Ravenscliffe

by Jane Sanderson

  ‘He never regained consciousness.’

  ‘We’ve lost him?’ Henrietta’s voice was cracked and broken, barely audible. The doctor turned to her.

  ‘We have, Lady Henrietta. I’m so sorry.’

  She dropped aghast onto the couch and Dickie sank beside her. They held hands. Isabella fell to the floor, face down on the fine Turkish carpet, screaming and screaming. Tobias, still supporting his mother, said: ‘Isabella. Please,’ but she continued on.

  ‘May I see him?’ said Lady Netherwood. Isabella’s noise seemed not to register.

  Dr Frankland nodded and the countess gently pulled her arm from her son’s grasp and moved towards the door.

  ‘Mama, I—’

  ‘No, Toby,’ she said, without turning. ‘No need.’

  At the top of the stairs she found Parkinson, though she passed him without a murmur. He watched her like a sad hound, suffering, longing for a kind word. He felt uprooted somehow, uncertain what to do, unprepared, in spite of years of service, for this awful eventuality. He would have liked to have stepped into his lordship’s bedroom and pay his respects; reminisce, perhaps, about the years they had shared as master and servant; weep. But it was not his place to do so, at least, not yet. From behind the closed door of the earl’s room, the sound of the countess talking softly to her husband threatened to undo him entirely. So he walked down the stairs. Mrs Powell-Hughes was still unaware of Lord Netherwood’s death. His heart was heavy at the prospect of burdening her with the news.

  ‘Teddy?’ said the countess.

  Dr Frankland had cleaned the wound on the earl’s head, and bandaged it, and now the patient lay on his back under the counterpane, though he was still dressed in his motoring clothes.

  ‘Teddy. Silly old thing, you still have your coat on.’

  He didn’t answer. She sat by him on the edge of the bed, and gazed about her. Such a masculine room. She imagined the rooms of his London club looked much the same; men were so predictable, so easily pleased in these matters. It struck her that Dr Frankland had closed the curtains, the thick green damask sinking the room into underwater gloom. Little wonder Teddy slept so deeply. She slipped from the bed – it was a fair drop, for her; once upon a time, in the early years, he had laughingly offered to provide a step-ladder for her visits – and wandered over to the windows, dragging the drapes apart.

  ‘Teddy?’ she said, more loudly now, from where she stood. ‘It’s time for tea and I do think if you stir yourself, you’ll feel all the better for it. I hope you’ll learn from this little misadventure, dear. Let Atkins drive. That’s why we have him.’

  She walked back to him, lifted the counterpane, took his hand.

  ‘Oh my! How cold you feel.’ She rubbed his lifeless hand between hers, then reached for the brass handle set into the wall by his bed. In the servants hall a bell would ring, and someone would be here in moments. Meanwhile she would hold his hand like this, and chat to him while she waited.

  Tobias went to find her. She looked at him when he entered his father’s room and her face showed irritation, not grief.

  ‘I thought you were Agnes,’ she said. ‘I rang. Your Papa needs beef tea.’

  He stared. His eyes alighted on his father’s body, still as stone, and he found himself unable to move or to speak. Behind him, just outside the open door, Mrs Powell-Hughes arrived, red-eyed, responding to the swinging bell in the servants’ hall, believing that perhaps the doctor needed assistance. She saw the earl on the bed; she saw the countess perched beside him, trying to warm his hand in hers; she saw Tobias, wordless at the threshold of the room. And immediately, she understood. She swept in, took control.

  ‘Now, your ladyship, come with me to your room and I shall send Flytton to you. You leave his lordship to the doctor.’

  She had the countess by the shoulders and led her across the room as if she were a sleepwalking child. As she passed Tobias, the housekeeper placed a warm hand on his arm, lingering momentarily and giving him a look of such limitless sympathy, such comfort and reassurance, that it remained with him, pure and perfect, for all the difficult days to come.

