Ravenscliffe (31 page)

Whittam & Co. was the new proprietor of Dreaton Main, barring a few legal loose ends and a signature or two. Hugh Oliver was in Netherwood with Silas now, the two of them acquainting themselves with their new venture, strolling about the pit yard in their Savile Row suits like Sunday visitors to a public garden. They were buying a going concern, so the Dreaton men were still in work, though Silas was already wondering if fewer men working a different shift pattern might not be more profitable. But these matters could wait until the colliery was properly theirs.

Hugh found Netherwood dreary after Bristol. And he couldn’t ever live in a landlocked county, he told Silas.

‘I feel hemmed in,’ he said. ‘No obvious means of escape.’

Hugh attracted a good deal of attention. Somewhere back in his distant ancestry was an African slave girl and an English sailor: the result, two centuries later, was a Bristolian with skin the colour of toffee and a head of jet black curls. People stared and made no apology for it: he was a wonder to behold in this town of pale, underground faces. Silas, aware of the impact his colleague was having, paraded him all over town: the Hare and Hounds, the Cross Keys, the newly reopened Hoyland Arms all played host to Hugh and Silas. And at Ravenscliffe, he was an instant success, the sort of man who – unlike Silas, his opposite in many ways but particularly this – wouldn’t let a woman lift a finger if there was something he could do to help. Today he was holding the wicker basket for Anna while she unpegged washing from the line. It might have appeared unmanly, except he gripped the basket in one hand, and his arm was outstretched, so that he gave the impression of performing a feat of strength. The wind caught the sheets in Anna’s hands and snapped them out and back again until she had grappled them into a manageable bundle.

‘Good drying weather,’ she said, her voice swallowed by a gust. Her skirts were pressed flat against her thighs and her
hair, missing its scarf, whipped becomingly about her face and caught in her mouth when she spoke. These things Hugh noticed.

‘Good sailing weather too,’ he said. When he smiled, his teeth were startlingly white against his brown skin. ‘Those sheets of yours call to mind a clipper, sails full of wind. Makes me homesick.’

‘Pah. And how long have you been away from Bristol? Three days? Four?’

He sniffed the breeze. ‘It’s the lack of salt in the air,’ he said.

‘I only travelled once by sea and I hated it.’

‘Ah, your packet steamer,’ Hugh said, who had heard the story of her long journey from Kiev to Bremen and on to Southampton. ‘Stink and crush, I expect. I’m talking about tea clippers, racing each other back to England with the new season’s leaves.’

She shrugged, unconvinced, a landlubber to the marrow of her bones. She placed the tamed and folded bundle on top of the basket and they walked back towards the kitchen door.

‘And our boats,’ he said, not discouraged by her evident lack of interest, ‘are very fine indeed. Steamers, admittedly, but they’d dispel in an instant your prejudice against them.’

Anna said: ‘Not prejudice. Just a preference for dry land.’

Hugh, without so much as a dent in his enthusiasm, said: ‘We’re going to turn heads, Anna, I can tell you. The new Whittam fleet will have only first-class cabins with every possible comfort. A ballroom, a dining room, a theatre. In short, a grand hotel on the open sea.’

‘With bananas,’ she said.

She was merely stating a fact, hadn’t intended to be funny, but he threw back his head and laughed.

Inside, Silas had pulled an armchair close to the range and was warming himself in a manner that Anna found shamelessly self-serving, but Eve seemed to find endearing. She ruffled his dark head as she stood by him, waiting for the kettle to boil. Seth was at the kitchen table, head in a book, his lips moving fractionally as he read, oblivious to the adults in the room. Hugh deposited the laden basket on the floor and sat down next to the boy.

‘Good book?’ he said.

‘Aye, right good,’ Seth said, without looking up from the page. The muck of his working day had been sluiced off in hot water and his face was pink from it, his hair plastered to his forehead in flat spikes. He had worked his shift today and run to the allotment to check on the pineapple plants and found his tan pit already begun – the early foundations anyway, and a pile of bricks – though there was no sign of Daniel. Seth had paced out the footings to gauge the finished size and the joy he had felt at the possibilities of this addition to the plot was hard to bear alone. Three plots away, Clem Waterdine was turning a fork through compost with an expression of grim resignation and Seth had shouted across to the old man.

‘Mr Waterdine, I’m to ’ave an ’ot bed.’

‘That right, lad?’ said Clem, with fine-tuned impassivity. His head stayed down so that Seth was addressing the flat, greasy top of his cap.

‘Aye. For pineapples and such like.’

This, at least, provoked Clem into laying still his fork and looking directly at the boy.

‘Tha’ll nivver get pineapples,’ he said.

‘We might. They grow ’em at Netherwood ’all.’

‘What does Amos Sykes ’ave to say about it, then?’

‘Nowt yet,’ Seth said. ‘I ’aven’t seen ’im. ’e’s busy with ’is politics and that.’

Clem had said nothing, but his expression spoke volumes.
Politics, pineapples – nothing to choose between them; both equally barmy, both doomed to failure. Amos Sykes hadn’t been elected to Parliament; pineapples wouldn’t grow in a Netherwood allotment. Clem had picked up his fork and returned his attention to the compost and Seth, feeling awkward now and crushed, had wished he hadn’t bothered saying anything. This was why he hadn’t told Anna about the scheme when he got home for dinner, or his mam when she came in from the mill, or Silas when he had turned up with Hugh. You just couldn’t rely on adults to say or do the right thing, Seth had decided: better by far to limit what they knew.

‘About this wedding,’ Silas said now and Seth stopped reading.

‘What about it?’ Eve said. She sounded guarded. It wasn’t long off now, but she still preferred not to talk about it in front of Seth.

