Ravenscliffe

by Jane Sanderson

  Silas was downstairs when she reappeared in the kitchen and he was sitting at the table nursing a cup of tea between both hands, with his customary comfortable ease, as if he had been there all along, waiting for her. He’d sent no word of his impending return, preferring the mild drama of an unexpected appearance. But it was late for visiting; this, anyway, was what Anna’s expression said. She was cross to have had her salt soak interrupted, cross to have padded to the door with wet, bare feet to find Silas waiting for admittance, when they hadn’t even known he was back from Bristol, and though she was performing the motions of hospitality, slicing cheese and buttering bread for a sandwich, she banged down the things – the loaf, the plate, the knife, the Cheddar – on the worktop a little louder than was necessary.

  ‘Good grief,’ Eve said. ‘It’s you, out o’ t’blue again.’

  He smiled his best, crooked smile. ‘Hello Evie,’ he said. ‘You look—’ He paused, and she jumped in.

  ‘Tired? I am.’

  ‘Very lovely, I was going to say. A little pale, perhaps, but it suits you. You look like the Botticelli Venus.’

  ‘Chutney?’ Anna said brusquely, from where she stood across the kitchen.

  ‘No fear,’ he said, without looking at her. ‘Never had a taste for vinegar.’

  Eve sat down opposite him at the table. ‘So, what do you think?’ she said.

  ‘About?’

  ‘Ravenscliffe. ’aven’t we gone up in t’world?’

  ‘It’s very fine,’ he said, in a voice that conveyed the weight of his experience of beautiful properties, the difficulties inherent in trying to impress him.

  Anna placed his sandwich in front of him and sat down too, next to Eve.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, then: ‘They tell me at the Hare and Hounds that Amos is running for Parliament.’

  There was a small smile playing about his mouth: it might have been friendly, or it might have been the opposite; Anna couldn’t tell, though she could have made an educated guess. She ignored the question in his statement and said: ‘So, you’re staying there again?’

  ‘Plenty of room ’ere,’ Eve said, hope and encouragement evident in her voice. Beside her, Anna tensed. They seemed to see him through different eyes, she thought.

  He dipped his head apologetically. ‘I’m used to being alone,’ he said. ‘My habits are irregular and I don’t enjoy the restrictions of other people’s domestic timetables. And also I rather like the Hare and Hounds. I like the way the noises and smells of the snug filter up to my quarters.’

  Eve, nose wrinkled, said: ‘That’s a good thing?’ and Anna, heady and generous with relief, said, ‘More tea?’

  He held up a hand to indicate no, then said with studied casualness: ‘So, I’m buying a small colliery. Dreaton Main.’ He allowed himself a moment to enjoy the looks on their faces before continuing. ‘Coal for my ships, you see. Makes sound sense.’

  There was silence, and then: ‘Aren’t there mines closer to Bristol than Dreaton Main?’

  This was Anna, who was making a very good point, although he ignored it. His haste and drive to buy a colliery so close to his childhood home was indefensible in business terms. Wales would certainly suit better, geographically speaking; but he wanted one here, where he’d started from nothing. Thumbing his nose, he supposed, at what destiny had once had in mind for him, at what his life could have been.

  ‘A pit? You’re buying a pit?’ Eve was utterly bewildered. She hadn’t realised this was possible; did pits come up for sale? Did they change hands, like motorcars or horses?

  ‘I am indeed.’

  ‘You’ll be a colliery owner, then?’ She sounded simple, she knew that. But in her experience, colliery owners were dukes and earls, not boys from Grangely. His confidence – the sheer brass neck of him – was breathtaking. She had no idea what she felt: pride, anxiety, amusement, shock. All of these.

  ‘Mmmm. Amusing, isn’t it?’ he said, mightily pleased with the effect of his announcement. ‘Penniless trapper at twelve, and look at me now.’

  Together, facing him across the scrubbed pine, they looked. Looking back at them, Silas laughed, to fill the silence.

