Netherwood (14 page)

Eve was pegging out sheets in the backyard when she heard the sound that had the power to render her catatonic with fear. Somewhere in the town a housewife had begun to strike a poker against the grate of her fire and the sound, carrying easily through the walls of the terraced houses, had been heard and replicated by her neighbour, and hers, and again hers, until it seemed that hundreds of pokers were striking hundreds of iron grates, to relay the news more effectively than any telegraph that there had been an accident at the pit. Eve listened to the hollow, chilling sound of metal on metal and prayed with all her heart that it wasn’t at New Mill, and if it had to be New Mill, then it wasn’t Arthur. Let it be anyone else’s husband, she prayed, but let it not be my Arthur.

Eve had walked up to the pit with a growing crowd of women, but she felt alone among them and drew no comfort from their presence. On the contrary, she regarded them as rivals in their joint desire to be spared the grief and uncertainty of widowhood. There was no comfort, either, in the fact that on previous occasions Arthur had survived unscathed. New Mill
was a safe pit compared to many, but Eve had made this journey twice before, her mouth as dry with fear as it was today, and had stood as close as she was able to the pit head while bodies were carried out and the dead named. That Arthur was not among them then made it more of a certainty, to Eve, that he would be this time.

She knew, the instant she arrived. There were many women there before her and their expressions of profound relief, for which at that moment Eve hated them, changed swiftly to looks of deep compassion when they saw her. So she knew from their faces that it was Arthur, though she didn’t know – at least not immediately – that it was him alone. That news was delivered to her later, as she sat motionless in the deputy’s office not drinking her hot sweet tea, waiting for Arthur’s poor, crushed remains to be brought up the shaft. She remembered, as if it were a glimpse of another person’s life, that she must have left Ellen alone in the house. The realisation didn’t alarm her; it simply crossed her mind, then was gone. The Earl of Netherwood came to speak to her; he always tried to attend an accident at one of his collieries, had even, on one occasion, joined the rescue effort underground. He sat by Eve for a while and spoke to her gently of his sorrow, but she didn’t meet his eyes and barely heard his words; this encounter, to her, was no honour, but merely part of the ongoing nightmare. Lord Hoyland, giving up the effort but sitting in silence with her for a while, wondered what her future held. He didn’t know Mrs Williams, had no idea what she was made of. He hoped she would find the resources – both inner and material – to stay in Netherwood. The earl was a fair man and his estate didn’t evict women for being widowed, but rent must be paid all the same.

‘Can we assist you home?’ he said now, in the hope that practical help might be more welcome than words of sympathy. ‘My driver’s outside. You’re more than welcome …’

She turned on him a gaze of such emptiness that he trailed off into silence again. Ah well, he thought. No point sitting here. So he took his leave and joined the pit managers for a debriefing; the priority now was to find unquestionable proof that the accident was unavoidable.

Eve sat on. Then Lew came to find her, one leg bandaged from the shin to the knee and blue and yellow bruising to one side of his face. He was weeping openly, like a child, though Eve was not. Arthur had saved him, he told her through great, messy sobs. Arthur had pushed him clear of the prop before it fell. He died a hero, said Lew, she could be proud of him.

Eve stared at him for a moment, then said, coldly, ‘I’ve always been proud of Arthur. He had nothin’ to prove to me.’

Lew left her alone then, and she sat in silent desolation. Boast not thyself of tomorrow, she thought, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.

Seth and Eliza hurried home from school together, earlier than usual. The headmistress, informed in the vaguest terms of an accident at New Mill, kept all the children in ignorance for a while but then had decided they should perhaps return home. None of them knew what had happened though, and they left the schoolhouse just before midday, more in excitement than in fear. The streets they ran along were festooned with flags of green and gold for Lord Fulton’s coming-of-age; it was hard to believe in disaster while bunting flapped between the gas lights.

But when Seth and Eliza left their friends and turned the corner into Beaumont Lane, they saw immediately that the curtains at number five were drawn, as if the house had closed its eyes on the day. Curtains drawn in daylight meant death
had come calling. Eliza began to scream and Lilly hurried out to scoop her up and carry her in to her mother. Seth followed them in, stony faced, his mind empty but for the thought that Arthur’s scarf was still rolled into a ball under his bed, and how very glad he was for it.