  Chapter 38

  At half-past three on the afternoon of the day the earl died, the great bells in the two cupolas of Netherwood Hall were tolled thirty times, slowly and with a five-second beat between them. They told the county of a death in the great Hoyland line, and though word had spread that Lord Netherwood was mortally wounded, there were plenty of people who were stopped in their tracks in the street, in their kitchen, in the colliery yard, stilled and silenced by the sonorous, sorrowful chimes. The last time they’d rung in this way had been twenty-six years ago, when the fifth earl had died. Then, his end came as no surprise, the inevitable conclusion of a protracted illness: weeks and weeks during which his condition worsened by tiny degrees, the old man visibly shrinking on his bed, hovering between life and death, before finally releasing his fragile grip on consciousness and slipping away. But now – the death knell for the earl was unexpected, horrifying: he was hale and hearty, not yet fifty years old, and wasn’t it only this morning that he’d driven to Long Martley in the best of spirits? This last was repeated again and again, as if his death defied all logic and the facts of the matter made it impossible.

  ‘Everybody’s alive until they die,’ Amos said to Anna the next morning. ‘Yet folk go on about ’ow they saw ’im looking right as rain. What do they expect? Grim reaper, following ’is car?’

  Anna didn’t quite like his tone. The town was in full mourning: schools, pits and businesses closed, curtains drawn in the windows of every home, black-clad men and women in solemn huddles on their doorsteps or in their back yards, swapping what little they knew in sombre voices.

  ‘They’re shocked, that’s all,’ Anna said. ‘I am, too.’

  ‘Aye. Death’s shocking, right enough, and we should know because it’s a regular visitor to these parts.’ He knew he sounded bitter, resentful, so he left it at that, though she knew what he was thinking.

  ‘Be careful, Amos,’ she said. ‘This isn’t good time for you to rage against privilege. Think of his family. Grief is grief, however well you live.’

  He didn’t want to upset her so he let it drop. But still, he thought – one less pampered aristocrat wasn’t a cause for universal mourning. If the town closed down as a mark of respect every time a miner died in a Netherwood colliery, there’d be a good deal less money in the Hoyland coffers. Must Seth and Eliza believe their father’s death was less significant than the earl’s, because the school stayed open and the pits and the shops didn’t close for business? It made him sick, that was the truth of it. But he’d save it for Enoch and the four walls of his office.

  ‘Best be off,’ he said. He’d walked up to Ravenscliffe on his way to the station, though it was patently out of his way and both of them knew it. She was baking with Eliza on this unscheduled day of freedom, letting the child break the eggs into a bowl then patiently picking out all the bits of shell for her. Seth was folded into an armchair, lost in a weighty-looking tome, chewing a finger as he read, a small scowl of concentration on his face. Making up for time wasted at the screens, thought Amos. He ruffled his hair as he passed, but the boy didn’t even look up.

  ‘Will you come later? Have a meal with us?’ Anna’s face, fresh and youthful, always gave him pause. He swallowed before he spoke.

  ‘What time are they back?’ He meant Eve and Daniel. He was long over his disappointment there, but he couldn’t be sitting here at the table, on their first night in the marital home.

  Anna’s face clouded. ‘I don’t know. Soon, I think. It’s dreadful – they know nothing about it.’

  ‘Aye, well.’ He turned to leave the room, then stopped. ‘Look, I’ll tell you what, you come to me for a bite to eat.’

  She laughed, and he feigned indignation.

  ‘Watch it,’ he said. ‘There’s more to me than meets t’eye, young lady.’

  ‘Well, all right,’ she said.
‘But not today, because Eve’s coming home. Tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Six o’clock. Bring an appetite.’

  ‘Can I come?’ said Eliza.

  Anna and Amos looked at her.

  ‘I’ve only got two chairs,’ Amos said.

  It sounded a poor excuse, and he knew it.

