Netherwood01 - Netherwood Page 3

He was hemmed in by other people’s expectations, he fumed inwardly; cornered by his damned noblesse oblige. Even now he wasn’t able to do as he wished. He had assumed that his actual birthday, in ten days’ time, might at least be spent in London where the multitude of diversions would take his mind off his wretchedness. But no. His father had insisted that he remain at Netherwood because there was an air of excitement among the people, and Toby would be obliged to wave at them from the back of a motor car before he was free to please himself. The countess – in truth just as keen as Toby for the delights of London and the comforts of Fulton House – had agreed that as soon as duty was done, they would flee south. This, at least, was a crumb of comfort.

  He was in the library, the best place for Toby to be when he didn’t want to be found, being the last place anyone would look for him. He sat crossways on a green leather wing chair, his long legs dangling over one arm, and he gazed morosely at nothing in particular. The past half hour had been spent aiming scrunched up balls of unused notepaper at a nearby waste bin, and the evidence of this sport lay in and around the target, as if a frustrated writer had tried and failed again and again to frame the perfect letter. As a form of entertainment, Tobias had found it perfectly acceptable, and infinitely preferable to the alternative, which had been a site meeting with his father and the land agent at the newly-dug Home Farm cess pit. At the thought of it now, Toby’s face puckered in distaste. His father’s enthusiasm for the disposal of human waste seemed to him to be deliberately controversial, as if he was displaying to his family that, though he was an earl, he was first and foremost a countryman with a countryman’s tolerance for the stink of decomposing ordure. Well, if he expected Toby to fall in behind him on his endless tours of duty, he could whistle for it.

  A squeal followed by a sharp bark of laughter outside stirred him from his mutinous lethargy. In a moment he was out of the armchair and crossing the library towards the window; if there was merriment to be had, Tobias was your man. At first, with his face pressed against the glass, he saw only the usual dull vista of neatly swept gravel and serene swathes of lawn. There it was again though: a breathless squeal of laughter, evidence that there was the possibility of amusement on this dreary Wednesday morning. Tobias frowned, looking this way and that for the source of the fun. And then his face broke into a great grin because all in a rush and none too steadily, his older sister Henrietta travelled past the window on a large, black bicycle, her expression grim with concentration as she tried to keep her balance, momentum and dignity intact. The squealing, Tobias discovered, came from Isabella who, somehow released by her governess, ran behind her big sister, red-faced with the effort of keeping up and clutching at her skirts in a manner most unbecoming to a fine young lady of eleven years old.

  Tobias hammered on the pane. ‘Bravo Henry!’ he shouted. She turned to look at him – big mistake – and started a wobble from which she had no hope of recovery. By the time Tobias appeared on the path outside, she was on the ground with the bicycle on top of her. She made no attempt to get up, however, but lay rather contentedly on the gravel, making the most of the unscheduled break.

  ‘Good God, what happened there?’ Toby said, standing over her. He hauled the bicycle upright then held out a helping hand which, for the moment, she declined.

  ‘You distracted me,’ Henrietta said. ‘It seems I can’t steer, work the pedals and look over my shoulder at the same time.’

  ‘So it’s my turn now,’ said Isabella. ‘As you fell off.’

  Henrietta shook her head.

  ‘Scram,’ she said.

  Isabella considered tears but opted for a scowl instead, Henry being in general immune to waterworks.

  ‘Don’t you have some French to translate or flowers to catalogue, Izzy?’ said Tobias, in a conciliatory tone. ‘If Perry catches you out here she’ll have your guts for garters.’

  Isabella knew he spoke the truth. Miss Peregrine had taught them all at various stages in their lives, and while she was kind enough when obeyed, she could show a heart of flint when her instructions were flouted. She’d left her reluctant charge alone in the schoolroom with a variety of irregular verbs and the ominous promise of a short test in half an hour. But, like Toby, Isabella had seen Henry through the window, and the bicycle had proved too great a distraction to keep her at her books. Anyway, Isabella had reasoned to herself, as she had no plans ever to visit France, indeed could only imagine herself in either Netherwood or London, the point of mastering the language was lost on her. Mastering the art of bicycling, on the other hand – now there was a useful pursuit. But now she was being thwarted; Henry and Toby were being beastly and Perry’s wrath was a fearful thing. She glowered as she flounced away. Tobias returned her scowl with an amiable grin.

