Distant Choices (23 page)

Ought she, perhaps, to go inside the inn and wait there? But, despite the rapid dispersal of the passengers from Lancaster, the inn still seemed full to overflowing, with local men, she noticed, cramming the doorways, talking, gesticulating, all at the same time and in a manner agitated enough to warn her that the presence of a lady would not be welcome. There could be no cause, of course, for alarm. Nothing – she firmly insisted – which need worry her in the least. Except the cold, perhaps, and the numbness of her feet in boots of well-cut but less than substantial calfskin, hardly likely to survive the ten miles or so of winter road to Lake Ullswater, should that turn out to be their destination.

Yes. A cold afternoon indeed, sharpening into a colder evening, the sky already darkening as the coach from Carlisle came in. And standing there, surrounded by her boxes, with very little money in her pocket, a definite threat of rain in the air, a threat of another kind – although she could not name it – hovering somewhere in the crowded, coarsened town very definitely
all
around her, she was exceedingly relieved to see a familiar face among the newly arriving passengers. Especially one set above a pair of burly shoulders with an air of authority about them quite sufficient to procure, for her use, a carriage from a livery-stable if necessary, and the wherewithal to pay for it. Mr Garron Keith, on railway business, she supposed, looking enormous and prosperous and possibly just the man her situation best required, in a black greatcoat with caped shoulders and a high-crowned, curly-brimmed, quite dashing hat.

‘Oh – Mr Keith …?' She had never been pleased to see him before but now, being sufficiently acquainted with life's emergencies to know the value of a suitable ally, and judging him very suitable indeed, she called out to him and waved her hand.

‘Miss Blake?' Shouldering his way to her through the crowded yard, he looked astonished. ‘Not here by yourself, surely?'

‘Oh no? Not really.' For Evangeline never liked it known that she permitted her daughter to travel alone. ‘I am to be met …'

Lightly she explained her situation – very lightly – not wishing him to see, or not quite at once, her awareness of the tension in the air, an odd impression, rapidly growing, that it would be as well to keep looking over her shoulder, to tread warily, above all not to risk herself alone in these familiar streets which now, because they
had
been so familiar, seemed to offer her a double menace.

Yet, having employed her ‘lightness'to its full effect, she did not want him to think her a fool either.

‘Has something happened, Mr Keith?'

‘Aye. I reckon so.'

Something to do with the railway? An accident? She had stood once before, in another country, at a place where people had died by blind chance, and felt this same menace. And here, with so much gunpowder in the hands of men who were famous for drinking their daily thirty or so pints of ale apiece and who therefore could never be sober, disaster might easily have occurred.

‘An accident, Mr Keith?'

‘You might call it that.'

‘Is there danger?'

‘Enough for me to get you out of Penrith
now
, my bonny lass.' And even as she made her protest – for form's sake only – he was snapping hard fingers at the inn-servants and ordering her boxes into his carriage.

‘Your friend Miss Woodley won't be coming. The road from Ullswater goes through Yanwath and the Yeomanry won't let her pass. Not a woman alone. They've been killing each other, I hear – or trying to – at Yanwath, since yesterday.'

‘They?'

He shrugged the massive shoulders upon which, with the spark of Evangeline inside her, she had already decided to rely.

‘The navvymen. Who else? The Irish against the English. Or the other way round. Not that it matters, since it's the contractors who'll get the blame, when it's over. For not keeping our flocks of lambs in order, I reckon.'

Which was why he had come down, in haste, from Carlisle, having heard, among other rumours, that the English navvies, having failed to drive the Irish off the site, were bringing in reinforcements from Kendal and Shap Fell who were already slipping past the Cumberland Yeomanry and getting into Penrith.

‘So there won't be a lodging-house safe in Penrith tonight if it has an Irishman in it. Nor a beer-house or a gin-shop that's ever served a drink to a Paddy. And when those pick-axe handles start to fly – well – I reckon it's no fit sight for a lady. You'll come with me, Miss Blake.'

