And it was as she hesitated, thinking of Liam, touched as so often, and usually at the wrong moment, by the silence and sadness of him which so troubled her, wondering if a sugar stick would lighten it, that she felt herself suddenly surrounded not by the usual ebb and flow of the market day crowd but by something much more purposeful. Something which she, brought up in a crowded street, could not fail to recognize.
Her pockets, as she well knew, had nothing in them but the stray penny she was thinking of spending on Liam. Her bag! Instantly her hands tightened their grip. Her resolution tightening to match, so that they would have to cut her wrists, she thought, to make her let go. And since they could hardly do that in so public a place, these ragged youths half her size who were pressing around her, she was not really afraid. She’d just box a few ears, knock a few heads together like she did with the Rattries, and chase them off. Little vermin. Little weasels.
That was still the thought in her mind as she struck the ground, not knowing how she came to be there, as one never knows, having suffered a blow aimed from behind which came at her like a thunderbolt, felled her in the presence of a hundred indifferent spectators and left her prostrate, struggling as in those terrible lodging-house dreams, to get up, to breathe, while the weasel-pack fell on top of her, shrieking with laughter. Just another rowdy street game, a half dozen ragamuffins playing rough-and-ready with a woman who was probably a drunken whore, on market day. Very likely. Who cared?
No one. A strength that was not of her body but rooted in absolute desperation got her to her feet rising with the urchins still clinging to her and then shaking them off like the she-bears, once chained in this square for sport, had shaken off the baiting dogs. She knew her bag was gone. She had not seen the thief nor which direction he had taken. She saw only a half-dozen dirty, twelve-year-old faces grinning at her, a half-dozen skinny little bodies beginning to disperse, to lose themselves in the alleys where they would be indistinguishable from dozens more. She heard a madwoman howling – herself – but on market day, in St Jude’s, with the taverns serving gin and strong beer from five o’clock in the morning, who was likely to be disturbed by a little howling? And madwomen, women in despair, in panic, at the end of their tether, were a common enough sight any day of the week.
Her only slight hope was to catch one of them, any one, and when she had him …? What? Time enough to think of that when it happened. Time now to run, to fix her eyes on that tow-headed lad with the green scarf around his stringy, chicken’s neck and never lose sight of him, no matter who got in her way, to catch him and crucify him if necessary to find out where her bag had gone.
Little bastard. She was going to kill him and enjoy it. She could taste blood now on her lips where her own teeth had bitten them, could see blood flecking her vision, hear it pounding in her ears as she ran, propelled by the first hot rush of her panic so that when she collided with the rough corner of a market stall she didnot feel it, when she stumbled again and scrambled to her feet she was unaware of her grazed hands and knees; heedless of brewers’ drays, the hooves of heavy horses; the outrage of the passers-by she pushed aside; the woman with the heavy market basket she knocked over.
She did not even realize her hair had come down and that she had lost her hat until she found herself leaning against a wall somewhere on the other side of St Jude’s Passage, her lungs bursting, her temples and her pulses hammering out their distress, her whole appearance wild and dishevelled and attracting not the least attention in that place which – no matter what might have befallen her – had seen it all before.
She knew, although she did not know for quite how long, she had been running aimlessly. The boy was gone. She had refused to believe it at first, her mind so full of him that her eyes kept on seeing him, playing tricks on her, raising false and cruel hopes. But her eyes were empty now. He had gone. And with him had gone Miss Gemma Dallam’s brown Chinese satin and every shred of hope Cara had cherished for the future.
Everything.
And so perhaps the time had come just to sit down somewhere on the ground and wait. Just that. Hands folded, head bent, to make it easier for the axe, when it fell.
‘All right, are you, love?’
A man, smelling strongly of spirits put a hand on the wall behind her head and leaned over her. No. She would never be all right again. But, pushing him aside, she gathered her cloak around her, made so bravely from those two old plush tablecloths, and began to walk downhill – the direction she happened to be facing – until she came to St Jude’s churchyard where she sat on a gravestone, her head in her hands, and shivered.
No one came near her. She expected no one. For why should anyone involve themselves with a stranger when the one thing that everybody had in plenty was trouble? And what real help could anyone give her? With a calm she knew to be unnatural it struck her that her life was probably at an end. Yes. Very likely. And those six little gutter-weasels and their heftier accomplice who had pushed her over would never realize, when they sold Miss Gemma Dallam’s valuable satin for a shilling or two, just what they had done to her.
‘Would it not be wise,’ she heard Miss Linnet Gage’s light voice saying, ‘to have the work done here …?’
Miss Linnet Gage, who disliked Cara, had already hinted at her dishonesty. Was it prudent, she had really been suggesting, to put temptation in Cara’s way? Miss Linnet Gage, therefore, would not believe and would not wish to believe Cara’s story. And if she did not, then why should Amabel Dallam, who bent with every prevailing breeze? Or Gemma Dallam who had her wedding day on her mind? Or John-William Dallam who was known, in St Jude’s Street, as a hard master who believed in keeping his operatives strictly in what he considered to be their place. Properly subservient.
