Cara bit her lip, knowing she had been told to mend her manners. And although she was by no means intimidated by the reprimand, she could see nothing to be gained at this stage by giving battle. This grim woman held the key to her mother’s whereabouts and if charm was required to obtain it from her, then charm it would be.
‘I do beg your pardon, Mrs Thackray.’
The woman nodded, her manner signifying ‘Aye, lass – it’s as well you do.’
‘But I believe my mother and father are expecting me …?’
‘Indeed?’
Cara’s mouth had gone dry. ‘Mr and Mrs Kieron Adeane? Doctor Adeane? They are here …?’
Of course they were. Even her father would not do this to her. She refused to believe it. But if he had …? Suddenly the grey town at her back menaced her as a gamekeeper’s trap menaces the running fox, alien streets swarming with furtive or ferocious hands ready to seize her and hunt her down – unless she went to earth or somehow kept on moving – as surely and savagely as a pack of hounds.
And there was Liam.
The woman spoke again, her voice harsh and unwilling.
‘Well, it’s like this, my lass …’ And perhaps, rather than wishing to be unkind, she simply saw no point in offering sympathy in a case – like this one? Dear God? – where no practical help could be given.
‘Yes?’ Cara’s mouth was parched now and her throat aching.
‘Your mother’s out – don’t ask me where. Why should I know her business? And your father’s gone.’
Gone? The word had only one meaning for her at that moment. And it was unthinkable.
‘No,’ she said and repeated it so that Liam, hearing her panic – and since Odette was not there after all – wrapped himself around her legs and began to whine again.
She did not hear him, her whole mind on her father. All her life he had been footloose, spendthrift, unreliable. Wonderful. All her life he had been there. She had quarrelled with him many a time, told him to take himself off and good riddance. She had loved him. No man – when he was being kind – had ever been kinder. Or more amusing. More alive. She knew already that she would never stop missing him.
‘Steady, lass. He’s not dead, if that’s what you’re thinking …?’
Of course he wasn’t. Thank God. But then – where the devil …?
The answer came quickly, gruffly, wanting the whole sorry business over and done.
‘He took himself off, lass – last Tuesday morning. To America.’
And as there had been grief, so now there was anger, and a familiar desire to break something, coupled with a new and strange desire to laugh, so that it was in a state as near hysteria as she had ever been that she first entered the house of Sairellen Thackray; aware, through all the turmoil in her head, that the words, ‘You’d best come inside,’ had been spoken grudgingly, out of no concern either for her or Liam but because the indomitable Mrs Thackray did not care to entertain the neighbours to any spectacle of grief or anger or betrayal on her doorstep.
The kitchen was small and steamy and very hot; and, in terms of the back-breaking effort involved, painfully clean, the stone floor meticulously scoured, the walls washed white, the big cast-iron range gleaming with black lead. A good housewife, Sairellen Thackray, that much was certain, a woman who bleached and scrubbed her kitchen table and carried her rag rugs out into the backyard every morning to be shaken and beaten free of dust. A woman whose bed linen, hanging now to dry around the fire, gave off a bracing odour of strong soap and lye, an impression of strong hands scrubbing and wringing, never ceasing until the job was done, a strong, straight back adapted by nature for the carrying of burdens.
Heavy burdens. And she had always had plenty of them to carry. Her own. Not Cara’s.
‘Sit down then,’ she said and Cara, still feeling dry and sick, sat obediently on a hard wooden chair by that spotless wooden table, paying no heed either to Liam or to the young man sitting quietly in the chimney corner his shoulders hunched over a book, her mind given wholly to whatever Sairellen Thackray chose to say.
And since she was not, in fact, unkind by nature but simply economical and realistic, it would not be the whole story.
There had been a letter from America. That, at least, seemed straightforward.
‘You have an aunt, I hear, in New York. In a fair way of business, according to what your father told me. She sent for him to join her. Wanted his advice, she said – he said – in extending her property. Made up her mind to it very sudden, it seems. So did he. As I understand it he’s to send for your mother – and you, very likely – when he’s able.’
Cara closed her eyes.
‘What else?’ she said.
A great deal, if the indomitable Sairellen should decide to tell it. But having watched Odette Adeane sink into grief like a woman sliding into deep water, she was not certain how much this girl – Kieron’s child by her face and figure but perhaps Odette’s in spirit – could endure. And the girl could not afford to collapse. The matter was as simple as that. As Sairellen could not afford to look after her if she did.
Sairellen Thackray was not generous with her affections, reserving them as she reserved her physical stamina, her occasional treasures of fresh eggs and butter, the benefit of her sound advice, strictly for the few she called her own. But, if she had allowed it, she could have grown fond of Odette Adeane, a woman whose disposition was so sweet and loving that she not only saw the best but usually managed to bring it out in everybody. Yet her selfless acceptance of her husband’s abandonment – because what else could one call it? – her heart-rending efforts to conceal her distress so as not to distress him; the way she had kept on insisting so cheerfully that she could manage very well alone, right up to the moment of his departure; the way she had broken down immediately after it, had all irritated Sairellen. Noble, perhaps. But if so, then Sairellen had no patience with nobility, knowing that in Odette’s place she would have been far more likely to have brained him with a sledgehammer and taken whatever he had in his pockets for herself. And for her children. The man was a scoundrel. Anyone who did not happen to adore him – as not a few unaccountably did – could see that. And now here was his daughter who might be just as ready to make excuses for him, and to pine for him, as Odette.
A handsome girl, there was no denying, although that had always had its disadvantages in Sairellen’s experience, leading, as it did, to the kind of temptation which, in young Miss Adeane’s case, had evidently not been resisted. A flighty girl, then, by the look of her and not much given to honest toil either, if she took after her father. And Sairellen was ready to dismiss Cara entirely – being unwilling to waste her time on those who could not help themselves – had not the sea-blue eyes suddenly turned green in their anger, like a cat.
‘I see.’ And the young voice was curt, sarcastic, offended. ‘I expect my aunt only sent enough passage-money for one.’
‘I expect so.’ Sairellen looked better pleased.
‘I expect so too. She never liked my mother. But she sent him a single ticket once before and we spent it on taffeta for summer dresses. Why should he be after taking it now?’ Sairellen shook her head.
‘All right. You don’t know. But you can tell me when she sent it, can you not? And how long after that did he write to me? Do you know that?’
‘I do.’ And the dates were supplied accurately, in full knowledge of their implications.
‘I see,’ repeated Cara, closing her eyes again, seeing inwardly, as clearly as Odette and Sairellen had seen, in their different fashions, how adroitly her father, in the very act of grasping his own opportunity, had still managed to save his conscience. For who could really accuse him of abandoning his wife in a strange city when he had first taken the precaution of summoning their daughter to look after her?
‘I’ll send for you, my darling. I’ll make you a queen in America.’
Not even his loving, trusting Odette had believed him. She had not blamed him eit
her. And Sairellen had marvelled, not for the first time, at the depth of devotion that could be aroused in a good woman by a feckless man.
‘God keep him,’ Kieron Adeane’s abandoned wife had said, with sorrowful, selfless tears which meant ‘He couldn’t help himself. It was his last chance. How could I stand in his way?’ pouring beneath her closed eyelids. ‘God keep him.’
‘If I ever see him again,’ said Kieron Adeane’s daughter, her blue-green eyes snapping open once more, ‘I’ll more than likely strangle him.’
‘Aye.’ Sairellen Thackray answered her and then, without speaking another word, got up and set a mug of hot tea in front of her and relieved her of her child, putting him down on the hearth-rug beside a basket overflowing with kittens of which, in the complex depths of his misery – his contemplation of yet another strange new world without Odette – he took no notice.
‘So you’ll strangle him, will you?’
Cara’s hands, clenching themselves into fists and then uncurling to show their long fingers, their square, serviceable palms, looked quite capable of it.
‘That I will.’
‘If you see him again. How do you rate your chance of that, young lady?’
‘Unlikely.’
Sairellen nodded, made the brief, sardonic grimace that was her smile and sat down at the other side of the table as grudging in her respect as she had been in her initial welcome – or lack of it. And, once again, it was not unkindness, just the simple good sense of survival. She had no place, in her home or in her heart, for Cara. And it would be as well – in fact it would be kinder – to say so now, and have done.
‘That’s right, lass. Unlikely. Happen your mother thinks the same, although she’s not saying. So I’ll tell you the rest now, while your temper’s high and you’re better able to stand it. According to his lights he left your mother provided for.’
‘Yes. That he did. He provided her with me. And what I want to know is why he didn’t just send her back to Dublin?’
‘There is a reason, lass, if you’ll let me come to it.’ Sairellen, who was not of a talkative disposition, who used speech to convey orders or information rather than engage in conversation, did not like to be interrupted. ‘He waited until he had your letter, saying you were coming over. Then he left your mother with a decent roof over her head – mine – and in decent employment, so she could keep it there. He left her some money too, as much as he had, I reckon. Told her to buy a new bonnet. That was ten days ago. The money went first. Then the job. That’s where she is now, unless I’m much mistaken – pleading to be taken back again. And unless she is – or finds something else … I expect you’ll know where I’m leading.’
Too well. In meticulous, miserable detail. But first, before getting down to that, there must be other avenues to explore?
‘There was a milliner,’ said Cara sharply. ‘A Miss Baker? My father wrote to me about her – said she had given my mother a job and was – a friend?’
‘Aye. There’s a Miss Baker.’ Sairellen sounded unimpressed. ‘She turned your mother off, without a character and with wages owing to her – by your mother’s reckoning. Last Thursday.’
‘She did what?’ Cara was shocked, enraged, could hardly believe it. For her mother was the most gifted embroideress in Dublin. In Paris. Anywhere. Conscientious. Attentive to customers. A soothing influence in the most volatile of work-rooms. A marvel of tact. Honest in the extreme. Miss Ernestine Baker – unless she happened to be half-witted – should have been glad, grateful, to employ her, anxious not to lose her rather than wishing to turn her off.
‘I dare say,’ said Sairellen, her eyes glinting with a sharp, faintly bitter humour. ‘But it was this way, lass. Your mother fell into a daze once your father’d gone. Sat here, at this table, staring at the wall and missing her work. Two days she did that, leaving Miss Baker up to her eyes in straw bonnet shapes and osprey feathers. And when she did go back, it seems Miss Baker caught her crying into the hatboxes …’
‘That’s not a reason to refuse her a reference. Not if she was fond of her …’
‘Who told you that?’
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, indus
trious 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.
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