Netherwood01 - Netherwood

by Jane Sanderson

  ‘“The mob was led by priests,”’ read Reverend Farrimond. ‘“And the general cry ‘kill the Jews’ was taken up all over the city.” Can this be so, Anna?’

  She shrugged her foreign shrug, all arms and shoulders. ‘Perhaps. I don’t know. There is much fear and ignorance in Russia.’

  He drove home his message, which Eve had come to realise was the purpose of all his visits to them; ‘Well, I know you’re not a Jewess, my dear, but you must stay here until it’s safe to leave. Who would return to such a country, where these atrocities are carried out and the authorities merely look on, unmoved.’

  ‘Sounds like Grangely,’ Eve said, to get him off the subject. He folded the paper and set it down on the kitchen table.

  ‘Well, we haven’t seen murder on the streets or religious persecution yet, but I do take your point,’ he said. Grangely was as sad a town as ever, the fire in the bellies of the militant miners entirely quenched, the dismal little tied houses occupied once more. It was as well for Grangely, thought Eve, that their Methodist minister had such a strong calling and that he wasn’t inclined to pack his trunk and take up a picturesque post in the Lake District or the Derbyshire Dales. There wasn’t much to celebrate in Grangely but Reverend Farrimond’s genteel, intelligent presence was, literally, a godsend.

  ‘So,’ he said now. ‘What tidings? How’s business?’

  ‘Brisk,’ said Eve, which was an understatement. Her frontdoor shop continued to sell out daily, and on top of that she had – as Amos had predicted – picked up new customers from Lord Fulton’s party. Orders from some of the more well-heeled guests had started to arrive the day after the function. Eve had answered a knock on her back door and found a smart young delivery boy from Wilkinson’s Comestibles. He wore a short navy jacket and a peaked hat with the company name stitched in red across the front; Wilkinson’s was a shop for the monied middle-classes and they dressed their staff accordingly. If he hadn’t been about the same age as Seth, Eve might have felt a little overawed by his military bearing. As it was he made her laugh, clicking his heels and introducing himself very formally as Albert Osgathorpe, before handing her a letter on thick vellum requesting a regular consignment of twenty raised pies every Thursday. A representative of Wilkinson’s, it said, would collect the produce from her at 8 am prompt each week. She was to entrust her reply to young Master Osgathorpe, who would cycle all the way back to the shop’s distinguished premises in Market Street, Barnsley.

  Eve – lacking her own headed notepaper – had told Albert to pedal back with the answer yes, and she gave him a slice of new bread spread with beef dripping before sending him on his way.

  She’d no sooner closed the door on him when Mavis Moxon, housekeeper at the rambling old vicarage by St Peter’s, stopped by to ask Eve for ten pies for the church fête two weeks on Saturday. And while she and Mrs Moxon were still speaking, a lad turned up from Squires’ butchers with an order for raised pies to sell in the cooked meats counters in all three of their branches.

  In the weeks since then, there’d been still more requests for regular deliveries, while the line outside her front door when she opened up in the mornings was never less than the length of the street. News was exchanged, gossip was spread and friendships were formed and broken in the queue for Eve’s Puddings & Pies. She’d branched out a little, selling dishes of Anna’s stuffed cabbage leaves and a clear brown chicken soup made from simmering the bones of the bird for hours in the bottom of the range. Anna said it was Leo’s recipe; he had called it Jewish medicine, the cure for all coughs, colds and even sadness of the spirit, and they sold it in jars with rubber seals and metal clasps. The initial general suspicion towards Anna and her foreign food had been eclipsed by the enthusiasm for how good it was – enthusiasm, that is, expressed in the traditional Yorkshire way, which is to say that although no one complimented it, every day it sold out. There was a penny charge these days for the dishes, repayable on return. In the early days Eve had sent Eliza to fetch them back, but she proved an unreliable courier; always at least one would be dropped and smashed on the trip home.

