Netherwood (32 page)

I
t was after midday by the time Eve got back, and Lilly had long beaten her to it, so Anna already knew that the earl had taken her for a drive in the Daimler, but that was all she knew because Lilly hadn’t been fast enough to follow them. Eve walked up the entry into the backyard to find Anna pegging out the last batch of washing.

‘Lovely dryin’ weather,’ Eve said.

‘Pish!’ Anna said. ‘Never mind weather! What happened?’

Lilly’s head popped out of her open doorway.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘What’s going off?’

It made Eve laugh to see her disembodied head, its brow knitted in cross perplexity: there were few things happened in Netherwood without Lilly Pickering knowing the details from the thread to the needle.

‘Who’s looking after t’shop?’ Eve said.

Anna looked a little defensive. ‘I close for lunch,’ she said. ‘I cannot be two places at same time.’

‘Can’t you?’ Eve said. ‘Shame on you.’

Anna laughed, a little reluctantly because she felt aggrieved. If it wasn’t for her, Eve wouldn’t have gone to see the earl this morning, and now here she was, keeping secrets.

Eve said, ‘Come on then, come inside and I’ll spill t’beans.’ She looked at Lilly. ‘You an’ all,’ she said.

Lilly, who really preferred bad news to good, feared from her neighbour’s expression that congratulations might be in order. But good news was better than no news at all, so she gathered up her two littlest babies and followed Eve and Anna into the house.

Down at the allotment, Amos and Seth were harvesting peas, runner beans and spinach, picking the pods and the leaves and laying them carefully in wooden crates that Amos had lined with newspaper. They worked in silence, both of them fully absorbed in their task. The allotment was a different place from the one they’d taken over back in January. Now it was a model of its kind, the vegetables growing in orderly fashion in raised beds that Amos had made using old railway sleepers from a stack down by the lines. They were seeping tar in the hot sun, but apart from that they were ideal for the job and there were other gardeners down the row of plots who were eyeing them covetously. They had three wigwams built out of silver birch for the runners to climb, and the tender leaves – lettuces and sorrel – grew under a cloche of netting impenetrable to slugs and snails. Raised furrows bore the bushy crowns of Red Duke of Yorks, and there were the highly promising beginnings of a prize-winning marrow bed; Amos had put the wind up Seth by saying he should start sleeping by it in case of theft or sabotage. Dotted all around were marigolds to further ward off the pests, and cosmos and larkspur to attract the bees. The still air was heavy with the scent of sweetpeas, which grew abundantly up both sides of a flat trellis of woven willow. The more Seth cut them the more they came; the house was full of
them in jam jars, and Eliza had a little stall in the street after school, selling posies.

Amos was learning on the hoof. He’d never had his own patch of land to tend, but he was catching on fast, watching what the other gardeners were up to and, on occasion, swallowing his pride and asking Clem’s advice. Seth, on the other hand, was going at it with his usual forensic intensity; the school library was inadequately stocked with gardening books but Miss Mason had brought him some of her own and he currently had
The Gardener’s Assistant
by his bed, and was marking pages of interest as he progressed. He was nagging Amos to build a melon pit, but was getting short shrift.

Their immediate neighbour in the run of allotments was Percy Medlicott, which meant Seth was truly among friends. Percy didn’t mind who he talked to, as long as they’d listen, and even though Seth was not quite eleven, he paid solemn attention to Percy’s pearls of wisdom so was a worthwhile, as well as willing, audience. Percy knew with wistful certainty that the day would come when Seth would know considerably more than he did. But he was enjoying his advantage while it lasted, and he gave the boy hours of his time. For a little lad who’d lost his dad, thought Amos, Seth was doing all right. Eve told Amos – swearing him to secrecy on pain of death – that he was wetting his bed and was mortified by it, because it was something even Ellen didn’t do any more. But Eve had refused to let Seth fret. This too would pass, she told him. He seemed to Eve to be not entirely happy, but happy enough. Certainly he loved being with Amos in the allotment.

‘Right,’ Amos said now, breaking the diligent silence and stretching his back against the ache. ‘Let’s get this lot dahn to yer mam.’

Carrying a crate each they took their leave, unwillingly on Seth’s part, but with some relief on Amos’s. He’d drop the boxes off at Beaumont Lane, then treat himself to a pint at
the Hare and Hounds. Percy Medlicott, who never seemed to leave his allotment – at any rate never left before them – gave them a farewell salute. He was basking like a cat in the evening sun, sitting on his old stool, chewing on the stem of a pipe. His tobacco tin was empty but the memory of his last smoke was strong enough, in taste and smell, to give him pleasure.

‘How come ’e’s stayin’ and we’re goin’?’ said Seth truculently.

‘Because ’e’s got Madge Medlicott at home,’ said Amos. ‘Think on, young Seth. When you take a wife, be sure you’d sooner be at ’ome with ’er than on thi own wi’ yer pipe.’

Seth did think on. Then he said, ‘Would you sooner be at ’ome wi’ my mam than alone wi’ yer pipe?’

Amos clipped him round the back of the head. ‘I don’t smoke,’ he said. ‘Cheeky beggar.’

