Ah, the joy of giving true pleasure. Isabella pushed back her chair and danced around the table to where Tobias sat, and then she pulled him to his feet and made him dance too, an awkward polka from which he immediately tried to extract himself. After all, the butler was watching, as well as their father.
T
here were visitors in the grounds of Netherwood Hall: two men in dark suits and black Homburgs, holding measuring wheels and Box Brownies. They paced up and down the outside of the old glasshouses, and in and out, with expressions of grim satisfaction, as if what they saw was disappointing, but no more so than they had expected. Daniel MacLeod, head gardener, watched from a distance as the men performed their cogitations and calculations. He had told them what he wanted, and now Messrs MacAlpine and Moncur were deciding what was possible. Behind him he heard the click of the gate from the kitchen garden, and he turned. His wife, Eve, was crossing the grass with their little son, Angus. The boy had a bucket in one hand and he talked as he walked. He talked much of the time, in fact; there weren’t enough hours in the day for all that Angus MacLeod had to say.
‘Found this urchin in among t’vegetables,’ Eve called to Daniel across the lawn. She’d been away for two days and he feasted his eyes on the sight of her: small, slight, effortlessly lovely. When he’d first met her she didn’t seem to know she was beautiful. She had no mirror at home, she’d said, and wouldn’t have time to look in it anyway.
They reached his side and Daniel bent to kiss her. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘He came with me to work today. Been out on snail patrol, isn’t that right, son?’
The child nodded sagely. ‘It’s ’portant to pick ’em off t’plants, because, Mam, if you don’t they just eat your cabbages and that. You can sprinkle lime on slugs and snails, can’t you Pa? I pick ’em off and put ’em in my pail though. I’m not to touch lime.’ He held up the bucket to Daniel. ‘See? They look right fed up, don’t they?’
Daniel studied the snails: five of them, in shock in the bottom of the metal pail. ‘Good work, Angus,’ he said, and pointed at the largest. ‘See? You’ve caught the ringleader.’ He smiled warmly at his son and then at Eve, and kissed her again. ‘Welcome home, my darling. How was Harrogate?’
‘Very grand. A cut above.’ She nodded in the direction of the men by the glasshouses. ‘They look miserable.’
‘Aye,’ Daniel said. ‘It’s a necessary prelude to the estimate of costs.’
‘Well, if you will hire Scotsmen…’
He winked at her, a Montrose man himself. ‘They’ll not bamboozle me, don’t you fret. They’re crafty buggers, but it takes one to know one.’
The men seemed to have finished. They snapped the lids back onto their pens and crunched morosely across the gravel. Daniel’s proposal was typically ambitious: the demolition of all but the finest of the existing plant houses, and the erection of one enormous glasshouse, comprising a wide central palm corridor, two hundred feet long, with subsidiary houses branching off to its north and south sides. All manner of exotics would be grown, but the countess – concentrating, finally, on the new scheme and flicking through a selection of colour plates – had pointed at gardenias, orchids, camellias and ferns. There would also have to be a stove house and another for propagation, but these technical details bored her. She was content, on the whole, to leave Daniel to his own devices; she barely glanced at his plans, meticulously drafted on sheets of paper, before approving them. He found he rather missed his regular skirmishes with her predecessor. The previous Lady Netherwood had always questioned everything he suggested, believing herself a horticultural visionary. She demanded the same from her gardens as she did from her gowns: flounce and flair, dash and glamour. What tended to happen, after each long negotiation, was that he would have his way, and she would take the credit: this was their unacknowledged arrangement. The present countess, whose home before she had come to Netherwood Hall had been a New York brownstone, took a different view. What was a head gardener for, if not for making all the decisions? All she knew was that she had a garden that was bigger than Central Park, and a capable fellow whose job it was to tend it. He could do as he wished. Demolish six plant houses and build a new one? Sure! The cost was never a consideration. Thea Hoyland might have grown up on a limited allowance, but she had quickly adapted to an unlimited one.
However, the Edinburgh hothouse engineers Mr MacAlpine and Mr Moncur appeared to think they might have to fund the project themselves and were walking towards Daniel like a pair of pallbearers in search of a funeral. Angus and his snails hid behind his mother’s skirts at their approach.
‘Gentlemen?’ said Daniel.
‘Aye, quite an undertaking,’ said Mr Moncur sadly.
