Ravenscliffe (25 page)

Anna couldn’t speak because of the pins, but she gave him a little wave.

‘Them bairns look ’appy,’ he said, thumbing towards the front door, which Anna had left wide open for Ellen and Maya to come and go. The little girls had a pail each and wooden spoons, and were mixing soil and water to make a chocolate cake: this is what Ellen told him, when Amos stopped to ask what they were up to. Maya, ineptly slapping her spoon about in the bucket of thick mud, had looked at him with her mother’s eyes and said ‘yum yum’ with the accent of a true Yorkshire tyke. It had made him laugh.

Anna took the pins out of her mouth and set them down on the sewing table.

‘So,’ she said and clasped her hands together in a gesture of eagerness. ‘Let’s talk politics.’

I
f William Garforth was surprised to discover that his two o’clock appointment was with not only the Earl of Netherwood but also Lady Henrietta Hoyland, he showed it in neither his face nor his conduct. He shook her hand as firmly as he shook her father’s, and in the ensuing conversation he was scrupulously fair in the division of his attention as he spoke, sharing equally between the two of them his wise and steady gaze. An ex-army man with a gentleman’s manners and an engineer’s brain, Mr Garforth’s perfect composure sprang from a reliable and sustainable source: his unwavering belief in the common good of the pursuit of greater mine safety. If these fine folk standing before him shared that goal, they were and would ever be welcome at the West Riding Colliery.

They were here to witness in action his Mines Rescue Centre, a simulated accident scene in a sealed-off chamber by the pit bank, where his men regularly endured the same smoke- and dust-filled conditions they would encounter after an underground blast or collapse while shifting tons of rock and rubble that had been placed there for the purpose. It was the only such centre in the world, and there were plenty
in the industry who had William Garforth marked down as a crackpot for spending money on training for an event that might never happen. But he cared nothing for naysayers. His interest was in people like the Earl of Netherwood and his forthright daughter: forward thinkers, with a large budget.

Mr Garforth assessed them shrewdly as the three talked in general terms about the Netherwood Collieries, the recent explosion, the lamentable number of fatalities. He noticed that while the earl did plenty of talking, the young woman often quietly prompted her father, reminding him of details or steering him back to their purpose if he seemed liable to wander off the subject. She clearly had some authority in this relationship, though he could see she was making strenuous efforts to take a back seat, for the sake of appearances. Mr Garforth wondered if this visit had in fact been at her insistence; certainly Lord Netherwood seemed less well acquainted than his daughter with the purpose of the rescue centre. Which wasn’t to say the earl was uninterested: quite the reverse. He had a battery of questions for Mr Garforth, who answered in minute detail, acutely aware that here was a man with a good deal of clout – a colliery owner, not a colliery manager like himself. If the Earl of Netherwood went home convinced of the value of safety and rescue training, then three more pits in Yorkshire would become less dangerous places to make a living.

‘So. The West Riding Colliery is one of Pope and Pearson’s?’ said Lord Netherwood. He was fascinated by this; that this distinguished man with military bearing, impeccable in a stiff white collar and monogrammed necktie, was merely an employee.

‘It is, m’lord, yes.’

‘And are they involved in your innovations?’

‘Not directly. The training school is my initiative, based
on my own experience of running collieries. I’ve been at this game for over three decades. But the owners do stand to gain, of course.’ He spoke well, like a man used to hearing the sound of his own voice and using it to good effect.

‘Gain? Financially, do you mean?’

Henrietta rolled her eyes skywards.

‘Daddy,’ she murmured, ‘there are benefits other than those of increased profits.’

Mr Garforth smiled: a warm, generous smile that implied he wasn’t taking sides, though he hoped his own daughters would never speak to him with the same cool disdain.

‘We all stand to benefit – the miners, the management and the owners.’ he said. ‘Advances in underground safety and rescue mean fewer fatalities, higher morale among the men, greater productivity, higher profits.’

