Ravenscliffe

by Jane Sanderson

  ‘Business?’

  ‘My business, yes. Not yours.’

  There was no shaming Trencham. He merely changed tack and returned to the subject of Fyfield’s latest investment: ‘Purpose-built carriers, gross tonnage three thousand eight hundred, thirteen knots and the whole cargo space insulated. They reckon sixty thousand stems a trip, comfortably.’

  Silas shrugged. ‘Nothing very innovative there. If you’re trying to imply that they’re nipping at my heels, I say, good luck to them. Nip away.’

  ‘Your own plans in this regard are bigger, are they?’

  Silas smiled. ‘This is where we part company,’ he said, indicating the small tobacconist that supplied his favourite slim cigars. He sprang nimbly up the three stone steps and entered the shop while Trencham, unperturbed, strolled on towards the docks. He knew Whittam was up to something: he always was. In any case the harbourside, always a fertile hotbed of gossip, was alive with the rumour that he’d negotiated a government contract to carry passengers to Jamaica on a new fleet of banana boats. Trencham mulled it over as he continued on his way: Whittam was well in with the Colonial Office – had been since he collaborated with them on commercial shipments to England from the Caribbean. Well. He’d have another crack at this particular nut later in the day: the harder its shell, the sweeter the kernel.

  Silas didn’t care what Wilberforce Trencham did or didn’t know about his plans for expansion, but it amused him to watch the journalist rooting around for information like a rat in a dustbin. Trencham had been on his tail for one reason or another for years, ever since Silas emerged from the sale of the Global Steamship Company with three quarters of a million pounds, a ready-made fleet of ships and the drive and flair to go it alone. He was an industry phenomenon: a ship’s lad turned managing director and major shareholder – and when the spoils were divided, Silas hadn’t had to pay a bean. The shares and the ships were a gift from Sir Walter Hollis, the Global chairman; whether for services professional or personal, no one was entirely sure, and even now, years later, there was speculation on this score. But however he had come about his generous haul, there was no denying his judgement in business matters. It was Silas who predicted the decline of the cane-sugar industry just before it damaged the company’s fortunes; it was Silas who made the case for increasing the banana trade, creating new business for the company and giving Jamaica’s failing economy a timely boost. The Colonial Office, alert to Jamaica’s difficulties, had funded Global’s early investigations into the feasibility of shipping bananas to England, then subsidised the first refrigerated shipment; the benefits at home and abroad were legion if this new trade should prove profitable. When the Dominion returned from its maiden voyage – steaming in to Avonmouth to a rapturous reception and a band playing ‘Under the British Flag’ – it bore in its hold eighteen thousand stems of bananas and forty crates of mangoes for good measure. Silas was on board, all breeze-blown hair and noble dignity, like a Crusader returned victorious from the Holy Land. At a gala dinner that evening, where Bristol’s merchants sampled the fruit before it was packed onto railway wagons and sent to grocers and costermongers up and down the country, Silas addressed the assembled company: ‘The Dominion is returned, the Trinity and the Emperor are ready to sail,’ he said. ‘We are poised, gentlemen, on the brink of a new prosperity, once more leading the world in innovation and discovery. Let us be upstanding and raise a toast to the glorious fruits of the British Empire.’

  ‘The glorious fruits of the British Empire!’ they boomed at once and as one, acknowledging by their mass compliance the unassailable position of Silas as the saviour of Jamaica’s economy, the linchpin of the Global Shipping Company and the king of the banana trade. Small wonder that he thought so well of himself.

  He was in his warehouse now, taking the stairs two at a time to the office accommodation above. His clerks hadn’t expected him back today, and a shiver of alarm disturbed the room as Silas crossed it. Not that standards slipped while he was away or that they had anything to hide: simply that it was pleasant to work without his presence from time to time. They sat at their Davenport desks, pens poised above silver inkwells, and watched warily as he strolled between them. When he reached the door of his own office he turned, surveyed the room, and said, ‘Brigstock?’

  ‘Sir?’ A startled young man stood at once, as if he was in a schoolroom.

  ‘What can you tell me about the new Fyfield’s vessel?’

