Yet it was really on his account that she stood in such urgent need of a man’s help in Liverpool.
Without Liam she could have gone ashore as freely as any of the country lads around her, as hardy and fit for work as they, to be seen by the port authority as another pair of hands for the loom or the plough, capable of fending for herself without recourse to charity. But a lone woman with a child in her arms might be required to convince some official person somewhere along the hard road to Frizingley that she was truly expected there, rather than simply making one among the two or three million Irish who came close to starvation every summer, fair harvest or foul; a growing multitude for whom no work existed, and who knew that if they could somehow scuttle aboard a ship for England then the English Poor Law – before shipping them back again – would be quite likely to give them a hot dinner.
And since Cara was not entirely convinced that the trains her father had mentioned really did run from Liverpool to Manchester and then to Leeds, nor by any means certain that, once in Leeds, she would actually find, at the address he had given, a carter willing to take her to Frizingley on the terms he professed to have arranged, she felt her need of a travelling companion to be great.
A man, young enough and presentable enough to match a woman in kid boots and a straw travelling bonnet with silk ribbons, strong enough to carry her two shabbily bulging yet infinitely precious carpet-bags ashore while she managed her son, so that anyone who might be watching – Poor Law Guardian, brothel keeper, sweatshop man – might see them as a couple and not trouble her. A man, best of all, who might have reasons of his own for wishing to avoid official scrutiny and so might be persuaded not only to put her on her train but to accompany her some part of her way. And if he expected to be amorously rewarded then she would make promises and break them with a clear conscience, it being her firmly held opinion – since the birth of Liam – that men, having nothing to lose from sexual encounters, ought only to ask such favours at their peril from women who most certainly did.
A man; not a gentleman, of course, since one did not encounter members of that particular species on the deck of a cargo boat, lounging among the baggage, but someone likely, who looked as if he might belong to her. Or she to him. Although she was not in the habit of regarding the relationship of man to woman in quite that fashion. And her practised eye had already seen him, last night as she came on board, leaning against the deck-rail above her, watching while she negotiated the shaky gangplank with her carpet-bags and her son, sure of her balance – precarious pathways being much as usual in her experience – her mind busy with her current necessities, her senses wary.
A man. She had looked up and there he was, young and lean and straight as an arrow, no bulk about him but a taut, whipcord strength promising toughness and the kind of well-paced, well-disciplined stamina she understood; a dark, clever face, a cool stare following her with an insolence and speculation to which she was no stranger; following her again this morning as she had picked her way across the deck – looking for him although he could not know it – positioning himself neither too close to her nor too far.
‘Good morning,’ she had said crisply in passing, to let him know that he had stared long enough, speaking English words with only the merest hint of Ireland, a whisper of France, on her tongue. He had smiled, raised his hat, a little shabby she’d noticed – like her own – but at least a proper curly-brimmed beaver not a common corduroy cap, and sweeping past him, managing despite the carpet-bags and the stranglehold of Liam to make her skirts glide and sway with the weight of the half-dozen stiffened petticoats beneath them, she had installed herself on this bale of something reasonably soft and odourless and remained there, waiting for him.
He did not come at once. Others, indeed, came before him and were rejected calmly, pleasantly, in accordance with her policy of offending no one, since who knew what she might need before the day’s end? But she had seen his interest and unless someone else should arouse more of it …? The brim of her pale straw bonnet shading her eyes from the brilliance of summer sky and sea she glanced swiftly around the deck, encountering no one among the women to challenge her. Just an unlettered country girl here and there and a few sad little wraiths of women, widows every one, draping themselves like empty shrouds over fretful children who, unlike her own drowsy, dreamy Liam, persisted, despite the perfect sailing weather, in wingeing and whining and feeling sick.
The young man in the beaver could have no use for these.
‘Good morning,’ he said a half hour later, his voice as neutral as her own, a travelling man whose accent, too slight to be easily identified, would strike no false notes anywhere, and whose keen eyes, accustomed like hers to planning his route ahead while, at the same moment, guarding his back, had already measured her shabby, stylishly cut woollen dress against his own faintly threadbare but fashionable broadcloth coat and narrow trousers, the flamboyance of his scarlet neckcloth against the vanity – and the weight – of her flaring petticoats. And it seemed to him that a woman who would so overburden herself in these cramped and dangerous conditions for her pride’s sake, was not to be despised.
Nor to be easily handled either. But if anyone watched for him, as they might, in Liverpool, they would be looking for a man alone, moving fast and light without baggage, not a man with a sleepy, heavy child, two carpet-bags, a woman with long black hair and sea-blue eyes. And in any case he was a young man in whom passion of many kinds was quickly stirred, impulsive by nature, taking risks for the pleasure they gave him; and from the moment he had first caught sight of her on the quayside dragging her burdens as if she rather pitied all those who did not possess them, he had understood two things. He would approach her because she could be of use to him and, even had it been otherwise, he would have approached her anyway.
‘My name is Daniel Carey.’
‘Cara Adeane.’