‘And the mines rescue centre – do you expect your men to attend in their own time? Unpaid?’

‘Yes. I’ve never encountered unwillingness.’

The earl laughed. ‘Lucky chap,’ he said and turned to Henrietta. ‘I can imagine how such a proposal would be received in Netherwood.’ He expected a smile, but she looked stern, as if his levity was an embarrassment to her.

‘I think our miners have the same respect for each other’s safety as Mr Garforth’s employees. You underestimate them.’

‘I think,’ said Mr Garforth carefully, ‘that we three have never lain waiting for help on the wrong side of a rockfall. Improvements in mines rescue isn’t something miners quibble over. I asked for thirty-five volunteers when we first started. Every man who works here put his name forward.’

The earl nodded. He felt incapable of saying the right thing. He had come here with his daughter out of a creeping and uncomfortable awareness of his failings, a realisation – late in life, admittedly, but better that, he supposed, than never at all – that he didn’t quite measure up to the man he had
thought he was. There had been a moment at the foot of the mineshaft at New Mill when he had thought his life was in danger and an emasculating liquid rush of fear had coursed through his system: it had shocked him, brought him up short, as if an unwelcome home truth had at last been spoken out loud and to his face. In his own eyes, on that day, he had lost confidence in his standing and did not yet feel quite recovered. Now, facing this earnest, educated colliery manager, he felt even slighter, even less of a presence in the world of honourable, serious men. There were certificates and diplomas all about the office walls displaying Mr Garforth’s excellence and endeavour: president of the local Mining Institute, vice-president of the national body, Fellow of the National Geological Society, an expert practitioner in aspects of mining engineering that the earl hadn’t even known existed. On the desk between them stood a brass safety lamp that the man had invented himself, for heaven’s sake. And yet, in the pantheon of great, titled colliery owners, Teddy Hoyland had always stood tall as a man with his employees’ best interests at heart. It was at once inspiring and disorientating, this dismantling of certainties and reordering of priorities: he had a notion that he might never be the same again, and that this might be no bad thing.

Thea was trapped again in a corner of the drawing room with the Duke of Knightwick, whose blatantly adulterous wife left him alone for great stretches of time and who therefore craved alternative female company on whom to inflict his wide range of opinions. Thea Stirling was an obvious target; he fancied himself a mentor to the young American woman and was forever seeking her out to continue his programme of instruction in the ways of the English aristocracy. She hadn’t yet
devised an effective method of cutting him short, being altogether too amiable for her own good. She pitied him his situation, though – his wife’s all-consuming liaison with the dazzling banker Wally Goldman, the pair’s careless and inappropriate intimacy, seemed to Thea intolerable and inhumane. So, instead of taking her cue from the duke’s more seasoned acquaintances and turning away as he approached or remembering a pressing engagement when he was mid-sentence, she would listen obligingly to his long, bewildering monologues and even, sometimes, submit to a short test at the end. Today’s lesson was at least topical, being a digest of the shooting season, prior to their departure for Glendonoch; she found she needed all her powers of concentration to follow the complex subtleties of what one might shoot when.

‘The whole shebang commenced on the twelfth of August – the Glorious Twelfth, you might have heard that said? No? Well, I’ll be blowed! You really are an innocent abroad. Anyway, grouse shooting from the twelfth in England, Scotland and Ireland. Partridge shooting starts on September the first, ends on the first of February. Pheasant shooting starts October the first, also ends the first of February. Are you with me? Hares may be shot until March the first, rabbits can be shot at any old time of the year. Rooks, May the twelfth and all through the summer.’

‘I see,’ Thea said. ‘Rooks. Who would shoot rooks?’

‘Good in a pie,’ said the duke, obliquely. ‘So. Start of the season is …’

‘The Glorious Twelfth,’ she said obediently.

‘Pheasant?’

She grimaced charmingly. ‘Golly. What was it? September first?’

