Ravenscliffe (30 page)

‘Are there ghostly visitations at Netherwood Hall? Or do you confine this particular sideshow to your Scottish home?’ This was Sir Wally Goldman, whose voice dripped with scepticism, though if pressed he would have had to admit to some
alarm at the prospect of a malodorous earl, long dead, lurking in the shadows of his room.

‘No,’ Henrietta said. ‘Netherwood Hall is peculiarly free of lost souls.’

‘I expect Mrs A will pay us the occasional visit now,’ Tobias said, and everyone laughed.

‘Was she carried out of the house feet first?’ said the Duke of Knightwick earnestly. ‘It’s most important that she was, you see, because a soul can’t return to a building if they’re carried out with their feet pointing towards the door.’

‘Poor Mrs Adams,’ the countess said vaguely, as she did whenever the cook’s name was mentioned. She felt better disposed towards her, more able to mourn her inconvenient demise, now that Monsieur Reynard was installed below stairs.

‘Well, if she’s there, it’ll be to keep an eye on the Frenchman,’ said Lord Netherwood, who was yet to be convinced that the new chef quite lived up to his reputation.

‘He’s awfully handsome, your
monsieur
, isn’t he?’ said the duchess. Her eyes widened, as if in anticipation of something delicious. ‘I went to the kitchens for a cold compress for Wally’s croquet bruises and the Frenchman was wonderfully helpful, even though he had to leave his meringues. Do let me know, Clarissa, if you tire of him.’ Sir Wally flashed her a swift, injured glance and she pouted back at him, playfully remorseful. Her husband looked tactfully away.

Archie Partington, Duke of Plymouth, had been following the conversation with his habitual expression of affable blankness. He had joined the Netherwoods in Scotland from his own neighbouring estate, invited by the countess who always liked a peppering of eligible men at the table. Granted, he was rather elderly; but he was indisputably single, since his second wife had fallen off her hunter and died at the Boxing Day meet two years before.

‘My cook at Denbigh Court,’ he said now, ‘organised her
own replacement from her deathbed. The transition was seamless. Saved me all the bother of hiring.’

‘Don’t you find,’ said Hermione Hartwick, ‘that one’s staff seem indispensible when they’re with one, and then they leave or they die, and one realises they were perfectly easily replaced all along. A little like a favourite hound, in fact.’

This seemed a singularly callous observation, though around the table there was neither the energy nor – in some cases – the inclination to contradict it. Silence fell, a dreaded conversational hiatus; Lady Netherwood jumped into the breach.

‘Ladies?’ she said, indicating the door and Thea, entirely unready to leave the company of the men for the tedious chit-chat of the drawing room, said: ‘Oh, let’s not withdraw tonight. Let’s have some fun together.’

This anarchic suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm by all but the countess, who felt woefully wrong-footed, and at her own dining table too. But the suggestion quickly gained momentum as everyone began calling out suggestions. Mah-jong, said Lord Netherwood, only to be laughed at for being too stuffy. He retreated into hurt silence while various parlour games were mooted, debated, dismissed. The two dukes were loudly insistent on their own favourites: Plymouth wanted riddles and enigmas – ‘Oh Archie,’ said Hermione Hartwick, ‘not all that “Tis in the church but not in the steeple” nonsense’ – and Knightwick longed for charades; he loved charades more than anything he said, and defied anyone to come up with anything more amusing, at which provocation his wife suggested sardines.

‘More food? I really couldn’t eat another morsel,’ Thea said, then she gazed in bewildered pique about the table as her companions roared with laughter. It was a game, Henrietta explained fondly: a sort of backwards hide-and-seek, where one person hid, and everyone else hunted for them.

‘And on discovery,’ said Sir Wally, in thrilling tones
suggesting great intrigue, ‘instead of revealing the hiding place, you squeeze in there with them, until everyone but the last seeker is squashed into the same space – hence sardines.’

‘Well, that sounds extremely jolly,’ Thea said. ‘Just so long as smelly Storrey doesn’t squeeze in too. I shall be the first sardine.’

Tobias smiled at her. She was such a game girl. He wondered if she might tip him the wink as to her hiding place. Getting his hands on Thea Stirling had become just about all he could think about.

‘Very good,’ said the earl. ‘However, I shall leave you to it, as my sardine-playing days are over. Instead, I shall nurse a fine Courvoisier in my library and look forward to hearing all about it.’

