Ravenscliffe (16 page)

‘I ’ope t’wind doesn’t change,’ she said, and Eliza immediately, obligingly, rearranged her features into a smile. Eve deposited a bundle of brodded rag rugs and smiled back at her daughter.

‘No sign o’ Seth then?’ she said.

‘No.’

‘Oh well, ’appen ’e’ll show up when all this lifting’s done.’ She kept her voice deliberately bright and cheerful so as not to frighten Eliza.

‘Mam?’

‘Yes?’

‘Will Mr MacLeod be living with us?’

‘I think you should call ’im Daniel. And yes, of course, after we’re wed, ’e’ll be living with us.’ Eve had sat her children down at the kitchen table the night before and told them that a date had at last been set for her wedding to Daniel and that she knew – she would make sure of this, she said – that they were all going to be very happy. Seth had taken the news surprisingly stoically: unsmiling but without fireworks. Still, thought Eve, his absence now would almost certainly be connected. The boy had known for weeks about the wedding, but without a date it had perhaps seemed more of an idea than a reality. She wouldn’t get off lightly, that much she knew.

‘Good. I like ’im,’ said Eliza with her blessed, uncomplicated enthusiasm. ‘And will I be a bridesmaid?’

‘Well, of course. And Ellen and Maya.’ She lowered her voice and leaned close to her daughter’s ear. ‘Anna looks busy now,’ she said confidingly, ‘but actually she’s thinking about the beautiful dress she’s going to make for you to wear.’

Eliza shone with joy. The little girl was as light as her brother was dark, thought Eve. She bestowed her approval readily, welcoming new people into her circle of friends with an ease and an interest that kept them there, out of love for her. When Anna and Maya had first come to live with them, Eliza had been instantly glad: the more the merrier, seemed to be her life philosophy. If she had to share her bedroom with a perfect stranger and her fretful baby, it may as well be done with good grace, was Eliza’s view. Now she had made room in her affections for Uncle Silas with no more fuss than if she had budged up on a tram seat to let him sit down: and Daniel, whom she had barely had chance to get to know, was accepted too. He had given her a flower press and stolen her heart. It was that easy with Eliza.

Seth, though: Eve was close to accepting that he was beyond her influence. He liked Silas – well, he was hard to resist – and he loved Amos, but fiercely, defensively, privately. Daniel, on the few occasions she had managed to keep Seth in the same room, was treated with open hostility, breathtaking rudeness, the sort of behaviour, really, that deserved a clout, but how would that help? You couldn’t beat a lad into liking someone, and anyway Eve understood that Seth was clinging to his dead father’s memory, as if by admitting Daniel into the family, Arthur would be forgotten. She felt a fool for thinking that because Daniel was a gardener, Seth would be all lively interest: a picture of them in her mind, working side by side at some planting scheme or other, seemed fanciful now. Seth had taken his gift from Daniel – a beautiful, illustrated book about the travels of John Tradescant – and placed it on the kitchen table, pointedly, without opening it. It had stayed
there, too, until Eve had packed it with Seth’s things this morning.

‘Ignore him,’ was Anna’s counsel to Eve and Daniel. ‘He was same to me – cold, cross, always with scowl. But now he is right as rain. Worst thing is if you try too hard with Seth. Treat him like wild animal. Let him come to you.’

