A Song Twice Over (6 page)

And when Cara hesitated, fearing the worst and – where trouble was concerned – not expecting to be disappointed, Sairellen shook her head and smiled ‘Nay lass, it was not your mother the woman was fond of.'

‘I see.' That too had happened before. ‘Do you know her?'

‘Ernestine Baker? Well enough. A spinster woman who looks like the taste of vinegar but … Well, spinsters have natural feelings too, under the surface, sometimes, that don't improve with keeping. And Ernestine Baker must be past forty-five. I dare say it was a shock to her. Jealousy, I mean.'

Cara shook her head, not denying it, and then – because time was pressing – reverted to her practical needs.

‘What happened to the money my father left her? She wouldn't just spend it.'

‘No. She didn't give it to me in advance rent, either.'

‘Well then?' The word ‘rent'was always ominous. When spoken in that fashion, with that sardonic lift of the eyebrow, that grim smile, Cara knew it to be very grave indeed. But before coming to grips with it, before making her promises and smiling her smiles in true Adeane fashion – ‘If you could just give me until the end of the week, Mrs Thackray, then I feel certain … And, in the meantime, if I can be of any service about the house …?' – before that, she had to know the whole truth. The worst.

‘Your father left a debt.'

‘Yes?' Her mouth had turned so dry now that it felt cracked, her tongue swollen as from a long, desert thirst. But there were debts and debts, some enforceable, others not. And since it was never easy to extract payment from a helpless woman she could make it her business, whenever circumstances required it, to be very helpless indeed.

‘There is a man here,' said Sairellen, speaking slowly, ‘who lends money – among the other things he does. He is landlord of the Fleece, the inn down in the square. Among the other things he is. And the other things he owns. Well – I'll just tell you this. Your father owed him fifty pounds. A fortune to me – and you. Nothing to Christie Goldsborough. Nothing at all – except that he'd take the same steps to get it back as he'd take for five thousand. To amuse himself, I reckon. Or else he'll lend an amount he knows can never be paid, and let the debt stand. That way – and it may have been like that with your father – he can have those who owe him at his beck and call. So your father had to leave quietly, hadn't he? – which is why he couldn't send your mother back to Ireland.'

‘And this man took the money my father left behind?'

Sairellen nodded, watching Cara's hands clenching into fists again and then uncoiling, flexing their long, supple strength.

‘So there's somebody else you want to strangle now, is there, lass?'

Yes. First her father. Then the milliner, Miss Baker. Then the landlord of the Fleece. But she could wait for that. Only one thing now remained for her to know. Perhaps the most important of all.

‘There's work here, isn't there?'

‘What work are you fit for?'

‘Anything.'

Sairellen smiled, having received the answer she had expected. The answer she would have given herself, since she, too, had spent her life turning a hand to anything that offered, her memory extending far beyond the coming of the steam engine and its raucous progeny of power-driven machinery, to a different world – forty years ago in time, a thousand in spirit – when Frizingley had consisted of little more than an old parish church, a few coaching inns, a handful of quiet, grassy streets built from the same grey Pennine stone as the surrounding hills. While the hills themselves, and the tough-grained, gruff-spoken breed of men who inhabited them, had had everything they required for the slow – but where was the hurry? – domestic manufacture of cloth. Moorland sheep in plenty with good fleeces on their backs. Fast-flowing moorland streams to wash the raw wool and turn a water-wheel. Patient, industrious women to sit all day at their cottage doorways spinning yarn for their menfolk to weave by hand on the upstairs loom, at that steady, laborious rate – but, there again, where was the hurry? – of one piece of cloth a week. A whole sturdy family to cart the finished goods down to the Piece Hall in Frizingley to sell at the Thursday market. A whole family to work all together in their own houseplace, like beavers, in the hope of cramming seven days work into six, or even five, and declaring the remainder a holiday.

