And Gemma had not the heart to tell either of them how much they wearied her.
‘My dear, it is God’s will,’ Amabel kept on saying because that was the thing her own mother and her dear old nanny – both gone now – had always said to her.
‘You’re looking simply splendid, Gemma. Isn’t she looking splendid, Aunt Amabel?’ Tristan kept on saying because that – surely – was what any woman must want to hear.
‘Oh, a little pale perhaps,’ murmured Amabel, because paleness seemed essential to the occasion, although with dear nut-brown Gemma it was rather hard to tell. And she had looked so well since her marriage, so calm and composed and so … Well, not matronly, at any rate, as wicked Lizzie Braithwaite had suggested. Noble was the word which sprang to Amabel’s mind. Regal, even. Although Queen Victoria, who had married just two years ago like Gemma, had produced the Princess Royal ten months after the wedding service, the Prince of Wales eleven months after that, and was thought on excellent authority, to be expecting again. And Victoria was even shorter in stature and a whole year younger than Gemma. Amabel, although hovering on the brink of tears, tried valiantly, in her own fashion, not to mind. Or not too much. For she had actually been engaged in the very pleasant task of deciding which room in her new house at Far Flatley might best be converted into a nursery when a messenger had come from Frizingley with the awful news.
And Amabel could not stop herself from thinking that this dreadful, dirty town must surely be to blame, that if Gemma had been less stubborn about remaining here, in this dark old manor, standing cheek-by-jowl with the brewery and the foundry and those hundreds and hundreds of unwashed, unlettered people who worked in them, then this tragedy would not have occurred.
Oh yes – naturally – a young wife needed a home of her own. A young couple in the first blissful days of their union needed to be alone together. Not that Gemma had actually said as much, although Amabel’s tender heart had at once understood. But John-William had bought so much land at Far Flatley from Colonel Covington-Pym, a whole bank of his river and several fields beyond that there would have been ample room to build Gemma and Tristan a dear little nest. Although Almsmead, the house they had built, was big enough, she felt quite certain, for half a dozen pairs of newly married turtle-doves to lose themselves in delicious privacy whenever they chose. She would have been the last person in the world to interfere with that.
And Almsmead was her own dream come true, a medieval castle in pale, newly-quarried stone on the outside, spacious and high-ceilinged and fitted with every modern gadgetry within. Bigger, wider, grander in all its dimensions than the houses the Colcloughs and the Lords had built, since John-William had cleverly engaged the same architect and told him to produce something similar but much more splendid. And the dear, good man had designed Almsmead, in the centre of a green field; had surrounded it with a rose-garden; given her apple trees and a lily-pond; a trellised, covered walk down to the river with its clear, clean water in which she could see smooth pebbles and little silvery fishes instead of the slime and gas bubbles and dead cats one saw – if one had the stomach to look – in Frizingley’s canal.
There were no rows upon rows of mean, diseased little cottages now to press upon her and worry her. As they had worried her. Enormously. No longer that terrible clattering of clogs in the street to wake her every morning and start her thinking about all those poor people and those ragged little children hurrying to the mill. Nor those dreadful factory hooters, Mr Colclough’s from the foundry, Mr Lord’s answering it, her husband’s from the top of the hill, Ben Braithwaite’s intruding as stridently as his mother’s purple taffeta dresses from the other side of town, each one of them blasting out its five minute warning as to the pains and penalties of being late.
She could sleep now in peace and with her windows open to sweet air and silence, nothing to disturb her in the mornings but birdsong and the lowing of Colonel Covington-Pym’s cattle, the barking of a dog that would most certainly be a pedigree animal bred for the retrieving of partridge and pheasant, as far removed from the yapping mongrel-packs of Frizingley as could be. And when her maids had got her dressed and done her hair and she had breakfasted by her tall windows overlooking her manicured rose-garden and a green, daisy-starred meadow, she had nothing to alarm her throughout the day but the possibility of a visit from the formidable Mrs Covington-Pym or the awkwardness, as she took her carriage-exercise, of encountering the wife of her dear friend Mr Adolphus Moon who had made himself so very agreeable. Particularly to Linnet.
