Netherwood (42 page)

A little dog planted itself at Eve’s feet where she sat at the kitchen table. It was some kind of terrier, a cross-breed, with a short muzzle, brindle coat and soft ears folded over on themselves. It nudged her skirts with its black nose, and she shifted her legs away. Dogs in the kitchen, she thought. What kind of place is this? Daniel, also seated at the table but a little further along, watched the little dog’s valiant efforts to be noticed, and could relate to its disappointment. Though he hadn’t gone so far as nudging Eve with his nose, he had tried various other ways to coax a smile from her. He had passed her the milk jug. He had offered her fruitcake. He had asked about the journey down. She had responded appropriately – accepted the milk, declined the cake, answered politely – but
she looked so sad as she did so that Daniel had retreated for fear of provoking tears. In any case, the company around the table was lively, as ever, and he was soon distracted by the banter between the kitchen maids and the footmen, whose conversation was usually mildly scandalous and all the more entertaining for it.

Eve couldn’t follow what any of them said. They spoke too quickly in a strange accent about people she didn’t know, and the lasses laughed coquettishly at everything the lads said. She drank her tea – it was weak and peculiarly fragrant, as if someone had introduced a few drops of scent into the tea caddy – and glumly took in her surroundings. The kitchen, she thought, wasn’t up to much, not compared to the one at Netherwood Hall or her own at the mill, although even in her bleakness she realised that bottomless misery was probably skewing the picture. Still, the work surfaces looked cluttered and floury, and in spite of the high ceiling the room felt airless. Not a pastry-making room, this. Not a single suitable surface. Perhaps she was expected to work in the scullery. She could see directly into it from where she sat; a soft heap of rabbits was piled on the stone floor, ready for a minion to skin and gut. Netherwood rabbits, thought Eve, wistfully. Must be. No chance of wild rabbits here in London, where all the fields have been swallowed up. The buildings might be soot-blackened up at home, and the workings of the pits might cast a shadow down the high street, but a short walk in any direction would soon bring you to open land. Eve had never felt fonder of Netherwood than she did now. She sipped her strange brew and surrendered entirely to despondency.

Opposite her the cook, until now in close conversation with Mrs Munster, had decided the time had come to cross-examine the newcomer. Beryl Carmichael, a pleasant enough woman while her sovereignty remained unquestioned, could turn despot at the drop of a hat when she sensed a challenge. She
had previous form in this regard; the countess, aware that the best families often employed a French chef to run the kitchen, had made two ill-advised attempts to tamper with the hierarchy. On each occasion, the highly trained messieurs had flounced back to Paris after only a short term, defeated by the redoubtable and, it has to be said, devious Mrs Carmichael, who had made their working lives entirely impossible, resorting even to childish sabotage where necessary. Cold draughts on risen soufflés, salt in the sugar bowl, that kind of thing. She managed all of this without alerting the suspicions of Lady Hoyland, who twice now had thrown herself gratefully – if metaphorically – back into the arms of her faithful cook. To be fair, Mrs Carmichael was not motivated by self-interest alone; she was mounting a rearguard action to protect England from insidious Gallic influence. The paucity of aristocratic old families in France, for which the proud republic only had itself to blame, meant a glut of overqualified French cooks. This was Mrs Carmichael’s view, at any rate, and in defending her kitchen, she felt she was doing her bit for King and Country. English cooks for English kitchens was her motto, and she would have had it stitched across the front of everyone’s apron if she’d been able. Meanwhile the countess seemed to have been persuaded that Parisian chefs were for occasional use only, and since the earl much preferred a good sirloin of beef or a saddle of mutton over anything fancier, there were no complaints from him either. But now perfidy was in the air again, in the form of this young intruder from Netherwood. It didn’t help that Lady Hoyland, innocent of kitchen politics and careless of feelings, had merely sent a blithe message to the Fulton House kitchen telling them to expect Eve on the seventh of May and to purchase any ingredients she might need.

Mrs Carmichael pointedly cleared her throat, and Eve looked up bleakly from her reflections.

‘So,’ said the cook, loud and clear. ‘Mrs, erm, Williams. Why on earth are you here? What is it you’re meant to be so good at exactly?’

It was so blatantly unkind, so clearly an attack, that it commanded the attention of the whole table. The scullery maid on Eve’s right actually gasped audibly with the drama of it, and for the rest of her life, she never forgot Eve’s response.

‘I don’t know why I’m so tired, Mrs Carmichael, since I’ve done nothin’ all day but sit on my backside,’ she said, in measured tones which took all her resolve to maintain. ‘Nevertheless, I find I’m too exhausted to bother tryin’ to justify myself to you. Tomorrow I may feel differently.’

She was acutely aware, for the first time in her life, of her flat Netherwood vowels, and she was proud of them. She stood, and her chair scraped back on the stone floor, loud in the near-silent kitchen. The terrier at her feet watched her closely, as if a walk in the park might be on the cards.

Eve looked down the table at the assembled faces. ‘Perhaps someone would be kind enough to show me to my room,’ she said. This, she knew, was a gamble, since Mrs Carmichael’s influence on the household staff was clearly much greater than hers. Yet she didn’t wish to stalk out of the room alone; she might inadvertently walk into a pantry and lose any advantage she had gained. However, joy of joys, four footmen jumped to their feet in a race to open the door for the heroine of the hour. Eve carefully replaced her chair, nodded solemnly, once at Mrs Carmichael and again at Mrs Munster, then left the room accompanied by the victorious footman. He led her along a corridor, up a narrow flight of stairs and through a green baize door which gently swung itself shut in their wake with a series of soft flumps.

