Ravenscliffe

by Jane Sanderson

  Mrs Stirling wept copiously – ‘Tears of joy, folks!’ she kept saying, ‘Tears of pure joy!’ – before the bride arrived, and then stopped, abruptly, when she saw her daughter standing at the back of the nave, preparing to walk down the aisle. Shock, she said later, had taken the wind out of her; until that moment, she said, she hadn’t fully appreciated the honour conferred on her daughter in marrying this particular young man.

  This was a gracious thing to say, and it was a shame Clarissa didn’t hear it. But there was no talking to her once the ceremony got under way: she simply became more and more cross. First of all Thea’s arrival at church was announced by a rousing organ rendition of ‘Hail, Columbia’, which had the small American contingent on their feet in a trice, soon followed by the rest of the obedient congregation. Clarissa was all for remaining seated, but Henrietta, catching her expression, lifted her surreptitiously but firmly by the arm and then, once up, she felt obliged to stay. But really! No one had insisted upon ‘God Save the King’, and why would they? Because the English were secure in their Englishness and, unlike the Americans, they had no need to continually assert their national pride; this was what Clarissa hissed at Dickie when he handed over the ring on cue and joined his mother in the pew.

  ‘I thought it was magnificent,’ Dickie said. ‘Very stirring.’

  She had missed Teddy then: missed his tendency to agree with her. One never knew what one valued about one’s spouse until they were gone. Her eyes pricked with tears and she dabbed at them with a handkerchief and, from the other side of the aisle, Dorothy Stirling clucked and made a little moue of sympathy.

  ‘You poor old thing,’ she said at the first opportunity. ‘Think of it as gaining a daughter, not losing a son.’

  She offered this gem with a finely timed vocal falter, as if it was an original thought, spoken aloud for the very first time at this, its moment of conception. Clarissa bestowed a chilly smile then looked steadfastly forwards, determined to avoid eye contact, if possible, for the rest of the day. But the bride’s mother was intent on forming a speedy alliance and it seemed she didn’t need evidence of reciprocity; at the reception afterwards she chatted brightly on, undiscouraged by Clarissa’s frosty profile or glazed smile, forcing upon her all the unwanted missing details of her life in New York.

  ‘We’re on East Seventy-Second Street,’ she said, ‘not quite Fifth Avenue, because who can afford that these days, but it’s near enough. Anyway, those places on the park are enormous and as it is we’re rattling around like two peas in a drum.’

  None of this meant anything to Clarissa.

  ‘I suppose your house is pretty big?’ Dorothy said. ‘You could probably fit two Fifth Avenue mansions into your Netherwood Hall. And to think, my little girl will be calling such a fine place home, after all these years of living on a budget.’

  ‘A budget?’ said Clarissa. It was the first word she had spoken for fifteen minutes. ‘What exactly is a budget?’ She pictured some kind of humble dwelling: waterborne, perhaps, like a barge.

  Mrs Stirling laughed. ‘Oh, you English with your famous dry wit! I must say, Lady Clarissa’ – she leaned in confidingly – ‘I do admire your strength. The loss of Sir Teddy must be hard to bear, and yet, here you are, a picture of composure, when I know if I was in your shoes I should be just a mess. I’m always telling Elliot that if he goes before me I shall be mad as a hornet!’

  To their absolute mutual horror, Clarissa began to cry. Dorothy, understanding intuitively that this thin, elegant, unremittingly grand lady would not welcome a matronly hug, waved a frantic arm at Henrietta, who registered the crisis, rushed to her mother’s side and swept her away from the party into the plush, upholstered interior of the ladies’ powder room. Here they sat facing each other on chintz vanity stools, and Henry held her mother’s hands, waiting for the sobs to subside. It was a most uncharacteristic display.

  Finally, Clarissa was composed enough to speak.

  ‘It’s all too ghastly,’ she said. ‘Too, too ghastly.’

  ‘What is?’

  Clarissa wafted a slender arm. ‘This is. This wedding, those people, the dreadful turn my life has taken.’

  ‘Oh, Mama,’ said Henry. Her voice was not entirely kind and Clarissa withdrew her hands.

  ‘Thank you, Henry, I would prefer to be alone now. Please leave, and send Tobias to collect me in five minutes.’