The house, of course, had been long in the building. John-William insisting on having everything just so, Amabel herself taking time and immense delight in her choice of furnishings, living a dozen delightful dramas every day over Aubusson rugs and inlaid cabinets, the recklessness of silk damask on newly plastered walls, the sheer extravagances of crystal and china which Linnet – the dear child – had encouraged her to commit.
For years she had cherished Almsmead in her imagination. For ten months she had watched it grow, had chosen the textures and colours of her own personality in which to clothe it. For almost six months now she had known the joy of waking every morning in a brand new feather bed like a fluted, pale pink shell in which no other woman had ever slumbered.
It was the most exciting time of her life. The happiest. Or would have been had Gemma not insisted on remaining in the very centre of so much decay and corruption and ‘horridness’, in Frizingley.
She had spoken to her about it, not sharply, of course – she could never do that – but with disappointment to which Gemma had calmly replied, ‘Mother, I told you all along that I didn’t want to live in the country.’
‘Oh yes, dear.’ Amabel’s chin had quivered. ‘But I just never believed you. How could I?’
How indeed, when Almsmead was so much better in every way than this creaking old hall and the Goldsboroughs’possibly valuable but, in her view, horribly antique furniture which had come with it, held together, she often thought, by little more than the beeswax with which it was polished. And these tiny, mullioned windows in their deep embrasures which let in the light so strangely, shadows like dark brown varnish suddenly filtered through by thin beams of light which might be any colour from silver to amber. And the sickening clamour of street noises beyond the cloister wall, the sickening odour of those who made them. Amabel had worried that Tristan would not like it.
‘Gemma dear, he has a right to be considered and I believe he is a fresh-air man – the Gages and the Bartram-Hyndes have all been brought up to that. And at Almsmead we have everything that a gentleman could possibly require, hunting and shooting and fishing and maypole dancing and cricket on the village green …?’
‘Yes, mamma. I am sure Tristan will enjoy all that.’
‘But darling – how can he? If you stay here?’
‘Mother, he may come and go as he pleases. I do not keep him tied to my apron strings.’
And Amabel, who never could feel quite safe unless John-William was somewhere in the house or, at most, at the mill where a note might easily reach him, had been scandalized.
‘Gemma my love – oh dear – how can I say this without giving offence? It is just that gentlemen are … Well, it does not do, you see, to be too much apart.’
And in Amabel’s experience it had always been the wife who complained of it, Ethel Lord, for instance, fretting herself into a decline, or very nearly, when her husband had taken to spending so much time in Leeds; Maria Colclough turning to religion because her man emerged so rarely from his counting house; even strident Lizzie Braithwaite complaining that she had been neglected for the sake of the business.
Yet Gemma had shown nothing but good-humour when Tristan had subscribed to the Far Flatley hunt and stabled a tall bay mare and a chestnut gelding at Almsmead. She had even bought him a hunting dog as a present, a sleek, golden, sweet-tempered animal from which he at once became inseparable. And since the dog also resided at Almsmead – Frizingley very cl
early being no place for one of his pedigree – so too, for most of the time, it seemed, did Tristan. While Gemma – still perfectly good-tempered – remained at the old manor, seeing no one of greater significance, so far as her mother could make out, than the spinster lady who ran the mill school, and the mill manager.
Excellent people, of course, particularly that good Mr Ephraim Cook who was so clever about taking care of the business so that John-William could take his rest. But hardly fit company – an employee, after all, and his rather blunt, not very pretty wife – for Gemma.
Yet Gemma had shown no more than a polite interest in Almsmead while Linnet, who was very dear but not Gemma, after all, had positively thrown herself into all the excitements of housebuilding and furnishing, taking to Far Flatley as if she had been born there. Particularly after her unfortunate experience with Ben Braithwaite.
Dear Linnet. Amabel smiled at her now as she sat by Gemma’s bedside tranquilly embroidering a cambric handkerchief, patient and beautiful as an angel and so terribly wronged.