‘And I shall be in the drawing room,’ said the countess, her voice the very essence of displeasure and disdain. ‘Please do join me there when you’ve had your’ – she paused – ‘fun.’

Lady Netherwood rose, and the dukes – excessively disappointed at being denied enigmas and charades and disinclined to squeeze in anywhere with anyone – rose with her and accompanied her out of the room. Dickie adopted an expression of comical suffering.

‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Wrap up warm. There could be a frost tonight.’

‘Oh pish,’ said the duchess. ‘An hour in the exclusive company of dreary Donald and awful Archie, and she’ll be delighted to see us all again.’

‘Really, Alicia. You’re too unkind,’ said Sir Wally, but he draped an arm cosily across her shoulders and he smiled as he spoke.

Thea, squiffy after two gin slings and wine with dinner, caught Henrietta’s eye.

‘As I haven’t played before and I don’t know the nooks
and crannies, let’s break the rules and start with two of us,’ she said. ‘Henry?’

‘Oh I say,’ said Tobias. ‘Surely you can find a hiding place without Henry’s help?’

But his protest was futile, since the two young women were already on their feet and – since no one else objected anyway – Toby had to stifle his disappointment and remain with the seekers while Thea and Henrietta ran giddily out of the room.

F
rom the pit yard at New Mill up the track to the main road, it was one hundred and eighty-five footsteps, and from the main road to the edge of Netherwood Common it was a further five hundred and sixty-eight. Often Seth would leave the pit at the end of his shift and begin to count backwards from seven hundred and fifty-three as he walked home; he liked this sense of the lengthening distance between himself and the colliery and he liked, too, the moderate challenge of keeping track of the numbers, coming as it did after nine long hours when his mental agility was not called upon at all.

Seth hated his work at the pit with a depth of feeling that was impossible to articulate: impossible, that is, if there had been a living soul he was willing to tell. As it was, he spoke to no one about the horrors of his day: the permanent cloud of dust too thick to see through, the ceaseless noise, the mindless cruelty of Mr Oatley, the supervisor, the painful boredom – a physical ache, unlike anything he had ever experienced before – of the hours at the steel belt, sorting muck from coal. Mr Oatley carried a long stick, which he periodically used to poke any lad who appeared to be slacking. ‘I’ll chop out your kidneys and put ’em in a pie,’ he would say, over
and over again, cackling demonically. Seth thought he was touched in the head. Opposite and beside him at the screens were boys he’d known at school, older boys who laughed raucously and shoved each other and seemed to find their work more than tolerable. They were happy to be out of the schoolroom, making their way in the world. But Seth, though he looked the same and sounded the same, felt like an actor playing a part. He played it well, though. He could hawk nastily and spit the dust out of his throat and onto the floor at his feet; he could stare sullenly ahead when the supervisor threatened to brain him for daydreaming; he could sit with his back against a brick wall and eat his snap, pretending not to care that his filthy hands left perfect fingerprints in the white bread.

But inside, where the real Seth resided, he wished with all his heart that he was still at school. He had always enjoyed it but now, now that it was his past, he remembered it as bathed in a golden light, an idyll of indulgent pleasure: the pursuit of knowledge, the thrilling quest for swift solutions to hypothetical problems. Like all deep thinkers Seth understood just how much he still had to learn; but now he had wilfully cauterised the steady flow of facts with which he had hoped to understand the world. Each day that passed at New Mill seemed a terrible lost opportunity. This tormented him. This, and the fact that his dad had loved this place, and yet he, Seth, loathed it. And so even his precious memories of Arthur were somehow tainted, all wrapped up in the misery of this new life that everyone had advised him against and yet he’d chosen anyway.

So it was a glum boy who walked slowly towards Daniel MacLeod as he stood waiting at the top of New Mill Lane: a glum boy, staring at the cinder path, ignoring all around him, silently mouthing his strange numerical litany. He only looked up when he saw a pair of boots ahead of him that
clearly weren’t going to move. When his eyes alighted on Daniel, his face registered first surprise, then embarrassment and finally utter dismay. Still, he wasn’t prepared to lose count.

‘Five ’undred and seventy,’ he said, then again, ‘five ’undred and seventy.’

‘What’s that?’ Daniel said. ‘Five hundred and seventy what?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Just summat I do.’ He was determined now not to say another word.

‘Fair enough.’

