‘Do bear it patiently,’ Amabel had continued to urge. ‘They do not mean any harm, you know. It comes quite naturally to them.’
Gemma was beginning to believe, contrary to all her expectations and her mother’s teaching, that it might also come naturally to her.
‘What a rattling good sort you are, Gemma – absolutely first class.’ Yes, that was all very pleasant. Very much, in fact, according to plan and she had no wish to complain. He had done everything she had asked of him. He had taken to life at Almsmead with all the enthusiasms she had hoped for. He had joined her, with all the whimsical mischief of a schoolboy, in her small conspiracy against her father with regard to the manor. He had never questioned either her motives or her decisions, allowing her a most aristocratic freedom of movement far beyond anything her middle-class upbringing in general and her life with her father in particular had encouraged her to expect. And if the only deep emotion she had ever seen in him had been on the day of Ben Braithwaite’s engagement to Magda Tannenbaum, then she felt no right and no reason to be astonished at that.
He had taken his sister to town that morning, to Miss Baker’s and Miss Adeane’s where all the gossip would be flowing free and strong, and bought her a new hat and gloves and a flask of the perfume Miss Adeane kept hidden discreetly away for customers who wished it to be believed that they smelled naturally of lavender or roses. Two exquisite thoroughbreds, she supposed they had looked, chatting to one another in their high-pitched, well-bred, ‘London’voices, filling each shop in turn with their faintly tittering laughter, making Frizingley aware – whatever it chose to whisper behind their backs – that the dynastic alliance of one ‘trading’and therefore ‘common’fortune with another could mean nothing at all to them.
And that night when Linnet, face to face with her own reflection in her solitary looking-glass and the stark realization of how much it had really meant to her, had been unable to sleep, Tristan had walked with her for hours in the manor garden, Gemma watching them from her bedroom window as they paced beneath the chestnut trees, engrossed, almost entwined, like turning to like, intent wholly and exclusively upon one another.
So had she once walked and talked herself in that same garden – or so it now seemed to her – with the young Irishman who had recovered the amethyst and diamond cat which she still wore, very often on her collar and which she had longed – very badly, she remembered – to give him as a keepsake. She had been unable to do so. Tristan’s arrival had prevented her and she would never have found the right words to accompany the gift in any case. It would have appeared to be charity and she could not have borne that. Yet, whenever she pinned the brooch to her dress, she remembered him, pleasantly, wishing him well, not in the least distressed by the absolute conviction that he would never once think of her.
He had been going to France, she recalled. Or Italy. Anywhere in the wide world which happened to call his name. And she hoped he had answered freely, fortuitously, and had found his heart’s desire at the end of the road.
Whatever it had been.
While as for herself, surely she already possessed as much as it would be sensible for her to desire? And she had always set great store by common sense.
She had the manor and with it a great many pleasures which were negative perhaps but no less welcome for that. No need to gossip every afternoon away at Amabel’s tea-table with Amabel’s friends. No need to accept every one of the invitations which kept on being delivered because of Amabel’s fear of giving offence. No need to be constantly laying down her book in case Mrs Braithwaite should catch her reading and name her ‘studious’again. No Mrs Drubb, or not for much longer. No need to go to bed when Amabel went because she did not like to keep the servants sitting up and had had nightmares, ever since Gemma’s birth, about accidents with bedtime candles. No need to explain one’s reasons for suddenly looking out of the window. The sheer, exhilarating wickedness of going out, if she had a mind for it, in the rain. The socially useless companionship of Mrs Ephraim Cook, the mill-manager’s wife, a plain-faced, plain-spoken woman, who had aroused Gemma’s interest in the mill-school and the somewhat ineffective spinster lady who ran it.
The school, of course, had existed for some years now, ever since the Factory Act which her father could not mention without turning purple, had thought it advisable for factory children to be given some education, feeling that an hour or two a week per child, perhaps, of reading, writing and arithmetic, would not go amiss. Like the Braithwaites and the Colcloughs her father had not agreed with that. But being steeped, like them, in the philosophy that if one did a job at all one might as well do it splendidly – or at least a good deal better than the Braithwaites – he had built a very decent stone school with a walled yard and a tiny house attached for the use of the teacher, where anyone who paid him rent for his mill-cottages or any of his other employees who resided elsewhere might send their children – to suit the convenience of the teacher – free of charge. Not that many came on any sort of regular basis, much preferring the excitement of the streets to the acquisition of learning for which even the teacher herself, who had known far better days, considered they would have little use.
Mrs Ephraim Cook did not agree with her, believing that every child should learn to read as firmly as she believed they should wash behind their ears every morning and not relieve themselves, like dogs, in the street. While Gemma, who had never thought very much about it, her own education having come to her just as easily and plentifully as soap and hot water and extremely private sanitary arrangements, had found it something to think about now, when any new thought would have been welcome. Something useful. Something which could interest her without being thought so eccentric or so socially damaging that it would upset her mother.
Something to do. Particularly now when there was after all, to be no baby.
Better luck next time, everyone had said.
