Netherwood (29 page)

Jonas, with no strong opinion either way, brought the conversation back to Saturday’s match. A knur-and-spell victory against Middlecar was very much uppermost in his mind, and he was worried now that Amos wouldn’t be there after all. Bugger the fight for better pay and conditions, he was thinking; more to the point, could New Mill field a full team?

He voiced his concerns and earned a withering look from Amos. Yes, he said, he’d be there. But he wondered at the intellectual calibre of his colleagues, when the greater good of the working man came a very poor second to a couple of hours’ entertainment on Netherwood Common.

It turned out that Anna was a fine needlewoman – the legacy of her idle, affluent youth, when a tapestry cushion cover was the only task requiring her attention on long winter’s evenings. Now, on those rare occasions when there was nothing more pressing for her to do, she took up a needle and thread, and sitting in the circle of light cast by the old paraffin lamp she mended holes and tears in the children’s clothes and even ran up new garments from odds and sods she picked up for next to nothing from Solomon Windross. In fact there was enough money these days to buy bolts of cloth from the draper, but Anna seemed to take real pleasure in reinvention. A blue serge door curtain had become two extremely serviceable pairs of gardening overalls for Seth, who kept putting out the knees
of his trousers, kneeling to plant pea plants and broad beans. The new trousers, like Anna, had a foreign look about them, but Eve couldn’t put her finger on what it was. The cut of the leg and the depth of the waistband somehow had a flavour of the mysterious world she’d come from, just as her knotted headscarf or her centre parting and thick plaits twisted into a crown around her head gave Anna the same indefinably un-English quality. Eliza and Ellen now asked for their hair to be done the same way, and when they wore the red pinafores made by Anna, with two bands of ribbon trim around the hem of the full skirts, she called them her little matryoshkas.

‘See,’ Anna said. ‘We take off your head, Eliza, and pop Ellen inside!’

There were no Russian dolls in Netherwood so the girls had looked at her blankly. Anna had to draw a set for them, showing five little gaily clad, apple-cheeked women in descending order of height. Eliza thought they looked more desirable than anything she’d ever seen.

There was no talk of Anna going home. Her presence was as completely necessary to Eve as Eve’s was to Anna. Like two cogs in a machine, their lives were mutually dependent and though no conversation had been held, no conscious decision taken, it was agreed that Anna was home already. It was a shame Samuel Farrimond didn’t realise this, thought Eve, when he came over one evening, waving a copy of the London
Times
and reading aloud in his sonorous, pulpit voice about continued violent unrest in Russia: Jews murdered in their beds, houses and businesses looted and destroyed. Anna muttered to herself in her native tongue and Eve could see conflict in her face, a mix of shame, sorrow and regret for her homeland.

‘“The mob was led by priests,”’ read Reverend Farrimond. ‘“And the general cry ‘kill the Jews’ was taken up all over the city.” Can this be so, Anna?’

She shrugged her foreign shrug, all arms and shoulders.
‘Perhaps. I don’t know. There is much fear and ignorance in Russia.’

He drove home his message, which Eve had come to realise was the purpose of all his visits to them; ‘Well, I know you’re not a Jewess, my dear, but you must stay here until it’s safe to leave. Who would return to such a country, where these atrocities are carried out and the authorities merely look on, unmoved.’

‘Sounds like Grangely,’ Eve said, to get him off the subject. He folded the paper and set it down on the kitchen table.

‘Well, we haven’t seen murder on the streets or religious persecution yet, but I do take your point,’ he said. Grangely was as sad a town as ever, the fire in the bellies of the militant miners entirely quenched, the dismal little tied houses occupied once more. It was as well for Grangely, thought Eve, that their Methodist minister had such a strong calling and that he wasn’t inclined to pack his trunk and take up a picturesque post in the Lake District or the Derbyshire Dales. There wasn’t much to celebrate in Grangely but Reverend Farrimond’s genteel, intelligent presence was, literally, a godsend.

‘So,’ he said now. ‘What tidings? How’s business?’

‘Brisk,’ said Eve, which was an understatement. Her frontdoor shop continued to sell out daily, and on top of that she had – as Amos had predicted – picked up new customers from Lord Fulton’s party. Orders from some of the more well-heeled guests had started to arrive the day after the function. Eve had answered a knock on her back door and found a smart young delivery boy from Wilkinson’s Comestibles. He wore a short navy jacket and a peaked hat with the company name stitched in red across the front; Wilkinson’s was a shop for the monied middle-classes and they dressed their staff accordingly. If he hadn’t been about the same age as Seth, Eve might have felt a little overawed by his military bearing. As it was he made her laugh, clicking his heels and introducing himself very
formally as Albert Osgathorpe, before handing her a letter on thick vellum requesting a regular consignment of twenty raised pies every Thursday. A representative of Wilkinson’s, it said, would collect the produce from her at 8 am prompt each week. She was to entrust her reply to young Master Osgathorpe, who would cycle all the way back to the shop’s distinguished premises in Market Street, Barnsley.

Eve – lacking her own headed notepaper – had told Albert to pedal back with the answer yes, and she gave him a slice of new bread spread with beef dripping before sending him on his way.

She’d no sooner closed the door on him when Mavis Moxon, housekeeper at the rambling old vicarage by St Peter’s, stopped by to ask Eve for ten pies for the church fête two weeks on Saturday. And while she and Mrs Moxon were still speaking, a lad turned up from Squires’ butchers with an order for raised pies to sell in the cooked meats counters in all three of their branches.