  Brigstock, not long in the employ of Whittam & Co. and new to the joys of tonnage, knots and hold capacity, trembled visibly and there wasn’t a man in the room who didn’t pity him.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said – and he sounded truly contrite – ‘I haven’t seen it yet.’

  ‘Then your presence here is surplus to requirement. Please leave your desk as it is so your replacement knows exactly where he is to begin. Now …’ he gazed about the room placidly ‘… Jones. I put the same question to you.’

  Another man stood while behind him Brigstock made as small a performance as possible of leaving the room.

  ‘She’s called Port Morant sir, room for twelve passengers, insulated hold for sixty thousand stems, not quite as fast as ours, sir, at thirteen knots.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Silas. ‘Now, Jones, alert Mr Oliver to my presence here and ask him to join me in my office.’

  He closed his office door on the room and saw, from the small stack of papers on his desk, that there was business to attend to, but for the moment he ignored it and instead stood at the window and stared down at the teeming dockside. The water was crowded with vessels but he could pick out the Port Morant – could even pick out Trencham sizing up the new ship while a Fyfield man boasted to the journalist of its special qualities. Silas could see nothing very extraordinary: certainly nothing to worry about. Behind him the door opened and Hugh Oliver walked in.

  ‘Brigstock passed me on the stairs. Looked pretty hangdog,’ he said.

  ‘He’s a fool.’

  ‘He had potential. Would have made a good clerk if you’d given him longer than five minutes at it.’

  ‘The competition takes delivery of a new ship and Brigstock either doesn’t know or doesn’t care,’ said Silas. ‘I don’t call that good. I call it incompetent.’

  ‘Still, he was a capable lad. You know your trouble?’

  ‘Of course I do. You tell me every time I dismiss someone.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you again. Everyone has to be like you. No good being an excellent clerk, if you don’t live and breathe boats and bananas.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Silas. ‘Brigstock can find employment in a company where boats and bananas don’t figure. Now. Two things you need to know: one, we’re buying a coal mine in Yorkshire and two, we’re diversifying.’

  Hugh Oliver looked anxious. The coal mine came as no surprise; the diversification, however, was news to him. He was second-in-command at Whittam & Co. – the ‘& Co.’, he liked to say, on the painted fascia of the warehouse front. And yet always, always, the boss was several steps ahead of him.

  ‘Diversification into?’ he asked, and his thoughts were of pineapples and passion fruit.

  ‘Travel,’ said Silas. ‘Luxury travel. We don’t have a ship in the fleet that carries more than fourteen passengers, and yet we travel back and forth to paradise on a regular basis.’

  Hugh said: ‘I see. Liners then?’

  ‘Small luxury liners, first-class cabins only. Same capacity for cargo as the present fleet but with, shall we say, added value.’

  He smiled at Hugh. Contrary to the impression he gave, Silas held his colleague in high esteem. He didn’t need Hugh’s approval of the scheme, but he would very much prefer it. For his part, Hugh was thinking that once, just once, it would be pleasant to be consulted rather than told. What he said, though, was: ‘And where will they stay? These first-class passengers of ours?’

  ‘In the first-class hotel we’re going to build,’ said Silas. ‘Now, what do you know abo
ut mining?’

  Chapter 22

  The king, his mistress and his confounded dog had gone; the guest rooms were vacated, cleaned and aired; the earl’s study was no longer a telegraph room; Mrs Adams was respectfully buried in the same plot as her mother and father in the Methodist churchyard; and in her place at the head of kitchen operations was Claude Reynard, patisserie chef extraordinaire and man-of-the-moment below stairs. No one wanted to be the first to say it, but he was much easier on the ears than Mary Adams had been, and easier still on the eyes. Sarah Pickersgill, so often in the old cook’s firing line and formerly pitied by all, was now the envy of the kitchen staff. It was all ‘Sarah, a moment, s’il vous plaît’ or ‘Sarah, where is le bain-marie?’ in his fabulously French accent, and Sarah was as soft and pliable as the pastry that he rolled and folded in his dextrous hands. Monsieur Reynard had the sleek manly beauty of a matinee idol: dark eyes, darker hair, a carefully cultivated moustache following the curve of his top lip.

