Ravenscliffe Read online

  Amos knew he’d get no small talk out of Alice Buckle. In any case, it was Eve he was after, so he climbed the stairs, puffing in the heat. The summer, which everyone had thought was done, had come once again to Netherwood, its fierce, debilitating heat hitting the town with a heavyweight punch, so that people in the street went about their business with stunned expressions and a lead-limbed lethargy, all the time longing for shade. In the upstairs dining room at the mill, all the windows were open, but the muslin curtains, drawn against the glare, were absolutely still and Eve, sitting at one of the tables with Ginger Timpson, fanned herself with a menu as they spoke. She had her back to Amos, so it was Ginger who saw him first.

  ‘Amos Sykes, as I live and breathe,’ she said. ‘Never too warm to leave your cap at ’ome, is it?’

  He winked at her and pulled it off. His hair was damp and flattened, and he ran a hand through it so it stuck up in spikes. ‘Nice bit o’ shade under this brim,’ he said.

  Eve turned, and smiled with pleasure. He was a rare sight at the mill these days.

  ‘You’re a good man, to bring us a delivery in this ’eat,’ she said.

  ‘Some beautiful produce down there,’ he said. ‘Raspberries like this.’ He made an oval with his thumb and index finger. The fruit cage had been his own idea, and he and Seth had built it themselves out of canes and chicken wire. It sagged here and there, but kept the birds off the berries, and had distracted Seth, for the time being, from building a melon pit. ‘And gooseberries like this.’ He made another shape with the other hand, a circle this time, and implausibly large. Ginger raised an eyebrow, but kept her mouth shut. Fresh produce was fresh produce. No point offending the gardener. She looked at Eve.

  ‘Crumbles, then? Or pies?’ she said.

  ‘Meringues, I’d say. For t’raspberries anyroad. Serve ’em with whipped cream. And gooseberry fool. Or set some aside for jam, if there’s plenty.’

  Ginger nodded and stood up. ‘I’ll go an’ get cracking,’ she said. ‘Twenty booked in for dinner, and who knows who’ll drop in unannounced.’ She nodded at Amos as she left, and he returned the compliment then turned to Eve. She was a fine-looking woman, he thought: warm smile, dark eyes. But he had taught himself not to care.

  ‘Busy as ever then?’ he said, casual, neutral.

  ‘Busier, if anything. We’ve been run off our feet this week and next month that Fortnum’s order starts. I shall need more staff at this rate. ’ow’s things with you?’

  ‘Champion,’ he said.

  ‘Work all right?’

  ‘Aye, grand.’

  ‘Allotment doin’ well?’

  He wagged his head, made a little downturned arc with his mouth. ‘So-so,’ he said. ‘Could do wi’ rain, but Seth manages to keep it all watered.’

  ‘Seth loves that garden. It’s ’is chief pleasure in life.’

  ‘Aye, well. Seth’s a grand lad. Grand worker an’ all.’

  Their conversation limped a little, still hampered by a lingering awkwardness between them. It wasn’t quite a year since Amos had offered Eve his hand in marriage and been immediately, kindly, emphatically declined. It had taken all his courage to voice his feelings – he was no poet, and was out of practice in matters of the heart – and the wound from her rejection had been slow to heal. Now, of course, she was engaged to another man. This fact, as much as anything else, had closed his mind to any further thoughts of romance with the lovely Eve Williams. He wasn’t fool enough to give chase when she was already caught.

  ‘It was Seth I wanted a word about, as a matter of fact,’ he said now.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Nowt to worry about. Not yet, anyroad. Just, ’e’s been on about going down t’pit after ’e turns twelve. I’ve told ’im what I think o’ that plan, but you might want a chat with ’im yourself.’

