Ravenscliffe

by Jane Sanderson

  ‘What a bloody carry-on.’

  Sidney Cutts, plucked from the time office and placed with the others at the foot of the shaft in recognition of his long service at New Mill, was sceptical about the extent of the honour. ‘I feel a right daft sod, stood ’ere.’

  ‘I’m all for it, me,’ said Lofty Vickers amiably. ‘Makes a change.’

  ‘What is it we say again? If he talks to us, like?’ Frank Ogden was just a boy, not long fifteen. He’d been picked to represent the youthful contingent of the workforce and he felt burdened by the responsibility. His mam hadn’t helped, fussing over him in the kitchen that morning, plastering down his disobedient hair, eyes welling with maternal pride.

  ‘You say, “Nah then, Bertie, ’ow’s tha bin?” then you sing t’National Anthem, solo,’ said Sam.

  ‘Get lost,’ said Frank. He scowled at Sam, who laughed at him.

  ‘Tha says nowt unless tha spoken to,’ said Albie Gilford, Don Manvers’s humourless deputy. ‘An’ then tha says, “Yes, Your Majesty,” or, “No, Your Majesty”. Depending on t’question, like.’

  ‘Oh aye?’ said Sam. ‘An’ if ’e says, “What’s your name, young fellow-me-lad?”’

  But he stopped short because the empty upward cage suddenly began to creak with the early signs of life, preparing to head towards the pinprick of daylight at the top of the shaft: this could only mean that the visitors were on their way down.

  Albie said: ‘I ’ope they know what they’re in for.’

  ‘They don’t,’ said Sam.

  ‘I can’t credit it, me,’ said Lofty. ‘A king in a pit cage. It’s not right.’

  ‘If it’s good enough for us …’ Sam began to say, but he stopped again because the flow and slide of the cables told them the royal party was now plummeting in their direction.

  There were seven of them, in the end – the king, the earl, Tobias, Frank Ponsonby, Henrietta, Thea and Joseph Choate, who had no real enthusiasm for the scheme but whose wife felt their wayward charge needed a chaperone. She was proving more of a handful than the ambassador had expected; he felt his old friend Elliot Stirling had ill-prepared him for the girl’s evident boundless enthusiasm for every unsuitable activity. Yesterday, while the other ladies played croquet and drank tea, Thea had walked out with an impromptu shooting party and, borrowing Toby’s gun, had bagged a respectable five birds with a series of cracking shots. She had shrugged off the praise: easier than killing rats and rattlesnakes, she had said.

  ‘Watch her today,’ Caroline Choate had murmured to her husband as they left for New Mill. ‘Don’t let her get her hands on a pick axe or shovel.’

  They were met by Don Manvers, rigid and dry-mouthed with anxiety. He looked, thought Lord Netherwood with sympathetic amusement, as if he might cry. The earl had consulted the king’s private secretary about the correct protocol concerning a sovereign visit down a coal mine: there was none, Francis Knollys had said with an oily smile, because there was no precedent. His best advice for such a scheme would be to cancel it, he had said, unhelpfully. So, unassisted by the courtier-in-chief, the earl had decided on a course of action: Don Manvers – capable, steady, pedantic Don – would take the royal party through the usual pit-top routine before descending the mine.

  ‘You mean brass checks an’ helmets an’ lamps, your lordship?’ Don had said, incredulous.

  ‘Exactly, Don. Might as well show His Majesty how it’s done, what!’

  ‘The ladies as well?’

  ‘Ladies as well.’

  So Don Manvers, uncomfortably conscious of the way he sounded and the frayed edge of his shirt collar, had led them to the time office, doled out two brass checks per person – one round, one square – chivvied them respectfully along to the lamp room, fitted them out with helmets, then led them up the wooden steps and introduced them to Stan Clough, who waited at the pit bank to take their downward checks and settle them into the cage.

  ‘You mun keep your square checks fo’ t’trip back up,’ he said plainly, much as if he was speaking to a group of lads promoted from the screens to work underground and heading down now for the first time. ‘Dunt lose ’em, else we’ll not know if you’re safe.’ They stood, an unlikely pack of apprentices, listening attentively.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Clough,’ Henrietta said.

