A Catch of Consequence

by Diana Norman

  It was as if he’d taken a broom to her mind and swept away everything except memories.

  The call of whaups from the moor and the distant pounding of the colliery pulled at the sleeve of her attention like insistent, nagging children. She shrugged them off.

  Procrustes? It was her husband’s voice.

  ‘Makepeace?’ It was Aaron’s.

  She turned to her brother. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘But you haven’t betrayed him. I have.’

  Hedley caught up with her as she climbed the Side, her boots slipping on its cobbles. The rain found its way down the hill’s depressions in grey, vitreous-looking rivulets and dulled the light of the candles in the cheese shops, which were anyway closing up for the night.

  She felt his hand grasp her elbow and lift her along.

  ‘I want to talk to you, lass.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ she protested.

  ‘You’ll be tireder when I’ve finished.’

  A side door led to the staircase to her rooms. The day had been bright enough when she set out that morning but the rain made everything so dark she had to fumble in the candle cupboard for tinderbox and fungus before they had light by which to move.

  Upstairs smelled damp. She put the candle on the mantelshelf. ‘There’s no food.’

  ‘Drink’ll do.’

  By the time she’d found the brandy bottle and glasses, he’d taken off his sopping cloak and hat and was lighting the fire. His hair had curled tight as it always did in damp, the flames reflected on tiny shreds of grey. He stood up and looked around the comfortless room but made no comment. ‘Where’s Hildy?’

  ‘I sent her home for a day or two. Her mother’s ill again.’ She braced herself. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Sit down.’ He set two chairs by the fire facing each other. Brusque movements indicative of anger. Any moment now he’ll howl like a wolf, she thought.

  He tossed the brandy down his throat and sat down opposite her. ‘Betty says you’re taking her and the bairn away.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To live in London.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sat back in his chair. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s time Philippa took up her position as her father’s daughter. I can afford it now.’

  ‘Isn’t she her father’s daughter at Raby?’

  Makepeace sidestepped. ‘Anyway, I have business in London that must be attended to.’

  ‘Would that be wor famous revenge?’ He nodded at her. ‘John Beasley told us. Canny lad, that.’

  She tried to become angry. ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘Mebbies not, but young Philippa is. I’ve affection for that bonny lass and she’s affection for me. That apart, she’s warm and bound in a tight community. What for d’you want to take her from it to that ugly town o’ yours?’

  Now she was angry. She leaned forward. ‘You’re not her father.’

  He leaned too, so that their noses almost touched. ‘Damnation,’ he shouted, ‘but Ah’m the next best thing.’

  They stayed where they were for a second or two, their eyes fixed on each other, then he got up and poured them both another glass of brandy. ‘Medicinal purposes,’ he said, handing one over.

  She gulped it, more to stay resolved than because she liked it. The cessation of their shouting emphasized the lesser sounds: rain drumming on the skylight in her attic; a sudden spit from the fire. She got up and went to the window to a view of the wet, grey, descending roofs of the hill. Well, she thought, drearily, it’s going to be easy to leave.

  She heard him say gently. ‘I’m the next best thing, pet.’

  She looked round. He was leaning against the mantelshelf, watching her. He said: ‘We’ve been that busy, the day never came. But it’s come now. I need you to make an honest man o’ me.’

  ‘What?’ she screeched.

  ‘I’ve been compromised, pet.’ He sounded aggrieved. ‘Down in t’pit, when roof caved in. You took advantage of me.’

  She said warily: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Yes, you do. Very compromising position, forced against a female body. Not the plainest I’ve ever seen, neither. Let’s face it, bonny lass, it was a matter of who came first, bloody rescuers or you and me.’

  She bit her lip, trying not to laugh, then she gave way.

  He grinned back. The candlestick fell over and went out as he lunged for her. ‘Where’s bloody bedroom?’ They were returned to darkness, this time his arms right around her, forcing her back and back, down and down, and she was scrabbling to help him get them both undressed.

  There was no comparison because there was no memory; no room for it; he possessed her mind and body; here was greed, violent and no holds barred. No flight to the stars but a desperate, grinding wrestle in sexual mud, go on, go on, until its groaning conclusion with both of them winners.