  ‘All right, but I’ll come. Toby’s busy. Everyone wants to talk to him.’

  ‘Send Tobias. In his father’s absence, his place is by me.’

  Henrietta opened her mouth to respond, but closed it again. This was neither the time nor the place for a confrontation. In any case, thought Henry, there was more than one suffering soul in this powder room. She felt barely equal to the day herself; small wonder she had nothing to offer her mother.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. She stood, and her mother looked her up and down.

  ‘Your skin, in that gown, looks rather sallow,’ she said.

  Henrietta turned and walked out of the room.

  She found Toby and delivered their mother’s message, then sought out Thea. She wasn’t alone – she hadn’t been alone since the day began – but anyway Henrietta touched her on the shoulder and said: ‘Could we talk?’ and though Thea looked a little displeased, she made her excuses and left the conversation, following Henrietta to a mirrored alcove and sitting down next to her.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  Her voice sounded impatient; she would prefer to be elsewhere, thought Henrietta, and she felt her heart constrict, as if it was held too tight in Thea’s hand.

  ‘I … I wanted you to know how very unhappy I feel,’ she said. She looked entirely bereft of the consolations and comforts of love. Thea softened.

  ‘Oh, my dear one,’ she said and at once, Henrietta felt weightless with relief.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t impose on your wedding day.’

  ‘Henry! Don’t be humble. I can’t love you if you’re humble.’

  ‘Can’t you?’ Now her spirits plunged again, and even Henrietta could see how irritating it must be for Thea to have such power over the happiness of another.

  ‘Oh, don’t take me so seriously,’ Thea said. ‘And smile, for heaven’s sake. Look, I can’t be mooning around you, today of all days, can I? Whatever would people say? In any case, I’m rather enjoying being a bride, and dear Tobes is such a sweetheart.’

  ‘Yes, I know. He really is. And I hate the way I feel.’

  ‘Don’t. You’re my love too, just as much as he is. And soon I’ll be permanently at Netherwood Hall and we can see each other every day.’

  ‘That’s the thing, though. I don’t want you to love Toby. I want you to love only me.’

  Thea laughed. ‘Greedy,’ she said. She leaned in so that her breath was hot in Henrietta’s face. ‘I was yours before I was his,’ she said quietly and she kissed her tenderly on the cheek. Henrietta sat, rigid with suppressed desire. Thea smiled, stood, and wove through the room to find her husband.

  Chapter 42

  May Day, and the feast had come. Mysteriously, like a snowfall, it arrived in the night, so that when Eliza opened her curtains the next day the rides and stalls were laid out on the flat plain of ground where the common met the edge of town. She stared. It had missed two years in Netherwood – it always did, there were other towns in the West Riding of Yorkshire that were just as profitable as this one – but here it was, faithfully fulfilling its triennial obligation to thrill, to entertain, and to cheerfully fleece the pockets and wallets of the good inhabitants of Netherwood. Eliza counted back to May 1902. She was seven, then, the last time the feast came. Her dad had carried her round on his shoulders and Seth had got lost for over an hour; she remembered the hot despair she’d felt at wasting precious time hunting for him, her mam and dad traipsing in and out of the attractions, calling his name. She’d been scolded by her mam for wanting to go on the Ferris wheel when Seth still
hadn’t been found, and her dad had said: ‘Hush, Eve, she’s a bairn, she doesn’t understand.’ All of this was clear as clear in Eliza’s mind, and she let the words and pictures play out while she rested her forehead on the glass and waited for signs of activity at the sleeping fairground. She was ten now, of course. Double figures. She’d be allowed to go about the feast with her friends, clutching her own money in her own purse. Seth had turned up in the crowd of men at a bare-knuckle fight; he’d ducked under the rope without paying to watch Lew Sylvester take on the feast’s travelling champion. Their dad had hauled Seth out, lifting him by his collar and plonking him on the grass at their mam’s feet. Then Seth had got a roasting for wandering off, and getting into places he shouldn’t, and had sulked for the rest of the visit, even when their Dad won a coconut and cracked it open there and then for Seth and Eliza to chew on. Ellen had been too small, just a baby. Their mam had bumped her around the rough ground so that she bounced and laughed in the big pram, and that was all the fun she’d had. This year she was three. Big enough for the carousel. She could sit in a carriage, anyway. Not on one of the beautiful horses with their names painted on their saddles, though. Eliza had sat on one called Starlight, a dappled grey with a real red leather harness and reins. She rose up and down as the carousel turned, and you could imagine yourself galloping away over the common if you closed your eyes. In her imagination, Eliza had been riding Starlight ever since, whenever she wanted to leave behind the humdrum. She was keeping a diary of their travels in an old accounts book that she hid from Seth between her mattress and bedstead. She had turned the book upside down and was working her way through it on the backs of the used pages. The Adventures of Eliza and Starlight was its working title, though she thought she might change it to something more charged with mystery before it was published.

