Ravenscliffe (15 page)

‘Tomorrow then,’ said the king brusquely. ‘It’s settled. Anyone care to accompany?’ He looked around at his fellow diners, who were very few at this hour. Lady Netherwood rarely emerged from her room before eleven in the morning, preferring to take breakfast in bed, and she had encouraged the female guests to do the same, although Thea Stirling and Henrietta were at the table, having agreed to ride out with Tobias and Dickie before nine. Joseph Choate, the American ambassador, was present, as was Frank Ponsonby and the Duke of Knightwick. His Duchess was absent and, one couldn’t help but notice, so was Sir Wally. Poor show, thought the earl.

‘Oh sure,’ said Thea unexpectedly. ‘Count me in.’

The earl looked aghast but the king beamed. He loved a tomboy, and this young woman seemed game for a good time. She’d been somewhat the star of the show last night; she had produced a gramophone record and popped it on just as the gathering was beginning to droop. It was an extraordinary, foot-tapping, syncopated something-or-other, music from the wrong side of the tracks, Thea had said. The king had danced
with her, doing exactly as she told him; then Alice had cut in and Thea had hauled Tobias to his feet and the pair of them had cut quite a dash, dancing as if they’d had a bit of practice together.

‘Splendid,’ the king said to her and she nodded at him pleasantly as she carried on eating, balancing bacon on a piece of toast and carrying it up to her mouth without recourse to cutlery. Watching her, the earl wondered if she knew quite in whose company she was breakfasting. She was more at ease than anyone else in the party, and she flouted the rules of English etiquette with such supreme grace and style that Teddy suspected they’d all be copying her before the visit was over.

‘Me too, please,’ piped up Henrietta. Her father cut her a disapproving look. She was taking advantage of the situation, having begged him, often and to no avail, to take her in a cage down a mineshaft.

The king laughed. ‘Just the girls and myself, then, eh?’ at which cue, Frank Ponsonby declared himself available, as did Tobias, eagerly and with great gusto; he had shunned countless entreaties from the earl to show an interest in the collieries yet now, this morning, he simply couldn’t wait. The earl and Henrietta, united – if only briefly – in their derision, shared a smile across the table.

‘Well,’ said Lord Netherwood, determined still to impose some order and authority on this plan, ‘I’ll see what can be done. Ladies, you can certainly visit the colliery yard and Your Majesty, I shall arrange for a—’

‘Oh no you don’t,’ said Thea perkily, wagging a forefinger at him. ‘We go where the boys go, don’t we Henry?’

‘Certainly we do,’ said Henrietta, nipping in before her father could stop her. ‘Helmets all round; can’t see a problem.’

Dickie said: ‘It’ll be dark, noisy and dull, I’ll wager. I shan’t go.’

Henrietta smiled fondly at him.

‘Dear Dickie,’ she said. ‘Such a spirit of adventure! Such curiosity about the world!’

He looked at her with placid eyes. There was never any baiting him.

‘I’d rather shoot, that’s all,’ he said mildly. ‘I’d always rather shoot than almost anything else.’

The king signalled for more woodcock. Two, he found, were never enough.

‘One can shoot anywhere,’ he said, to the gathering in general. ‘But only in Netherwood can one mine for coal.’

Silas Whittam was on his way to the railway station when he encountered Jem Arkwright, heading in the same direction. They nodded at each other and Silas fell into step with him, pleased at the opportunity to talk to the earl’s land agent: he was a useful man to know, Silas had worked that out within a day or two of arriving in Netherwood. It was a skill of his, weeding out the wheat from the chaff, and part of the secret of his success. Silas couldn’t care less if someone was decent, kind, honourable, honest; the only quality he looked for in a new acquaintance was the extent of their usefulness to him. Jem, with his knowledge of land prices, his understanding of the market, his instinct for a good deal, was very much Silas’s kind of chap.

‘Off again then,’ said Jem, and it was a statement, not a question.

‘Briefly. Back to Bristol for a few days. The fleet’s due in tomorrow and I need to be there to check the cargo.’

