A Song Twice Over

by Brenda Jagger

  He shook his head. ‘Well – I reckon I could do the job. But they wouldn’t give it to me. Because my father was Jack Thackray. And I wouldn’t take it for the same reason. And what else is there for a man like me? Be realistic, Cara. I’m not like our Chartist candidate, who can afford to play the grasshopper because he already has his education in his hands – his classics degree that can open doors in his life for him whenever he chooses. Those doors are closed to me, Cara – tight shut. You know that as well as I do. Yes, I have a good brain. I even use it, to keep it active, in the only way I can – by reading all those poets and philosophers which, as you rightly say, are unlikely to profit me financially by one penny. I went to a dame-school, Cara, where an old woman taught me the alphabet, which was about as much as she knew herself. And I was lucky to have even that much schooling, since my mother never went to school at all. And then, when I was eight years old, I went into the mill – like everybody in this town goes into the mill – because there was nowhere else to go. And now I’m nearly thirty. Half-educated. Self-educated. A success in St Jude’s, where overlookers are men to be looked up to and kept on the right side of. Nothing in my own estimation, perhaps. Full of haphazard reading that doesn’t qualify me for anything and never could. The professions are for gentlemen, Cara, you know that. And the only men who get promoted from the factory floor are those who think as Mr Braithwaite tells them to think. I don’t.’

  ‘Oh Lord …’

  ‘Yes, Cara?’

  ‘Your fancy ideals.’

  ‘I’m afraid so. I’d feel the cold without them.’

  She glanced at him sharply. He was warm then, it seemed, in his integrity. While she needed a velvet cloak with a double lining between herself and the weather. Needed it. Bitterly she drew it around her, shivering slightly, her throat, suddenly and to her intense annoyance, very tight with tears.

  ‘I have no religion either,’ she said.

  He smiled, enduring and immovable, his straw-coloured head bare, his eyes far-sighted and kinder, sometimes, than her flesh and blood could stand.

  ‘What does that mean, Cara?’

  ‘I don’t know – I don’t know – No ideals, no religion, no politics. Oh Lord – you know what I am.’ Christie Goldsborough’s woman, she meant. He did not. And again, at this vulnerable, fragile moment when she could least resist it, she felt that he had clasped her hand.

  ‘Yes, Cara. I do know what you are. From the start – I knew.’

  ‘Luke. I want something wonderful to happen to you,’ she hissed at him, meaning it with all her heart yet sounding as if she were spitting venom.

  He took it calmly. ‘Perhaps it has.’

  She was very cold now, struck by a chill which brought her yet another memory, of Gemma Gage’s wedding morning when she had stood in the churchyard wrapped in two plush tablecloths stitched together, shivering before Christie Goldsborough and longing for nothing more – in that killing wind – than his spectacular fur-lined cloak.

  She had her own cloak now, and she was no warmer.

  No. If Luke meant that she had happened to him then it was not wonderful. No. When there was so much of her that she could neither show him nor tell him. Could he mean that? She felt her heart lurch and a great fluttering start up inside her, like wings beating through warm water.

  ‘I want you to be happy, Luke.’ It was a plea. For if she could see joy in his life then at least she would have had something. She believed it would content her.

  ‘That’s a lot to ask,’ he said. ‘I want the same for you – although perhaps I don’t expect to get it. I reckon that’s the difference between us. I can settle for less.’

  They walked back quietly, rather carefully, Luke’s hand not touching her elbow but, just the same, guiding her, guarding her, first over the coarse tufts of moorland grass and then, when the town started, over the uneven cobbles. Although in fact she did not stumble, keeping pace with him, warmed by him and cleansed by him as she had always been. From the start. A little exasperated too. But that had always been present in the brew that was her affection for him. Her trust. The comfort she derived from her certain knowledge of his worth.

  Had anything changed? If, now, she were to reach out and put her hand in his what would he do? Once again she felt that strange, churning sensation of wings through water. An excitement she did not wholly welcome. She had wanted peace from Luke. Now her mind was filled with what he might want from her. And whether – or not – she could give it.

