Ravenscliffe (33 page)

‘No, no. Just me. There’s no one left in Montrose who’d trouble themselves to make the journey, I’m afraid.’

‘Poor do.’

‘Aye, I suppose it is.’ He honestly hadn’t considered a guest list. He was a man with tunnel vision where this wedding was concerned.

‘I might look in at t’chapel when you wed. Through t’window, like, not inside.’

‘Be my guest,’ Daniel said. ‘Come in if you like, take a pew.’

Stevie shook his head emphatically.

‘No. Tha dun’t want an oaf like me in theer.’

Daniel opened his mouth to contradict him, then thought
better of it. Oaf, sadly, was about right. It would be altogether odd to have simple Stevie representing the groom’s family.

‘Right you are then, Stevie.’

‘Ta-ta then, Mr MacLeod. I’ll be off now.’

‘On your way, then.’

Stevie loped away like a cheerful ape and Daniel let him make some headway before following him out of the door. He took a great lungful of crisp autumn air – the best kind, and nobody could persuade him otherwise – and smiled at nothing and everything. Stale bread for breakfast and no one for him at his wedding but the village idiot, but life was sweeter now than it had ever been, and was about to get sweeter still.

Eliza’s dress was the most precious thing she had ever owned: no, ever seen. The most precious thing in the world, but it was hers. It was made from shot silk and was the same shade of deep pink as raspberry ice cream. It was snug in the bodice, full in the skirt, and there were layers of cream tulle beneath that made her feel like a ballerina, especially when she wore the cream satin slippers and pranced about her bedroom to the music, and before the audience, in her head.

‘Oh, it’s you. Thought there were an elephant in ’ere,’ Seth said, sticking his head round the door. ‘What you doin’, anyroad?’

Eliza carried on dancing. ‘Dancing,’ she said. Seth could say what he liked this morning. Her happiness was inviolable.

‘Should you be wearin’ that yet?’ he said.

Probably not, thought Eliza. It was only six o’clock and she hadn’t washed her face or had breakfast. But obviously – really, truly obviously and who would say otherwise? – she needed to wear the dress for as long as she possibly could
today. It was still unfastened at the back – there were twelve fiddly little silk-covered buttons that needed an extra pair of hands to manage – so it bagged out at the front, but still she felt utterly lovely in it. She ignored her brother’s question and spun so that the skirt swelled around her like a full-blown rose.

‘Show-off,’ Seth said.

Eliza’s spinning slowed and stopped. She smiled at him.

‘You can’t be a show-off if you’re on your own,’ she said, reasonably. ‘An’ I was on my own till you poked your nose in.’

‘Tha’ll be for it when Mam catches you,’ Seth said, but he left her to it. He thought she looked grand, actually, but he had never complimented Eliza in her life, and he wasn’t about to start now.

By nine o’clock they were all ready, apart from Eve, who was still upstairs with Anna. The children were in the parlour, which was filled with the sweet scent of lily of the valley because a trailing bouquet had been delivered for Eve from Daniel earlier that morning, along with a note that she wouldn’t let them read, because, she said, it was private. They had been instructed to wait quietly and on no account go outside to play; this last instruction was for Ellen and Maya, though. No mud pies, was the message.

Seth wore a proper morning suit, nipped and tucked to fit his skinny limbs. Eliza was now legitimately buttoned into her raspberry dress and though she’d stopped dancing, she still held herself regally and moved with a consciousness of an invisible audience. She stood straight-backed by the long sash window in the parlour like a ballerina awaiting her cue. Ellen and Maya were in cream cotton sateen with pink collars
and sashes. They were uncharacteristically motionless, waiting side by side on the couch in the parlour; they understood that something special was going to happen and they had to stay clean, but that was all they knew. At least they had something to look at, because in front of them Seth paced the floor and bit his nails, overcome with anxiety at the role he was to play at the wedding. The glory of the offer had mutated into folly. He wished he could just sit in the chapel and watch, like everyone else. He wished he’d kept his trap shut when Uncle Silas first spoke up. And that was another thing – Seth had thought his uncle would have been here this morning, but he’d said not on your life, he’d see them at the chapel and he hoped Seth knew what he’d taken on, getting five women to the church on time, and rather Seth than him. His mam had laughed at the joke, but Seth hadn’t. He felt he’d made a dreadful mistake and underestimated the burden of responsibility; its weight was making him feel very small.

