Ravenscliffe (39 page)

Daniel ordered cheese sandwiches and a jug of lemonade, standing stark naked at the table and dialling the big black telephone, speaking with a mysterious authority, as if he was used to hotel trysts and room service. It should be champagne, he said, not lemonade, but Eve was thirsty and anyway, she thought champagne was overrated. She watched him from under the covers, amused by his lack of self-consciousness.

‘You’ll put summat on, when t’food comes?’

‘Might do,’ he said. He smiled at her and her heart flipped. ‘You look a wee bit tousled there, Mrs MacLeod.’

She blushed, and he laughed.

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘It’s allowed.’

‘Perhaps we should show our faces downstairs, though. What’ll they be thinking?’

He laughed again.

‘Eve, it’s a big hotel, they don’t log our comings and goings.’

‘Still, though.’

‘Still nothing. You’re staying right there on that bed. I’m not finished with you yet.’

They grinned at each other.

‘Do you suppose there’s time, before the sandwiches?’

‘Daniel!’

‘No, you’re right. A man can’t work on an empty stomach.’

She threw a cushion at him; they were dotted about the bed, plush red velvet, serving no purpose except to add to the opulence of the room. It was very fine, if a little overblown. She thought of Anna, moving through Ravenscliffe working her magic. Anna would pare this room back to its essential elegance. Where there was velvet, she would put muslin or linen. Where there was heavy flock paper, she would put paint in a soft, surprising colour. Daniel hadn’t seen the bedroom yet, the one they were to share at Ravenscliffe. Under Anna’s influence, it was as if the sun shone in it all day long: palest yellow, cream, white, and then the bedspread was cornflower blue. When Eve had talked about it, in the kitchen up at the mill, Ginger had raised her brows and asked, wouldn’t it be peculiar, the three of them up at Ravenscliffe; shouldn’t Anna be moving out when Daniel moved in? Eve had looked up from her task, her hands suspended under warm, sudsy water in the sink.

‘Why?’ she’d said.

‘Like I said, it might look peculiar.’ Ginger had sounded a bit uncomfortable. She hadn’t meant to cast aspersions.

Eve had said: ‘I don’t think so. Not to us, anyroad.’ She had pulled a saucepan out of the sink and begun to scrub at its insides.

‘Well, you don’t want to pay attention to what folk say,’ Ginger had said and Eve had tossed her a look and said: ‘No, and you don’t either,’ in a tone that signalled the end of the exchange. Anna’s place in Eve’s life was a given; certainly Daniel understood this, and it had never crossed his mind to question it.

Now he took a running jump and threw himself back onto the bed beside her. The bedstead rocked and the springs protested but he just lay there, flat out with his hands behind his head, a great, contented smile on his face. She leaned across and kissed him chastely on the cheek.

‘We’ve so much to look forward to,’ she said. ‘So much ’appiness ahead.’

‘We have,’ he said.

‘I can hardly wait to be back. I mean, this is grand, being ’ere. But to be at Ravenscliffe knowing you’re coming back at t’end of each day, waking up with you every morning …’

‘I know. Waking up with me every morning – there’s women would kill for the privilege.’ He winked at her and she pulled a face.

There was a crisp rap at the door.

‘Hello?’ Daniel said, still prone on the bed.

‘Your refreshments, Sir.’

She looked at Daniel with startled eyes and he laughed.

‘Och, all right then. Just for you, I’ll pull my trousers on.’

Dr Frankland had been with the earl for almost two hours before the countess and her children heard his step on the stairs. Brisk and businesslike, thought Henrietta; the footsteps
of a man coming to tell them that all was well, her father was recovered; he was sitting up in bed waiting to see them all.

The door was ajar and he pushed it fully open and entered the room. His expression was exceptionally grave. The countess stood.

‘I am so very sorry,’ he said.

‘Is my husband unwell still?’ said Lady Netherwood.

‘Mama,’ said Tobias gently, taking her arm, holding it tight.

‘Lord Netherwood has passed away, your ladyship,’ said Dr Frankland with infinite sorrow. He had never shirked from the difficult aspects of his profession, but to be the bearer of this news was painful to him. He knew this family intimately, all of them; the countess had suffered over the years from every fashionable illness and he had attended the births of all her four children; he had seen them subsequently through the ailments of childhood – had, on occasion, feared for their chances in the torrid grip of a fever. Their father, however, had rarely called on the doctor’s services, and yet now he lay dead upstairs, victim of a strange and terrible twist of life’s path.

‘He never regained consciousness.’

‘We’ve lost him?’ Henrietta’s voice was cracked and broken, barely audible. The doctor turned to her.

