Steam-driven looms to keep pace with these monster supplies of machine-spun yarn, and factories to house them in.
No decent Yorkshireman – or so many said – would submit to the tyranny of the millmaster, the infamous opening and closing of the factory gates with a captive work-force locked inside like cattle, no longer pacing themselves to natural rhythms but to the hands of the factory clock, the cold heart of its engine. And so, of those who vowed it to be intolerable, many came close to starving in their cottages and breaking up their precious handlooms for firewood, or went on the tramp to look for work elsewhere; or otherwise disappeared.
Not that the millmasters had had much use for them in any case, the new looms being so light that women – and children, who were much cheaper and far less trouble – could handle them. And so they had sent to the poorhouses of the south for cartloads of nameless, orphaned ‘pauper brats’as young as five years old who had slept, after their daily toil, on heaps of wool-waste in a corner of a factory shed; and were still here now, some of them – the survivors – living in the mean back-to-back cottages which had sprung up so thick and fast on Sairellen’s childhood meadow, sending their own undersized children into the mill.
Sairellen’s father, a man of stern morality, had vowed he would rather see his daughters dead than weaving by steam, locked up every morning in the heat and grime and promiscuity of the sheds, at the beck and call and mercy of overlookers and engineers, men about whose virtue there could be no guarantee. But they had gone, one by one, just the same, Sairellen herself as a young wife of seventeen, a widow at nineteen and the mother of two children; her second husband, Radical Jack Thackray, claiming her a year later.
After which her troubles had begun in earnest, Jack’s mind being given to such wide-ranging political freedoms as were explained to him in the unstamped and therefore outlawed radical press, the right of the common man to vote having so much importance to him that he had died for it, twenty-one years ago this August – she still faithfully kept the anniversary – cut down by the sabre of a British soldier on the battleground of St Peter’s Fields in Manchester, when swords had been drawn to disperse a peaceful crowd – in a holiday frame of mind almost, she remembered – assembled to demand a mild enough alteration in the method by which parliament was then elected.
It had taken her a long time to recover from that. But recovery – with bairns to be fed and rent to pay – had been essential, her grief a private matter, her gratitude for the money presented to her by a group of radical journalists in her husband’s memory, being dignified but not carried to excess.
She had used it to take the lease on this house and had run it ever since as a lodging for decent working men, four to a room and one small, slope-ceilinged attic she would occasionally let – on a very temporary basis – to a married couple. Hard beds and somewhat narrow, but clean. Tea and oatmeal every morning. Barley broth from the cast-iron pot on the kitchen range every night. Bacon on Sundays. An occasional leg of pork if one of her acquaintances killed a pig. Eggs from the hen-run at the end of her back-yard and, from time to time, a chicken which had foolishly ceased to lay. A well-ordered house in which Kieron Adeane had been a mistake and in which there was no room at all for a handsome and regrettably fertile young woman like his daughter.
Once again it was not unkindness. Just hard and simple common sense. For what could the girl do in a house full of single men but cause trouble? And now, with workers pouring into Frizingley from all directions, train-loads and cartloads discharging daily, whole gangs turning up on the tramp ready for anything and prepared to cut up rough unless they got it, the town’s population swollen from the few hundred quiet families of Sairellen’s childhood memory to thirty thousand badly-housed, under-paid strangers, what chance did this pert young woman really have of any decent employment? What millmaster would waste time and money to train her when he could have his pick from the crowd of skilled weavers and spinners assembled at his gate every morning? What millmaster’s wife would take her in as a parlourmaid with that gleaming mane of Spanish black hair and those sea-blue Irish eyes? And what else remained – when hunger really gnawed and no other door would open – but the brothel on the corner. On every corner. And the workhouse for Odette.
The circumstances of Sairellen’s life had not permitted her to be tender-hearted but, just the same, she did not wish to see that happen to Odette. And, since she believed it to be inevitable, it would be well to stand back.
