Ravenscliffe

by Jane Sanderson

  Chapter 50

  These days, Monday to Friday, Lilly Pickering walked from Beaumont Lane to Ravenscliffe with her ragged assortment of younger offspring trailing behind, before and about her. She would arrive at ten-past eight, by which time Daniel would be long gone, Eve would have left for the mill and Seth and Eliza would have gone to school. Anna would be waiting for Lilly, who on arrival would go immediately to the big kitchen and warm her backside on the range, however brightly the sun might be shining outside. Too thin, Daniel said: no flesh to warm her bones. Anna would then take off for Netherwood Hall to wield her paintbrush in the countess’s suite of rooms. Lilly held the fort at Ravenscliffe – a little washing, a little cleaning, a few stolen moments on the swing in the sunshine – until Anna came back at four in the afternoon, unless Eve managed to get home sooner, in which case Anna would walk not into the riotous assembly of Pickering infants, but into a calm, orderly house with tea in the pot and warm scones on the table.

  The arrangement suited everyone. Lilly had real, regular paid work; a weekly pay packet, the first she’d ever had. Her children ate a cooked dinner every day, prepared the night before by Eve or Anna. Maya and Ellen had four new playmates – the best kind: clueless and easily led, happy to fall in with orders from the two little generals. And Anna was released from domestic duty for the first time since she’d come to live with Eve, in those dark days when the loss of Arthur was still an open wound and Anna was a foreigner in Netherwood.

  Anna’s walk to Netherwood Hall took her each morning past the new miners’ memorial, and every day she would pause and lay a hand on the lamp that the bronze miner held out before him as if he was following its light down a tunnel. She kept this little ritual to herself, but it had become important, and passing by without this moment’s pause was now unthinkable. She had never known Arthur Williams, but she felt he had somehow granted her the right to step into the life he had left behind, and for this she would always be deeply grateful. When she stood before the bronze statue, she imagined Arthur like this: a noble bearing, his shoulders broad, his arms sinewy and strong, his eyes warm in a careworn face. She saw Amos, too, of course. Her own Amos, who through gritted teeth had given his blessing to this new venture of hers, and who could see – indeed, had admitted – that the happiness it seemed to bring her made his own qualms and concerns immaterial. She was more than halfway through the job now. Thea would be back at the end of July, and her rooms would be ready for her. She had given Anna carte blanche to complete the work as she saw fit – ‘surprise me with something wonderful’ had been the instruction, daunting in its simple optimism – and this had included the freedom to hire some help for the donkey work. Cue Jimmy and Stan, seconded from the only firm of painters and decorators that had adequately fulfilled Anna’s scrupulous list of requirements: cleanliness, thoroughness and affability in adversity. She was a hard taskmaster, and she didn’t like her instructions to be questioned.

  They were waiting for her this morning; overalls laundered, obliging smiles on clean-shaven faces. They never made a start without her, and they never finished until she said they could. Something about her made them anxious to please.

  ‘Morning, boys,’ she said now, walking past them in the courtyard, collecting them in her wake.

  ‘Morning,’ they said in unison, like nicely behaved schoolboys. They followed her into the house, whose passages and doors she knew now as well as she knew Ravenscliffe.

  ‘Cup of tea before you get going?’

  This was the housekeeper, who had spotted Anna’s progress from the boot room past the kitchen.

  ‘No thank you, Mrs Powell-Hughes, best crack on,’ Anna said.

  The housekeeper smiled. She liked this young woman very much. It had taken precisely one working day for Anna to win her heart, and she hadn’t even really been trying. When the family was absent, the great house was always cleaned with the sort of dedication to infinitesimal detail that wasn’t possible when they were in residence. There were 612 chandeliers in Netherwood Hall, and each one would be washed, one crystal drop at a time. Curtains and pelmets would be removed, beaten, brushed and replaced. Pictures would be taken down from the walls and their frames carefully cleaned with stubby little sable brushes whose bristles penetrated every cranny of the elaborate gilt. With all this to accomplish, the very last thing Mrs Powell-Hughes needed was decorators traipsing in and out of the house, so she was very much minded to take umbrage when she had entered the countess’s rooms at the end of Anna’s first day there, fully expecting mess and mayhem. Instead, she had found Anna on her knees with a dustpan and brush, cleaning the carpet. The two lads seemed to have gone, the dustsheets were folded in a tidy pile by the door, and the pots of paint and brushes were stacked in a wooden crate. Two long stepladders had been laid on their sides along the skirting boards. Anna had looked up from her labour.