  Chapter 26

  An ugly gash, a broad, brown scar, cut through the perfect green of the lawn from its uppermost beginnings to its furthest end and Daniel – the architect of this outrage – walked its perimeter with an air of supreme satisfaction. He had his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his corduroy work breeches and he sauntered with a jaunty, carefree gait along the length, across the width and all the way back up towards the house again, and the scar was so wide and so long that it took him a full fifteen minutes to make the journey. He was imagining, as he walked, the brilliant future of this Grand Canal: a regatta, perhaps – a small flotilla of handsome yachts scudding prettily across the water; or gondolas and gondoliers at a Venice-themed event; or fireworks blazing into the night sky above the canal, their brilliance exquisitely reflected on the surface of the black water. But these things were hard to visualise for anyone who wasn’t Daniel and to a man, his thirty-four under-gardeners thought their new boss was addled in the brain. They had, after all, spent the years of Hislop’s tyrannical reign paying slavish attention to the quality and condition of the grass, feeding it, laboriously mowing it, aerating it with the tines of a fork, scrupulously checking it for foreign bodies: fallen leaves, rogue daisies, defiant buttercups, the insidious beginnings of moss. From a distance this lawn had, under their vigilant care, taken on the appearance of the green baize surface of an enormous billiard table. Now, at Daniel MacLeod’s insistence, the baize had been slashed and torn, and for what? For a canal, apparently; a word that invited an image of the oil-slicked stretch of grey-brown water that ran from Barnsley to the Barnby Basin, bearing coal-laden barges and smoky little tugs pulling platforms of lumber and steel. The under-gardeners couldn’t visualise the long, light-filled, brilliant sheet of water that Daniel spoke about, or a day when a Hoyland family birthday might be marked by a nautical spectacular. But anyway, they did as they were bid and dug conscientiously within the marked-out area, striving to get the job properly started before the winter arrived and turned the earth to iron.

  Daniel’s priority had been to push through his plans before the family decamped to Glendonoch, but his powers of persuasion had been tested to the limit when he had first revealed his new scheme to Lady Netherwood. The king’s car had barely turned out of Oak Avenue on the day of his departure before Daniel was seeking a meeting with the countess, unrolling his precious drawings in the morning room and pressing them flat on the table, a series of beautiful depictions of a garden quite unlike the one she had. She had looked at them long and hard before looking up and saying: ‘I don’t quite understand.’

  ‘Understand what, your ladyship?’

  ‘Well, Daniel, these drawings seem to bear no relation to my garden.’

  ‘These are my suggestions for how your garden could be.’

  ‘So this’ – she traced with the tip of an oval, manicured nail the outlines of the proposed Grand Canal – ‘is a stretch of water where my lawns currently lie? And this’ – again she traced a line, this time around the pared-down remains of her Japanese Garden – ‘is to replace my pagoda and goldfish pool?’

  ‘This could be the most talked-about garden in the country,’ he said, deliberately evasive. ‘The most beautiful, complex, integrated, classical garden in England.’

  ‘Is that so?’ She sounded peevish, still feeling irrationally bruised by his insistence on marrying Eve Williams.

  ‘With your approval, of course, and your input,’ he said, the diplomat now.

  ‘And with my money, more crucially.’

  He laughed. ‘Indeed. But look – it’ll be Fulton House, writ large, and you know how widely admired that garden has been,’ he said. ‘If you look carefully at this scheme, you’ll see a lot of the existing beds are all still in place. We don’t need to change them; your planting’s superb.
But there are new ones here, here and here, as well as a parterre across this area, and paths leading down to the wisteria tunnel and beyond. We can keep the goldfish, if you really can’t bear them to go.’

  Her eyes followed his finger as it moved over the drawings. She could see the ambition of these plans, could visualise the glory for herself if Daniel pulled them off. But pride was making her snappish and mealy-mouthed, and though she nodded in apparent agreement with him, she said: ‘The pagoda must stay too. It’s a particular favourite, much admired.’

  He looked at her, trying to gauge how bold he could be, how honest in his opinions. Not especially, was his conclusion.

