‘Then you may also know that Linnet Gage is only interested in marriage? In her view it is the only career open to a woman of her birth and breeding. It follows, therefore, that successful women must, first and foremost, be married women. And since she is clever and ambitious – as you are – she does not enjoy regarding herself as a failure. Perhaps she would have done better to open a shop.’
‘I hope you are encouraging her to do no such thing.’
‘My dear – she would be scandalized at the very suggestion.’ He appeared somewhat shocked, although much amused, by it himself. ‘A lady does not involve herself in trade – you should know that. She may serve soup for charity but she certainly does not sell it. A lady exists to adorn her husband’s home and provide him with a social life designed to promote his interests. Something Linnet Gage would do with the skill and ruthlessness of a cabinet minister. As it is – without a husband – all she can do, without losing caste, is to arrange flowers in the church. And as for the gossip linking her with me, one should discount it. Only think of the scandalous things they are saying about Mrs Gage and your Chartist friend. Do you think it can be true?’
That Daniel and Gemma were lovers again? She was by no means certain. But … ‘I expect so,’ she said. It seemed safer.
‘Have you seen anything of him yourself, Cara?’ And although his voice seemed pleasant enough, making no more than a chance remark in passing, her nerves drew themselves smoothly to attention nevertheless, warning her that he would already know the answer.
‘Yes. He comes collecting for the famine every now and then.’
‘What do you give him?’
‘Money, Christie.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes – what?’ Very much against her will, and having, in fact, done nothing to which he could really object, she was suddenly defending herself. ‘He visits all the Irish – Father Francis sends him –’
‘All the Irish?’
A simple question spoken without heat or anger, yet transformed by the black art of his mockery into a challenge. But a challenge to what? It did not really matter. He had not even troubled to accuse her. Her guilt was assumed. He had already tumbled her into hot water and was concerned now only to watch her sink or swim. It was a game they often played.
‘Yes. O’Halloran at the livery stables. The widow Cunningham. Myself. Ned O’Mara at the Fleece …’
‘Alas no. Poor Ned is no longer with us at the Fleece.’
‘Oh –?’ Could she use this to distract him. ‘Why not? Where has he gone?’
‘My dear –’ he gave her the familiar look of surprise she often saw in Lady Lark when presented with her millinery bills. ‘Where is it that ageing and very drunken prize-fighters go when they have quite outlived their usefulness and lose what one is bound to consider their very last chance of employment? Do tell me if you know, for I have not the least idea?’
‘You turned him off, then?’
‘I? No – no. I simply bowed to Oliver Rattrie’s judgement in the matter.’
‘You did what?’
‘Of course. If one places a man in a managerial position one must allow him to manage. And poor Ned could not meet Oliver’s standards, it seems …’
‘You mean he couldn’t work with the little rat from St Jude’s you’d set up to lord it over him …’
He clicked his tongue. ‘Cara – my dear – must you speak so scathingly of Oliver? I find him enormously improved. And you and he have much in common. Considering his background one could even call him as great a success in his way as you are in yours. And I have a marked partiality, I confess, for hungry fighters.’
‘Because you’ve never been hungry yourself.’
‘There is hunger,’ he said, reaching out for her, ‘and hunger – my dear.’
And in most ways, on most occasions, she believed she satisfied his appetite. Only a pawn in the games he played, she knew that, although it pleased him to dress her as a queen for his own pleasure and the pleasure of seeing other men dazzled and tempted when he chose to display her like a collector’s item of sculpture, it seemed to her, or a thoroughbred horse. He had polished and faceted her like a diamond so that in the hotels and restaurants and the luxurious houses of friends – like Marie Moon – where he spent his life, she could be brilliant, could sparkle, entertain, decorate, could arouse desire which he – when it had amused him long enough – would cynically frustrate.
