Ravenscliffe (23 page)

‘Diversification into?’ he asked, and his thoughts were of pineapples and passion fruit.

‘Travel,’ said Silas. ‘Luxury travel. We don’t have a ship in the fleet that carries more than fourteen passengers, and yet we travel back and forth to paradise on a regular basis.’

Hugh said: ‘I see. Liners then?’

‘Small luxury liners, first-class cabins only. Same capacity for cargo as the present fleet but with, shall we say, added value.’

He smiled at Hugh. Contrary to the impression he gave, Silas held his colleague in high esteem. He didn’t need Hugh’s approval of the scheme, but he would very much prefer it. For his part, Hugh was thinking that once, just once, it would be pleasant to be consulted rather than told. What he said,
though, was: ‘And where will they stay? These first-class passengers of ours?’

‘In the first-class hotel we’re going to build,’ said Silas. ‘Now, what do you know about mining?’

T
he king, his mistress and his confounded dog had gone; the guest rooms were vacated, cleaned and aired; the earl’s study was no longer a telegraph room; Mrs Adams was respectfully buried in the same plot as her mother and father in the Methodist churchyard; and in her place at the head of kitchen operations was Claude Reynard, patisserie chef extraordinaire and man-of-the-moment below stairs. No one wanted to be the first to say it, but he was much easier on the ears than Mary Adams had been, and easier still on the eyes. Sarah Pickersgill, so often in the old cook’s firing line and formerly pitied by all, was now the envy of the kitchen staff. It was all ‘Sarah, a moment,
s’il vous plaît
’ or ‘Sarah, where is
le bain-marie
?’ in his fabulously French accent, and Sarah was as soft and pliable as the pastry that he rolled and folded in his dextrous hands. Monsieur Reynard had the sleek manly beauty of a matinee idol: dark eyes, darker hair, a carefully cultivated moustache following the curve of his top lip.

‘When ’e looks at me,’ Sarah whispered to Ivy and Agnes, ‘I feel like I’m meltin’ or summat.’

The kitchen maids were agog. Sarah melting? Whatever
did she mean? But they hovered on the fringes of Monsieur Reynard’s orbit, and hoped to experience for themselves his warming influence. They would stand in their respective corners carving carrots into matchsticks and potatoes into marbles, and they would steal furtive glances across the kitchen at the new cook – the chef, they were to call him – whose dashing good looks, tall hat and white jacket with silver buttons were the most interesting thing they had ever seen. Apart, that is, from Mrs Adams dead in the cold store.

Parkinson was less ready to admire. The ‘man-cook’, as he persisted in calling him, had had an unsettling effect on the girls in the household. Some of them seemed to be loosening their buns so that tendrils escaped from their caps and the staff dinner gong these days sparked a shameful stampede to Monsieur Reynard’s end of the table. The chef himself only seemed to encourage them in their infatuation. He appeared to adore them all: he had their names off pat and the way he pronounced them sounded like seduction. Even Agnes, such a plain, everyday sort of name – well suited to the plain, everyday sort of housemaid attached to it – sounded exotic and beautiful after Monsieur Reynard’s translation.
Ann–yes
, he said it, losing the ugly ‘g’ and elevating the spirits of little Agnes Nichols every time he singled her out for a mention. It was too bad, thought Parkinson, but his chilly disapproval had thus far gone entirely unnoticed, so he had a word with Mrs Powell-Hughes, who suspected her colleague of old-fashioned jealousy but spared him the discomfort of telling him so.

‘The man has no innate sense of the dignity of his position,’ Parkinson had said to her. ‘He’s vain as a peacock. All style over substance.’

‘I’m sure it’ll all settle down, Mr Parkinson,’ said Mrs Powell-Hughes soothingly; his feelings clearly ran high, she thought, if he could be so patently unjust about the new chef.
‘It’s all still a great novelty for everyone, you see. And you have to admit, he’s sending some beautiful food upstairs, from what I’ve seen.’

Parkinson nodded minimally. It couldn’t be denied; the food was superb, and the kitchen girls were working hard at their tasks between regular peeps at Monsieur
Reynard’s Gallic profile. But the butler was still very far from accepting the new status quo.

‘The problem is,’ he said, ‘that our man-cook is French.’

Mrs Powell-Hughes waited.

‘And the French,’ Parkinson went on, ‘have no respect for hierarchy.’

‘Well, I don’t think they’re still beheading aristocrats, Mr Parkinson.’

He looked a little crushed; she remembered his many kindnesses to her and felt contrite. ‘But I imagine you and I can lead by example,’ she went on. ‘We can show Monsieur Reynard how we go on in a correctly run English house. And I’ll speak to the girls; remind them of their positions. But we should bear in mind that the countess is very pleased with the appointment.’

He nodded. ‘Indeed, indeed, a point of crucial significance. Thank you, Mrs Powell-Hughes. You’re a most dependable friend.’

‘As are you, Mr Parkinson. We shall address the situation together. We must both be on our guard for irregularities, while demonstrating traditional English courtesy and respect to Monsieur Reynard.’

The butler smiled. He liked that idea. He could adapt, he thought, to being a moral and social compass for the Frenchman, embodying standards of etiquette towards which the man-cook might aspire, if not actually attain.

