Netherwood (2 page)

Eve loved her home from the day she moved in, even though there was a full five days’ cleaning to be done before she felt she’d made it her own. She and Arthur had taken the tenancy when they married, she a lovely girl of seventeen, him an old man of thirty and a miner at New Mill Colliery. They were
filling a dead man’s shoes, taking up residence two days after the burial of old Digby Caldwell, who had clung on to life for some years longer than his neighbours expected him to, and for many years longer than they would have liked. He had stubbornly sat out his dotage with an unapologetic disregard for health or hygiene, leaving for Eve the charming house-warming gift of twenty-five makeshift chamber pots in varying shapes and sizes, each one brimful and reeking and dotted at random through the rooms. Arthur had been all for keeping some of the vessels as there were one or two decent saucepans and basins among them but Eve had given him short shrift. She would rather manage with what little they had than picture Digby Caldwell relieving himself every time she steamed a pudding.

And then there’d been the kitchen range, turned through disuse into a devil of a job, the iron rusted and the flue cracked. There was a dead crow up the pipe; Arthur had felt it as he groped up there checking for blockages and had pulled it out by one wing, stiff and sinister, its beak open in outrage. At the time it seemed to Eve a portent of sorrow, but she’d long ago forgotten it. The estate sent a welder to mend the flue but the rest was up to her, and she had scrubbed at it inside and out with wire wool and sandpaper until her fingers bled, then had black-leaded it back to a showroom shine. She’d made a good friend that day, though; she and the range were allies. It performed for nobody as well as it performed for Eve.

Arthur had watched in bewildered silence as his wife went through the house like a dose of salts. He couldn’t step out of the back door without some small, womanly improvement springing up behind him. His young wife had some fancy ideas. Deep lace curtains around the base of the brass bed to conceal the pot underneath. Brodded rag rugs, made not from the usual dreary mud colours but in brighter shades, blues and greens and yellows, worked into clever designs from a
collection of carefully hoarded scraps. Jolly little jugs and jars of wild flowers made a seasonal appearance in unexpected places, and at the windows were pretty curtains made from a bolt of cloth that Eve had been given by the draper in exchange for two of her meat-and-potato pies. Her ingenuity astounded Arthur, though he never told her so because he felt foolish for noticing, and anyway he lacked the language of compliments and endearments. But he admired her silently and treated her well, and he never sat down to a meal in his muck from the pit but sluiced it off in the tin tub first, no matter how famished he was. These small acts of kindness were his way of showing appreciation, and for Eve, who knew this, they were enough.

She had been downstairs for over an hour this morning before she heard the distant tattoo of Clem’s pole. Turnpike Lane, she thought, head cocked, listening. No, Brook Lane. In this stillness before dawn she could track his movements and if the kettle wasn’t on by the time he reached Watson Street, she knew she was running behind. She moved quietly around the small kitchen, going about her business, performing the rituals of early morning. This was her domain. She had mended the fire in the range, coaxing the barely smouldering coals back into life until she could safely pile a proper shovelful of new fuel into the hatch behind the bottom door. Now the water in the vast copper set pot was slowly heating, shuddering with new warmth, promising comfort. On a floured board, under clean linen cloths, three softly plump mounds of risen dough were waiting for her attention. Taking up a broad-bladed knife, she sliced a quick, deep cross in the top of each then opened the top door of the range and gingerly popped in a square of newspaper from a tin on the dresser top. The paper curled in the heat and began, in a leisurely way, to turn golden brown – not bucking and
blackening as it did when the oven was too hot, but gradually colouring over the course of half a minute. Eve fetched the loaves and slid them into place in the oven. Then she set a pan of stewmeat to reheat at the back of the range, filled the kettle from the set pot and placed it to boil on the heat.

By now the sound of Clem’s stick on his customers’ windows was loud enough to raise the dead, let alone the sleeping. Hard of hearing, that was his problem. A whack sounded like a tap to Clem. Really, thought Eve, he’d be cracking the panes at this rate, spending the few coppers he earned on repairs. She wrapped the thick shawl tighter around her shoulders and pulled back the bolts on the door. Bracing herself for the cold she stuck her head out into the morning and waited for the old man to pass the entry. And there he was, bent against the chill, pole in his right hand, an oil lamp in his left.

‘Clem,’ she hissed. ‘Clem!’

She startled him and he stopped dead, peering suspiciously towards the sound.

‘It’s me, Clem. Eve,’ she whispered, as loudly as she could.

He came closer, and in the feeble light from his lamp was able to pick out the extraordinary sight of Eve Williams in a nightdress, shawl and woollen stockings, standing on her doorstep.

‘Ey up, lass,’ he said, astounded. ‘Tha’ll catch thi death!’

‘Never mind me,’ said Eve. ‘It’s you! Shoutin’ an’ ’ammerin’. Pipe down!’

Clem grinned at her, toothlessly. His walnut face was pinched and blue-tinged with cold, in spite of the heavy overcoat, thick scarf and old flat cap he’d been wearing for half a century, but his rheumy eyes were full of pleasure at seeing Eve. She looked pretty as a picture, he thought to himself, with her long brown hair loose and that stern look in her bonny eyes. Aye, even in a temper she was a fine-looking lass.

‘Just doin’ my job, flower,’ he said. ‘If I don’t wake ’em, no bugger else will.’