She was his woman. He was not her man. He took what he desired from her as and when he wanted it. She made no claims on him whatsoever, asked him no questions – knowing full well she would get no answers even if she did – took what he gave her and watched his moods carefully to assess the right moment for obtaining more. When he wanted her to be happy then she smiled. It was much easier. When he wanted the thunder and lightning of her temper then he would stimulate it. That was easy too. When he wanted her desire he had only, these days, to put his hands upon her, sometimes only to look at her with a certain narrowing of his eyes, to set the pulses of her sensuality obediently pounding.
And whenever it happened that she, herself, experienced a moment of personal triumph or exhilaration, whenever her heart was full – if only briefly – of the mischief that came from some score being settled, some customer won or wooed back into her fold, some stray beam of sunlight crossing her life, she had learned to curb her natural instinct to throw her arms around him – if he happened to be nearby – or make any other gesture of spontaneous warmth or camaraderie. She had learned, in fact – except in his bed – not to be familiar.
Yet the dinners and receptions to which he escorted her, the parties held almost continuously by Marie Moon to celebrate the miracle of her husband’s demise, the trips to London and the country homes of rackety, racing peers who were his friends, were by no means distasteful to her. She had spent too much of her life enviously watching other women stepping down from their carriages not to enjoy the landau she herself now kept at O’Halloran’s livery stable, not to glory in the elaborate satin dresses she now had the leisure to design for herself, in the gold bracelets on her arms, the pearls in her ears, the lace gloves on her manicured hands. A certain dryness, a well-hidden but rather hollow space somewhere inside her giving her no more trouble, she supposed, than it gave to Magda Braithwaite. Considerably less than to Linnet Gage.
She did not care to dwell too deeply on Gemma Dallam.
‘So he comes collecting for the famine,’ murmured Christie. ‘Very commendable. Although it is almost over, they tell me. This year’s potato has decided not to blacken, I hear, and one expects it will be adequate. Particularly now that the landlords have so obligingly thinned out the population by shipping it off – well – wherever it could manage to land. One might succeed in feeding the rest with the Indian Corn they are suddenly sending in. I have some land in Ireland myself. Did you know that? An inheritance from my grandfather, General Covington-Pym.’
She was not surprised.
‘And what have you done with your tenants, Christie?’
‘My dear –’ once again the blank look of surprise. ‘I have not the least notion. My agent there does very much as he pleases. And who am I to complain, so long as he sends me the agreed amount of rent. I have never set foot on the place myself.’
She did not ask him if he had taken his rents for this year, and last. She did not want to know.
‘So your Chartist friend will not be coming to see you again, will he, Cara, with the famine officially over and the Queen planning a state visit to Dublin to tell them so?’
She shrugged. ‘Why should he? He lost the election so he’ll be going back to London, I suppose – or, wherever.’
‘Away from Mrs Gage? Do you think so?’
‘Yes, I do.’
She meant it, for Daniel would not change his course now for any woman. He would walk his own way alone, until that cold flame had burned itself out in him, or consumed him. She could see that. Could Gemma Gage? Yet Dan
iel made several visits to Frizingley that autumn and winter, coming, he still declared, as the true representative of the working people, which amounted, after all, to ninety per cent of Frizingley. And he was dining at the Ephraim Cooks with Gemma one night the following February when the news arrived of revolution in France.
Not the first, of course, and not in France alone this time either. Although no one doubted that the revolutionary French, with their great liking for turning out their kings, had triggered it off. Beginning when the French king Louis Philippe found himself running from the Paris mob without his wig – remembering, no doubt, another King Louis, not too long ago, who had lost not only his wig but his head – and spreading with the terrifying rapidity of a spark among dry trees to similar uprisings in Austria, Hanover, Naples, Schleswig Holstein, Prussia. A whirlwind of revolt sweeping across the whole continent of Europe, against established monarchs and dukes and generals, which only Belgium and Russia, and England so far, resisted.
