Ravenscliffe (19 page)

‘Leave ’em with me, Lilly,’ she said and Lilly, without
speaking a word, bundled her children into Eve’s arms, then resumed her swift pace. Beside his mother, Seth was white-faced. She hoisted Lilly’s little ones, one on each hip, then she turned a livid face on her son.

‘Do you see now what you’ve done?’ she said, her voice hard and loud. ‘I ’oped never again to suffer like these women are suffering. Do you see? To hear t’sound of a poker on t’fireback, to run to t’pit without knowing if your man or your lad’s been carried up dead? That’s what you’ll give back to me if you go to New Mill next week. Fear, Seth. Terror. Do you see?’ The pitch of her voice grew urgent, frantic, as if their lives depended on his understanding her. One of the children, Lilly’s youngest, began to cry.

For a few beats Seth said nothing; Eve could hear him breathe, in and out through his nose, his mouth clamped shut to keep from crying too. Then he said: ‘You make me sick, you do,’ and his voice matched hers in anger. ‘It’s all ’ow you feel, what you think, what you want, in’t it?’ He looked away from her, then back, and said again: ‘You only think o’ yourself. You make me sick.’

She was stunned. This child, this boy, this precious being of hers and Arthur’s, for whom she would walk through fire if she had to – he was staring at her with contempt and she didn’t know how they had come to this or what she should do to mend it.

The first of the dead were up and laid out in rows on the floor of the wages office by the time the earl’s convoy drove into the pit yard at Long Martley. Their journey had been slow through the crowd of women who were pushing their way down the narrow lane to the colliery and standing in a silent mass in the yard, waiting for news. There were hundreds
of them. It was like a scene from the fringes of hell, thought Thea: the damned awaiting admittance. Like Henrietta, Thea had refused to be driven back to Netherwood Hall, insisting instead that she could be of some use. Frank Ponsonby and Joseph Choate had returned, but Tobias had come to the colliery and the king was with them too. It was a rare thing, he had said, to be among his subjects in a time of need. Henrietta had wondered how welcome he would be amid the grief and horror, but there was no one in the party with the influence or authority to steer his inclination in another direction. Certainly her father seemed unequal to the task; he had somehow emerged from the New Mill pit shaft a lesser man than the one who went down. One wouldn’t expect ebullience at such a time, but one might expect authority and command. She wondered if the cause of this change was fear at the sound of the explosion, or shame at the onset of fear. Either way, the earl was pale and quiet, and it had been Henrietta who had allocated motorcars and directed chauffeurs. Lord Netherwood, as was proper, rode with the king and their vehicle had made its way through the ranks of wives and mothers in a sad parody of the usual royal progress: crowds lined the road, but there were no Union flags, no smiles, no sound at all. It seemed hardly possible that such a multitude could maintain so profound a silence.

The Daimlers crawled into the pit yard and came to a halt, but for a few moments it was impossible to get out because the sea of humanity, which had parted to let them through, closed again around the stationary vehicles as more people pressed into the area, looking for loved ones, desperate for news. Atkins, who drove the earl and the king, managed to prise himself out, then held back the tide for his distinguished passengers. Harry Booth, the colliery manager, had seen them arrive and he pushed his way towards them. He was an angry man: angry and distressed. He hadn’t expected to see King
Edward VII, but he took it in his stride. Tragedy, he thought afterwards, was a great leveller. Men and boys were dead and dying: deference was a nonsense at such times.

‘Explosion out by Crookgate district,’ he said to the earl, cutting to the chase the moment Lord Netherwood levered himself out of the car. ‘It’s bad. Rescue team are down, but we’re short o’ breathing apparatus. We’ve sent to New Mill for more. I don’t suppose you ’ave it?’

Of course you don’t have it, he might have added, for what use are you to us now? He kept his voice steady, but there was evident accusation in it. The earl heard this but replied evenly. ‘We must all do what we can with what we have, Mr Booth. What’s the tally so far?’

‘It’s not a bag of pheasant, m’lord,’ said Harry Booth. He knew he had probably just lost his job with this remark, but he found, at this moment of crisis, that his loyalty and respect for his colleagues was far greater than that he felt for his employer. He turned away and walked back through the crowds to the pit bank. The wheel and cables of the winding gear were moving and the cage very likely held more corpses. The earl faced Henrietta, who he knew was watching him.

‘I meant death toll,’ he said. His face was stricken and he looked suddenly pitiful.

‘I know you did,’ she said consolingly, as if to a child. She was acutely aware of the picture they presented: cosseted, protected, untouched by the pain of personal loss. And there was the king, observing her father with a look of incomprehension. The famous royal face showed his thoughts as clearly as if he spoke them aloud; these were the Earl of Netherwood’s serfs and yet they moved about him as if he was invisible, and spoke to him as if he was a fool. Henrietta saw it all and she took immediate control.

‘Tobias,’ she said to her brother, who was only here
because of Thea and who had never looked more out of place in his life. ‘Accompany His Majesty – if it pleases you, Your Majesty –’ she added quickly, to the king’s evident relief, since in this pandemonium his status seemed to have been all but forgotten – ‘to the manager’s offices. I can see injured men in there whose spirits may be lifted by a meeting with the king. Father, you must go up to the pit bank with Mr Booth. These are your men and they need your support. Thea, you and I—’

But Thea was gone and when Henrietta scanned the crowd she saw her, kneeling on the stones of the pit yard, her arms supporting an old woman who had fallen to the floor in an agony of grief.

