And what would Gemma Dallam – Gemma Gage – think to that, she wondered, if she knew the price he had made another woman pay to recover her brown satin?
He had had little to say to her since then, having turned his attention to the red-headed horsewoman she had today identified, from the servants’ gossip at the back of the church, as Mrs Covington-Pym. She wondered what he could have to say to her now, not expecting it to be pleasant. Not much caring. Since what had been pleasant lately? What had turned out even half-way right?
‘Miss Adeane, you are looking unwell.’
Was she? She realized that she was feeling it too, frozen to the marrow in this bitter East wind which kept whipping her cloak off her shoulders as contemptuously as if it had been made of pocket-handkerchieves instead of tablecloths, her stomach hollow and aching, her head feeling light and aching a little too. But that was only because she had eaten nothing since last night and had been so furious this morning about her father’s gall in writing that damnably cheerful letter. Nothing worse than that. Just lack of food and bad temper coming together, which never did her any good.
‘I’m quite all right, thank you. Just cold.’
‘You are not expecting a child by any chance, are you?’
She opened her eyes wide and amazed, and then lowered them as she made a rapid calculation. Since he had troubled to enquire, then he might be willing to help. Should she tell him yes, he had made her pregnant, and see if he would give her a guinea or two to put it right? That way she could buy a little warmth and cheer for Christmas and how would he ever know that she had lied?
‘No. I’m cold, that’s all.’
She felt him watching her and, ill at ease beneath his scrutiny, said quickly. ‘Everybody seems to be going off to the wedding-breakfast. Shouldn’t you?’
He gave her the gleaming smile she detested.
‘Are you dismissing me, Miss Adeane?’
‘They won’t be liking it if you’re late.’
She’d be there in good time herself, given half a chance, to eat their game pies and their plum cakes and drink their wine, to stand by their log fires to warm herself. Oh God – it was going to be a terrible winter. She could feel it coming. Ice and snow and killing damp, sore chests and feet and hands, the stand-pipe frozen over, coal and candles coming to an end, no water, no heat, no money, from now until March at the soonest.
And Liam’s cough.
‘I won’t be late,’ he said and it took her a moment to remember that they were speaking of Miss Dallam’s wedding-breakfast. ‘I drive rather faster than these upright commercial gentlemen. Because they tend to worry, you see, about spoiling their Sunday suits and their dignity. They can’t risk a roll in the gutter, can they now, with all their factory-hands looking on? So they go sure and steady. I don’t. And perhaps I know a short-cut or two to Frizingley Hall, which ought not to surprise you …’
‘Oh?’ She was barely listening to him. She was just cold. Cold. She just wanted to go home and had started to worry about the hour it would take her to get there, the sorry state of her boots, the snow coming on.
‘I was born there, Miss Adeane. They are all very much aware of that.’
‘Oh,’ she said again, not much caring. And then, remembering it would be unwise to cross him, added quickly, ‘I don’t know where I was born.’
She had never given much thought to it either. She very much doubted that when she got home, if she ever did, she would think it worth asking her mother.
‘In your case,’ he said, setting a well-shod foot casually upon a gravestone, his warm and wonderful fur cloak eddying snugly around it, ‘it can hardly matter.’
‘No. I suppose not. Any old scrap-heap would do.’
He laughed. ‘My dear young lady, why so bitter? Did the fairies take your cradle to the wrong address? Ought it to have been a palace?’
She shrugged. If palaces were well-heated, yes. I’ll make you a queen in England, Odette my love. She heard her father’s voice somewhere in her aching head speaking those words, making his wild promises. Breaking every one. Had he even married her mother, she wondered, other than by common law, by simply announcing their intention of being together? Like the Rattries, she supposed, who would never have had the money for a marriage licence or to put in the vicar’s collecting plate. Nor have seen the sense to it if they had.
Marriages then, like palaces and warm fires and good soles on one’s shoes, were just refinements for the rich. Captain Goldsborough, wrapped in his thick, black fur, and with a little time to while away until the road should be clear of wedding-carriages, appeared to be telling her so.