‘I’ll put it to you very plain,’ she said. ‘Your mother’s room is paid for until Friday next. After that, if she finds work, then she’s welcome to stay. But I have no accommodation at any time for single women, or for children. You will understand.’
Cara nodded and smiled – stiff-lipped but a smile of sorts nevertheless.
‘Yes. I understand. It’s turning me out into the street, you are.’
‘I am. I reckon there must be two hours of daylight yet.’
The young man, still sitting by the chimney corner, so motionless, so absorbed in his reading that Cara had barely noticed him, looked up from his book.
‘Mother …?’ he said, just the one word, not quite asking a question nor issuing a warning, something in between, so that Sairellen turned to him and smiled, not in the least surprised, it seemed, at his intervention.
Sairellen Thackray had borne thirteen children and lost twelve, most of them in infancy of the cholera or the measles, a daughter in childbirth, two sons as a result of industrial injury, another from injury of a different kind received at a protest against women and three-year-old children working down the mines, leaving her with Luke, her last born, the child of her middle-age, now a man – twenty-six years old – of whom she had always been proud.
Not that she had ever felt the need to tell him so, having merely grunted her approval when, as a little lad, he’d tramped off regularly if not religiously to Sunday school to learn to read and write – skills she herself had never had the chance to acquire – and, later on, to the Mechanics Institute where he still spent his time poring over volumes of history and old maps. She’d done little more than grunt when he’d been promoted to overlooker at Braithwaite’s mill either. She just made sure that there was always a hot dinner waiting for him, a clean shirt, kept the lodgers out of his way as much as she could, took not a penny more of his wages than she absolutely required. Left him in peace with his books and rarely asked questions about his other pursuits, either amorous, political or social, having implicit trust in his sense and decency.
She supposed he was not handsome, although that was of no importance, being tall and craggy and loosely put together like herself, with a thatch of coarse fair hair, steady grey eyes, an overcrowded face of large, heavy features, a finely developed conscience which – since his life had been marginally easier than hers – made him rather more easily put upon.
And she had known from the start that he would object to the putting out of doors of a young woman and child.
Well, perhaps she objected to it herself. What decent person would not? But, as she had told Luke many a time, Frizingley was full of stray dogs – whimpering little lost puppies like Liam; bright-eyed, vagrant cats like his young mother ready to charm themselves a place at any fireside; sad and dignified creatures like Odette, not wishing to be any trouble – all of them able to touch the heart. And since, with the best will in the world, one could not take them in – since one had to face the brutal fact that there was simply not enough to go around – far better to send them off at once. Better – for one’s own peace of mind – never to raise false hopes. Better for them.
She had told Luke that too, but felt nothing but her habitual grunt of pride in him when he stood up to her, not aggressively as he could well have done considering his height and the rough work he was used to, but with easy good-humour.
‘I reckon you’ll want them to stay overnight, mother.’
‘Why should I want that, Luke?’
She e
njoyed these confrontations. Perhaps because no one else, these days, ever confronted her.
‘Because Odette is a good woman. And she’s been counting the hours until they got here.’
‘I’ve nowhere to put them, Luke. Odette knows that.’ He smiled. ‘Aye. But you’ll have been keeping it from her – to surprise her I reckon – that the little lad could sleep in her bed tonight. And that we could manage a chair by the kitchen fire for his mother.’
Had she found a champion? Cara, her turquoise eyes agleam, would have rushed to thank him had not his mother prevented it, placing herself between them, her eyes as shrewd and watchful as ever, in no mind to expose her son – a man with natural inclinations after all – to the obvious temptations of a female in distress.
Not that he required gratitude, returning with an expression of quiet amusement to his chair, stretching out long legs towards the fender where I am still sat in stunned silence by the basket of kittens, while Cara began, very ably, to defend herself.
Just a chair for the night, no need to keep the fire going. She wouldn’t dream of accepting such luxury and would be gone in the morning, first thing.