  A crowd had gathered at the top of St Jude’s Street, not the usual, indifferent ebb and flow of passers-by but silent, solemn groups of women in blanket shawls and men in cloth caps, all staring in the same direction, a sure sign of something amiss. An accident? Common enough in these streets where children were left to roam untended. And in these houses with their open, unkempt fires of sticks and rough-hewn wood that sparked and splintered and could so easily set fire to a child’s dress. Liam? Her heart lurched now with an entirely familiar panic. But no, for there was Odette looking troubled but not bereaved – sorry for others, thank God, not herself – standing beside a grim, bare-headed Sairellen Thackray who seemed as impervious to the cold as her son.

  ‘It’s the Rattries,’ Luke said.

  Of course. What else? The Rattries, or rather the end of them. A common enough sight in St Jude’s. And as she watched the landlord’s men – Goldsborough’s men – carrying out the few pathetic sticks of furniture into the street, roughly, since nothing was fit to sell to recover the arrears of rent, she was merely surprised that Mr Rattrie had managed to keep a roof over his head for so long. He had had no work, that she knew of, since his wife died. Yet, since he had been continuously drunk and she was not ignorant of the price of gin, money had come from somewhere. The pittance she gave Anna, she supposed, and whatever Oliver could earn from Christie. Dutiful children then, in their fashion. Despicable father, who had spent their wages on strong drink, which meant that Christie Goldsborough, who owned both the cottage and the gin-shop in St Jude’s Passage, had had his money in any case. Once, that is, rather than twice over.

  An old story. Particularly at the end of a short winter afternoon with the sky darkening and the rain coming on. And there was often high drama at evictions, sobs and swoons and hysteria, fisticuffs sometimes as husband and wife turned on each other, tooth and nail. ‘See now what you’ve done to me. If you hadn’t been bone-idle, or drunk. If you hadn’t always been pregnant.’ So that St Jude’s was accustomed to public agony and humiliation, skin and hair flying and, rather less often, to surprising moments of love. They had seen old couples who, clinging together like limpets, had been prised apart and taken off to the separate male and female wards in the workhouse. They had seen a young man, last winter, put out into the street with his sick wife in his arms, begging for shelter none of them could afford to give since she had been spitting blood and everybody knew what that meant. They had seen men who had once been decent, cursing and foaming at the mouth, turned into mad dogs by frustration. And although it was not a spectacle which anybody in St Jude’s savoured, it brought them out of doors as they would have come out to watch a funeral, to pay respects, to acknowledge the ease with which it could happen to any one of them, to give whatever help one could so as to be able to claim help, more easily, in one’s turn.

  But the Rattries came quietly, nine – or was it ten? – little weasel-children huddled together in drooping, blank-eyed silence around the soiled mattresses and broken chairs, the few gaudy fairground jugs and vases which had been their mother’s treasures piled up on the cobbles, with not even a wheelbarrow, by the look of it, to carry them away in. Ten little weasels, all alike, except for Anna who had grown taller since Cara had been feeding her, and furtive, fidgety Oliver who ran errands and listened at keyholes for Christie Goldsborough.

  And their father? Where was he?

  Nobody knew. Perhaps nobody cared, except that he ought to be doing something now about getting his fu
rniture and his children off the street instead of leaving it to Anna, who could do nothing but tremble like a broken sparrow, or the hated Oliver to whom no one in St Jude’s would extend a helping hand.

  Where was he?

  ‘Have you seen my father?’ asked Oliver of the silent, sombre faces around him, squaring his puny shoulders, his eyes desperate, his alert, trapped-animal senses aware not only of hostility but of the approaching dark, a taste of snow in the damp air. Unless the furniture, such as it was, could be moved it would be gone by morning, broken up and used for firewood by families every bit as desperate as his own. And, no matter what these grim, reproachful watchers might think of him, he didn’t want to be the one to take his brothers and sisters to the workhouse.

  Would anybody lend him a handcart? He didn’t think so. And the landlord’s men were feeling the cold and growing impatient, wanting to seal the doors and windows and get back to their ale and hot meat pies at the Fleece.