Back in the kitchen, under the table, the dog slumped to the floor broken-hearted and Daniel almost gave in to an
impulse to break the astonished silence by leading a round of applause.

Meanwhile, in the privacy of her quarters Eve cried with noisy abandon for a full fifteen minutes. Then, as her tears began to abate, she thought of the lost comfort of Arthur’s strong arms holding her to his broad, dependable chest, and she sobbed anew.

A
mos stood on an upturned wooden crate which until recently had held twelve bottles of Samuel Smith’s pale ale, but served as well now as a podium as it had for its original purpose. He needed the extra height to be seen at the back since the room was packed with off-duty miners, here in the tap room of the Hare and Hounds. He’d chosen the location so that there was the promise of a pint for any man who attended, and also because Albert Roscoe, the pub’s landlord, knew how to mind his own business; nothing he saw or heard in his establishment had ever been used against a living soul. That he was in every other way an irascible old bugger was another matter, and not to the point as far as Amos was concerned.

He’d committed nothing to paper, spreading news of the meeting by word of mouth, approaching the few miners he knew were discontent with their lot. They in their turn spoke to others of a similar opinion, who in turn spoke to others, and so on and so forth in the manner of these things, until it was a widely known but well-kept secret that the inaugural meeting of the New Mill branch of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association was to be held on Monday the ninth of May at the Hare and Hounds, at eight o’clock in the evening. That
is, before the night shift started work, and before tomorrow’s day shift took to their beds. It was coincidentally – and perhaps fortuitously – the same day that the Earl of Netherwood and his family left for their sojourn in London; Lord Hoyland would hardly have sat so easy in the carriage of his train had he been privy to the information that his blanket ban on union membership, cast in stone – he believed – in 1893, was now being so boldly and coldly disregarded.

Frankly, Amos was wondering why he’d taken so long to get cracking. He never would have believed the numbers that had turned up, if he wasn’t witnessing with his own eyes the massed ranks of flat caps and Woodbines. It was a salutary lesson. Never take apparent apathy at face value; the lack of demand for action was not necessarily a signal to do nothing. Now, having got them here, the challenge was to keep them friendly. To speak of representation and negotiation. To save the fire and brimstone for future emergencies that Amos was certain they would face.

‘Right, now then, thank you,’ he said from atop his crate. The room settled and quietened. All eyes were on him and he had a brief, strange, out-of-body vision of himself at the head of this crowd of men, about to address them. It felt comfortable, apt, natural. As if this was what he was always meant to do.

‘I’ll keep this brief,’ he said. ‘There’s upwards o’ eighteen hundred miners in this town. If tha not a shopkeeper or a landlord’ – he waved across at Albert, because it was always worth trying to get a smile out of him, not that he succeeded – ‘tha’r probably a miner.’

There was a murmur of agreement at this statement of the obvious.

‘And what I’m sayin’ to you tonight is, we should all of us, every man Jack, be protected by union membership. There’s fifty thousand members of t’Yorkshire Miners’ Association.
Fifty thousand men, for t’most part ’ardworkin’, god-fearin’ men with no desire to bring t’British Empire to its knees’ – though we could, if we downed tools, he thought – ‘just a strongly ’eld belief in t’rights of miners to decent pay, decent housin’ and safety underground.

‘Now I’m not sayin’ Lord ’oyland is a bad employer. Compared to some, ’e’s a saint. But just because ’e’s better than most shouldn’t mean we’re denied a voice. Alone, as individuals, we ’ave no voice. United, as a whole, we can be ’eard. It’s time we joined t’YMA, and by so doin’, bring Lord ’oyland into t’twentieth century and show ’im that ’e ’as nowt to fear from us.’

A voice piped up from the back of the room.

‘Oh aye, Amos Sykes, that’s right enough. But we ’ave plenty to fear from Lord ’oyland.’

There was a smattering of laughter and a ripple of interest at this. Sidney Cutts, thought Amos. Mouthy devil. He’d seen him arrive, and knew he’d have something to say.

‘What will ’e do?’ said Amos, speaking towards Sidney, over the low rumble of noise which duly subsided. ‘Sack everybody? Clear us all out and start anew wi’ young lads and strangers? T’earl knows as well as we do that ’is workforce is one of ’is greatest assets. Some of us ’ave worked these seams for nigh on thirty years or more. We know them tunnels an’ workin’s better than we know t’way ’ome. Do you really think Lord ’oyland places no value on that?’

Actually Amos was far from sure that this was the case, but it was a fine idea at any rate, and it gave the assembled miners something to think about. Most of the men in the room had never considered their existence in terms of value to the earl. They waited for more.

Amos shifted slightly on the beer crate. He would wind things up, he thought, keep it brief. He could talk all night on the subject if he wasn’t careful.

‘Nob’dy wants strike action. Nob’dy wants a repeat in Netherwood o’ what ’appened in Grangely. All I’m callin’ for tonight is that we, as a body of men, join t’Yorkshire Miners’ Association so that if, some time in t’future, we need to negotiate, we shall have t’wisdom and might of t’union behind us. An’ if we join, more’ll follow. Long Martley an’ Middlecar will take their lead from New Mill an’ all. Gents, let’s show ’em t’right way.’

This was a masterstroke. The prospect of beating the two other Netherwood collieries to anything was hard for any of them to resist. Amos stepped down from his crate, and moved through the crush of men to a table he had placed near the bar. On it was all the paperwork he needed to sign up new members, supplied to him earlier in the day by the YMA. He was becoming a regular visitor to the imposing headquarters in Barnsley, where he had found the officers were more than happy to help him rally the troops at New Mill, and forcibly steer the Earl of Netherwood into the light.