Ravenscliffe (20 page)

TERRIBLE PIT CALAMITY AT NETHERWOOD HORRIFIC EXPLOSIONS SWEEP LONG MARTLEY EIGHTY-EIGHT LIVES LOST KING VISITS BEREAVED AT COLLIERY PEN PICTURE OF THE SCENE OF THE TRAGEDY OFFICIAL LIST OF DEAD RELIEF FUND OPENED FOR BEREAVED WIDOWS

Daniel had picked up a copy on his way over to Ravenscliffe, exchanging platitudes with Ted Fletcher because it was hard to say anything original or meaningful about a catastrophe on this scale. There was a list of the dead inside the paper and Eve had read it and wept with horror and astonishment at the barefaced cruelty of death. All of Nellie’s menfolk were gone: Alf, William, Richard and Edward, dead within an hour and a half of starting their shift. Lilly’s Victor had perished too. Her little ones were still with Eve, sleeping the untroubled sleep of infancy in a room with Eliza. Eve had taken them back to Lilly last night and found her whey-faced and unresponsive, catatonic with fear for her future and that of her children. She’d never held Victor in much esteem when he lived, but now he was dead she saw that he’d stood firm between her and the open door of the workhouse. Eve had sat in Lilly’s dismal kitchen for a mostly silent half-hour, then had picked up the children, two boys, both of them sorry little scraps of humanity with no meat on their bones or colour in their cheeks, and had carried them back to Ravenscliffe, where she’d fed them and put them to bed. It was the least she could do and even so it still left five more looking to Lilly for comfort.

Daniel stood. His fob watch showed him six o’clock and
it was half-an-hour’s walk back to Netherwood Hall. Eve said: ‘Shall we see you later?’

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘This evening, if you like.’

‘I would like,’ she said, and she smiled wanly. He stooped over her where she still sat and pressed his mouth to the top of her head, keeping it there a while so that she felt his hot breath through her hair. Fleetingly, like a dream remembered, she felt a sense of how fortunate she was, and how happy, and then it passed.

‘I need to go and see Nellie today,’ she said. ‘I can’t think what I might say to ’er.’

‘Did anyone say anything to you, when Arthur died – y’know, something that comforted you? That you remember still?’

She gazed at him, taking herself back to that time: not so very long ago, but she felt as if it was another life she recalled, a different woman. ‘No,’ she said, after a while. ‘There was no comfort. Then Anna came, and she made all t’difference. But not because of anything she said. I don’t think we talked about Arthur at all. She just, well … she just shared t’burden, somehow or other.’

‘Well then. Try to do the same for Nellie.’

Ah, she thought, but you don’t know Nellie.

The house party was affected, of course it was, but there was no reason for it to disband entirely, thought Lady Netherwood, who had risen early out of a sense of crisis and now sat at her desk in the morning room feeling virtuous and serious-minded. Mixed doubles tennis, lunch in the summer house, fishing for carp in the ponds, an archery contest: no reason why these activities shouldn’t still take place, so long as hilarity and high jinks were kept under control – obviously – out of
respect. Teddy, morose and quiet since he had come home yesterday, thought everyone should go. Clarissa thought absolutely that they shouldn’t. In any case, the king must decide what the best course of action was for himself, and so long as they didn’t all mope about the house looking miserable, the countess was confident that Bertie would stay put. Also he would be swayed by Alice – as Clarissa now blithely thought of Mrs Keppel – and since Alice hadn’t been at the wretched colliery, hadn’t witnessed the dead or ministered to the injured, she was still as full of high spirits as she had been since arriving. She must be called upon to assist, thought Clarissa: she must be given the job of helping gee up the party as it teetered on the brink of the doldrums. After all, only a minority of those present had involved themselves in yesterday’s disaster – the rest had had an extremely pleasant afternoon. And also – and this surely was the key point – no one here had actually suffered any personal loss. They had returned yesterday as if bereaved, the Daimlers driving at funereal pace and the passengers apparently shattered by what they’d witnessed. But for heaven’s sake, thought Clarissa: if an accident at the colliery was going to spoil their fun, then what was the point in planning anything, ever?

However. She drummed her lovely fingers on the mellow rosewood of the table, her brow knotted in concentration. If Thea Stirling felt she really couldn’t stay, that wouldn’t be at all a bad thing. There was, she knew, a plan to take the Americans to Glendonoch for the shooting, but they could surely be persuaded that this was no longer appropriate. And then they could all sneak off to Scotland after they’d gone. Tobias was traipsing about after the girl like a hopeless case and Clarissa didn’t mind admitting she had misjudged the depth of her son’s infatuation. A corsetless beanpole she may be, but Thea seemed to possess magnetism. Even Clarissa had found herself being drawn in; she had always admired spirit
in a girl. This, far from reconciling her to the object of her son’s ardour, only made her doubly anxious to get Thea off the premises. If a marriage couldn’t take place, then where was the sense in tormenting Tobias in this way, dangling Thea before him like a carrot before a donkey? No, let her return to London, where she might snare a banker or some such. So, the question was this: how to persuade the Choates and Miss Stirling that their early departure would be acceptable, while holding on to everyone else? This was the sort of social conundrum that Clarissa rather enjoyed. She rang a small brass bell on her desk and the door opened immediately, revealing a footman awaiting instruction.

‘I’ll take another cup of tea, please, Robert. Lemon.’

‘Of course, your ladyship.’ He closed the door softly and with great care, as you might close the door on a newly bereaved woman or a patient with no hope of recovery, and Clarissa felt a flash of irritation. Really, this was too silly. She must speak to Mrs Powell-Hughes. The drama was over and she must be able to rely on the household to set the tone.

It was mid-afternoon, the day after the explosions. Investigations had begun into the cause, the district coroner had opened an inquest and death certificates had been signed for eighty-eight souls so that the funerals could be arranged. Not all of the bodies had been easily identifiable, because of the charring. Billy Somerscale, a fourteen-year-old pony boy, had been recognisable to his mother only by the soles of his boots; a broken metal seg, which had caused him to complain to her – on the very morning of the day he died – that he rocked a little to the left when he walked, was still evident when all the rest of him was burned black. He had been found dead with his arm around the neck of his pony, and this detail, while
heartbreaking in itself, at least gave his mother the comfort that her boy hadn’t been alone when he passed.

In the Netherwood Methodist churchyard, eight sextons were working diligently on a large plot of ground for the graves of the dead. The Archbishop of York, moved by the scale of the tragedy reported in the day’s national newspapers, had offered his assistance with the service, but Wilfred Oxspring had declined the help; Netherwood’s Methodist minister, who had known every one of the victims personally, would be conducting the funerals. A relief fund had been opened; there were sixty-one widows as a result of the accident, but when the girls and boys who had lost their fathers were counted, the number of dependants totalled one hundred and ninety-four. The whole town was in mourning, it seemed to Eve as she walked to Nellie’s. There were more curtains closed than open and the streets were empty but for the occasional arrival of a horse and cart taking coffins from the colliery to the houses.

Nellie was baking when Eve arrived. She had a housecoat on and a hairnet over her grey curls. The kitchen was spotless, the flagstone floor newly swabbed, the range newly blacked. Sarah, Nellie’s daughter, was nowhere to be seen: usually by now they’d both be at the mill, busy with cooking and customers.

‘Nellie?’ Eve said cautiously.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ Nellie said without turning. ‘Come in if you’re comin’ in. I can’t be doin’ wi’ that draught.’

Eve stepped into the kitchen and closed the door. For a moment she watched Nellie in silence, and Nellie didn’t turn. She dipped a finger into the bowl, licked it, then added a shake of sugar. Eve felt surplus to requirements.

‘Nellie, I’m so sorry, love,’ she said.

‘God’s will,’ said Nellie, pounding at the cake batter. Eve stepped closer, reached out a hand and placed it on Nellie’s shoulder, but the gesture wasn’t acknowledged.

‘Is there anythin’ you need? Anythin’ I can do?’

Nellie stopped beating and looked at Eve for the first time since she’d arrived.

‘You can open t’mill and give me a reason to get out of bed in t’morning,’ she said. She turned back to her bowl.

Eve stared for a few beats, then said: ‘Yes, I see. Well, I shall. It’s only closed today because, well …’

‘Yes, I understand why it’s closed today. But if I can get up there tomorrow and get on with things, I shall feel a lot better.’

Eve’s hand still lay useless and unwanted on Nellie’s shoulder but she didn’t know how to remove it now it was there. ‘Thank God you have Sarah,’ she said, though she wished the words unsaid at once: she meant to comfort, but instead felt she’d merely emphasised Nellie’s loss.

Nellie regarded her for a moment. ‘I should never ’ave sent ’em all on t’same shift,’ she said. She looked at the wooden spoon she held in her hand as if, for a moment, she had forgotten what its purpose was. ‘It were easier for me, to ’ave ’em all down t’pit together.’

‘You weren’t to know, Nellie.’

‘No ’appen not. But now I do.’

She resumed her beating and Eve understood that the subject was closed. She lifted her hand from Nellie’s shoulder and folded her arms, feeling awkward and suddenly chilled. How those young men and their father must have filled this house, she thought. How very empty it seemed now.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow then, Nellie?’ she said.

‘Aye,’ Nellie said. ‘Pull that door to on your way out.’

F
ar from curtailing his visit, the king extended it, staying until the day after the funerals, which he had respectfully asked leave to attend. He had sat humble and sorrowful with the earl at the front of the chapel, and spoke afterwards to many of the mourners who were so numerous that they spilled out into the churchyard and beyond to the road. A cynic, Amos thought, might suspect the monarch of conducting a brilliant popularity campaign. Certainly his stock was very high in the town by the time he swept through the streets to Hoyland Halt, from where he would be travelling to London and on from there to the spa in Marienbad. Not that anyone turned out to wave him off. It was more that if his name was mentioned, it was always warmly, fondly, almost familiarly; the king had shared Netherwood’s sorrow, and these matters were binding.

What Amos wondered was why, if the king was so moved by the town’s plight, the relief fund had to date received nothing from the Crown.

‘’appen ’e’s ’ard up,’ said Enoch Wadsworth, tamping tobacco into his pipe. ‘All them palaces, but no ready cash.’

‘’ard up, my eye,’ said Amos.

They were in their shared office at the YMA, Amos on a chair, Enoch perched on the corner of a desk. He was a tall man by local standards, and lanky. He had a beaky nose and round, wire-framed spectacles, which together gave him the look of a bird, a long-legged wader. Enoch was a trade-union official who had served his time in the mines. But he was also an intellectual, a thinker; he read Marxist literature, corresponded with Sidney Webb, wrote essays for the Fabian Society and fired off generally unpublished letters to
The Times
about the nationalisation of the land and the abolition of the House of Lords. He was younger than Amos, though he looked older; the pits took their toll on all miners, but six years after leaving the colliery Enoch’s lined skin still had an underground pallor because, unlike Amos, who felt the sun on his face in the allotment, Enoch spent all his free time indoors with his books. He had bad lungs, too, and from time to time he would be seized by a fit of coughing that left him quite debilitated; his narrow shoulders were permanently hunched with the effort of breathing.