Poor Linnet Gage: although, indeed, she bravely kept up her spirits by spending far more on dress and adornment – it was noted – than she had ever done, appearing fresh every morning, it seemed, in some new creation from Miss Adeane’s clever hands. Gossamer-fine confections of tulle and silver gauze and sprigged organdie totally unlike the flamboyant, almost Oriental tastes of Frizingley’s other Queen of Fashion, the feverish and somehow hungry Magda Braithwaite, thin as a stick and restless as a hot wind, parading herself all day and every day in stridently coloured satins, her gold bracelets jangling like fetters, the orange and emerald feathers in her hat as tall and unable to keep still as the lady herself.
Both Miss Gage and Mrs Braithwaite ceding first place for elegance, of course, to Mrs Marie Moon, the pale and lovely enchantress who had caught and held so many exceedingly willing victims in her spell. And, quite soon, these were the vital questions which Frizingley’s upper echelon asked itself. If Marie Moon did not wish to marry again, as it seemed she did not, then to whom – when the time came – would she leave her money? To her pretty little Persian kitten Gussie Lark, or to Uriah Colclough, her spiritual adviser? Or had she, perhaps, some inconvenient relative, a sister or a child – a grandchild, even – hidden away in France? Would Miss Linnet Gage succeed, after all, in enticing Captain Goldsborough, or someone to the altar? Or could the hints concerning her virtue possibly be true? Could it really be that the chaotic Magda showered Linnet with invitations and drove her up and down in her carriage only because her husband forced her so to do, keeping her quiet with presents of jewellery and new pianos and – even worse – his occasional favours, like some kind of male harlot, in her bed? In which case might it not be advisable to keep a sharp lookout for any suspicious increase in Linnet’s figure, although – to the chagrin of many – she seemed to be getting even more slender, Magda positively thin, while that other subject of scandal, Gemma Gage, had a bloom on her like a peach and a waistline that had not budged an inch.
Or had it? Miss Adeane would know.
‘Mrs Gage is looking very well, Miss Adeane?’
Cara nodded and smiled.
‘Miss Adeane – would you not agree that Miss Linnet Gage has a frail look about her these days?’
Cara murmured that she would.
‘Whereas Mrs Magda Braithwaite seems to be burning away quite to the bone – like a stick of firewood?’
Cara agreed with that too.
She had lost weight herself, although no one appeared to notice. Why should they? She could not sleep either, nor eat very much, which seemed ironic, now that she had, all to herself, a feather bed big enough for two and could afford any delicacy she wanted. As she could afford ‘time’and that strange substance called ‘leisure’, once so desirable, now so perplexing, so heavy on her hands, such a void to be somehow and very inexpertly filled.
Work and struggle were both familiar to her. She understood the fight but was uncomfortable, it seemed, with the victory, if it could be called that. And now that her business was running smoothly, her customers loyal, her competition insignificant, her workrooms and her salesrooms competently staffed, her bank balance healthy and her cash-box beneath the floorboards always full, there were many times when, quite simply, she had no idea what to do.
She had achieved not merely her goal but her wildest dreams. What next? To have more of the same in a richer measure? She could do that now with half her mind, leaving the other half far too much liberty to pester her with inconvenient questions. Why? What now? What is it worth? To whom? For whom? She could not even pretend that she had done all this for herself. No. Why try? It had been done to save Odette and Liam from destitution. Had she been free to choose – had her father not so casually abandoned them – she would have thrown in her lot with Daniel Carey, and lived poor no doubt but, just possibly, happy. She was free now. Free and richer than she had ever expected. And the time for loving Daniel had passed. She accepted that without pain. Just as she accepted that there had never been a time for loving Luke. Yet she was empty and lonely. Empty in the presence of everything she had always wanted to fill her, lonely in a constant, ever-clamouring crowd.