  Amos delivered his news casually, without drama, but Eve’s face fell. Her boy, the eldest of her three children, would be perfectly well aware of the explosive effect this information would have on his mother and undoubtedly this new development was calculated to wound. Seth was angry with her most of the time these days; the arrival in Netherwood of Daniel, the suspicion that they were planning a life together, the shift in the normal order of things that, for him, had anyway only recently settled into an acceptable pattern – all this had sent the boy into a dark mood from which he only really surfaced in the company of Amos. Eve knew, of course she did, that the boy missed his father every day, and she tried to take account of this when his behaviour overstepped the mark. But here was Amos, innocently delivering Seth’s bombshell, quite unaware that only yesterday, over dinner, Eve had talked to the boy about college in Sheffield, about all the different, wonderful directions that an education could take a man and though he had sat there wordless, she had thought he was taking it in, was even, in spite of his sullenness, interested. He was a clever boy, a reader and a thinker, and he knew very well that there was no need for him to scrape a meagre living underground, but now it occurred to her that he would perhaps do it, just to hurt her.

  ‘Seth doesn’t say a lot to me,’ was all she said, though, to Amos.

  ‘No, well, like ’is father. A man o’ few words.’

  Like Arthur, and not like, thought Eve. Her late husband never made her feel, as Seth did now, that all her decisions were selfish ones. He was a carbon copy in appearance though, and – just like Arthur – a devil for clamming up when something troubled him. Even now, nearly eighteen months after his dad had been killed in a rockfall at New Mill Colliery, Eve was certain that somewhere within Seth, buried like the coal under its protective layers of rock and shale, lay an untapped seam of grief.

  ‘Do you think ’e wants to do it for Arthur?’ she said, hope suddenly springing forth that Seth might be motivated by love for his father rather than by resentment towards her.

  ‘Aye, ’appen so.’

  Amos replaced his cap as he spoke, a signal to Eve, subtle but unmistakable, that his involvement in the problem was ended now that he had passed it on to her. This, Eve had found, was the price she had paid for turning him down. There was a time he would have done anything for her and her small family. Now, and not unreasonably, there were limits to his generosity and concern. But he still worked the allotment with Seth as often as his new job at the miners’ union allowed, and for that Eve was grateful.

  ‘Well, thanks, Amos, for lettin’ me know. And for t’fruit an’ veg. It’s what folk keep coming back for, y’know, that home-grown produce.’

  He smiled. ‘I think it might ’ave more to do with what you do wi’ it after I’ve picked it,’ he said.

  She stood to go back downstairs with him. ‘Well, take summat ’ome with you. There’s plenty ready.’

  They walked together across the dining room. The windows, six of them, elegantly arched and draped in soft muslin, flooded the long room with light and the polished wooden floor gleamed honey-coloured underfoot. There were jugs of sweet peas on the tables, and blue and white cloths made from old linen flour sacks that Anna had found stashed in a chest in a forgotten corner. The effect was charming.

  ‘You’ve worked wonders up ’ere,’ said Amos. He remembered its beginnings, when the earl first proposed it as the place for Eve to expand her business: an abandoned storeroom in the disused flour mill, the floor thick with bird droppings, the beams chock-full of roosting pigeons.

  ‘It’s Anna’s work, mostly,’ Eve said. ‘She ’as an eye for this sort of thing. She’s a demon with that sewing machine.’

  Ginger, standing at the foot of the stairs, called up: ‘Eve, there’s a wooden crate been delivered. Is it summat we’re expectin’?’

  They joined her downstairs, their progress at the bottom impeded by the large crate in question. Its lid was nailed shut and across the top, stamped in black ink, it said MRS A. WILLIAMS, NETHERWOOD, YORKSHIRE. That was all. They stood for a moment, staring. It had the look of a crate that had travelled some distance to be here.

 
‘Now then,’ Eve said, puzzled. ‘Amos?’

  ‘Nowt to do wi’ me,’ he said. But he was curious enough to linger while Nellie – this was her kind of job – prised off the lid in short order with a sturdy steel knife. A thick layer of straw hid the contents and Ginger stepped back, as if something alive, or explosive, might be revealed beneath. Alice, still peeling, watched from the safety of the sink.