This was untrue, in fact: not that the ships were due – they were – but that he had to be there. Hugh Oliver, his deputy at Whittam and Co., was more than capable of managing without him, but Silas had decided that a few days back in
Bristol would be preferable to being obliged to help Eve with the dreary upheaval of moving house. Let the Scotsman do the heavy lifting: he himself had no wish to be involved in any of it. Rather, he thought he’d like to return when she was nicely ensconced in the lovely house up on the common. Her sharp-tongued shadow, Anna Rabinovich, had given him a sideways look when he made his sorrowful apologies, and he had smiled pleasantly at her, which was his favoured method of attack.

‘Bananas, in’t it?’ said Jem pithily.

‘It is. Fascinating trade, and demand’s increasing all the time. I say, are you heading for the station too?’

Jem shook his head. ‘New Mill,’ he said.

‘Shame. We could’ve talked on the train.’

‘Oh aye? About what?’ The land agent eyed Silas cautiously. He was wearing a three-piece suit and a Homburg hat and by his side, in breeches and a collarless shirt, Jem felt very much the working man. He doubted they had anything much in common.

‘Well.’ Silas looked about him before he continued. ‘I was thinking of sinking a mine.’

Jem hadn’t known what he expected this dandified brother of Eve Williams to say, but it certainly wasn’t that. Not that he betrayed any surprise in his response. ‘Oh aye,’ he said, as if Silas had said he was thinking of buying a loaf of bread.

‘I need my own supply of bunker fuel for the ships. Makes no sense, dealing out hard-earned money to feed the beasts when I could be producing my own. And with the proposed expansion of the fleet …’

He tailed off, expecting some interest from Jem, but the man strode along silently beside him. Unless a direct question had been asked, Jem Arkwright saw no reason to speak.

‘So,’ said Silas, as this fact dawned on him. ‘I’m after a prime piece of land where a shaft might be sunk. Wondered
if you might have some suggestions. Have you heard of anything likely? On the grapevine, as it were?’

‘No,’ said Jem bluntly. He didn’t much like the volley of questions, or the familiarity implied by them. Also, the earl’s interests – always paramount in the thoughts of his land agent – seemed vaguely under threat from this newcomer. Jem, devoted to the earl and the preservation of his prosperity, was inclined to throw him off the scent.

‘No,’ he said again. ‘An’ there’s no point pursuin’ it, if you want my view. This part o’ Yorkshire’s bristlin’ wi’ windin’ gear as it is. There’s been no new mine sunk for nigh on forty years. You’d be wastin’ your time an’ your money.’

‘I see.’ Silas felt rather deflated. Jem had a dour and final manner of speaking that could make a man feel a proper fool.

‘What about, perhaps, buying, just for the sake of argument, an existing colliery?’ Silas spoke cautiously, as if his proposal was hypothetical: some self-protection was necessary, he felt.

‘Aye, well. Different story, that,’ said Jem. ‘Course, you’d want to know why it were for sale in’t first place.’

‘Of course,’ said Silas, encouraged. ‘Of course. There’d be no rushing into anything. And do you know of anything? For sale, I mean?’

‘Aye, one or two.’

‘And they are?’ Good God, thought Silas: blood from a stone.

‘Ashton Vale’s lookin’ for new owners. Out by Monk Bretton, Barnsley way. An’ Dreaton Main’s coming up, just through Netherwood, out on Sheffield Road.’

Jem lapsed back into silence. Silas, needing more, said: ‘So, Ashton Vale any good?’

‘Terrible. Poor coal, ’ard to extract.’

No harder surely, thought Silas, than it was to extract information from Jem. He chipped away with another question.

‘And Dreaton Main?’

‘Aye,’ said Jem. ‘Decent colliery, productive. They’ll be after a good price.’

Suddenly, without ceremony, Jem swung a right turn on to the track that led down to the pit yard of New Mill Colliery. Silas, surprised and more than a little put out, watched him go then called out: ‘Goodbye then, Mr Arkwright,’ with a noticeable edge to his voice, a slight, ironic reproof. Jem, if he picked it up at all, ignored it.

