Ravenscliffe

by Jane Sanderson

  ‘Gain? Financially, do you mean?’

  Henrietta rolled her eyes skywards.

  ‘Daddy,’ she murmured, ‘there are benefits other than those of increased profits.’

  Mr Garforth smiled: a warm, generous smile that implied he wasn’t taking sides, though he hoped his own daughters would never speak to him with the same cool disdain.

  ‘We all stand to benefit – the miners, the management and the owners.’ he said. ‘Advances in underground safety and rescue mean fewer fatalities, higher morale among the men, greater productivity, higher profits.’

  ‘And the mines rescue centre – do you expect your men to attend in their own time? Unpaid?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve never encountered unwillingness.’

  The earl laughed. ‘Lucky chap,’ he said and turned to Henrietta. ‘I can imagine how such a proposal would be received in Netherwood.’ He expected a smile, but she looked stern, as if his levity was an embarrassment to her.

  ‘I think our miners have the same respect for each other’s safety as Mr Garforth’s employees. You underestimate them.’

  ‘I think,’ said Mr Garforth carefully, ‘that we three have never lain waiting for help on the wrong side of a rockfall. Improvements in mines rescue isn’t something miners quibble over. I asked for thirty-five volunteers when we first started. Every man who works here put his name forward.’

  The earl nodded. He felt incapable of saying the right thing. He had come here with his daughter out of a creeping and uncomfortable awareness of his failings, a realisation – late in life, admittedly, but better that, he supposed, than never at all – that he didn’t quite measure up to the man he had thought he was. There had been a moment at the foot of the mineshaft at New Mill when he had thought his life was in danger and an emasculating liquid rush of fear had coursed through his system: it had shocked him, brought him up short, as if an unwelcome home truth had at last been spoken out loud and to his face. In his own eyes, on that day, he had lost confidence in his standing and did not yet feel quite recovered. Now, facing this earnest, educated colliery manager, he felt even slighter, even less of a presence in the world of honourable, serious men. There were certificates and diplomas all about the office walls displaying Mr Garforth’s excellence and endeavour: president of the local Mining Institute, vice-president of the national body, Fellow of the National Geological Society, an expert practitioner in aspects of mining engineering that the earl hadn’t even known existed. On the desk between them stood a brass safety lamp that the man had invented himself, for heaven’s sake. And yet, in the pantheon of great, titled colliery owners, Teddy Hoyland had always stood tall as a man with his employees’ best interests at heart. It was at once inspiring and disorientating, this dismantling of certainties and reordering of priorities: he had a notion that he might never be the same again, and that this might be no bad thing.

  Thea was trapped again in a corner of the drawing room with the Duke of Knightwick, whose blatantly adulterous wife left him alone for great stretches of time and who therefore craved alternative female company on whom to inflict his wide range of opinions. Thea Stirling was an obvious target; he fancied himself a mentor to the young American woman and was forever seeking her out to continue his programme of instruction in the ways of the English aristocracy. She hadn’t yet devised an effective method of cutting him short, being altogether too amiable for her own good. She pitied him his situation, though – his wife’s all-consuming liaison with the dazzling banker Wally Goldman, the pair’s careless and inappropriate intimacy, seemed to Thea intolerable and inhumane. So, instead of taking her cue from the duke’s more seasoned acquaintances and turning away as he approached or remembering a pressing engagement when he was mid-sentence, she would listen obligingly to his long, bewildering monologues and even, sometimes, submit to a short test at the end. Today’s lesson was at least topical, being a digest of the shooting season, prior to their departure for Glendonoch; she found she needed all her powers of concentration to follow the complex subtleties of what one might shoot when.

  ‘The whole shebang commenced on the twelfth of August – the Glorious Twelfth, you might have heard that said? No? Well, I’ll be blowed! You really are an innocent abroad. Anyway, grouse shooting from the twelfth in England, Scotland and Ireland. Partridge shooting starts on September the first, ends on the first of February. Pheasant shooting starts October the first, also ends the first of February. Are you with me? Hares may be shot until March the first, rabbits can be shot at any old time of the year. Rooks, May the twelfth and all through the summer.’

  ‘I see,’ Thea said. ‘Rooks. Who would shoot rooks?’

  ‘Good in a pie,’ said the duke, obliquely. ‘So. Start of the season is …’

  ‘The Glorious Twelfth,’ she said obediently.