Occasionally she had tea with Gemma Gage who, no longer caring what anyone had to say of her, was placidly making arrangements to rent a house in York should Daniel be detained in the Castle prison. Occasionally she dined with O’Halloran who kept the livery stable, or a certain railway engineer whenever he happened to be staying in Frizingley. Occasionally she took Madge Percy to the theatre and supper afterwards at a Leeds hotel. Once she spent three tedious days and nights at the sea. She wrote letters to her mother and her Aunt Teresa concerning the welfare of her son and wept a little, sometimes, at her aunt’s refusal to allow her the satisfaction of declining to visit them by the simple process of not inviting her. She wrote letters to her son and gritted her teeth over his stilted replies. She walked on the moor with her dog, designed her dresses, cared for her face and her figure and the glossy sheen of her hair, sparkled – so long as anyone was looking – like the polished, faceted and hollow diamond Christie had made her.
She heard nothing from Luke although she had written to him several times since the Chartist troubles. She had seen Christie only in the distance, limping badly, and heard nothing from him, no message, no curt command, no word. He had let her go. Or cast her off. Her prayers, then – in his direction – had been answered. She was free of him too. Her own woman. Just as she had always wanted. Yet the sight of Oliver Rattrie in the foyer of the station hotel, raising his tall silk hat to her, his eyes no longer sore but horribly knowing, always caused her an uncomfortable pang. What could he tell her, she wondered? Had Christie replaced her? And how soon? And what did it matter? Now that she was free, why was it that she had suddenly lost all her enthusiasms and her mad urges to do this or that or the other? Now that she could do anything she pleased it seemed such a pity – such a waste – that nothing managed to please her any more. Or not enough to make a fuss about.
She was like a bird with the cage-door open and afraid to fly. How very stupid. Yet such birds did fly away eventually. Or almost always. Perhaps all she required was time to accustom herself to the astonishment of affluence and the perfect liberty of being needed by no one.
Her own woman.
‘I am so very easy and comfortable now,’ she wrote to Odette, ‘I have trouble in thinking of something to want.’
A great trouble. She who had wanted everything the world had to offer at least twice over. What a death it was now, what a sorry decay of the spirit, to live in this dreary realm of plenty and peace. This flat pasturage, this safe harbour, where nothing challenged her. This tame and – oh, so stuffy, paradise.
And then towards the summer’s end her housekeeper came to her most apologetically at breakfast time with the information that there was a ‘person’at her door who would not go away. An old woman tall enough to be a Grenadier guard, with a face like dusty granite, carrying something wrapped in a blanket shawl. A formidable old woman who could not be persuaded that Miss Adeane did not receive callers at this hour of the day and who had planted herself in the doorway like a gnarled old tree which might have been growing there, immovable and distinctly malevolent, for generations.
‘A Mrs Thackray,’ the housekeeper said.
Throwing down her napkin and picking up her trailing taffeta skirts Cara ran downstairs as if to a lover, her pulses racing with the excitement of moorland water released from its winter confinement by the merest stirring of spring. Just one warm breeze. What more was needed? Just one breath from the past, and she was her bustling, busy self again. The nurturer, the provider, the bearer of fire and water that she had always been.
Was there news? Help to be given? Did someone need her again? Sairellen? So it was. Incredibly dusty and travel-stained as if she had come from Timbuctoo instead of Nottingham, and so old – so very old – so weary. Her craggy face hardly a woman’s face any longer, stripped by grim
endurance of its final femininity, Luke’s face as it would be when he became an old and sorely tested man.
Luke’s face. Where was he? How was it that he had allowed his mother to come here alone in that rusty old skirt and boots it would be kinder not to notice?
At least she could alter that.
She began to say many things and finish none of them. Her words, her cries of welcome, her questions over-flowing now like the same moorland streams which had been her pulse-beat a moment ago. To which Sairellen listened, impassive, unimpressed, apparently uncaring. The old Sairellen – except that she was so very much older – her arms folded, her eyes sardonic and grim, her mouth unyielding, humorous, and hard. And when Cara had finished. ‘He told me you’d take the child,’ she said.
‘What child? Luke’s child?’
‘Well of course, lass. Have a bit of sense. Who else’s child do you think I’d have carried here from Nottingham?’
