A Song Twice Over

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘about Ireland.’ And he told her rapidly, fluently, concisely, finding it easier than talking of the past in which he still believed he had not given her her due, or the future in which for him, the pursuit of personal happiness no longer existed. She had loved him. Now she was free to love him again. But looking at her in her black widow’s gown, her figure upright and resolute, her brown eyes clear and wise and steady, the idea of it seemed indecent. She had suffered and overcome, as he knew he had failed to do. She had learned resignation, tolerance, compassion from her pain while he had learned resentment. But he had always known her heart to be greater than his. He was not surprised.

  ‘Now tell me about your electioneering and the progress of the Charter.’

  He told her that too, talking on at length, drinking more of her hot, sweet tea, while she listened, her neat head on one side, gravely weighing and measuring his opinions, giving him her whole attention while a summer fire burned low in her comfortable hearth, an unseen clock ticked away the minutes of that tranquil, solacing hour. A gift of time to span the gulf between the lovers who had parted and the man and woman who had met again. Her gift. He realized that. As all gifts had come from her to him, not in the other direction. A bridge for him to cross – or not – as best suited him. A double gift of consideration and freedom.

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that you have been in poor health, Daniel – recently – have you not?’

  Yes, indeed. He had had the same famine fever which had killed her husband, lying alone in a lodging-house behind a locked door and a boarded-up window. And he had lived. Could he tell her that?

  He told her.

  ‘How very brave you were, Daniel.’

  ‘Ah no. You’re wrong there. I wasn’t after saving mankind from my fever. I just didn’t want to catch his on top of it. That’s all.’

  ‘And you lay alone for days on end by the sound of it. Tristan only lasted a day and a night. One would hardly have thought it possible – remembering him.’

  And seeing how much pain that memory caused her, he said quickly, ‘It was so in Ireland, with the fever. Doctors and priests and good ladies like yourself, all untouched by famine, going down with it in their hundreds and never getting up again. While the poor, starving wretches they’d been looking after sometimes recovered.’

  ‘Yes.’ She had obviously thought it over very deeply. ‘It occurs to me that they may have been exposed to the infection before, in childhood, and thus acquired some kind of immunity. Whereas men like my husband …’

  Men like Tristan. Rich in health and energy. A superb physique. Good blood and bones and sound, clean muscle. Taking the world in his long, thoroughbred stride. He had simply looked at her in bewilderment, still trusting her, still believing in his delirium, that she would know how to save him. And died.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Daniel, seeing a fresh spurt of pain in her. ‘How is your mother?’

  She smiled and, very gently and carefully, put the image of Tristan away.

  ‘She is well. Indeed, she is planning to remarry – as soon as her period of mourning for Tristan is over, I think.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you?’ Her voice told him that she did not think so. ‘She has made the acquaintance of a gentleman at Almsmead, who reminds her of my father.’

  ‘Would your father take that as a compliment?’

  She smiled again, her eyes unmistakably twinkling. ‘Perhaps not. But he would wish to see her safe and settled, and Mr Stevens is a most reliable man. A retired wool merchant with a very adequate income, who will never startle her or surprise her.’

  ‘You approve, then?’

  ‘Oh – shall we say I understand. My mother married at sixteen, Daniel. It is the only life she knows. It is what she is – a married woman.’

  And widowhood, as a garment, had been many sizes too large for her, a child sadly parading in her mother’s clothing with no John-William to tell her what to do next, until Mr Dudley Stevens had begun to speak to her with his voice. And then with what magical, merciful ease – how quickly – had the telling phrase ‘If John-William says it’s all right, then it will be’become ‘If Dudley says one should, then one really ought to …’

  What a blessed relief to Amabel.

  And to Gemma. Even though, once or twice, she had caught the faint muttering of a voice in her head which she recognized as her father’s. ‘Well – I’ll be damned. The woman didn’t hide in a corner and pine away for me after all. Who would have thought it?’