  ‘Aye,’ said Stan, looking at his clogs. He hadn’t expected womenfolk. Womenfolk at a colliery were a bad business, in his opinion.

  ‘In we go, then,’ said the earl cheerfully. He had made this journey before and he knew what none of the rest of his present party did – that the cage would drop like a stone down a well when released. He was looking forward to seeing Henrietta’s face when it did. She had had an aggravating air about her, a triumphant jauntiness at succeeding where he had been determined she should fail. They stepped on to the iron grille of the cage floor, stooping slightly in the confined space, and Stan hauled the door into place.

  ‘You might want to ’old on,’ was all he said by way of advice. He pointed at the safety bar and they all reached for it, obediently. ‘Ready?’

  Two miles away on the east side of Netherwood, the afternoon shift at Long Martley was under way. No bunting or fresh paint here: this was the least presentable of the earl’s three collieries and the men who mined it knew it would never be graced by a visit from the king. There was a unifying resentment, the camaraderie of shared indignation, among the Long Martley miners at their poor-relation status in Netherwood. It was, by a very small margin, the least productive of the three pits and its appearance was more than usually shabby, but then – as the men there would robustly maintain – it was always the last to benefit from investment or innovation, always the one waiting longest for repairs. There was no rhyme or reason for this: it was just that, rightly or wrongly, Long Martley had become known as the runt of the earl’s coal-producing litter. There were even rumours that he was running it down ready for closure, but the same story had been peddled around town for the past ten years and yet there Long Martley still stood, scruffier and more neglected in appearance than New Mill or Middlecar, but still yielding tubs of first-quality coal every working day of the week, and still providing a living for six hundred men and boys.

  They were a partisan lot, as well. There was no cross-pollination between pits and once you started somewhere, that’s where you stayed, for good or ill. Alfred Kay had worked at Long Martley for twenty-eight years; his father and grandfather had worked there before him and now his sons were there too, all three of them. They were doing nicely, the Kays. Four wages from Long Martley and Nellie’s income from her work at Eve’s Puddings & Pies up at the old flour mill. They’d never felt so flush. There was talk of a few days in Bridlington in August.

  Alf and his lads kept the same shift patterns: Nellie preferred it that way, and wherever possible her menfolk tried to keep her happy – or, at least, keep her not unhappy, which was the closest to happy that Nellie generally got. This week they were on afternoons, starting at half-past one, finishing at half-past ten. Alf and his boys, William, Richard and Edward – distinguished names, never shortened by their parents – walked the short distance to Long Martley together, though at the pit they dispersed among the couple of hundred men gathering there at the foot of the pit-bank steps. The day shift was up, but half of them were still in the yard listening to Amos Sykes, who stood like a lay preacher on an upturned crate, hurling words at the gathering of working men. He was good, too: convincing, passionate. Alf liked to listen to him. There were sceptics, still, and plenty of them, but shorter hours, more pay, protection from the workhouse for miners’ widows – what was there to take issue with? That was Alf’s view, anyway. He raised an arm in salute at Amos as he passed, and Amos saluted back without breaking his verbal stride.

  It took a while to get the afternoon shift down, but by half-past two Alf was underground and heading for the Crookgate seam with his own lad Richard and Victor Pickering. They were to lay a new road there: easy work, compar
ed to hewing coal. Three abreast, they negotiated the busy main roadway, where trammers, faceworkers and boys with ponies were milling about at the start of their shift, and then, turning off into a narrower passage, they dropped into single file, Alf at the head. Their lamps threw bouncing light onto the wet walls of the tunnel as they walked. Victor whistled a cheerful tune. Ten more minutes and they’d be there. And then the warm air that until this moment had blown steadily against their backs suddenly stopped, reversed, and came at them in a hot gust from the opposite direction so that now they were walking into it. A thick and silent cloud of foul-smelling dust whipped up and swam about their faces and the flames in their lamps reduced to a thin plume of sickly blue. The change was soundless, sinister and absolute, and all three miners knew instantly what it meant: somewhere in the pit there had been an explosion.

