Very little, perhaps, since the leaders seemed either to be in prison like O’Connor, or embroiled in the bitter conflict which already threatened to split the newborn creed asunder; the ‘moral force’ men of Birmingham who believed they could obtain their People’s Charter by means of petitions, mass meetings, rational discussion, and the ‘physical force’men of the North who thought it might best be obtained by a little judicious brandishing of pike and gun.
And there had been a great many pikes manufactured in Yorkshire and Lancashire this last year or two, on the anvils of radical blacksmiths who could knock a lethal weapon together as fast as they could shoe a horse, particularly when the middle-class intellectuals and artisans of the ‘moral force’brigade had failed to persuade anybody at all with their speeches and petitions leaving it to the men of the north, led by Peter Bussey of Bradford and Feargus O’Connor of Leeds, to take stronger steps.
Not that they had been noticeably more effective either, it seemed to Daniel. At the National Chartist Conference called by the ‘physical force’men in Heckmondwike last November he had heard a great deal of talk about pikes and guns, had seen a great deal of drilling, afterwards, on the moors on winter nights with makeshift weapons for those who had them and walking sticks, pick-axes, broom handles, for those who had not; had even listened to the call, by some, for the overthrow of the government and the setting up of a Republic, as working men with home-made pikes like these had done in France.
But Heckmondwike, for all the oratory and fervour, had led to nothing but some disorganized rioting here and there, for which the leaders had been sentenced to death and then, to avoid the dangerous creation of martyrs, locked up or transported to Australia instead: Peter Bussey having hidden himself behind his own flour sacks when he heard the call to arms, to avoid leading his Bradford Chartists to war.
Yet the cause had been just and, despite the muddle and the police informers and the betrayal, it remained so, Daniel himself having spent that winter moving quietly about the counties and cities of England and Ireland, conveying messages from one Chartist leader to another.
For nothing, it seemed. Yet the great Charter still existed. And what did it ask for that could not lay claim to be called democracy? A vote for every man in England, whether he owned property or not. The abolition of the property qualification for MPs so that any man could stand for election. A salary to be paid to him should he be elected so that he need not be beholden – and thus have his arm twisted – by a paymaster. Above all the end of the system by which every man who had a vote was forced to declare publicly how he had used it. That was the People’s Charter. And if it would take revolution to achieve it – the noble lords of Her Majesty’s Government being understandably unwilling to share their privileges – then Daniel was ready.
He had no overriding interest – like Luke Thackray – in what seemed to him the narrow issues of factory reform, of ten hour days or the exact ages at which children might be sent to labour. Such abuses would be cured automatically by the reform of the system as a whole. And his concern was with democracy on a grander scale, international, universal, the Rights of Man – from which followed, naturally, the Rights of Woman and Child – to freedom, justice and opportunity. He had therefore made the journey to Leeds to meet the hot-headed, emotional proprietor of the Northern Star and had met Cara Adeane instead.
And, contrary to his normal practice with the women he encountered on his travels and with whom he shared what it had seemed right and pleasant to call love, he had been unable to forget her.
July, August and September had kept him chained, furiously sometimes and resentfully, in the neighbourhood of Frizingley, looking for her, quarrelling with her more often than not when he found her, giving her advice at which she laughed and tossed her head, hating the life she led and growing illogical, unreasonable, with the hatred. And the jealousy. Wanting to guard her and keep her as a husband his wife when he knew he would never have a secure home to offer. Wanting her to need him, to lean on him, when he knew he could offer her no guarantees, no certainty even as to his whereabout beyond tomorrow. Wanting her to be sweet and yielding and gentle in his arms when he knew that without her toughness she could not survive.
Quite simply wanting her.
And now Autumn was crisping the air, finding him still jealous and irresolute, unable either to leave her or to stay with her. Seeing quite well that she too could neither leave nor live with him.