‘Aye. I reckon you will,’ said Sairellen. And if, in the meantime, Mrs Thackray would be so kind as to give her the address of Miss Ernestine Baker, the milliner, she would run along there this very minute to meet her mother and perhaps say a word or two of her own about the wages which, if Odette said were owing, then assuredly must be. She wouldn’t be long.
‘What about the bairn?’ enquired Sairellen.
‘Oh –’ Cara’s blue-green eyes were widely, innocently open, her mouth curving in an angelic smile. ‘It seems a shame to move him – doesn’t it? – poor little thing, quiet as a mouse – and I’ll only be half an hour …’
Sairellen sighed.
But a moment later Cara was running down the street called St Jude’s, her mind obliterated of all anxieties but the need to find her mother, taking one thing at a time as seemed best to her at crisis points like these, when every problem was urgent, terrible, and to tackle too many at once would overwhelm her.
One thing at a time. First her mother, to be rescued from the spite of Miss Ernestine Baker, to be consoled, defended, reunited with Liam. Then Miss Baker herself, either money to be extracted from her or, if she could be charmed, then charmed into taking on Cara in her mother’s place she must be. Then – and her heart sank at the thought of it – the sinister landlord of the Fleece, to ascertain to what portion of her wages – once she had them – he felt entitled. Then the long, slow, often humiliating rounds of anybody who might give her work. Anybody. Except the brothel keepers who would not be slow to offer, the elderly, comfortable women one saw in every railway station, every coaching inn, every town square when the daylight was fading, looking for girls to suite one sexual purpose or another.
She had never even remotely considered that. She did not consider it now and was therefore ready to defend herself when she felt a man’s hand on her arm; until she saw that it was Daniel Carey.
‘Oh dear God.’ And it was a lament, full of grief for what they could have been to one another, anger at the knowledge that they could not. He heard only the anger.
‘What are you doing here?’
She was in the most desperate situation of her life, as near the brink of total disaster as she had ever been. How could she pause now in her mad rush to salvage whatever could be salvaged – if anything at all – how could she possibly add to the sum total of her disaster by allowing herself to fall in love?
Not now. Please – let it be later. When it would be resolved, one way or another, and she would have time to think only of herself. And torn badly, most distressfully by a conflict of racing emotions – a burst of sheer, pure joy at the sight of him, an urgent need to send him away, terror that he might not come back – the tears in her throat causing her to clench her jaw as if in temper, making her voice cool – although he could not know that – she rapped out ‘Wouldn’t the pedlar take you back on his cart?’
‘Oh yes. I got on, right enough. And off again.’ There had been no sense to it. He knew that. No certainty even, of seeing her again that day. He had simply, suddenly, and most urgently desired to be here. And so, once again, he had vaulted over the tail-board of the wagon, already a mile on its homeward track, and had come back to the street called St Jude’s with no specific intentions, his aim now extending no further than to draw her into the narrow passage between two darkened warehouses and then into his arms.
‘I had to see you, Cara. Now. I couldn’t risk going back to Leeds and then tomorrow finding you gone. I couldn’t wait.’
Nothing had ever equalled the ferocity of her gladness. He was all she wanted. For the brief moment in which she allowed herself to rejoice in him, to live as herself for herself wholly and fully, she knew that there could be nothing more wonderful anywhere in the world than the love and passion and folly vibrating from his body, his mind, to hers.
And then it was the folly, after all, which really counted. The folly she had sworn never to commit again. And how could she give in to it now? How could she?
She could not.
But, choked by her tears and frustrations, she could not tell him so. Nor could he – as unused to love as Cara, although quite comfortable with passion – understand her muttered fears as she began to resist, pushing him away with one hand and holding him with the other, refusing his kisses and then abandoning herself to them almost, never quite, entirely; increasing his fever.
‘Cara – come with me …’
‘Where?’ She was scandalized.
‘Just with me – away – Anywhere.’