He hadn’t intended any sort of slight; it was simply that when Jem’s path diverged from that of the other man, he saw no reason for formalities. This was Jem’s way. He had a job to do, a message to deliver to Don Manvers in the pit office and therefore he took the New Mill road when he came upon it. Other folk might have time for farewells, but Jem never wasted his breath on them. So he thought nothing of it, and no more of Silas Whittam, as he entered the yard. It was mid-morning, three hours before the end of the day shift; he could see the lads at the screens in the far shed, a few more at the mouth of the pit unloading wagons, and Wilf Barrow nodded a greeting through the open doorway of the stores, but otherwise there were few people about on the pit top. Jem thanked God, as he always did when the earl’s business sent him to one of the collieries, that he wasn’t a miner, that his work was outside, on the land, in daylight; he’d rather spend twelve months digging ditches in driving rain than spend a single day in a tunnel underground.

Don was at his desk, head down, poring over price lists. Best coal, seconds coal, top coal, slack, riddled slack, screen slack: all separately priced, all changing – sometimes up, often down – by the week. Whether Netherwood coal held its price
at the Coal Exchange was the estate’s concern, not his personal one, but Don felt the fluctuations as if his own carelessness might be the cause. So his brow was furrowed when he looked up, and he kept his place on the column of figures with an index finger, firmly planted.

‘’ow do,’ he said, and then: ‘What’s up now?’ because Jem Arkwright rarely darkened his door, and only then when there was some kind of problem.

‘Message from Lord Netherwood,’ said Jem, holding open the door but not coming in. ‘You’ve to smarten up t’pit yard and t’shaft bottom. T’king ’as a mind to pay a visit.’

Don laughed. ‘Very funny.’

Jem smiled grimly.

‘I’m not coddin’,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, before t’afternoon shift goes down, you’ll ’ave a royal visit and ’e wants to go down t’pit. So, daft as it sounds, you mun get them lads off them screens, and give ’em a broom each. There’s tins o’ whitewash coming’ up on a cart, and some planted tubs. Set tomorrow’s day shift on wi’ it an’ all. T’earl says do what you ’ave to do, but get it done.’

Jem retreated, closing the door on Don, and began to cross the pit yard then stopped, came back, and stuck his head around the door again.

‘There’s a pile o’ timber needs shiftin’ out there by t’stores and summat needs to be done wi’ all that rustin’ iron. It’s a right mess.’

‘It’s a pit yard,’ said Don, but he said it to a closed door because Jem was gone.

T
he day they moved house from Beaumont Lane to Ravenscliffe, Seth couldn’t be found. This came as no surprise to anyone, but still, the boy had to be located and Eliza was dispatched to all his usual haunts: the allotment, the railway track, Harley Hill. She stood at the top, panting with the effort of running all the way and, like a lad in the crow’s nest of the sort of ship she imagined for her Uncle Silas, she turned a full circle, one flat hand shading her eyes, scanning the terrain beneath and beyond. She meandered then towards home: forgot, for a while, her mission and joined a skipping game in Allott’s Way then, remembering again, she hurried back, bursting into the upturned household with the message that Seth was nowhere.

Anna, her face obscured by the crates she carried, said: ‘You mean you can’t find him.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘No. You said Seth was nowhere. This makes no sense.’

Eliza was used to Anna’s lectures in the uses and meaning of language, but even she could see that now was no time to engage in a debate. There was a high-sided dray in Watson Street by the entry, and the contents of the house were being
carried out and piled onto it. Everything looked smaller outside the house than it had when it was inside, and much less comfy, thought Eliza. She watched in a detached manner as the narrow single beds and Maya’s cot were brought out by two bulky men whose arms, thick as hams, made light work of their humble sticks of furniture. The painted frames of the beds were chipped with age and use and the coiled springs of their bases dropped flakes of rust as they went. Eliza pulled a face and Eve saw it.