Netherwood (33 page)

And then finally, on a crescendo of applause and to raucous cheering, Buffalo Bill himself cantered on playing General Custer astride a heroic grey stallion, and the Battle of Little Bighorn was played out in all its gory detail. The horses, skilled actors every one, fell with their wounded cavalrymen or Red Indians until the arena was strewn with the lifeless bodies of men and their steeds. Seth watched with a rapt and fervent concentration, as if the afternoon’s entertainment might be followed by a test on the sequence of events; Eliza had lost her voice and could only croak her excitement; and Amos, along with every other grown man in the grounds, hollered and hooted, roared and whistled, stamped his feet and waved his cap in the air as the Last Stand drew to its inevitable conclusion and Chief Sitting Bull polished off Custer with a deadly arrow to the heart.

‘Is ’e a goodie or a baddie?’ Eliza said, pointing at the Red Indian chief who was executing an immodest triumphal circuit of the battleground. He had paint daubed on his face, which was old but curiously unlined. The feathers of his headdress were impossible primary colours, not at all birdlike in Eliza’s opinion, and he had long dark hair which he wore in two plaits, as Anna sometimes did. His fringed shirt and trousers looked to be made out of shammy leather, like her mother’s window cloth. His horse danced past Eliza and the chief seemed to pick her out in the crowd, his stern brown eyes settling on her for the briefest moment; she shivered in the grip of a strange ecstasy.

‘Depends on yer point o’ view,’ Amos said. ‘Depends if yer an Indian or a paleface.’

Seth was reading the programme. ‘That is actually ’im,’ he said. ‘That is t’actual Chief Sittin’ Bull. Not an actor.’

‘Is that General Custer an’ all then?’ said Eliza. Seth bestowed on her a rather overused look of shrivelling disdain.

Amos laughed. ‘’E’s dead, you clown. That there is William Cody, Buffalo Bill, see?’

He was on his feet again, the dead general, and hopping back on his horse to join Sitting Bull. Behind them the rest of the fallen were also rising, men and horses alike, preparing to take their share of the riotous applause, but there was a smell in the air of onions and sausages frying and potatoes baking, and it was drawing the fickle crowd away.

‘Can we ’ave summat to eat?’ Eliza asked.

‘Mam should ’ave come, sold ’er pies an’ that,’ said Seth. He was always doing this, invoking Eve at every opportunity then watching Amos’s face for clues.

‘Yer mam ’as bigger fish to fry,’ Amos said, an unsatisfactory result for Seth; he wanted a straightforward agreement.

‘Bigger pies to bake, you mean,’ said Eliza, who was still at a very literal age.

‘That an’ all,’ said Amos. He pulled his cap lower on his head and stared out gloomily from under the peak. The wild west was melting away, Indians and cavalry on the same side now as the props were dismantled and the horses led away.

‘Amos?’ said Eliza.

He looked down at her upturned face and she smiled gappily. Her front milk teeth were long gone but there was still no sign of their replacements. It gave her a soft lisp, so that Amos was Amoth.

‘Right then, toothless Aggie,’ he said. ‘Thpud or thauthage?’

The earl had thrown himself into the Mitchell’s Mill project with the zeal of a man who had money, energy and ample time on his hands. Three months after the contracts between himself and Eve Williams had been drawn up – by a stunned but obedient Absalom Blandford – the renovations were all but complete. Stonemasons, carpenters, builders and painters had swarmed over the building every day for weeks. Alfred Hague, the earl’s electrical engineer, was brought out of the pits to do the wiring, enigmatically threading and twisting his strange brown cables under floorboards and up channels in the plaster of the walls; a small crowd assembled and applauded when, for the first time, the wall lights were switched on.

The great gristmill had been fetched down from the upper floor – in itself a full day’s work for fifteen labourers – and placed as a centrepiece in the rear courtyard. Lord Hoyland was wondering if it might not be turned into a water feature. He rather hoped Clarissa might show an interest, if he could only winkle her out of the drawing room, but the weather had turned poor and she seemed to be temporarily hibernating. The fine arched windows, front and back, had been reglazed, and the frames rubbed down and repainted. The wooden gantry – on consultation with Eve, much to her bewilderment – was to remain; there would be little or no use for it, but it was attractive enough, and was, after all, part of the town’s history. The wisteria-clad colonnade had been pretty much left alone. Once it had been swept of dead leaves and mopped free of bird droppings, the original floor tiles were properly revealed, black-and-white chequered like a giant chess board. Its inherent glory needed no improvement and when the tradesmen left for the day and Eve was alone there, she sometimes gave in to the urge to perform a short, celebratory tap dance on it.

New timbers had been laid on the upper floors and waxed to bring out the grain, and there were York stone flags in the kitchen. The ranges – four of them, brand new with a
showroom shine – were of the old, coal-fired type, which was what Eve was used to and what she very much preferred. Mr Hague had talked about electric ovens, but Eve had had the final say. Electricity might well be cleaner, she told him, but nothing could turn a pie crust brown like a coal fire.

There was a long work surface running down the centre of the main kitchen, with a cool marble top for pastry-making and three butler sinks set into wooden stands with blue-and-white tiled backs and storage cupboards beneath for soap, dishcloths and pot brushes. Everything, every single thing, was brand new. Eve, given
carte blanche
to furnish the kitchen with what she needed, had been directed by the estate to Micklethwaite’s Household Emporium in Sheffield, proud purveyor of high-class kitchen goods; the bill was to go directly to Mr Blandford.

