Ravenscliffe

by Jane Sanderson

  ‘You taste beefy,’ she said. She slipped a hand deep inside the waistband of his trousers and felt the shocking contrast of his warm flesh against her cold skin. He gasped, then moaned into her hair like a helpless animal. He pulled the coat tighter around and submitted to her skilful attentions: tiny movements, adroitly placed. In seconds she brought him shuddering to a silent climax and then she brought out her hand, wiped it, deft and efficient, on his tweed waistcoat, and slipped away. He lost sight of her almost at once; it was dark, and the terrace was crowded with friends. His wife had as many tricks as a seasoned whore and this should probably trouble him, he thought: for the life of him, though, he couldn’t do anything but smile.

  Denbigh Court would do very well, Clarissa thought. It was older and more distinguished than Netherwood Hall: begun in the sixteenth century and completed in the seventeenth, it had been designed by a student of Inigo Jones and had all the free and fanciful hallmarks of the Jacobean age. Netherwood Hall, by comparison, was quite flat and dull. Archie Partington would do well enough too, though Clarissa had made it plain, in terms that couldn’t be misunderstood, that their relationship would not extend into the bedroom. His face had fallen, but she had stood firm. It wasn’t as if he lacked an heir; he had offspring from both of his previous marriages. And she presumed that, if he still felt the urge to seek physical pleasure, then he must have some arrangement already in place. There was no earthly reason for his marriage to Clarissa to alter the way they both lived. All of this she set out with no more emotion than a lawyer, adding that if Archie should pre-decease her, she must insist on inheriting, in her name for the duration of her own life, his Park Lane mansion. She would not be forced to hole up with his oldest son Henry and his fat wife, whose name she had been told countless times but which continued to elude her. Archie listened to all of this and when she finished, he said: ‘Very well, my dear. Received and understood,’ and then he gave her a bracelet of emeralds and she felt almost sorry that she’d been so stern.

  ‘How do you like the duke?’ she said later to Isabella. ‘Shall you be able to love your new papa?’

  ‘Shall I be expected to?’ Isabella asked, with some surprise. ‘I don’t see why I should if you don’t.’

  Clarissa had chided Isabella for her insolence, but half-heartedly. After all, she made a perfectly good point. However, she must remember, said Clarissa, that through the Duke of Plymouth, great connections could be made. He dined with the king whenever he was in London, she said, widening her eyes significantly, as if to suggest that Isabella might reasonably hope to throw her cap at a prince. Isabella was sceptical: wasn’t royal blood a requirement in the bride of a prince?

  ‘Depends,’ Bryony said in the bedroom that night. ‘One of the younger ones with no chance of the throne, perhaps. You’re the daughter of an earl, and you’ll be step-daughter of a duke. Quite the aristocrat. I, of course, can hope for very little, especially now my parents have brought disgrace upon me. I shall be free to marry for love, however. I shall live a passionate life with a man who cares nothing for material wealth.’

  She sounded jubilant, not tragic, and Isabella was silent. She didn’t know what to say. The older girl seemed to have the knack of deflating Isabella’s spirits while affecting to buoy them up. She wondered if she might have Bryony sent back to London.

  Claude Reynard had given notice. César Ritz was building a new hotel in Piccadilly that would open in spring next year, and Monsieur Reynard simply couldn’t resist the glamour, the cachet or – perhaps most significantly – the promise of working once more among compatriots. This Yorkshire kitchen had lost its appeal; he wished to bark orders in French and have them understood; he wished to sit, eat and behave how he liked, free from the baleful gaze of an English butler; he wished never again to be asked to provide a crowd of unruly inebriates with fifty baked potatoes in place of dinner. At home in Bordeaux, pommes de terre au four was what his grandmother had fed to the pigs, and they did not require an Escoffier-trained chef to produce them. Sarah Pickersgill, given the bare bones of the news by Mrs Powell-Hughes, dropped like a stone onto a kitchen chair and looked at the housekeeper with damp and wounded eyes.

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  Mrs Powell-Hughes said: ‘He has his reasons,’ which meant she wasn’t entirely sure herself.

