Netherwood (26 page)

Still, thought Eve, the local gossips would find ammunition even if she didn’t present it to them on a plate, so what was the point fretting? She knew, and Amos knew, that theirs was an innocent friendship, and that was all that really mattered.

‘Arthur would’ve enjoyed today,’ she said. Invoking his name was a comfort.

‘Aye, ’e would that,’ said Amos.

‘It were a grand do,’ said Eve. ‘T’ earl’s a generous man.’

Amos didn’t respond; there’d been two more fatalities in Netherwood since Arthur’s death, one at Middlecar and another at New Mill. The wooden posts that held the tunnel roofs in place needed replacing in all three of the earl’s collieries, and it was beyond Amos’s understanding how Lord Hoyland could apparently jib at the expense, while roasting oxen and lighting rockets for his son’s birthday. He regarded the celebration as a monstrous display of lavish personal wealth rather than an act of generosity towards the workers, but he thought that in present company he should keep that opinion to himself. They walked for a few seconds in silence, but it was comfortable enough.

Then Amos said, ‘You did a grand job.’ Complimenting Eve was safe territory. ‘Your pies were flyin’ off them tables.’

Eve smiled. ‘So I ’eard.’

‘I expect you’ll pick up a bit o’ business after this,’ Amos said. ‘Everybody knew they were yours.’

They walked along in silence again. Up on her perch, Ellen had fallen asleep, one soft cheek pressed against the top of Amos’s cap, her head jogging gently with every step he took. Eve had Eliza by the hand, and Seth was well ahead of them, leapfrogging the lichen-covered posts that lined the path they had taken. Eve yawned widely.

‘I could do with some of what ’e’s got,’ she said, pointing at her son.

Amos laughed. ‘You’ve not done so bad,’ he said. ‘Pork pie queen o’ Netherwood. ’Ow many did you make?’

‘Forty-one,’ Eve said. ‘Then Mrs Adams got me on game pies for a few hours, and loaves while t’game pies were coolin’.’

She’d stayed on, in fact, long after the terms of her contract had been fulfilled. Mrs Adams hadn’t wanted her to leave. They’d had to send a messenger in the early hours of the morning from the big house to Beaumont Lane with a note explaining the situation. Eve had written it, her hand shaking slightly, on Netherwood Hall headed paper. She’d asked Anna to bring the children to the afternoon’s entertainments, then to entrust them to Amos’s care whenever she needed to leave. The kindness of friends, thought Eve now, was something on which she entirely depended. True, Anna had board and lodging for her part of the deal, but all Amos got was extra work after his shift at the pit. If he wasn’t planting veg on her behalf, he was minding her children.

She looked sideways at him now, striding along beside her. Arthur used to say he’d come to resemble his bulldog, Mac, and while this was overstating the case, it was true that they shared a similar pugnacious set to the features. He was small – shorter than Eve and she was only 5’3” – but he was wiry and strong. For a widower, he was a fastidious man, his nails
always scrubbed clean of pit muck and his hair tidy. Eve thought about his late wife. She knew very little about her, only that her name was Julia and that she’d died in childbirth, then was followed to the grave by their first child a day later. They’d only been married for a twelvemonth. There was a headstone in the same churchyard where Arthur now lay; In Loving Memory of Julia Sykes and Frances Mary Sykes, it said, then came the dates which told the story, followed by the words May You Rest in Peace Together. There was a vale of sorrows contained in that simple inscription, thought Eve, and she felt a wash of shame that she’d never spoken to Amos on the subject.

‘What was Julia like?’ she said now, on an impulse.

He started slightly and Ellen stirred, up on his shoulders, then settled again.

‘Sorry,’ said Eve.

‘No, no, yer alright,’ Amos said. ‘It’s just, that’s t’first time in years anybody’s said ’er name out loud.’

‘Oh, Amos, that’s so sad.’

‘Well, who is there to mention ’er? She’s been dead more ’n twenty years.’

‘So what was she like?’ Eve said, again.

Amos thought about it. It wasn’t easy for him to answer, not because it was painful, but because he’d lived so long without her. He remembered her not as a whole, but in small, disconnected details like the scar on her calf from a childhood dog bite, or the strange fleck of blue in one of her brown eyes. But he had to say something.

‘She were nobbut a child when we wed. Just sixteen,’ he said. ‘Tiny, like a little bird. Not a beauty, but she ’ad summat.’

‘Like Arthur. Not a beauty, but ’e ’ad summat.’

They both laughed fondly at Arthur’s unquestionable lack of beauty. And they walked on to Beaumont Lane, where Amos
handed over Ellen, somehow heavier asleep than when awake, then said goodnight and carried on alone.

Inside, in spite of the long day and the lateness of the hour, Anna’s face was alight with excitement.

‘What?’ said Eve, with the smallest of warnings in her voice. She was in no mood for revelations, wanting only to sink into a chair and let the healing properties of strong tea revive her for the work still to be done before bed.

‘I have idea,’ said Anna.

‘An
idea.’ Eve corrected her automatically. Anna took it for encouragement.

‘Da,
an idea,’ she said. ‘You want hear?’

‘Not really,’ said Eve.

‘Imagine scene.
A
scene,’ said Anna, correcting herself this time. ‘Small tables with pretty cloths, maybe jugs of flowers.’

‘Sounds nice,’ said Eve.

‘Set for lunch.’

‘Dinner,’ said Eve.

‘Or dinner.’

‘Tea,’ said Eve.

Anna conceded, with a nod of her head, that she should perhaps, by now, be using the local terms for meal times, though for her, dinner would always be a meal taken in the evening, while tea was always and for ever a hot drink.

‘So. Daily menu, with simple hot meals, served to paying customers who sit at tables,’ said Anna.