Where to? She saw no point in asking as he lifted her into the nondescript livery-stable gig and drove off with her, managing the horse with the rough skill of a coachman who had the Queen's mail to deliver. A man who had swung a pick-axe handle himself, she supposed, before railway money had put gold rings on his square-palmed hands and a gold watch-chain thicker than Lord Merton's across his well-fed middle. Not her ideal companion for a romantic Lakeland journey but a man who – that spark of Evangeline again told her – would be of far greater assistance than any romantic ideal just now.

‘This is very kind of you, Mr Keith.'

He did not answer.

She tried again. ‘I hope I am not taking you far out of your way?'

He smiled down at her. ‘No, Miss Blake.'

It hardly seemed enough. ‘Then – you were going, in any case, to Lake Ullswater? I did explain to you that my friend's house is on the far shores of the lake, between the bays of Sharrow and Howtown – didn't I? Is that in your general direction?'

He smiled again. ‘No, Miss Blake. My direction is Askham. The Queen's Head – a charming hostelry. I often stay there.'

‘But you will take me on – of course – to Ullswater.' Very deliberately she had made a statement, allowing no question to be possible.
Of course
he would take her where she wished to go.

‘I will take you to Ullswater,' he said. ‘When I can.'

The village of Yanwath lay two miles away. An empty road. A sudden taste of snow in the air. The early winter dark drawing in. The black sketch of a bird circling mournfully in a blackening sky. And then, some way ahead but fast approaching, appearing as suddenly as if they had risen from the ground, a crowd of short, thick-set men in flat caps or gamekeepers'feathered hats, flannel shirts in red and yellow, blue and yellow checks, moleskin trousers tied below the knee with string, a jaunty band of navvymen on the ‘randy', until one saw the shovels, the pick-axes with the sawn-off heads, the iron bars used on the line as rammers for blasting, lethal weapons every one in the hands of men who would not think too much, or too long, about using them. Men who drank ale in buckets, lived rough and usually in sin, cut off from ‘decent folk', like gipsies, like bandits, in their isolated camping places. Men with no roots, no loyalties, with no property of their own, no families of
theirs
cowering in Penrith, no reason, therefore, to worry just where the axe fell or the flame kindled. Fifty of them, Oriel counted, then a hundred. A battalion.

Suddenly not far away. Quite near. ‘Englishmen, by the look of it, from Shap and Kendal,' said Garron Keith. ‘And Penrith has more Irish in it today than Dublin.'

‘Will they stop us?' She did not wish to sound too alarmed about it, although her mouth felt very dry, her skin oddly tender. Fear, she supposed, of an expressly physical nature to which she was not accustomed. Fear, not of insult but of actual injury, not of damage to one's pride and emotions, but of brute force.

Her skin crawling now, her stomach tightening very close to nausea, she forced herself to admit the possibility. Yes, it could happen. Anything could happen. And since there was absolutely nothing she could do to prevent it she might just as well straighten her back and make the only choice left to her; to behave badly or to behave well. No choice at all, of course. She would behave well.
Very
well, if she possibly could. At least that would be something.

‘Will they stop us?' she murmured again, believing him well able to judge.

He shrugged his shoulder. ‘If they want to, then yes, I reckon they will.'

‘Do you know them?'

‘I shouldn't think so. But they may know me. In which case they'll know I'm a Geordie, not an Irishman. It might help.'

‘Can you – help them?'

‘To do what?'

She hesitated. ‘I think – to keep out of trouble.' For, even through her fast-building panic, it seemed more than likely to her that these unguided, incoherent men were heading to punishment, deportation, prison, the gallows even, far more surely than to victory.

She saw him smile. ‘Trouble is what a navvy's made for, Miss Blake. They like it. Why else would they lead this life?'

‘One hears – for the money?'

‘What money?' Once again, although he kept his eyes on the road, his gaze as narrowed with calculation as a sailor squinting through strong sunlight on the sea, she saw him smile. ‘Money's not in it. There are ten thousand men up and down this line and I'll not be far out if I tell you they'll spend a thousand pounds on booze for every mile of track they lay down. And what I know for certain is that not more than a hundred will have a penny piece to take away, wherever it is they're going, when the job's done. That's the way they are.'