Yet it occurred to her now, as she lay quietly on her pillows, listening to the fire crackling in the winter chimney and her father peacefully snoring beside it, that such a time may never come. She had wanted her child. Badly, in fact. More, far more, than she had cared to show. Yet her body had rejected it so soon, with a firmness which had seemed quite final. Almost as if her body did not find it natural to bear a child.
‘Nonsense,’ the doctor had muttered gruffly when she had attempted to explain her fears to him. ‘You ladies have strange notions at times like these. Well known for it. You’ll be laughing, Mrs Gage, at the very idea – this time next year, perhaps. Or the year after.’
She had not believed him. She did not trust him either, considering him to be little more than a teller of comforting lies, her mother’s doctor oozing reassurance from every pore. Yet she had smiled obediently, taken her tonic, eaten her nourishing broth, allowed him to earn his fee.
‘Yes, doctor.’
But her own body told her a different story which, lying here for the long days of rest which had been prescribed for her, she had heard clearly enough through the bird-twitter of Linnet and her mother, and Tristan’s determined joviality.
Perhaps she would never have a child. Perhaps – in fact most certainly – it would be sensible to face the possibility. She faced it, therefore. Wept over it a little whenever her mother was safely out of the way. And then found her thoughts, which desperately needed a new direction, turning slowly towards the mill-school.
No child of her own. But there were other children. Ragged urchins, of course, sitting on those school benches on the occasions of her visits. Cleaned up for her inspection she supposed and even then many of them very far from tidy. But intelligence could not possibly be reserved for the washed and monied classes. Far from it, indeed, when one remembered Felix Lark who would have been thought half-witted had he not been a baronet, or Amanda Braithwaite who, no matter what her mother said, had never really learned to read.
Certainly in that plain, square classroom there would be bright, quick minds behind not a fe
w of those dirty faces, and budding abilities, potential, which she – with so much leisure and ease and money – could surely discover? Some clever little girl full of hope and fun and joy of living as Cara Adeane, the Irish dressmaker, must once have been. And what would one have made of Miss Adeane, Gemma wondered, had her talents been properly nurtured from the start?
Any one of a dozen useful, exciting, challenging things. Just as there might well be a dozen little Cara Adeanes waiting up there.
Something to do. It was what she most urgently craved for.
‘Father –?’ His moment of waking was often the best one, sometimes the only one, in which to approach him with any certainty of success.
‘What? … what is …? I wasn’t asleep … Just resting my eyes …’
She was content to let him believe it.
‘Father, there is something I would like so much …’ And she had spoken deliberately with the voice of Amabel.
Still half asleep he smiled indulgently, scenting a victory, since he had wanted to be generous all day and had been feeling mildly irritated with her for not giving him the opportunity. So now, after all, there was something she had set her heart on. He just hoped it would be difficult to come by and very expensive.
‘I would like full responsibility for the running of the mill-school.’
What had the girl got into her head now?
‘Although I’m not sure you can do it, father …’
What was that? He could do as he liked with his own property, couldn’t he? Who challenged him?
‘Mrs Ephraim Cook has taken it under her wing, father …’
The manager’s wife? He’d make short work of her.
‘And I would so enjoy turning it into the best school of its kind in Frizingley. In the West Riding even. Because if a job’s worth doing, then its worth doing well, father. Very well. That’s what you’ve always told me, haven’t you?’
‘Aye, lass.’ And John-William closed his eyes again, squeezing them tight shut to force back the painful, incredible start of tears.
What a damn shame, he thought, what a tragedy that she was a woman instead of what she ought to have been. A useful, sensible, hard-headed man.
Chapter Eleven
Daniel Carey returned to Frizingley as its Chartist Candidate entirely by chance, the gentleman who had originally been selected to fight the by-election having taken up a longish residence in jail on charges of plug-drawing and helping to demolish a workhouse near Rochdale.
A substitute had been required, therefore, in haste – and Daniel, who had never reached France or Italy after all but had spent the last two years at the London office of the Chartist Northern Star, had seemed as good a choice as any. Better than some, in fact, since he had once had West Riding connections and, as young political agitators went, possessed a relatively unblemished reputation, with not so much as a single term of imprisonment, as yet, to be used against him at the hustings.
A pleasant, very nearly a respectable, young man, it seemed, which was far more than could be said for the fellow they had put up for Bradford in 1841, an Irishman of the wilder variety who had served his apprenticeship to the political trade in such select establishments as Northallerton House of Correction and the castle jails of Lancaster and York.
Yet the disreputable William Martin had won an enormous following in ‘Worstedopolis’, culminating in a mighty show of hands at the hustings which had left no one in any doubt that, had those hands possessed a vote apiece, he would have been elected overwhelmingly as a Bradford MP.
Could Daniel Carey do the same in Frizingley? Better even? Could he ruffle the smugness of manufacturing Whigs and land-owning Tories alike by reminding them of what hands such as these had done in France? Of the Liberty and Equality too long denied which had been so bloodily taken? Very likely he could. And so they had sent him North, not to win, of course, perhaps not even to poll a single vote, but to lay the Charter once again before the people, to let them know what could be done in a land where every man had his vote and the freedom to use it without intimidation, as he and he alone thought best.