T
he funeral was held on the seventeenth of January, the Saturday after Arthur died and the day of Tobias Hoyland’s twenty-first birthday. It was a strange confluence of celebration and sorrow; the young Lord Fulton was driven around Netherwood to receive his birthday ovation, then not quite an hour later the cart bearing Arthur’s coffin followed a similar route to the chapel. People who had waved their flags and yelled cheerful birthday greetings to Tobias stood silent on the kerb stones and bowed their heads as Jeremiah Hague’s black-beribboned funeral horse pulled Arthur on his final journey. The earl had paid for the hearse; he always did when men died in his service. Other men, who lived without his protection, died without it too, and had to be carried by relatives to the graveside. None of it made any difference to Eve. She walked behind the hearse, supported by Samuel Farrimond, although she seemed to need no assistance and, though ashen-faced, was dry-eyed and upright. Seth, who had refused to stay at Lilly’s with his sisters, walked on the other side of his mother, his likeness to Arthur adding extra poignancy to the occasion. Like Eve, Seth shed no tears, although unlike her he had cried a great deal in the days since his father’s death.

As they processed the mile or so from Beaumont Lane to the chapel the cortege grew, joined along the route by people from the roadside, so that by the time Jeremiah drew to a halt in Middlecar Road, there were almost two hundred mourners. The coffin was carried by Lew Sylvester, Amos Sykes, Jonas Buckle and Wally Heseltine; the rest filed into the chapel and, seated or standing, they hung their heads and prayed for the soul of Arthur Williams.

Eve, at the front, prayed for her own. She felt cold and empty and, in spite of the great number of folk behind her, entirely alone. Seth, sitting beside her, trying so valiantly to be a man, was no comfort to her. At this moment, and indeed since she had first learned of Arthur’s passing, she had felt nothing for the children: no compassion, no concern, nothing that she recognised as love. She harboured a dark fear that death, when it took Arthur, had robbed her of the capacity to feel. There was at least some small comfort in the thought that she would therefore be spared any future pain.

Wilfred Oxspring, the Netherwood minister, addressed the congregation. He was a local man, a former miner, and his face and voice conveyed the compassion he was truly feeling for Eve; he wished she would look at him.

‘“I am the resurrection and the life,” saith the Lord. “He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.”’

Eve had heard these words before, spoken at the funerals of others, but they had never then struck her as utterly meaningless. She barely listened now, her mind wandering to the previous Sunday when she had stood in ignorance in this chapel alongside Arthur and their three children. The girls had fidgeted and complained about the cold and Seth had fumed in his stiff Sunday collar. She and Arthur had been cross with them and a little cross, too, with each other. How they had wasted his last hours on this earth.

Reverend Oxspring raised his voice, as if to penetrate Eve’s reverie with his prayer for the bereaved.

‘O Holy Spirit, Divine Comforter, we know that Thy presence is among us in fulfilment of the promise of our Lord Jesus Christ; we ask that Thou wilt pour Thy comfort and strength into the minds and hearts of these Thy children. Grant that courage may rise within them to meet this test.’

Eve thought, Arthur is dead and gone and there is no comfort here. She hadn’t realised until now that her faith had been in her husband, not in God. She sat motionless through the rest of the service, concentrating hard on not uttering out loud any of the words in her head. Then she felt herself being led to the graveside, and she watched as Arthur’s body in its plain wooden casket was lowered into the hard earth. Seth, standing at her side, began to wail, but Eve, locked in private misery, could offer the boy nothing. Lew and Amos stepped forwards to cast a handful of dirt on to the coffin.

Back underground, thought Eve. At least he won’t be afraid down there.

Teddy Hoyland, diary permitting, always tried to attend the funerals of men who died in his collieries and today he had insisted that Tobias accompany him, notwithstanding the fact that it was his birthday. A good and loyal man had died in their service and his memory should be honoured by them. Henrietta was with them too, though in her case through choice, and it gave the earl pleasure to have her on his left at the graveside and his handsome heir on his right. None of the mourners would ever know, of course, of the truculent resistance to this show of unity displayed by said heir the previous evening. For a young man of twenty-one, Tobias still had a great deal of spoilt child in him, thought Teddy. The boy had
proved peculiarly resistant to all notions of duty and responsibility over the years, but it was never more evident than now, when the time had come to help shoulder the burdens of his lands and title. Well, his hand must be forced, thought the earl. Waiting for Tobias to do the right thing, he had realised, bore no fruit at all.

So the earl and his son stood shoulder to shoulder at Arthur’s graveside, two tall men with the same noble bearing, though Tobias’s mutinous expression rather gave the game away. He’d had other plans for his birthday morning; Buffy Mountford, an old school chum with a country pile in Derbyshire, had proposed a day’s snipe shooting followed by a steak and claret supper. But good old Pater, always to be relied upon to scotch a half-decent plan, had insisted he stay home and – worse still – had requested in that tone of voice which brooked no objections that Tobias accompany him to pay his respects to a dead miner.