A Song Twice Over (81 page)

She slept hardly at all, being as anxious for news the next morning as everybody else although, standing in her pale blue and gold shop wreathed in her welcoming smiles, she could not allow herself the luxury of either laughter or tears when it began to come in.

After all, what could the Charter matter to her? Feathered bonnets and embroidered chiffons were her trade, the adornment of woman, not the rights of man, and Magda Braithwaite would certainly not forgive a moment's inattention to the fitting of her new poppy-coloured silk mousseline for the sake of these Chartist tramps who had been abandoned, left in the lurch, to fend for themselves without a penny in their pockets – hoped Mrs Braithwaite – who may well have passed an uneasy night dreaming of that guillotine in Market Square.

But what a dismal fiasco it had turned out to be, declared Miss Adeane's ladies that afternoon, sharing scraps of information as they nibbled their wafers of lemon cake and sipped their china tea. Two hundred thousand men indeed! Twenty thousand seemed nearer the mark, from what one could gather. As for those five million signatures, how many of them were forgeries? How many Chartists could even write their names, if it came to that? And it was being strongly rumoured now that all sorts of impossible names had been seen on that petition, including Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington, seventeen times.

Cara experienced some difficulty in smiling at that.

And there had been no grand procession, of course. No march, with banners and anthems, across Westminster Bridge. The police had simply taken Feargus O'Connor aside and, perhaps even to their surprise, that ageing warrior who had been breathing fire and brimstone down everybody's neck for years, had given in, agreed to abandon his procession and deliver the petition to parliament in a cab. Which he had done, or rather in four cabs, the petition itself with those five million signatures, taking up four of them, Mr O'Connor himself riding tamely behind. To avoid bloodshed, he'd said. And where was the petition now, if not shut away in some archive somewhere, where it could just get on with the only thing it was fit for – gathering dust?

Cara did not find that any too amusing either.

Three London trains came into Frizingley that day and, unobtrusively, Cara sent her youngest apprentice to meet each one, a sensible girl with a Chartist father who might be supposed to have reasons of her own for haunting the station. No one came. And that evening, when the shop was closed, she walked over to the station herself, no great distance, just taking the air should anyone enquire, which no one would, she supposed, Christie having gone off to celebrate the collapse of Chartism at the Braithwaites.

She was free, then, to wait and worry, standing in the cobbled yard pressed close to the wall, a shadow in her dark cloak among shadows, her ears straining for the sound of an engine, her body dry and hot with its tight anxiety. If Daniel came she had no idea what she would say to him or what help he would allow her to offer. She simply knew that he would need help of some kind, from somebody. And she was here. She cared not a fig herself for his People's Charter. But she knew how ardently Daniel himself had believed in it, knew how that cold flame of faith had gutted him, jealously absorbing him and permitting space for nothing inside him but itself. How then must he be feeling now? As she would have felt, she imagined, if, on the same day her mother and Liam had left her, she had returned from Liverpool to find her shop and all her stock in ashes, her customers already on their way to resurrect Miss Ernestine Baker.

And she was stronger, far stronger and always had been, than Daniel.

The train arrived, almost empty, most of its passengers having got down at Leeds. Nevertheless … But no. Only two thick-set commercial gentlemen, another in a clerical collar, night-travellers emerging, all strangers, from the gloom, heavy but rapid footsteps on the cobbles, a voice enquiring for a cab, the slamming of unseen doors as the train prepared to move away.

She waited a moment longer, counting the seconds it would take him to walk along the platform, pause to fasten a shoe-strap perhaps or anything else which might conceivably delay him, and then, when all those seconds had run away, stepped briskly, irritably from the shadow to find herself face to face with Gemma Gage.

A shock to both since both had been standing breathless and motionless, believing themselves alone and invisible because that was how they had wished to be. Yet now, with an acre of dark, wet cobbles and empty railway track around them, it would have been ridiculous and highly suspicious, just to nod and smile.

‘Good evening, Miss Adeane. Have you come to meet the train?'

But that too was ridiculous.

‘You will have friends, of course,' said Gemma quietly, ‘among the Chartists.'

