Ravenscliffe (35 page)

‘Mrs MacLeod,’ said the earl, taking Eve to one side. It sounded so strange to her ears, and it would be weeks before she could answer to it without hesitation. Lord Netherwood enveloped her in an unexpected bear hug, which crushed her bouquet and left her breathless when he released her. ‘I couldn’t be prouder of you if you were one of mine.’

There was a tremor in his voice and Eve herself felt the threat of tears. She had so much to be grateful for, and most of it was due to him. He wasn’t joining the gathering at the mill – Lady Netherwood felt that gracing the church service
with her presence was glory enough for the happy couple: any more would be
de trop,
she said, a compromise of one’s dignity. Her husband, while disagreeing heartily with her rationale, nevertheless had business to attend to at Long Martley and he supposed, also, that the wedding breakfast might go off with more of a swing without the inhibiting presence of the aristocracy. But there was something he had to say to Eve before she left; his wedding gift to her had to be explained.

‘Now look,’ he said, and his face was suddenly serious. ‘I have something to tell you, and I don’t want even a murmur of protest. It’s my dearest wish that you should own your wonderful business in its entirety – no’ – for she was about to demur, as he had known she would – ‘I will not listen to objections. Eve’s Puddings & Pies will be just that – yours, my dear. This is my gift to you, on your wedding day. My bailiff has been asked to inform our solicitor of my wishes, so the paperwork should be ready to sign in the next day or so.’

She stared at him, slow to absorb what he had just offered.

‘Come to Mr Blandford’s office on Thursday. I shall be there too, and we’ll get the ball rolling, what.’ He rubbed his hands together, gleeful at the prospect of giving away a gold mine. She found her voice at last, and though he had forbidden her to protest, she couldn’t help it.

‘Thank you, your lordship, but it’s too much,’ she said. ‘My ’alf share in it is already more than I ever dreamed of. I don’t need more than that. Really I don’t.’

‘Alas, my dear, what you think you need and what I intend to bestow are two different things entirely.’ He laughed now, because she looked stricken. ‘The business shall be yours, I’m afraid, and you will have to take comfort from the fact that it gives me enormous pleasure to hand it over.’

‘Well,’ Eve said, her argument nothing against the might of his generosity. ‘In that case …’

‘Believe me, I have given this due consideration – been meaning to do it for a while, and then you went and got married, giving me the perfect opportunity, what.’ He paused to smile at her then, suddenly serious again, said: ‘I would ask one thing of you, however.’

She looked at him hopefully. A condition attached might make her feel better.

‘Use your new independence to think about expansion,’ he said. ‘New premises elsewhere – Barnsley, perhaps, or Sheffield, or further afield. Even Bristol: why not? Your brother is no stranger to ambition, I think. Talk to him, seek his advice. You have a quite brilliant talent and a good head for business. Let’s see where these assets might take you.’

She smiled at him. ‘More Eve’s Puddings & Pies?’

‘Many more, I hope. Up and down England.’

‘You are so kind to me.’ She shook her head, wonderingly. ‘Too kind. I don’t have t’words to thank you.’

‘Good. Lavish thanks are such a bore. But you do accept the gift, and the small condition I place on it?’

‘I do.’

‘Excuse me, but didn’t you say exactly the same thing to me just now?’

This was Daniel, who had sauntered up to join them. He grinned at his wife. The cat with the cream, thought the earl. Lucky, lucky fellow. Eve took her husband’s hand.

‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you all about it on t’way.’

‘Be happy,’ Lord Netherwood said. ‘And Mr MacLeod?’

‘Yes, your lordship?’

‘You’ll be doing something soon with that ruddy great hole over there, I presume?’

Daniel laughed. ‘Certainly I will. There’ll be a regatta to plan by the summer months.’

The earl clapped a hand to his head in mock despair. ‘Please don’t repeat that to the countess,’ he said.

