Ravenscliffe (59 page)

‘He did not, your ladyship. Had he done so, I would have carried out his wishes to the letter.’

‘Mr Blandford, please don’t be hasty.’ She moved closer, close enough to lean with both hands on the desk. He could only imagine the mess her fingers would be leaving on the polished mahogany. ‘Please think carefully before you answer so unequivocally. Could you, perhaps, be mistaken?’

For a fraction of a second, he wavered in his confidence. Something in her manner unnerved him. Then he rallied.

‘There is no mistake, your ladyship, except that of Mrs MacLeod in spreading this lamentable misrepresentation of my character.’

‘Mrs MacLeod has never spoken to me of the matter. From what I understand, she has no wish to seek justice, preferring to expand her business at her own expense and without recourse to you. However, I have been told a story this morning by a trusted individual. I am minded to believe this individual because although I barely know you, Mr Blandford, I knew my father very well indeed.’

She paused. Still, he held her gaze.

‘My father held Eve Williams – Mrs MacLeod – in very high esteem. He admired her independence, her industriousness, her business acumen and, more than likely, her beauty, because, after all, he was only human. To present the business to her as a wedding gift seems to me exactly the sort of thing my father would have done.’

The bailiff’s face twitched visibly under the effort of remaining impassive.

‘And yet,’ he said, ‘he didn’t.’

‘And so,’ she said, as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘I did something I have never done before. I took my father’s journal from the shelf.’

Absalom’s mouth dropped open and he snapped it shut again. Here, indeed, was an unforeseen difficulty.

‘I have it still, back in the study, open at the page in October last year when he notes in his meticulous fashion that he spoke to you regarding his plans for Eve. How odd, then, that you have no such recollection.’

The bailiff opened his mouth again to defend himself but found himself, for once, lost for words. Henrietta watched his face closely, and was satisfied; the trap had sprung and he was caught. He closed his eyes. To continue to protest his innocence remained an option; whatever the earl may or may not have written in a journal was evidence of a sort but, still, it would hardly be upheld as definitive in a court of law. And yet in the face of Lady Henrietta’s clear-voiced case for the prosecution, Absalom Blandford, master of the cutting rejoinder, was powerless to respond.

She was in his office for ten minutes. Mrs Powell-Hughes knew it, because she had noted the time when Lady Henrietta left
the house through the kitchen door, and noted it again when she returned. It was hardly time to boil a kettle, she remembered thinking, hardly time to make a pot of tea. Lady Henrietta had gone back to the study to resume her business there and Absalom Blandford, the housekeeper couldn’t help noticing, had left his office shortly afterwards and had climbed into one of Lord Netherwood’s Daimlers. Phillips had been driving. They were gone for half an hour, and later, when Mrs Powell-Hughes had engineered a chance encounter with Phillips, he told her he had been asked by Lady Henrietta to drive the bailiff to Mitchell’s Mill. No, the young chauffeur had said; he had no idea what Mr Blandford’s business there was. Mr Blandford, said Phillips, was not the sort of chap to welcome cheerful enquiries about the whys and wherefores. This, conceded Mrs Powell-Hughes, was incontrovertibly true. She had returned to the house resigned to the fact that though something was clearly up, she had no idea what it was. Yet.

They were busy with the lunch service at the mill when Absalom Blandford entered the kitchen and asked for a private word with Mrs MacLeod. She was absorbed in making a batch of puff pastry, a labour of love requiring cool hands, a pound of best butter and a patient temperament. Ginger stepped in front of her as the bailiff approached and Nellie, who was tenderising a batch of beef shin, stepped forwards too with the wooden mallet still in her hand. Between them they might have pulverised him, but Eve looked up and saw from his face that he was already altered. The perpetual sneer was missing, and the arrogant tilt to the chin. He looked shifty rather than threatening, so she showed him through to her office, though she left the door wide open just as a precaution. In his hand
he held a thick file of papers and in a curiously gauche and childlike gesture he thrust this at her the instant they were alone.

‘What’s this?’ Eve said. She held the file gingerly, as if she couldn’t trust it.

‘The deeds to Ravenscliffe,’ he said, the words coming out in a rush in the end, though he’d been sure in the car on the way from Netherwood Hall that he would be unable to utter them. She stared at him, uncomprehending.

‘It’s yours,’ he said. ‘Lady Henrietta wishes you to have Ravenscliffe, rather than to continue to pay rent on the house. She asks me to wish you much joy, and she asks that you accept this gift as a formal apology from the estate, for failing to carry out her father’s wishes with regard to the business.’

Eve looked down at the bulky envelope then back at the bailiff.

‘Her father’s wishes,’ she said, faltering a little, ‘were thwarted by you, Mr Blandford.’

He closed his eyes briefly, as if her words caused him pain. When he opened them again she was watching him steadily.

‘Indeed,’ he said.

Still she watched him, waiting – perhaps – for an apology.