  ‘So there was really no need,’ said Daniel slowly, ‘for all that worry on your mother’s behalf.’

  Bound feet, it seemed, could walk after all, in their fashion. Or had simply acquired the art of getting others to carry them.

  ‘There is no disloyalty,’ Gemma said firmly. ‘To my father, I mean. If she had not been happy with him then she could hardly have wished to live the same life twice over. Even though I – or you – might think it unwise – unjust, even – to rely so heavily on another person – to make such a total demand –’

  Tristan’s voice again. ‘If Gemma says it’s all right, then it will be.’ No, she had not wanted to inspire that degree of devotion in him, she could admit that now. But once it was there, offered to her with all his diffident charm, she had felt bound to value it, taking it from him with surprised yet reverent hands. Not the love she had wanted but love, nevertheless, the most precious of human emotions, the ultimate human treasure given to her by a man she had judged incapable of truly loving. Not the man she had wanted, either, but who had become the sweetest of her responsibilities.

  And now those responsibilities were over, each one of them resolved in its separate fashion. The cage door indeed was open, yet the wings she had once felt beating with such vigour, such frustration, had become very still. Not weakened, she thought, but waiting to be very sure of their direction.

  ‘Daniel,’ she said, ‘do you really believe that your Charter could have saved all those poor starving people?’

  ‘I do.’ And it was Daniel Carey the visionary, the cold flame of his adherence plainly visible, who leaned towards her. ‘The vote would have saved them, Gemma. There is no doubt about it. One man one vote. Every man with at least that much of a voice, that much power to speak out about what he wants, or doesn’t want, done to him. Democracy. And then those “poor starving people” would have had no need to beg for the government food depots to be opened. It would have been done as a matter of course – by right. Since what government could afford to offend so many voters? And it is rights that are needed, Gemma. Not charity. Not crumbs from the table but a right to share in the feast. Opportunity. Justice. Dignity. The Charter offers that. It gives the people the right to elect their own men to office, as the gentry have been doing forever, and the ‘millocracy’for a good few years now. Men who understand hunger. Not only what causes it but what it feels like. Such men will act against it.’

  ‘Men like you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And if you are elected, Daniel – one day – will you keep your faith? Not everyone does.’

  ‘Not everyone has been hungry, Gemma. I had never been hungry myself until last winter. And now my appetite for justice is so keen that I don’t expect ever to fill it …’

  ‘Although you have made up your mind, I think, to spend the rest of your life trying?’

  ‘Yes. That I have.’

  Like a knight dedicating himself to the service of a holy cause for which he would first make sacrifice of the luxuries to which no initiate of holy causes can feel entitled. The cumbersome, personal possessions of friendship and love and happiness, and then, quite possibly, his life.

  She understood.

  ‘Then I will help you in any way I can,’ she said, since what was love, after all, but the gift to the beloved of what he desired most? Even if it turned out not to be oneself.

  ‘After all,’ and she was smiling now, ‘there is a limit to the g
ood that serving soup can do. And I have a great deal of money, you know.’

  Horribly embarrassed, he dropped his eyes, unable, for a moment, to answer her. He knew she had not offered money personally to him, but the very mention of it was enough to make him uncomfortable. More wealth than he could probably imagine of which she, with her father and husband gone, was now in absolute control. Until she married again, that is, bestowing herself and her fortune with her upon another man. And it struck him most forcefully that, could he be considered even remotely as a marrying man – which he could not – her fortune would stand as an impassable barrier between them. Even if he loved her to distraction he knew he could never climb that mountain of riches and tell her so.

  ‘I have a poor understanding of money,’ he said, in order to fill the silence.

  ‘Oh, I know that, Daniel. Luckily I understand it very well. I have an inbred aversion to paying tuppence for something worth only a penny. Which is not meanness, you know. Just good business sense. So you need not fear I shall throw my substance to the winds.’