This was sound advice, borne out by experience; time would overcome Seth’s reservations, Eve was sure of it. But still she wished he didn’t have to make such heavy weather of things. She walked back up the entry to the back door of her house to collect another load, passing Anna who staggered in the opposite direction with a crate of crockery. They exchanged a look, eyebrows raised, smiles rueful; they had their work cut out today. Silas had been called away on business – dreadful timing, but unavoidable, he’d said; Daniel, Eve knew, would come when he could. She had splashed out on a removals firm from Barnsley to shift the heavy furniture and the silent men they’d sent on the dray were making quick work of all that, but she insisted that the trappings of the kitchen were packed and loaded by herself and Anna; what would two men with more brawn than brains know about the importance of keeping like with like from the kitchen cupboards and shelves? And those hands: fingers like butchers’ sausages that could crush a tea cup and barely feel it go. She nodded at Lilly Pickering and Maud Platt, side by side on Maud’s back doorstep, watching with pursed lips and folded arms the spectacle of Eve Williams officially getting above herself. She could’ve used Sol Windross’s rag-and-bone cart for her few bits of furniture, but no – Chandler’s Removals, no less. And her departure from Beaumont Lane was insulting, in their view: a slap in the face to her neighbours. They glowered as they sat in judgement, united in their verdict, but Eve, used to ignoring their naked disapproval, found she had no difficulty in doing so again. You could spend your whole life
trying to please the likes of Lilly and still get nowhere. Give her a gold pig, Arthur used to say, and it’d be the wrong colour.

The countess was sitting in the rose garden alone when Daniel appeared. He had come to assess the damage inflicted by three weeks of unabated sunshine followed by a torrent of rain, which had fallen on the flowerbeds and shrubberies like the wrath of God. The roses, at least, were already nearly over anyway. There were more than two hundred varieties here; the collection had been started by an earlier countess whose French ancestry had led her, rather scandalously, to visit Josephine Bonaparte at Malmaison. The ambitions of the empress, the scope of her famous rose gardens, had thus travelled back across the English Channel to Netherwood.

‘You’ve kept a secret from me,’ the countess said to Daniel, with no preamble or pleasantry. She had been looking for him since yesterday morning in order to effect a chance encounter.

He was startled to see her at this early hour. She looked fragile and pale, not out of place among these tired roses; her fine cotton lawn gown, gauzy layers of pale pink, seemed insubstantial against the chill. The temperature, since the rain, had dropped to something more typical of the time of year. Lady Netherwood looked at him; her tone had been jocular but her expression was accusatory.

‘Och well, I keep a fair few secrets from you, your ladyship,’ he said, unfazed. ‘Which of them have you discovered?’ He had never developed the habit of dipping his head in the company of greatness. He looked her directly in the eye when he spoke, as he did to all members of the family. They had a gardener in Daniel MacLeod, but they did not have a servant.

She pouted at him. ‘You know very well,’ she said. ‘You’re to marry Eve Williams. And since you’ve been here barely a month, I can only assume that was already your intention when you accepted my offer of employment here.’

‘Correct,’ he said. ‘I came here to be your head gardener and to marry Eve.’

‘You should have told me.’

‘Should I? Forgive me, but I do think whether and to whom I get married is my business.’

‘You’re very impertinent. No one speaks to me as you do.’

‘I don’t mean to be rude, your ladyship. But I love Eve Williams, and she loves me. We’re to be married in October. I hope I have your blessing, but we’ll go ahead without it if we must. None of this could possibly affect my abilities as your gardener.’

‘Oh Daniel.’ She wagged a hand at him, brushing away his indignation. ‘You must do as you wish. I’m just sad you didn’t feel able to confide.’

She was such an artiste, he thought, such a performer. In this brief conversation she had moved seamlessly from sulky child to haughty aristocrat to injured confidante. She looked at him now with another expression and one that made him uncomfortable: a sort of longing, but not quite that. More a wistful regret. There had never been anything between these two but a love of gardens, and it would ever remain thus, at least as far as Daniel was concerned. But he had underestimated – and so, perhaps, had the countess – the extent to which she regarded him as her own possession. And she had discovered, to her annoyance and surprise, that she didn’t want Daniel MacLeod to be married in the least. She turned her face away from him, the better to display her famous delicate profile.

‘I suppose you have all sorts of plans for me,’ she said, deliberately ambiguous.

‘For the garden, yes I do,’ he said, deliberately
unambiguous. ‘They’re beautiful, and they’re all rolled up safe and sound in my wee cottage.’

‘Well, when all this has died down’ – she waved an arm, slender as a sapling, in the direction of the house, meaning to indicate the king – ‘we shall sit down together, you and I, and discuss them.’