  To their eternal credit they continued on to Crookgate to investigate.

  Chapter 18

  Extraordinarily, Sam Bamford and Lord Netherwood heard the explosion. Heard it and felt it: a raging, furious roar of ignition, then a profound, sickening, prolonged vibration in the bowels of the earth as they took the impact. The king, along with the rest of the group, had been led a few hundred yards along the main roadway by Albie Gilford, who was relishing his role as oracle and answering their questions with an articulacy that no one had known he possessed. The tour group had emerged submissive and humble from their short adventure in the cage and even Thea had nothing to say for a full five minutes after disembarking. Now, like mountaineers adjusting to conditions at base camp, they were all perking up, venturing further afield and making sensible enquiries about the purpose of different pieces of equipment and the logistics of hacking coal from a seam and carrying it up to the surface of the earth. Ace and Queenie, proudly led by Frank and Lofty, flanked the little posse and batted their lashes at the ladies. Sidney Cutts, struck dumb by the presence of the monarch, brought up the rear. So Sam, his presence not immediately required, had elected to stay by the shaft bottom and wait for their return and the earl, who had no wish to steal Albie’s thunder, stayed with Sam. This was why, in the silence of the near-empty pit – its normal business paused for the duration of the king’s tour – the two men heard the distant but unmistakable boom of catastrophe underground.

  Sam was far more familiar than the earl with the subterranean geography of this colliery: he knew that this spot, at the bottom of the shaft, was the closest of any point in New Mill to the underground workings of Long Martley and his experience told him from which direction the sound had come, so when the earl looked at him, bemused, he simply said: ‘Long Martley. Firedamp, most likely.’

  ‘God damn it,’ said the earl, beads of sweat suddenly lining his brow. He stumbled fractionally: felt, for the first time, the terrible proximity of danger in these mines of his, the volatility of their moods. ‘What the hell do we do now?’

  ‘Get back up,’ said Sam. ‘T’show’s over.’

  There was nothing to say that she hadn’t already said, thought Eve: she was sick of the sound of her own voice. So she and Seth, their spirits defeated by each other, left Beaumont Lane together in a heavy, despondent silence. For a final time she pulled her old back door shut and heard the lock snap into place, closing them out for good. They walked down the cobbled entry and out into Watson Street and then suddenly, before and behind them, like birds driven by beaters from a copse, women began to emerge from their houses, running grim-faced and oblivious to each other in the direction of Long Martley. She and Seth halted in the sudden wave of activity around them. She saw Lilly Pickering fleeing with an infant under each arm and Eve reached out to her, pulled at her skirts, forced her to stop.

  ‘Leave ’em with me, Lilly,’ she said and Lilly, without speaking a word, bundled her children into Eve’s arms, then resumed her swift pace. Beside his mother, Seth was white-faced. She hoisted Lilly’s little ones, one on each hip, then she turned a livid face on her son.

  ‘Do you see now what you’ve done?’ she said, her voice hard and loud. ‘I ’oped never again to suffer like these women are suffering. Do you see? To hear t’sound of a poker on t’fireback, to run to t’pit without knowing if your man or your lad’s been carried up dead? That’s what you’ll give back to me if you go to New Mill next week. Fear, Seth. Terror. Do you see?’ The pitch of her voice grew urgent, frantic, as if their lives depended on his understanding her. One of the children, Lilly’s youngest, began to cry.

  For a few beats Seth said nothing; Eve could hear him breathe, in and out through his nose, his mouth clamped shut to keep from crying too. Then he said: ‘You make me sick, you do,’ and his voice matched hers in anger. ‘It’s all ’ow you feel, what you think, what you want, in’t it?’ He looked away from her, then back, and said again: ‘You only think o’ yourself. You make me sick.’

  She was stunned. This child, this boy, this precious being of hers and Arthur’s, for whom she would walk through fire if she had to – he was staring at her with contempt and she didn’t know how they had come to this or what she should do to mend it.