If guests had been a little sparse at the service, the reverse was true at the mill, where a throng had gathered by the time Daniel and Eve arrived. Anna and Ginger had swagged the upstairs dining room with long, lavish garlands, ivy from the walls of Ravenscliffe studded with white tuberoses from the glasshouses at Netherwood Hall, where there was no such thing as a season and any bloom was possible, at any time of year. The tuberoses gave off a heady scent, sweet and warm and faintly narcotic, though the less exotic smells of warm pastry and pork wafted up from the kitchen below to remind everyone where they were. When the bride and groom came up the stairs and burst into the room a great cheer went up, hollering and clapping and whistling: a joyful racket, joyfully received. Amos pushed forwards to kiss the bride and shake the groom’s hand, immediately redeeming himself for missing the service and dispelling Eve’s fears of awkwardness between the man she’d turned down and the man she’d accepted.

‘You look grand,’ he said to Eve, and to Daniel, ‘look after ’er, or there’ll be trouble,’ but it was said jovially, with a wink and a smile and Eve felt a wave of gratitude that he had come and that all was entirely easy between them. Anna caught Amos by the arm.

‘She’s happy you’re here,’ she said as they stepped aside to make way for other well-wishers.

‘I’m ’appy I’m ’ere an’ all.’ He took a glass of champagne from a proffered tray, sniffed it, and pulled a face.

‘She thought you might not come.’

‘Did she? Never a chance. Are they serving ale? This’ll give me gripe.’

‘But you could have come to service too.’

‘And scraped and bowed to ’is lordship? Not on your nelly.’

‘Nobody scraped. Nobody bowed.’

‘Look.’ He put his untouched drink down on the nearest table. ‘I didn’t much fancy it, that’s all. Stately ’omes aren’t my style. Stop trying to read summat into nowt.’

Eliza danced up, all smiles and raspberry silk.

‘Excuse me,’ Amos said to Anna. ‘I just need to ask this beautiful princess ’ere if she’s seen Eliza Williams anywhere about.’

Eliza squealed with laughter and gave him a twirl then flung herself at him for a hug. Watching her, Anna wished she were at liberty to hug whoever she liked, whenever she wanted.

‘Y
ou see, Tobias is a lost cause,’ said Lady Netherwood. ‘I can do nothing for him now.’ She was peeling a ripe peach with a filigree knife and an expert hand. Her husband was behind his newspaper, refusing thus far to come out. ‘And so,’ she continued, ‘I shall turn all my attention to Henrietta.’

‘Unlucky girl,’ said the earl. He had hoped for fifteen uninterrupted minutes with the paper before leaving for the colliery, and had been working himself up into an enjoyable lather at reports of pugnacious Russians firing at trawlers off Dogger Bank, having mistaken the east coast fishing fleet for the Imperial Japanese Navy. But such matters were nothing to Clarissa, who had sniffed him out and joined him in the morning room with this bee in her bonnet. She had sent the footman to fetch a peach from the hothouse tree, then had immediately begun on her theme: the urgent need to make a match for Henrietta. That was ten minutes ago and she was far from running out of steam.

‘In any other family she would have been obliged to marry by now.’

Stoically, the earl ignored her. Three fishermen dead and others wounded in twenty minutes of hostile fire: Accident,
my eye, thought the earl. We should blast the confounded Russian pirates to kingdom come.

‘It’s talked about, you know, and not kindly.’

She waited. The peach was skinned; carefully, delicately, she sliced it from the stone, then dipped her fingers in a silver dish of warm water and dried them on a linen napkin. Teddy huffed behind his newspaper. She tried again, this time with a little more steel.

‘It’s an embarrassment and it reflects badly on us all. It reflects particularly badly on you.’

He lowered his newspaper at last.

‘Meaning?’

‘You know perfectly well what I mean. You overindulge her independent spirit, and you support her refusal to take seriously any marriageable prospect.’

‘For which kindness I am to be reproached?’