  No, he knew she would not do that. He knew too that she was smoothing his path again, as she had done on the day he left her, easing away his embarrassment, his awkwardness, offering him with all the free-flowing abundance of her generosity the riches, not of her bank balance, but of her friendship; since he had made no sign that he wanted her love.

  ‘A moment will come,’ she said, ‘when perhaps just a little cash in hand could make an enormous difference. It would give me pleasure – when it does – if you would apply to me …’

  ‘Gemma …’

  ‘Apply to me,’ she said firmly. ‘Although of course I may find your application wanting.’

  ‘Very likely.’

  ‘In which case I shall reject it.’

  He did not think so.

  She stood up and gave him her hand, signifying, he supposed, that the conversation was at an end.

  ‘Daniel, you must not deny me my right to be of service, you know. You would take it very much amiss if I tried to deny you yours. And when the Charter comes to pass, you must also bear in mind that my right to speak out and be heard – my right to a share in that democratic feast – will be every bit as valuable as yours. I may be a woman, and of the “despised millocracy” at that. But if we are to have justice and dignity and opportunity then it must be for all the people. For me and mine, as well as for you.’

  He could not argue with that.

  Needing to make a gesture he bent his head over her hand and kissed it, only briefly, the contact disturbing him in a manner far too complex to be desire. Or even close to it. The best woman in the world. She was still that. But her world was not his and the bridge she had offered him seemed very fragile beneath his feet.

  For he was booted and spurred now, a soldier, a crusader, marching on stones to battle. How could the gentle pathway of her good intentions bear the angry weight of him?

  ‘The world has become divided for you, Daniel, hasn’t it,’ she said, ‘between those who have been hungry and those who have not?’

  But there was hunger of another kind. She saw, with love and sorrow, how completely he had forgotten that.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Charter, then. Nothing else would save the Irish peasant from famine or the English labourer from exploitation in mill and mine. Nothing else would free Ireland from England’s yoke and England herself from the remote grandees of the ‘ruling class’that governed her. It was the quickest and surest way to the human dignities of education and opportunity, a breaking down of barriers so that men of all classes might come together to use the gifts they had been given. A new society where what counted would be a man’s integrity, what he had in his heart and his head rather than in his pocket. The Charter. The Vote. Freedom and Justice for all through the Ballot Box with which no grandee of any persuasion would have the power to tamper.

  It would be the salvation of the world.

  Ernest Jones, the Chartist poet and a godson of the Duke of Cumberland, thundered out the message from the hustings at Halifax, winning a show of thousands of eager, voteless hands and, from an electorate – in that thriving town of several hundred thousands – of little more than a thousand men, an actual and decidedly disturbing vote of 279. The Chartist candidate polled 220 at Derby. Daniel Carey, despite everything Ben Braithwaite and Christie Goldsborough could do to prevent it, walked away from Frizingley’s hustings with a defiant vote of 205. Feargus O’Connor, the Chartist leader, was elected at Nottingham.

  Elected. Had the world gone mad? Both Lady Lark, that ancestral Tory, and Lizzie Braithwaite, ardent champion of the Whigs, wondered both together over a pot of china tea and the summer fashion plates so obligingly offered by Miss Adeane.

  Nottingham, wondered Miss Adeane herself? Had Luke Thackray been there at the hustings, raising his hand for Feargus O’Connor, letting the whole world see where he stood, and why? She supposed so. She had not heard from him. Nor had she enquired. Although the absence of news took nothing away from the vividness with which she remembered him, the sense of warmth and comfort his distant presence still gave her. She could not think or act as he did, could not conduct her life even remotely as he conducted his own. But that did not stop her from being proud of him. Yes – proud. So long as Luke was there, in Nottingham – which might just as well have been Timbuctoo – she knew something was right with the world.

  ‘May I give you another cup of tea, Lady Lark? Mrs Braithwaite?’ she murmured, thinking, beneath her smiling sweetness, that if it should choke them and they fell dead at her feet she would not turn a hair. Provided they had first settled their bills.