  ‘Och, well everyone has a pagoda, don’t they?’ he said. ‘But I was hoping you’d agree it’s time for something new. Let’s be the English garden with no pagoda. And if you miss it in the new scheme, we’ll find a place for it, you have my word.’ The kitchen garden, he thought, with a wry private smile: a Japanese chicken house, perhaps.

  ‘Hmmm. Why do I feel you’re plying me with false promises?’

  He placed a hand over his heart like a knight before his lady. ‘Never false, your ladyship. You have my word that the pagoda will be placed in safe storage until such a time that you accept that …’ he paused to smile at her ‘… I was right and you were wrong.’

  A moment stretched into two, three, four moments while the countess decided what she made of his playful insolence.

  ‘Oh, you,’ she said, at last, waving her little hand at him in magnanimous exasperation. ‘I’ve given you too much freedom these past twenty years. Now you believe you may simply do as you wish. But go ahead. Let’s see what you can make of our little corner of England.’

  And the digging had begun the very next day.

  To the relief of everyone – for he really was very much loved by his friends and family – the earl had decided that, after all, he could accompany them on the shooting party to Scotland. He felt that, in fact, the break would do him good: that, and the company of the young people, whose high spirits were in such invigorating contrast to his own. Little Isabella was home from her holiday with the Suffolk cousins, and being reunited with his favourite had been something of a tonic: she adored her indulgent father, and this uncomplicated fact had done much to restore his equilibrium and soothe his injured pride. With his youngest child by him on the couch, or sitting on his lap, or taking his hand on a stroll through the grounds, Lord Netherwood began to feel almost heroic. He had been too long in the company of the excellent but severe Henrietta, who had coached him to accept her scepticism and exasperation as his just desserts. Isabella’s company was restful and restorative by comparison.

  But the principal reason for his decision to go to Scotland was the progress he felt he had made towards salving his own conscience; it would be a long job, but it had begun. The earl believed, since meeting William Garforth, that all the wrongs of the past – though they couldn’t be righted – had at least been acknowledged and could now be used to inform his decisions and help prevent future mistakes. Harry Booth, the manager at Long Martley, had found that far from being sacked for disrespectful rudeness – and that in front of the king – he was in fact to be rewarded with the honour of presiding over the new Netherwood Collieries Mines Rescue Training Centre. Mr Garforth would be consultant to the project, and would advise on where in the pit yard to site the centre and how to equip it. As at the West Riding Colliery, volunteers were being sought to form the core of a new highly trained rescue squad and Henrietta had been absolutely right: hundreds of miners had so far applied to be considered and the earl felt humbled by their commitment to this cause. He wondered at himself, at his blindness to what mattered most to all these employees of his, at his own complacency that for decades had passed for benign liberal tendencies.

  A great granite obelisk was to be erected in the centre of Netherwood and engraved with the name of every man who had died in the explosion, as well as those who had perished in earlier days. Along with the rest, the stonemason would be chipping A. Williams New Mill 1903 into the smooth grey rock, which was only right and proper: the death of one man in a pit must be honoured in the same way as the death of eighty-eight. Meanwhile, an inventory of essential repairs in all three of the earl’s collieries had been drawn up ready for immediate attention. The earl – facing head-on his new greatest fear: that he would perish beneath a pile of rubble in one of his own mines – had descended the shafts of New Mill, Middlecar and Long Martley, and walked the roadways with his deputies, inspecting conditions underground, prodding roof supports and stooping to examine wagon tracks. There was talk of new equipment – electric coal-cutters to eliminate the perilous business of working under the seam, if the hewers could only be persuaded to use them, and hydraulic metal props to replace the wooden ones, if the men could only be persuaded that they were safer – and new iron winding gear was replacing the old timber structures at the three pits. Suddenly, and with remarkable speed, Netherwood’s collieries were becoming pioneers: the best examples of the coal-mining industry’s willingness to move with the times. The verdict of the inquiry was still to come – the affected area so badly damaged that it still wasn’t safe for inspection – but here was Lord Netherwood, stirred out of complacency, whipping up a storm of improvements before any inspector had been able to demand it of him. With the zeal of the newly converted, the earl had even sent proposals to his three managers for pithead bath houses, a modern phenomenon already in use in some parts of Europe, where miners sluiced off their filth and donned clean clothes before going home. But this was a step too far for the Netherwood miners: safety improvements were one thing, but where and how they washed was quite another, and nobody’s business but their own. There was a hasty vote, and the handful of men who raised their hands in favour quickly sat on them again, resulting in an overwhelming ‘no’ to a ridiculous notion that would make soft women of every man in the earl’s employ.

