A Song Twice Over

by Brenda Jagger

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  Contents

  Brenda Jagger

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Brenda Jagger

  A Song Twice Over

  Brenda Jagger

  Brenda Jagger was writer of historical fiction, best known for her three-part ‘Barforth’family saga.

  Jagger was born in Yorkshire, which was the setting for many of her books including Barforth. The recurring central themes of her work are marriage, womanhood, class, identity, and money in the Victorian Era.

  Her work has been praised for its compelling plots and moving storylines as well as its exacting emotional descriptions. Her later novel A Song Twice Over won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 1986.

  Chapter One

  That a woman with a child in her arms and little more than the price of a train ticket in her pocket is in need of a man to help her must be quite certain. Therefore Cara Adeane, sailing from hunger in Ireland to no great certainty of eating her fill in Liverpool, could not long delay in making her choice.

  She had come aboard the ship in darkness, endured an unspeakable, overcrowded night on a hard plank bench, her child sleeping – or perhaps simply shocked to silence – in the folds of her skirt. But now, on this new morning of sun-streaked cloud and salt breezes, having somehow managed to smooth her hair, to freshen her cheeks and even fluff out the feather in her bonnet, she had found herself a place on the open deck, a vantage point on a bale of sacking where she sat with great composure, looking as if she had slept all night in a feather bed.

  She was nineteen years old, travelling alone with two carpet-bags, a heavy, three-year-old child, a parasol and now, with Liverpool only an hour or so away, was in a considerable hurry to make the acquaintance of someone who might be willing to carry them ashore.

  A man; as young and well-muscled and obliging as possible. And although there were a great many of them crowding the deck all around her she could tell, at a glance, that they would not do, being diggers of ditches and cultivators of potato patches from the far western shores, sailing – on this vessel of dubious antiquity, its belly sagging far beneath the waterline with its dead weight of grain, its live weight of cattle and pigs – to swell the ranks of their fifty thousand fellow-countrymen who annually crossed the water to England at this season.

  For this year of 1840 was no particular year of famine, no lean year as years went – there being no fat years in Ireland – but simply the summer time, the hungry time when, with the old potatoes running out and the new crop not yet in, it seemed better to any lusty lad who was able, to dig English canals and build English railways than sit idle-handed and empty-bellied at home.

  But none of these cheerful and, in many cases, handsome labouring men could hope to be of service to Miss Cara Adeane, herself city-bred, city-wise; no barefoot, shawl-wrapped country girl from a mud cabin but a young woman of a certain, hard-earned experience in the world, who wore real kid boots on her feet and a proper straw hat on her head like a lady.

  Though she was not a lady of course, and saw little point in pretending, her father being the black sheep of a Dublin family of small shopkeepers and schoolmasters, her mother a Frenchwoman, a skilled embroideress, who had once earned her living as a maid: Cara’s own status in the world remaining serenely unmarried despite the solemn, sleepy infant curled up at her side.

  She was not ashamed of her son. Such a thing had never crossed her mind, her present need being not to apologize for him but to convey him – and her carpet bags and parasol – with as little effort as she could contrive from this ship to a train which would take her to Manchester; another train, or perhaps two if the line remained unfinished, to Leeds; and then – with luck – by wagon to the smaller Pennine town of Frizingley, ten miles away from any railway track, where her parents awaited.

  A natural state of affairs in her experience, for the pattern of her life had always consisted of following the trail blazed by her father, whimsical, beguiling Kieron Adeane, self-styled doctor of law or philosophy or music or whatever else might promise him a passing advantage, for whom the grass on the other side of the mountain was always infinitely more enticing, and whose habit it had always been to rush off alone to ‘establish himself’at the end of each fresh rainbow, before sending for his family to join him.

  He had ‘sent for them’from the four green corners of Ireland; time and time again from Dublin; twice before from England. He had ‘sent for them’from Scotland and even from France. As a child Cara had been taken to him by a mother who never seemed fully alive unless she was by his side. As a grown woman – for so she had considered herself these several years past – she had sometimes resisted his blandishments, taking a road of her own until freedom, quite suddenly, had fallen flat, rebellion turned stale, and hastily packing her bags, she had run to him.

  As she was doing now. As she supposed she always would. Sometimes to her advantage. Usually not. Although she tended to believe, with her father, that no experience could be wholly bad if one could learn at least – well – a smattering of something or other from it. And the many roads she had travelled with her father had taught her much.

  There had been Edinburgh, for instance, her father involved in some chemical enterprise, some hair restorer or youth restorer guaranteed to make him rich, while Cara, in a dark brown cavern of a shop, had acquired the art of pinning sumptuous velvets and brocades around well-corseted, middle-aged posteriors; and the even more essential art of flattery, so inseparable from the dressmaking trade.