  So when Eve said, ‘Brisk’ in answer to Samuel Farrimond’s kindly interest, she was hiding the fact that the business, though undoubtedly thriving, was threatening to run her into the ground. She fell into bed every night dog-tired at gone midnight, but would be awake again before dawn with the weight of her new responsibilities closing in on her. She had anxiety-induced dreams where angry customers bore down on her shop with blazing torches, or where all her stock was eaten by a pack of crazed fox hounds. Being asleep, she said to Anna one morning, was more exhausting than being awake. Anna told her she should embrace her success, not resist it.

  ‘Expand,’ she said, illustrating her point with widespread arms. She was such a physical speaker, thought Eve; she used her body as much as her voice. ‘You are businesswoman, Eve. You must act like one.’

  Eve didn’t much like her tone, and huffed a little about how expansion was hardly on the cards given they were barely managing the current workload. But Anna knew all about speculating to accumulate; she understood that overheads were sometimes higher than income. Daughter of a wealthy merchant, daughter-in-law of a bookkeeper, she saw income and expenditure as simply a list of numbers in an accounts book.

  ‘When my father wanted to make bigger his business,’ she said carefully, as if speaking to an infant, ‘he found wealthy men who could lend him money to grow. Then, when he grew, he paid them back, with extra on top for having faith in him.’

  ‘Are you suggestin’ I go to a moneylender?’ said Eve, scandalised. ‘Because I most definitely will not. If I spend money on my business, it’ll be my money and nob’dy else’s.’

  Anna laughed. ‘Not moneylender, no. Another businessman, perhaps. An investor, not a crook.’

  ‘It amounts to t’same thing,’ Eve said. ‘Why spend money I don’t ’ave?’

  ‘Because your little business is telling you it wants to be bigger. You could take new place, with more ovens; you could have people work for you; you could make ten times this, twenty times.’ She waved a hand at Eve’s cash box, dismissing its contents with a disparaging gesture. ‘You think too small,’ she said. ‘You need think big.’

  Then Maya, waking from her nap, began to cry in her cot upstairs and Anna went to attend to her, leaving Eve all in a turmoil as she started on yet another batch of pie pastry. And as she worked, the familiar ritual soothed her so that she was able to apply rational thought to what Anna had said. It was quite true that the business was bursting at the seams. She simply couldn’t make any more pies or puddings than she currently did. The very next new order would have to be turned down, and that seemed plain wrong. Amos and Seth were already harvesting the vegetables and soft fruit they’d been nurturing for months, and that had opened up new possibilities for dishes she could sell. Eve, up to the elbows in a sticky mass of damp flour, wondered if Anna perhaps had a point. Maybe all this was just the beginning, she thought. She tipped the pastry out of its bowl and pounded and pulled at it for a few seconds, absorbed in the task. And then suddenly, with a flash of clarity which lit up her face, she thought of Lord Hoyland.

  Chapter 29

  Absalom Blandford, the Netherwood bailiff, was a man with two faces, one for the earl and another for the rest of the world. So while Teddy Hoyland knew him to be an excellent chap, amenable, dependable and trustworthy, everyone else he dealt with thought him an out-and-out swine. It was a testament to his own ingenuity and consistency that these two entirely diverse impressions had been successfully maintained for so many years.

  Of course, being an out-and-out swine was a useful quality in a bailiff, whose typical daily workload didn’t generally call for empathy or good humour. Absalom worked alongside, though independently of, Jem Arkwright; while Jem was responsible for the estate’s outdoor concerns, Absalom had complete control over all the dwellings, businesses, farm buildings and any other brick-and-mortar structure upon which
he could place a rent. His efficiency and commitment was such that he also doubled as the earl’s accountant, there being nothing more fascinating to him than a row of numbers. He took nothing – nothing at all – on trust. There wasn’t a single tenant on the Netherwood estate who was above his suspicion. When he’d been appointed, twenty-five years earlier, he cast aside his predecessor’s books and ledgers and conducted his own general survey of every building entrusted to his care, making an inventory that then formed the basis of his scrupulous execution of duty. Over the years, regular memoranda and amendments were entered on the pages; notes relating to deficiencies, improvements, insurances, dates of leases, rates, changes of use, changes in tenancy, lapses in rents. The history of Netherwood could be told from the pages of his estate books and most of it – perhaps all, though he’d never been tested – was committed to his prodigious memory. If a person were to ask Absalom Blandford what date Arthur and Eve Williams moved into the house vacated by Digby Caldwell’s corpse, he would say 19 April 1891, without pausing for thought, let alone having to check his facts in the ledger.