‘Where are you bound?’
‘Frizingley in Yorkshire.’
‘I’m going to Leeds.’
And they smiled at the same moment with the same satisfaction, the same self-congratulatory pleasure in having chosen right.
They were travelling in the same direction.
‘And is there no one to meet you in Liverpool, at all?’
‘No one.’
‘You’ll be needing help then, I’m thinking.’
She smiled and nodded, making a helpless gesture at her bulging carpet-bags with long-fingered, brown-skinned hands which had no real helplessness in them whatsoever. No wedding ring either, he was quick to notice, although he felt no urge to condemn her for that, his own inclinations being far from domestic, his tolerance for the sins of the flesh extremely broad.
‘Then if you will allow me to assist you …?’
Of course she would. What else might she allow? For another half hour her bright, bold eyes smiled and seemed to make promises in direct contrast to the careful pitch of her voice as softly, demurely, she offered the picture of herself she wished him to see. And when he leaned a little closer, hearing only the unspoken promises, she enquired suddenly but just as demurely, ‘Is it no baggage you have, then?’
‘None to speak of.’
She smiled at him. ‘Daniel Carey, how does that happen? What can you be running away from? Home?’
He returned her smile, his dark, shrewd eyes meeting her shrewd, blue ones and holding them a moment in a kind of acknowledgement. A recognition. He was twenty-three years old and ‘home’had been very long ago, an impression, merely, at this distance, from which he could gain nothing now by remembering.
‘Home’had ended suddenly, very savagely, forcing him overnight, as one forced hot-house plants, from a serious, studious child to a disciplined, tempered man, and he knew that this girl did not really care what – if anything – he might be running from now. What mattered to her was the convenience of his protection on her way to Leeds. What mattered to him was getting there, and then the next place. The one after.
&nb
sp; They were two coins disturbingly alike on one side, dangerously dissimilar on the other. He was a young man who believed in grand designs and complex ideals of truth and freedom. While Cara Adeane, on that golden summer morning, believed in nothing but herself.
‘Have you made the crossing before?’ he asked her.
‘That I have. Twice before. And you?’
‘I come and go.’
Yes. She had understood that much about him at once. And she supposed that the authorities – who did not care for too much talk of freedom when they remembered what it had led to in France – while not snapping at his heels precisely, had already started to be curious about him, just beginning to take notice of his ‘comings and goings’and the identity of his friends.
Not a wicked man. Not a criminal. Just someone – and the Adeanes had always known plenty of those – who wanted something that others did not wish them to have. The opening of English ports to cheap foreign corn perhaps to make the price of bread more reasonable. Or the right of the common man to vote at election time. Even a secret ballot so that he could use his vote against his landlord if he chose, or against his employer without fear of losing his cottage or his job. None of these things being greatly to the taste of landlords and employers like the Duke of Wellington or my lords Melbourne and Palmerston and the rest of the Queen’s ministers who seemed forever alarmed that the revolution of the common man, which had begun so bloodily and not really so very long ago, in France, might spread with its tumbrils and guillotines and its Rights of that dangerous common Man, to London Town.
And to which particular brand of Liberty, Equality or Fraternity, she wondered, might Daniel Carey subscribe? For she knew every one of them by heart, having heard them expressed heatedly, poetically, violently, evangelically, in every lodging-house and workshop and servants’ hall she had ever frequented, while she had listened, smiled, agreed with each and every solution and put her faith in none. So that she felt no concern – why should she? – about the exact cause for which Daniel Carey chose to risk himself, as she supposed he did, or to go hungry for, as it seemed he sometimes must by the pared-down, fine-drawn look of him. He was just a man, after all, who would take advantage of her if he could. Unless she put a stop to it. Or seized her own advantage first.
Yet his lean, dark face had an oddly slanting smile of a kind she had never seen before, a sudden, entirely different smile at which she had to stop herself from looking, while his eyes – flecked with brown and amber like an agate stone – kept on looking openly at her, seeing her too clearly for either her comfort or her vanity, so that she found herself bending her neck to show him the heavy black gleam of her hair, displaying her hands, too broad and brown and capable for good-breeding but which had never yet cut peat or dug potatoes and did not intend ever to try. Wanting his admiration. Knowing, quite soon and with a deeply felt satisfaction, that it was hers.
‘And what do you do in the world, Daniel Carey?’
‘Oh – what I can. I am a schoolmaster sometimes.’
That could hardly impress her when her father had half a dozen brothers – dry as dust, he called them – who did the same.
‘And have you been to France?’
‘I have.’
That was better. Indeed, it was the highest proof of sophistication, in her eyes, that he could offer. Although – since poor schoolmasters did not go to France for a whim or a fancy – it also marked him as someone who had found it expedient to leave his own country for a while, a political exile in Paris as she had been a financial one, who had concerned himself far more with the rights and wrongs of his fellow men than with the embroidered satins and osprey feathers which she had found so enchanting.
‘What did you do there?’
‘I looked about me.’
‘And what do you do now?’
He gave her a slight bow and his faintly slanting smile.