  The first of the dead were up and laid out in rows on the floor of the wages office by the time the earl’s convoy drove into the pit yard at Long Martley. Their journey had been slow through the crowd of women who were pushing their way down the narrow lane to the colliery and standing in a silent mass in the yard, waiting for news. There were hundreds of them. It was like a scene from the fringes of hell, thought Thea: the damned awaiting admittance. Like Henrietta, Thea had refused to be driven back to Netherwood Hall, insisting instead that she could be of some use. Frank Ponsonby and Joseph Choate had returned, but Tobias had come to the colliery and the king was with them too. It was a rare thing, he had said, to be among his subjects in a time of need. Henrietta had wondered how welcome he would be amid the grief and horror, but there was no one in the party with the influence or authority to steer his inclination in another direction. Certainly her father seemed unequal to the task; he had somehow emerged from the New Mill pit shaft a lesser man than the one who went down. One wouldn’t expect ebullience at such a time, but one might expect authority and command. She wondered if the cause of this change was fear at the sound of the explosion, or shame at the onset of fear. Either way, the earl was pale and quiet, and it had been Henrietta who had allocated motorcars and directed chauffeurs. Lord Netherwood, as was proper, rode with the king and their vehicle had made its way through the ranks of wives and mothers in a sad parody of the usual royal progress: crowds lined the road, but there were no Union flags, no smiles, no sound at all. It seemed hardly possible that such a multitude could maintain so profound a silence.

  The Daimlers crawled into the pit yard and came to a halt, but for a few moments it was impossible to get out because the sea of humanity, which had parted to let them through, closed again around the stationary vehicles as more people pressed into the area, looking for loved ones, desperate for news. Atkins, who drove the earl and the king, managed to prise himself out, then held back the tide for his distinguished passengers. Harry Booth, the colliery manager, had seen them arrive and he pushed his way towards them. He was an angry man: angry and distressed. He hadn’t expected to see King Edward VII, but he took it in his stride. Tragedy, he thought afterwards, was a great leveller. Men and boys were dead and dying: deference was a nonsense at such times.

  ‘Explosion out by Crookgate district,’ he said to the earl, cutting to the chase the moment Lord Netherwood levered himself out of the car. ‘It’s bad. Rescue team are down, but we’re short o’ breathing apparatus. We’ve sent to New Mill for more. I don’t suppose you ’ave it?’

  Of course you don’t have it, he might have added, for what use are you to us now? He kept his voice steady, but there was evident accusation in it. The earl heard this but replied evenly. ‘We must all do what we can with what we have, Mr Booth. What’s the tally so far?’

  ‘It’s not a bag of pheasant, m’lord,’ said Harry Booth. He knew he
had probably just lost his job with this remark, but he found, at this moment of crisis, that his loyalty and respect for his colleagues was far greater than that he felt for his employer. He turned away and walked back through the crowds to the pit bank. The wheel and cables of the winding gear were moving and the cage very likely held more corpses. The earl faced Henrietta, who he knew was watching him.

  ‘I meant death toll,’ he said. His face was stricken and he looked suddenly pitiful.

  ‘I know you did,’ she said consolingly, as if to a child. She was acutely aware of the picture they presented: cosseted, protected, untouched by the pain of personal loss. And there was the king, observing her father with a look of incomprehension. The famous royal face showed his thoughts as clearly as if he spoke them aloud; these were the Earl of Netherwood’s serfs and yet they moved about him as if he was invisible, and spoke to him as if he was a fool. Henrietta saw it all and she took immediate control.

  ‘Tobias,’ she said to her brother, who was only here because of Thea and who had never looked more out of place in his life. ‘Accompany His Majesty – if it pleases you, Your Majesty –’ she added quickly, to the king’s evident relief, since in this pandemonium his status seemed to have been all but forgotten – ‘to the manager’s offices. I can see injured men in there whose spirits may be lifted by a meeting with the king. Father, you must go up to the pit bank with Mr Booth. These are your men and they need your support. Thea, you and I—’