Eden Falls (51 page)

‘The Whittam was a disaster before we changed it.’

‘No, you’re right, and I’d tried often enough to talk him into selling up. But he’s dogged, your brother.’

‘That’s one word. I could think of others.’

Hugh raised his eyebrows and smiled. ‘You’re still angry.’ This was an observation, not a question, but she nodded in any case.

‘Certainly am.’

‘Let it be, Eve. You’ve done him a favour and he knows it.’

‘Actually, it isn’t really about the hotel.’ She halted, unsure what Hugh knew and what he didn’t.

‘Ah. More personal, is it?’

She took another sip of champagne and eyed him across the rim of the glass. There were too many secrets already, she thought; she wouldn’t add to the morass.

‘Roscoe’s ’is son,’ she said, feeling bold and rash. ‘And now t’ousemaid’s expecting too. Justine.’

‘Ah, right,’ he said, quite unruffled.

‘You knew?’

‘Eve, he might be your brother but I’ve known him a lot longer than you have.’

She replaced her glass on the table. ‘So it’s quite acceptable, is it?’ She felt the anti-climax of revealing a great, shocking truth, only to discover it was already known.

‘It’s not how I would live my life,’ he said. ‘But men have done worse things down the centuries than father illegitimate babies.’

Put like that, it sounded almost reasonable. But it wasn’t so much the fact of his cavalier philandering as the manner in which he went about it, she thought. She had seen at close quarters the cold, careless streak, the easy way he had with hard words and cruel barbs. He now seemed, to her, a different man from the one she thought she knew. He seemed wicked.

‘Are you ready to order sir, madam?’

The waiter had appeared soundlessly at their table, but their menus were still unopened. ‘Give us a couple more minutes, will you?’ said Hugh smoothly, and the waiter slid gracefully away. Eve opened her menu and tried to concentrate, but almost at once gave up. She looked up again at Hugh.

‘It’s just, ’e’s not who I thought ’e was,’ she said.

‘Who did you think he was?’

She didn’t answer.

‘Look,’ Hugh said, with the patient air of a man who had said all this before. ‘Silas can be a charmer, a heartless bounder, a sparkling conversationalist, a ruthless bastard, a true friend, an ill-tempered curmudgeon. Yes, he likes to goad, he can be a bit of a gadfly and he drinks more than he should. But Eve, you can’t reform him, so don’t try. He’s not the easiest of men, but he’s not dull. You could never call him that.’

She seemed so sad and silent, he felt sorry for her dis-illusionment. ‘You just have to take the mixed bag, with Silas, or take nothing at all.’ He picked up his menu and said, ‘Shall we decide?’ but she ignored him.

‘When ’e came to Netherwood, after all those years away, I was swept away by ’im. My bairns were too. Now I feel we were fooled.’

‘You might have fooled yourselves,’ Hugh said. ‘But I’d bet a pound to a penny that he didn’t aim to fool you.’

‘Well I don’t see much difference, in t’end.’

‘World of difference.’ He drained his glass. ‘Anna didn’t like him. Amos couldn’t stand him. Daniel didn’t trust him. You, however, loved him at once. I’m not here to apologise for Silas, or to justify his behaviour. But Eve, he is who he is. Yes please.’ This last was to the waiter, who replenished Hugh’s glass and then hovered hopefully.

‘Bring us today’s special,’ Hugh said to him. ‘Whatever it is. We’re all of a dither here,’ and Eve, who at the moment couldn’t care less what or whether she ate, said, ‘I’ve asked Ruby to come back to England with me.’ It was meant purely to shock him; it did.

Over lunch – a divine filet mignon with chive butter: exactly the sort of dish Ruby would once have cremated – he tried to talk her out of the scheme. It was patent madness, Hugh said, to pluck a Jamaican woman and her child from the only home they’d ever known and expect them to thrive in industrial Yorkshire. Ruby and Roscoe Donaldson in Netherwood? Lambs to the slaughter. Eve put up a stout defence. Ruby was a strong woman, emotionally and physically, and Roscoe was a delightful boy whom anyone would love. In any case, the pair would be under the protection of her and Daniel at Ravenscliffe. Ruby would have employment, Roscoe would have excellent schooling and, later, the chance of further education. He was her nephew; she wanted him close.