  But his encyclopedic knowledge of key moments in the lives of others was accompanied by a chilly lack of interest in humanity. His fascination lay not in the people, but in the buildings they inhabited. Tenants were just that; names in his books, significant only if they either failed to pay up on time, moved away or died. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, and if he’d learned how to laugh or to love he would have been downright attractive: slim, tidy, always dressed immaculately and with not inconsiderable style. His distinguishing physical feature was a fine head of glossy black hair which was as abundantly luxurious as his spirit was mean. He was unmarried – matrimony held no appeal – and entirely friendless, but in his own, emotionally barren way, he was content. And on the fine Monday morning in early July when Eve Williams presented herself, without appointment, at the estate offices, Absalom Blandford was in what passed for him as a good mood.

  Not that Mr Blandford was the person Eve was hoping to see. She cursed inwardly when she realised that she would have to put her request to him instead of the somewhat surly but infinitely more approachable Jem Arkwright. He, however, was out with Walker Spruce and his terriers, mending fencing and – if truth were told – enjoying the sunshine. So it was the basilisk gaze of Absalom Blandford that greeted her when she knocked on the office door and was bid to enter.

  As it was, Eve’s heart was pounding with fear – had been since she left Netherwood and entered the gates of the park to walk the mile down Oak Avenue. She looked the part, but she didn’t feel it. Anna had made her a little red flannel jacket, the first such garment Eve had ever owned; it was beautifully dapper, with a cinched-in waist and narrow lapels, and it looked very well over her good white blouse and grey skirt. She had real boots, too, in tan leather, newly purchased from a shoe shop on Cheapside in Barnsley, and although she still preferred the feel on her feet of her old clogs, she hoped the boots lent her a professional air because she needed all the help she could get.

  It was all Anna’s fault, she said to herself as she walked along under the towering trees. The liquid feeling in her gut and the dryness of her mouth were Anna’s doing. She had chivvied Eve out of the house this morning and was now safe at home, darting between the dolly tub and the front-door shop – Monday was Monday, after all, and Anna was juggling the demands of wash day with those of a busy trade in pies and puddings. Well, thought Eve, she’d swap places with her now. Aye, she would that; let Anna come to the big house with a hare-brained scheme to borrow money. No, to raise capital. She had to remember that, because apparently it was the correct term. Reverend Farrimond had told her, when he heard of the plan, that looking and sounding professional was the key to success in these matters. People in business raised capital, he said, they didn’t borrow money – although he and Eve both knew it amounted to the same thing. Amos, never backward in coming forward these days, had weighed in with his own advice, which was not to go cap in hand to the earl under any circumstances. But Eve judged, quite correctly, that Amos’s interest wasn’t entirely objective, so here she was, smartly dressed, coached in what to say, hair brushed to a shine and pinned into a fetching twist – a vision, had she but known it, of loveliness – but still feeling like a small child on her first day at school.

  What made it worse was that the gardens were swarming with staff, all of whom seemed fascinated by the novelty of her presence. Eve wondered, as she passed them, what on earth there was to do in a garden, however grand, to keep so many men and boys busy. Old Bartholomew Parkin, the Oak Lodge gatekeeper, had been the first person she encountered and he’d lifted his cap deferentially as she walked past before realising it was just Eve Williams and he needn’t have bothered. That, at least, had made Eve smile. But she soon began to feel foolish again, as she ran the gamut of gardeners who stood and watched her lonely progress towards the magnificent cupolas and columns of Netherwood Hall. She kept in her head the words of Lord Hoyland at Arthur’s funeral: ‘We cannot offer charity to every needy case, my dear, and you doubtless wouldn’t seek it, but we will always help if we can.’

  What she sought this morning was an audience with the earl. And if Jem Arkwright had been sitting behind the desk instead of Absalom Blandford, her objective might have been far more easily achieved.

  ‘Good mornin’, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Yes it is. At least, it was,’ he said. An unpromising start, but not disastrous. At least he hadn’t demanded she leave at once.