And not a whisper or a curl of factory smoke above the valley. Not a face in Frizingley or for miles around that one had not grown up with, except for the merchants on market day, the excitement of a pedlar – a foreigner from Lancashire or Cheshire sometimes – or a wandering Methodist preacher delivering his sermon in a field, along the canal bank, or in a coal yard.

And the canal had run sweet and clean in those days, carrying the products of Frizingley's cottage industries to Leeds in leisurely fashion. For, when all was said and done, why hurry when one day, one year, one generation scarcely differed from another?

Sairellen's father had woven heavy worsted since his boyhood from yarn spun first by his mother, then his wife, then by Sairellen and her sisters, several ‘spinsters'being needed to keep one weaver occupied. And when the daily quota of spinning was done they had rushed out into the open air to the adjoining meadow – as thick now with streets of workers'cottages as it had been thick, then, with daisies – to tend the milk cow and the bacon pig, or had run off to pick blackberries on the moor or mushrooms on Frizingley Green.

A hard, simple life. No paradise, Sairellen thought, as some now liked to call it, but with its measure of dignity and independence. Not that anything was to be gained by looking back now that power-driven machinery had so effectively put an end to it. The mechanical spinning-frame, to begin with, producing its eighty threads at a time instead of one, which had killed the domestic spinning-wheel; and then, when the weavers had finally stopped complaining about waiting for yarn and were up to their eyes in it at last and revelling, had come the power-loom to sound
their
death-knell too.

Steam-driven looms to keep pace with these monster supplies of machine-spun yarn, and factories to house them in.

No decent Yorkshireman – or so many said – would submit to the tyranny of the millmaster, the infamous opening and closing of the factory gates with a captive work-force locked inside like cattle, no longer pacing themselves to natural rhythms but to the hands of the factory clock, the cold heart of its engine. And so, of those who vowed it to be intolerable, many came close to starving in their cottages and breaking up their precious handlooms for firewood, or went on the tramp to look for work elsewhere; or otherwise disappeared.

Not that the millmasters had had much use for them in any case, the new looms being so light that women – and children, who were much cheaper and far less trouble – could handle them. And so they had sent to the poorhouses of the south for cartloads of nameless, orphaned ‘pauper brats'as young as five years old who had slept, after their daily toil, on heaps of wool-waste in a corner of a factory shed; and were still here now, some of them – the survivors – living in the mean back-to-back cottages which had sprung up so thick and fast on Sairellen's childhood meadow, sending their own undersized children into the mill.

Sairellen's father, a man of stern morality, had vowed he would rather see his daughters dead than weaving by steam, locked up every morning in the heat and grime and promiscuity of the sheds, at the beck and call and mercy of overlookers and engineers,
men
about whose virtue there could be no guarantee. But they had gone, one by one, just the same, Sairellen herself as a young wife of seventeen, a widow at nineteen and the mother of two children; her second husband, Radical Jack Thackray, claiming her a year later.

After which her troubles had begun in earnest, Jack's mind being given to such wide-ranging political freedoms as were explained to him in the unstamped and therefore outlawed radical press, the right of the common man to vote having so much importance to him that he had died for it, twenty-one years ago this August – she still faithfully kept the anniversary – cut down by the sabre of a British soldier on the battleground of St Peter's Fields in Manchester, when swords had been drawn to disperse a peaceful crowd – in a holiday frame of mind almost, she remembered – assembled to demand a mild enough alteration in the method by which parliament was then elected.

It had taken her a long time to recover from that. But recovery – with bairns to be fed and rent to pay – had been essential, her grief a private matter, her gratitude for the money presented to her by a group of radical journalists in her husband's memory, being dignified but not carried to excess.

She had used it to take the lease on this house and had run it ever since as a lodging for decent working men, four to a room and one small, slope-ceilinged attic she would occasionally let – on a very temporary basis – to a married couple. Hard beds and somewhat narrow, but clean. Tea and oatmeal every morning. Barley broth from the cast-iron pot on the kitchen range every night. Bacon on Sundays. An occasional leg of pork if one of her acquaintances killed a pig. Eggs from the hen-run at the end of her back-yard and, from time to time, a chicken which had foolishly ceased to lay. A well-ordered house in which Kieron Adeane had been a mistake and in which there was no room at all for a handsome and regrettably fertile young woman like his daughter.