Anna ran down the stairs and into the parlour and when she saw Seth she said: ‘Cheer up, it might never happen.’ She looked pretty, he thought. She’d almost run out of time to make herself something new to wear, but now here she was in a shimmery green frock, which changed colour in the light, like a mermaid’s tail. It was longer at the back than at the front so you could see the pale green shoes she wore and a hint of her narrow ankles. She wore a wide hat, too, which she’d decorated with leaves but it didn’t look daft, it looked champion. Seth recalled a school pageant where the top class had dressed up as the seasons and Miss Mason was Spring. That’s what Anna looked like. Spring, personified.

‘Where’s Mam?’ he said. ‘It’s time we went.’

She smiled at him.

‘Well, we can’t go until cars come. We’re not walking there.’

He sighed in a weary, careworn way and sat down heavily
next to Ellen and Maya so that they bundled into him helplessly, which was apparently hilarious. He scowled at them.

‘All will be well, Seth,’ Anna said. ‘Really. You know what to do at chapel. We can practise again if you like?’

She had been so pleased with him for asking to give Eve away at the wedding that she’d completely finished painting the tree on his bedroom wall and had added an iguana to one of the low-lying branches. This had been the one good thing to come out of his big-mouthed moment in the kitchen a few days back.

‘No,’ he said.

‘I go in and you wait for five minutes with your mam and girls. Then you give—’

‘—a signal to t’minister an’ just after t’music starts we walk in. I know.’

‘Well then.’

‘Well, I know what’s meant to ’appen. But it’s just, what if I trip an’ fall flat on my face? All them folk thinkin’ what a blitherin’ idiot I am.’

‘You won’t trip. When do you ever trip?’

‘Be just my luck to do it today.’

‘If you race down aisle as if chasing tram, you might trip. But you’ll walk down aisle at snail’s pace. Have you ever seen snail fall over?’

From her imaginary stage by the window Eliza laughed at Anna, then gasped and said: ‘Oh Mam,’ and everyone looked at Eve, who was somehow standing in the room, though no one had heard her on the stairs. She was ready.

‘Well?’ she said to the assembly.

Eliza, who was seeing Eve’s finished wedding dress for the first time, graciously and instantly conceded the spotlight.

‘Mam, you look absolutely more beautiful than anybody in the world,’ she said.

Anna, creator of this vision, smiled with satisfaction at
the finished effect. The dress was entirely from her imagination and in it Eve looked ethereal, celestial, quite shockingly exquisite. Her hair was loose – no bun, Anna had said, not even a loose chignon – but it was held back from her face by a slender silver band onto which Anna had secured a row of perfect, waxy jasmine blooms. She wore no jewellery, no rouge, no lip colour, but the dress and the simple adornment to her hair were together so lovely that on the couch the two little girls began to clap and cheer heartily, so Anna and Eliza joined in. Seth, who suddenly felt he’d never really looked at his mam properly before, found he had nothing useful to say and simply stared.