  ‘Au revoir, ma chérie. À bientôt,’ he said.

  ‘Gosh, well done,’ she said, without turning. ‘Sum total of your command of French, all in one go.’

  Henrietta laughed, if a little grudgingly. As a general rule she tried not to encourage Isabella, who in her view lacked the firm parental control that she herself had been subject to at the same age. The youngest Hoyland offspring was indulged and precocious, the undisputed darling of the earl, with the capacity – indeed the tendency – to be what the household staff, in the privacy of their own quarters, called ‘a proper handful’. It piqued Henrietta, for example, that the child had been dining with the adults since she was ten, and often ended the meal on her father’s lap as he popped petit fours into her open mouth. The rest of them – Henrietta, Tobias and Dickie – had all been confined to nursery suppers until well past their twelfth birthdays and when they finally graduated to the dining room it was backs straight, elbows off the table, and woe betide you if you spoke out of turn. However, Henrietta found little support when she voiced this particular complaint to her brothers, both of whom claimed they would still rather be eating shepherd’s pie with Nanny than enduring the tedious ritual of family dinners.

  Henrietta stood now, unaided by Toby. She was as tall as her brother, though there the resemblance ended because she was the only one of the four Hoyland siblings who possessed none of the physical characteristics of either their father or mother. Isabella was the countess in miniature, a doll of a child with an adorable cupid’s bow mouth which was always primed and ready to pout. Toby and Dickie each shared the earl’s sandy hair, high complexion and distinctive, pale-blue eyes. Henry, on the other hand, was simply herself; thick blonde hair, which tended to unruliness despite the best efforts of her maid, eyes more green than blue, and a determined set to her mouth and chin which gave an outward indication of her personality. Some people thought her beautiful, others thought her plain, while Henrietta herself thought the matter barely worth consideration. This blithe indifference was of grave concern to her mother, and four seasons after her society debut Henrietta was still resolutely single; she attracted suitors but then would somehow, infuriatingly, turn them into friends. The countess was at a loss: she herself had married at twenty and was considered one of the great beauties of her age. It was said that Clarissa once caused an orchestra to stop playing when she walked into a ballroom, such was her beauty. No one would ever stop what they were doing to stare as Henrietta passed, but no one ever forgot her after they had met.

  The gravel had left imprints in her palms and there would probably be bruising from her impact with the ground, but she’d suffered worse many a time when riding. She dusted her skirts and smiled at her brother.

  ‘Have a go?’ she said, indicating the bicycle which he was still holding upright.

  ‘Whose is it?’

  ‘Parkinson’s. Isn’t that a scream?’ The two of them enjoyed for a moment an imagined snapshot of the butler, revered in the household for his dignity and rectitude, wobbling along on two wheels. ‘It’s for his health, apparently,’ said Henrietta. ‘Modest exertion to quicken the pulse.’

  ‘Good Lord, I can think of more interesting ways to quicken the pulse than this,’
said Tobias.

  ‘Doubtless. But you’re you, and Parkinson’s Parkinson. Any pulse quickening on his part has to be morally defensible. Go on, have a go.’ She stepped back to allow Tobias a clear run. ‘Be bold and forthright as you begin with the pedals. He who hesitates falls off.’

  Tobias swung his right leg over the saddle and settled himself into position. Then he pushed off strongly with his left foot and began to move, precariously at first but more securely as he gained momentum, away from the front of the house.

  ‘Oh I say! Well done,’ called Henrietta.

  She stood, hands on hips, and watched him go, and Toby, with the confidence of one who knows he is watched and expects to be admired, raised an arm and waved it in triumph. Henry realised that her own experiment with the bicycle was clearly over, though she didn’t begrudge Toby in the least; it was an unnatural contraption in her view, and in any case she had a date with Dickie in the stable yard in thirty minutes to canter out to the top coppice and back before luncheon. Much more fun. She turned and ran back into the house to change.