  ‘I’m just about done,’ she had said, not apologetically, but with satisfaction.

  ‘But aren’t you back tomorrow?’ said Mrs Powell-Hughes.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Anna. ‘But tomorrow I don’t want to arrive to yesterday’s mess.’ She had stood and with a gesture of her hand directed the housekeeper’s attention upwards. ‘I cleaned chandelier. I hope you don’t mind. It was a little bit dusty, and I was up ladder and …’ She tailed off and shrugged.

  Mrs Powell-Hughes looked up. The myriad glass droplets were pristine in their brass surround. She looked about her. In the housekeeper’s mind, the memories were still painfully clear of the pandemonium caused during the last lot of renovations: paint on the stair runners, builders’ rubble in the bathrooms, turpentine fumes accompanying her all day long on her rounds. Redecoration meant disruption. And yet, here was a room in better order now than it had been before Anna arrived. She looked about her, at the walls and the ceiling. Nothing much seemed to have changed, except that on the long section of wall between each of the three sash windows, she could see the sketchy outline of what appeared to be birds in flight. Anna, following the direction of the other woman’s gaze, said: ‘Just ideas, nothing final.’

  Mrs Powell-Hughes, her eyes still fixed on the birds, said: ‘Years ago, Lady Henrietta drew on the drawing-room walls in charcoal.’ She looked away now, at Anna. ‘There was such a rumpus.’

  ‘A rumpus?’

  ‘Fuss, you know? Lots of shouting and crying – well, Lady Henrietta cried, when her pictures were washed away. They weren’t half bad, actually.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘Horses. She was mad for horses as a little girl. Still is, of course, though she seems to have less time for them now.’

  The housekeeper looked sad, Anna thought; lost among her recollections.

  ‘You’ve known Lady Henrietta for a very long time?’

  Mrs Powell-Hughes nodded. ‘Almost all her life. She was a babe in arms when I took this position. And Master Toby – the earl, I should say – was just walking. They were delightful.’

  There was a brief silence, almost awkward. Anna said: ‘They must be very fond of you,’ and the housekeeper seemed to come to, returning to the present from the past.

  ‘Well,’ she said, briskly now, ‘I’d best crack on.’ She smiled warmly at Anna, who returned the compliment. ‘See you tomorrow Mrs Rab …’

  ‘Anna,’ said Anna. ‘It’s so much easier.’

  This was when she first began. Now, five weeks into the job, they were as thick as thieves. Anna – endearing, engaging, entertaining – had tapped a maternal vein in Mrs Powell-Hughes, who found the details of Anna’s life quite fascinating by comparison with her own rather uneventful history and, for her part, Anna enjoyed rediscovering the lost luxury of a motherly ear. Her brief marriage to the poor, sick Jewish boy; the rift this marriage created with her family in Kiev; her love now for a firebrand former miner; her surprising, modern views about a woman’s place in the world: all these matters were aired over refreshments at the kitchen table and the older woman had found that Anna,
young though she still was, had a surprisingly wise head on her shoulders. There was no giddiness about her, no flightiness; she had all the best qualities of Mrs Powell-Hughes herself, without her tendency – acknowledged, to her credit, by the housekeeper herself – to judge too swiftly or too harshly. Furthermore, as Anna wasn’t a member of staff, she could be accepted as an equal, and this had proved an unexpected and wonderful bonus, because while hierarchy must always be respected, a housekeeper’s life could as a result be a little lonely. Constantly vigilant, ever on the lookout for wrongdoing or shoddiness, Mrs Powell-Hughes was no one’s first choice for a companion at the tea table, except sometimes for Parkinson, who suffered just as she did from the inevitable and necessary dearth of friends at the top of the household’s pecking order. In Anna, however, she had found a confidante and today, having failed to tempt her at the beginning of the day, Mrs Powell-Hughes caught her instead as she left.