‘Them ’oylands ’ave more money than sense,’ Eve had said to Anna as they wandered together through the hallowed halls of Micklethwaite’s. It was a fine old establishment, two-storeyed and with none of the clutter and chaos that generally characterised such enterprises. The goods were displayed in tasteful fashion on fine tables and dressers, so that even the most workaday items achieved the status of an exhibit. There was a country house smell of beeswax and Eve, noting the yards and yards of polished wood panelling on the walls, wondered which poor soul was given that job once a week. Not the uppity Miss who seemed to be keeping them under surveillance at the moment, she’d wager. The place was quite unlike any Eve had ever been into; a showpiece of a shop, all gloss and gleam and outrageous prices handwritten on linen tags.

‘Look at this,’ she said to Anna. ‘I mean, a wooden spoon’s a wooden spoon. Why pay a ha’penny more ’n you ’ave to?’

She plucked the spoon, a perfectly ordinary example of its kind, from its Cornishware jar and stroked its curves. They were waiting for the attentions of the assistant manager, a Mr Francis Micklethwaite, who was expecting their visit but had
been detained, as he told them in a fruity
basso profundo
dripping with regret, by ‘an erroneous delivery at the rear of the premises’. The two women were happy enough to stroll through the shop while the crisis was dealt with, but Eve was discovering that a lifetime of thriftiness was a hard habit to break, even when she was spending someone else’s money.

She waved the spoon at Anna. ‘You can get four o’ these at this price from Eli at t’market,’ she said.

Anna took it from her and adopted the affected air of a connoisseur. ‘But look at grain, so beautiful, and handle, so slender. Probably it stirs all by itself.’

Their mirth was coolly regarded by the supercilious young woman watching their progress. Hilary Kilney, great-niece of the original founding Micklethwaite, was steeped in her own sense of superiority. On this occasion, however, she was at a distinct disadvantage; she had no idea why Eve and Anna were there, and was quite certain that they had no good reason to be.

She coughed, and the two women looked at her properly for the first time. Miss Kilney had presence, a brass name badge and a fine silk blouse. Eve felt a little awed. Not so Anna. Three hard years on the breadline in Grangely had been merely a passing phase in her life, not a defining one; it hadn’t made so much as a dent in her self-esteem. Shop assistants were her social inferior, of that she had no doubt.

Miss Kilney said, ‘Can I help you?’ politely enough, but her expression belied the courteous question. She wore an unpleasant smirk and held her head rather too high, as if sniffing out fresher air.

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not,’ said Anna, in her heavy accent. Perheps. Perheps not. She leaned in to read the name on the badge, then added: ‘Hilary,’ and managed to make it sound like an insult: hil-lair-ree, just one syllable short of hilarious.

Eve gawped at her, as did Miss Kilney though she recovered more swiftly.

‘Let me put it another way,’ she said. ‘Do you intend to buy that implement?’

She indicated the wooden spoon which Anna still clutched.

‘Because if you don’t, you should replace it.’ She smiled, not warmly.

Anna shrugged her Russian shrug. ‘When we make up our mind, we let you know,’ she said. She made a swift little sweeping motion with the fingers of one hand, as if to brush something out of her way. ‘Eve,’ she said. ‘Come.’

And she swept off, like a young and offended Queen Victoria. Eve threw an appeasing look at Miss Kilney before following her.

‘What you playin’ at?’ she hissed.

‘Playing? Not at all,’ Anna said. ‘Like you, I shop.’ She looked genuinely baffled.

‘But t’way you just spoke to ’er,’ Eve said, still whispering. ‘Like she was muck you’d stood in.’

Another shrug. ‘She was rude,’ she said indignantly. ‘She forgets her position is to serve. And don’t whisper. It makes you look like thief.’

Eve, grudgingly impressed but nevertheless affronted, decided it was time to retrieve the upper hand from her haughty friend. These flashes of imperiousness were all very well, but Eve wasn’t going to stand there and be told how to behave.

‘Put that back,’ she said briskly to Anna, pointing at the spoon. Then she turned to Hilary Kilney, who had retreated slightly from this discomfiting pair, but was still within earshot.

‘If t’Earl of Netherwood ’appens to ask why we bought nothing from you,’ she said, ‘I shall tell ’im your prices are too ’igh and we took our business elsewhere. Give our apologies to Mr Micklethwaite.’

She turned back to Anna and, in a deliberate and skilful parody, said, ‘Come,’ and stalked out of the shop. Only when they were outside in the throng of the street where needles of rain were falling steadily from a leaden sky did she remember
that their transport – a pretty brougham gilded in Hoyland colours – wasn’t to meet them until a full hour from now. Still though, it had to be done; Hilary Kilney and her top-end wooden spoons were not to be countenanced.

‘Let’s find a pot of tea,’ Eve said, cheerful now and feeling like herself again. ‘We’ll order some scones and mark ’em out of ten.’

They set off down the street in search of a tea room, arm in arm, heads together, laughing at nothing very much. And in the shop, Miss Kilney spent an uncomfortable five minutes explaining herself to Mr Micklethwaite who, in addition to anticipating a profitable morning’s business, had rather looked forward to assisting the delectable young woman with clogs and shawl and access to the bottomless Netherwood Hall account.

Four days later and for the first time in living memory, the estate offices of Netherwood Hall received a slightly grubby bill from Eli Wilton’s Hardware & Housewares stall on Barnsley Market. It was for just short of £24 and the order had almost cleaned Eli out of stock, but the shelves and cupboards at the old flour mill were now primed and ready for business, and Eli took his wife Melody off for a week in Bridlington to celebrate the unexpectedly happy turn in their fortunes. Meanwhile Absalom Blandford made a mental note to speak to Mrs Powell-Hughes and Mrs Adams about the Netherwood Hall housekeeping receipts and wondered whether either of them might be prevailed upon to visit the market in Barnsley next time they needed supplies.