‘Will I send Justine to you in due course? With her offspring? Keep them all in the bosom of the family?’ He sounded like Silas, she thought, and wondered for a moment whether the two men were more alike than she’d realised. Her powers of judgement were flawed, she now believed; her discernment was questionable. But then he said, ‘Sorry, that was uncalled for,’ and he seemed to mean it. He sawed at his beef, and popped a slice into his mouth, and across the table, they watched each other. It was quite true, thought Eve, that she was as closely related to Justine’s unborn child as she was to Roscoe. But he’d misunderstood her purpose if he thought for one moment that all of Silas’s cast-off women were welcome in her home. For all she knew, they could be legion.

‘All I’m saying,’ said Eve, ‘is Ruby and I are friends now, and Angus and Roscoe are friends too, as well as cousins, and in England, there’ll be a world of opportunity that doesn’t exist in Jamaica.’

‘No sunshine, or not much,’ he said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘No sea or sand. No ackee and saltfish. No hummingbirds, no jacaranda.’

‘All right, all right, that’s all true,’ she said, not ready to be amused, ‘but none of those things are reasons to stay.’

‘She’s a negro, Eve.’

‘I’ve noticed.’

‘Well, how do you think it’ll feel for her and Roscoe, being the only black-skinned residents in Netherwood? In the entire county, for all I know.’

‘Anna was – is – the only Russian. She’s managed well enough.’

‘Absurd comparison,’ he said. ‘Anna is blonde and blue-eyed and five foot two, not statuesque with ebony skin. Anna doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb in the Netherwood Co-op, does she?’

Eve conceded the point with a curt shake of the head, which swam a little when she moved it, after two glasses of champagne. Now a deep red claret had arrived, to drink with the beef. ‘Try it,’ he said, nodding at her glass. She did, and its mellow liquid weight slipped warmly down her throat.

‘Eve,’ he said. ‘This is something I understand, believe me. I’m a shade or two darker than most of the people I live and work among, and it can be difficult, being different.’

She looked at him, the gloss and polish of him, the cut of his jacket and the crisp white of his shirt against his light brown throat: hard to imagine him suffering a failure of confidence in the company of anyone. Though it was also hard to imagine anyone getting the better of Ruby, and the fact was she didn’t even know yet if Ruby would come. What she did know, however, was that she profoundly regretted mentioning it today.

‘Please don’t mention this to Silas,’ she said, and he held up his hands in a non-committal way.

‘I think that if you’re planning to abscond with the cook the boss should probably be told.’

‘She’s not an indentured slave, you know.’

‘I do know that, thank you.’

‘Then she’s free to leave your employment if she wishes.’

‘She is indeed.’

They moved on, then, to speak of other things, but the air between them had cooled and it proved difficult to completely regain the friendly footing on which they’d begun earlier in the day. Even the first-rate hospitality of the Mountain Spring began to grate, and by the time they left Eve was ready for the authentic, if slightly unpredictable, charms of the Eden Falls Hotel.

What Eve hadn’t told Hugh was that she wanted to take Seth back with her too; she wanted to take him but he wouldn’t go. She had asked him the very same evening of her row with Silas, the evening she’d begun packing – far too hastily, of course: it had all had to come out of the trunk again – in her frenzy to be away. She had found Seth sitting alone on the terrace late at night, long after the hotel had fallen quiet and still. He had seemed very content, and she remembered thinking this was odd, given the drama of the day, the ripples of which had surely not escaped him. Even Wendell, the kitchen lad, had looked at her with saucer eyes when she passed him on the stairs. She had told Seth her story, recounted her conversation, left nothing out; this all must be in strict confidence, she had said, but if he didn’t know the truth he would never understand how much it mattered that he left with her and Angus, that he remove himself from his uncle’s influence. Seth had heard her out in placid silence, and then had simply said no.

His uncle valued him, Seth said. He had told him so, just this evening; he saw his potential – more so, perhaps, than she did. His uncle had told him, more than once, that the company would be his in the end. And the paternity of Roscoe Donaldson, while admittedly a surprise, was neither here nor there. ‘Not my concern,’ he had said. ‘Not yours either.’

Eve had looked at her son, her firstborn child, and although she was close enough to have taken his hand, she had never felt further away from him. He held her gaze, with the defiant challenge that, over the years, he had always reserved for her, and she felt, amid her sadness, a slender but quite distinct thread of relief at his decision.

‘Mam,’ he had said, ‘you look after yourself and Angus. I’ll look after myself.’

So she had left him in the dark, with just the crickets for company. After she’d gone he tried to smoke a cigarette, a habit he longed to acquire, but the taste was too bitter and he stubbed it out. He thought about Ruby Donaldson, whom he disliked, and felt glad that his uncle had spurned her. If he hadn’t, then her little bastard – he felt a thrill at the ugly word – might be a threat. As it was, so long as he, Seth, could make himself indispensable to Uncle Silas, he was on a straight, clear road to success. He lit another cigarette, determined, this time, to see it through to the end.