To Daniel it was a battle worth fighting, an opportunity to be of service which he had long desired. And if he would have preferred it not to be Frizingley, to be, in fact, anywhere else but there, he managed to quell his initial misgivings by the grim reminder that he would be unlikely to know anyone in St Jude’s now. No one at all. Two years had passed. A long time by any standards. Longer than ever by his – and hers.
She would not be there.
And even if he did find her what more had he to offer her than before? What, indeed, might he discover except ills that he still could not remedy, and wounds – both hers and his – that still could not be healed?
Better then – far better – not to look. Safer to close his eyes and his mind to her and give his entire concentration to the matter in hand; a resolution to which he firmly held, even when, after a tumultuous welcome at Brighouse – the nearest railway station to Frizingley – he was escorted, with an appropriate accompaniment of banners and Chartist hymns, to a lodging-house at the top of St Jude’s street where the landlady, Mrs Sairellen Thackray, had offered to accommodate him free of charge.
He had expected to stay at the Dog and Gun, a tavern well known for its radical associations, where unstamped, illegal newspapers had always been laid out openly on the bar-counter for the perusal of anyone so inclined. But, when certain pressures had been brought to bear upon the landlord – Daniel had not been told why or from where – the redoubtable Mrs Thackray had come forward at once to make her contribution to the cause.
A good woman, someone had explained to him on the road from Brighouse, the widow of Radical Jack Thackray, something of a local hero, who had been cut down by a sabre at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester, asking for rather less in the way of electoral reform than Daniel himself was demanding now. A woman who was afraid of nothing and who would feed him, starch his linen, give him peace and quiet in which to compose his speeches, until the campaign should be over. And it was not until Mrs Thackray’s tall, craggy fair-haired son had shouldered his luggage and led him to the top of St Jude’s Street that he had realized his peril.
Yet – just the same – she would not be there. And he had not come here as a lover, in any case. He had embarked on a serious and very likely dangerous undertaking which, until its conclusion, must precede anything and everything in his life. He was the Chartist Candidate for Frizingley. That was what he meant to Mrs Sairellen Thackray as she served him the first of her good dinners of boiled beef and potatoes and onions towards which the town’s Chartists had all made their contributions. That was what he meant to Luke Thackray, her son, who was to sleep in the kitchen so that the ‘candidate’might have the privacy of his tiny but spotless room. And so it was as the ‘candidate’that he spoke to them, his accent so neutral by now that he could have come from anywhere and everywhere, his green broadcloth jacket still shabby but worn as jauntily as if it had been lined with ermine, his lean, dark face handsome enough to please the women and hard enough to reassure the men.
Young, of course. Or so he seemed to Sairellen Thackray who preferred her leaders to have the mature dignity of a Richard Oastler, whom she had followed on foot those ninety miles to York and back when they had been campaigning for the ten hour working day. But Richard Oastler was still in his debtor’s prison, more than a thousand pounds short of the repayment of his debt, despite the money which Luke and thousands like him kept on collecting, week after week, from their wages. Nor had the ten hour day yet come to pass. And so when Luke had brought home a copy of the People’s Charter and read it aloud to her she had listened; considered; believed.
‘If we could all vote, mother, then we’d get our way. And if this candidate they’re sending should be more interested in Home Rule for Ireland than our Ten Hours’ Bill then what of it? With the Charter we could have both.’
So be it. Although, despite her principles a
nd her ingrained reluctance to compromise, she could not suppress a pang of gratitude even now – as she dished up her broth and herb dumplings for the candidate – that an attack of the low fever, caught as usual from terrible, tormented Mrs Rattrie who, this time, had died of it, had kept Luke in bed during that wild week last summer when the plugs had been drawn from Braithwaite’s boiler and all Luke’s brave young friends who had got into the habit of gathering to smoke their pipes and set the world to rights of an evening in her hen-run, had gone marching off to join their ‘brothers’from across the Pennines. And thence to Halifax where they had entered the town in their thousands, led by the women, Sairellen had been pleased to hear, walking four and five abreast, empty-handed and bare-headed as she had herself once walked to York, singing the psalm she too had sung on that day.
‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.
Serve the Lord with gladness,
Come before His presence with singing.
We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.’
And like sheep they had eventually been ridden down by soldiers as her husband had been ridden down at Peterloo, the crowd dispersed and then hunted over the open fields like running hares, so that of Luke’s companions one had crawled into a hedge with a leg that might have been mangled in a bear-trap and had bled to death there; two or three others had taken refuge in haystacks and barns; two had been arrested and sentenced to hard labour. While those who had gone back to Braithwaite’s mill had been picked out of the crowd by wild little Oliver Rattrie, the eldest Rattrie boy – nineteen or twenty she supposed he’d be by now – the twisted, crook-shouldered lad who had done more talking of pikes and pistols and bloody revolution than anybody else at the meetings in her back-yard. A betrayal which had secured their dismissal from Mr Ben Braithwaite himself who had branded them as troublemakers with no hope of employment anywhere in Frizingley again.
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