‘Marriage is only a device, after all,’ he said, ‘by which property can be inherited. A man only starts to worry about the virginity of his bride or the virtue of his wife when he wants to breed an heir. And if he has nothing to leave behind – no counting houses full of money like these pompous millmasters, or no land, no name like those of us who are rather less common – then why take the trouble?’
She didn’t really know about that. But one thing had caught her attention.
‘Common? Do you think the millmasters common?’
He looked very much amused. ‘I have met no species commoner. Nor so clumsy. The only thing that distinguishes the Dallams from the vulgar, upstart herd of Braithwaites and Colcloughs and the rest is that John-William Dallam had the imagination to buy the manor and leave it relatively unscathed. Although his wife’s chintz chaircovers bring on a certain nausea whenever I am obliged to call.’
‘She hates it there.’ Cara realized she had enjoyed telling him that. ‘She wants to move to the country. To Far Flatley, wherever that is …’
He threw back his head and laughed, very heartily. The landlord of an unsavoury city tavern. The owner of every thieves’kitchen in St Jude’s. Goldsborough of Frizingley Hall. Contemptuous, in all his guises, of the pretensions of these new-made millionaires.
‘It is Lark country. Covington-Pym country. Your little Mrs Dallam will never survive it. The exquisite Miss Linnet Gage may do better. Her father was a cousin of the Cheshire Bartram-Hyndes, she tells me.’
‘Do you know her?’ Instinctively Cara bristled, knowing her enemies, ready to defend herself.
‘Only slightly. The lady is looking for a husband and she has been about the world sufficiently to know that I am not one of those. And, in any case, the Bartram-Hynde side of her nature, which might have made her interesting, has been somewhat watered down, one finds, by her mother – a cotton-spinner’s daughter with social ambitions, I believe, from some dreary middle-class suburb somewhere or other. Miss Gage wishes to be respectable.’
‘Is that wrong?’
‘Dull. And timid. Like all these posturing middle-class women are timid. So terrified of doing the wrong thing that they do nothing at all – except bleat like sheep about their petty rules and regulations and their morality. A sorry crew, Miss Adeane. Setting up their own gods in their own mealy-mouthed image. Thrift and Economy. How very thrilling. One wonders how many symphonies were ever composed or how many masterpieces created with that. And those castrated accents of theirs, making sure one knows exactly what everything has cost. Working five-year-old children to death in their mines and mills and breeding their own daughters to swoon at the sight of an injured sparrow. Believing, as fervently as they say they believe in their Almighty, that money can make up for anything, even bad taste and bad manners.’
‘It can.’ If she believed in anything at all then it was that.
‘To you, perhaps, Cara.’
‘Then why do you attend their weddings?’
‘For my amusement. To see the efforts they make to be ladies and gentlemen and the constant strain it puts them under. To see how far I can go with them, sometimes. To watch them pretending not to know all the things about me which I take not the least trouble to conceal. Things they won’t admit so that they can keep on asking me to dinner – because my name is Goldsborough. And they w
ould like to buy a name to go with the millions. Felix Lark has put his up for sale, after all. The first young lady ready to pay off the mortgages on his land can be Lady Lark tomorrow.’
‘You haven’t got any land left, though – have you?’ But her spite – for such it was – did not dismay him.
‘Oh yes – my dear – I have. There are a great many acres in St Jude’s and thereabouts. Growing a very adequate crop, in their fashion, I do assure you.’
‘Rents, you mean? So you don’t despise money, really – do you?’
And she had no way of knowing how hungrily her eyes had fastened upon his fur.
‘By no means. When used with style and not exclusively to breed one fortune from another in a bank vault, as these people do. Money is for decorating life, Cara – one way or another. For acquiring pleasures. And powers. And not being ashamed of them. For opening doors and not giving a damn about what anybody else has to say to it. But these people use theirs to make strait-jackets to strangle each other. Marie Moon did well to stay away.’