T
he
Victoria and Albert
was only ten years old and very fine, but even so she was eclipsed in grandeur and elegance by the Russian imperial yacht, which had sailed with immense grace into Cowes harbour, masts gleaming like golden spars in the soft morning light. The day before, Tsar Nicholas, gaunt but elegant in the white uniform of a British admiral, had stood at salute, shoulder to shoulder with the rotund and somewhat florid Edward, to review the mighty armada of British battleships at Spithead; but now the sailing races were about to begin and, with them, the fun.

Tobias invited the household staff up on deck when the
Lady Isabella
took her place in the busy harbour, so that they could properly observe the
Standart
, the tsar’s yacht. She was a magisterial craft. Four hundred feet long, with a gleaming black hull and a bowsprit adorned with gold leaf. There were three towering, varnished wooden masts and two vast white funnels, and her deck seemed to be crowded with people, so that it was difficult to pick out Nicholas and Alexandra, although everyone claimed they could. Parkinson stood at the rails, mesmerised: that the tsar and tsarina were practically within hailing distance was a remarkable and memorable thing. Poor Mrs Powell-Hughes, he thought; she had had to send up her sincerest apologies from the darkened sanctuary of her cabin.

‘She’s feeling decidedly seedy, Your Lordship,’ Parkinson said with a knowing smile, one sailor to another. That neither he nor the earl had ever sailed before seemed to escape him, although Lord Netherwood said, ‘Poor soul, me too, and it was only eight miles.’

Sarah Pickersgill was a natural, however. She didn’t even hang on to the rails but stood twitching her nostrils in the breeze like a foxhound, and shading her eyes with her hand so that she appeared to be saluting the other vessels. All the while, she kept half an eye on the boatswain, who wore his best blue coat with brass buttons and, if she wasn’t mistaken, had winked at her when she emerged from the galley, slightly flustered from cooking for the first time on the move and tucking rogue strands of unruly blonde hair into her cap.

There were hundreds of yachts at anchor, and all of them were required to keep a respectful distance from the king and the tsar, who were moored side by side in the centre of the harbour and closely guarded by a circle of small gunboats. Nicholas was famously anxious, Ulrich told them – not about his own safety but that of Alexis, the sickly little tsarevich; in Russia, he said, assassination was a constant threat, and subversives came in the most unlikely guises. Ulrich was a fount of information. He knew the yachts of all the European royals, and pointed them out as they passed: the Prince of Battenburg’s
Sheila
; the King of Spain’s
Hispania
; the old, exiled French Empress Eugenie on her beloved
Thistle
;
and the kaiser’s racing cutter
Meteor
.

‘All of Cowes is
en fête,
’ Isabella said gaily. She had been giddy since their arrival at Cowes, as if the salt air itself were intoxicating. Here, in this remarkable melting pot of continental nobility, her own status – as bride-to-be of Ulrich von Hechingen – had hit new and dizzying heights. Uli appeared to know absolutely everyone who wasn’t English, and at a regatta overrun with crown princes, archdukes and romantically exiled French royals, this was a distinct and exciting advantage. He wasn’t on terms with the kaiser, being too distant and obscure a relation, but nobody minded that, as Wilhelm was such an angry-looking, off-putting little fellow. It was enough, for Isabella, that the kaiser’s cruising yacht was named
Hohenzollern
and there was she, sporting a fat diamond with the very same pedigree. Small wonder that she currently existed in a state of exultation. Even her mother was finally impressed; her daughter’s fiancé had secured invitations for dinner with the Crown Prince of Bavaria, whom Uli called Rupert. ‘He’s not much fun,’ Uli warned the duchess. ‘He’s very much the military man.’ But Clarissa didn’t care a jot; in her view, fun was overrated anyway. Certainly, it played second – even third – fiddle to connections, especially those of a royal nature. She had half hoped that Edward VII would remember her kind hospitality at Netherwood Hall five years earlier and bring her and Archie aboard the
Victoria and Albert
, but it quickly became evident that the king’s attention was all taken up by the tsar, who didn’t seem to want to meet anyone. He had yet to set foot on dry land. Crown Prince Rupert, while rather a minor royal, was nevertheless better than nothing, and Clarissa was very glad that the Plymouth tiara would get another outing so soon after the last.