Ravenscliffe (13 page)

The disarray had been dealt with, but it was impossible – and unthinkable – to audibly articulate the complex mix of punctured excitement and injured pride felt by the Netherwood staff who had assembled in two respectful lines to greet the king, only to be entirely overlooked in the pandemonium that accompanied his arrival. No hands were shaken, no curtseys acknowledged: the very moment the king burst in, Lord Netherwood began snapping his fingers at the valets and housemaids, urging them to fetch this or take that, until the receiving lines were entirely dismantled and the servants had to hurry about their extra duties in the most disappointing, deflating fashion.

‘Staff dinner almost an hour late now,’ was all Mrs Powell-Hughes would allow herself to say to Parkinson as together they left the dining room and took the servants’ staircase down to the kitchen. And then, of course, she learned that a delayed dinner was the least of the difficulties below stairs, because there was Eve Williams where Mrs Adams generally stood, expertly seasoning three five-rib roasts with pepper and thyme, while the cook lay quite dead in the cold store.

The cavalry arrived in the form of Ginger and Nellie but not Alice; Jonas had forbidden his wife to come – his own tea wasn’t on the table yet and he reckoned that trumped the king’s dinner – so Ginger had the coachman stop at Watson Street for Nellie then hotfoot it back to Netherwood Hall.
They were ready for action in their pinnies, Eve’s right-hand women, sitting in one of the earl’s carriages with an aura about them of great importance. In the kitchen they were greeted with a smile and a nod, but there was too much to do to give any time to pleasantries. The beef was in, and there were plum puddings rattling on their trivets on the range. A scribbled menu in Mrs Adams’s near-illegible hand was now in Eve’s possession, though she had made a small alteration to the running order; her Yorkshire puddings would be served as a course in their own right, before the rib of beef and after the pea and bacon soup. It seemed only fair, thought Eve, that they should take centre stage, since they had lured the king to Netherwood in the first place. A good, thick onion gravy would accompany each pudding, served in sweet little individual brass pitchers that Eve had found, dusty and forgotten, stacked in a dresser cupboard. Ivy, shaking slightly and still pasty with shock, was currently preparing them for use, rubbing them with roche alum, buffing them until they shone with the brilliance of solid gold. Nellie was making custard for the plum puddings and had taken over the claret gravy for the beef, too. Ginger was on hollandaise for the salmon fishcakes, and had moved in on the curd tart: Sarah Pickersgill, who had been about to make a start, had been happy to give way, fetching fresh curds from the dairy for Ginger then busying herself soaking currants in rum, the sort of simple task she enjoyed most. No wonder Mary Adams had dropped down dead, thought Eve: the miracle was that it hadn’t happened sooner. There wasn’t a dish of food left this kitchen that Mrs Adams hadn’t had a hand in. Perhaps the strain of performing this feat day in, day out – and, ultimately, terrifyingly, for the reigning monarch – had in the end proved fatal.

‘Do you think a woman could cook ’erself to death?’ Eve asked Nellie, who had just enveloped them both in meaty steam by adding wine to a pan of bubbling beef juices.

Nellie sniffed judgmentally. ‘It were fat killed Mary Adams, you mark my words,’ she said. ‘She fair fills that larder floor. I ’ope t’undertaker ’as plenty ’o timber because she’ll take some boxing.’

‘Always a good spread here. House of plenty, this one.’

The Duke of Knightwick, sitting next to Thea Stirling, patted his pot belly with both hands as if to show her where the food was going.

‘Y’see, you can’t always rely on these great houses,’ he continued. Thea, not very fascinated, glanced at Tobias to see if he was still watching her. He was. ‘At Chatsworth one year’ – the duke lowered his voice now as if the Devonshires, who were safely at home in their Derbyshire pile, might be straining to eavesdrop – ‘the snipe ran short and there were no apologies. None at all. I was given half a bird. Imagine!’

Thea smiled, shook her head in a parody of astonishment and tried to imagine half a snipe but found she couldn’t even picture a whole one. She added snipe to her mental list of things to look up in the English dictionary back in her room.

‘I mean to say,’ said the duke, ‘I’ll share most things with any man, even my wife, but I won’t be made to share a snipe!’ He roared with laughter at his own wit while opposite and along, the Duchess of Knightwick raised a knowing, saucy eyebrow at Sir Wally Goldman. Extraordinary, thought Thea. She cut another glance at Tobias, who caught it and smiled at her. He would be accused of neglecting his neighbours at this rate. She was pleased, though, even as she looked away.

Parkinson stepped into the room, followed by a slick procession of footmen bearing in each of their hands a silver-domed platter. The king sat up in his chair with a boyish enthusiasm for what was to come and conversation, while not
entirely ceasing, dropped to a few murmured exchanges. The footmen slid soundlessly around the table, sharing themselves one between two, and then in perfect synchronicity they placed the platters in a precise and measured fashion onto the table before the diners. A barely discernible tilt of the head from Parkinson, and the domes were raised in beautiful unison, revealing small tureens of the sort of pea and bacon soup that was commonplace all over Netherwood town, but an extraordinary novelty here.