  Downstairs, Anna was banging the gong. Shouting from the kitchen, as they’d done in Beaumont Lane, didn’t work at Ravenscliffe. You could shout till you were blue in the face and still nobody would hear you. So Anna had come home one day carrying a brass gong with its own special wooden mallet. They kept it on the hall table and, tempting though it was to disobey, it was only ever to be struck when a meal was ready. Striking the gong just for fun was a deadly sin, Anna said. Eliza dragged herself away from the window, though there were men out there now, hauling tarpaulins off the stalls and drawing down the wooden shutters with long hooked poles. But ignoring the brass gong was also a deadly sin, and anyway, as ever, Eliza was starving.

  There were eggs frying on the range and Daniel was slicing bread.

  ‘Morning, beautiful,’ he said, as he always did when he was here to say it. He started work at the hall so early in the mornings that Eliza usually missed him, but today was May Day, so everyone was here: Mam, Anna, everyone.

  ‘Is Amos coming?’ Eliza said.

  ‘Later,’ said Anna. She was at the stove, flicking hot fat onto the eggs so the skin would bubble and brown over the yolks. Eliza smiled. What she loved best was when their kitchen table was so crowded that extra chairs had to be fetched in from the parlour and she, Seth, Ellen and Maya had to crush up together on a bench that was only meant for three. Often, Amos was there, now that he and Anna were engaged to be married – a thrilling development, in Eliza’s view, since she was once again to be a bridesmaid, though their flat refusal to set a date was a continuing source of frustration – and sometimes Uncle Silas came too. Very occasionally he would bring Mr Oliver with him as well, and then they would be ten and it felt like a party.

  ‘Daniel?’ she said.

  ‘Eliza?’ he said.

  ‘What’s your favourite ride?’

  Seth tutted. ‘Well, since ’e’s never been to Netherwood feast, ’e wouldn’t know, would ’e?’ He spoke slowly, as if to a simpleton.

  ‘Och well, they’re all the same, wherever in the country they are,’ Daniel said. ‘There’s always a carousel, a helter-skelter, a big wheel, a coconut shy …’

  ‘My dad got banned from t’bell and mallet,’ Seth said. ‘Because ’e kept winning.’ This was a fact that Seth knew, rather than remembered: a family legend, kept alive by the retelling.

  Daniel laughed. ‘Well in that case I shall stay away from it, in case I make myself look a puny fool by comparison. I like the big wheel the best,’ he said, turning to Eliza, answering her question, ‘because from the top you can see the world from a different perspective. A bird’s-eye view. The best thing,’ he said, sitting down next to her, ‘is when you get stuck for a while right at the top, with the seat swinging in the breeze. That’s nice.’ He smiled at her and she snuggled into his side.

  ‘Will you take me on it?’ she said.

  ‘I thought you wanted to be with all your pals today?’

  ‘Oh yes. I forgot.’ She looked a little flat now.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ll meet you at the foot of the big wheel at two o’clock, for a ride on it together. Then afterwards you can scoot off with your pals again.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’d like that.’ Seth rolled his eyes; she was addled where Daniel was concerned.

  Eve came into the room with Ellen and Maya. They liked to wear identical clothes these days, so whenever Anna made a new pinafore for one of them, she would have to make the same for the other. Today they were both wearing their dark red linen, not quite Sunday best, but almost. Saturday best, thought Eliza. Daniel stood to give Eve a kiss and pour the tea, and Eliza scooted along the bench to make room for the little girls.