Once again it was not unkindness. Just hard and simple common sense. For what could the girl do in a house full of single men but cause trouble? And now, with workers pouring into Frizingley from all directions, train-loads and cartloads discharging daily, whole gangs turning up on the tramp ready for anything and prepared to cut up rough unless they got it, the town's population swollen from the few hundred quiet families of Sairellen's childhood memory to thirty thousand badly-housed, under-paid strangers, what chance did this pert young woman really have of any decent employment? What millmaster would waste time and money to train her when he could have his pick from the crowd of skilled weavers and spinners assembled at his gate every morning? What millmaster's wife would take her in as a parlourmaid with that gleaming mane of Spanish black hair and those sea-blue Irish eyes? And what else remained – when hunger really gnawed and no other door would open – but the brothel on the corner. On every corner. And the workhouse for Odette.

The circumstances of Sairellen's life had not permitted her to be tender-hearted but, just the same, she did not wish to see that happen to Odette. And, since she believed it to be inevitable, it would be well to stand back.

‘I'll put it to you very plain,' she said. ‘Your mother's room is paid for until Friday next. After that, if she finds work, then she's welcome to stay. But I have no accommodation at any time for single women, or for children. You will understand.'

Cara nodded and smiled – stiff-lipped but a smile of sorts nevertheless.

‘Yes. I understand. It's turning me out into the street, you are.'

‘I am. I reckon there must be two hours of daylight yet.'

The young man, still sitting by the chimney corner, so motionless, so absorbed in his reading that Cara had barely noticed him, looked up from his book.

‘Mother …?' he said, just the one word, not quite asking a question nor issuing a warning, something in between, so that Sairellen turned to him and smiled, not in the least surprised, it seemed, at his intervention.

Sairellen Thackray had borne thirteen children and lost twelve, most of them in infancy of the cholera or the measles, a daughter in childbirth, two sons as a result of industrial injury, another from injury of a different kind received at a protest against women and three-year-old children working down the mines, leaving her with Luke, her last born, the child of her middle-age, now a man – twenty-six years old – of whom she had always been proud.

Not that she had ever felt the need to tell him so, having merely grunted her approval when, as a little lad, he'd tramped off regularly if not religiously to Sunday school to learn to read and write – skills she herself had never had the chance to acquire – and, later on, to the Mechanics Institute where he still spent his time poring over volumes of history and old maps. She'd done little more than grunt when he'd been promoted to overlooker at Braithwaite's mill either. She just made sure that there was always a hot dinner waiting for him, a clean shirt, kept the lodgers out of his way as much as she could, took not a penny more of his wages than she absolutely required. Left him in peace with his books and rarely asked questions about his other pursuits, either amorous, political or social, having implicit trust in his sense and decency.

She supposed he was not handsome, although
that
was of no importance, being tall and craggy and loosely put together like herself, with a thatch of coarse fair hair, steady grey eyes, an overcrowded face of large, heavy features, a finely developed conscience which – since his life had been marginally easier than hers – made him rather more easily put upon.

And she had known from the start that he would object to the putting out of doors of a young woman and child.

Well, perhaps she objected to it herself. What decent person would not? But, as she had told Luke many a time, Frizingley was full of stray dogs – whimpering little lost puppies like Liam; bright-eyed, vagrant cats like his young mother ready to charm themselves a place at any fireside; sad and dignified creatures like Odette, not wishing to be any trouble – all of them able to touch the heart. And since, with the best will in the world, one could not take them in – since one had to face the brutal fact that there was simply not enough to go around – far better to send them off at once. Better – for one's own peace of mind – never to raise false hopes. Better for them.