He understood her fears. He also understood himself. The only decent thing to do then – surely – would be to leave her in peace? Of course. But what had decency to do with this hungering and burning, this terrible conviction that without her he would never be wholly alive, wholly enthusiastic, never be whole again? He walked out alone one October morning to try and come to terms with it, needing air and solitude, striding sure-footed over the rough ground without really seeing it, the town well below him beneath its dense cloud, a thin blue sky above him which gave him no ease. Could he change? Could he take employment as a schoolmaster again, instead of the random journalism by which he now eked out a living, and settle down? Could he give up the broad view, the grand vision, for a blinkered security which, even as a supposition, appalled him.
If he loved her then he could. He could not. But he did love her. He wanted his own way of life. And Cara. She wanted him just as he was. But differently. There was no solution. Sitting down on a rock he attempted to face it, to compose himself sufficiently to go to her calmly and say goodbye. Calm above all. For there must be no quarrel at the end. His last memory of her must be a good one, something he would bury deep, perhaps, but which would always be there, he supposed, rising to the surface to plague him whenever he tried to fall in love in his old free and easy fashion, with somebody else.
Because of course there would be other women. He might never feel like this again. Indeed, no man in his right mind could possibly wish to do so. But he was too much of a realist to imagine that he would hunger for her, in this intense and painful fashion, for ever more. No. He wouldn’t do that. Nor would she. He’d learn, eventually, to make do with second-rate emotions and be content with them. And that, perhaps, was the saddest part of all.
Sad. But, from his vantage point on the moorland outcropping of rock, he began the hurtful process of making up his mind to it. For the world, after all, was full of women who were not Cara and he’d learn to enjoy them again. He’d have to. There was even one now coming along the stony little track below him, near enough for him to examine her in detail, too far away for her to be incommoded by his stare. Younger than he’d first thought, although not handsome in any way he understood, sturdy enough to cut peat and dig potatoes in Tipperary, although all dressed up like a lady in a dark purple mantle with shoulder-capes, a grey fur muff, a bonnet with a grey feather, accompanied by a stout old gentleman who – since the girl was really not the stuff a rich man’s mistress would be made of – must be her father.
Daniel, from his perch just beyond their view, watched them idly because there was nothing else to look at, feeling no great stirring of interest in this prosperous Frizingley couple out for their moorland constitutional, the young lady for the good of her figure and her complexion, he supposed, the old man for his health, to balance the effects of his four square meals a day, no doubt, his vintage port and brandy; although limping a little, Daniel noticed, as if the gout were troubling him.
A large man, heavy by any standards, particularly those of Daniel Carey who had pared his own whipcord body down to the hard muscle and bone. A clumsy man, too, stumbling over the tiny, scattered stones, straying off the path into the tufted, spiky grasses and blundering there a moment in city-soft confusion, calling out to his daughter who had ploughed solidly ahead. Clumsy: until Daniel saw the agonized line of the bent back, the hand clutching the chest, the horror on the girl’s face as she turned and ran back to him.
And although he felt no particular inclination to help them, although he was bitt
er with his own pain and had no pity to spare, or to waste on such as these, he made a grimace of annoyance – Lord, this was all he needed – and then, with a wry smile, a shrug, slid down from the rock and easily, swiftly, descended the slope towards them.
Bending over her father as he crouched, groaning and sweating on the damp ground, Gemma Dallam, who prayed only at the conventional hours of Sunday morning service and Evensong, could think of nothing to do but close her eyes in a request for Divine Assistance. For although she had been brought up to believe that all women were born with an inbred ability to nurse the sick she had never believed it, having had occasion to wince, herself, many a time, at the ministrations of so many medical amateurs. Therefore, being convinced that good intentions alone could never be enough, she prayed ‘Please help me to do the right thing.’ And when she opened her eyes the young man was there, straight and direct as an arrow, asking her cheerfully ‘Is the gentleman not feeling well?’
‘No. Oh please – can you …?’