They would not hate her, if she tried to sob out what would sound to them like a typical housemaid’s melodrama. They would simply raise disdainful eyebrows and say what else could one expect of the lower orders; the Irish? At the very best they would dismiss her, as Miss Ernestine Baker had done, with an icy reminder that she must never expect to work in Frizingley again. And since they certainly would not pay her for the work she had already done on the trousseau, where else could she go? But at worst, and far more likely, they would simply hand her over to a magistrate as a thief. A necessary precaution – she heard a voice she imagined to be John-William Dallam’s say the words – to discourage others of her kind from following her criminal example.
Of course. For she had learned long ago of the mistrust and fear these upper-class households felt for ‘her kind’with whom they were surrounded. Maidservants who had access to storecupboards and the family silver. Cooks who were being constantly accused of purloining cream and chickens, butlers of watering the claret. Tradesmen who might overcharge or who might tamper with locks and window-catches to let burglars in. Dressmakers who might prefer to sell a valuable piece of material rather than settle for the modest profit of making it into a dress.
A short-sighted profit. But such things did happen. Feather-headed serving girls who could not possibly hope to go unsuspected did steal from their mistresses. Milliners’assistants did take feathers and fancy buttons from their workrooms and told amazing tales when they were apprehended wearing them in their Sunday hats. An Irish dressmaker from nowhere, called Cara Adeane, might well try to make off with Miss Dallam’s satin. John-William Dallam would give her credit for no more sense than that. Particularly when it was discovered – as it would be – that she was the mother of a bastard child, the daughter of a man who had left Frizingley heavily in debt, and had already been dismissed by Miss Ernestine Baker for her loose behaviour in a public street.
She could not defend herself against them. What magistrate would listen to her lame excuses, in any case, if John-William Dallam named her a thief, and Miss Ernestine Baker testified that she was a slattern?
They would take her to York castle, she supposed, and lock her up. For how long? She knew of a woman in Dublin who, for the theft
of a few pounds, had gone to prison for five years. With hard labour. Or they might put her on a prison ship to Australia, as they’d done with two girls from St Jude’s a couple of months ago, because – on those farms where the transported convicts worked all chained together – there was a shortage of women.
And if either of these things happened to her then Odette and Liam would be separated and taken away to the workhouse, Odette with her heart in pieces and her nerves in tatters, Liam retreating so far into that anxious silence of his that nothing would ever bring him out again.
A length of brown satin would have killed him. And Odette.
Leaning forward, still shivering, wanting to be sick yet unable to raise anything from her empty stomach but an acrid bile which made her retch again, she attempted to find a chink somewhere in the blank wall, growing granite upon unyielding granite, around her.
Finding none.
Her education had been sketchy, vague in the extreme, but she understood the law as she had always seen it in operation around her. John-William Dallam’s law, according to which, had she committed an offence against ‘the person’ – provided the person in question had been one of her own kind – then her sentence might well have been light; a leniency by no means extended to offences against ‘property’which must be strenuously, mercilessly put down. So that a knife in Mr Rattrie’s feckless ribs would have cost her less in penal servitude, if she had not actually killed him, than Miss Gemma Dallam’s satin. The Dallams and Braithwaites and Colcloughs and the rest feeling in no way threatened by skirmishes between one resident of St Jude’s and another, yet closing ranks in a punitive fury when it concerned no matter how small a portion of their wordly goods.
She continued to lean against the gravestone, sick and shaking, her teeth chattering, her stomach as knotted and tormented as it had been in childbirth. It did not occur to her to ask the police for assistance. There were two constables now in Frizingley, she’d heard, since Sir Robert Peel had created his ‘peelers’or his ‘bobbies’ as everybody was calling them, just a few years ago. But nobody liked them. Nobody had wanted to be regularly policed as people were abroad, preferring to leave it to the magistrates to swear in special constables as they’d always done in times of civil disturbance, or use the troops. Cara had seen neither member of Frizingley’s force herself; nor was she in the least surprised that two men armed only with truncheons should shirk from attempting to enforce their will upon St Jude’s. Exactly what duties they did perform she was uncertain but in matters of law and order it was Christie Goldsborough, and only Christie Goldsborough, who sat in judgement here.
There was no doubt at all about that.
And even then it took a few more strangled moments before she could force her numbed brain to function with anything more coherent than a scream of anguish. But something was becoming clear to her, something was emerging. And, clenching her teeth and her jaw, digging strong, pointed nails into the soft undersides of her arms, she slowly gathered herself, through pain and concentration, into some semblance of order. Stolen goods required a rapid disposal. To be taken, in fact, for the perusal of certain pawnbrokers in St Jude’s Street, or to the back door of either the Beehive or the Dog and Gun. And Christie Goldsborough, who owned those pawnshops and those taverns could find out if he so wished just where her satin had gone.
He could recover it.