They looked at each other for a moment. Seth held his silence, but he hadn’t hurried on by, so Daniel took heart from this. He delved into a canvas bag slung over his chest and pulled out two terracotta pots, each bearing what looked to Seth like tiny palm trees. The pots were packed with rich black soil. So were Daniel’s fingernails. He stared. The small leaves were sharply pointed and plentiful.

‘What’s them?’ Seth said, tricked into speaking by his own curiosity.

‘Pineapple tops, planted up just this morning in one of my hothouses. I thought you might like to try to grow them.’

Seth looked at him suspiciously. He would very much like to try to grow them, but he didn’t know how Daniel MacLeod might know that.

‘Who sent you?’ he said, and Daniel laughed.

‘Nobody sent me,’ he said. ‘I thought, catch him on the way home and we can walk along to that allotment.’

His voice was casual, though he was perfectly well aware of the various disastrous scenarios that might result from his precipitous action. It was just that he was thoroughly sick of playing this waiting game with Seth. If progress could be made before the wedding he knew how happy Eve would be. And when all was said and done, Seth was just a boy and boys’ hearts could be unlocked, if you only had the right key.

‘They don’t grow ’ere. In our climate, I mean.’

‘Aye, they do, under glass and with a bit of care.’

‘I’ve no glass’ouse.’

‘All right. Well, we can see about that. Shall we walk on over there and have a look?’

Seth said nothing. On the one hand, the possibility of cultivating exotic fruit in his allotment was truly interesting. But on the other hand, he’d vowed for the sake of his father to treat this interloper with chilly contempt. Clearly, these two positions were incompatible. But those little plants … they intrigued him. And had this maddeningly pleasant Scotsman just hinted at building him a glasshouse?

‘Amos says you’d be soft to try and grow owt tropical in Netherwood soil,’ he said, attempting to remain unfriendly while at the same time prolonging the discussion.

‘Och well, Amos is quite right. Netherwood soil can’t nurture pineapples into good health all on its own. But a skilled gardener like yourself can bring them on, in the right conditions.’

It was no good. Seth had a brief, glorious vision of Percy Medlicott’s face when the first crop of pineapples made themselves evident, and all resistance was lost.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Well, in that case.’

‘Good. C’mon then.’

So they went together to the allotment, and though it was Daniel’s first visit, it wouldn’t be his last. They’d need a tan pit to warm the roots, he told Seth, and a sloping glass roof: a warm air flue too, if it could be managed. At Netherwood Hall they’d been growing pineapples since 1737, Daniel said; they knew what they were at down there. Keep the soil warm and keep away the mealy bugs and the thrips, and there was more than a fighting chance that Seth would be cropping fruit next summer. Seth listened, intent. Occasionally he asked a question; how warm did the soil need to be, how many pineapples per plant? His animosity had dissipated into the clear
blue sky. They walked the plot and it didn’t take long, up the brick path to the back wall, and down again. Daniel commented on the railway sleepers, deployed by Amos many months ago to make raised beds. Clever idea, that, he said. The willow trellis was beautifully done – was that Amos too? No, that was me, said Seth, and held up his hands: nimble fingers. What a team you’ve been, Daniel said and he wondered, aloud, whether Amos would mind his being here, making suggestions.

‘P’raps, at one time,’ Seth said. ‘But now ’e’s that busy with union work, ’e doesn’t get down so often.’ All the same, Daniel said, Amos should be consulted. Seth nodded, sagely. Men’s talk.

For now, they placed the little pots under two large glass cloches, in a part of the plot where the autumn sun, when it shone, could still warm the soil. But there was room aplenty for a tan pit against the back wall, just a wee one, Daniel said, and he would build it as soon as he got the materials together. This was a fine plot, he said. Seth was a fine gardener. Maybe they could take a turn around the kitchen gardens at the hall one day? Seth’s heart beat a little faster at the prospect. Aye, he said, maybe.

The conversation didn’t stray from the realm of the horticultural, but never mind. They were two gardeners, and two gardeners will never run out of something to talk about. Afterwards they walked back together until Seth’s path took him on to the common and Daniel’s to Netherwood Hall, and they parted with no ceremony or words of farewell: a brief salute, a nod of the head, was all that occurred between them. And Eve knew nothing of it, except she noticed, when she came home from work, that Seth was reading the biography of John Tradescant: reading it intently, with a small frown of concentration, like a scholar.