‘That I can.’ She didn’t know what she was asking but he, very evidently, had handled sick and heavy men before. Easily. Without panic. Without much effort either although he was neither tall nor broad nor obviously strong.
‘Here, let me be taking him. There’s no sense in trying to hold him up, the weight he is. He’ll be better on the ground. That way there’s nowhere else for him to fall. And if that’s a muff you have there, then it might go well behind his head.’
John-William Dallam’s half-conscious, desperately struggling body – because he wasn’t ready to die yet. And not here, God dammit – was large and unwieldy yet the young man laid him neatly on the ground, undid the starched linen at his neck and his waistcoat buttons, arranged him so that he looked almost to be resting rather than agonizing. If one could imagine John-William Dallam taking his ease on the bare ground. Help had come: although it made no real difference to the pinched, blue look around her father’s lips, the sinking of those high-coloured, well-fleshed cheeks of his into mottled hollows, the grunting and labouring of his breath.
‘Thank you so much.’ She was thinking a little more clearly now, her panic subsiding, but not entirely. For if her father was dying, as he might well be, then she was about to lose not simply a parent but the person upon whom her cloistered world totally depended. The architect and foundation stone of that world. And her mother’s. A loving tyrant perhaps. But that potent blend of love and tyranny had, since her birth, built padded walls of warmth and certainty around her a mile thick. And the shock of their removal, she realized, would leave her – despite the independence of her spirit – feeling exposed and bewildered and cold.
‘We left our carriage about a mile down the road. Could we – is it possible to get him there?’
He got to his feet, smiling. ‘If I were Hercules, miss, then it might be. But since I can’t carry him on my shoulder, why don’t you sit yourself down with him and be keeping him company while I fetch your coach and horses?’
He set off, not running but walking fast, almost jauntily she thought; a mile of stony track to the place where they had left Williams with the victoria and then a mile back in the carriage. How long could it take him? How much time did they really have? She sat down to wait in the tufted grass, making the kind of foolish, female noises one made to frightened children – ‘It’s going to be all right, father. There’s no need to worry.’ – to which he irritably responded by closing his eyes, having regained enough consciousness now to understand that he had no strength to waste in arguing with his daughter. No. He must keep very still now and very quiet, carefully guarding what vital forces he had left for the grim business of keeping his soul – to which he’d never before given much consideration – and his body in the same place, where they belonged.
In Frizingley he was a man of power, a master of other men, of machines, and a great deal of money. Here, on this sparsely covered moorland hillside with the rain coming on, he was just an old man with a pain in his chest and a dizziness in his head, who might die here with no more consideration than a tramp without a penny in his pocket.
Very well. He accepted that. But if death wanted him, then there’d be a struggle. No doubt about it. And if it turned out that he had to meet his end here, alone with the girl, then all he hoped was that the shock of it wouldn’t addle her brain and turn her silly. A sensible lass, Gemma, as lasses went. But one never knew with women. His wife Amabel, for instance, would have run amok by now, screaming and carrying on and very likely twisting her ankle on a stone or falling over one of these ledges and breaking her neck. Sweet, helpless Amabel. How he loved those qualities in her. Amabel, his luxury. His indulgence. What joy she’d given him. And what a gracious pampered, privileged life he’d given her. Amabel, as young at heart now as on the day he’d married her. Twenty years younger than he was, dammit. One day – if not today – she’d have to learn to live without him. Could she do it? Groaning, squeezing his eyes tight shut, he knew she couldn’t.
‘It won’t be long now, father,’ said Gemma, just to remind him that something was being done, that she was there. ‘The young man seemed pleased to help. He could be Irish, I think.’
