Ravenscliffe

by Jane Sanderson

  But Thea was gone and when Henrietta scanned the crowd she saw her, kneeling on the stones of the pit yard, her arms supporting an old woman who had fallen to the floor in an agony of grief.

  There were obvious signs of an explosion, even before Alf, Richard and Victor got as far as Crookgate: splintered tubs, damaged, twisted supports and the foul stench of gaseous air. Alf called out into the darkness but his shouts were met by silence. They ventured a little further and found the first body, and beyond that, another, lying broken and badly burnt beside the corpse of a pony. Alf sent Richard back to the pit bottom for rescue assistance and he and Victor crept forwards, feeling their way with the feeble assistance of their lamps. In the crepuscular light it was hard to identify anyone, but it was plain to both men that there were many more bodies on the tunnel floor, and not a breath of life between them.

  Behind them, Richard reappeared, sooner than they’d expected.

  ‘Rescue team’s on its way, they say. They’ve sent to New Mill for more breathing equipment, but they’re coming down with what we ’ave.’

  Unprotected by safety gear, the three men made a start themselves. They were hampered by the dust and the stink, but they ripped off their vests and used them as rudimentary masks, covering their noses and mouths, then began carrying the dead out of the tunnel. More men joined them. Alf saw his two other lads, William and Edward, among them: he nodded his approval. If he’d taught his sons anything about this life underground, it was their bounden duty towards their colleagues. The time would come, he always said, when they would be the ones in need. To date, they had never been found lacking and he was proud of all three of them; they were a credit to him and Nellie.

  ‘Mind out,’ Alf said brusquely now to Edward as he passed him, pulling the body of a young pony boy out towards the wide main roadway. There were wagons there, and the corpses were being placed tenderly, respectfully, into them, for their last journey out of the pit. Ahead, a small platoon of rescuers hove into view, monstrous in the heavy metal helmets that gave them some immunity to the dust and the gas. Alf and the rest of them stepped aside; they could return to the pit bottom now that the professionals were here, but already they had hauled twelve bodies from the scene. Alf turned, signalled to Victor that he was heading out, and Victor signalled back. Then Richard, just ahead of his father, spun around and shouted: ‘We need to shift,’ but even as he issued the warning, a slam, like the heaviest of doors shutting, reverberated through the tunnel and Richard’s lamp flew from his hand, knocked away by the searing wave of hot air that barrelled like a solid mass, unstoppable and inexorable in the confined space.

  ‘Down on your faces, lads,’ Alf shouted. He dropped to the floor, saw Richard do the same, hoped to hell that Edward and William were clear. Then a ball of fire, monstrous and pitiless, came hurtling towards them down the tunnel like a comet flung by a vengeful god. There was no time to move: barely time to pray. Richard reached out towards his father and took his hand and with their faces pressed to the cold tunnel floor they gripped each other firmly, their fingers locked together. It was the first time they’d touched each other in affection for fifteen years, and they both felt the deep comfort of it before they were engulfed by the flames.

  Chapter 19

  ‘Do you believe in omens?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Eve looked at Daniel. ‘You sound very sure.’

  ‘I am. I believe we make our own fate.’

  ‘Then you don’t think that what happened yesterday …’

  ‘Bodes ill for us here? No, I really don’t.’

  Daniel wasn’t going to concede an inch on this point. He was as shaken as any of them, but he wasn’t going to have Eve reading anything more into yesterday than what it was: a terrible accident, an appalling tragedy, which for a while must cast a long shadow over Netherwood, but not for ever, and not over Ravenscliffe. The house was very fine, he could see that now: in the fragile light of early dawn it seemed to stand strong and sure like a citadel, a refuge from the vagaries of the world, a place of safety for its inhabitants. Apart from Eve, they all slept, but she was up and dressed when he arrived and she made him tea in a kitchen that was in chaos, crates piled upon crates, because nothing had been accomplished yesterday beyond the basic act of moving belongings from one dwelling to another. This was the first time Daniel had set foot in Ravenscliffe – since arriving at Netherwood Hall he had barely left the garden, apart from two rather formal occasions when he ate an evening meal with Eve and the children, all of them grateful for Eliza’s stream of questions and observations. Now he sat in a room that itself was perhaps as big as the ground floor of the little house in Beaumont Lane. Because they were alone, Eve sat close. She looked drawn, dark shadows bruising the tender skin below her eyes. He put out a hand and cupped her cheek.