  He felt the crowd closing in on him, waiting, asking him with silent accusation if he knew how easily his fleshless, half-naked brothers and sisters could freeze to death. He knew.

  ‘Where’s my father?’

  ‘Inside.’ It was Anna’s scared whisper that answered him. ‘He went back inside.’

  They found him, a few minutes later, hanging from the meat-hook in the cellar, the first carcase ever to be suspended there; the landlord’s men by no means pleased about it as they cut him down since it meant delay, additional complications, a constable. Damn him. The man had always been a nuisance.

  Who mourned him?

  Outside, in the street, his daughter Anna fell to her knees on the wet cobbles, her thin arms around as many of his other children as they could accommodate, no idea in her reeling head but to stay there, clutching them, until such things as were about to happen had happened. Whatever they might be.

  ‘Get those bairns off the street before they carry him out,’ commanded Sairellen Thackray, her loud, flat voice easily stirring the crowd of barely-shocked women who had seen and heard all this before. For whatever the man had been, and no matter how vile the treachery of his eldest son Oliver, one did not leave children in the street to perish of cold. Sairellen had no need to tell them that, although she did so, just the same.

  ‘You’ll take one, Martha-Ann, won’t you? And you can make room, can’t you, Mary-Ellen – Beatrice – Sophia?’

  They could. For a night or two, perhaps longer, being so overcrowded in any case that it was a simple enough matter to move over the few inches it took to accommodate a stranger, who might stay among them, relatively unnoticed, for ever. Or not. Who knew?

  One by one the Rattrie children were led away silently by women who made no show of affection since they did not feel it, nor of pity either which, in itself brought no solutions. Stray weasels now, huge, hungry eyes swallowing their wizened, baby faces, making no protest, going where they were taken; unlikely, in this shifting, uncertain population, to see much of one another again.

  The pawnbroker from St Jude’s Passage came sidling up to Oliver. ‘These articles of furniture are worthless, of course,’ he said to him. ‘A hard man might ask you to pay him for taking them off your hands. But, as it is, I’ll take them free of charge.’

  Dumbly Oliver nodded his head.

  The body was carried out, frail as a child’s beneath a tattered sheet, and handed over to ‘Authority’in preparation for its pauper’s grave.

  The landlord’s men, grumbling profusely, nailed boards across the windows, sealed the door, and went away.

  The crowd dispersed.

  The snow came on.

  The Rattrie family was no more, only Anna still kneeling where the pawnbroker poked and pried among her mother’s pathetic treasures; and Oliver. Both of them shivering with shock and with cold.

  ‘Come inside, Anna lass, and get warm,’ said Sairellen. But Cara, standing by the Thackray’s doorstep, saw plainly that Anna could not move, that in her thin white face and her wraith’s body through which the wind already seemed to whistle, only her huge, transparent eyes were alive, their gaze fastening on Luke as on her only hope of Heaven as he crossed the street, lifted her as carefully as a new-born child and carried her through his mother’s door.

  But when Oliver Rattrie attempted to follow, a stern sentinel barred the way.

  ‘Not you, lad,’ said Sairellen, her face carved in granite.

  He backed away, knowing why.

  ‘It’s – it’s bitter cold, Mrs Thackray,’ he whispered.

  ‘Aye. No doubt the lads you sent to Northallerton jail might say the same.’

  She slammed the door.

  ‘It’s bitter cold,’ he said again, helplessly, humbly, hunching his scarecrow’s shoulders, tears spilling suddenly from his eye corners.

  So it was. Beneath her splendid black and scarlet cloak Cara could feel the chill, sharpened by a spasm of pity for this ugly, puny, vicious boy. And a spasm of disgust. Oliver the traitor who had sold his mates for money and then Oliver the fool who had lost every penny of it in the canal. Oliver the spy who listened at doors and windows for Christie Goldsborough. Hateful little Oliver who had been desperate and hungry and frightened every day of his life and who was shaking now with a cold she understood, until his bones rattled.

  ‘Go across to my mother’s house,’ she told him curtly. ‘She will give you a hot drink.’

  Ducking his head, unable to answer her, he scuttled away.