  ‘I’m Eve Williams,’ she said.

  Number five, Beaumont Lane, widow, three children, émigrée lodger, thought the bailiff automatically. He looked at her steadily with his lizard’s eyes.

  ‘I wondered if I could see you for five minutes?’ Eve said.

  ‘And can you? See me?’ said Mr Blandford, coldly facetious. ‘Or have I become invisible since arriving at work this morning?’

  Eve blushed deep red and her train of thought crashed spectacularly into a brick wall of pure panic. She had expected discouragement but not mocking, naked hostility.

  ‘Yes, sir. I mean, no. That is, yes, I can,’ she said.

  ‘Oh for the love of God, what on earth are you doing here?’ he said. His nostrils twitched with displeasure; he was entirely unmoved by her confusion.

  ‘I wanted to see t’earl,’ she said, blurting it out helplessly. ‘To borrow some money.’ Oh bugger, she thought.

  Absalom Blandford snorted derisively.

  ‘Quite extraordinary,’ he said, as if to himself. He indicated the door with one outstretched arm. ‘Do close it behind you on your way out,’ he said, then he balanced a pair of spectacles on his neat little nose and opened the ledger in front of him, not because there was anything there demanding his attention, but because it was the most effective way possible to ignore this preposterous young woman.

  She stood for a moment looking at the crown of his head, until he looked up at her with an expression of such practised coldness that she turned and walked to the door. She had almost left the office when she was suddenly seized by the reckless urge to plead her case.

  ‘I expressed myself badly just then,’ she said. He didn’t look up. ‘I ’ave a small business, sir, a little shop – I’m sure you know that – and I need to raise some capital in order to expand.’

  She sounded now as if she knew what she was about. He knew it, and so did she. But Absalom Blandford didn’t like to back down or retract and he was 100 per cent certain that the earl would have no interest in investing in a back-street pie shop.

  ‘The usual channels for such matters are financial institutions,’ he said. She seemed entirely uncomprehending, so he added: ‘Banks,’ spitting the word out contemptuously. ‘Now, off you go. You were quite mistaken to come.’

  Now Eve did leave, closing the door behind her with a defiant little bang and allowing herself an internal stream of colourful curses of which, to look at her, you wouldn’t have thought her capable. A
mos was right, she thought. She should never have come. The silent invective sustained her as she crunched along the gravelled carriageway and set off back up Oak Avenue just as Lord Hoyland emerged from the entrance of Netherwood Hall. Serendipity, Samuel Farrimond said later, though Eve called it a simple stroke of good luck. The earl, surmising that Mrs Williams must have emerged from the estate offices, briefly postponed his own departure by car in order to enquire after her business there. Absalom Blandford, secure in the knowledge that he had protected the earl from an inconvenience, told him with the sycophantic bonhomie he always used in Teddy Hoyland’s company that the impertinent tenant had been sent packing after asking to see his lordship.

  ‘To borrow money, apparently,’ he added, and let slip a bitter little cough of amusement.

  There was no reciprocation, however. The earl looked thoughtful, then said, ‘Get her back, Absalom. Atkins can fetch her in the Daimler. I’ll see her in the morning room. Bring her to me, would you?’

  Stunned into silent submission, Absalom Blandford watched his master return to the house before following his orders to the letter. Atkins swung the car out of the courtyard and set off in pursuit of Eve Williams, and Absalom positioned himself at the steps of the house in order to receive her when she emerged from the Daimler. He was, after all, a faithful and obedient servant as well as an out-and-out swine.

  Chapter 30

  Mitchell’s Stone Ground Flour Mill, just off – aptly enough – Mill Street, had ceased production five years before, finally driven out of business by the Barnsley British Co-operative Society, which was producing better flour and selling it for less. Those workers who were willing to travel were given jobs at the Co-op’s mill in Summer Lane, Barnsley, and the rest were out of work. But even those who grumbled at their lot knew that Mitchell’s flour was of a poor grade; take a fistful from the sack and it crumbled to dry dust, whereas Co-op flour was strong and pure. It held the shape of your clenched hand and showed the indentations of your fingers. Eve would use nothing else.