‘Sounds like t’Central Café in Barnsley,’ said Eve. ‘Oxtail soup, sausage an’ mash, poached egg on toast. Oooh, do we ’ave any eggs? I could murder a couple.’

‘So,’ said Anna, ignoring her. ‘As well, we sell usual things
at door – pies, puddings – but also feed customers here, at our tables.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Eve, suddenly cottoning on.

‘Eve’s Café!’ Anna, like a child on Christmas morning, was wide-eyed and pink-cheeked. She looks like Eliza’s china doll, thought Eve. What a shame it was to disappoint her.

‘No,’ she said.

‘But—’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘If you just—’

‘Absolutely, definitely not.’

‘Why?’ said Anna.

‘Because we haven’t t’space. Because we haven’t any tables and chairs. Because folk wouldn’t come. Because we only have one pair of hands each.’

Anna, her voice beseeching, said, ‘We do have space, if we move things a little. We buy tables and chairs. People will come. They love your food.’

Eve sat forwards in her chair. ‘Anna,’ she said. ‘We’re managing to run a good little business, but perhaps you ’aven’t noticed that we’re flat out doin’ it. ’ave you heard t’expression “t’straw that broke t’camel’s back”?’

Anna, a touch sulkily, said, ‘No.’

‘But you know what I’m getting at?’ said Eve. ‘Because between us we just manage all t’shoppin’ and choppin’ and stewin’ and bakin’, not to mention t’cleanin’, washin’ and feedin’ of four children. T’very last thing we want to be doin’ is inviting folk in to that parlour for their dinner or their tea. Especially miners in their mucky britches.’

Anna said nothing. She knew it was a good idea, just as she knew Eve would say no. Now, it was simply a matter of waiting.

O
n Sunday, after church but before luncheon, the countess and Lady Henrietta left Netherwood for Fulton House in Belgravia, the family’s London mansion. Lady Hoyland had felt in need of diversion since the house guests had dispersed, and London society would provide the perfect antidote to the
ennui
that had stolen over her since waking on Friday morning. Lady Hoyland craved variety. She liked a diary full of engagements, witty company, pretty garments that were Absolutely the Latest Thing. So she had proposed what she called a ‘girls’ jaunt’ which generally involved the twin pleasures of shopping and tea-taking. Sometimes she went alone to London, in which case she also indulged her taste for elegant gentlemen, whose ardent attentions made her feel younger and more vital, and quite restored her
joie de vivre.
Pleasures of the flesh, in actual fact, held little real interest for her, though occasionally she would allow one of her admirers an intimate liaison, just to keep them panting. But her excursions to the capital weren’t simply for social gratification, because in London, too, lay all the novelty of recent modernisation; the earl had just spent a fortune on bathrooms and lavatories throughout, and electric lights now performed daily miracles where once only gas lamps and smoky sconces had lit
the scene. For all these reasons, Fulton House was absolutely her favourite place to be – that is, until she tired of it, and yearned again for her Netherwood garden.

The jaunt excluded young Lady Isabella, who was still by and large kept prisoner by her nurse and her governess. She knew her mother and sister would return in a few days’ time with a tantalising collection of tied paper parcels and striped hat boxes, most of which would not be for her and it was a tragedy of circumstance that young Isabella, so much more generously endowed with materialism than Henrietta, was made to stay at home. She had watched them leave, gazing glumly from the rain-streaked nursery window as they processed down Lime Avenue away from the house. Henrietta and the luggage were squashed into the Daimler and they followed behind Lady Hoyland, who refused – at least in this regard – to move with the times and give up the landau. They were heading for the family railway station, a private facility known locally as Hoyland Halt, quite separate to the busy station built by the Midland Railway Company and used by the rest of Netherwood’s population. The fifth earl, Lady Hoyland’s father-in-law, had commissioned the building of the station and the laying of the tracks for the family’s private use and it had remained entirely at their disposal ever since. The intervening years had seen an enormous increase in the comings and goings of passengers, goods and coal trains to the town, but the little station was never used for industrial purposes, and the handsome dark green locomotive bearing the Hoyland crest was ever available for the earl and countess. So much better, even the countess conceded, than rattling and bouncing one’s way south in a coach-and-four. Mrs Adams had packed wicker hampers with a light luncheon for the ladies, and these were loaded on to the locomotive, along with padded baskets bearing produce from the kitchen garden and destined for the Fulton House kitchen.

The earl, like Isabella, had also watched the ladies leave. His expression was anxious as the Daimler bearing his older daughter juddered into life and set off down the driveway. His anxiety stemmed not from their imminent absence from the family home, however, but from the fact that the last time Atkins had driven the car, its motor had inexplicably failed to start for the return journey, and he’d had to be ignominiously towed home by a couple of plough shires borrowed from the farm. So Lord Hoyland breathed an audible sigh of relief as, now, the vehicle accelerated smoothly then receded, diminished still further, and finally disappeared altogether from view.

The earl was dressed in his shooting tweeds with Min and Jess, his two black labrador retrievers at his side, though all he actually intended to do was take an instructive stroll through the estate with Jem Arkwright, his land steward. There was flooding at the Home Farm again and Jem had some new ideas about improving the drainage. Teddy’s ruddy face bore the expression of a man profoundly satisfied with his lot; there was little he enjoyed more than a long discussion with Jem about the condition of his land, his buildings, his stock or his boundary fencing. All of this and more would be covered in their walk today, which would conclude with a pint of ale at the Hoyland Arms in the full and certain knowledge that, on his return, he would not be required to dress for dinner. He watched a thin plume of smoke rise from the lower lawns and trail into the cloudless sky; Hislop had a bonfire of wet leaves on the go. You could keep your colognes and your potpourris, thought the earl. Bottle that smell and you’d be a wealthy man.