Whatever Parkinson’s reservations, Netherwood Hall was fortunate to have Monsieur
Reynard and it might never have come about had not the timing of the emergency telegram been so fortuitous. He was a Parisian chef of the very highest pedigree; he had trained with Escoffier, and worked in the kitchens of the Ritz in Paris and the Savoy in London. From time to time he would make guest appearances in the great houses of noble families: his elaborate patisserie – his clever ways with spun sugar, his miraculous petal-thin pastry – elevated the tone at a banquet and even the redoubtable Mrs Adams had stepped aside on occasion to make room for him and his staff. When the plea for assistance from Netherwood had reached him, it was just two days after he had flounced dramatically away from the Savoy for the very excellent reason – in his view – that because the hotel continued to make such an excessive ritual of afternoon tea, none of the guests were hungry come dinner time. A small triangle of bread and cucumber, a slender slice of Madeira cake, a finger of shortbread: one of these delicacies taken with a cup of tea was one thing. But a multi-tiered cornucopia of creamy confections was quite another. He felt most strongly on the subject, to the point that the countess, on the very day he arrived at Netherwood Hall, had had to agree that no one’s appetite would be wilfully spoiled at four o’clock in the afternoon now that he was master of the kitchen, although until the king left for London there could be no such rule, obviously. Even Claude Reynard wouldn’t dare to deny Bertie a plate of cream scones – which, in any case, didn’t seem remotely to diminish the relish with which he would then eat his dinner. Monsieur
Reynard had cooked for the king before and knew it to be a fact that the great man was impossible to fill. The night before he left Netherwood Hall the king had ordered a plate of oysters before retiring and then had a cold roast chicken sent to his apartment in case he – or perhaps Caesar – felt peckish in the night.

There was some relief in the house that the king was gone, and below stairs it was palpable. Without him, mealtimes were properly sedate, bedtimes were properly respected and Mrs Powell-Hughes found that she could once again beat the dust from a chaise longue without returning half an hour later to find Caesar curled up on it, embedding wiry white hairs into the plum velvet while he slept. Soon it would be quieter still in the great house, since the family’s departure for Glendonoch was imminent – they would be in Scotland for ten days, and Mrs Powell-Hughes felt not a shred of disloyalty at the relish with which she anticipated their temporary absence. Indeed, these periodic lulls were essential in preserving the housekeeper’s staunch goodwill and sterling service: if she had to live and work without any respite from the demands made by her employers, she believed she would have packed her trunk years ago.

The countess had singularly failed in her stratagem. The Choates were gone, yet Thea remained, a situation that was actually worse than the one she had been trying to avoid in the first place. How this had come about was still something of a mystery to Clarissa, who was unused to failure in her manipulation of other people and had yet to comprehend fully the extent to which Thea Stirling did as she pleased.

‘So now we have the American girl without an official chaperone,’ the countess said to Teddy. She had tapped on his door and entered his bedroom at an extremely inopportune moment, but instead of retreating until he was at liberty to speak, she had planted herself on a leather ottoman and was speaking loudly to him through the locked door of his bathroom. ‘And having seen what she’s capable of under the watchful eye of Mrs Choate, I dread to think what she might get up to unobserved.’

‘I do think we might discuss this at another time,’ said the earl waspishly. He felt grievously harassed, helpless in the face of this blatant assault on his basic human right to lavatorial privacy.

‘Don’t you think I wouldn’t rather be elsewhere?’ said Clarissa sharply. ‘But this is a matter of some urgency and I’d like you to at least acknowledge that.’

‘Actually,’ he said defiantly, ‘I like her.’

‘Well of course you do. So do I, come to that. But liking or not liking doesn’t enter into it. She must be kept away from Tobias.’

He sighed, resigning himself to the conversation. ‘Your antipathy to Dorothea is passé, my dear. An American daughter-in-law would bring us bang up to the minute.’

‘An American countess at Netherwood Hall?’ Clarissa’s voice wavered melodramatically.

‘Just the ticket,’ he said lightly, deliberately provocative. ‘What’s more, she’s not an heiress. All she’d bring by way of a dowry would be a few gramophone records and a jolly good head on her shoulders.’

From inside the bathroom came the rush of flushing water, and the countess was obliged to wait until the cacophonous pipe symphony had subsided. He took his time washing his hands, then drew back the bolt, opened the door, and came out to face her. As he’d expected, her expression was reproachful.

‘And how, pray, does her relative poverty add to her appeal?’

‘It makes her interesting. Rich Americans are so proliferous as to have become downright dull.’

The countess, finding no support where she had counted on it, was furious. She stood in order to bring her baleful glare closer to his maddeningly placid face. ‘Your flippancy does you no credit,’ she said icily. ‘Do bloodlines mean nothing to you?’

‘Not beyond the stable yard, no,’ he said, and he realised with a flash of pure and unusual understanding that he really meant this. A curious, uncharacteristic defiance had settled upon him. He always backed down in the end, both of them knew it: but this time, he really thought he might not. Even the tears now springing to his wife’s blue eyes – always, until this moment, a reliable last resort – left him unmoved.

‘I believe it’s a matter of perspective, Clarissa,’ he said. ‘I believe there are things in life more important than whether Tobias marries Thea Stirling.’

She looked at him in utter disbelief. ‘Such as?’

‘Such as the loss of eighty-eight lives in one of my collieries.’

‘Teddy! Have you lost your mind? The two matters are entirely unconnected!’ She felt genuinely aggrieved that he had – eccentrically, perversely, pointlessly – invoked the wretched explosion, and now stood looking at her as if he was personally responsible. Really, it was beyond her understanding: he had lost all his famous vim and vigour the day of the disaster, and he was a much lesser man without it, in her view. Perhaps a few days on his Scottish moor would lay this business to rest. She said as much, trying hard to keep her disappointment in him out of her voice. He stood silent for a moment, then shook his head.