  ‘I have a jug of lemonade here, Anna,’ she said. ‘Can I pour you a glass?’

  Anna hesitated. She preferred to go home, not to linger here, but she was parched, and there was ice in the jug too, crowding the surface of the lemonade and frosting the glass. She said: ‘Yes please, Mrs Powell-Hughes,’ because although she was always Anna, the housekeeper’s Christian name was not for public use; it simply hadn’t been mentioned, and the moment for asking had now long passed. Anna pulled out a chair from the table and sat down. The backs of her hands were flecked with white paint, and she scratched at it absently while the housekeeper poured a drink.

  ‘Still coming along well up there, is it?’ Mrs Powell-Hughes hadn’t been in since that first day; Anna had asked if the door could remain locked, so that the countess, when she returned, would be the first person to lay eyes on the finished work. To the astonishment and dismay of the upstairs maids, the housekeeper had agreed, and since the key to that room hung from the iron ring on her belt loop, no one so far had managed so much as a peek.

  ‘Mmmm.’ Anna took a long drink. ‘Oh my,’ she said, ‘that’s so good,’ then: ‘Do you ever have anything to do with Mr Blandford?’

  ‘The bailiff? Not much. He likes to see the household accounts, though what business it is of his I’d like to know.’

  ‘I need to give him this.’ Anna pulled an invoice from her pocket. ‘Bill for my materials.’

  ‘Well, his office is just across the way there.’

  ‘Yes, I know this. But I wondered, could you give it to him?’

  This seemed an odd request and the housekeeper looked at her askance. Anna shrugged.

  ‘I don’t like him,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry if he’s friend of yours.’

  Mrs Powell-Hughes laughed. ‘He’s no one’s friend,’ she said. ‘The only person I ever saw him smile at was the late earl. He’s an odd one, but he’s a good bailiff, I will say that.’

  Anna placed the bill on the table in front of her.

  ‘So, will you give this to him? I’d rather not have to do it myself.’

  ‘Of course I will, dear. I’ll send it across with the next set of accounts.’ She studied Anna for a moment, then said; ‘I must say, you don’t seem the type to be frightened off by a stern face.’

  ‘He’s bad man,’ Anna said. ‘I prefer not to deal with him.’

  ‘Bad?’

  Anna nodded vehemently.

  ‘Is there something we should know?’ said the housekeeper. She spoke gently, picturing a dreadful physical assault in the shadows of Netherwood Common; occasionally, her preference for gothic novels invaded her common sense.

  ‘Well, it’s business matter, between him and Eve,’ Anna said.

  ‘Oh, I see.’ This didn’t seem half so interesting, but she prodded again. ‘Well, evidently it’s upset you very much. What exactly has Mr Blandford done?’

  Anna considered for a moment. Many months had passed, much water had flowed under the bridge, but still, Absalom Blandford’s treachery rankled in Anna’s loyal heart. She took another draught of lemonade, then told the housekeeper the full story.

  Chapter 51

  Henrietta had written to Emmeline Pankhurst all those months ago in her fit of pique, but it had been Christabel who replied. Her mother was temporarily indisposed, she had said, but she had thanked Henrietta for her letter and her support and included a long list of dates. These were of meetings of the Women’s Social and Political Union, to which Henrietta was cordially invited. All were in Manchester and Henrietta had attended none of them. Indeed, after her father’s death, she had felt so ashamed at what then felt like her childish defiance that she had burned Miss Pankhurst’s letter as an act of atonement, fancying that she could feel the late earl’s approval and relief as the sheet curled and blackened and, finally, disintegrated in the grate. However, there had been a pamphlet enclosed with the letter too, and this Henrietta had kept: The Rights of Women: A Plea for Suffrage. In it, Christabel Pankhurst set out her case so passionately, fluently and altogether admirably that Henrietta found that she couldn’t in all conscience destroy it. Instead, she had pushed it to the back of her bureau and from time to time she took it out and read its contents. She found herself very drawn to this cause, although there had been a time when, influenced by her parents – in particular her mother – she had taken the opposite view: that politics was a male domain for good reason, and that a woman’s qualities, while no less valuable than a man’s, were better employed in the home. Of course, these days Henrietta was responsible, by default, for the smooth running of three collieries and an estate of twenty-five thousand acres. It was impossible to believe or to argue, either to herself or anyone else, that she lacked the particular acuity of thought or vision to make her own mind up about whom she would like to govern the country. And Christabel Pankhurst’s words, set out so forcefully in her pamphlet, perfectly articulated this burgeoning belief and fixed themselves in Henrietta’s mind as her own strongly held principles.