  ‘I believe he’s had a better offer,’ said Parkinson. ‘The London Ritz wants him, and if you ask me—’

  ‘I haven’t asked you, Mr Parkinson,’ said Sarah, made bold by her grief and disappointment. ‘And I don’t want to ’ear it.’

  She stood and ran from the room, her pinny at her face to catch the tears. The butler looked at Mrs Powell-Hughes in high dudgeon, but she wasn’t in the mood to join him.

  ‘Let her go,’ she said. ‘She’ll come to her senses before long.’

  There was a pause, during which Parkinson wondered when, exactly, it had become acceptable for an under-cook to dish up insolence to a butler. For now, and while he still could, he blamed Claude Reynard.

  ‘The sooner the Frenchman goes, the better,’ he said. ‘Good riddance, I say. He has his merits, but I’m afraid I just don’t like him.’

  ‘Well, Mr Parkinson, you surprise me,’ said Mrs Powell-Hughes. ‘You’ve done such a good job of concealing it.’

  He was polishing the plate as she spoke and something in her tone made him stop and look up from the task. The housekeeper had turned away to busy herself with table linen, but Parkinson got the distinct impression that her shoulders were shaking with laughter. For a little while, he watched her, hurt and indignation battling in his breast, but soon enough the shaking stopped and she began to hum lightly as she folded the linen glass cloths and placed them in tidy piles in a dresser drawer. But he felt unsettled. It seemed to him – and it had done now for quite some months – that the ordered surface of his existence was starting to craze with hairline cracks and the sight of the housekeeper’s private mirth was yet more evidence of a creeping deterioration in standards of behaviour. It was disorientating; he was surrounded on all sides by the familiar, yet by tiny increments the world was altering, and not for the better. It was a measure of his distress that he found himself wondering who was butler at Denbigh Court and whether the dowager countess might insist he be replaced by her own dear Parkinson.

  Chapter 60

  On 4 December the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, surrendered the seals of office, driven out by dissent in his party over tariff reform, and the shrewd Scotsman Henry Campbell-Bannerman stepped up to the crease with a minority Liberal government. There’d be a general election within weeks and Enoch was worried. Balfour’s game plan was to manoeuvre the opposition into office, dragging all the old Liberal disagreements into the spotlight and ushering in an easy Conservative victory at the next election. But his tactics were wrong, said Enoch to Amos.

  ‘Dead wrong. Campbell-Bannerman’s a canny bugger. Look at ’is Cabinet. Asquith, Grey, Haldane – it’s stronger already than t’last lot. All Balfour’s done is given t’Liberals a chance to shine.’

  ‘Aye, I reckon you’re right,’ Amos said. They were in their office at the YMA, but union business lay unfinished on their desks while bigger themes enjoyed their full attention. This was how it was these days: hard to concentrate on minor amendments to this or that motion when the nation was in a state of limbo and every day the newspapers promised that an election was imminent. ‘Webster Thorne’s walking round Ardington like ’e’s lost a penny and found a shilling. Thinks there’s a place for ’im in t’Foreign Office, by all accounts. Pal of Grey’s from a long time back, apparently.’

  ‘Balliol,’ said Enoch, glumly. ‘That lot all know each other, one way or another.’

  ‘It’s what you know that counts in Ardington, not who you know,’ Amos said. He smiled. ‘Anyway, we’ve got a trump card now.’

  ‘Oh aye?’

  ‘Anna. She’s on first-name terms wi’ t’mayor, she’s making a new set o’ curtains for t�
�miners’ welfare. Butcher saves t’best cuts o’ meat for ’er. Greengrocer lets ’er know when ’e gets Savoys in. You’d think she were born and bred.’

  It was true. Anna had lived in Ardington for just two months, but already she was part of the local furniture, familiar and welcome. Molly Jenks, who for the past thirty years had sold an unchanging range of strictly serviceable balls of wool from her shop on the high street, was now stocking bolts of cloth and reels of ribbon so that Anna would go in more often. She sat on the Poor Relief Committee, the Miners’ Welfare Committee and had been asked to join the school board when the new term began in January. Twice a week she and Maya took the train to Netherwood, and the station master wouldn’t let the train go until they were safely on it, even if – as sometimes happened – Maya refused to run and they were five minutes late.