That Ben Braithwaite had most ardently desired her was beyond question. All Frizingley knew it, even his mother who had grown so incensed about Linnet’s poverty that she would have poisoned her if she could. Harsh words had been exchanged, in strident Braithwaite voices, between Lizzie and her eldest son. Amabel, for the first time in her life, had felt in less than perfect harmony with her John-William when he had declared that Linnet, on the small dowry he was prepared to give her, was aiming too high. Would he give more? ‘No,’ he’d said flatly in a manner which meant he would not change his mind. ‘If the lad takes her then he must take her for passion and hope it stays hot.’
It had burned a whole year long, and the half of another, the image of Linnet gliding down the aisle behind Gemma like a lovely, abandoned swan so engraved on Ben Braithwaite’s memory that he would have no peace, no rest – he’d vowed – until he had possessed her. He was his own master. He could afford her, God dammit. He’d have her then. He told her so. And grew frenzied enough, more than once, to attempt to take her, a half-rape, half-seduction, to which she appeared to submit and then, at the last moment, eluded him; leaving him more famished and furious and consumed by passion than ever.
A whole year long of hungering and thirsting, and the half of another. Yet last week he had married Magda Tannenbaum, daughter of Sigmund Tannenbaum of Bradford and Hamburg, a wool merchant of legendary wealth, enormous possessions, and no son to inherit the lion’s share of them.
Linnet had attended the wedding, of course, looking exquisite in dove-grey velvet with a swansdown hat and muff, her face calm and remote, betraying not the least flicker of anything which anyone could call unbecoming, even when she saw the bride, thin as a stick and hideously sallow, led to the altar dripping pearls and diamonds and a London-made gown with a train half a cathedral-aisle long.
Amabel, torn between sympathy for Linnet who had loved and lost and this poor little jewelled bride who was unlikely to be loved at all, had suffered a severe headache that day. Linnet – who could doubt it? – had endured untold agonies beneath her cool, just a shade too persistent smile, finding a little consolation, perhaps, but hardly so much as she had pretended, in the renewed attentions of Uriah Colclough.
Gemma had winced slightly – Amabel would never forget it – as they left the church and, later that day, had started to lose her baby. A day of celebration and a day of tragedy, one superimposed upon the other, so that Amabel, who did not even wish to be rational, found it easy to believe that Ben Braithwaite had broken not only Linnet’s heart, but Gemma’s.
‘Never mind, my darlings,’ she said now, bathing them both in her overflowing affections, Gemma propped up on her pillows looking polite and pleasant – surely that could not be right? – Linnet still remote and very tranquil. ‘Never mind.’
‘About what, mother?’
And since she could not say, ‘About horrid Ben Braithwaite for wasting two years of Linnet’s youth and having his dreary wedding on a day when Gemma would have been better off staying in bed,’ she chirruped brightly, ‘Everything, darlings – because this is what I want us to do. Just as soon as you are better’ – and she meant both of them – ‘we’ll get out the carriage and go down to that sweet little shop of Miss Adeane’s to buy bonnets and shawls and order new dresses. And then we’ll just run across the street to Miss Baker’s and order some more, so that the dear old thing will not feel left out. Shall we do that?’
She meant well. Very well indeed.
‘Yes, mamma,’ said Gemma.
‘Oh yes, Aunt Amabel – do let’s,’ said Linnet.
‘Can I come too?’ asked Tristan, playing his part.
‘To make eyes at Miss Adeane?’ enquired Gemma, playing hers.
‘Oh, absolutely not, my darling. Since it is Miss Ernestine Baker who has my heart.’
‘Incorrigible flirt,’ teased his sister.
‘Heartbreaker,’ teased his wife.
‘Really, girls – how can you?’ protested Amabel, dimpling with smiles.
So that when John-William Dallam came into the room it was to find his womenfolk as he most liked to see them, cheerful, comfortable, and under his roof safely and securely together.
He knew his arrival would disperse the party, being well aware that his presence made both his son-in-law and pretty Miss Linnet frankly nervous.