‘The deeds to the house,’ he said, speaking carefully, ‘are recompense for last year’s unfortunate misunderstanding. We understand you would prefer the business to remain a joint concern for the time being. However, we trust you will accept the house as a gesture from the family, in the late earl’s memory.’

It wasn’t contrition, but it was as near as made no difference. But though Absalom clearly thought his ordeal was over, Eve had other ideas. As he made to move out of the office, she stepped smartly between him and the open door.

‘Not so fast,’ she said. Ginger and Nellie, out in the kitchen, made ready to snare him should he bolt.

‘Last October you told me Lord Netherwood never meant
to give me t’business. You made me feel very small, Mr Blandford, and very, very foolish.’

Almost imperceptibly, he nodded. There was no emotion in his lizard’s eyes, but his bearing betrayed discomfort, at which she silently rejoiced.

‘Are you telling me now that I was right and you were wrong?’

He looked at her and something of his old contempt seemed to colour his features as if, having been forced to abase himself before her, he took heart from the fact that he could fall no further. Indeed, the journey back to full-blooded superiority had already begun.

‘The only thing I am telling you,’ he said, ‘is that Ravenscliffe is now yours. That, Mrs MacLeod, is the end of my business here. Good day.’

He left then, sidestepping Nellie and Ginger, and beating a hasty retreat through the courtyard. Behind him, in place of a visiting card, he left an astonished silence.

There was no journal, never had been. Teddy Hoyland had been the sort of man who was too busy living his life to spend any time writing about it. But Henrietta had realised, as she looked into her bailiff’s cold eyes, that some sort of evidence must be produced to shock him into a more confessional frame of mind: that, and a direct threat of the termination of his employment. Do not think, she had told him, that you are unassailable here. Do not think that the years of service you have given this estate give you, in return, the power to flout my wishes. Unless you right this wrong, this will be your last day as Netherwood bailiff.

Absalom Blandford had thought, just for a moment, that perhaps dismissal would be preferable to the alternative.
But a glimpse of a future stripped of his status was a terrifying thing, and was not to be borne. He was the Netherwood bailiff, and that was all he was; there were no other layers, no other strings to his bow or facets to his personality. He was useful to the estate, certainly: but the estate was essential to him. So he would survive this blow to his pride – had survived it; already it was history – and he would rise again. By midday he was seated once more at his desk and only the keenest observer of his habits and appearance would have noticed an occasional facial tic that now and then broke the surface of his composure; a sort of incomplete wink of the left eye which came and then was immediately gone. A sign that beneath his habitual expression of haughty disdain lay a positive tumult of carefully suppressed yet conscientiously nurtured bitterness.

T
he gentlemen of the press had been invited to view the new fleet of passenger liners and since champagne had been mentioned, attendance was high. There were three new vessels, larger than their older siblings but bearing a distinct family resemblance: silver-grey hulls, buff-coloured stacks with a broad navy band and a thinner band of red immediately below the blue. They were distinctive ships, the most easily identifiable of any sailing under the Red Ensign. Silas had named them for constellations –
Cassiopeia
,
Orion
and
Pegasus
, romantic names with popular appeal but touched by greatness. Silas and Hugh, immaculate in evening dress, stood at either side of a gangplank, welcoming their visitors like society hosts at a London club. Up on deck an orchestra played the ‘Britannia’ overture and vigilant waiters – the dining-room staff that had been hired by the company for the inaugural voyage – offered flutes of Dom Perignon to each new arrival and immediate refills when glasses were drained. The journalists were decked out in dinner jackets too, though Wilberforce Trencham wore tweed, as he always did. A professional assignment was no place for dress shirt
and tails, in his view. He eschewed the champagne, too; with a glass in one hand, how was one to take notes? He badgered the hosts with questions, not about the fine marquetry ceiling of the ballroom or the inlaid marble floors of the bathrooms, but about fuel consumption and tonnage and the relative merits of comfort over speed. How many knots, he asked, would
Cassiopeia
make? A ship this size must surely be forced to keep under twenty knots to avoid the massive incremental increase in fuel?

‘Thank you for your concern, Mr Trencham,’ Silas said. ‘But please rest assured that we have coal aplenty in our own Yorkshire colliery.’ There was an appreciative titter from the champagne-fuelled audience.

‘And so how many knots would you expect your liners to make? Forgive me for repeating myself, Mr Whittam, but I don’t believe you answered my question.’

‘Our commitment is to luxury, not speed,’ Silas said. He smiled at the journalists collected around him. ‘The ship does not exist that betters our fleet in the quality of its accommodation. First-class only and, waiting for them in Jamaica, a first-class hotel.’

‘Yes, yes, but how many knots will this vessel make?’

This was how it was with Wilberforce Trencham. His head could not be turned by the trappings of luxury on the new Whittam liners when all he wanted to know was how fast they would sail.

‘Sixteen knots,’ Silas said, though he had hoped to evade a direct answer, for reasons that were immediately exposed.