In the weeks since then, there’d been still more requests for regular deliveries, while the line outside her front door when she opened up in the mornings was never less than the length of the street. News was exchanged, gossip was spread and friendships were formed and broken in the queue for Eve’s Puddings & Pies. She’d branched out a little, selling dishes of Anna’s stuffed cabbage leaves and a clear brown chicken soup made from simmering the bones of the bird for hours in the bottom of the range. Anna said it was Leo’s recipe; he had called it Jewish medicine, the cure for all coughs, colds and even sadness of the spirit, and they sold it in jars with rubber seals and metal clasps. The initial general suspicion towards Anna and her foreign food had been eclipsed by the enthusiasm for how good it was – enthusiasm, that is, expressed in the traditional Yorkshire way, which is to say that although no one complimented it, every day it sold out. There was a penny
charge these days for the dishes, repayable on return. In the early days Eve had sent Eliza to fetch them back, but she proved an unreliable courier; always at least one would be dropped and smashed on the trip home.

So when Eve said, ‘Brisk’ in answer to Samuel Farrimond’s kindly interest, she was hiding the fact that the business, though undoubtedly thriving, was threatening to run her into the ground. She fell into bed every night dog-tired at gone midnight, but would be awake again before dawn with the weight of her new responsibilities closing in on her. She had anxiety-induced dreams where angry customers bore down on her shop with blazing torches, or where all her stock was eaten by a pack of crazed fox hounds. Being asleep, she said to Anna one morning, was more exhausting than being awake. Anna told her she should embrace her success, not resist it.

‘Expand,’ she said, illustrating her point with widespread arms. She was such a physical speaker, thought Eve; she used her body as much as her voice. ‘You are businesswoman, Eve. You must act like one.’

Eve didn’t much like her tone, and huffed a little about how expansion was hardly on the cards given they were barely managing the current workload. But Anna knew all about speculating to accumulate; she understood that overheads were sometimes higher than income. Daughter of a wealthy merchant, daughter-in-law of a bookkeeper, she saw income and expenditure as simply a list of numbers in an accounts book.

‘When my father wanted to make bigger his business,’ she said carefully, as if speaking to an infant, ‘he found wealthy men who could lend him money to grow. Then, when he grew, he paid them back, with extra on top for having faith in him.’

‘Are you suggestin’ I go to a moneylender?’ said Eve, scandalised. ‘Because I most definitely will not. If I spend money on my business, it’ll be my money and nob’dy else’s.’

Anna laughed. ‘Not moneylender, no. Another businessman, perhaps. An investor, not a crook.’

‘It amounts to t’same thing,’ Eve said. ‘Why spend money I don’t ’ave?’

‘Because your little business is telling you it wants to be bigger. You could take new place, with more ovens; you could have people work for you; you could make ten times this, twenty times.’ She waved a hand at Eve’s cash box, dismissing its contents with a disparaging gesture. ‘You think too small,’ she said. ‘You need think big.’

Then Maya, waking from her nap, began to cry in her cot upstairs and Anna went to attend to her, leaving Eve all in a turmoil as she started on yet another batch of pie pastry. And as she worked, the familiar ritual soothed her so that she was able to apply rational thought to what Anna had said. It was quite true that the business was bursting at the seams. She simply couldn’t make any more pies or puddings than she currently did. The very next new order would have to be turned down, and that seemed plain wrong. Amos and Seth were already harvesting the vegetables and soft fruit they’d been nurturing for months, and that had opened up new possibilities for dishes she could sell. Eve, up to the elbows in a sticky mass of damp flour, wondered if Anna perhaps had a point. Maybe all this was just the beginning, she thought. She tipped the pastry out of its bowl and pounded and pulled at it for a few seconds, absorbed in the task. And then suddenly, with a flash of clarity which lit up her face, she thought of Lord Hoyland.

A
bsalom Blandford, the Netherwood bailiff, was a man with two faces, one for the earl and another for the rest of the world. So while Teddy Hoyland knew him to be an excellent chap, amenable, dependable and trustworthy, everyone else he dealt with thought him an out-and-out swine. It was a testament to his own ingenuity and consistency that these two entirely diverse impressions had been successfully maintained for so many years.

Of course, being an out-and-out swine was a useful quality in a bailiff, whose typical daily workload didn’t generally call for empathy or good humour. Absalom worked alongside, though independently of, Jem Arkwright; while Jem was responsible for the estate’s outdoor concerns, Absalom had complete control over all the dwellings, businesses, farm buildings and any other brick-and-mortar structure upon which he could place a rent. His efficiency and commitment was such that he also doubled as the earl’s accountant, there being nothing more fascinating to him than a row of numbers. He took nothing – nothing at all – on trust. There wasn’t a single tenant on the Netherwood estate who was above his suspicion. When he’d been appointed, twenty-five years earlier, he cast
aside his predecessor’s books and ledgers and conducted his own general survey of every building entrusted to his care, making an inventory that then formed the basis of his scrupulous execution of duty. Over the years, regular memoranda and amendments were entered on the pages; notes relating to deficiencies, improvements, insurances, dates of leases, rates, changes of use, changes in tenancy, lapses in rents. The history of Netherwood could be told from the pages of his estate books and most of it – perhaps all, though he’d never been tested – was committed to his prodigious memory. If a person were to ask Absalom Blandford what date Arthur and Eve Williams moved into the house vacated by Digby Caldwell’s corpse, he would say 19 April 1891, without pausing for thought, let alone having to check his facts in the ledger.