She jumped to her feet, her brain no longer numb and resigned to her destruction but awash, all over again, with hope and a new blaze of panic. She could be saved. Therefore she was no longer willing to be destroyed. She would not be destroyed. Christie Goldsborough could save her. She could think of no reason why he should take the trouble nor of anything he seemed to want from her with which to persuade him. Yet, if he would, he could. With his assistance she could return to that blessed, wondrous world of – when had it been? – an hour ago, before disaster had fallen upon her, when she had been blissfully on her way to pin Miss Dallam into the dress that would make both their reputations in Frizingley for elegance. That earthly paradise, only sixty minutes gone, when Liam had still had the chance of growing up to be a man, Odette of growing old. Before the prison doors had opened, or she had been stuffed into the hold of that ghastly convict ship, to spend her life scrubbing and cleaning and whoring for rough and dangerous men.
Captain Goldsborough – please.
Blindly she moved forward, panic crashing now through every barrier she had managed, through her twenty precarious years, to erect against it, flooding her whole mind, sweeping away her sense of reason and reality, so that she could already feel the coarse fustian of prison clothing and workhouse clothing against her body as she ran, could feel her skin crawl from every one of prison’s basic indignities, her stomach heave with revulsion. And terror. No – she didn’t want to be locked away to die, yet as she rushed across the square she escaped death by inches from a dog-cart without noticing it, the magnet that was Christie Goldsborough drawing her in a straight line, through brick walls if need be, to get at him.
And what to say to him when she did? She had not the faintest notion. Yet, when she found him, more or less alone in the bar parlour although she was aware of Ned O’Mara somewhere nearby, she couldn’t stop talking, words rushing out of her, spilling one over the other, over and over ‘Please, please, oh please, you can help me if you want to, I know you can, and I’ll go mad you see if they take my little boy away, because he’s not – not just as he should be – more delicate than he should be. He cries in his sleep – God dammit – for my mother and if they take her away too then he’ll just turn his face to the wall and fade away. And if I’m on a prison ship at the other end of the world – because that’s where they send women, isn’t it? I mean young women, strong enough to breed like the cows every spring time and dig the fields in between – isn’t that what they want in Australia, for all those men? And I can’t – I can’t – for a length of brown satin I didn’t even steal. I can’t. I won’t. Do something …’
She knew she was hysterical yet could do nothing to calm herself, could hear her own voice rising higher and higher, going on and on, and could do nothing to make it stop. She knew that Christie Goldsborough was looking at her strangely and that other people, somewhere in the room – pushing into the doorway to see what was going on – were looking at her too. What of it? She had always lived in a crowd, other people’s dramas and her own played out through a thin wall for the benefit of anyone who chose to listen. What could that matter now?
Her voice went on.
It seemed that he was about to slap her and she leaned forward to take it, accepting it as the thing one did for hysteria. That or a jug of cold water full in the face. Either. She didn’t care. He took her by the shoulders and kissed her instead, a real kiss with his tongue and his teeth and a strong aftertaste of brandy.
That silenced her. Instantly.
‘Oh Christ –’ she said, limp suddenly, as if that one contact had drained her of her vital energy, preparing her, weakening her, for what was to come.
‘Oh Christ …’
‘You want Christ to help you now, do you?’
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘You.’ And although other people were certainly present they seemed to have faded to some other level of reality, very far removed from herself and this bulky, swarthy man who was letting her know, without a word, not only that he had her, but that should he now refuse to open the trap and let her in she would plead with him to do so. On her knees, if he required it.
‘You flatter me, Miss Adeane.’
‘You can get it back, can’t you? The satin?’
‘I do believe I might.’
‘Oh – please say you can.’
‘I have said so. Nothing goes on in St Jude’s that I don’t know about – should I choose to enquire.’
‘And will you?’
‘Will you, Miss Adeane?’
He kissed her again, several pairs of eyes watching differently as he received her submi
ssion. Ned O’Mara frozen behind the bar. The other two barmaids, all agog, who would talk about nothing else for the rest of the day.
‘I didn’t know you wanted me,’ she said with total sincerity. Perhaps she would have come sooner if she had. For, no matter how distasteful this was, one did not die of it.
He smiled, that flash of large, white teeth against his dark, slightly oily skin she had always disliked and which now, quite suddenly, turned her stomach queasy.
‘Ah well, I won’t pretend to be precisely on fire for you, my dear, like poor Ned over there and one or two others. But they can’t have you, can they? Whereas I – for a length of brown satin – do believe I can. Tell me …?’
Yes. For a length of brown satin, for her life, and Odette’s, and Liam’s, he could.
She bowed her head.
He nodded.
‘Very well. Then go upstairs, while I set the necessary wheels in motion, and wait for me.’
She went, moving like a sleepwalker past Ned O’Mara, who might even be in love with her, past the ginger-haired barmaid who would have been happy to settle for Ned and therefore hated her, past the mousy-haired barmaid who had a good man of her own and could therefore afford to pity her. She mounted the stairs, entered the captain’s sitting-room with its Turkey carpets and leather chairs, sat down, hands folded, mind folded, heart scarcely beating, by the fire to wait for him. And when he came she went, in passive silence, to his bedroom, took off her clothes at his direction, lay down on his bed, her arms above her head, her body outstretched and unresisting, and closed her eyes.
A Song Twice Over Page 18