  Daniel saw Eve home to Ravenscliffe and left her with Anna and the children, then half-ran, half-walked back to Netherwood Hall through streets that were eerily quiet for the time of day. They had driven into town in a hansom cab from Sheffield and both of them knew, instantly, that something was amiss. Eve had thought it was another rockfall, claiming lives, and she had sat catatonic with fear, unable to speak, until they reached home and she opened her front door and Anna took her coat, her gloves, her hat: it’s Lord Netherwood, Anna said. Killed on Harley Hill by a pit pony – it’s outside now, tethered to the fence. The absurdity of this statement detracted from the horror, but only momentarily. The earl was dead. Her benefactor. Her friend. She turned a stricken face to Daniel, who took her hand, holding it tight. He’d better go, he told them. He might be of assistance, somehow, to someone. He lifted her hand in his, and kissed it, then turned on his heel and left through the door, which was still wide open, letting the sharp October wind into the house.

  Henrietta had risen early, earlier even than the household staff, so that when little Josie Morton arrived with her ash bucket and brushes to clean and relight the bedroom fire, edging into the room like a cautious mouse, dreading the possibility of disturbing her ladyship, she found her already gone. Her initial relief was followed immediately by anxiety over whether she should now leave the grate cold and empty and – perhaps more pressingly – whether she should report Lady Henrietta’s absence to someone. Suddenly, in the space of just a few hours, life seemed to have lost all its certainty. In the end, she lit a fire, reasoning that Lady Henrietta might be glad of the comfort when she returned from wherever she had gone. But she didn’t tell anyone that the bedroom was empty, because that anxiety was soon entirely subsumed by the bigger one of having now to enter the countess’s rooms, a task she would have gladly paid a week’s wages to avoid. The junior maids were all afraid of the countess’s grief. They had heard she had run mad with it and, since none of them had seen her, there was no evidence to the contrary.

  Henrietta’s absence was easily explained. Sleepless with grief, restless with remorse, she had gone to the gardens to think. There was a place she was partial to, a favourite retreat from girlhood; an old weeping copper beech and beneath its sweeping canopy, the statue of a dog, a sitting Great Dane, faithful companion of an earlier Earl of Netherwood. When she was small she fitted snugly between his two front legs and she would sit there looking out at the same things that he did. Now, though, she merely sat by him, leaning against his solid stone body and watching the trailing branches move in the wind, shedding leaves like tears.

  She was sorry with all her heart that her last words to her father had been deliberately antagonistic: that their last conversation – out of all the hundreds of conversations they had had – had been ill-tempered. He had died believing her angry with him. And she had been. She had been angry because he had been a good and loyal husband, taking his wife’s side against their headstrong daughter. Henrietta dipped her head on to her knees and wailed with the sort of noisy inhibition she detested in Isabella but which now, in this genuine crisis, gave her some sort of strange, cathartic release.

  Below stairs Monsieur Reynard, less affected than many in the kitchens, continued on as usual, though the breakfast he dispatched through the green baize door was returned an hour and a half later, untouched. Undaunted, he began preparations for luncheon; someone, at some point, would need to be fed, and he instructed Sarah Pickersgill to pull her weight.

  ‘Life goes on, Sarah,’ he said. ‘And so we make beef consommé for the grieving souls.’

  She looked at him with damp eyes and he handed her a shin of beef.

  ‘Run this through the mincer,’ he said. It wasn’t that he was pitiless: just that there were tasks to be done. The earl is dead, long live the earl – that was Claude Reynard’s view. There would be no lapse in culinary standards on his watch. When the family decided, in their own time, that they needed sustenance, he, their chef, would not be found wanting. It was an attitude that earned him, finally, a grudging respect from Parkinson, whose own sense of duty and obligation was proving greater than his sense of loss, profound though this was. He approved of the Frenchman’s dogged professionalism, just as he disapproved of maids who openly wept on their way through the corridors of the house, or footmen who presented long faces to the world. None of them had known Lord Netherwood for as many years as Parkinson had, and had he given way to unbridled sorrow? No, he had not. He said as much to the assembled household staff, corralled by himself and Mrs Powell-Hughes for an emergency meeting in the servants’ hall.