He sniffed the air and nodded towards the kitchen behind her. ‘That’s a grand smell comin’ from in there,’ he said, his artful old face adopting a wistful look. And Eve, who was fonder of Clem than she chose to let on and who never could resist a plea for food, ushered him in.

A
stranger walking the streets of Netherwood, hoping from there to find Netherwood Hall, would almost certainly fail unless he resorted to asking directions from a local. Unlike many great country houses, the hall had been built not on high ground with commanding views of its own parkland and beyond, but in a wide, shallow valley whose gently sloping sides sheltered the house and its inhabitants from prying eyes. A stone wall, mellowed over the years by lichen and more than ten miles in length, encircled the park and gardens of the house, although it by no means marked the limits of the Hoyland family’s ownership, which extended for many square miles beyond. Within the walls lay the usual trappings of wealth and power – gently undulating pasture and parkland dotted with coppices and cattle and leading eventually to a majestic garden of many different elements, each one more charming than the last. A network of paths led the visitor on a tour of the varied delights; an oriental water garden with a miniature pagoda at its centre and a collection of ancient goldfish, whose lazy circuits of the pond gently broke the stillness of the dark green water; a rose garden with numerous fragrant blooms of every possible hue, whose blousy heads
graced silver bowls in the entrance hall of the great house; a circular maze of dense yew, which successive generations of young Hoylands had mastered by sheer perseverance, but which always foxed the unsuspecting newcomer; a shady grove of rhododendrons and azaleas with flowers as big as Sunday hats and branches old enough and tall enough to climb; hothouses that cocked a snook at the northern climate with their abundant display of exotic blooms and tropical fruits; and lush acres of sweeping lawns, immaculately kept, bordered on all sides by wide paths of dusty pink gravel, swept daily into soothing stripes by one of the thirty-five gardeners employed at the hall.

The house itself could be reached from the outside world by any one of four tree-lined avenues, one north, one south, one east and one west of the property, and each one leading from massive ironwork gates bearing the Hoyland crest. The avenues were each a mile in length and each, at its end, converged on the same broad circular carriageway that surrounded the house. The four avenues had been planted with their own different species of tree, and were named after them; Oak Avenue was perhaps the most frequently used and therefore the most admired, leading as it did from the gate closest to the town of Netherwood on the south side of the estate, but Poplar, Lime and Cedar avenues, though less often seen by visitors, were stately and handsome, and maintained to the same lofty standards.

As befitted the splendour of its grounds, Netherwood Hall presented a magnificent face to the world from whichever direction you chose to view it, although naturally its front aspect was the most impressive. To the family who dwelt there, the Earl and Countess of Netherwood and their four children, this was simply home, but to anyone else it was a glorious, grandiose masterpiece. Built in 1710 for John Hoyland, the first Earl of Netherwood, whose forebears had ensured his
fortune through judicious marriages and the canny acquisition of land, the hall was the largest private house in England. An earlier, humbler, timber-framed manor house built in Tudor times by an ancestor was pulled down to make way for this new and potent symbol of the family’s wealth and status. At its furthest extremities, the east and west wings were identical, massively built square towers which jutted forwards like vigilant stone sentries. At the top of each tower was a cupola housing a great iron bell, and when both were rung together, on high days and holidays, their peals were said to be heard as far away as Derbyshire. Between the east and west towers, the main body of the house ran flat and simple, with two long rows of eighteen windows, each one identical to its neighbour. At the centre of the building stood a proud, eight-columned portico with curved stone staircases left and right leading up to a gallery from which one could view the gardens, and also to four towering French windows, each giving potential access to the fine reception rooms on the first floor. However, these doors were rarely used for any practical purpose, the portico being intended primarily to declare to the world the full pomp and circumstance of the noble family inside. Instead, the house was generally entered through a pair of great brass-studded wooden double doors in the shady recess beneath the portico. They opened on to a pillared entrance hall with a marble floor that rang out underfoot and a domed, painted ceiling depicting richly coloured images from the lives of the Roman emperors. Many a titled guest, visiting for the first time and being themselves the owners of a fine country estate, were nevertheless rendered temporarily speechless by the grandeur.

To enter the gates and progress through the park and grounds of Netherwood Hall was to leave behind all trace of the corner of northern England that it inhabited. There were stately homes up and down the country where visitors gasped at the splendour of the estate yet barely noticed a change in the landscape
as they left the great park for the Surrey – or Sussex or Worcestershire or Norfolk – countryside beyond. But at Netherwood Hall, the contrast could not have been more marked between the worlds within and without the perimeter wall. In a thirty-mile radius there were just short of a hundred collieries, so that whichever direction you journeyed as you left, you were before long assailed by the scars inflicted by heavy industry on the hills, fields and valleys of this corner of the county. As their barouche or landau rattled its way north towards Barnsley or south towards Sheffield, the traveller’s view through the carriage window would be of slag heaps, headstocks, smoke stacks and railway tracks. Only with the blinds of the carriage window pulled down was it possible to imagine the verdant meadows of the agricultural past.

But verdant meadows never made anyone’s fortune; it was the stuff beneath them that counted here, and which was the continued source of the now-fabled fortune of Edward Hoyland, sixth Earl of Netherwood. Because in 1710, when the building of the great hall began, John Hoyland unwittingly laid the foundations of the family seat on a wellspring of seemingly limitless wealth. At the end of the eighteenth century, when the prosperous family already wanted for nothing, their Yorkshire estate was discovered to include, far beneath it, one of the richest seams of coal the country had to offer.