Netherwood (15 page)

Mind you, thought Tobias, the widow was a bit of a stunner. He was on the opposite side of the grave to Eve, so was well placed to discreetly observe. Lovely hair, lovely eyes. The black looked well on her too. Altogether rather ravishing, he thought. He wondered, idly, how old she was, and whether he might take an interest in her. She would be in need of succour, he thought. He forgot where he was and smiled.

Tobias’s stomach rumbled loudly, and he wondered what was for lunch. He’d felt too queasy to fully partake at breakfast, hadn’t managed more than a scrap of dry toast. A blinder of a night in the Cross Keys, though. He smiled again at the memory of it, then looked across the cemetery and eyed the Daimler longingly. Soon be home. Forty winks, a slap-up lunch, then a ride out with Dickie and Henrietta, perhaps; a cobweb-blowing gallop through the park. He’d speak to the stable lad when they got home.

The mourners began to move away from the churchyard
now and there was a palpable, if slight, relaxation of tension among them. Tobias nodded and smiled at one or two familiar faces then realised that his father and Henry had moved around the grave in order to speak to the widow and he followed them in a spirit of curiosity. The woman was gazing steadfastly at the coffin in a rather unnerving manner and Tobias wasn’t sure that he’d bother, if he was in their shoes. Leave her to it for the time being. But no, his sister and the earl seemed unfazed. Henry reached out and placed a gloved hand on the widow’s arm, murmuring words of sympathy, and his father cleared his throat to speak.

‘Mrs Williams,’ he said. ‘We spoke at New Mill on Monday but may I say, once again, how very sorry I am and how very much your husband will be missed?’

Eve dragged her gaze upwards, like a sleepwalker trying to get her bearings. There were no tears, but her face was rigid with trauma. Tobias felt awkward, exposed to her suffering in this way.

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said. Her voice came in a whisper.

‘Please, don’t hesitate to seek assistance if you need it,’ Lord Hoyland went on. ‘My land steward, Mr Arkwright, and my bailiff, Mr Blandford, act on my behalf, and their office is always open. Don’t suffer in silence. We cannot offer charity to every needy case, my dear, and you doubtless wouldn’t seek it, but we will always help if we can.’

Eve nodded again but found she was unable to speak. Reverend Farrimond, who had left the graveside to attend to Seth, now came back for Eve. He nodded a greeting to Tobias and Henrietta, then turned to their father.

‘Lord Hoyland,’ he said, briskly, ‘Reverend Samuel Farrimond.’ He extended a confident hand, and the earl shook it.

‘We haven’t met, your Lordship, but it is a very great honour and I must thank you on Mrs Williams’s behalf for acceding to my recent request.’

This fellow has aplomb, thought Tobias. Wonder what the dickens he’s talking about?

‘Not at all, not at all,’ said the earl, who understood no more of the situation than Tobias but was rather more practised at appearances.

Reverend Farrimond went on: ‘Mr Blandford and I agreed that the young woman and her child will remain with Mrs Williams until such a time as she is able to make the journey home. She arrives tomorrow.’

Eve, through her fog of silent grief, felt the unpleasant sensation that her life was no longer her own concern. Between Reverend Farrimond and Lord Hoyland, her fate was being busily arranged. Surely an agreement made when Arthur was alive was null and void now Arthur was dead? She made as if to speak and the men kindly waited but weariness engulfed her and she looked away, defeated.

‘Yes. Well. So,’ said the earl. If Absalom Blandford had the details, he thought, he need not trouble himself with them. Time to be off; this churchyard was no place to linger. He raised an arm, signalling to Atkins that the Daimler should be readied for the short trip home.

‘My good wishes to you, Reverend Farrimond,’ he said. ‘And to you too, Mrs Williams. Tobias, Henrietta?’

The earl and his son strode briskly off to their motor car, though Henrietta hung back, moved more than she could say by the young widow. She wished she had something meaningful to say, something other than platitudes.

‘I am so very sorry, Mrs Williams,’ she said. ‘Please let us help if we’re able.’

Eve directed her blank stare in Henrietta’s direction but made no reply, and Reverend Farrimond, with a kind smile for the aristocratic young woman, took Eve by the arm and walked her away from Arthur’s remains. He would bring her back, he thought, when the hole was filled with fresh earth
and the reality of the grave, its depth and its darkness, was no longer so brutally evident. Ahead of them he could see Seth walking alongside Amos Sykes, holding his hand. The minister was glad of it; the boy needed compassion, and he’d had none yet from his mother.

A
nna Rabinovich, at the age of twenty-two, felt there was very little left for the world to show her that she hadn’t already seen. She was mistaken in this, of course, but still, in her short life so far, she had known comfortable prosperity and extreme hardship, the heights of joy and the depths of sorrow; she had been treasured by her family then cast asunder from them; she had loved with all her heart then had lost the object of her love. Now Anna, always by nature cheerful and resilient, was adrift in a country that was not her own, among people who seemed to be perpetually bowed down under the weight of their own woe. When Anna tried to imagine her future, she struggled to see beyond a lonely battle for survival.