  ‘Thing is,’ said Harry Booth to Lord Netherwood when he reported back with the emphatic message. ‘We asked t’wrong folk to vote. We should’ve asked t’wives. I reckon they’d ’ave a different take on t’matter.’

  The earl had nodded earnestly, so keen to take seriously any suggestion for the better that he didn’t realise Harry was only joking. This was how it was now: the earl so desperate to atone that he couldn’t see the comedy in putting it to the women of Netherwood that their menfolk leave their muck at the pit head.

  On the broad, shallow steps of Netherwood Hall’s main entrance, Mrs Powell-Hughes, Parkinson and a hand-picked collection of their most presentable underlings formed a farewell party, so the family shouldn’t have to leave their home with no one there to wave. It was the pleasantest of duties, thought the housekeeper disloyally. She really was pleased to see the back of them and if they decided to extend their stay in Scotland, you wouldn’t find her complaining. For weeks now she and her girls had been run off their feet and she knew the kitchen staff were feeling equally worn out after preparing breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, suppers and who knew how many light snacks at eccentric, arbitrary points in time. The night before last, Sir Wally’s bell had rung below stairs at two o’clock in the morning, when the last of the dishes from a long, late dinner had just been washed, dried and stacked. They would have had every right to ignore it, being well past the time when anyone might be expected to answer; but Sally had trotted obligingly up there and had come back down – looking mortified – with an order for fried eggs on toast for Sir Wally and the Duchess of Knightwick, who was sitting up in his bed as bold as brass, her hair all mussed and the sheets pulled up to her neck to hide her nakedness. Mrs Powell-Hughes was familiar with the ways of the world, but there were still rules to abide by, even when morals had gone to pot. So, what with bedroom antics, unreasonable demands, the king and all his entourage, the king’s terrier treating the house like a glorified kennel, the dragging-on of the house party as everyone waited to see if the earl would accompany them to Sc
otland … it had all resulted in a housekeeper who was finally at the very end of her tether.

  So when the convoy of cars and carriages had disappeared in its own cloud of gravel dust, Mrs Powell-Hughes sighed feelingly and said, ‘Thank goodness they’re gone,’ and in front of the parlour maids too, which was so unlike her that Parkinson, shocked, dismissed them at once and caught the housekeeper gently by the arm as she made to leave herself.

  ‘Are you quite well, Mrs Powell-Hughes?’ he said.

  For a moment she looked at him, puzzled by his concern and then the penny dropped and she laughed lightly. ‘Oh, don’t fret, Mr Parkinson. I haven’t turned revolutionary. It was simply a mild expression of relief that we have the house to ourselves for a couple of weeks.’

  The demands had not yet been made on the butler that would compel him to utter – audibly at any rate – the words she had used. His own loyalty to the family seemed to know no limits, and of this he was proud. But he was a good man, and he did his utmost not to judge the housekeeper for her momentary lapse. She was tired. They all were. He smiled in a general, non-committal way that he hoped demonstrated sympathy with her fatigue rather than with her views. She left him and returned to the house and for a minute he stood alone on the steps, surveying the gardens with an attitude of grave appreciation and savouring the earthy, smoky smells of early autumn. A small shadow of concern crossed his benign features as he noticed that the recently departed wheels and hooves had left unsightly ruts and pockmarks in the pinkish gravel of the avenue. The driveway must be raked, all the long mile from the house down to the gates. This was well outside his remit, of course, but still he found himself hoping that Mr MacLeod, immersed as he was in his Grand Canal scheme, would not overlook this small detail. For it was, thought Parkinson with pious, proprietorial satisfaction, the attendance upon such small details that made Netherwood Hall the glorious place it was.