They staggered into the kitchen ten minutes later, hamming it up as if the weight of the vegetables had them nearly on their knees. The dry washing was in and Anna was pressing the linens with the smoothing iron, hot work on any day, but barely tolerable on a day like this. Her face was damp with sweat, though she looked cheerful enough. Seth, still cool towards her, though even he didn’t know why, pushed through to the parlour where Eve was whisking crumbs off the shop table and into her hand. She turned and smiled at him.

‘Good gardenin’?’ she said.

‘Champion,’ said Seth. ‘Amos’s ’ere.’

Amos is always here, she thought. And she knew why he was here now – he’d be wanting to find out how she got on up at the Hall. Hoping it’d all come to nought, no doubt. She tossed the crumbs out through the open door and, wiping her hands briskly down the sides of her skirt, followed Seth back into the hot kitchen.

‘You should do that in t’yard,’ she said to Anna. ‘You’ll be a puddle on t’floor before you’ve done.’

Amos said: ‘Now then.’

She smiled at him. ‘Thanks for all that,’ she said, indicating the two laden vegetable boxes on the table. ‘Will you take some of it with you?’

‘Not till you’ve turned it into summat I can eat,’ he said, grinning at her. He smiled more these days; people were almost getting used to it. It had a lot to do with Eve, and the time he spent with Seth, but it was also partly to do with the gardening. He reckoned it was making him more peaceful, this connection with the soil and what he could coax from it. He sometimes thought if Lord Hoyland provided a few hundred allotments, his pits would be safe from socialism. All that fresh air and fruitful labour could take the fight right out of a man. Not that he was giving up the struggle, but he could see how others might.

Eve wasn’t volunteering any information so Amos said, ‘’ow did you get on then, this morning?’

She told him, and as she talked his face lost its smile.

‘If I were you,’ he said carefully, when she’d finished, ‘I’d think very ’ard before signin’ up for life wi’ Teddy ’oyland.’

‘Well, you’re not me. And who’s signin’ up for life?’ she said.

‘You’ll never be free,’ Amos said. ‘You’ve been bought by ’im, an when—’

She stopped him, mid-flow: ‘Don’t you dare, Amos Sykes. Don’t you dare preach to me. I’ve been bought by nob’dy. Lord ’oyland is an investor in my business, and I for one am pleased with t’connection. If you can’t be pleased an’ all, it’s your problem, not mine. The earl’s a good man, an’ your blindness to that just makes you sound foolish.’

Amos’s expression was thunderous. It was rare for anyone to take him on, and rarer still for it to be anyone whose high opinion he cared about. But this, instead of making him conciliatory, consumed him all at once with a hot anger, and though there was nothing, in truth, in his relationship with Eve to merit it, he felt betrayed.

‘You’re t’fool, Eve Williams, if you think any good can come from this.’ His voice was raised and Seth stood watching the scene with an expression of abject dismay. Anna tried to steer him gently out of the kitchen but he shook her hand from his arm, wouldn’t even look at her. She shrugged, and left the room.

Eve was shaking with a powerful emotion she couldn’t name. Amos was wrong, she thought, and not only that, he had presumed too much in speaking to her in this way. She took a deep breath and said, ‘You’d best leave.’

It was shocking, the coldness in her voice, but there it was, and they all heard it. Amos didn’t linger; he stalked across the kitchen and out of it with such haste that his cloth cap lay forgotten on top of the spinach leaves, like a reproach for treating him so ill when he’d worked so hard. Seth snatched up the cap and clutched it to his breast, swept along on the melodrama of the moment.

‘I ’ate you,’ he said to his mother, in the same controlled and chilly tones she’d used herself, then he followed Amos out of the door.

C
uster’s Last Stand turned out to be a triumph, though not for General Custer who ended up, as he always did, dead at the hands of Chief Sitting Bull and his terrifying braves. The Queen’s Grounds in Barnsley was the wild west, dense with spectators who had never witnessed a spectacle like it. Amos arrived early with Seth and Eliza and they placed themselves near enough the front not to miss anything, but not so near as to be able to see the whites of the Red Indians’ eyes, which Amos said would put the willies up them.

The crowd was warmed up with a show by the Rough Riders of the World; Turks, Gauchos, Cossacks and Arabs in outlandish national dress, careering about the arena on wild-eyed stallions, drenched in sweat. As they exited stage left, the Red Indians entered stage right, whooping their battle cry, bare-chested and fearsome in war paint and feathers. There was a thrilling attack on the Deadwood stagecoach, gunshots ringing out in the October afternoon, arrows flying, horses rearing.

Then Annie Oakley sauntered on, twirling her pistols and shouting, ‘howdy pardners!’ to the crowd. She had two hundred glass marbles fired one after another into the sky and shot every one of them to tiny shards; she invited spectators to toss
pennies into the air – ‘First time ah’ve seen Yorkshiremen chucking their money away,’ said Amos – then handed them back punched through with a perfect hole; she shot the ash from a cigarette dangling from a man’s mouth; and with the thin edge of a series of playing cards facing her, and at a range of 90 yards she shot the cards from their moorings and peppered them with holes as they fell to the ground. Eliza’s eyes were wide as she imagined a whole new future for herself. She wondered how, and when, she might have a pistol.