‘How would it be if I gave you away?’ He spoke casually, though he rather hoped to move his sister to tears with his thoughtfulness. Disappointingly, she remained dry-eyed – beyond the dress and the venue, she had given little thought to the mechanics of the day and in all truthfulness, now that Silas had raised the issue, she wasn’t at all sure that she needed to be given away by anyone. First time round, when she’d married Arthur, she had walked into the chapel with her father’s brother, whom she barely knew but who had been tracked down in Bradford for the sole purpose of handing her over. Young as she was, and conventionally minded, it had still struck her as ironic that having managed for so long without the protection of a family, this stranger was entitled to both claim ownership and relinquish it, merely by dint of his surname. But this was Silas, long lost and much loved, so she smiled at him with good grace, grateful if not for the service he had offered, then for his kindness.

‘Well, thank you,’ she said.

‘No.’

Seth’s young voice trembled a little as he spoke out and all eyes were suddenly on him. He closed his book and looked at Eve and she thought, Here we go again. But what he said was: ‘I should give you away, Mam.’ He looked at Silas. ‘If you don’t mind, Uncle Silas.’

Silas held up two hands as if to say fine by me, though in truth it rankled, having his thunder stolen so neatly. Eve, momentarily too shocked to speak, gazed at her son.

‘Well,’ said Hugh, who had not the slightest idea of the pitch and swell of emotion all about him in the room. ‘You’re the man of the house after all, Seth. Seems only right and proper to me.’

‘Yes please,’ Eve said then, looking at Seth. ‘That’d be grand.’

‘Right you are,’ Seth said. He opened his book again and began flicking through the pages to find where he had left off and then, aware that his mother’s eyes were still on him, looked up again.

‘What?’ he said, though he understood full well the effect of his words, and inside he glowed with the novel sensation of having done the right thing.

A
t one end of the servants’ dining table, Parkinson and Mrs Powell-Hughes were eating egg-and-bacon flan and at the other, Claude Reynard and Sarah Pickersgill were eating
quiche Lorraine
, though their plates bore the same food. In the no man’s land between them sat housemaids, footmen and kitchen girls who didn’t care what their dinner was called but were enjoying it almost as much as they were enjoying today’s instalment of the daily drama that was the butler’s disapproval of the dashing chef. Perhaps because he was French, Monsieur Reynard seemed to lack the necessary antennae to pick up the nuanced chilliness of Parkinson’s manner; much of the fun, for those in the ringside seats, was the chef’s Gallic insouciance in the face of the butler’s stern attempts at maintaining propriety in the dining hall, hierarchy at the table, discipline among the young members of the household staff. He raised an eloquent eyebrow now at Mrs Powell-Hughes as Sarah Pickersgill, who had grown a personality since stepping out from the shadow of Mrs Adams’s bulky presence and into the sunshine of Claude Reynard’s attentions, said to the table in general she’d heard that servants in other great houses had a bit of fun when the family was away.

‘Fun?’ said the housekeeper at once, not because she was unfamiliar with the concept – she had a lighter side, did Mrs Powell-Hughes, though it was well hidden – but because Sarah appeared to be suggesting something illicit, of which the family might not approve.

‘
Mais
, I think we have fun, Sarah,’ said Monsieur Reynard, feigning hurt feelings.

She smiled, and it was a little too arch for Parkinson’s taste.

‘This is your place of work, Sarah Pickersgill,’ he said, ‘whether the family is here or not.’

But Sarah, the new Sarah, was less inclined to be put in her place. She continued on her theme.

‘That’s as may be,’ she said. ‘But when t’Knightwicks are away from Harradine Park, their ’ousemaids sometimes try on t’fine frocks and pretend for a day to be ladies.’

‘What arrant nonsense, Sarah,’ said Mrs Powell-Hughes.

‘True as I’m sitting ’ere. T’duke’s valet showed me a photograph of ’em. All decked out in finery and posing on t’front steps.’

‘I saw it an’ all Mrs Powell-’ughes,’ said Ivy Ramsbottom, made brave by Sarah’s confidence and the fact that she had, indeed, seen a photographic likeness of four of the Knightwicks’ upper housemaids clad in chiffon and large-brimmed hats adopting a pose of haughty indifference to the photographer on the steps of the ancestral home. ‘There were a little dog in it,’ she added, hoping this detail might dispel the scepticism on the housekeeper’s face.

‘Let me tell you now,’ said Parkinson, with heartfelt severity, ‘that if any one of you should be discovered in clothing belonging to her ladyship, or any other member of the family, for that matter, the result will be instant dismissal.’

‘With no Character,’ said Mrs Powell-Hughes.

‘I was only saying,’ said Sarah.

‘As is your perfect right,’ said Monsieur Reynard with silken tones and a wink, with which slight gesture he managed to somehow invest his words with a lascivious intimacy. The girls at the French end of the table smirked and Parkinson wondered, with grave alarm, whether Sarah’s virtue was in jeopardy.

‘Anyway,’ said Sarah, defiant and breezy. ‘There’s no wonder their staff lark about – look ’ow t’duchess carries on.’

There was some truth in this, thought Mrs Powell-Hughes, though she wasn’t about to reward Sarah’s sauciness by agreeing with her. In Parkinson’s view, however, the moral tone of a household was in the hands of the servants, not the family, since for the idle rich temptation lay around every corner. His dander was up, and everyone – with the certain exception of Monsieur Reynard – knew it.

‘The codes of behaviour and standards of discipline that define an excellent body of household servants have always been understood and closely adhered to here at Netherwood Hall,’ he said, and his uncharacteristic pomposity was sobering to the younger members of the gathering; their smirks and smiles died on their faces. ‘I had thought, until recently, that I need have no concerns in this regard. However, of late this seems increasingly to have been a false confidence …’