In Paris a new republic was proclaimed, King Louis Philippe taking refuge with that natural patron of dispossessed royalty, Queen Victoria. Would the Habsburgs fall too? It seemed likely. And the families of Hesse and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and Romanov with them? There were many in England who hoped so. And what of the socialist and nationalist groups in Hungary, Poland, Italy, where voices had been crying out a long time now against oppression? Would they not take this opportunity to rise, each nation against its own brand of tyranny? What of mutilated Ireland, seething like a cauldron about to spill over? What of the Charter?
Where France had led could not England follow?
The young men of Halifax certainly thought so as they marched in military formation up and down their town, openly and volubly declaring their support and whole-hearted admiration for the republican French who had overcome their enemies and established – forever, it was hoped – the power of the people.
The Chartists of Bradford – that most hot-headed and belligerent of cities – met en masse on Peep Green to pay homage to the revolutionary enterprise of their brothers across the Channel; among some discreet speculation as to the expected increase in the price of pikes turned out by the local blacksmith, and much singing of Chartist hymns and the Marseillaise.
In Frizingley Daniel Carey was carried shoulder-high from a torch-lit meeting on Frizingley Moor, above St Jude’s, where he had informed a crowd of grimly exultant men – quite enough of them to trouble Ben Braithwaite’s peace of mind – that the time was now. Now. For Justice and Democracy. For the Vote. So that no man need ever go hungry again. The Charter.
In Manchester the Chartist MP for Nottingham, Feargus O’Connor, asked a crowd of thirteen thousand men to swear to him, individually, hand on heart, never to abandon the cause of the Charter until it had been won. They swore.
It was the same everywhere. Hope and excitement, as there had been in ’ 38 and ’42. Vows. Dedication. The singing of hymns and anthems by crowds that seemed to rise from the ground like dragons’ teeth. The collection of signatures for a new petition to be presented to parliament that April. A petition this time which would be too enormous to be ignored. The familiar tactics of the ‘moral force’ wing of the movement. Victory through education, persuasion, rational argument. And, in their background, the ‘physical force’ men polishing their home-made pikes again, oiling their guns, drilling on remote moorland all over the Industrial North on moonlit nights, no matter what their ‘moral force’brothers might have to say about it.
The Charter. It would now not merely have to be nipped in the bud but stamped on, hard and quick. Both Braithwaites and Larks were at one on that. So was Her Majesty’s Government. So was the Duke of Wellington when he fortified London that April against the invading Northern hordes, coming to present their petition to Parliament and vowing, if it should not be listened to, to declare a Republic of Lancashire and Yorkshire instead.
There were five million signatures, one heard, on that petition and a quarter of a million men to carry it in procession from Kennington Common to Westminster. Angry men, one assumed, who knew what had happened in France and who, by sheer weight of numbers, – and despite the restraint of their ‘moral force’brothers– might easily overtip the scales of revolution in England.
Short-sighted, thought Ben Braithwaite, General Covington-Pym, the Duke of Wellington, to deny it. Might Buckingham Palace itself fall to their republican fervour as the Tuileries Palace had fallen to the Paris mob, with Victoria gathering up her skirts and her children and running for her life as poor old Louis Philippe had had to do? The Duke of Wellington – conqueror of Napoleon – declared he did not think so but sent the Queen and her family to the Isle of Wight just the same, out of harm’s way. Troops, in large numbers, were drafted into the city, 200,000 special constables issued with batons and hastily enrolled. London’s bridges and her public buildings were fortified. Noble gentlemen, with houses in town, had brought up the gamekeepers from their country estates, the windows of Belgravia’s mansions sprouting a wicked crop of sporting guns.
The time was now.
Feargus O’Connor would march across Westminster Bridge at the head of 200,000 loyal men – one to match every special constable the Duke had enrolled – and lay the Charter at Mother Parliament’s feet. A triumph for ‘moral force’. A peaceful and bloodless coup d’état, if coup d’état there would have to be, O’Connor having requested his quarter of a million soldiers to come unarmed.