And pushing back the shawl she revealed a tiny, sleeping child perhaps two years old, straddling her hip and held there by the blanket, peasant fashion, as once and for dozens of miles together, Cara had carried Liam. Luke’s child. A girl’s face, petal-fine and soft, a flushed cheek, a curl or two of thin, fair hair. A miracle. Where was Luke? And Anna?
‘Come upstairs,’ she said anticipating distress and not wishing to suffer it here on her doorstep for anyone to see. ‘Come and sit down.’
‘Aye lass. I will.’
They went upstairs, Sairellen sitting down heavily without a word, the child still on her lap, a stool at her scandalously ill-shod feet. Boots which looked as if they had walked every step of the way from Nottingham.
With shock, Cara realized that they had.
‘The train …?’ she said weakly but Sairellen, quickly under standing her meaning, waved it aside.
‘I don’t hold with trains.’
‘You mean you couldn’t afford the fare.’
She had forgotten – almost – how it felt to have no money at all, not one penny or the hope of any. Nothing. So that the only way to get to one’s destination was to walk. And she had been twenty, not seventy, when such a necessity had last befallen her.
‘Where is he, Sairellen?’ It was time now to know. ‘In prison?’
‘Aye. I reckon you’d call it that. A floating prison. Unless he’s arrived by now. They sentenced him at the beginning of May and, since I don’t rightly know where Australia is, I don’t know how long it takes to get there.’
Neither did Cara. The other side of the world, she supposed. Wherever that was. Very far away.
‘They transported him? Like John Mitchel?’
‘So they did. A Nottingham man, you see. One of Feargus O’Connor’s own. The only Chartist to be elected. Luke helped him to that.’
‘And you’re proud of him, aren’t you, Sairellen.’
Cara’s own first instinct had been to tear her hair and beat her breast.
‘Aye lass. That I am.’ And there was that, in Sairellen’s tone, which gave clear warning that she would do well to keep her weeping and wailing to herself.
‘Did he go to London, too, with the petition?’
‘Of course he did.’ What else? Cara was in no doubt that Sairellen would have gone herself, had she not been needed at home by the child. And Anna?
‘Sairellen,’ she whispered urgently, ‘is there nothing to be done?’
Someone to bribe to get him better food and cleaner water, as Gemma was doing in her dignified, placid way for Daniel? Something? Could one really be condemned to stand helplessly by, doing nothing?
‘Aye, lass.’ Sairellen’s eyes were like stones set deep in her head. ‘Wait. That’s all. Seven years. And since I haven’t got seven years by anybody’s reckoning I’ve brought you the child, like he said. Anna’s gone. Dead and buried two weeks ago. She’d been ailing since the little lass was born and Luke’s sentence finished her. She knew I hadn’t long to last and nobody ever thought she could manage with the little lass alone. You’ll have seen women die like that, I reckon, of – well – whatever it is that kills them.’
‘Despair,’ said Cara flatly.
Yes, she had seen it. Once, very nearly, in Odette. But it had not killed Cara herself. Nor Sairellen who had spent her last penny burying Luke’s wife in a proper grave – none of the dismal shovelling away designed for paupers – and then set off to walk, from Nottingham. How long? Ten days?
‘When did you last eat?’
‘I don’t eat much, lass, at my age.’
At least these were practical issues which required no more than her hand on a bell, a few orders for tea and muffins, fresh milk and new bread.
‘Eat.’ It was done without ceremony or gratitude, as a matter of course, Sairellen eating to fuel her body as one might fuel an engine for the few miles still left inside it, while Cara stared at the sleepy child, looking for Luke and finding Anna.
‘How old is she?’
‘She’ll be three on Christmas Day.’
‘She’s very small.’
‘Aye. She takes after her mother.’
‘Were they happy, Sairellen?’
‘I believe so. Aye – I know so. They were happy, Cara Adeane.’