  Peace fell on them like the rain on the window. She lay with her nose buried in his chest, breathing him in, wondering where she was, when it was. She was suffused with physical gratitude from the top of her head to her toes. She turned her cheek so that she could rub it against his skin. It was all she had the strength to do.

  Flames from the steel plant down the hill made a sub-fusc square out of her window.

  He said something. Dreamily, she cupped her hands round his face and moved her lips across his. ‘What?’

  ‘I was hungry for you.’

  ‘I don’t feel guilt for this, I was starving too, Andra Hedley.’

  He sounded surprised. ‘Guilt never entered my mind.’

  She looked down at their entangled legs, hers very white in the dimness, his very dark. ‘It’d enter a lot of people’s if they saw us now.’

  ‘Porvorse sods,’ he said. ‘No idea of ecstasy.’

  She settled her head into his shoulder and wrapped her arms round him; he was luxury, satisfaction, humour; she wanted to anoint him with compliments. She felt surprisingly chatty.

  ‘I think I was shipwrecked,’ she said. ‘Struggling to stay afloat for years—difficult, I’m tired of difficulties—and you’re the island I’ve bumped into in the night, all warm and dark and safe . . .’ Her voice trailed off; this wasn’t her at all, though it was what she felt.

  ‘An island,’ he said. ‘I’d hoped for a bloody continent.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with islands.’

  ‘ ’Cept you get off ’em eventually.’

  She said: ‘I’ve got to go to London, Andra, I’ve a score to settle.’

  ‘Tell us.’

  She told him everything. Here was mental release after the physical; an orgasm of pain and wrongs, explanation, confession. She knew she was exposing her soul to this man as she had to nobody outside her circle—but, Hell, she’d exposed everything else.

  ‘I’ve been watching them these years.’ She told him about Robert as well. ‘When I go to London he keeps me up with what they’re doing. He makes it . . . vivid . . . It’s like sitting in the dark at a theatre watching clowns on the stage. You wonder at them: so evil and at the same time so bloody silly. There’s no understanding them. They’ve no conception of earning, or even paying their way. He owes his bootmaker nine hundred-odd pounds. Nearly a thousand pounds, just on boots. He’ll ruin the man. Money spurts out of their fingers like taps: gambling, entertaining, doing nothing valuable. Everything’s impermanent with them, as if they haven’t long to live.’

  ‘No bairns?’ he asked.

  ‘No bairns. She’s barren. You could be sorry for them; sometimes I almost am, and then I think: That’s Philippa’s money, you’re not sorry for her. They wouldn’t even let me in to bury him. Oh God, Andra, they wouldn’t let me say goodbye.’

  He held her tight until she’d cried herself into a hiccuping stillness.

  ‘Clay, pet,’ he said. ‘They’ve come from clay and they’ll return to it.’

  ‘Indeed they will.’ She sat up, sniffing and wiping her nose on the back of her hand. ‘And I�
�m sending ’em. That’s what I’ve been doing—buying their debts. Susan’s Jew’s been collecting them for me. Nearly every penny of my profit’s gone on financing Mr and Mrs Conyers—and at a very pretty interest. Next year, oh-ho, next year the price of coal goes up and so does mine.’

  She held up her hand so that he could see it against the square of window and curled it into a fist.

  ‘Then I’ve got them. Then I send in the bailiffs. The Fleet, I think—King’s Bench is for gentry. The Fleet’ll hurt bad.’ She looked down at him. ‘Did you know that when you can’t pay you need permission from every single one of your creditors to get out of debtors’ prison? Well, you do. One creditor to say no, one creditor to keep them in for life. Just one.’

  ‘You,’ he said.

  ‘Me.’

  He watched her watching her own fingers gripe, stretching and clawing like a cat’s. ‘Know what I’ll do then? I’ll dress in my very, very bloody best and I’ll walk into that prison, just to the door, and I’ll stand there and smile at her. And then I’ll walk away.’

  ‘Smile,’ he repeated, flatly.