She and her young husband Leo had arrived in England three years earlier with the intention of travelling to Lanarkshire, where his brother was already making a living as a miner. Leo was Anna’s romantic hero, and her financial downfall; she had defied her family of wealthy Ukrainian merchants to marry the penniless only son of their bookkeeper, although it was not that he was poor that inspired their wrath, but that he was Jewish. The depth of her family’s anti-Semitism took even them by surprise. They had always employed Jews and
had believed themselves to be almost liberal, but their anger at their daughter’s choice was immediate and immutable, and it grew in direct proportion to Anna’s determination, the one feeding off the other until too much had been said and done on each side to ever reach a reconciliation. Anna’s brother, Alexei, fought hard to win their parents round; he felt her banishment from the family home more keenly than she did herself. But the door remained closed on the wayward daughter, in the belief that only in this way might she return to them, contrite and begging forgiveness. Fate, however, had other plans. A wave of pogroms in their country and the threat of violence against them forced Anna and Leo to flee Kiev, where they had lived all their lives. With a few scant belongings they had travelled with other Jews, crowded like cattle on to a train, as far as Bremen, from where they were able to buy a passage on a packet steamer bound for Southampton. It was only on disembarkation that they realised how very far indeed they still were from Scotland.

Undaunted, they had used most of their money on two train tickets to Sheffield, where they planned to find work in order to raise the money needed to travel further north. Leo had been taken on at Grangely Main, and thus began their downward spiral from romantic adventure to relentless adversity. By the time their baby girl, whom they named Maya, was born, Leo was already showing early symptoms of tuberculosis; then the Grangely miners went on strike, and Anna discovered that what she had believed to be hardship had not been hardship at all but merely a rehearsal for the penury into which they were now plunged.

When Leo died, Anna envied him the release, though only for the briefest of moments. She was young; she was resourceful and clever too, quick to pick up not only the English language, but also the Yorkshire dialect, so that she spoke in a lively hybrid of hard Ukrainian W’s and dropped Yorkshire aitches.
She spoke and sang to Maya in a mixture of her native tongue and her newly learned English. Her plan, she explained to Reverend Farrimond, was to strive to live as well as she could until such a time as she could buy a passage back to Russia. She would not, she said, write to request her family’s financial assistance; she felt they did not deserve such a compliment.

Anna was tremendously relieved when Reverend Farrimond presented her with his proposal; leaving Grangely, she felt, was essential to their survival. She and Maya were ready, their few poor possessions gathered about them, when he arrived to accompany them to Netherwood. It was two days after Arthur’s funeral, but they were almost halfway there before the minister explained how recently Eve had been widowed. Anna was all for turning round and returning to Grangely; she threatened to jump down from the carriage and walk back if the minister refused to take her. But Samuel Farrimond was a wise man and his quarter of a century in the ministry had taught him a thing or two about human nature. He believed Eve and Anna needed each other; Arthur’s death, while utterly unexpected and unutterably sad, made perfect sense to him in the context of this arrangement. He had thought, when he heard the news, not that Anna must remain in Grangely, but rather that she should go to Netherwood as soon as possible.

They arrived at Beaumont Lane at shortly after ten o’clock on Tuesday morning. Seth and Eliza had gone to school, Eve and Ellen were in the house, the child pottering aimlessly about the kitchen while her mother, as was her new custom, sat silently at the table. At the back door, Anna stood beside Reverend Farrimond with Maya in her arms and a tight knot of anxiety in her belly; when he knocked, she longed to flee. Inside, Ellen looked eagerly at her mother, who pushed herself wearily to her feet, walked to the door and opened it.

The two women, face to face, held each other’s gaze. There was a split-second jolt of recognition then Anna handed her
baby to the baffled minister, stepped into Eve’s house and wrapped her in an embrace that was so entirely natural and necessary that Eve was finally able to let go of the burden of unshed tears. She lay her head on Anna’s shoulder and wept.

Anna and Eve had met before, on the day of the evictions, when Anna and Leo’s belongings had been flung out of their house and into the dirt of the street. Leo, close to death, had been unable to help his wife, and she had struggled alone with their furniture until Eve had appeared, kind and capable, to silently share the load. Then she had seemed to vanish into the bedlam and Anna had wondered afterwards if her own imagination, fevered with fatigue and distress, had conjured up the lovely stranger. But here she was again, now pitiful and helpless, her own face white with trauma and exhaustion. Anna’s protective gesture had been an act of instinctive compassion, one human being responding to the need of another; but, more than that, it was an unspoken acknowledgement of a kindred spirit.

Eve cried in Anna’s arms for a long time; long enough for Reverend Farrimond to move beyond satisfaction at this promising beginning and into the realms of embarrassment. He was beginning to feel foolish, and more than a little voyeuristic, as the private moment between the women extended into minutes. The baby in his arms was becoming heavy and slightly damp at the rear end. It blew bubbles at him and pulled on his whiskers, so he was extremely relieved when Ellen, with all the insensitivity allowed to a one-year-old and bored now with the spectacle of her mother’s noisy tears, pushed herself between Eve and Anna and shouted: ‘Mam!’

The little girl’s imperative tone of voice seemed to stem the torrent and Eve looked down at where her daughter stood,
squeezed into the space she’d created between the women’s skirts. Ellen smiled at her artlessly and raised her arms for a cuddle. Eve picked her up and kissed her.

‘Now, that’s better,’ said Reverend Farrimond.

‘It’s a start,’ said Eve.