A Song Twice Over Read Online Free PDF Page B

population.
    â€˜Well,’ she said briskly. ‘Here we are.’ And it was not a moment for promises and declarations, with the bags to be rescued from the hooves of the carter’s heavy horses, the child to be prevented from falling in the gutter, a sense of impending family reunion, a chance that Odette might glimpse her grandson from a window and come rushing out to claim him; excluding Daniel. Not the moment. But would there ever be another? And it was then, for the first time, that he put a hand on her, his hard fingers touching fire into her skin, his mind already groping for words of love although his tongue could not yet employ them. So that he spoke to her instead – to hold her attention – in a manner he knew she would expect and understand.
    â€˜You owe me, Cara,’ he said.
    She did not intend to deny it. For the journey had been difficult and without him she could so easily have been left behind in Liverpool, where there had been only one train that day with third class accommodation and ten people for every place on those sparse wooden benches. No roof, either just open wagons packed to bursting and Liam no longer sleepy and silent but screaming, terrified not so much by the scramble on the station platform but by its ferocity. As she had been scared herself – she knew it. For she was not always brave and calm and, with that frantic multitude struggling around her ready to kill and be killed for their right to board that train, she had lost her head thoroughly, seizing hold of Liam so fiercely in her dread of seeing him trampled underfoot that she had come near to suffocating him, until Daniel Carey had opened a way for her, less by brute force than by a steely and most effective determination.
    And once inside the train she had sat for a long time gasping for breath, fanning herself with her hand, her nerve broken, covering her ears to Liam’s whining, unable to bear it, unable to stop it, so that Daniel had taken the boy on his knee and pointed out to him, by way of distraction, the silk-hatted gentlemen ‘riding outside’on the roofs of the first-class carriages up ahead, as ‘sporting gentlemen’ had always been wont to travel on the box of a stage-coach.
    So his sweet-faced grandmother Odette would have spoken to him.
    But then – as Cara swiftly reminded herself – so too would her father, the charming but entirely bogus Dr Adeane.
    Manchester had been easier, the third-class carriage although open-sided, having a roof, which had proved a blessing with the rain coming on. But there had been a long delay, made bearable – enjoyable had she cared to tell the truth – by Daniel Carey’s wit, the clean bench he had found her to sit on, the sponge cakes he had bought her, with what might have been the last of his money for all she knew, not from a street trader but from a proper baker’s shop.
    She had been – what? Moved by the gift? Ridiculously so. What remained in her mind was that they were the best cakes she had ever eaten. What remained in her mind, far too clearly, was that she had been happy sitting there, on a station bench, eating them. And sensations of happiness were rare with her. What her mind also retained was an anxiety equally rare – about how much, if anything at all he really did have left in his pocket, whether or not and how soon he could get more, whether or not she could risk offending him by offering to share the very little she had left in hers. Or whether or not she should contrive to give him the whole of it in some manner he could not refuse.
    And this impulse of generosity to a stranger was the rarest thing of all.
    Yet in Leeds he had been no stranger, striding ahead with Liam on his shoulder, teasing her because she could not keep pace with him, so that she had quickened her stride, taken up his challenge, arrived at the pedlar’s yard laughing and breathless. And regretful.
    â€˜I may as