‘Oh – shall we say – yes, let’s say that I escort beautiful strangers on their way to Leeds.’
She neither expected nor wanted him to say more. And it sufficed, in any case, for her to label him as a dangerous acquaintance who could disappear to suit his own need at the very moment when she might need him the most. And it was in her mind, therefore, from the start, that it would be foolish – most foolish – ever to need him too much at all.
Handsome, of course. And exhilarating – if she had the leisure, one day, to be exhilarated in that particular fashion. A challenge to the mind and the senses. But so was her father. And she could see little difference between the dreams of Kieron Adeane, professor of grandiose schemes, creator of false and fascinating rainbows, and the dreams of another kind which she had detected in Daniel. The result, in both cases would be the same. Cheap lodgings, darned linen, a gnawing, never-ending anxiety about the payment of a doctor’s bill, a pawn-ticket, the rent. And although her mother had settled patiently and sweetly for a lifetime hovering on the fringes of such disaster, Cara already knew that she could not.
Stirring against her side her son, Liam, opened eyes as dark and velvet-textured as the heart of a violet and, finding the sea too vast for his contemplation, the sky too distant and nothing else to interest him on the crowded deck – crowds being his natural habitat – burrowed down into the folds of his mother’s skirt and fell asleep again. Or at least appeared to sleep. She was never sure. For he had been very quiet since Odette, his adored grand’maman, had sailed for England, leaving him behind. Too quiet? Had she allowed herself to dwell on it she may well have thought so. But she had had enough to do, surely, with finding the means to feed him and clothe him, running all over Dublin tracking down work wherever it could be found, and in her fatigue and flurry she had not encouraged her son to prattle. Had she even told him, in any way he could understand, that now – at last – she was taking him to Odette? Glancing down at him, feeling the sharp tug of almost anguished affection she often felt for him but rarely managed to express, she hoped so.
‘A fine child,’ said Daniel Carey, meaning it, for he had once been a silent, secretive boy himself, observing the world minutely, critically even then, basking in the adoration of a mother as handsome as this one, although softer, sweeter; a saddened woman – her image fading now in his recollections – who often reminded him how overwork in the cause of the mass of suffering, downtrodden humanity had killed his lawyer father. A woman meticulous in the discharging of her social and charitable obligations, who had taken him driving in a carriage piled high with lilac silk cushions, delivering invitations to reform meetings to her friends and blankets to the poor, until a soldier, faced with the sudden menace of an angry crowd during a famine year – did it matter which? – had fired wide as they drove by and put an end to her.
But it was a long time now since he had dreamed of red stains on lilac upholstery; and on his hands.
He had gone to France, to spend the rest of his boyhood with an uncle, the editor of a radical journal living abroad to escape the prison sentence imposed for his refusal to pay the stamp duty on his publication which would have made it too expensive – as the government had intended – for the working man to read. A good man, or so Daniel supposed, but one whose burning concerns for the welfare of mankind en masse left him no time even to notice whether or not his own small nephew had been adequately washed or warmed or fed.
Not that Daniel had ever minded that, since it had hardened him and made him resolute. And now, his uncle bankrupt, disillusioned and dead, he lived as he pleased or as best he could on a small private income which had come to him from his mother and would have been just sufficient had he not been so ready to give it away, not carelessly nor even generously but merely to avoid the weight of possessing it, money having no interest to him beyond travelling expenses, the freedom to move, to learn to ‘look around’.
And in any case if he wished to understand poverty he must first endure it – his uncle had taught him that; not only the carefree, bohemian insolvency of his student days, when to be s
hort of money had seemed part of the fun, but the constant, grinding hardship of men who, born to poverty, would very likely die of it. As his father had died, worn out from paying other men’s bills and rarely charging for his own professional services as a lawyer. As his uncle had died. As Daniel himself did not intend to die, having equipped himself for his chosen life of endurance by the simple process of learning to endure, by a stripping away of unnecessary flesh and unnecessary emotions, a reduction of appetite, tempering himself like steel to a sinewy hardness of nerve and muscle, a sharp, sometimes cold strength of mind, so that he would be fit to do whatever he might one day be asked to do, not for any one nation or creed or power – his vision sweeping infinitely further than that – but for his fellow men.
Attitudes hardly likely to match the vanities – he was well aware – of this self-possessed, self-polished girl sitting on a heap of dusty sacking as if it were an imperial throne and who, when the position of the sun and a certain hollow ache in her own body reminded her of hunger, simply unwrapped a parcel of bread and bacon which Daniel could not bring himself to share when so many others around him had eaten nothing that day, very little the day before, and had no guarantee about tomorrow. It would be his pride to fast with them. But Cara, unabashed, shrugged half-amused, half-scornful shoulders at his refusal, broke her bread and fed crumbs to her child as to a sparrow and shreds of apple to quench his thirst, with no apparent concern for the hollow stares of a dozen other children, or the native dignity with which the knot of famished men and women close behind her turned their heads away.
A Song Twice Over Page 2