  However, she had yet to contribute anything practical towards the cause. And then, one warm Saturday in June, as she strolled through Kensington Gardens with Thea on one arm and Tobias on the other, their attention was drawn by a gathering just inside the park by the Albert Memorial. A crowd had collected around an elegant young woman who appeared to be haranguing not the gathering in general, but one gentleman in particular. Her voice was raised and her colour was high, and although she had no podium or pedestal, she drew the eye and dominated the little scene.

  ‘And you believe, sir,’ she was saying, ‘that womankind falls into the same category as infants?’

  ‘In terms of the law of the land, madam, I do.’ The man’s voice was reasonable, in contrast with her own, which was distorted by indignation.

  ‘A woman may be a taxpayer, a homeowner, even – merciful heavens! – a queen, and yet we’re still unworthy of the right to vote?’

  ‘Thank you, madam, you state my position most succinctly.’ He smiled, and looked about him at the faces in the crowd; someone laughed, though most people avoided his eye as if they weren’t yet quite ready to pledge their support either way.

  ‘Then, sir, you are a fool.’

  This was a new voice. It came from the back of the crowd, and it was Henrietta. Tobias and Thea gawped at her in utter astonishment and the collection of spectators turned to face the newcomer to the debate, parting slightly so that the man at the front, who was now at the back, could see the foe. ‘What do you fear will happen if women are enfranchised?’ she said. ‘Do you think we will cease to be wives and mothers? Do you think we will stop loving our children, stop caring for our family members, simply because on polling day we have the same right as you to place a vote?’

  She had a clear, clever, rational voice, and the man, a tall, bewhiskered, professional-looking chap with a silver-tipped walking cane, seemed rather taken aback. He rallied, however.

  ‘I think, madam, that loving your children and caring for your family is the greatest service a woman can perform for society,’ he said, and i
n the crowd there were nods and murmurs of approval. ‘And a dignified woman will always submit to her husband’s or her father’s judgement in all other matters.’

  ‘Or her brother’s,’ Tobias chipped in merrily, and Thea jabbed him hard in the ribs.

  ‘I denounce your assertions.’

  This was the first woman again, and everyone turned back to her. Her eyes blazed and she spat out her words with contempt for his position.

  ‘It is false dignity if it is earned by submission. True dignity for women lies in revolt. We must shed the slave spirit and stand as equals with men, shoulder to shoulder.’

  ‘Women of the British colonies are citizens and voters,’ Henrietta said now, seizing the stage before he was able to interject. ‘But they haven’t ceased to be wives and mothers. Instead, they have shared with their menfolk the democratic right to elect a government.’

  ‘A woman’s democratic rights are expressed through her husband, madam. This is the civilised way.’ The man brandished his cane at Henrietta, not to threaten her but to emphasise his point. ‘I will never concede this point of principle.’

  ‘Then, sir, you are to be pitied,’ Henrietta said. ‘Women will fight their way into every sphere of human activity and you and your kind, like the dodo and the dinosaur, shall become extinct. However, your demise will not be regretted, but celebrated.’

  Across the crowd, the other woman, the first speaker, began to applaud. Toby and Thea joined in and this seemed to signal the end of the entertainment, so the spectators started to drift away. The man with the cane hissed ‘traitor’ at Toby as he passed, stomping out of the park on to Kensington Gore. Toby laughed with delight.

  ‘I say,’ he said. ‘You’re a dark horse, Henry. How did you manage to come up with all that?’

  She didn’t answer, but instead walked over to her fellow combatant, who smiled warmly.

  ‘Eva Gore-Booth,’ the woman said, and held out a hand. She was tall and slender, with a beautiful mass of golden hair.