A Song Twice Over Read Online Free PDF Page A

land and off his conscience.
    â€˜Poor devils,’ said Daniel Carey, sitting Cara’s child on his shoulder and picking up her carpet bags, waiting his moment before hazarding himself, and her, among the fearful confusion on the dockside below, a kaleidoscope of human pieces carelessly shaken, heedlessly thrown down, sombre-coloured specks that were men and women huddling, settling a moment, starting off again in yet another wrong direction, falling. And not always picking themselves up again. The lucky few had relatives to meet them with wheelbarrows into which whole lifetimes of bags and boxes, a baby, a dazed old grandmother, were hastily bundled. The ‘squatters’, in the manner of those accustomed to concealing themselves underground, had melted away as if they had never been. But the widow with her six children had simply walked six feet of hard-paved English ground and then, not knowing which way to turn and suddenly realizing the futility of turning anywhere, had sat down cross-legged on a paving-stone, her children about her, waiting in silent, well-mannered desperation for what would happen next. No longer even curious to wonder if it might be worse than what had happened before.
    And what else but despair had brought her here in the first place? Daniel Carey had no need to ask her story. Her husband had died, judging by the ages of the children, about a year ago. And with him had gone the cottage and the couple of acres, repossessed by a landlord who did not care for the complications of a lone woman and infant children on his land. For there would have been no lease, no security of tenure, just a ‘tenancy at will’, the ‘will’in question belonging to the landlord who might evict as and when he chose. And therefore, while she still had a few possessions that would fetch a few coppers, he had evicted at once. As he had evicted the squatters. Although that had been a long time ago.
    â€˜Poor devils,’ said Daniel Carey once more and then, his eyes narrowing, their expression hard and bitter, he shrugged and said ‘Ah well – it’s better-fed we are and better-dressed than they. So I reckon we’ll get by.’
    â€˜We’ll get by,’ murmured Cara Adeane somewhat to herself, walking down the gangplank empty-handed, unencumbered, gracefully swinging her parasol. ‘Because we have better sense.’

Chapter Two
    She had expected him to leave her in Leeds. So had he. Yet when, late in the afternoon, they had located the alley her father had named, opening on to a littered courtyard behind Boar Lane, with the carter just about to set off on his Wednesday delivery of cheap dress goods to the milliners of Keighley and Bradford and Frizingley, he had said his goodbyes, wished her luck and then surprised her, although not himself – so much of his life being dictated by impulse in that way – by leaping into the already moving cart beside her.
    â€˜I may as well see you to your father’s door. It’s not far. And it doesn’t look like rain.’
    Did she want his company now? Regretfully she admitted she did, although nothing obliged her to tell him so.
    â€˜I thought you had friends in Leeds.’
    â€˜That I do.’
    â€˜Will they not be waiting?’
    â€˜Hardly. I’m to visit the editor of the Leeds Northern Star . But there’s no call for hurry – since he’s in prison for printing treason.’
    And leaning back against the bales of printed calico and housemaid’s cotton he raised an amused eyebrow and smiled at her.
    â€˜What treason?’
    â€˜Oh –’ and he sounded very far from alarmed about it. ‘Much as usual. That working men should have the vote. That members of parliament should be paid salaries so that men like me could get ourselves elected and keep our own bodies and souls together without being in the pay of my lord duke or my lord millmaster – and having to