  ‘Go on,’ said Eve to Nellie, who didn’t need asking twice and pulled with two hands at the blanket of straw.

  They all stared.

  ‘Well, I’ll be blowed,’ said Nellie.

  ‘Bananas,’ Ginger said.

  And they were. Hand after hand of yellow bananas, each layer protected from the next by more straw. At the sink Alice, overcome with mute astonishment, dropped her knife and it fell with a discordant clatter, disturbing the respectful silence.

  ‘Can’t grow them in Netherwood soil,’ said Amos.

  Eve looked at him, then back at the bananas, then back at Amos again. Her face was unreadable and the colour seemed to drain from it so that he was afraid she might be about to faint away. He put a hand out, rested it on her arm.

  ‘You’ve gone white,’ he said.

  ‘Silas,’ she said, and she seemed to be offering this enigmatic pronouncement as an explanation. The others, Amos, Ginger, Nellie and Alice, looked at her uncomprehendingly.

  ‘My brother Silas,’ she said.

  Still they stared.

  ‘A long time ago, when ’e wasn’t much more’n a bairn, ’e said that one day ’e’d send me bananas,’ Eve said. She was smiling now, her eyes bright with the beginnings of excitement. She looked down at the crate at their feet, at the exotic cargo, incongruous in this Yorkshire kitchen. Looking up again, she laughed at the miracle of it.

  ‘And now ’e ’as,’ she said.

  Chapter 4

  Patient observation. This, Daniel knew, was what was required to make a new garden. Wait and watch over the course of a twelvemonth, see what comes up and how well it looks, or how incongruous. Walk the acreage daily, and let it slowly reveal its secrets to you. All very well in theory, he thought, but nigh on impossible in practice, when there was clearly so much to be done. He looked at the majestic gardens of Netherwood Hall, of which the countess was so fond and so proud, and he saw not a fine and finished product, but the greatest challenge of his life. There was no geometry to the plan. Indeed, he thought to himself, coming up once again from the ha-ha that separated the gardens from the park, there was no plan at all. Instead there were great swathes of undulating, tree-dotted lawns, interrupted here and there by the realisation of Lady Netherwood’s various whimsical fads and fancies. The Japanese water garden was monstrous, risible, and its days were numbered. The circular maze of yew could stay, but it needed regular close cropping if it wasn’t to resemble a shaggy, mythical beast. The wisteria tunnel was doubtless attractive for its three weeks of joy in late spring, yet it stood like a folly, without purpose, leading nowhere. Before it and beyond, there would have to be created entirely new garden rooms with paths and beds and stonework, in order that the tunnel might then make sense and lead from one place and into another.

  There must be more water. A garden with lawns this size cried out for the shimmering, glassy counterpoint of a Grand Canal. There must be parterres. There must be knot gardens. There would still be flowers, and many of them, but there must also be clipped box and precise gravel paths and flowerbeds with perfect specimens selected for their rare and delicate qualities. He had made a start; the ruler and set-square were, to Daniel, as crucial to gardening as a spade and a hoe and he had already begun his drawings for Netherwood. These loose lines and undulating curves, the hallmark of the landscape movement, would not do. Gardening, to him, was the control and the manipulation of nature, not an attempt to mirror it. Let Capability Brown turn in his grave. This English garden – now his English garden – would, when Daniel had done with it, rival Versailles.

  Behind him, a soft footfall became suddenly apparent and, just as he registered the sound, Eve appeared at his side.

  ‘Found you,’ she said, slipping an arm through his.

  He smiled down at her. His Eve, his love, the reason he was here in Netherwood. She smiled back.

  ‘So,’ she said, looking away from him and at the garden. ‘What’s t’verdict?’

  He grimaced. ‘It’s just as I expected,’ he said. ‘Dull as ditch water. No vision, no imagination, no flair.’

  She laughed, quite sure he was joking. To her the gardens of Netherwood Hall looked magnificent, even now in the dog days of summer when the sun had leached the colours from the plants and the earth was baked hard like a potter’s clay in the kiln.

  ‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘That’s coming out for a start.’

  He pointed at the pagoda, centrepiece of the Japanese water garden and just visible from where they stood.

  ‘Not before t’king’s visit, I ’ope,’ she said. ‘And ’ave you broken it to Lady Netherwood? I mean, I could be mistaken, but I think she might be very partial to that particular corner.’

  ‘I’ll win her round,’ he said. ‘She had all sorts of ideas for Fulton House, and I managed to ignore those too.’

  This was true. The garden of the family’s London residence in Belgravia was a small masterpiece, but it was all of Daniel’s making. In twenty years in her service, he had contrived a way of agreeing with the countess yet all the while pursuing his own obsessions. Curiously, she seemed to detect no discrepancy between what she suggested and what she got; indeed, she happily claimed credit for all improvements, however far they strayed from the original brief. So while he knew he’d have to consult Lady Netherwood before too long, he also knew his vision would be realised. Money wasn’t an issue, because the higher the cost of a scheme, the more Lady Netherwood seemed to regard it. The skill would lie in persuading her, without giving offence, that the garden in its present form did no justice to the house.

  They turned and began to walk together, though Eve released his arm. Hardly anyone knew how things stood between them – it was barely three weeks since he’d arrived here. In any case, there were stringent new rules, apparently, now that he had come to Netherwood for her. In London, in May, when Eve was at Fulton House to cook for the countess, she had fallen into Daniel’s arms with an abandon that filled him with delight. But now – and until they were married, she had said – they would behave with absolute propriety. It wasn’t easy when he knew full well exactly how her naked body felt against his; there wasn’t an inch of this woman he didn’t know, and yet here she was, walking along beside him as prim as a Sunday-school teacher.

  She folded her arms across her chest, to keep from taking his hand.

  ‘Anna showed me t’house,’ she said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Big.’

  ‘We need big, don’t we?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  They walked on in silence for a few moments. He didn’t want to rush her on this, or on anything else, but he hoped he wouldn’t be too long in the gardener’s bothy. Custom-built for Hislop forty years ago, it provided nowhere, other than on the staircase, that Daniel could stand entirely upright. It would be comical, except he kept cracking his head on beams and lintels. As he went about his ablutions in the morning, he felt like Gulliver making his way around a Lilliputian guest-house. If Ravenscliffe was big, it would get his vote.

  ‘I liked it, actually,’ she said now. ‘It needs some work – y’know, cleaning, decorating – but Anna reckons she can tackle that. Then there’s t’bairns. They know nowt about it.’

  ‘Then tell them, Eve,’ he said. ‘Really. Give them time to get used to the idea of change, of our marrying, of moving house. They’ve probably guessed, anyway. Seth and Eliza, certainly.’

  ‘Aye, you’re probably right.’ Her face was very grave, as if the difficulties she faced were numerous and insurmountable.

  He smiled down at her. ‘Don’t present it as
a dark development,’ he said. ‘Keep it light. Make sure they know you’re happy.’

  It was good advice and it was possible, she had come to realise, to tread too carefully around the children, to muddy the waters with veiled hints and allusions rather than clarifying with cheerful facts. When Daniel had first arrived she had made a proper hash of things, introducing him to them in a vague and foolish way: he was a friend, Mr MacLeod from London, come to Netherwood as head gardener down at the big house, wasn’t that lovely? The older two had looked at her with knowing eyes and it was immediately clear to Eve that only little Ellen had no inkling of the full story. The others correctly interpreted the situation at once and nine-year-old Eliza, in her frank manner and piping voice had said, ‘Mam, are you an’ Mr MacLeod courting?’ so that Eve had been forced to stammer out a yes. Eliza had stared at Daniel with new interest and Seth had turned away blackly, exuding hostile resentment. Even before his father’s untimely death in the colliery, the boy’s happiness had been a fragile thing, easily knocked off course: now he seemed to walk through each day with something akin to dread, as if misery lay in wait in all the most unexpected places.