‘I should like that, your ladyship,’ he said, and smiled at her.

She wished she could say, Call me Clarissa. Instead, she smiled demurely and rose from the seat to drift away up the stone steps and along the gravel path towards the hall, conscious that her figure, still that of a girl and skimpily clad, would look charming from this angle, in this light.

H
e found Eve alone in the house. She was upstairs, in the bedroom she had shared with Arthur and, latterly, with Seth and Ellen. He had left his boots at the door; they were encrusted with mud from his morning’s work in the rose garden and he knew she wouldn’t thank him for treading any of it in to the newly cleaned, empty house. He stepped into the kitchen and admired the evidence of her labours; the flagstones were glossy from a recent encounter with a mop and the wooden surfaces, dented and bruised from years of use, were scrubbed and polished to a high, proud shine. The smell was of scouring powder and fresh air. In his stocking feet he climbed the stairs and, unheard by Eve, had the luxury of watching her for a moment where she stood, her back to him, looking out through the bedroom window over Beaumont Lane. She held a chamois leather in one hand, though she wasn’t cleaning the glass, but simply gazing out through it, as if committing the view to memory. Her long brown hair was tied up with a pale blue scarf, and that contrast – the blue, the brown – as well as her absolute stillness in the clear light of the window, gave the scene the appearance of an old master.

Daniel reached instinctively for the doorframe. Whenever he saw her, his breath momentarily failed and his heart pounded; he was floored, like a hapless, love-struck lad. He was looking forward to a time when she would seem ordinary to him, when his familiarity with the look, smell and feel of her would give him some immunity and the mere sight of her wouldn’t flood him with lust. Today she wore a drab serge skirt in serviceable brown and a white, high-collared blouse that hid her arms and her throat, and yet she appeared to him a vision of desirable loveliness.

‘Eve,’ he said, and she jumped and turned, his voice clearly having interrupted a deep reverie. He went to her and caught her up in an embrace, though she stepped clear of the panes before he reached her, even now wary of being seen by prying eyes with this man, her intended. With her face in his neck she kissed the hollow above his collarbone and inhaled deeply.

‘I love t’smell of you,’ she said. ‘Sweat and toil.’

He said nothing but held her hard and moved against her hoping – without any real hope – to reduce her to wanton desire, to have her here and now on the scarred linoleum floor of her old bedroom. She pushed away from him, although her breathing, rapid and shallow, gave her away.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Not ’ere.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘So where, then?’ He spoke lightly, looking about the room and grinning as he did, expecting at worse an indignant clip round the ear, but to his horror she began to cry and he gathered her up again and held her, this time with no motive other than giving comfort.

This move from her old, beloved, familiar home was momentous for her, he knew that; she used the local word for it, called it flitting, but it seemed too light and easy a term
for the great leap of faith she was taking. He understood, really he did; she was bidding farewell to her past.

‘I was nearly eighteen when Arthur brought me ’ere,’ she said finally, through her tears. She sniffed, hiccupped, shuddered. ‘I loved this ’ouse from t’minute I set foot in it: it saved me. An’ Arthur did an’ all – Arthur saved me. He seemed like a miracle.’

‘I expect you were the miracle, to him,’ Daniel said feelingly.

‘Aye, well.’ She sighed. ‘If I was, ’e never said.’

‘Y’know, if I’d loved you first, then died, I would’ve wanted only happiness for you, Eve. I’m sure Arthur would too.’

They didn’t speak for a while but stood together in the slanting afternoon light, Eve lost in her memories, Daniel lost in Eve. After a time her sadness seemed to be abating and he gently suggested that perhaps it was time to follow the others up to the new house. She looked at him and said: ‘I can’t leave. I can’t go,’ and her words filled Daniel with sudden, cold dread.

‘Eve, Eve.’ He took her face in his hands and tilted it upwards, kissing it again and again, tasting the tears. ‘I just want to make you happy.’