  ‘That was kind of you, Cara.’ Luke’s voice spoke from behind her and spinning round she fell against him as if propelled by the forces of sorrow and struggle and endless strife rising from the very cobbles of the street, feeling his arms close around her with a sense of homecoming. She had been here before. Had stood – God knew when – in this man’s embrace, just so, just like this, so that when he carried her, her feet just skimming the ground, into the narrow passage between his mother’s house and the next, she seemed to float on air with him, lifting her face to a kiss which did not seem strange to her and then nestling against him, the rough texture of his jacket comforting her cheek, the odour of pipe tobacco which clung to it moving her as she suddenly remembered odours of a secure and happy childhood.

  Peace. Safety. Absolute trust. The stirrings of passion which – with this man – held no danger. So her body told her as his hard, work-stained hands touched it beneath the folds of her cloak with tenderness and integrity, her breathing in perfect tune with his as they held each other tight and fast.

  Luke – and it was her body that spoke – don’t let me hurt you. It was the first time she had ever felt such concern, such need to protect and cherish a grown man. Such awareness of his worth and of her own shortcomings.

  ‘I know,’ he said, his mouth against her forehead. ‘I know.’ Of course. What had happened to the Rattries could still happen to her. But not while she stood in his secure embrace. Not while he kept his arms around her.

  May he never release her.

  There came a sharp tap on the side-scullery window, his mother’s imperious hand which caused Cara to stiffen with alarm and Luke merely to smile.

  ‘Luke,’ and the voice, too, was imperious. ‘Go fill the coal buckets. And then come inside, the pair of you. Are you daft, standing out in the weather?’

  He smiled again, not yet taking his hand from Cara’s shoulder, his mouth tender, his eyes amused, tolerant, steady, the presence of his long, hard fingers telling her that if Luke said it would be all right then it would be. No other man had ever made her feel that.

  ‘I’ll get the buckets. You go inside. She won’t eat you.’

  He went off to the back yard while she remained leaning against the wall, feeling shaken and – for a panic moment – unsteady on her feet without him there to support her. She wanted him back again. Badly. She wanted him to lift her and carry her and care for her. Yet how could she give way to it? How could she not? Oh God – had it happened to her again? Don’t let me hurt him. Ple
ase let me do him no harm. This was the message her heart pounded. This time – with this man – her own hurt did not seem to matter.

  Let me do him only good. Or nothing at all. And when she drew herself together sufficiently to go and face his mother, Oliver Rattrie was standing at the end of the passage, the narrowness of the space giving him more substance than usual, his malice spurting out of him as his tears had spurted ten minutes before.

  Malice, and something more tormented and twisted than she had ever imagined.

  ‘I saw you,’ he hissed at her. And suddenly her skin was crawling.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Although she knew.

  ‘I saw you – with him.’

  How dare he? Yet daring had nothing to do with it. He had always looked at her, slyly she’d thought – longingly she now supposed – making her uncomfortable. When she had lived in that cottage next to his own he had always been there, under her feet, staring, watching her, listening at the wall as she almost – but never quite – made love to Daniel. Wanting her himself. And as that impotent, impossible desire of his reared up at her from his eyes and seemed to touch her – his dream of love turning her stomach to nausea – she pushed him aside with savage fingertips, disgust swamping even the remembrance of pity. Get away from me foul creature – little rat – little toad – little weasel. And whether she spoke the words or not she believed he heard them as, her stomach heaving, she stepped past him into Sairellen’s kitchen.

  The room was warm and clean and empty, only Sairellen herself dropping vegetables in separate string nets into the cooking pot on her fire, the steam of onions and cabbage and herb dumplings making the mouth water: although Cara’s had turned very dry.

  ‘I have a word to say to you, lass.’

  ‘Yes?’ She had expected it.

  ‘So I’ll say it straight out. Before Luke comes back with the coal, or Anna comes downstairs.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You’d do well to leave my lad alone.’

  Yes. On the whole – and with infinite sorrow – she tended to agree, although she did not mean to admit it. At any rate not yet, and not to Sairellen.