Inwardly John-William Dallam groaned again and bit his lip Irish? Whatever was the girl prattling on about? Of course he was Irish. He’d heard that turn of speech often enough in loom gates and navvy camps and road gangs – even in the discreet arms of a certain bold and black-eyed woman before Amabel – to recognize the hint of it on a man’s tongue. He knew the Irish all right. He’d even imported whole families of them, piecemeal, from Mayo and Donegal, in his younger days, when he’d needed the kind of muscle to get his factory started that one didn’t find too often in local men bred to the weaver’s trade. He’d just written to the parish priest of some unpronounceable village and placed his order. Simple as that. Four families. Ten families. Passage paid. And even then it had worked out cheaper, paying ‘Irish wages’. Although they’d been scoundrels, every one. Like that handsome young devil who’d just gone off striding down the track – fit as an overstrung fiddle, damn him – and who most likely wouldn’t bother to come back. Why should he? Particularly since the girl had forgotten to mention that she’d make it worth his while. No. He’d just go merrily on his way, whistling his damnable Irish jig, feeling young, being young, with all his life before him. Damn him to hell.
A lad in his twenties. Acutely, with an agony far more piercing than the pain in his heart, John-William Dallam could remember another lad like that, striding out into his future. Taking it by the scruff of its neck and squeezing out of it his ambitions, his dreams, his pleasures. No longer. And feeling the incredible spurting of tears – since when had he ever cried before – he turned his head away and concealed it, as best he could in the collar of his coat, thinking it unseemly that any woman, especially his daughter, should see him cry.
‘Yes. I expect he’s Irish. Although he didn’t look like a workman. Rather shabby, but well-spoken, I thought and polite. He didn’t sound like a navvy.’
There she was, running on again. Talking and saying nothing. Like her mother. And how the devil did she know what a navvy sounded like when he’d taken good care never to let one get within a yard of her? Good God, what did she know about anything? Not much, he supposed. Which was perfectly right and proper so long as he was there to know it for her. She was a good girl. He loved her, dammit. If she’d been a boy he’d have been proud of her. But she wasn’t a boy. And what he regretted now, with all that remained of his heart and the taste of ashes on his tongue, was his own softness in not forcing her to marry Ben Braithwaite when he’d had the chance. Not that he was particularly fond of young Ben – old Ben’s eldest lad – who had a queer temper sometimes and a mean streak like his father. But he had a good, hard head on his shoulders, knew how to keep his house in order and how to look after his women. Like John-William Dallam. And now, because he’d been fool enough to think himself immortal, it looked as if he might be leaving
Gemma, and Amabel, and the mill, to Tristan Gage who had no real harm in him but was a silly, posing fellow just the same, all very well in a lady’s drawing-room making Amabel laugh, and looking very good on horseback or in evening-dress, which, John-William supposed, must have attracted Gemma. (Just like a woman.) But not much good for anything else.
Well, thank God he’d found a good mill manager who could blind the likes of Tristan Gage with science any day of the week and tied up ample funds for Gemma in such a way that unless she took to wild speculation, which seemed unlikely, she’d never run out of money.
Not so Amabel.
And abruptly realizing what had always lurked in his mind as an obscure dread, that Amabel, if he died, would have her butterfly hands on large sums of money for the first time in her life, a despairing panic seized him. Somebody would have to look after Amabel. Somebody would have to steer her away from all the beguiling vultures in doves’ and peacocks’ clothing who would come flocking around her the moment he was gone. Ben Braithwaite, of course, being part vulture himself, would have done the job to perfection. Not Tristan. Did Gemma have it in her? Suddenly he believed so. And if he survived he’d show her the way to do it, re-arrange his affairs a little to give her the means.
‘Not long now, father.’
There she went again, telling him comforting lies as if he’d been a child – like he’d always treated her – when she must know as well as he did that even if young Master Paddy O’Riley or whatever his name might be managed to deliver her message to the coachman that they’d never get that finely-sprung, over-priced victoria – Amabel’s favourite carriage – down this steep and narrow track. At best they’d have to leave it on the strip of flat land just below and carry him down the slope like a sack of flour. Well, they’d need Irish muscle for that since Williams, the coachman, a handloom weaver in his youth, had the bandy legs and narrow shoulders associated with the cramped, airless conditions of the textile trade.
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