  ‘Don’t get complacent,’ Enoch said now. ‘It’ll take more than Anna to send you to Parliament.’ He was in a black mood. Just days, in all likelihood, before an election was called and the Liberals were looking like the future.

  Amos looked at him across the desk.

  ‘It will,’ he said. ‘But if she was married to Webster Thorne – perish the thought – we should be worried. So think on.’

  The house they had rented had a number, not a name, which struck Anna as rather sad, since it was such a characterful dwelling in every other way. It was an old weaver’s cottage, built during the Barnsley linen boom in the eighteenth century, so the basement was high and cavernous, having been built to accommodate the looms. Outside, a long flight of stone steps ran up from the pavement to the raised front door. From the parlour, passers by could be heard but not seen. A good house for a flood, Amos said, should the Dearne and Dove canal ever burst its banks. It had a good-sized kitchen, a second small parlour as well as the larger front one, three bedrooms upstairs and no bathroom.

  ‘Tin tub and outside privy,’ Anna had said when they first looked at it.

  ‘Just like t’old days. Can you face it, or shall we look elsewhere?’

  But the fact was, she liked the cottage and in any case there wasn’t much indoor plumbing to be had in Ardington. So she settled for what she’d once been grateful for and Maya, whose only memories were of Ravenscliffe and night-time trips along a dark landing to a lavatory whose hidden pipes clanked and groaned monstrously, thought the chamber pot a fine invention.

  There was still an old loom in the lofty basement: a cumbersome beast, with trailing strands of warp thread hanging from the heddle. A spindle-backed chair was positioned at its centre and there were foot pedals to work the shuttle. This basement was to be her workroom, and though Amos had offered to chop it up for kindling, Anna had insisted that the loom be left in peace. This morning she had cleaned it, wiping away the dust of decades and now she sat down on the chair and pushed hard on a pedal with her right foot. The loom, woken from its long sleep, lurched into noisy activity and she drew back at once, in some alarm. She tried again, more gently this time, watching the mechanics of it, trying to understand and interpret its movements. She wondered if she might try to make her own cloth. She wondered where to buy flax for linen. She wondered who had once sat here, making from the warp and the weft something useful, or even beautiful.

  Outside on the street the sound of a motor – a rare thing in Ardington, where the horse and cart still reigned supreme – interrupted her reverie, followed by footsteps, quick and purposeful, up the steps from the pavement to her door. Mac barked at their approach. A sharp rap and then Maya’s voice came from upstairs – ‘Mam,’ she shouted from her post at the parlour window, ‘there’s a lady.’ Anna left the loom, climbed the basement steps and opened the front door to find Thea Hoyland, all smiles, incongruous in a bolero jacket of gold sable and a matching fur headband. On the street Atkins stood beside the motorcar. He nodded when he saw Anna, and touched his cap. She waved.

  ‘Wonderful,’ Thea said. ‘I was worried you might be out and about. Can I come in?’

  Anna smiled. ‘Of course,’ she said, and she opened the door wide, hoping as she did so that Amos wouldn’t come home to find the countess in the house and a Daimler outside.

  Tobias was in bed reading Horse and Hound when Henrietta found him. His bedroom had been the last place she looked, given that it was already almost lunchtime, yet there he was, tucked up and smiling at her, a little sheepish; he could tell from the way she was dressed and the flush to her cheeks that she had just come in from outside, and even Toby wasn’t insensitive to the glaring contrast of their respective situations.

  ‘Hello Sis,’ he said. ‘You find me déshabillé, old thing. I feel somewhat at a disadvantage.’

  ‘I’ve had enough, Toby,’ she said, and he sat up a little straighter against the duck down.

  ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘Give me half a mo’ and I’ll sling on some clothes. I meant to be up in time for lunch anyway.’