  ‘There wasn’t any sinister meaning,’ he said. ‘You’re going to be happy here. We all are.’

  She nodded, and sat in silence for a moment but then she said: ‘Years ago, when we first moved in to Beaumont Lane, Arthur found a dead crow in t’stove pipe.’

  ‘And?’

  She shrugged, unwilling to continue in the face of his scepticism, but he knew exactly what she was getting at.

  ‘The dead crow was a dead crow,’ he said. ‘Unlucky for the bird, but not for you.’

  Eve looked away, too sorrowful to be reassured. But life was already moving on, the morning gathering strength and momentum from its pale beginnings and growing swiftly into a full-blown day. Outside, far beyond and below them, miners walked the roads to their pits. Long Martley was open for business again today. The Crookgate district would be closed while the roads were cleared and the scorched timbers replaced, but there was no reason why the rest of the pit shouldn’t be mined, and none of the dead would expect a man to lose a day’s pay out of a misguided sense of sorrow or respect.

  Seventy-six men and twelve boys had perished yesterday. All of the rescue party died in the second explosion, and the first had killed everyone in the vicinity of Crookgate. It was the worst accident in Netherwood’s mining history and the first editions of the Chronicle, dumped in tied bundles outside Fletcher’s paper shop, blared out the tragedy in a series of headlines that filled the front page:

  TERRIBLE PIT CALAMITY AT NETHERWOOD HORRIFIC EXPLOSIONS SWEEP LONG MARTLEY EIGHTY-EIGHT LIVES LOST KING VISITS BEREAVED AT COLLIERY PEN PICTURE OF THE SCENE OF THE TRAGEDY OFFICIAL LIST OF DEAD RELIEF FUND OPENED FOR BEREAVED WIDOWS

  Daniel had picked up a copy on his way over to Ravenscliffe, exchanging platitudes with Ted Fletcher because it was hard to say anything original or meaningful about a catastrophe on this scale. There was a list of the dead inside the paper and Eve had read it and wept with horror and astonishment at the barefaced cruelty of death. All of Nellie’s menfolk were gone: Alf, William, Richard and Edward, dead within an hour and a half of starting their shift. Lilly’s Victor had perished too. Her little ones were still with Eve, sleeping the untroubled sleep of infancy in a room with Eliza. Eve had taken them back to Lilly last night and found her whey-faced and unresponsive, catatonic with fear for her future and that of her children. She’d never held Victor in much esteem when he lived, but now he was dead she saw that he’d stood firm between her and the open door of the workhouse. Eve had sat in Lilly’s dismal kitchen for a mostly silent half-hour, then had picked up the children, two boys, both of them sorry little scraps of humanity with no meat on their bones or colour in their cheeks, and had carried them back to Ravenscliffe, where she’d fed them and put them to bed. It was the least she could do and even so it still left five more looking to Lilly for comfort.

  Daniel stood. His fob watch showed him six o’clock and it was half-an-hour’s walk back to Netherwood Hall. Eve said: ‘Shall we see you later?’

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘This evening, if you like.’

  ‘I would like,’ she said, and she smiled wanly. He stooped over her where she still sat and pressed his mouth to the top
of her head, keeping it there a while so that she felt his hot breath through her hair. Fleetingly, like a dream remembered, she felt a sense of how fortunate she was, and how happy, and then it passed.

  ‘I need to go and see Nellie today,’ she said. ‘I can’t think what I might say to ’er.’

  ‘Did anyone say anything to you, when Arthur died – y’know, something that comforted you? That you remember still?’

  She gazed at him, taking herself back to that time: not so very long ago, but she felt as if it was another life she recalled, a different woman. ‘No,’ she said, after a while. ‘There was no comfort. Then Anna came, and she made all t’difference. But not because of anything she said. I don’t think we talked about Arthur at all. She just, well … she just shared t’burden, somehow or other.’

  ‘Well then. Try to do the same for Nellie.’

  Ah, she thought, but you don’t know Nellie.