  The Charter, then. A bad joke in some quarters. A golden promise in others. A growing menace, perhaps – wondered Larks and Braithwaites? – not serious enough to lose sleep over but which one might be well advised to nip in the bud. After all, in Frizingley alone two hundred and five men with enough money in the bank to place them on the electoral register had voted for it. Misguided souls, of course. Intellectuals and journalists, a doctor or two, a renegade clergyman, a few wild young men who had probably done it to annoy their fathers.

  Not Mr Ephraim Cook, need it be said, the Dallam mill manager who, whatever the persuasion of that odd creature the Dallam daughter, had remained firmly within the Whig fold. Although he had had no objection to attending the dinner-party given to celebrate those shocking 205 votes, by Mrs Gemma Gage who, since she became a widow, seemed thoroughly to be losing her always somewhat peculiar head.

  A very lavish dinner too, one heard. Not, as the victorious Whig candidate had suggested, a variation on the good lady’s Irish soup-tureens, but quite a gala occasion with the Chartist candidate dressed up like a gentleman and making a damned impudent speech about how – considering that show of hands in his favour at the hustings – he believed himself to be Frizingley’s true representative and meant to act accordingly. An easy enough matter nowadays with those trains steaming into Frizingley morning, noon and night, so that he could spend as much time in his ‘constituency’ – the sheer audacity of the man! – as he liked.

  If he could raise the money for the fare, that is; which, when one thought of Gemma Gage’s weak head, seemed far more than likely.

  John-William Dallam would turn over in his grave if he got the slightest whiff of it. No one had the least doubt of that. And one of the subjects much discussed that summer, in the comfortable elegance of Miss Adeane’s pale blue salon, over the tea and biscuits and magazines, was the unfortunate position of Miss Linnet Gage. The poor, dear creature. One felt so sorry for her. And losing her looks too, thought Mrs Magda Braithwaite although her husband, Benjamin – it was shrewdly observed – did not exactly rush to agree with her. Thin nowadays – dear Linnet – rather than ‘spiritual’ and delicate. Her profile still quite appealing as she knelt by the mellow stained-glass window of the parish church where she went every morning to pray, but gaunt in full sunlight. Magda, despite her
‘great fondness’for Linnet, could think of no kinder word for it. And with no gentleman hovering around her now that Frizingley’s marriage market had acquired two rich widows to play for. Fickle Mrs Moon and foolish Mrs Gage leaving no one for Linnet but the vicar and Captain Goldsborough who would usually come to her rescue at the few social occasions she now attended.

  And while nothing could be expected of the vicar – a natural celibate said Mrs Marie Moon whose judgement could be trusted on such matters – Captain Goldsborough had become outwardly more respectable since moving into that splendid suite of rooms at the station hotel, the preferential treatment he received there surely reflecting the number and value of his railway shares. A woman of Linnet’s high pedigree and excellent breeding might be just what he needed to get back into decent society again. Although Marie Moon did not think so.

  ‘Why do you bother with that Gage woman?’ Cara asked him, irritated by the gossip which had been aired, rather deliberately she thought, in her hearing, not a few of her customers having caught glimpses of her by now with Christie in theatres and hotel lounges and reserved compartments on the London train.

  ‘Could this be jealousy?’ he enquired.

  ‘Should it be?’

  ‘Cara, you have developed a most annoying habit of answering one question with another. I can’t think where you have learned it.’

  ‘From you, Christie. Where else. But what about Linnet Gage?’

  ‘She interests me.’

  Another living chess piece? Another specimen?

  ‘The woman is as tart as a green lemon,’ Cara said flatly.

  ‘So she is.’ He sounded perfectly pleased to agree with her. ‘But that is only an excess of virginity, you know. Quite enough to turn any woman sour.’

  ‘And are you thinking of relieving her of it?’

  ‘Oh – hardly. Ben Braithwaite seems more inclined to do that. Which is why his wife so positively dislikes her.’

  ‘Yes, I do know that, Christie.’