  ‘Pheasant?’

  She grimaced charmingly. ‘Golly. What was it? September first?’

  He gave a patronising smile, pleased that this favourite subject of his was not so easy to master after all. ‘October the first. September’s partridge.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, in a voice so obviously flat with lack of interest that even the duke couldn’t miss it. ‘So, what is it about you guys that you need to keep shooting birds out the sky? You seem kind of crazy about it.’ Her New York drawl still seemed incongruous in the context of this English stately home. Shooding birds, she said, and kinda crazy: her accent was one of the things about Thea that either attracted people or repelled them. The duke fell into the former group, but nevertheless he bridled at this casual slight against the sporting prowess of a nation; in a few easy words, she had managed to reduce a noble pursuit to an eccentric aberration. Unprepared for the challenge and unused to justifying his pastime, he briefly fell silent while a defence formulated itself in his head, but it proved to be a critical pause and one he instantly regretted, because Tobias strolled into the room and hailed Thea from the opposite end.

  ‘There you are, you elusive creature,’ he said, and she leapt to her feet at once, seizing the chance to make an escape without appearing rude. She blew Knightwick a kiss and winked at him: saucy behaviour, but not untypical, and it at least brought a frisson of pleasure to the duke’s poor, neglected breast. If he was but twenty years younger, he thought to himself wistfully. He watched her shimmy across the room to Tobias in her startling gown – bold girl, wearing red satin on a Wednesday morning – and thought she had something of a bird’s qualities about her, though an exotic one, not the type one would take a shot at. Tobias watched her too, with the minutely focused attention of a connoisseur of women. He would have liked to place his hands either side of her waist to feel the satin slide under his fingers; he would have liked to press her against the wall of the drawing room and bruise her lips with his own. An effort of will was required simply to stand and smile in a casual manner, but his will prevailed and he managed, again, to keep his hands from her.

  ‘Tobes,’ she said. Her smile was direct, straight into his green eyes. He had grown on her, this English earl-in-waiting. He was fun.

  ‘Thea. You look extraordinary. Have you finished teasing poor Knightwick?’

  She looked back at the duke in alarm, but he was deeply involved now with the Sporting Life. She shot Toby a chiding look.

  ‘Don’t be mean. And I don’t tease him, I listen to him.’

  ‘You can’t help being irresistible. Nobody blames you.’

  ‘Quit the flannel. What’s the plan today, then?’ There would be something, she knew that much. Tobias was wooing her with activities, keeping her mind off thoughts of returning to London or – worse – America, where she still thought she might take up the place at Cornell. Toby would follow her there if he had to, though he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Far better, he thought, that he captured this rare North American specimen and kept her here.

  ‘Netherwood Common and all my boyhood haunts. There’s a tree with a hollow trunk. You can climb it, but only by going up the insid
e.’

  She smiled again, that wonderful, piercing, direct smile.

  ‘Henry and Dickie too?’

  ‘Sadly no,’ he said, not sad at all. ‘Just dull old you and boring old me.’

  Her peal of laughter caused the duke to look up briefly from details of the three-thirty at York but the sight of Tobias and Thea on the other side of the room radiating bright beams of youth and desire and energy sent him instantly back to the pages of the Sporting Life, a landscape he understood and where he felt he belonged.

  Chapter 25

  The first indication Amos had that he was considered a threat was an offer from the Liberals of a safe seat at the next general election and a substantial salary from the party, if he withdrew from this forthcoming contest as Labour candidate. He would, he was told, be a well-paid Liberal MP with a real voice in the House of Commons, if he would but take his name off the Ardington ticket. Amos said no, decisively and bluntly, without taking time to think or talk it over with Enoch or Anna, who between them had become his political inner circle; if he was to enter politics, he told himself, he would be led by his heart first, then his head, but never by his pocket, and no one would convince him otherwise. Enoch backed him entirely; the Labour Party would never amount to anything if it continued to simply shore up the Liberals at every election. Anna agreed too, though she put him through his paces first, playing devil’s advocate to be sure he knew his own mind.

  ‘Perhaps better a Liberal MP than not an MP at all?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ Amos said emphatically. ‘Better a principled failure than an unprincipled victor.’

  ‘Everyone says Liberals will win at next general election. Think of it – you could be part of government, not opposition.’