  The house party was affected, of course it was, but there was no reason for it to disband entirely, thought Lady Netherwood, who had risen early out of a sense of crisis and now sat at her desk in the morning room feeling virtuous and serious-minded. Mixed doubles tennis, lunch in the summer house, fishing for carp in the ponds, an archery contest: no reason why these activities shouldn’t still take place, so long as hilarity and high jinks were kept under control – obviously – out of respect. Teddy, morose and quiet since he had come home yesterday, thought everyone should go. Clarissa thought absolutely that they shouldn’t. In any case, the king must decide what the best course of action was for himself, and so long as they didn’t all mope about the house looking miserable, the countess was confident that Bertie would stay put. Also he would be swayed by Alice – as Clarissa now blithely thought of Mrs Keppel – and since Alice hadn’t been at the wretched colliery, hadn’t witnessed the dead or ministered to the injured, she was still as full of high spirits as she had been since arriving. She must be called upon to assist, thought Clarissa: she must be given the job of helping gee up the party as it teetered on the brink of the doldrums. After all, only a minority of those present had involved themselves in yesterday’s disaster – the rest had had an extremely pleasant afternoon. And also – and this surely was the key point – no one here had actually suffered any personal loss. They had returned yesterday as if bereaved, the Daimlers driving at funereal pace and the passengers apparently shattered by what they’d witnessed. But for heaven’s sake, thought Clarissa: if an accident at the colliery was going to spoil their fun, then what was the point in planning anything, ever?

  However. She drummed her lovely fingers on the mellow rosewood of the table, her brow knotted in concentration. If Thea Stirling felt she really couldn’t stay, that wouldn’t be at all a bad thing. There was, she knew, a plan to take the Americans to Glendonoch for the shooting, but they could surely be persuaded that this was no longer appropriate. And then they could all sneak off to Scotland after they’d gone. Tobias was traipsing about after the girl like a hopeless case and Clarissa didn’t mind admitting she had misjudged the depth of her son’s infatuation. A corsetless beanpole she may be, but Thea seemed to possess magnetism. Even Clarissa had found herself being drawn in; she had always admired spirit in a girl. This, far from reconciling her to the object of her son’s ardour, only made her doubly anxious to get Thea off the premises. If a marriage couldn’t take place, then where was the sense in tormenting Tobias in this way, dangling Thea before him like a carrot before a donkey? No, let her return to London, where she might snare a banker or some such. So, the question was this: how to persuade the Choates and Miss Stirling that their early departure would be acceptable, while holding on to everyone else? This was the sort of social conundrum that Clarissa rather enjoyed. She rang a small brass bell on her desk and the door opened immediately, revealing a footman awaiting instruction.

  ‘I’ll take another cup of tea, please, Robert. Lemon.’

  ‘Of course, your ladyship.’ He closed the door softly and with great care, as you might close the door on a newly bereaved woman or a patient with no hope of recovery, and Clarissa felt a flash of irritation. Really, this was too silly. She must speak to Mrs Powell-Hughes. The drama was over and she must be able to rely on the household to set the tone.

  It was mid-afternoon, the day after the explosions. Investigations had begun into the cause, the district coroner had opened an inquest and death certificates had been signed for eighty-eight souls so that the funerals could be arranged. Not all of the bodies had been easily identifiable, because of the charring. Billy Somerscale, a fourteen-year-old pony boy, had been recognisable to his mother only by the soles of his boots; a broken metal seg, which had caused him to complain to her – on the very morning of the day he died – that he rocked a little to the left when he walked, was still evident when all the rest of him was burned black. He had been found dead with his arm around the neck of his pony, and this detail, while heartbreaking in itself, at least gave his mother the comfort that her boy hadn’t been alone when he passed.

  In the Netherwood Methodist churchyard, eight sextons were working diligently on a large plot of ground for the graves of the dead. The Archbishop of York, moved by the scale of the tragedy reported in the day’s national newspapers, had offered his assistance with the service, but Wilfred Oxspring had declined the help; Netherwood’s Methodist minister, who had known every one of the victims personally, would be conducting the funerals. A relief fund had been opened; there were sixty-one widows as a result of the accident, but when the girls and boys who had lost their fathers were counted, the number of dependants totalled one hundred and ninety-four. The whole town was in mourning, it seemed to Eve as she walked to Nellie’s. There were more curtains closed than open and the streets were empty but for the occasional arrival of a horse and cart taking coffins from the colliery to the houses.