There were obvious signs of an explosion, even before Alf, Richard and Victor got as far as Crookgate: splintered tubs, damaged, twisted supports and the foul stench of gaseous air. Alf called out into the darkness but his shouts were met by silence. They ventured a little further and found the first body, and beyond that, another, lying broken and badly burnt beside the corpse of a pony. Alf sent Richard back to the pit bottom for rescue assistance and he and Victor crept forwards, feeling their way with the feeble assistance of their lamps. In the crepuscular light it was hard to identify anyone, but it was plain to both men that there were many more bodies on the tunnel floor, and not a breath of life between them.

Behind them, Richard reappeared, sooner than they’d expected.

‘Rescue team’s on its way, they say. They’ve sent to New Mill for more breathing equipment, but they’re coming down with what we ’ave.’

Unprotected by safety gear, the three men made a start
themselves. They were hampered by the dust and the stink, but they ripped off their vests and used them as rudimentary masks, covering their noses and mouths, then began carrying the dead out of the tunnel. More men joined them. Alf saw his two other lads, William and Edward, among them: he nodded his approval. If he’d taught his sons anything about this life underground, it was their bounden duty towards their colleagues. The time would come, he always said, when they would be the ones in need. To date, they had never been found lacking and he was proud of all three of them; they were a credit to him and Nellie.

‘Mind out,’ Alf said brusquely now to Edward as he passed him, pulling the body of a young pony boy out towards the wide main roadway. There were wagons there, and the corpses were being placed tenderly, respectfully, into them, for their last journey out of the pit. Ahead, a small platoon of rescuers hove into view, monstrous in the heavy metal helmets that gave them some immunity to the dust and the gas. Alf and the rest of them stepped aside; they could return to the pit bottom now that the professionals were here, but already they had hauled twelve bodies from the scene. Alf turned, signalled to Victor that he was heading out, and Victor signalled back. Then Richard, just ahead of his father, spun around and shouted: ‘We need to shift,’ but even as he issued the warning, a slam, like the heaviest of doors shutting, reverberated through the tunnel and Richard’s lamp flew from his hand, knocked away by the searing wave of hot air that barrelled like a solid mass, unstoppable and inexorable in the confined space.

‘Down on your faces, lads,’ Alf shouted. He dropped to the floor, saw Richard do the same, hoped to hell that Edward and William were clear. Then a ball of fire, monstrous and pitiless, came hurtling towards them down the tunnel like a comet flung by a vengeful god. There was no time to move: barely time to pray. Richard reached out towards his father
and took his hand and with their faces pressed to the cold tunnel floor they gripped each other firmly, their fingers locked together. It was the first time they’d touched each other in affection for fifteen years, and they both felt the deep comfort of it before they were engulfed by the flames.

‘D
o you believe in omens?’

‘I don’t.’

Eve looked at Daniel. ‘You sound very sure.’

‘I am. I believe we make our own fate.’

‘Then you don’t think that what happened yesterday …’

‘Bodes ill for us here? No, I really don’t.’

Daniel wasn’t going to concede an inch on this point. He was as shaken as any of them, but he wasn’t going to have Eve reading anything more into yesterday than what it was: a terrible accident, an appalling tragedy, which for a while must cast a long shadow over Netherwood, but not for ever, and not over Ravenscliffe. The house was very fine, he could see that now: in the fragile light of early dawn it seemed to stand strong and sure like a citadel, a refuge from the vagaries of the world, a place of safety for its inhabitants. Apart from Eve, they all slept, but she was up and dressed when he arrived and she made him tea in a kitchen that was in chaos, crates piled upon crates, because nothing had been accomplished yesterday beyond the basic act of moving belongings from one dwelling to another. This was the first time Daniel had set foot in Ravenscliffe – since arriving at Netherwood Hall he
had barely left the garden, apart from two rather formal occasions when he ate an evening meal with Eve and the children, all of them grateful for Eliza’s stream of questions and observations. Now he sat in a room that itself was perhaps as big as the ground floor of the little house in Beaumont Lane. Because they were alone, Eve sat close. She looked drawn, dark shadows bruising the tender skin below her eyes. He put out a hand and cupped her cheek.

‘There wasn’t any sinister meaning,’ he said. ‘You’re going to be happy here. We all are.’

She nodded, and sat in silence for a moment but then she said: ‘Years ago, when we first moved in to Beaumont Lane, Arthur found a dead crow in t’stove pipe.’

‘And?’

She shrugged, unwilling to continue in the face of his scepticism, but he knew exactly what she was getting at.

‘The dead crow was a dead crow,’ he said. ‘Unlucky for the bird, but not for you.’

Eve looked away, too sorrowful to be reassured. But life was already moving on, the morning gathering strength and momentum from its pale beginnings and growing swiftly into a full-blown day. Outside, far beyond and below them, miners walked the roads to their pits. Long Martley was open for business again today. The Crookgate district would be closed while the roads were cleared and the scorched timbers replaced, but there was no reason why the rest of the pit shouldn’t be mined, and none of the dead would expect a man to lose a day’s pay out of a misguided sense of sorrow or respect.

Seventy-six men and twelve boys had perished yesterday. All of the rescue party died in the second explosion, and the first had killed everyone in the vicinity of Crookgate. It was the worst accident in Netherwood’s mining history and the first editions of the
Chronicle
, dumped in tied bundles outside
Fletcher’s paper shop, blared out the tragedy in a series of headlines that filled the front page: