Netherwood (55 page)

She could see why he liked it. It was peaceful, hushed like a library and shady with its shuttered windows that let in only thin slices of light between the slats. The walls were lined with mellow wood shelves and dressers, which bore jars of oils and distilled waters and bowls and sachets of mysterious, fragrant substances that Alice, the still-room maid, concocted, working like an alchemist with the leaves and seeds, spices and petals.

Eve came to him for a kiss, and they stood for a moment in each other’s arms. The urgency had gone from their embraces
now that they were daily occurrences. They broke away and Daniel turned back to his task while Eve made a slow circuit of the room. Alice had meticulously labelled her ingredients, and they read like the recipes for magic potions, ancient and mysterious. Yellow saunders, orris root, calamus aromaticus. She uncorked a glass bottle the shape of a teardrop and sniffed the contents. Sandalwood, the label said. It was exotic, unfamiliar. She returned to his side, where the smell of roses was one she knew.

‘I shall be going soon,’ she said, finally saying what she’d come to say.

He stopped what he was doing and turned to her.

‘How soon?’

‘Middle of next month. Lady ’oyland needs to return to Netherwood. King Edward’s going to stay, and there’s everything to do up at t”all, apparently. All t’London engagements from July onwards ’ave ’ad to be cancelled. They won’t need me ’ere.’

‘Eve,’ he said, investing her name with a world of meaning.

‘I know.’

They looked at each other for a long moment, and it was she who broke the silence.

‘I ’ave to go, you know that, don’t you?’

‘I do.’

‘If I was free, I would stay ’ere with you. If I ’ad no obligations.’

‘I know.’

‘Daniel.’

‘I love you, Eve Williams.’

‘But—’

‘Sssh.’ He placed a gentle finger on her mouth. ‘I know all your buts,’ he said. ‘And we shan’t let them spoil the time we have left together.’ He smiled. ‘Four weeks, maybe more. There are any number of things we can do together in that time.
Let’s live for the moment, let the future make its own arrangements.’

She leaned in to him, resting her head against his chest.

‘You could stay here, y’know. Bring the children down.’

He’d said that before, and she wished he wouldn’t, because it demonstrated how little he knew her. Odd, that. She loved him wholeheartedly, and he loved her, but he still thought she could fetch the bairns from everything and everyone they knew. They were Arthur’s children, children of Netherwood. They couldn’t be transplanted like one of Daniel’s perennials. She shook her head now, as she had done before.

‘My life’s there,’ she said.

He wanted to shout at her that her life was wherever she wanted it to be, and that children would live where they were put, and very likely thrive there. But he didn’t want to push her away so he said nothing, and instead caressed her face with his rose-smelling fingers.

‘Will you come to me tonight?’ he said. His rooms were in the servants’ mews, behind the house; easy enough, if she was canny, to slip into and out of undetected. She nodded. Tonight and every night, she thought, until she had to take the train north and step out of this adventure, back into her old life.

T
he earl didn’t pay Amos the compliment of sacking him in person, delegating the job instead to Jem Arkwright, who had cooked his goose in the first place by sending the incriminating papers to London. Jem, to be fair, had been at a loss as to how to proceed; nobody hated Harry Tideaway more than he did, and part of him would have liked to stick the documents straight into the fire and be done with the evidence. But Jem was the earl’s man; if Amos Sykes was agitating in the pits, Jem’s duty was to keep the boss informed. He still sat on the papers for a few days, though, before finally passing them on and sealing Amos’s fate.

The upshot had been instant dismissal and blacklisting, so that no colliery within a ten-mile radius would touch him. Not one of the men on the list of members was sacked, though; Amos had been right on that score. The earl would’ve liked to send every one of them packing, but by the time he got wind of the situation there were almost two hundred union members working at New Mill, and he wasn’t about to dismiss a third of the workforce. He sent them one of his mutual-loyalty-and-respect letters, full of paternal disappointment at their behaviour, but there was a new mood at the pit these
days, an awareness among the men that perhaps, after all, their future – or, at least, a say in it – might be in their own hands rather than Lord Hoyland’s. His reluctant concession to allow them union membership while in his employ was their first taste of victory. For now, it was enough.

Jem privately felt that Lord Hoyland was losing a good man in Amos Sykes. He was impressed by his dignity, by the way he’d made the unpleasant task easy; there was no scene, no fuss. When Jem told him his fate, Amos said, ‘Aye, as I thought. When d’you want me out of the ’ouse?’

Jem hadn’t even thought about that, though Absalom Blandford had, and notice was swiftly served to vacate the premises within the week. Nearly thirty years in the earl’s service, thought Jem, and in the end it counted for nothing. Amos took all of this on the chin, though. All he really wanted to know was who’d shopped him. In the days before Jem acted on the information he’d been given, Amos had felt like a hunted man, each day waiting for the axe to fall, or a blackmail demand from the thief to arrive – free vegetables in perpetuity in return for their silence, perhaps, since he had little else to bargain with. He regarded everyone he met as a potential suspect, staring hard at them during any exchange for signs that here was the snake in the grass who’d stolen his paperwork. It said a lot about Amos’s usual demeanour that no one noticed a difference in him. He’d fixed the broken lock himself, unwilling to involve Absalom Blandford in the mystery before he had to, and there had been no further signs of disturbance since. And each day, when he presented himself at the pit yard time office, fully expecting to be met by a furious Don Manvers, or a lynch mob from the earl’s estate, he was merely nodded at as usual and handed his helmet, lamp and checks. It was unsettling in the extreme. So when he finally received a summons to the estate offices from Jem, it came almost as a relief. And
when Jem told him it was Harry Tideaway’s doing, he actually laughed.

‘That’s not the reaction I expected,’ Jem had said.

‘Tideaway’s an arse’ole,’ said Amos. ‘Rather it were ’im than some’dy I work with.’

So, he was without a job and almost without a home, though not yet without hope. He’d managed to save a bit, being a single man with no dependants, and something would turn up, he was sure of it. Anna had already offered a berth in Beaumont Lane, though to be honest, he wasn’t that desperate. The last thing he wanted was Eve coming back to find him living under her roof. No, he’d find a job above ground – working in daylight, what a novelty – and he’d rent a room that wasn’t tied to the estate. Today he’d been up to the brickworks just after first light, asking to be considered if anything came up. There was nothing at the moment, but they took his name. Then he’d spent a couple of peaceful hours in the allotment before strolling back to Brook Lane for a bite to eat.

There were two letters on his door mat when he got there, and one of them was addressed in Eve’s tidy, meticulous hand, so, for the time being, the other one was eclipsed. He sat down at the kitchen table, his heart beating a little faster at the thought of her taking the time to write to him. It was on thick paper with the Countess of Netherwood and Fulton House, Belgravia embossed in black across the top of the sheet, which he could’ve done without, but he supposed she had no other option. He didn’t know what he was hoping for – he’d ceased trying to comprehend his feelings for Eve – but in the event the letter was a little sterile and disappointingly short; she hoped he was well, had been so relieved he was safe, was sorry for the bereaved and had written to them too, was missing everyone but would be home by the summer’s end.

There was no news about herself, no way of knowing from her letter whether she was happy in London or sad, no
indication whether her life was too full for the written word to do it justice, or so empty that there was nothing to say. Missing everyone didn’t mean she was crying herself to sleep at night, he thought. Not that he’d want her to. He wished her well, really he did, even though he loathed the way she’d jumped up and left when Lady Hoyland snapped her fingers. Anna, of course, took issue with his position on this matter, and she was a feisty, articulate adversary. She kept Amos on his mettle; he felt he was sharpening up his debating skills every time he talked to her. Anna refused to see Eve as a servant of the earl and countess. Eve was in the driving seat, Anna reckoned; she had the skills they needed, and was being paid handsomely for them.

‘She doesn’t need their money, but they need her,’ Anna had said. ‘I would say that puts Eve in charge, yes?’

‘Codswallop,’ said Amos, who used these colourful colloquialisms in the hope that Anna would echo them later in the conversation, because it never failed to amuse him when she did. ‘Complete codswallop. Eve didn’t want to go, but she ’ad to.’

She had given a short, derisory bark. ‘Ha! So this is basis of your great, ideal world? We all do only what we want to do?’

There she went again, turning his argument upside down and using it as a weapon to beat him with. It was Anna’s speciality. When he pictured her, it was making just such a point, her small chin jutting forwards and an expression of Slavic contempt clouding her pretty face. She should run for parliament, he’d said. They should give her the vote and she might, she’d replied.

Amos put Eve’s letter to one side and picked up the other. It was postmarked Barnsley, though he didn’t recognise the handwriting. Perhaps this was the blackmail note, he thought. Bit late now.

It wasn’t, though. It was a letter from the secretariat of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association, inviting Amos to apply for the post of regional recruitment officer for Barnsley and district.

‘Well, I’ll be blowed,’ he said out loud.

Tobias was in love with Dorothea Sterling. No matter that he’d met her for the first time just three weeks earlier, had seen her only four times since, and had spent none of those times alone with her. He was in love, he was quite convinced of it – had known, in fact, the first evening he met her that she was the one for him; she was bold and independent, and she sparkled with vivacity and wit. Henry, in that maddening way of hers, had been quick to point out the recessive chin, but even she conceded that, while no conventional beauty, Thea had something special about her, something that turned heads when she entered a room. She was so spirited! Tobias felt pepped-up by her presence, as if she transmitted invisible waves of enthusiasm and
joie de vivre.
She was something else, really she was. She was a masterful horsewoman, but she didn’t ride sidesaddle like every other girl in the capital; they’d ridden out, she, Tobias, Henry and Dickie, in Hyde Park and Thea had worn a new style of redingote that allowed her to sit astride the horse without showing more than a modest flash of ankle. It was an incredibly stirring sight, seeing her straddle the horse’s back in that way. People stared and Tobias, eyes on stalks, had almost come a cropper watching her instead of the path ahead. Everything about her – her clothes, her manners, her voice – was different to what he knew, and therein lay the appeal. He was so unutterably bored by the girls his parents favoured. Thea shunned chiffon in favour of exotic shot silks in hot colours; she shook hands like a man and opened doors for herself; she could play poker and baccarat
as well as bridge, and when Tobias lit a cigarette in the club that he and Henry took her to, she took it from his mouth and enjoyed a couple of long drags before handing it back, stained with red lipstick. She wasn’t fast though. He’d come not even close to getting his hands on her. Something told him that this thoroughly modern young woman, who danced to Scott Joplin and taught Toby the cakewalk, drank bourbon on the rocks or whiskey sour, studied Greek and Latin and mathematics and was in England to attend a summer school on Elizabethan literature, would nevertheless require a marriage proposal before she loosened her stays.