  ‘She smiled at me once.’

  She felt his chest rise in a deep breath. ‘You’ve gone to a lot o’ work for one smile, lass.’

  ‘A lot.’

  ‘And a lot of blaa,’ he said. ‘You’d have done it anyway. I saw it. One sniff o’ that coal and you woke to what you are—as good a businessman as ever came over the Atlantic. No need to make that trash the excuse, pet—I shudder to think o’ their minds. Leave ’em to the Hell they’ve made for their own selves. You and me, bonny lass, the earners and makers, we’re blessed wi’ building things that matter.’

  He reached for her. ‘Furthermore, you’ve breasts a man could drown his soul in.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘oh, Andra.’

  When she woke up, the window had gained light, though rain still pattered softly against the glass. ‘It’s morning,’ she said, stretching. ‘What?’ He was muttering something.

  He yawned. ‘I said you’ll have to marry me now.’

  Makepeace sat up. ‘Marry? I can’t marry.’

  ‘Have to, pet. I’ve been led astray.’ He turned over and went back to sleep.

  She peered at him closely. She saw a curly-headed man with grey beginning in his hair, a blue cut across his broken nose.

  Have to, pet. It panicked her. I can’t marry you, I can’t marry anybody. I’ve been alone too long, I can’t be owned now. Not by you. I don’t belong to you. I’m an independent woman. What she spent her money on, how she earned it—if she earned any at all—who she left it to, these things would be at this man’s command.

  She looked around, desperate, and her husband came into the room, not vulnerable as he’d been these past years, not the victim who’d died calling for her. Here was the essential Dapifer: laconic, elegant, amused and suddenly so vivid she could smell his skin.

  And here she was, nauseatingly naked in a bed with a man marked by coal. Hurriedly, she got up and wrapped herself in a petticoat, took the ghost with her into the sitting room and, at once, they were back at the Roaring Meg, the narrow encompassment from which he’d rescued her.

  He asked: ‘And where is Captain Busgutt and his improved mizen now?’ It was typical of him to say nothing to any purpose.

  Captain Busgutt, she thought tenderly. How long ago.

  ‘Let me tell you, Mister Dapifer,’ she said, smiling, ‘Captain Busgutt’s sermon on the Lord’s scourging of the Amorites caused some in the congregation to cry out and others to fall down in a fit.’

  ‘Pity I missed it.’

  ‘Who’s Captain Busgutt?’ said a Northumbrian voice.

  The tall image gave way to a living, stocky man in the doorway pulling up his breeks.

  Another unsuitable man I was saved from marrying, she thought. Her husband haunted for a reason; she saw it now. How could she not have seen it before?

  In a rush she said: ‘I’m marrying nobody.’ It was only fair to tell him; she had slept with him, after all, and enjoyed it, God help her. ‘We’re partners, Mr Hedley, that must be enough for us.’

  He stroked his chin. It rasped. ‘Partners,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Still going to London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Still taking Philippa away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the bedroom. ‘And you and me in there, what o’ that?’

  She said timidly, because there were long years of starvation ahead: ‘I’ll keep the rooms on, I’ll have to come back now and then—I’m not leaving the business.’ She couldn’t rule out hunger.

  ‘By Christ,’ he said, slowly. ‘What do you think o’ me?’

  He made her flinch. ‘I think highly of you, I truly do. Don’t look at me like that.’

  He said: ‘You’ve lived too long among gentry, pet. What am I? Some prick-peddler comes round every year to render his bloody services?’

  ‘No, I . . . Oh, go away.’

  He dragged her hands from her face and shook her so that she had to look at him. ‘I’m a marryin’ man, lass, what’s wrong wi’ that?’

  ‘Nothing. Yes. You see. . .’ She grimaced at him, baring her teeth. ‘I’ve a duty to my husband. He was a very special man.’

  ‘I heard. But I’m special too, pet. And he’s dead.’

  She didn’t say anything and he dropped her hands. She watched him go to the bedroom to pick up the rest of his clothes. For the first time she saw the deep scars on his back where his body had protected hers from the roof fall. When he came out he was putting on his coat.