‘We have, Lady Henrietta. I’m so sorry.’

She dropped aghast onto the couch and Dickie sank beside her. They held hands. Isabella fell to the floor, face down on the fine Turkish carpet, screaming and screaming. Tobias, still supporting his mother, said: ‘Isabella. Please,’ but she continued on.

‘May I see him?’ said Lady Netherwood. Isabella’s noise seemed not to register.

Dr Frankland nodded and the countess gently pulled her arm from her son’s grasp and moved towards the door.

‘Mama, I—’

‘No, Toby,’ she said, without turning. ‘No need.’

At the top of the stairs she found Parkinson, though she passed him without a murmur. He watched her like a sad hound, suffering, longing for a kind word. He felt uprooted somehow, uncertain what to do, unprepared, in spite of years of service, for this awful eventuality. He would have liked to have stepped into his lordship’s bedroom and pay his respects; reminisce, perhaps, about the years they had shared as master and servant; weep. But it was not his place to do so, at least, not yet. From behind the closed door of the earl’s room, the sound of the countess talking softly to her husband threatened to undo him entirely. So he walked down the stairs. Mrs Powell-Hughes was still unaware of Lord Netherwood’s death. His heart was heavy at the prospect of burdening her with the news.

‘Teddy?’ said the countess.

Dr Frankland had cleaned the wound on the earl’s head, and bandaged it, and now the patient lay on his back under the counterpane, though he was still dressed in his motoring clothes.

‘Teddy. Silly old thing, you still have your coat on.’

He didn’t answer. She sat by him on the edge of the bed, and gazed about her. Such a masculine room. She imagined the rooms of his London club looked much the same; men were so predictable, so easily pleased in these matters. It struck her that Dr Frankland had closed the curtains, the thick green damask sinking the room into underwater gloom. Little wonder Teddy slept so deeply. She slipped from the bed – it was a fair
drop, for her; once upon a time, in the early years, he had laughingly offered to provide a step-ladder for her visits – and wandered over to the windows, dragging the drapes apart.

‘Teddy?’ she said, more loudly now, from where she stood. ‘It’s time for tea and I do think if you stir yourself, you’ll feel all the better for it. I hope you’ll learn from this little misadventure, dear. Let Atkins drive. That’s why we have him.’

She walked back to him, lifted the counterpane, took his hand.

‘Oh my! How cold you feel.’ She rubbed his lifeless hand between hers, then reached for the brass handle set into the wall by his bed. In the servants hall a bell would ring, and someone would be here in moments. Meanwhile she would hold his hand like this, and chat to him while she waited.

Tobias went to find her. She looked at him when he entered his father’s room and her face showed irritation, not grief.

‘I thought you were Agnes,’ she said. ‘I rang. Your Papa needs beef tea.’

He stared. His eyes alighted on his father’s body, still as stone, and he found himself unable to move or to speak. Behind him, just outside the open door, Mrs Powell-Hughes arrived, red-eyed, responding to the swinging bell in the servants’ hall, believing that perhaps the doctor needed assistance. She saw the earl on the bed; she saw the countess perched beside him, trying to warm his hand in hers; she saw Tobias, wordless at the threshold of the room. And immediately, she understood. She swept in, took control.

‘Now, your ladyship, come with me to your room and I shall send Flytton to you. You leave his lordship to the doctor.’

She had the countess by the shoulders and led her across the room as if she were a sleepwalking child. As she passed
Tobias, the housekeeper placed a warm hand on his arm, lingering momentarily and giving him a look of such limitless sympathy, such comfort and reassurance, that it remained with him, pure and perfect, for all the difficult days to come.

A
t half-past three on the afternoon of the day the earl died, the great bells in the two cupolas of Netherwood Hall were tolled thirty times, slowly and with a five-second beat between them. They told the county of a death in the great Hoyland line, and though word had spread that Lord Netherwood was mortally wounded, there were plenty of people who were stopped in their tracks in the street, in their kitchen, in the colliery yard, stilled and silenced by the sonorous, sorrowful chimes. The last time they’d rung in this way had been twenty-six years ago, when the fifth earl had died. Then, his end came as no surprise, the inevitable conclusion of a protracted illness: weeks and weeks during which his condition worsened by tiny degrees, the old man visibly shrinking on his bed, hovering between life and death, before finally releasing his fragile grip on consciousness and slipping away. But now – the death knell for the earl was unexpected, horrifying: he was hale and hearty, not yet fifty years old, and wasn’t it only this morning that he’d driven to Long Martley in the best of spirits? This last was repeated again and again, as if his death defied all logic and the facts of the matter made it impossible.