‘Indeed. It’s no kindness to confirm her belief that she may simply gallivant through life, unfettered by the obligations of womanhood.’

He began to laugh; he couldn’t help himself. She looked so pained and long-suffering, yet there she sat with absolutely nothing to do for the rest of the day but eat a peach. Obligations of womanhood, indeed. It was barely half an hour after the wedding and clearly this event, plus the fact that she had little else to occupy her mind, had set his wife on this matrimonial one-note song. She was right, of course: Henry should be married by now. But so many supposedly eligible young men were blithering idiots and he could quite see why his daughter might prefer the company of horses, given the choice.

‘It’s so like you to laugh,’ Lady Netherwood said testily. She drummed her fingers on the side table by her chair, and the footman looked suddenly alert. Another peach, perhaps? It seemed not.

‘It’s so like you to find amusement in my concerns.’

‘Clarissa dear, I was amused by your choice of words, not by your concern for Henry,’ he said. ‘“Unfettered by the obligations of womanhood”: splendid, quite splendid.’

She looked at him, perplexed. How odd he could be! She was quite sure that when they married all those years ago he had been an entirely conventional young man. Now he seemed to be acquiring eccentricities with age, along with grey hairs and inches on the waistline.

The morning room door opened and Henrietta appeared, dressed for outdoors.

‘Speak of the devil,’ said the earl. ‘Would you say, Henry, that you are unfettered by the obligations of womanhood?’

‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Who wants to know?’

‘Your mama. She believes it’s time you were fettered, in fact.’

Lady Netherwood gave a noisy, exasperated exhalation of breath. She glared at the earl and then at Henrietta. They would turn on her now, for sport: well, let them try.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked her daughter.

‘To Long Martley with Daddy.’

Lord Netherwood rolled his eyes heavenward: unfortunate answer, under the circumstances. Now Clarissa would forbid it.

‘I forbid you to go,’ she said, right on cue. ‘Remove your hat and coat and come and sit down.’

Henrietta stared at her, and then at her father, who cravenly picked up his newspaper again and opened it.

‘Mama,’ she said patiently. ‘Daddy and I have an engagement with Mr Garforth at the Mines Rescue Centre. It won’t be dirty or remotely dangerous, will it, Daddy?’

‘Please don’t appeal to your father against my word. He can do just as well without you. You have no business in a colliery yard. The very idea is preposterous.’

‘Daddy?’ Her voice was indignant, not beseeching.

He considered his options, but only briefly. ‘Do as your mama asks, Henry. She makes a very good point.’

‘Thank you, Teddy.’

Hands on hips, Henrietta all but stamped her foot in temper. If it weren’t for her, there would be no Mines Rescue Centre and now it seemed she was surplus to requirements. She glared contemptuously at her father, who had the good grace to look uncomfortable. He would have liked Henry’s company, in fact, but to fly in the face of Clarissa’s wishes would be impolitic, not to say disrespectful. There would be other occasions, and he tried to communicate this silently to his daughter. She was having none of it, however.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Very well.’

She removed her hat, pulled off her gloves.

‘I won’t join you in here though, Mama. You may enjoy your peach in private. I have a letter to write, as it happens.’

‘Good,’ said Lady Netherwood, thinking she had managed her wayward daughter very well. She cut a glance at the earl to share her satisfaction, but he refused to compound his disappointing performance by meeting her eye.

‘Are you writing to Thea?’ he said.

‘I may do, now that I have an entire day at my disposal. But first I have some business to attend to.’

The countess, wary now, said: ‘Indeed? Of what nature?’

‘Of a political nature.’

Now the earl folded his newspaper and put it down. He looked extremely grave.

‘To whom are you writing, Henrietta?’ he said.

‘To Mrs Pankhurst,’ she said. ‘I feel it’s high time we became acquainted.’

Out she stalked in high dudgeon.

‘Bluffing,’ the earl said to his white-faced wife. ‘There’s not a radical bone in her body.’