Daniel Carey went off with the Frizingley contingent as to a pilgrimage. Would Luke Thackray make the journey from Nottingham, Cara wondered? Another pilgrim? Although one, it seemed to her, who would neither burn so fiercely nor break so easily as Daniel. Who would not rush headlong into the battle as Daniel would do – very likely without a weapon – but whose carefully husbanded strength would be far more likely to last the day.
For how taut and fine-drawn Daniel had become, paying no regard to safety. Or survival. Quickly she closed her mind to that. Damn him, the hot-headed, light-minded fool. Had he even thought to take food and money, or wondered about what to do if it did not succeed? Where to take refuge, and how to get there?
But perhaps Gemma Gage had taken care of that.
‘I wonder,’ said Christie, spending the day which was already being spoken of as the Revolutionary Tenth, very much at his ease, drinking champagne in his new, over-heated apartment with Cara.
‘What do you wonder?’ She was not feeling her best.
‘About those 200,000 men.’
‘What about them?’
Two of them were giving her considerably more than enough to wonder and worry about.
‘Oh – simply whether Feargus O’Connor has made suitable arrangements to get them all there.’
‘To London?’
‘Well, not precisely. To Kennington Common where they were all to have assembled at some unearthly hour this morning. I know where it is. So does Feargus O’Connor. As a politician and a journalist he is more than accustomed to finding his way to all kinds of places. I wonder if one can say the same for his 200,000 men? I wonder, in fact, if there are those among them who, having made firm promises to attend, now realize that they cannot raise the train fare? They will not all have had shepherds to lead them, you know, like the men of Frizingley. And none of those special constables we have heard about will be likely to give them directions. In O’Connor’s place I would have taken care of that.’
‘I believe you.’
He bowed his head slightly.
‘One can only hope he has had the sense to think of it. The Duke of Wellington will be far from pleased if he has called out all those troops for nothing.’
She had hardly thought beyond her anxiety for the two individuals who mattered to her, seeing Luke and Daniel and the dangers which might befall them – which almost certainly would in Daniel’s case – rather than the upheaval which might touch them all. But now, darting a rapid glance at Christie, taking in the value of his cambric shirt and st
riped satin waistcoat, the glass of vintage wine in his hand, his nonchalance, his arrogance, she said, ‘What if it succeeds, Christie? What if there really is a revolution? I mean a real one, like they’ve had in France? What would happen to you then?’
‘To me?’ He smiled at her and raised his glass. ‘What would happen to you, Cara?’
‘Nothing,’ she said decisively. ‘Why should it? I’ll start making bonnets in Chartist green, that’s all. I’ll survive.’
And if anybody threw stones at her windows, Chartist or not, she’d make short work of them.
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘So will I. Survive, I mean.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘They had guillotines in France, you know – not too far back.’
‘One doesn’t forget it. I imagine a great many of one’s friends are remembering it very clearly today. And yes – if they set up a guillotine in Market Square – not too near your shop windows, of course – then I suppose we might expect to see Ben Braithwaite in the tumbrils. And Uriah Colclough. And my cousin Grizelda Lark. Not our good Mrs Gage, though, since she would have a member of the Revolutionary Committee or whatever they chose to call themselves, to protect her. So would I.’
‘To protect you? Who, for Heaven’s sake?’
‘I have no idea. Somebody who would find my services sufficiently useful to keep me alive. And in good health. It is rarely the idealists who profit from revolution. In fact hardly ever at all. The Feargus O’Connors – and Daniel Careys – may be good at toppling thrones. But there is always a new crop of kings waiting nearby, you know.’
‘So you would turn Chartist?’
‘Of course.’
‘I don’t think anybody would believe you.’
‘Why not? I have been a Whig and a Tory for years already. And newborn regimes need experienced men. I could probably make a sizeable fortune out of this revolution, Cara. If it happened.’
‘But you don’t think it will?’
Leaning forward he refilled her glass.
A Song Twice Over Page 61