‘I think I’d best step outside a moment and see to the dogs,’ said Tristan. ‘I left them in the stable.’
‘Dogs? What’s this?’ said Linnet. ‘Have you found a friend for Goldie?’
‘I have. That pure white bitch Adolphus Moon could never handle.’
‘But darling – what fun. How wonderful.’
‘Why not go and see?’ murmured Gemma.
They went, wreathed in love and kisses for their dear Gemma yet tiptoeing slightly as people do when making an escape.
Mrs Drubb came in with offers of tea.
‘Why not take it downstairs, mamma?’ whispered Gemma. ‘I believe Mrs Drubb has things to say to you.’
She went, leaving John-William Dallam alone, as he wished to be, with his daughter. Had Gemma sent them all away, then? He believed she had. Clever girl, his Gemma. What a clever man she would have made. What a useful, reliable, clear-headed son. And what a trick Fate had played on him by putting the very qualities he had wanted to see in that son in a daughter. There’d have been no need for Ephraim Cook then to manage the business when he was gone; an upright, Nonconformist – Mr Cook – the kind who never allowed a drop of alcohol, or a smile, to pass his lips and whose well-trained conscience would never allow him to cheat Gemma nor to waste a penny of her money, no matter how hard Tristan tried.
A good man, Ephraim Cook, with a good, strait-laced, sensible wife, a man who’d keep the looms turning and the profits coming in long after John-William himself was in his grave. No imagination though. None of that extra quality, whatever it was, which had got the business going in the first place, which had ensured John-William success in those early rough-and-ready days of colossal risks and colossal returns, when so many had failed. The drive – perhaps that was what he ought to call it? – which Gemma may well have inherited in abundance. If she’d been a man.
‘Are you happy, lass?’ he wanted to say to her. But one could never speak so directly to a woman. At least he couldn’t. And so he muttered ‘Are they treating you all right?’
‘Of course, father.’
‘Aye – but if there’s anything you want that they can’t get you …?’
He would see to it at once. She knew that. Yet it gave him pleasure to tell her so.
‘You’re not feeling so poorly then – as you were?’
‘Oh no. I feel quite well. I’d like to get up. I’m sure I could. But they won’t have it.’
Her father looked shocked.
‘I should think not, my lass. You just stay where you are.’ His wife, who had miscarried he was no longer sure how many times
, had stayed in bed two or three weeks without setting her foot to the floor on every occasion, and had then spent a week or so more, he remembered, on a sofa in the drawing-room looking not merely untouchable but as if even a heavy footstep across the hall might shatter her into pieces like spun glass.
He felt a twinge of unease even now at the memory. Poor Amabel. He had wanted a son and had made her suffer for it. Not that she had even thought of complaining. Yet the sight of his daughter going the same way seriously displeased him. He had no intention – absolutely none – of letting any man make her suffer. And what need had Tristan Gage for a son and heir in any case when he had nothing to leave him? What need had he, John-William Dallam, for a grandson, he thought grimly, when he would be dead and gone, by the look of things, long before he could teach the little chap how to run the mill?
No. Let Ephraim Cook keep the business in order for Amabel and Gemma, and whoever came after them must take care of themselves. As he’d had to do. For he was no landed gentleman like the Larks and the Covington-Pyms who’d go to any lengths to pass on their noble names. Names, indeed. Dallams were ten a penny in the backstreets of Frizingley. Always had been. It made no difference to him. And if young master Tristan, with his fancy education and his airs and graces had any such notions about founding a dynasty then he – common or garden John-William Dallam – would soon put a stop to it.
‘It’s not the whole world, you know, Gemma,’ he said gruffly, ‘… having a family, I mean. Some do. Some don’t. Some can’t. And that’s that.’
It was the most intimate thing he had ever said to her. An acknowledgement of her womanhood coupled with his offer, at all times, to protect it. ‘If that fancy lad doesn’t suit you,’ he was really telling her, ‘then we’ll get rid of him. Church wedding, marriage settlement, your mother’s godson or not, he can have his marching orders whenever you say the word.’
A Song Twice Over Page 22