  ‘’ere we are then,’ Eve said. ‘May Day Feast, and this year it’s right on our doorstep.’

  Anna said: ‘Mixed blessing, that.’ She wasn’t keen on fairgrounds, either the rides or the people that ran them. A motley collection of dwellings – some little more than covered drays – had laid claim to a patch of land that was too close for comfort, in Anna’s view. She would dry the best linen in the house until the feast had moved on. There’d be no leaving the doors wide open, either.

  ‘I wish Uncle Silas was ’ere,’ Eliza said.

  A pause in activity among the adults, the merest shiver of tension: the child was oblivious, however.

  ‘Uncle Silas said ’e’d take me to Bristol.’

  ‘Well, don’t ’old your breath,’ said Seth. ‘Uncle Silas couldn’t be much further away if ’e tried.’ He was in Jamaica, in fact, overseeing operations there. Progress on the hotel had been sluggish, and if he was to advertise this summer, carry tourists there by December, he had to catch the slackers red-handed. This is what he’d told Seth. ‘Jamaicans – lazy buggers the lot of ’em,’ he’d said, flattering the boy with this adult talk. ‘Don’t know the meaning of hard work.’ Seth, who had noted his uncle’s pale, uncalloused hands and white-tipped nails, wondered exactly what hard work meant to Silas. Still though, you didn’t become as rich as he had by sitting idle on your backside.

  ‘There’s a zoo,’ said Eliza, who wasn’t done yet with Bristol. ‘They’ve an elephant called Zebi and she eats straw ’ats off ladies’ ’eads.’

  Eve smiled at her daughter. She fancied a trip to Bristol herself, actually – Silas was always on at her about it, and she’d like to be able to picture him when he was gone. But now, it was awkward. She’d thought she could talk to Anna about most things: but not this, it seemed.

  Silas had fallen foul of Amos, or Amos had fallen foul of Silas, depending on whose version of events you happened to hear. Anyway, it amounted to the same thing; under the stewardship of Silas Whittam, the regime at Dreaton Main Colliery was undergoing a radical review. Timesheets had been scrutinised, wages bills assessed. The manager and his deputy had been sacked, and in their place were two Bristolians, drafted in from Whittam and Co. to apply their accountants’ minds to the boss’s new venture.

  ‘And what do they know about mining?’ Amos had said: a dangerous topic, this.

  ‘As much as they need to,’ Silas had replied, his voice pleasant, his eyes like steel.

&
nbsp; ‘What they know about mining,’ Amos had said, directing his comment now to Anna, ‘could be written on t’back of a Penny Black.’ Anna, sitting across the table from him, had looked blank. ‘A stamp, then,’ he said. ‘A postage stamp. Oh, never mind. Fact is, they know nowt about owt.’

  They were all at Ravenscliffe, Silas too; he’d joined them for a Sunday roast before leaving for London, and Jamaica. A family gathering, Eve had said, and it had been lovely, until the children left the table and the talk had turned to Silas’s plans for this latest business venture. He looked at Amos and feigned bafflement.

  ‘What on earth can you mean?’ he said.

  ‘Clear enough, I would’ve thought.’

  ‘Not to me.’ Silas smiled, sat back in his chair, folded his arms. ‘Perhaps you could elucidate?’

  Amos, his belly full of Eve’s roast lamb, knew he shouldn’t eat her food then repay her by souring the atmosphere around her table. But it was hard to avoid and, anyway, her brother had no such compunction; he had fixed his sardonic gaze on Amos and was waiting for him to speak. So he did.

  ‘You’ve sacked two good local men who’re now struggling to feed their families, and you’ve installed in their place two office clerks who wouldn’t know a pick or a shovel if they fell over ’em.’

  Silas laughed. ‘You twist the facts, Mr Sykes, to suit your own version of the truth. Perhaps you’d do very well as a politician, if only you could get yourself elected. What I’ve done at Dreaton Main – not that I feel obliged to account for myself, particularly – is remove two incompetents from their posts and appoint two men whose track record with regard to honesty, hard work and business acumen is unblemished. I aim to make as much money from my colliery as possible. Now that might hurt your socialist sensibilities, but I make no apology for it.’