‘Yes. So I have.' Dare she mention Daniel's name? Perhaps not.

‘Mr Daniel Carey,' said Gemma softly, not even asking a question.

‘Yes.' Pointless to deny it. Yet, just the same, since Mrs Gage
could
do her harm if she so desired, she added quickly, ‘We have been acquainted for a long time – as members of the Irish community here …'

Through the dark, Gemma smiled. ‘Yes. I believe you met on the crossing from Ireland eight or nine years ago.'

‘We did.' And even then she had told him he was born to be hanged. Inwardly and violently, although it made no ripple on her polished surface, she shivered. ‘But it seems we will not be meeting him tonight.'

‘No. I think not. Miss Adeane, my carriage is over there. Allow me to drive you home.'

‘You are very kind, Mrs Gage, but it is just across the square …'

‘I am aware of that.' Gemma's voice wondered why the distance should be important. ‘Nevertheless, it is late, and rather chilly. Please do get in.'

The note of authority was quiet, but very evident. And Cara found herself in the Gage carriage, allowing the Gage coachman to place a cashmere rug over her knees, wondering, as she took the soft material between expert fingers, how much it cost and if it might do well, this coming winter, in the shop.

‘Miss Adeane,' Gemma was speaking calmly but with purpose. ‘We have assumed Mr Carey to be coming from London directly into Leeds. However, if he had found it expedient to make a detour – to Brighouse, perhaps? What do you think he would do then?'

‘He would walk over the moor, Mrs Gage.'

‘Yes. Do you, by any chance, know the way he would be likely to take, Miss Adeane?'

Of course she did. She had taken it herself, many a time, in the old days when the only way to get wherever she wished to go, or
had
to go, had been on foot.

‘Across country,' she said, ‘and rough country. Impossible in a carriage.'

‘Might he be visible from the road?'

All too clearly Mrs Gage had never walked on the moor at night, thought Cara, shaking her head. ‘No. It is as black as pitch out there. And treacherous. Like being in the middle of the ocean.'

But Mrs Gage had never been to sea, either.

‘Would he notice a passing carriage, do you think?'

‘He'd hear it. But they all sound alike, Mrs Gage.'

‘Even if one stopped occasionally,' said Gemma quietly, ‘and got down – with a lantern – to identify oneself?'

‘Mrs Gage – I don't think you should do that.'

‘Why not?'

Good Heavens, where had the woman been all her life? Did the world really seem so safe and one's own person so inviolable from the shelter of those close-carpeted drawing-rooms, these cashmere travelling rugs?

‘Because if you start making signals with a lamp you don't know who might answer them. The moor might look empty but it's got bolt-holes all over it where men hide or dig themselves in. Hungry men still on the tramp because of the famine who aren't fussy what they do now, since they've got nothing to lose. And not all the Chartists are really Chartists, Mrs Gage. Some of them just like causing trouble. And there are one or two ale-houses up there that are – Well, dens of thieves and dens of iniquity. If somebody dragged you into a place like that I don't know how you'd get out again.'

And Daniel was probably safe and sound somewhere in London. Probably not. She shivered again.

‘It's far too dangerous for you, Mrs Gage.'

The carriage came to a halt outside her shop.

‘Yes. You are quite right,' said Gemma. ‘And even if one took the risk, and he happened to be there, one would be unlikely to find him. I must agree.'

What more was there to say? Cara did not, in fact, intend to say any more yet her voice, speaking alone it seemed, asked the question nevertheless. ‘How much danger do you think he is in, Mrs Gage?'

Not from moorland tramps and bandits. Surely even Mrs Gage must realize that he was accustomed to that? But from the fear he had aroused in men like Mrs Gage's own father and husband, whose vested interests he had appeared to threaten.

‘It will have to be stamped out.' She had come near to screaming from listening to Mrs Braithwaite and Lady Lark saying that. ‘And now – at once – before it spreads, as it did in France.'

Neither of those two good ladies had slept easily in their beds this last night or two because of men like Daniel. Obviously such men would have to pay.