  Meanwhile Tobias, pedalling furiously up the gentle incline of Oak Avenue, had had the sudden, marvellous thought that if he carried on all the way into Netherwood he might pay a social call on a certain warmly pliable barmaid, the latest in a succession of local girls to delude herself into believing that a willingness to please the young heir to the Netherwood fortune might result in a wonderful, glamorous twist of fate. Tobias smiled at the thought of her, even as he puffed at the effort of keeping the pace of his forward and upward trajectory. It was all that talk of pulse quickening, he thought to himself. Henry’s fault entirely.

  Chapter 5

  Arthur Williams had a miner’s build. He wasn’t tall, but he was strong, and his power was concentrated in his torso and arms, the parts of his body that needed strength for hewing coal from a seam. He could walk the mile-and-a-half to chapel with Seth on his shoulders and Eliza and Ellen in each arm, and never have to pause for breath. He always said he could carry Eve along with the children, but she never gave him the chance to try. She didn’t doubt it though. He was barred from the bell-and-mallet game when the feast came to New Mill Common, because four years ago the prizes had run out as Arthur delighted the crowd and infuriated the owner by hitting the sweet spot with every easy blow.

  It was his strength that had drawn Eve to him in the first place; his strength and his steadiness, certainly not his looks. He had the Williams ears, jutting out like jug handles, and rather forbidding dark eyebrows which gave him the appearance of being cross when he wasn’t. But Eve, the most beautiful lass at the chapel dance, had looked at no one else after Arthur sauntered into her life. She knew instinctively, without any promises from him, that he would love her and provide for her and keep her out of harm’s way. It was the feel of his hand on the small of her back as they moved together around the dance floor, and the directness of his gaze when he looked at her; she was reassured by him, without words, that after a childhood and adolescence racked by poverty and uncertainty, all would now be well.

  For his part, Arthur had dreamed of Eve long before he met her. He told no one this, not even Eve herself because it sounded soft, but he had seen her, in precise detail, and it was the only dream he ever remembered having. His unconscious mind had summoned her and she had stood before him and lifted her hand up to his cheek and caressed him softly, and the image of her face – the shape of it, her features – had stayed with him as clearly as if he had her photograph in his waistcoat pocket. So when he saw her for the first time, he recognised her at once. Their engagement had followed so swiftly that folk had talked, but he had known that Eve was his intended. Their union was meant to be.

  His faith in fate had been well rewarded, although the casual observer wouldn’t necessarily have thought so had they chanced upon the scene in Eve’s kitchen that morning, as Arthur brought his fist down on the kitchen table, making spoons and crockery bounce on the oilcloth surface and overturning the jug of milk, as if a small earthquake had struck in the bowels of Beaumont Lane.

  He rarely lost his temper and more rarely still lost it with Eve, because when he did his anger swelled and heaved within him like a separate entity, more powerful than himself, and it alarmed him. But today she had maddened him, going on and on as he ate about the evictions at Grangely. Had he heard about them? Of course he had. So why hadn’t he said owt? Because there’s nowt to say. Nowt to say about thousands of men, women and bairns cast out into the street on a January morning? Eve, fire in her eyes, had spat the words at her husband, challenging him to claim indifference.

  ‘It’s colliery business,’ he’d said. ‘They mun go back to work if they want to keep a roof over their ’eads.’

  ‘Ha!’ Eve, hands on hips, stalked the brief distance between table and range as if the small room could barely contain her. ‘Go back to work? Twenty-five weeks of strikin’ and near-starvation for no gain?’

  Arthur pushed his bowl aside. ‘Nob’dy said it’s fair, Eve,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for ’em, like you. But it’s a plain fact – them ’ouses are for working miners. If you ask me, they’re lucky not to have been turfed out before now.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ Eve spat back at him furiously, ‘those miners are ’eroes, and if you can’t see that then you’re no better than the buggers who own that ’ell ’ole.’

  She knew she’d gone too far, even before Arthur smashed his fist on to the table top, and if she’d been swift with an apology he might not have reacted so violently. The whole wretched row could have been defused and reduced to a difference of opinion. But Eve was never swift with a sorry; sometimes it didn’t come out at all, no matter how badly she wanted to say it or how clearly a situation demanded it. She knew, of course she did, that between Arthur and the profiteers at Grangely Main lay a world of differences; she knew he was as loyal to his peers as he was to her, that he would lay down his life for a colleague as readily as he would for his children. But today, in her fury, she chose to take him for a company yes-man, a craven wage slave. It was unjust but, for a fleeting moment, profoundly satisfying.