He gave a patronising smile, pleased that this favourite subject of his was not so easy to master after all. ‘October the first. September’s partridge.’

‘Right,’ she said, in a voice so obviously flat with lack of interest that even the duke couldn’t miss it. ‘So, what is it about you guys that you need to keep shooting birds out the sky? You seem kind of crazy about it.’ Her New York drawl still seemed incongruous in the context of this English stately home. Shooding birds, she said, and kinda crazy: her accent was one of the things about Thea that either attracted people or repelled them. The duke fell into the former group, but nevertheless he bridled at this casual slight against the sporting prowess of a nation; in a few easy words, she had managed to reduce a noble pursuit to an eccentric aberration. Unprepared for the challenge and unused to justifying his pastime, he briefly fell silent while a defence formulated itself in his head, but it proved to be a critical pause and one he instantly regretted, because Tobias strolled into the room and hailed Thea from the opposite end.

‘There you are, you elusive creature,’ he said, and she leapt to her feet at once, seizing the chance to make an escape without appearing rude. She blew Knightwick a kiss and winked at him: saucy behaviour, but not untypical, and it at least brought a frisson of pleasure to the duke’s poor, neglected breast. If he was but twenty years younger, he thought to himself wistfully. He watched her shimmy across the room to Tobias in her startling gown – bold girl, wearing red satin on a Wednesday morning – and thought she had something of a bird’s qualities about her, though an exotic one, not the type one would take a shot at. Tobias watched her too, with the minutely focused attention of a connoisseur of women. He would have liked to place his hands either side of her waist to feel the satin slide under his fingers; he would have liked to press her against the wall of the drawing room and bruise her lips with his own. An effort of will was required simply to stand and smile in a casual manner, but his will prevailed and he managed, again, to keep his hands from her.

‘Tobes,’ she said. Her smile was direct, straight into his green eyes. He had grown on her, this English earl-in-waiting. He was fun.

‘Thea. You look extraordinary. Have you finished teasing poor Knightwick?’

She looked back at the duke in alarm, but he was deeply involved now with the
Sporting Life
. She shot Toby a chiding look.

‘Don’t be mean. And I don’t tease him, I listen to him.’

‘You can’t help being irresistible. Nobody blames you.’

‘Quit the flannel. What’s the plan today, then?’ There would be something, she knew that much. Tobias was wooing her with activities, keeping her mind off thoughts of returning to London or – worse – America, where she still thought she might take up the place at Cornell. Toby would follow her there if he had to, though he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Far better, he thought, that he captured this rare North American specimen and kept her here.

‘Netherwood Common and all my boyhood haunts. There’s a tree with a hollow trunk. You can climb it, but only by going up the inside.’

She smiled again, that wonderful, piercing, direct smile.

‘Henry and Dickie too?’

‘Sadly no,’ he said, not sad at all. ‘Just dull old you and boring old me.’

Her peal of laughter caused the duke to look up briefly from details of the three-thirty at York but the sight of Tobias and Thea on the other side of the room radiating bright beams of youth and desire and energy sent him instantly back to the pages of the
Sporting Life
, a landscape he understood and where he felt he belonged.

T
he first indication Amos had that he was considered a threat was an offer from the Liberals of a safe seat at the next general election and a substantial salary from the party, if he withdrew from this forthcoming contest as Labour candidate. He would, he was told, be a well-paid Liberal MP with a real voice in the House of Commons, if he would but take his name off the Ardington ticket. Amos said no, decisively and bluntly, without taking time to think or talk it over with Enoch or Anna, who between them had become his political inner circle; if he was to enter politics, he told himself, he would be led by his heart first, then his head, but never by his pocket, and no one would convince him otherwise. Enoch backed him entirely; the Labour Party would never amount to anything if it continued to simply shore up the Liberals at every election. Anna agreed too, though she put him through his paces first, playing devil’s advocate to be sure he knew his own mind.