‘I don't know,' said Gemma, her eyes on the far distance. ‘I was invited, this evening, to dine with Ben and Magda Braithwaite who are behaving very much as if some kind of Bastille has been prevented from falling. My sister-in-law has gone to celebrate with them and called me naïve when I insisted that no guillotines and tumbrils and revolutionary tribunals had ever been intended. Not by any responsible Chartist, that is. But Linnet finds it more amusing to believe that my father's workers were all hovering around our gate waiting the signal to snatch our jewels and strip the clothes from our backs. A great many others seem to have been genuinely afraid of it. And while Ben Braithwaite – and the Duke of Wellington – may not have been
too
bothered about their jewellery they neither of them like the idea of one man one vote. That is the very last thing they would care to encourage. I suppose, therefore – yes. There is danger. They have managed to ridicule the Charter. So now, while people are still laughing, I expect they will do their best to crush it. Without too much fuss, perhaps, so that by the time people begin to reconsider, it will be gone.'

‘How?'

She made a small and yet still purposeful gesture with her carefully gloved hands.

‘Earlier this month a bill was rushed through parliament – a “gagging act” they call it – increasing the penalties for the making of “seditious speeches”. A crime of which we have all been guilty, from time to time, I should think. Or
could
be guilty if someone particularly wanted us to be. And every Chartist who has ever opened his mouth in public could certainly be accused of it – if one wished to do so. I imagine it will be found convenient now to make those accusations.'

‘You mean they will be rounded up,' said Cara flatly, ‘and sent to jail.'

‘I do.'

Could the fine, steel thread in Daniel survive that, she wondered, without snapping? Not that she would let it happen. America, she thought. Let her father come in useful for once. If she could get Daniel on a ship then her father could arrange his reception in New York. He owed her that much. She would see to it now that he paid.

‘Good night, Miss Adeane.'

‘Good night, Mrs Gage. Thank you for bringing me home.'

‘My pleasure, Miss Adeane. I must be off now, to mine.'

But as Cara stood in the shop doorway taking out her keys the carriage turned quite sharply in the empty street going off at speed not in the direction of Mrs Gage's comfortable home but out of Market Square to St Jude's hill and beyond it.

Cara had already planned his escape to America. But Gemma Gage had gone, with her bound feet, to fetch him in from the dark.

She did not find him, of course. Cara, haunted all through the night by dreams of Mrs Gage making signals with her lantern on the moorland road which were answered by every nightmare species of man and beast, went herself the next morning to the manor to check on her safety, inventing a quick excuse of orders for grey and lilac half-mourning dresses when Linnet Gage came into the drawing-room.

But, although Mrs Gage was safe enough, having encountered nothing more alarming than a rabbit, Daniel had not been there. Nor did he come the next day, or the day after. Or a week, or a month after that.

If only, prayed Cara, he would have the good sense to lie low and keep
quiet
. But now that the petition, the ‘moral force'tactics of peaceful persuasion had once again failed so lamentably, so tragically and comically, the ‘physical force' pikemen were out again, marching with green rosettes and green banners flying through the streets of Manchester, Nottingham, Halifax, Leeds, rebellious Bradford where a Chartist mob fought, with sticks and stones and desperation, against the drawn cutlasses of a squadron of dragoons who cleared the streets most effectively – one heard – except for the wounded.

It was the same everywhere. Arrests of Chartist leaders leading to riots, leading to jubilant rescues of those arrested, which led, in turn, to drawn swords, soldiers on horseback, guns. And the same arrests all over again.

In May the Irish Chartist John Mitchel was sentenced to transportation on a convict ship to Australia, his harsh treatment giving rise not to a scuttling for cover – as Cara thought it should have done – but to a new boldness, a new surge of protest, the flinging down of new challenges by men, in her opinion, who were in no position to pick them up again.

Ernest Jones, the Chartist candidate for Halifax, was arrested in June on the charge of making seditious speeches, his arrest resulting in a firm and exceedingly blunt-spoken declaration from the town of Halifax that should the same sentence of transportation be passed upon him as had been passed on John Mitchel, then the government might expect to see riot indeed. And of a most blood-curdling variety. Her Majesty's Government could take the collective word of Halifax for that.