  ‘We have an obligation to the whole family, a duty to uphold the traditions of this fine house,’ he said. ‘This is not to deny our sadness at the earl’s death; we feel it most profoundly.’ There were doleful sniffs and a general murmur of assent, and he paused for a moment to allow it to settle. ‘But our sadness, our distress, must not become an excuse for a decline in standards. Lady Netherwood is relying on us, more so now than ever before, as are her children. It does none of us credit if the smooth running of the household begins to falter. And it does no justice, either, to our memories of Lord Netherwood.’

  There was a small break in his voice at this point, and he paused again, as if – unthinkable notion – he might be unable to continue. He bowed his head, breathed deeply, and rallied.

  ‘So. Let me see you carry out your duties with appropriate dignity and restraint. Mrs Powell-Hughes and myself – and of course Mr Reynard – will be looking to you all to help the family through this most difficult of times.’

  It was beautifully put, nicely judged; morale began to be restored under the butler’s firm direction. And it was noted by all – and chewed over later – that the chef had been paid the compliment of a particular mention, even if Parkinson hadn’t managed the French appellation. Credit where credit was due was one of the butler’s abiding principles, and Claude Reynard had proved himself worthy of it. But nothing, nothing at all, would induce Parkinson to address him as monsieur.

  ‘What did you do?’

  This was Eve. She sat with Daniel in the quiet of the Ravenscliffe parlour. Her eyes were red, her face white and she didn’t look, or feel, like a newlywed. It was cold in the room without a fire, but the children were in the kitchen and she needed to talk, and to listen.

  ‘Not much. I’d have liked to talk to the countess, pass on my – our – condolences, but there was no sign of her. According to the upstairs maids she’s been in her rooms with the doctor all day. Taken bad.’

  ‘She’s not strong,’ Eve said. ‘In some ways, she’s a child.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Did you see any of them?’

  ‘No. One of my lads saw Lady Henrietta, in the grounds by the stone dog. She looked like stone herself, he said. Poor girl.’

  ‘She was close to ’im. What about ’er mam, though – what becomes of ’er, now Tobias is earl?’

  ‘The Dowager Countess of Netherwood. Doesn’t suit her, does it?’

  Eve shook her head no. ‘Will she stay at Netherwood ’all?’

  ‘You’re asking the wrong man. We’ll all have to wait and see.’

  ‘It’s such a shock. Such a terrible thing.’

  ‘There’s a strange atmosphere down there just now. No lights lit in the windows, no comings or goings.’

  Eve thought of the household staff: imagined the dread silence in the servants’ hall after Jem Arkwright brought the earl home senseless in his arms.

  ‘Jem thought he’d live,’ Daniel said, as if he could read her mind. ‘They all did. But he never woke up.’

  ‘Poor Jem,’ Eve said. ‘’e’
ll take it bad.’

  They were quiet for a while, then: ‘What about the business?’ Daniel said.

  She flapped a hand, as if nothing was less important.

  ‘No, Eve. He wanted to give it to you. You have to go and see Blandford. He’ll be expecting you.’

  The thought of it, of walking in to Absalom Blandford’s office, the earl dead, everything changed, was dreadful to her.

  ‘I’ll see,’ she said, quite certain she wouldn’t.

  ‘I’ll come with you, if you like. But you should go, Eve. The earl’d want it.’

  There was a tap on the parlour door and Seth came in, looking like a boy with something to say.

  ‘Come and sit by me, love,’ Eve said, patting the couch, but he hung back by the door, feeling suddenly shy.

  ‘Mam,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I left New Mill. I left my job.’

  Abruptly, she stood, her hands to her mouth. She thought, he’s safe, my boy’s safe, and joy flooded her body and it didn’t feel wrong, or disrespectful, not in the least. The world outside Ravenscliffe was one thing: the world inside, another. Seth smiled at her, a real, heartfelt smile such as she hadn’t seen from him for many, many months.

  ‘I’m so glad, Seth,’ she said, in a voice low with emotion. She walked to him and took his precious face in her hands and kissed his forehead. He was taller than she was, but he was her boy. He had come back to her, and she felt blessed.