‘Was she invited?’
‘I am sure she was not. Could our good Christian Mrs Dallam possibly expose her daughter, and her friends’daughters, to a woman like Marie, who has shown herself on a public stage for money, and lived with one man while married to another? One quite sees that she could not. Although Adolphus Moon, of course, is another matter. He is a drunkard and a profligate and has certain amorous peculiarities which even Marie – and sometimes the law – finds hard to tolerate. But all our tender young ladies can be exposed to him quite happily because he has never been caught. At least, not precisely in the act of anything Mrs Dallam would not care to know about. Or anything he has not been able to hush up. So Adolphus Moon can be received. So can Audrey Covington-Pym who is the most accomplished whore of my acquaintance. Because she has not been caught either, or not so blatantly that one has had to stop pretending to look the other way. And Audrey has never been on the stage, or left her husband, or made a false move in public in any direction.’
‘I am sure Mrs Dallam doesn’t know all that.’
‘I am sure Mr Dallam does. And Miss Linnet Gage, who would marry Adolphus Moon herself, like a shot, if she got the chance. And put up with him, as well – like poor Marie.’
‘Poor Marie?’
‘Money again, Miss Adeane? I don’t doubt he pays her well. Which brings me to what I really have to say to you … You are cold, aren’t you?’
She believed she was ready to expire with it. The churchyard had emptied, the wedding-carriages had rolled away, taking their fragile gaiety with them to another world so far as Cara was concerned. Here, in her world, an icy wind was gathering force and malice, preparing to freeze the path beneath her feet, aim fierce arrows of hail and sleet at her cringing back, bury her – unless she could drag herself up St Jude’s Hill fast enough – in snow.
‘Yes. I’m cold.’
At that moment it was all she was. Cold, and terrified of growing colder, so that when he opened his arms and put them around her, his musk-scented cloak coming with them, ample enough to cover them both, all she felt was the salvation of his warmth, his hard, hot body supporting her as she shook and shivered against him, that blessed, beautiful fur enclosing her as in a nest, muffling her from the killing storm.
A nest, of course, that had a huge, probably wholly malevolent, black-browed spider at the centre of it, King Spider himself warming her up for his dinner she supposed. But the cold had numbed her senses and all her ingenuity and she could think of nothing at all to do about that.
If she was going to be devoured, well then … She was going to be devoured. She closed her eyes.
‘So – Cara Adeane. Would you care to spend Christmas with me?’
What on earth was he saying? Why her? Surely he had women enough?
‘Ah yes.’ And his breath too was warm against her cheek and down the back of her neck, making her spine tingle. ‘But my mistresses go home to their husbands for Christmas, and although I could stay at the Covington-Pyms and ride out with the hunt on Boxing Day morning, and call round at the Moons on my way back to cheer up poor Marie … I think not. Variety, you see … So – Miss Adeane? What do you say to Christmas underneath a warm fur blanket with as much to eat and drink and as many logs on the fire as you like? And anything else I decide to give you – or teach you. And there are things you really ought to learn, you know.’
She didn’t know. Or care. She felt his hands on her back and her waist and could not manage to care about that either. Last time it had been for a length of dress material. This time it would be to stop herself from freezing, or starving, to death.
Only one thing had to be settled.
‘I have my little boy and my mother to think of.’
‘I know.’ She had expected he would. ‘I see no difficulty. Your mother looks after your son, doesn’t she? Perhaps a little money would make her festive season easier to endure. A cellar full of coal. A roast goose. And – shall we say – anything else you can steal in ten minutes from my kitchen and carry home? You’ll enjoy that.’
It struck her – thinking of Marie Moon and Audrey Covington-Pym – that if she was going to sell herself, and it seemed she was, then it would be as well not to come too cheap.
‘My little boy has nothing to wear for the cold weather.’
‘Of course.’
‘And it’s a decent doctor he needs for his cough.’