He had forgotten her parents and her child, forgotten the business which had brought him to Leeds. All he saw was Cara Adeane who did not resemble in any way the kind of girl he had expected to love. And yet it seemed that he loved her. Unwisely. Far too suddenly to be able to cope with it, to go beyond the astonishment, the unease, and convert it to tenderness.
He had been tender, sometimes, with other women in a light-hearted, highly enjoyable fashion, had teased and cajoled and usually had his way. What seemed to matter now was that she should not escape him. And the only way he could be sure of her was physically to possess her. After which – calm in the knowledge that she was his – he would soon learn how to tell her what was in his heart.
And caught up in the heat of his own new emotions, he was angry with her for not understanding this, angry with himself for his sudden inability to communicate.
A moment more and they were bitterly quarrelling.
‘You don’t think I can look after you,’ he accused her. No, of course she did not.
‘You don’t trust me.’ It surprised her, even in her condition of near hysteria, that he could think she might. Men did not exist to be trusted. Nor were they put on the earth to look after women. She was very sure of that. They could be loved, of course. They were loved.
‘You won’t see me again,’ he told her.
‘Well – I won’t die of that.’ But as he turned away white with anger, and strode off down the street, she felt that he had killed her already.
She had not told him of her plight. Once he had turned the corner she would have no way of finding him. And who knew where she might be herself tomorrow?
‘Daniel …’ But it was only a whisper with no hope of reaching him, spoken only to comfort herself as she leaned for a moment, feeling sick and shaken and totally desolate, against the stone wall.
And then, slowly, deliberately, she tidied her hair, smoothed her skirts, straightened – almost an inch at a time – her suddenly aching back.
One thing at a time. And she must steady herself now, compose herself, in order to achieve it. First her mother. Then Miss Baker. Then the landlord of the Fleece. Then somebody, somewhere – Please God – to employ her.
But the name in her mind was Daniel.
Chapter Three
Gemma Dallam would alw
ays remember the first time the Irish girl came to call as the day on which she made up her mind to marry Tristan Gage, her mother’s godson.
Not an easy decision. Nor – above all – in the least romantic. But, as the threads came together in her mind, oddly natural.
She must marry someone. She and her mother, for rather different reasons, were both agreed on that. And since she was plain, rich and, at twenty-two no longer in the first bloom of youth, being of a practical disposition and quick wit, short of stature but high in her financial expectations – a combination which made it unlikely that she would ever be courted for love – then surely, among the several who had offered, it would be better to take shallow, charming, undemanding Tristan than a man of greater substance who would exercise the right, with which marriage empowered him, to demand a very great deal.
Better Tristan who was poor and who, having no home of his own, would be glad to remain here in the ancient, inconvenient but – to Gemma – uniquely beautiful manor house her father had purchased with the profits of his weaving sheds, rather than Ben Braithwaite, young autocrat of Braithwaite & Son, worsted manufacturers, who had inherited a tall dark house to go with his mill, complete with Braithwaite family traditions, a tribe of Braithwaite relatives to be entertained, Braithwaite interests to be first and foremost considered; even the vague malice of a widowed mother.
Better Tristan who took little in life very seriously beyond the set of his lace cravat, the cut and quality of his jacket, than Uriah Colclough, master of Frizingley Ironworks and Nonconformist lay preacher who would require her to conform, nevertheless, and most strictly, to the very letter of his moral principles.
Tristan, who saw her fortune only in moderate terms of thoroughbred hunters and good living and would think it ill-bred to question her own expenditure, rather than Jacob Lord of Lord’s Brewery who was over-meticulous with money, or the heir to a certain local baronet who, while making her Lady Lark of Moorby Hall would also use her last penny to keep his crumbling, ancestral home intact, and to purchase for his half-dozen noble brothers, a seat in Parliament, a commission in a crack regiment, a sugar plantation in Antigua, appointments in the Foreign Service and in the English Church.
A Song Twice Over Page 5