And the road ahead was black with them now. Men who held their own lives cheap and so would have no care of hers.

‘Are you afraid, Miss Blake?'

She straightened her back at an exceedingly proper angle.

‘Yes. It would be foolish – surely – not to be?'

‘It would. Especially – look over there …'

But she had already seen the smoke curling quite gracefully in the sky ahead of them, a cloud of it rising high and then spreading, drifting, from fires already growing cold.

‘Damnation,' he said. ‘They've been burning the Irish huts at Yanwath. And making free with Irish whiskey and Irish women, I reckon. There'll be no quarter now.'

And whipping up the livery-stable horse, he took a sudden left turn at a speed which jarred every bone in her body and went hurtling along a lane so narrow that, unable to contemplate the possibility of some other vehicle coming from the opposite direction, she closed her eyes and clung to the edge of her seat with aching hands, her mind finding enough to occupy it with the immediate problem of keeping on her hat, not bursting into tears, not – absolutely not – being sick.

The gig stopped – eventually – in the yard of another inn surrounded, she thought, by miles of sleeping, undulating, empty land.

‘This is Askham,' he said. ‘The Queen's Head.'

Was it also safety? She rather doubted it.

‘Miss Blake.' He looked amused. ‘What else can I do? You're an Englishwoman. And if you happened to meet a gang of Irish lads on the road somewhere between here and Pooley Bridge, who've just had their homes burned down and their women molested – one way or another … Well, I can't let you risk it, can I?'

‘No, Mr Keith.'

‘So you'll stay here and I'll send a message to your Miss Woodley. I reckon a boy could get through across the fells.'

‘Thank you, Mr Keith.'

What else could she say? Nothing, she rather suspected, to which he would pay the least attention.

‘So I'll just take you inside and get you settled. They know me here and so they'll look after you very well. And when I get back we'll have some supper together and talk a while …'

‘Where are you going?' Her voice was sharper than she had intended, crying out, perhaps – she was not quite certain …
Don't leave me. I may not trust you. In fact, no, certainly not, I don't trust you. But at least I know who you are, and even if you harm me yourself – and I expect you might well try – you won't let any of these others, these strangers, come near me.

Had she understood that much already? He nodded and smiled at her. ‘Not far. And maybe not for long. There's just a spot of railway business – you may have noticed – to attend to.'

The inn was low-beamed and very pleasant, full of the fragrance of wood smoke and the gleam of copper and brass, a caress of warmth and ease touching her, velvet-handed, as she entered, the landlady agreeing at once with Mr Keith that the ‘young lady'must have every consideration, a small, firelit parlour of her very own to sit in behind a discreetly closed and very heavy door, hot water and towels, a deep, leather armchair made into a nest of welcome repose by large, fringed, dark red cushions, red plush curtains drawn across the window to make the nest warmer, cosier, more secret, even a glass of brandy which one could offer with perfect propriety to any young lady in shock. Dreadful, she thought it, wrinkling her nose, although having taken it like medicine, she found herself very drowsy and fell fast asleep, waking to find Mr Keith back again, sitting with a whisky bottle beside him, a glass in his hand, looking at her.

A strange, and very shocking, moment.

She had taken down her hair, anticipating a long wait with plenty of time to do it up again, and now, badly shaken by the very fact of being observed in the vulnerable act of sleep by a stranger, she shook it instinctively forward to hide her face like a pale curtain.

‘Very pretty,' he said.

She gave him a level stare, not unfriendly – since, in the circumstances, she doubted if she could afford to be
that
– but thinking it best, thinking it wise, to nip any familiarity firmly in the bud. And then, having delivered her reprimand, her sharp little rap on the knuckles of his possible desire to flirt with her, she followed it, in recognition of the service he had done her, with a slight smile.

‘Are you forgiving me my trespasses, Miss Blake?' he said.

She ignored that.

‘What has happened, Mr Keith? Did you go back to Penrith?'

‘I did I'm not the only contractor on the site. There's Brassey's men, and Stephenson's men. So I thought I'd just go along and make sure my lads weren't the only ones clapped in jail …'