  At the door to the stairs he looked back. ‘Tha’s to be pitied, missus. We could have had wor bit share o’ happiness, thee and me.’

  She heard him go down the stairs, heard the side door slam behind him.

  After a long while she raised her head. The candlestick Hedley had knocked over was still on the floor. She picked it up and put it back on the mantelshelf, took their two glasses and the brandy bottle to the scullery, came back again, put the chairs back in their place. There had to be some order to counteract the chaos in which so many people were ashamed of so much for so many different reasons. Aaron ashamed of her, Pip ashamed of her, Hedley; even Temperance Burke was adding a far-off toll of condemnation to a slut. ‘Thee offered thyself outside marriage? To a good man? Are thee lost, daughter?’

  It evens out, Mother, she thought wearily. I was ashamed of him and he shamed me.

  There was no further resurrection. She sat for most of the morning in a tidy, unhaunted room, apologizing for the fine mess she’d made in it.

  The only ghost that came was female. It turned up around midday. It stood exquisitely in the doorway and smiled at her.

  Makepeace welcomed it like an old friend. ‘Howay, wor Catty.’

  He was wrong; this was the object for which she’d raised money, and fought the hostmen and keelmen. This had been her purpose: the downfall of this woman. She just hadn’t been attending to it properly.

  But now . . . here was simple, clean hate, flags fluttering; here was an enemy to clear the mind and decks for. Here, at least, was a defined thing still to be done. Here was unfinished business.

  Chapter Nineteen

  AS part of London’s Twelfth Night celebrations in 1772, distinguished actors, singers and musicians came together at Drury Lane Theatre to give a concert to benefit the Foundlings’ Hospital. An invited audience included the Duke of Cumberland as well as lesser royalty, peers, a member or two of the Cabinet and distinguished commoners, among them that well-known couple-about-town Major and Mrs Sidney Conyers.

  One of the dramatic offerings was a burletta, The Pillar of Fire, set in early Troy before its troubles with Greece. It told the story of a kindly, mythical king, Philippus, whose wife, Katerina, betrays him with his brother, Sidneus and plots his overthrow. This achieved, and with the King dead, the evil couple banish his second, faithful wife
and her child to a barren island where they are left to starve. The goddess Athene, however, taking pity on the exiles, transforms them into a pillar of fire with the ability to haunt those who’ve wronged them. It is seen flickering through the castle and its ramparts, sending the wicked King and Queen mad before eventually consuming them in its flames.

  Mercifully, because it wasn’t very good, the burletta was short and doubtless would have remained in the common memory for no longer than it took to perform if it hadn’t been for three events.

  One was that, during the first scene, Major and Mrs Conyers angrily left the theatre. The second was that, at the burletta’s close, its cast lined up on the stage to curtsey and bow, first to His Grace of Cumberland and then to a neighbouring private box in which sat a woman with red hair.

  Thirdly, one of the burletta’s songs, the best of them, which was sung in her famous Cockney style by Miss Fanny Cobb as the good Queen’s cheeky, faithful servant, became popular. It was called ‘Playing with Fire’ and its chorus ran: ‘Them as filch what they ain’t earned Shall have their naughty fingers burned.’ Not deathless lyrics, perhaps, but the tune was catchy and it hymned the fate of all dispossessed: the Enclosure Acts were creating a lot of those. Overnight, it was being sung in taverns and whistled everywhere on the streets.

  Following an appeal by Major Conyers to the Lord Chamberlain, wrath was called down on the heads of the actors responsible but, since they had packed their bags and departed for a tour of Ireland immediately after the curtain fell at Drury Lane, it missed. The burletta was banned from any future performance.

  The song, however, proved harder to suppress, and those who heard it were reminded by some well-placed articles in the scandal sheets that it referred to the forgotten plight of a real woman. ‘Where is she now, that unhappy lady?’ was the question. ‘Has she returned to haunt her persecutors?’ For it was being rumoured that a certain Mrs Burke, a wealthy widow, had lately been seen in London and that she bore a remarkable resemblance to the person who had once described herself as Lady Dapifer.