  ‘Oh aye – an MP in a government I don’t believe in? Not me. There’s working men in Parliament already who’re only there because they toe t’Liberal line – they can’t speak for t’likes o’ Stan Clough or Sam Bamford because t’Liberal whip won’t let ’em. It’s like ’aving a guard dog, then clouting ’im for barking. If I’m to be an MP, I want to be an MP who can stand up and say exactly what I would say at a miners’ meeting in New Mill pit yard.’

  ‘Very good, very nice. And who will hear your fine, principled opinions if you don’t first get elected to Parliament?’

  ‘My views are ’eard every time I raise a crowd at a colliery and if it never goes further than that, so be it. I shall fight as a Labour candidate, or not at all. The working poor of Ardington need a poor working man to represent ’em. That’s me.’

  She was proud of him, proud of his fierce integrity, but she worried, too, that in spurning the Liberal Party so wholeheartedly, he had gained as many powerful new adversaries as he had admirers. And then one evening in Ardington, on the steps outside the Pheasant Inn in front of a crowd of locals, Amos burnt his bridges, promising his audience that the Labour Party would one day replace the Liberals and hoist the working classes from their present place as an afterthought in the Liberal manifesto, to true prominence in Parliament.

  ‘That’s torn it,’ said Enoch afterwards.

  ‘Good.’ Amos, slow to get started, was fast developing his radical public persona. He had always known how to use words, and now he honed the skill, speaking with passion and fury at the betrayal of the ordinary man by the Liberals in Parliament who claimed to speak for them but forgot their interests at every critical vote. Labour had to cut its ties with the Liberals and plough its own political furrow, he said, so this was the message that Amos, Enoch and Anna – and a small, loyal posse of supporters – took from door to door in the few days before the by-election. Anna walked so far, knocking on doors and preaching the Sykes gospel, that her voice was reduced to a pitiful croak and her feet bled; in the evenings, back in the kitchen at Ravenscliffe, she wincingly forced them into a bowl of warm salt water in the hope that the cruel stinging meant the weals and blisters would heal by morning.

  ‘You should consider a bicycle,’ Eve said, peering into the bowl and flinching in sympathy. She was back from the mill, back from a day of making and baking a hundred and fifty miniature veal and ham pies for Fortnum & Mason, and she was dog-tired herself, though her feet, at least, were still in one piece. Amos’s political ambitions were taking a heavy toll on her friend: taking a toll, too, on the state of the house. Eve inadvertently let her gaze stray over a pile of unwashed linen, a sink full of dirty pots and Anna, seeing her, said: ‘It’s only until Thursday.’

  ‘I know,’ Eve said. ‘It’s fine.’ But, anyway, she set to work on the washing-up because she couldn’t bear to sit down while there was work to be done.

  ‘Is Seth back, then?’ Eve liked to be home to see him, but sometimes it just wasn’t manageable and, in any case, she hardly got two words out of him. It was through Anna and, occasionally, Amos that she had gleaned the few scraps she knew about her son’s first days at New Mill.

  ‘Mmm. He’s upstairs with his vegetable book.’

  ‘Good. I’ll go and say g’night then. ’ow did ’e look?’

  ‘Same. White where he wasn’t spotted with black. He said his ears are ringing.’

  Eve shook her head in dismay. Seth was on the screens, and stood his entire long shift at a rattling conveyor belt picking useless rocks and shale out from the moving mass of coal. The work was mindless and hellishly noisy, so that when the lads were allowed to sit outside and eat their snap they took a few moments to adjust and continued to yell at each other as if they were still trying to be heard above the clank and grind. You could train a monkey to do what Seth was doing, thought Eve. She abandoned the pots in their sudsy water, left Anna to her salt footbath, and climbed the grand wooden staircase to the first floor. Along the landing she paused at the little girls’ bedroom and looked inside. There were two iron beds side by side, but Ellen and Maya were curled up together in only one of them, facing each other, foreheads grazing, their angel faces deadly serious in repose. Next door was Eliza who, though on the edge of sleep, waved from her bed and asked Eve if she’d had a nice day.

  ‘Busy. You?’

  ‘We did geography and I stood at t’front and talked about Jamaica. Blanche Marsden said I was making it up.’

  Eve smiled.

  ‘Blanche Marsden doesn’t ’ave an Uncle Silas, so don’t be too ’ard on ’er.’