  ‘Oh aye,’ she said with a sneer. ‘You can chuck your weight about at ’ome right enough. But there are two lots of strength, Arthur. Strength of body and strength of mind, an’ it takes a real man to stand up for ’is rights an’ the future of ’is bairns.’

  How in God’s name had this started, thought Arthur. Not twenty minutes ago she was rousing him from his bed with a cup of hot, sweet tea and now she stood before him like one of the three furies. He pushed back his chair and got to his feet, leaving the table in disarray. His snap tin was on the sideboard, already packed by Eve with bread and beef dripping and an apple. One of them had to stop this, and he reckoned by the look on her face that it had to be him. He picked up his snap and dropped it into the pocket of his jacket. She watched him, hiding her anxiety that he would leave for work without fighting back, but unable to be the first to break the silence. He turned to her and his face was dark with the struggle to stay calm.

  ‘Everything I do,’ he said, quietly, ‘everything, is for you an’ t’bairns.’

  ‘Aye, an’ Lord ’oyland,’ said Eve, prolonging the bitterness even as she told herself to stop.

  ‘Aye, for ’im an’ all,’ said Arthur. ‘For ’im as provides me with a good living and puts a decent roof over us, and cares for t’sick and t’needy in Netherwood. ’E deserves my loyalty, and I’m not ashamed to say it. But them up at Grangely, they ’ave bad bosses and they mun act according to their lot. The only thing they’ll get from railing against their miserable lives is more misery.’

  He pulled on his cap and tied a plaid scarf snug round his throat. He felt the pleasure of being in the right and it made him generous towards his feisty wife.

  ‘There’s nowt to be done about it, Eve,’ he said. ‘It’s a bad do, but not our business.’ He opened the back door to leave. ‘I’ll see thi at two.’

  ‘You won�
�t,’ she said, far from ready to make her peace. ‘I shall still be at Grangely. Them folk need as much ’elp as they can get.’

  He turned back, goaded into delaying his departure for work. Until she said it, Eve had no real notion of going anywhere, but now she’d uttered the words she wouldn’t retract them. She cursed her quick tongue, silently. She’d have to take Ellen with her, and there was work enough here at home to keep a small army occupied. But there was no backing down now, not for Eve Williams. She’d committed herself to an eight-mile walk – four miles there and four back – in mid-winter with a child strapped to her hip, just to shock her husband out of his complacency. She expected him to protest now, to raise objections, to attempt to forbid the fool’s errand but he just stood for a moment, letting the cold into the kitchen and regarding his wife with an expression she couldn’t read.

  Then he said, ‘Why?’ and Eve heard herself give him a pious earful about duty and compassion, yet still her husband wouldn’t be drawn.

  ‘If tha’s got to go, then go,’ he said, maddeningly. ‘But take care o’ thissen.’ He pulled the door to and was gone. Eve listened bleakly to his receding footsteps, then she heard Lew Sylvester’s greeting – ‘Ey up’ – as he fell in with Arthur, then they were too far away to be heard.

  Arthur had had to strike once himself, ten years back, in 1893, when the earl’s miners all walked out – many of them without conviction – in support of the Great Coal Strike. They were out for months, reliant on soup kitchens and handouts, but it wasn’t memories of the deprivation or the hunger that had stayed with Arthur, it was the shame he felt when four platoons of mounted troops rode through Netherwood, called to defend Lord Hoyland and his family from the insurgents. There was no need, of course; there was nothing personal in the strike action, at least so far as the Netherwood miners were concerned. So although the dragoons and lancers held their positions on the great lawn of Netherwood Hall for almost three months, they never saw action. At the end of the strike the earl had written an open letter to his employees, and Arthur had hung his head at the words: ‘I am at a loss to understand why you would lay my pits idle,’ he wrote. ‘I had expected the loyalty of my men to match that of mine to them.’ There were, of course, employees of Lord Hoyland who were unmoved by the admonishment, but not Arthur. The day the pits were re-opened and the miners returned to work – all of them forbidden by the earl to join a union or ever again withdraw their labour – was one of the happiest days of his life.