  Nellie was baking when Eve arrived. She had a housecoat on and a hairnet over her grey curls. The kitchen was spotless, the flagstone floor newly swabbed, the range newly blacked. Sarah, Nellie’s daughter, was nowhere to be seen: usually by now they’d both be at the mill, busy with cooking and customers.

  ‘Nellie?’ Eve said cautiously.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ Nellie said without turning. ‘Come in if you’re comin’ in. I can’t be doin’ wi’ that draught.’

  Eve stepped into the kitchen and closed the door. For a moment she watched Nellie in silence, and Nellie didn’t turn. She dipped a finger into the bowl, licked it, then added a shake of sugar. Eve felt surplus to requirements.

  ‘Nellie, I’m so sorry, love,’ she said.

  ‘God’s will,’ said Nellie, pounding at the cake batter. Eve stepped closer, reached out a hand and placed it on Nellie’s shoulder, but the gesture wasn’t acknowledged.

  ‘Is there anythin’ you need? Anythin’ I can do?’

  Nellie stopped beating and looked at Eve for the first time since she’d arrived.

  ‘You can open t’mill and give me a reason to get out of bed in t’morning,’ she said. She turned back to her bowl.

  Eve stared for a few beats, then said: ‘Yes, I see. Well, I shall. It’s only closed today because, well …’

  ‘Yes, I understand why it’s closed today. But if I can get up there tomorrow and get on with things, I shall feel a lot better.’

  Eve’s hand still lay useless and unwanted on Nellie’s shoulder but she didn’t know how to remove it now it was there. ‘Thank God you have Sarah,’ she said, though she wished the words unsaid at once: she meant to comfort, but instead felt she’d merely emphasised Nellie’s loss.

  Nellie regarded her for a moment. ‘I should never ’ave sent ’em all on t’same shift,’ she said. She looked at the wooden spoon she held in her hand as if, for a moment, she had forgotten what its purpose was. ‘It were easier for me, to ’ave ’em all down t’pit together.’

  ‘You weren’t to know, Nellie.’

  ‘No ’appen not. But now I do.’

  She resumed h
er beating and Eve understood that the subject was closed. She lifted her hand from Nellie’s shoulder and folded her arms, feeling awkward and suddenly chilled. How those young men and their father must have filled this house, she thought. How very empty it seemed now.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then, Nellie?’ she said.

  ‘Aye,’ Nellie said. ‘Pull that door to on your way out.’

  Chapter 20

  Far from curtailing his visit, the king extended it, staying until the day after the funerals, which he had respectfully asked leave to attend. He had sat humble and sorrowful with the earl at the front of the chapel, and spoke afterwards to many of the mourners who were so numerous that they spilled out into the churchyard and beyond to the road. A cynic, Amos thought, might suspect the monarch of conducting a brilliant popularity campaign. Certainly his stock was very high in the town by the time he swept through the streets to Hoyland Halt, from where he would be travelling to London and on from there to the spa in Marienbad. Not that anyone turned out to wave him off. It was more that if his name was mentioned, it was always warmly, fondly, almost familiarly; the king had shared Netherwood’s sorrow, and these matters were binding.

  What Amos wondered was why, if the king was so moved by the town’s plight, the relief fund had to date received nothing from the Crown.

  ‘’appen ’e’s ’ard up,’ said Enoch Wadsworth, tamping tobacco into his pipe. ‘All them palaces, but no ready cash.’

  ‘’ard up, my eye,’ said Amos.

  They were in their shared office at the YMA, Amos on a chair, Enoch perched on the corner of a desk. He was a tall man by local standards, and lanky. He had a beaky nose and round, wire-framed spectacles, which together gave him the look of a bird, a long-legged wader. Enoch was a trade-union official who had served his time in the mines. But he was also an intellectual, a thinker; he read Marxist literature, corresponded with Sidney Webb, wrote essays for the Fabian Society and fired off generally unpublished letters to The Times about the nationalisation of the land and the abolition of the House of Lords. He was younger than Amos, though he looked older; the pits took their toll on all miners, but six years after leaving the colliery Enoch’s lined skin still had an underground pallor because, unlike Amos, who felt the sun on his face in the allotment, Enoch spent all his free time indoors with his books. He had bad lungs, too, and from time to time he would be seized by a fit of coughing that left him quite debilitated; his narrow shoulders were permanently hunched with the effort of breathing.