  ‘I’m not. Minnie Pickering cried again and went ’ome early.’

  ‘Oh dear. T’Pickerings are all very sad at t’moment.’

  ‘When my dad died, it were only ’im, weren’t it?’

  Eve nodded.

  ‘I cried an’ all.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘Aye. With Minnie. She set me off. But it was for my dad, not ’ers. I’m right as rain now, though.’ She smiled, to prove it. ‘I saw your wedding dress.’

  ‘I ’ope you didn’t touch it wi’ mucky fingers.’

  ‘No. Anna said she’d chop ’em off if I did.’

  ‘I should say so.’

  ‘I wish she’d finish it and make mine.’

  ‘She’s saving t’best for last. Get some sleep now. You’re a devil for keeping me chatting.’

  Eliza smiled ruefully. ‘I can’t ’elp it. There’s such a lot to talk about,’ she said.

  ‘Night night.’

  ‘Night. Shall you be in t’kitchen when I get up?’

  ‘I shall. We can walk to school together tomorrow.’

  Her daughter, sublimely easy to please, sighed with pleasure at this happy prospect, then settled back down into her pillow, which clouded up on either side of her face, obscuring her from Eve’s view. In here, Eliza’s bedroom, Anna had used three different paint colours on the wooden floor so that it was pastel-striped like a bathing hut or a deck chair: pale blue, pale pink, pale yellow on each consecutive floorboard. At the window she had hung simple cambric drapes with side-ties of broad navy blue ribbon. The bed had blue and white bunting strung along its length and Eliza’s clothes were folded into a wooden chest on
to which the child’s name had been stencilled in dancing capital letters. Her few books and toys – a bear, Mabel the china doll, whose face was fixed like Eliza’s in an expression of wide-eyed wonder, a xylophone and the flower press from Daniel – were arranged in a line along the floor, waiting for a shelf to go up on the white walls. The perfect plainness of these was lifted by Anna’s delicate handiwork: a painted garland of pink, blue and yellow daisies, which looped and twisted around the four walls until it met its beginning. It was all so utterly charming that Eliza had burst into joyful tears when Anna allowed her to have her first peep. It had given the little girl the impression that Anna, already very high in Eliza’s estimation, had magical qualities, fairy powers, a mysterious ability to turn an ordinary bedroom into an enchanted place. Eve, who had never in her life wielded a paintbrush or properly mastered a sewing machine, was inclined to agree.

  Further down the hallway Seth’s bedroom door was ajar and a slice of soft light extended from it on to the landing, which meant his lamp was still burning. Eve, encouraged, pushed the door wider and looked inside. In here Anna had spread more magic and begun a mural of a tree whose branches were going to bear an unlikely menagerie – monkeys, parrots, lemurs, hummingbirds, owls, squirrels. This special project was – unbeknownst to Eve – the subject of considerable behind-the-scenes bargaining. Anna had told Seth that her work on the mural was connected directly to his own behaviour towards his mother and Daniel, and this explained its faltering progress: some days even the prospect of a spider monkey hanging by its tail from a branch wasn’t enough to keep a civil tongue in Seth’s head, and on these days, Anna’s paintbrushes would remain in the jar of turpentine. Eve, ignorant of this and standing at the threshold of the room, saw the tree and marvelled at it, as she always did, because to use a wall as a canvas seemed to her such a bold, inventive thing to do. The tree was a great oak, a version of the one that stood outside on the common, perfectly framed by Seth’s bedroom window. He was sound asleep, his vegetable book fanned out on his chest and moving slowly up and down as he breathed. He had washed his face but his hands, spread like two starfish on the counterpane, were filthy, coal dust packed into his bitten fingernails and in the creases of his knuckles. This would once have raised a flash of annoyance in Eve: now, all she felt was sadness. She picked up the book, closed it and placed it on his bedside table, then snuffed out the lamp. She would see him in the morning before he left for work. Leaving the bedroom, stepping softly across the floorboards – unpainted as yet, though they were to be the same bright green as spring grass – she paused again to admire Anna’s oak tree, a shadowy image now in the lampless gloom. From an uppermost bough a wise old tawny owl gazed with amber eyes directly at Seth in his bed as if trying by the force of its avian will to make the boy see sense. Good luck to you, thought Eve.