  ‘I’m going to Manchester for a few days to stay with a friend there. You’ll find the diary on the desk in Daddy’s old study – you remember where that is, do you? Two doors down from the gun room, if that helps.’

  Her tone was distinctly cold. He wished he was in the armchair, at least.

  ‘Not quite sure what you’re driving at, Henry. Of course I know where the study is.’

  ‘Good. Then you can make your way there after lunch and acquaint yourself with what has to be done over the next week or so. There are meetings at all three collieries and Mr Garforth is coming over to Long Martley from Altofts tomorrow, so it’s especially important that you’re there to see him. There’s a contractor coming to conduct a drain survey at Home Farm. Jem knows all about that. Be sure to speak to the bailiff at least once, doesn’t matter what about, it’s just that he’s been left to his own devices for too long and needs reminding that he isn’t a law unto himself. Someone should address the matter of hiring a new cook. Sarah Pickersgill might do, though she’s rather young for the job. Where’s Thea, by the way? I can’t find her anywhere. Honestly, Toby, you look quite ridiculous, gaping in that way.’

  He was sure now that she was having fun at his expense and he put on a high-pitched comedy voice to show what a sport he was. ‘Mr what? Drain survey? Who’s Sarah Pickersgill? Have you gone stark raving mad?’

  ‘On the contrary, I believe I’ve come to my senses. I shall be in Manchester until next Wednesday, after which you, Thea and I will sit down together and talk sensibly about how the multitude of responsibilities attendant on our privileged existence here may be shared equally between the three of us.’

  ‘Who do we know in Manchester?’

  Now he whined rather than spoke, and his question was hardly to the point, but she answered patiently enough.

  ‘You don’t know anyone,’ she said. ‘I have several friends there, but I shall be staying with Eva Gore-Booth. I’ll leave an address, for emergencies only.’

  ‘Look, you’ve caught me on the hop here,’ he said, adopting a third voice, this one his sensible man of the world. ‘Let’s reconvene in the dining room at one. Yes?’

  ‘No, I shall be on my way by then. I’m lunching on the train. Cheerio, Tobes. And don’t look so glum. Say goodbye to Thea for me, will you? Did you say where she’s gone?’

  ‘Why would I know? She pleases herself.’

  ‘Whereas you are the embodiment of altruism,’ she said, and she stalked out of the room, leaving him to wallow in his own injured feelings. His sister was such a brute, always had been. She spoke to him as if he was a perfect idiot. Two doors down from the gun room indeed. He reached for a cigarette from the box on the bedside cabinet, lit it, took a long, restorative drag then, with the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, lay back against the pillows again, his hands behind his head, his eyes closed. He breathed heavily through his nostrils, in and out, again and again, and the sound he made was curiously soothing, curiously effective at banishing unpleasantness. Betty Cross popped into his mind, unbidden but not unwelcome. He con
jured an image of her, her bodice untied to the waist, his hands up her skirts, and from here it was an easy step to wondering idly if she was still in the Netherwood dairy or whether some other young lord had the pleasure of her these days. And in the end it was this thought, rather than the diary on the study desk or any of the estate matters awaiting his attention, that got him out of bed.

  When Amos walked in at just past six o’clock, Anna and Maya were sitting together at the kitchen table playing pairs. She was only three years old but there was no beating her at this game: once seen, always remembered. Anna, on the other hand, found the opposite was true: once seen, instantly forgotten. Maya thought this was hilarious. ‘No Mam, that’s t’kitten,’ she was saying, though she spoke with some difficulty, on account of her merriment. Anna was quite glad of the interruption.

  ‘Come and sit,’ she said. ‘Help me find yacht.’

  ‘We’re on,’ Amos said. ‘Campbell-Bannerman’s dissolved Parliament.’

  She stood up, since his tone and his news seemed to merit it.

  ‘Good. At last,’ she said. ‘Tea?’

  ‘I’ll make it,’ he said, and so she sat down again, watching him. So this was it: the beginning of the campaign, the end of the wait. Amos picked up the kettle and placed it on the range. On the worktop was a sheaf of papers of various sizes, each headed with a different address. He picked them up and flicked through.