her case at once.

‘Christie, you have just evicted a friend of mine. I wondered why?'

‘Ah yes,' he smiled at her. ‘The fighting Mrs Thackray. The Boadicea of St Jude's. I was expecting you, Cara.'

Once again, when she had thought the advantage of surprise to be hers, he had taken it from her, cutting the ground – which had been none too solid in any case – from beneath her feet. Opening up a pit, very likely, into which she knew she might all too easily tumble.

But if
that
was his price then she would tumble with a good heart.

She shrugged off her shawl, seriously incommoded now as she always was, by the fire. ‘Expecting me?' She thought it well to bide her time and allow him to tell her a little more.

‘Yes. Expecting you. Ought you to be surprised?'

‘Probably not.' No doubt she would find out, at his good pleasure.

‘You heard about the eviction – when, Cara?'

‘This morning.'

‘Early, I imagine. And when was it served?'

‘Last night.'

He nodded. ‘Yes. Rather late, in fact. Who told you of it?'

‘Anna Rattrie.'

‘Quite so.' He sounded pleased with her, as if – at whatever game they were playing – she was making progress.

‘And how do you suppose Anna Rattrie knew about it – so early this morning? Too early for her to have seen either of the Thackrays, wouldn't you imagine? So, unless she saw one of them late last night, which seems unlikely – and which you would know, in any case, since she is your apprentice and sleeps in your shop – who told her?'

She looked at him for a moment quite blankly, marvelling, as so often, at the tortuous processes of his mind. And then she sighed.

‘Her brother Oliver,' she said.

‘Precisely.'

‘And then he told you that he had told her so you knew she had told me …'

He clicked his tongue. ‘With rather more finesse than that, my dear. I knew at what time the information was given. Therefore – allowing our good Anna a few minutes to have her cry and you to have yours …'

‘I haven't been crying.'

‘Your tantrum then. It suits you better. After which you walked up St Jude's Street, had your explanation with the formidable Mrs Thackray, reached the obvious conclusion that only I can help you, and have arrived accordingly. You should learn to play chess, Adeane. I have told you so before. With a little practice you might graduate to playing with live pieces, as I do.'

‘I'm too busy for games.'

‘Nonsense. It is all a game, Cara. I have told you that too. If one started to take it seriously one shudders to think where one might end …'

‘Life, you mean?
I
take it seriously.'

‘Of course. So do most people. So does Ben Braithwaite, believe me – our future Lord Mayor and all those other pompous gentlemen who will be his Corporation. My greatest single advantage is that I do not. Nor do I intend to. You have something to ask me, I believe?'

An awareness of danger, the need to tread warily, filled her whole mind. For if he had planned all this in such detail then he had some specific purpose in which she – as ever – might be no more than a pawn, but would have to take care for all that. Since pawns, as she well knew – like herself and Luke – could suffer as grievously as any kings and queens or bishops.

‘Mrs Thackray has been kind to me. I wondered why you have turned her out? She has been your tenant for twenty-five years, after all.'

‘Oh – hardly mine, Cara. I am not so old. My father's tenant first. Then my trustee's. Then my agent's. Mine when I came back from the West Indies a matter of ten years ago. A model tenant at all times, I understand.'

‘Well then …?'

‘The woman is a Chartist and an Oastlerite.'

‘What do you care for that, Christie?'

‘Not a scrap.'

‘So …?'

The heat in the room had taken her by the throat now, parching it so that it cost her an effort to speak at all.

‘So? Do you need a reason, Cara? Allow me to give you one. Mrs Thackray is the sole tenant of a house large enough to provide me with a greater revenue than can possibly be extracted from a single tenancy. It is, therefore, far more to my advantage as a landlord to divide the house – and all other houses like it – into as many separate lettings as I can. In simple terms, my lamb, if I have the choice of one tenant at ten shillings a week for occupation of the whole house and eight tenants at two shillings each for a small part of it, then I will have the eight tenants, at sixteen shillings the lot. A clear profit of six shillings a week over your Mrs Thackray.'

‘You'll let tinkers in, you mean, and vagrants, and see the house go to rack and ruin, since they'll take no care of it.'

He nodded, as if in indication that she had passed a test. ‘Exactly – which matters not a damn since the whole street is due to come down as soon as I can contrive it. Hence my policy of squeezing whatever profit I can get before it crumbles to its dirty knees. You know that, Cara. It is a policy I have pursued most enthusiastically at every possible opportunity. Have I not?'