She smiled, poured out more tea, left the room for a further consultation with her housekeeper and, returning found Sairellen dozing by the fireside, the child sitting placidly on the hearthrug. Dear God. She had forgotten the dog. That savage brute. That peevish monster, jealous of his private and pampered kingdom by her fire. She moved forward swiftly to throw herself between the lethal jaw and the fragile, elfin hand reaching out, with unmixed delight, to pat that most churlish of canine heads. No need. For what she heard was no crunch of tender bone but a resigned sigh from the animal, a gurgle of pleasure from the child. What she saw was the wagging of a stumpy, grudging tail, a wide smile which rendered the pale, plain face of Anna Rattrie’s daughter luminous with joy.
Sairellen opened her eyes.
‘I wasn’t sleeping.’
‘No. But you soon will be.’
She had told them to clear out the room at the end of the passage where she stored her fancy goods and cosmetics and prepare it for her guests. Two soft beds with feather mattresses and brand new linen, rugs on the floor and pictures on the walls, a marble wash-stand with a jug and basin in flowered china.
‘Nay lass, I’ve done what I set out to do,’ said Sairellen. ‘I’ve brought little Anna. That’s what my lad wanted. So if you’ll take her …’
‘Of course I’ll take her.’
‘Then I’ll be on my way.’
‘Just where?’
‘Is that any business of yours, Cara Adeane?’
‘If I make it so. Because there’s nowhere you can go – is there?’
Only ‘away’, wandering off like an old cat to die in a ditch somewhere, in solitary dignity, a trouble to no one. She wouldn’t have it.
She wanted to be troubled, in any case.
‘You’ll stay here, Sairellen Thackray.’
‘I reckon I’ll make my own mind up about that …’
‘You’ll do as you’re told …’
Sairellen stood up, her bones beneath their sagging, yellowing skin still tall and valiant, still capable of making short work of any little flibbertigibbet such as Cara Adeane; or dying in the attempt.
‘I don’t take charity,’ she said. ‘Never have. Never will. And that’s that.’
‘You stubborn old woman,’ Cara yelled at her. ‘He told you to bring me the child because he wanted me to look after you – don’t you know that? He had to give you a reason for coming, to save your stupid pride. He trusted me not to let you wander off again and I won’t – dammit, Sairellen – even if I have to tie you.’
Sairellen sat down again. Heavily. Gladly, perhaps.
‘Don’t use foul language to me, my girl,’ she said.
‘You’ll stay.’
‘Happen so.’
‘No “happen” abo
ut it. You’ll stay. And don’t think of it as charity because I can easily employ you. There’s always work to be done. There’s – well – A hundred things.’
‘Aye,’ said Sairellen, closing her eyes. ‘You’ll think of something if you put your mind to it. But he won’t come back, you know, lass, if that’s what you’re hoping for …’
‘Of course he will. He’s strong enough …’ Cara’s mind leaped instantly to survival, the rigours of a convict ship and of penal servitude, men like Luke in chains, digging and tending an alien land, building roads and railways and bridges like her own people had done in England. Surely he could survive that?
Sairellen shook her head. ‘Strength has nothing to do with it. He’ll serve his time and then he’ll stay out there, wherever it is. That’s what I reckon. Why shouldn’t he? Anna’s gone. I won’t be far behind. Seven years from now he won’t know the child. And if you’ve made a fine young lady of her, as I expect you will, she might be none too pleased to know him. So he’ll leave well alone. He’ll stay. A new land. A new opportunity. That’s what he talked about, sometimes, before they took him. You’ll never see him again, Cara Adeane. Neither will I.’
But she would see his child grow up. She would have that much. That miracle. How wonderful that it was through Luke this joy had come to her. No child of her own body but a child nevertheless, coming to her now when the easy circumstances of her life would allow her to be a mother. No substitute for Liam but a girl whose wide, breathless smile was already tugging at her heart. A little doll to be cherished and protected and dressed up in lace and sprigged muslin, who would grow into a ‘young lady’of education and manners upon whom could be lavished every advantage – every single one – that Cara’s own girlhood had lacked. Luke had given her what she most needed. Another human being to work for and care for. An opportunity to redeem the mistakes of her hectic past. He had sent her the means to start again.
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