  There had been a sour back room in Manchester – departure from Scotland having become urgent when the hair restorer had produced little but sore patches and spots – where, in a windowless, nauseous space, she had stitched fine cambric shirts for gentlemen until her fingers bled. She had learned endurance from that. Not patience precisely, but the art of biding her time. And holding her temper.

  There had been the fresh green breezes of Kilkenny soon after, her father having invented, or purchased the invention, of a new brand of pony-nut, Cara feeling herself almost on holiday in a graceful Georgian mansion where, in her trim parlourmaid’s apron and cap, she had answered the door, dusted the china, and acquired not only a great many cast-off skirts and bo
dices and silk stockings, but a store of second-hand gentility.

  There had been milliners’shops and silk mercers’shops of many descriptions, both in Ireland and in France, where she had worked her twelve hours every day behind the counter and slept under it – as befits an apprentice – every night. There had been a common lodging-house once – in fact twice – where she had boiled soup in greasy vats for seamen and dockers and shared her wages with her father, in need of money to pay for his defence when his pony-nuts had been accused of causing somebody’s mare to die of the colic, and with her mother whose nerves, that year, had been somewhat in decline.

  Hard times, she supposed, although she had never seen much sense in brooding. Particularly when her father after all, had escaped conviction and the transportation to Australia which had threatened. Her mother’s nervous collapse had not taken place, or at least not so totally as she had been warned to expect. And Cara had given up her own drudgery in the lodging-house kitchen and gone to work for a fanmaker.

  One did what one could and usually – as her father always told her – enough could be salvaged to begin again. And always, in the background of her life, shimmering with all the colours of her father’s brightest and most distant rainbow, was the promise of ‘money from America’; the legacy from her father’s sister, Miss Teresa Adeane who kept a bakery in mythical New York and who had no one except her brother – said Kieron Adeane – to whom she could possibly wish to leave it. And, in the meantime, who knew which bright morning would bring a letter begging them all to set sail at once and join her? Enclosing the passage-money, of course, and a little something left over for new coats and shoes for Cara, so as not to disgrace ‘dear Aunt Teresa’before her friends.

  As a child Cara had dreamed of it sometimes quite feverishly, believing it would happen tomorrow, and then, when she understood that even to her father it was little more than a comforting fable – a shred of hope being better at times than no hope at all – she had put it to the back of her mind. For this Aunt Teresa of America had most bitterly resented the ‘throwing away’ as she had once savagely phrased it, of her clever brother on a French lady’s maid and therefore could hardly wish to share the rich, full life of her bakery with a mongrel niece she had never seen and a sister-in-law whose existence she had never brought herself to acknowledge.

  The ‘money from America’would remain a dream. So said Odette Adeane, Cara’s patient, soft-voiced mother. And since she rarely spoke out on any subject with conviction, her husband – whose current series of lectures on the evils of tight laced corsetry and the consequent advisability of purchasing his new brand of smelling salts did not seem to be drawing the crowds – had paused in the addressing of another affectionate missive to his ‘dearest sister Teresa’and decided, at the toss of a verbal coin, to try his luck in England once again, in a certain West Yorkshire town where a friend, ‘a capital fellow, the kind one can stake one’s life on’, had spoken to him of work.

  Not an offer, of course. Not directly. But if work of the right calibre existed, with prospects, opportunities, high expectations of advancement, then who better than Kieron Adeane to seize them?

  He packed his bags that very day.

  ‘I’ll make you a queen in England, Odette my love,’ he vowed, hand on heart, to his wife.

  ‘Yes, Kieron. I know.’

  They both were compelled to believe it. Kieron Adeane because, without this faith in himself, what had he? Odette because, after these twenty precarious years, she was still in love.

  ‘I’ll go forward, my darling, and send for you.’ Four months later he had done so. And now, four months after that he had sent ship-money and train-money and wagon-money to Cara, urging her to forsake the mounting and painting of fans and to join her loved ones, his invitation sparkling with good spirits and good luck.

  He had secured a managerial situation in a textile factory, he wrote to her, where, in view of the number of Irish immigrants employed, his services were fast becoming invaluable, his standing in the thriving Irish community very high.

  (A clerk, translated Cara, reading expertly between his lines, adding and subtracting his ledgers for twelve cramped hours a day and making a little extra composing letters home to Ireland, sent by men who could not write to families who could not read.)

  While Odette too, the letter went on, had found excellent employment with a local milliner, a spinster lady of an age to see in Odette the daughter she had always wanted, and who seemed, moreover, most touchingly to appreciate such advice on certain practical matters, as Kieron himself had been glad to offer. An elderly woman alone, after all …? Who knew? Great things might be expected in the fullness of time.

  (A few years of servitude and spite, translated Kieron’s daughter, dancing attendance on an old woman’s whims and fancies just to find an unsuspected cousin or nephew at the funeral holding out a legitimately greedy hand.)