‘You’ll be needing a rain-water cistern in every one of the houses,’ said Mr MacAlpine.
‘Aye. Welsh slate, sixty gallons apiece,’ said Mr Moncur.
‘And eight rows of six-inch pipes all down the central corridor, four rows in your side houses, six rows in your stove house.’
‘And ventilation sashes throughout.’
‘Aye. And a new boiler house. Your existing one’s entirely inadequate.’
‘Aye. Three, maybe four, boilers in a new brick building away out of sight.’
All of this they intoned as if breaking the worst possible news.
‘And when could you start?’
This was Daniel, defiantly cheerful in the face of their gloom. The two engineers exchanged doleful looks.
‘You’d like to proceed?’ said Mr Moncur.
‘Of course,’ Daniel said. ‘We’re none of us here just for the good of our health.’
‘Only, you’ll be looking at something over four thousand pounds for a scheme of this magnitude,’ said Mr MacAlpine.
‘Not far short of five thousand, possibly,’ said Mr Moncur.
‘Well,’ said Daniel. ‘Let’s not stand here waiting for it to reach six. Put it in writing, gentlemen, and we’ll take it from there.’
They nodded, then tipped their hats at Eve and made for their motorcar.
‘You’d think, wouldn’t you, that they’re being charged a guinea a smile,’ Eve said, watching them. She turned to Daniel. ‘It sounds like a proper upheaval, though. All that knocking down and building up again. Can’t you manage with what you ’ave?’
He gave her a reproving look. ‘That’s rich coming from you, with your ever-expanding pork pie empire.’
‘Can I ’ave a pork pie?’ Angus asked.
‘Not right now, Gussy,’ said Eve. ‘I don’t carry them under my ’at.’
The child’s face fell. Now he knew there were no pies, he felt hungry.
‘C’mon,’ Daniel said, holding out a hand. ‘Come and see my fruit wall. Peach now, pie later.’
The Harrogate branch of Eve’s Puddings & Pies was the fourth in the chain: the fourth and probably the finest, housed in an elegant Regency building near the Pump Rooms. Like the other branches – in Netherwood, Barnsley and Sheffield – it had a café for the leisured shopper and a counter for the hurried and the harried, and the bill of fare was the same too: pork pies, meat pies, steak puddings, fruit pies and a small, surprising range of Russian specialities, the legacy of Anna’s involvement in Eve’s life back when it all began. Six years ago, now. Six years and three months since Arthur Williams was killed at New Mill Colliery and Eve had had to find a way to keep herself and the children from the workhouse. It seemed like another life, another time. Anna – Russian, widowed, homeless – had pitched up at the little house in Beaumont Lane and had placed herself like a lucky charm at the centre of Eve’s existence. She had been Eve’s prop then: stronger and indefatigably optimistic. They had made an unconventional family group – Anna and Maya, Eve and her three – but those days, which began dark with sorrow, were also golden in Eve’s memory. Eve Williams and Anna Rabinovich, a force to be reckoned with, a winning team. Now, amid the trappings of their respective success, despite everything each of them had gained, Eve still sometimes felt a jolt of loss. On her dressing table she had a small inlaid jewellery box, the tiny key of which had long ago been mislaid. She didn’t need the key because the box was always open, but still, she felt the lack of it. That was how she felt about Anna.
Certainly she would have been an asset in Harrogate. Not just as company, though the solitary train journey had been long and dull, but for her unassailable confidence. Anna was a stranger to inferiority; she had an air of Russian imperialism about her, Daniel always said: a touch of the tsarina. In Harrogate, Eve could have wished herself similarly equipped; the town’s mineral springs and noble connections had given it a very high opinion of itself. There she had been, representing meat pies and suet puddings in a town blessed by the patronage of princes and dukes. Of course, Eve had once cooked for the king; she told herself this as she stood by the railway station, feeling humble. But the driver of the hansom cab that took her to Crown Place had evidently held himself in high esteem, looking down his nose at Eve even as he took her business. She had over-tipped him to make a point, and then had immediately felt like a fool.
The day had improved, though, and her shop had looked very fine. She had been before, of course: chosen it, supervised its renovation, appointed the staff. But this was her first visit for some weeks, and she’d forgotten what an imposing building it was: double-fronted, with an elegant iron porch at the entrance and a tiled floor pristine in black and white. Eve had stood a little distance away and watched as an arresting pyramid of produce in the windows and the irresistible aroma of hot pastry had lured customers through the door. It was early days, but the signs were promising. She had been thinking of this and smiling to herself on the train home when the ticket collector had accused her of looking happy.