  ‘When ’e looks at me,’ Sarah whispered to Ivy and Agnes, ‘I feel like I’m meltin’ or summat.’

  The kitchen maids were agog. Sarah melting? Whatever did she mean? But they hovered on the fringes of Monsieur Reynard’s orbit, and hoped to experience for themselves his warming influence. They would stand in their respective corners carving carrots into matchsticks and potatoes into marbles, and they would steal furtive glances across the kitchen at the new cook – the chef, they were to call him – whose dashing good looks, tall hat and white jacket with silver buttons were the most interesting thing they had ever seen. Apart, that is, from Mrs Adams dead in the cold store.

  Parkinson was less ready to admire. The ‘man-cook’, as he persisted in calling him, had had an unsettling effect on the girls in the household. Some of them seemed to be loosening their buns so that tendrils escaped from their caps and the staff dinner gong these days sparked a shameful stampede to Monsieur Reynard’s end of the table. The chef himself only seemed to encourage them in their infatuation. He appeared to adore them all: he had their names off pat and the way he pronounced them sounded like seduction. Even Agnes, such a plain, everyday sort of name – well suited to the plain, everyday sort of housemaid attached to it – sounded exotic and beautiful after Monsieur Reynard’s translation. Ann–yes, he said it, losing the ugly ‘g’ and elevating the spirits of little Agnes Nichols every time he singled her out for a mention. It was too bad, thought Parkinson, but his chilly disapproval had thus far gone entirely unnoticed, so he had a word with Mrs Powell-Hughes, who suspected her colleague of old-fashioned jealousy but spared him the discomfort of telling him so.

  ‘The man has no innate sense of the dignity of his position,’ Parkinson had said to her. ‘He’s vain as a peacock. All style over substance.’

  ‘I’m sure it’ll all settle down, Mr Parkinson,’ said Mrs Powell-Hughes soothingly; his feelings clearly ran high, she thought, if he could be so patently unjust about the new chef. ‘It’s all still a great novelty for everyone, you see. And you have to admit, he’s sending some beautiful food upstairs, from what I’ve seen.’

  Parkinson nodded minimally. It couldn’t be denied; the food was superb, and the kitchen girls were working hard at their tasks between regular peeps at Monsieur Reynard’s Gallic profile. But the butler was still very far from accepting the new status quo.

  ‘The problem is,’ he said, ‘that our man-cook is French.’

  Mrs Powell-Hughes waited.

  ‘And the French,’ Parkinson went on, ‘have no respect for hierarchy.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think they’re still beheading aristocrats, Mr Parkinson.’

  He looked a little crushed; she remembered his many kindnesses to her and felt contrite. ‘But I imagine you and I can lead by example,’ she went on. ‘We can show Monsieur Reynard how we go on in a correctly run English house. And I’ll speak to the girls; remind them of their positions. But we should bear in mind that the countess is very pleased with the appointment.’

  He nodded. ‘Indeed, indeed, a point of crucial significance. Thank you, Mrs Powell-Hughes. You’re a most dependable friend.’

  ‘As are you, Mr Parkinson. We shall address the situation together. We must both be on our guard for irregularities, while demonstrating traditional English courtesy and respect to Monsieur Reynard.’

  The butler smiled. He liked that idea. He could adapt, he thought, to being a moral and social compass for the Frenchman, embodying standards of etiquette towards which the man-cook might aspire, if not actually attain.