S
amuel Farrimond drove his gig as slowly as was possible without actually stopping. He wanted time to observe his surroundings and order his thoughts, so he kept the pony in check up the elegant sweep of Oak Avenue in order to delay his arrival at Netherwood Hall. He was not a man to be easily awed; indeed, he was an imposing presence himself. The Methodist ministry called, as in all things, for simplicity of dress, but within those boundaries Reverend Farrimond was never less than immaculately turned out: a handsome, silver-haired fellow with a carrying voice that served him well at the pulpit. But this rolling parkland, this immaculately swept driveway of dusky pink gravel, this fine, long, classical house with its windows lit as if by homecoming beacons – perhaps he had been too long in Grangely, he thought, for it seemed he had forgotten how arresting was the world inhabited by the very rich. It was his first visit to Netherwood Hall, for what business would a Methodist minister from an impoverished neighbouring parish have at the sumptuous family seat of the local earl? None whatsoever, until life’s unexpected twists and turns made it necessary, and it was indeed an extraordinary sequence of events that had brought him here today to unite
Eve and Daniel in holy matrimony. Actually, he mused, as he kept a crawling pace past the classical portico of the south front, if it wasn’t for him, none of this might have happened. Credit where it was due. It had been his idea, after all, that Eve should make a living from her peerless pies, and what a runaway success that had been. And now look – she had come so far that the Netherwood Hall family chapel was at her disposal, and the earl was sending a car to convey her to it. Fairy tales had been spun from less.

Ah, there was the chapel now: modestly proportioned, which was all to the good, and from what he could see through the open door, relatively unadorned inside. Well, perhaps the Hoyland ancestors had Methodist leanings, though from what he knew of the family, he had expected they would have thrown their money at God’s house in the same way they threw money at their own. Now, now Samuel, he chided himself, these are friends, not foe. And after all, they had shown real discernment and good taste when they took a shine to the lovely Eve, and her a poor Grangely girl, with a Grangely girl’s traditional burdens; a hapless wastrel for a father and a mother so reduced by illness and poverty that she surrendered her last breath with a grateful smile. Samuel Farrimond knew this, for he had been there at the time and had gently closed Dinah Whittam’s eyes, so that her children would understand she was gone. He had buried Dinah, and had feared for Eve, knowing her own resilience was all that would save her. And how she had risen! The minister had watched her progress through life with increasing joy, for she had truly flourished on the journey. No one was more deserving, of either her happiness or her success. She was a thoroughly splendid young woman. He hoped Daniel MacLeod was worthy of her; himself, he had hardly had time to form an assessment of the man’s character, and that handsome face of his might blind a woman to other faults. One must look beyond the obvious to seek the truth; the longer he
lived, the more he trusted the wisdom of this position. Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty, but beauty cannot supply the absence of good nature. Now who wrote that? He wondered if his faculties were beginning to fail, because time was when he would have had the source and the date off pat. In any case, it was a man of great good sense. Never a truer word.

The gig rolled eventually into the rear courtyard where the minister was obliged to stop, though he continued to stare, mesmerised still by the opulence of his surroundings, even here, at the business end of the house. If it wasn’t for the horses and the stable doors, these outbuildings could pass for a respectable country manor: how many of his parishioners, he wondered, could comfortably be housed here?

‘Ah, Reverend, splendid, splendid. Welcome sir, welcome.’

He had expected a stable-hand, not the earl, but there was Lord Netherwood striding towards him in mud-caked boots and a flat tweed cap and, in his hand, a shovel. This he flung to one side as he approached and it was instantly retrieved – so quickly it was almost caught before it fell – by a menial, who darted noiselessly from the shadows then darted back again. Placing one steadying hand round the pony’s bridle, the earl held out the other in welcome. The minister reached across and shook it, then sprang down from the gig in a surprisingly sprightly manner for a man who was the wrong side of sixty. He had met the earl on other occasions and found him likeable enough, though Reverend Farrimond held a dim view of vast privilege – working tirelessly as he did among the very needy – and in his experience a person’s capacity for spirituality diminished in direct proportion to their wealth. Only the poor could be relied upon to turn to God with constancy and humility, though they might have every reason to believe He had forsaken them. These thoughts were not written in his
countenance, however, and he returned the earl’s easy smile with what certainly passed for warmth.