  There had been ‘expectations’such as these before. And it seemed to Cara – the letter still held speculatively between her fingers – that fan-painting was not really such an arduous trade. Yet – and somehow she could not stop herself from reading the letter twice over – her mother and father appeared to be well-lodged in this northern town of Frizingley, this monstrously expanding industrial miracle, as much the creation of industrial machinery as the steam engines and power looms which caused it to keep on doubling and re-doubling its size. A town where gold could be found in plenty among the engine grease and grime, where one could sense it – as she could sense her father’s excited desire for it – glinting through the ever present pall of factory smoke, illuminated by the sudden flare of molten iron from a foundry, its prevailing harmony being the hissing and belching of industrially harnessed steam.

  Not a pretty place. But the Adeanes had good beds there – she had her mother’s word for that – good coal fires, good bread, shop-bought meat pies, opportunity. And what a pleasure, wrote Odette, to see, through all the smoke and dust, so many fine carriages and high-stepping horses, so many finely dressed ladies in high-plumed hats. How advantageous, wrote Kieron Adeane to his daughter, to place oneself in such close proximity to the rich.

  He had ‘sent for her’once again.

  ‘We are comfortably settled, my little love.’ Well – possibly. But it had taken the feel of his money in her hand to convince her; and then not entirely.

  ‘Your mother misses you – and frets herself cruelly for our little Liam.’

  Yes, of that much she was quite certain. And she needed no more than the evidence of her own eyes to know how much the child Liam was fretting for his grand’maman Odette.

  And so since it was, after all, the summer time, the hungry time, with fans not much in demand and employment for a lone woman and child precarious at any season, she had packed her bags, her skills, her little son and set sail once again across the water.

  Her expectations were not immense. But adequate. Realistic. A good bed. A meat pudding. Her mother’s gently flowing affection which both she and Liam had been sorely missing. That much – surely? And beyond it, not riches, no fabled ‘money from America’ or anywhere else, but, nevertheless, a view of herself to which her circumstances did not entitle her, a conviction that Fate had never really intended her to be poor. Had Fate blundered then? Her father had always believed so. She believed it too.

  Yet, for the moment, here she was on the deck of a creaking cargo boat, sitting on a bale of sacking about whose inner contents she did not wish to enquire, her child, exhausted by the journey, hardly stirring beside her, silent, lethargic, unwilling to support his own weight on his own two legs since there was nowhere he particularly wished to go.

  She had developed her own manner of never quite explaining his existence in the world.

  ‘A bonny boy,’ some woman or other seemed always to be remarking, the inevitable question already half spoken.

  ‘Yes,’ she would reply demurely smiling. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And his fat
her? Is he … gone?’

  And with all the patiently controlled sorrow of a young widow – and there were many of those in Ireland – she would cast down her eyes and release a faint, resigned sigh.

  ‘Oh yes – gone. So young, too. Oh dear … I try to accept – isn’t that right? … do the best I can?’

  Not the truth, of course, but not entirely a lie since her lover had indeed ‘gone’although no further than his home in Donegal and then to America, parting from her before either of them had realized her condition. And if it struck her later that he ought to have taken the possibility into consideration then, in all fairness, so, she concluded, ought she.

  ‘I’ll send for you, Cara.’

  His words had been very familiar.

  And when she had understood, from his letters, that the ‘New Life’he had dreamed of had nothing particularly new about it after all; that, just as in Donegal, he could barely keep himself in buttermilk and potatoes, much less scrape together the wherewithal to maintain a pregnant bride, it had seemed pointless even to mention it. What, after all, could he have done had he known, except worry and feel ashamed of himself? And she had chosen to spare him that.

  Her own mother Odette had looked after her, welcoming the baby, Liam, like a rare jewel. Kieron her father, had sat with her through her long labour, telling her tales of Kings and Empires and high adventure, telling her she was beautiful. She needed no others. She had been sixteen then. She was nineteen now and had taken care ever since to preserve her virtue as the only means she knew of avoiding unwed motherhood again. For if once might be judged unfortunate and could be accommodated, twice must surely be seen as slatternly or dull-witted. And she was neither.

  When she thought of her lover now, it was none too clearly and without rancour. She knew she had loved him but could no longer quite remember the feeling. Nor was she consciously aware of any unusual degree of tenderness for her child. Did she make professions of love, after all for her own shoulder-blades or her elbows? Hardly. But she took good care, just the same, that they were well nourished and warm, and would make short work of anyone who threatened them with harm. Her solemn black-eyed Liam seemed as naturally a part of her as that. And he had his pretty grand’maman Odette, more often than not to croon to him and cosset him, to dote on him so exclusively that when he spoke at all, which was seldom, his accent was wholly, delightfully French.