‘Pies,’ Eve had said. ‘I was thinking of pies, and how far they’ve brought me.’
‘Is that so?’ He had taken her ticket, stamped it, handed it back. ‘Change at Leeds,’ he said.
Lilly Pickering, a former neighbour and a miner’s widow, had known Eve since the days when a tin bath and a brick-built privy had seemed like a step up. Lilly held the fort at Ravenscliffe every day, to one extent or another. She was there when Eve and Angus arrived at their house on the common.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I expected you sooner.’
It was Lilly’s habit to scold. She didn’t always mean anything by it.
‘Ah well, ’ere I am now,’ Eve said. She took off her coat and hat and hung it on the stand in the front hall, and by the time she’d accomplished this Angus had gone: straight through the house and out of the back door to the hutch in the garden, from where his new rabbit Timothy gazed balefully at the world. Angus was trying hard, but failing, to love Timothy. The creature’s pink eyes were unsettling, and he shrank from human contact. Angus squatted in front of the hutch for a while and stared at his pet. Timothy, unblinking, stared back. In a box by the hutch were some carrots, and Angus considered them now, trying to decide if his rabbit deserved the treat. No, he decided. He shook his head firmly at Timothy and stood, then took two carrots anyway and went looking, instead, for pit ponies. They grazed on the common after retirement and they were so accustomed to human contact that Angus had once persuaded one to follow him into the kitchen. By the time it was discovered he was feeding the pony Cox’s Orange Pippins from the fruit bowl. Lilly had hit the roof, Angus had cried and the pony had bolted, smashing two tureens and a milk jug on its way out. Now he understood that ponies were strictly an outdoor diversion, but he knew their haunts and they knew his.
‘Don’t go too far, Gussy.’ This was Eve, who had followed him through the back door and now watched him opening the gate to go onto the common. ‘Tea time soon.’ He smiled at her and waved a carrot, and Eve went back into the kitchen.
‘Where are the girls?’ She could tell from the quiet that her daughters weren’t in the house.
‘Eliza’s at that Evangeline’s again,’ Lilly said. ‘She’ll end up with rickets at this rate.’
‘I doubt it, Lilly,’ said Eve. ‘It’s not caused by ballet dancing.’
‘Mary Sylvester ’as bow legs from rickets.’
Eve looked at her. ‘From rickets, yes, not from ballet. And it’s because she’s half-starved, not because she likes dancing.’
‘Aye, well.’
Lilly snapped out the tea towel she’d been using and it cracked like a pistol. She folded it twice and hung it on the brass rail in front of the range. ‘That’s me done then.’
‘Is Ellen in?’ Eve said.
‘Outside wi’ mine. Doubtless black bright by now, though that pinafore was clean on this morning.’
‘It’ll wash.’ Eve walked to the back door and looked out. Four children squatted in a circle at the back of the garden where the grass met the hawthorn hedge. Ellen, true to her reputation, had mud on her frock and a headdress of leaves and fern. Her face was flushed with the effects of recent exertion and fresh air. She was talking: issuing instructions, no doubt. She had a long stick in one hand, and she stood suddenly, wielding it like a spear and making a fearsome, ululating war cry, which her gang immediately, obediently, imitated. Eve called her name, shouting over the racket, and Ellen, sensing rather than hearing her, scowled.
‘Mam! We’re busy.’ She looked like Seth had at the same age: plain as a pikestaff, with her dad’s ears jutting out like the handles on a sugar bowl and a pugnacious little face to match her hard-boiled personality. She kept her hair as short as she was allowed, and if she could have worn shorts in place of her pinafore, she would have done.
‘Come on, Sitting Bull. Time for tea.’
Lilly materialised beside Eve on the back doorstep. ‘Cheerio then,’ she said. She’d hung her housecoat on a peg in Eve’s kitchen and was shrugging herself into a lumpy green cardigan, which at least had the advantage of making her look plumper. She was skin and bone, always had been. Even now, when she had her own weekly pay packet from Eve and two of her boys had jobs at Long Martley Colliery, she still looked as if she lived on potato water. She stepped out onto the path and without raising her voice said, ‘Right,’ and her children, responding at once to the higher authority, stood up and cut shamefaced looks of apology at Ellen.