The monarch, watched in varying degrees of fondness by the whole table, dipped his great head like an inquisitive bear and took a deep, impolite, appreciative sniff of the vapours that rose from the bowl. His face registered great pleasure and the countess allowed herself a small frisson of satisfaction: triumph was in the air. The king smiled at Clarissa, lifted his spoon, and began to eat.

A
nna regarded Silas coolly. He wasn’t looking at her, but was reading the newspaper she’d bought earlier, scouring the business pages for, he said, news of his investments. He whistled as he read, the implication being that his shares were high or – perhaps – that high or low, it was all the same to him. Anna didn’t ask. There was a quality about Silas that she found hard to define but which made her determined to resist him. It was late, and she wished he would go. She sat at the sewing machine and concentrated on the fabric in her hands; it was a new bolt of cloth, a jacquard weave, richly patterned in shades of blue from cornflower through to dove grey, the different colours of the summer sky. Anna spent more time in the draper’s than in any other shop in Netherwood. The smell of new fabric lured her just as surely as others were drawn to the aroma of baking bread. She loved the possibilities, the potential, of the cloth: the linens, silks, chintzes, brocades, velvets and damasks. In the shady privacy between the shelves of fabric rolls she imagined Ravenscliffe draped and upholstered, enhanced and embellished by the curtains and covers she planned to make. The cloth she held now was destined for a large window on a half-landing where the staircase turned
an elegant forty-five-degree angle before making its final flight. Anna raised a corner of the cloth to her face and inhaled surreptitiously, smelling its newness, feeling the texture of the weave against her cheek, and when she lowered it Silas was watching her with a smirk on his face.

‘What?’ she said, feeling caught out, defensive.

‘Nothing.’ Silas returned his gaze to the newspaper. He knew Anna’s story – the eviction from her miserable home in Grangely, the death of her wretched Russian husband, the kindness of the meddling Methodist minister who brought her to Netherwood to lodge here in Beaumont Lane – but he didn’t quite understand why, when she was clearly back on her feet, she was still living cheek-by-jowl with his sister. He’d asked her, and she’d looked puzzled by the question. It’s her home, Evie had said; she lives here. Her tone, though friendly, invited no further discussion and Silas had let the matter drop. Odd business though, he thought: there wasn’t a person on God’s green earth with whom Silas could share such close quarters without being driven to madness or murder.

He was waiting, now, for his sister to come home. Anna wished he would go, but word had spread – as word always did – that the cook had dropped dead and so Silas wanted the full story before returning to his rooms. It maddened Anna that suddenly Eve – what she did, what she said, where she was – was Silas’s business. She suspected herself of childish jealousy and tried hard to fight it, and yet here was this stranger, landed among them with tales of the world and his own wonderful success, and Anna – who, goodness knows, had been a stranger to Netherwood herself not so very long ago – found him hard to believe in. Not the reality of him, or his claim on Eve; no one could look at the two of them together and doubt they were siblings. Rather, it was a subtle, unsettling concern, hard for her to express in English, though she’d tried, earlier this afternoon, sitting in the allotment with Amos, sheltering from the downpour
under an old green umbrella that for the past three weeks had been needed solely for shade from the sun. The two of them had been avoiding the royal arrival – Amos thought the king a scandalous drain on the nation’s coffers, Anna thought him merely scandalous – but it had been Silas Whittam on Anna’s mind as they bided their time in the deluge.

‘He’s too … too sure of himself and too … ah, what is word?’

‘Good to be true?’ said Amos, who didn’t mind Silas but could see that the wonder of him might wear thin if you were too long in his company.

‘That, yes. But also he is too often blowing his trumpet.’

Amos didn’t laugh or correct her because he could see how serious Anna was. It troubled her, he knew, that her response to Silas was so different from Eve’s.

‘Aye well, ’appen folk’ll tire o’ listenin’. No point blowin’ a trumpet when you’ve lost yer audience.’

Anna picked up a twig and began to draw it through the earth. Much as it craved the rain, the sun-baked soil was slow to absorb it; water collected in the track she made, forming a miniature canal as it followed the trail left by her stick.

‘When he first came, he seemed interesting. Not many people I meet here have seen anything of world.’

‘No. Bit short of globetrotters in our little corner,’ said Amos.

‘But always he comes and tells stories of his great adventures and always he is great hero. It makes me …’

‘Suspicious?’

She nodded. ‘Sort of. And sad,’ she said, ‘because Eve is so happy to have him here. But I don’t think he’s kind man, and always I’m thinking, what is it you want? Why is it you’re here?’ She looked at him glumly and Amos wondered, not for the first time, what she would do if he put an arm round her shoulders.

‘Look,’ he said, instead. ‘Silas Whittam won’t be around
for too long if ’e’s t’big shot ’e reckons to be. A man like that ’as to keep an eye on ’is business.’

‘This is what I think,’ said Anna. She fell silent for a moment, drawing now a small nine-square grid in the earth with her twig. Then she looked at Amos again.

‘Unless it is business which brings him here,’ she said enigmatically. Then, with a conversational segue that threw him entirely, she said: ‘Noughts and crosses? Here,’ – she gave him the twig – ‘you begin.’