  Whatever Parkinson’s reservations, Netherwood Hall was fortunate to have Monsieur Reynard and it might never have come about had not the timing of the emergency telegram been so fortuitous. He was a Parisian chef of the very highest pedigree; he had trained with Escoffier, and worked in the kitchens of the Ritz in Paris and the Savoy in London. From time to time he would make guest appearances in the great houses of noble families: his elaborate patisserie – his clever ways with spun sugar, his miraculous petal-thin pastry – elevated the tone at a banquet and even the redoubtable Mrs Adams had stepped aside on occasion to make room for him and his staff. When the plea for assistance from Netherwood had reached him, it was just two days after he had flounced dramatically away from the Savoy for the very excellent reason – in his view – that because the hotel continued to make such an excessive ritual of afternoon tea, none of the guests were hungry come dinner time. A small triangle of bread and cucumber, a slender slice of Madeira cake, a finger of shortbread: one of these delicacies taken with a cup of tea was one thing. But a multi-tiered cornucopia of creamy confections was quite another. He felt most strongly on the subject, to the point that the countess, on the very day he arrived at Netherwood Hall, had had to agree that no one’s appetite would be wilfully spoiled at four o’clock in the afternoon now that he was master of the kitchen, although until the king left for London there could be no such rule, obviously. Even Claude Reynard wouldn’t dare to deny Bertie a plate of cream scones – which, in any case, didn’t seem remotely to diminish the relish with which he would then eat his dinner. Monsieur Reynard had cooked for the king before and knew it to be a fact that the great man was impossible to fill. The night before he left Netherwood Hall the king had ordered a plate of oysters before retiring and then had a cold roast chicken sent to his apartment in case he – or perhaps Caesar – felt peckish in the night.

  There was some relief in the house that the king was gone, and below stairs it was palpable. Without him, mealtimes were properly sedate, bedtimes were properly respected and Mrs Powell-Hughes found that she could once again beat the dust from a chaise longue without returning half an hour later to find Caesar curled up on it, embedding wiry white hairs into the plum velvet while he slept. Soon it would be quieter still in the great house, since the family’s departure for Glendonoch was imminent – they would be in Scotland for ten days, and Mrs Powell-Hughes felt not a shred of disloyalty at the relish with which she anticipated their temporary absence. Indeed, these periodic lulls were essential in preserving the housekeeper’s staunch goodwill and sterling service: if she had to live and work without any respite from the demands made by her employers, she believed she would have packed her trunk years ago.

  The countess had singularly failed in her stratagem. The Choates were gone, yet Thea remained, a situation that was actually worse than the one she had been trying to avoid in the first place. How this had come about was still something of a mystery to Clarissa, who was unused to failure in her manipulation of other people and had yet to comprehend fully the extent to which Thea Stirling did as she pleased.

  ‘So now we have the American girl without an official chaperone,’ the countess said to Teddy. She had tapped on his door and entered his bedroom at an extremely inopportune moment, but instead of retreating until he was at liberty to speak, she had planted herself on a leather ottoman and was speaking loudly to him through the locked door of his bathroom. ‘And having seen what she’s capable
of under the watchful eye of Mrs Choate, I dread to think what she might get up to unobserved.’

  ‘I do think we might discuss this at another time,’ said the earl waspishly. He felt grievously harassed, helpless in the face of this blatant assault on his basic human right to lavatorial privacy.

  ‘Don’t you think I wouldn’t rather be elsewhere?’ said Clarissa sharply. ‘But this is a matter of some urgency and I’d like you to at least acknowledge that.’

  ‘Actually,’ he said defiantly, ‘I like her.’

  ‘Well of course you do. So do I, come to that. But liking or not liking doesn’t enter into it. She must be kept away from Tobias.’

  He sighed, resigning himself to the conversation. ‘Your antipathy to Dorothea is passé, my dear. An American daughter-in-law would bring us bang up to the minute.’

  ‘An American countess at Netherwood Hall?’ Clarissa’s voice wavered melodramatically.

  ‘Just the ticket,’ he said lightly, deliberately provocative. ‘What’s more, she’s not an heiress. All she’d bring by way of a dowry would be a few gramophone records and a jolly good head on her shoulders.’

  From inside the bathroom came the rush of flushing water, and the countess was obliged to wait until the cacophonous pipe symphony had subsided. He took his time washing his hands, then drew back the bolt, opened the door, and came out to face her. As he’d expected, her expression was reproachful.

  ‘And how, pray, does her relative poverty add to her appeal?’

  ‘It makes her interesting. Rich Americans are so proliferous as to have become downright dull.’

  The countess, finding no support where she had counted on it, was furious. She stood in order to bring her baleful glare closer to his maddeningly placid face. ‘Your flippancy does you no credit,’ she said icily. ‘Do bloodlines mean nothing to you?’