‘You may instruct him to send his bill to me.’
‘All right.’
She had agreed to it. She was a whore then? Sairellen Thackray had always said she had the makings of it, would come to it one day. So the day had come, and she was accepting it very calmly. Why not? She had seen it happen to others many a time. No one in St Jude’s would blame her. No one who had ever stood on the edge of that abyss where she had been teetering for so long, that held hunger and cold, sickness that could not be treated for lack of a shilling, children one could afford neither to raise nor to bury, would have a harsh word to say. No one who had ever struggled in the mire as she had, could fail to understand.
It was not what she had wanted. He was not what she had wanted. But he would not keep her long. And in the meantime, since he had spoken of thingss she ought to learn, she would see if he could tell her just what it was that women like Marie Moon and Audrey Covington-Pym did to stop themselves from bearing child after child after child.
That would be worth knowing.
‘Poor little Adeane,’ he said kissing her ear and her neck. ‘Women don’t survive alone, I’m afraid. It entertained me watching you try. Shall I help you to try again?’
‘How?’ She was growing warmer now, and more alert.
‘We might work out a formula – if the next few days go well, that is. If you continue to entertain me. What do you want out of life, Adeane?’
She sighed. How could he understand.
‘Peace of mind.’
‘Oh that.’ She had known he would treat it with contempt. ‘You mean money in your bank, don’t you. I can show you how to manage that. What else?’
She screwed up her eyes, feeling suddenly fierce.
‘Not being at everybody’s beck and call.’
She felt his mouth smile against her forehead.
‘Well, so long as you remain at mine, I think the rest could be managed. Nothing else? Nothing beyond coal and candles and cough medicine – in this your one and only lifetime?’
A fur cloak, she thought, like this one. Even a ride back to St Jude’s in his phaeton would be something to begin with. But she doubted he would offer either.
She was quite right.
‘Very well then, Miss Adeane. I had better go now and pay my respects to the petty bourgeoisie. I shall see you tonight. In my seraglio. At eight o’clock, shall I? To make our arrangements?’
The wind, as he moved away from her, was like a knife.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘unless I freeze solid on my way back.’<
br />
He smiled, adjusting his cloak, drawing on his gloves.
‘Yes, the wind does have a raw edge to it, I must admit. May I advise you to hurry home as fast as you can.’
She walked with him to his carriage, the reckless high-perch phaeton she had seen often enough outside the Fleece, his horse held now by a wizened little urchin quite blue with cold, to whom he tossed a coin.
He mounted, settled his eddying fur comfortably around him, the reins loosely in his hands, the horse skittish – feeling the cold too perhaps – and ready to be off.
He looked down at her, smiling.
She looked up, clutching her inadequate plush tablecloths, the supple line of her body begging him for a ride.
‘Until this evening then, Cara.’
‘Yes.’
‘Hurry home, now – we can’t have you catching a chill.’
‘I won’t do that.’
‘Of course not – if you walk briskly, as I told you.’
He drew in his reins, raised his driving whip.
‘You haven’t thought of anything else you’d like me to give you – by any chance?’
‘Yes.’ And she had gritted her teeth to stop them from chattering. ‘Yes, I have.’ A ride to town? That, surely, was what he was expecting. Please Captain Goldsborough – I’m so small and poor and cold. And when she had said it – when she had put so pathetic a value on herself – he would still drive off and leave her standing there, with those steep, chilly miles to go. To the devil with that.
Many things were becoming clearer to her now.
‘I’ll have Miss Ernestine Baker’s dress shop,’ she said.
Chapter Ten
Shortly before the second anniversary of her wedding Mrs Tristan Gage suffered a miscarriage which kept her in bed for several cosseted days surrounded by every possible luxury and attention, including the embarrassed affection of her husband who had rather more idea how mares and hound bitches might feel at such moments than women, and the deep concern of her mother who, throughout her own twenty-six years of marriage had herself miscarried eight times.
A Song Twice Over Page 21