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.
Chapter 32
Custer’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 seri
es 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.
And then finally, on a crescendo of applause and to raucous cheering, Buffalo Bill himself cantered on playing General Custer astride a heroic grey stallion, and the Battle of Little Bighorn was played out in all its gory detail. The horses, skilled actors every one, fell with their wounded cavalrymen or Red Indians until the arena was strewn with the lifeless bodies of men and their steeds. Seth watched with a rapt and fervent concentration, as if the afternoon’s entertainment might be followed by a test on the sequence of events; Eliza had lost her voice and could only croak her excitement; and Amos, along with every other grown man in the grounds, hollered and hooted, roared and whistled, stamped his feet and waved his cap in the air as the Last Stand drew to its inevitable conclusion and Chief Sitting Bull polished off Custer with a deadly arrow to the heart.
‘Is ’e a goodie or a baddie?’ Eliza said, pointing at the Red Indian chief who was executing an immodest triumphal circuit of the battleground. He had paint daubed on his face, which was old but curiously unlined. The feathers of his headdress were impossible primary colours, not at all birdlike in Eliza’s opinion, and he had long dark hair which he wore in two plaits, as Anna sometimes did. His fringed shirt and trousers looked to be made out of shammy leather, like her mother’s window cloth. His horse danced past Eliza and the chief seemed to pick her out in the crowd, his stern brown eyes settling on her for the briefest moment; she shivered in the grip of a strange ecstasy.
‘Depends on yer point o’ view,’ Amos said. ‘Depends if yer an Indian or a paleface.’
Seth was reading the programme. ‘That is actually ’im,’ he said. ‘That is t’actual Chief Sittin’ Bull. Not an actor.’
‘Is that General Custer an’ all then?’ said Eliza. Seth bestowed on her a rather overused look of shrivelling disdain.
Amos laughed. ‘’E’s dead, you clown. That there is William Cody, Buffalo Bill, see?’
He was on his feet again, the dead general, and hopping back on his horse to join Sitting Bull. Behind them the rest of the fallen were also rising, men and horses alike, preparing to take their share of the riotous applause, but there was a smell in the air of onions and sausages frying and potatoes baking, and it was drawing the fickle crowd away.
‘Can we ’ave summat to eat?’ Eliza asked.
‘Mam should ’ave come, sold ’er pies an’ that,’ said Seth. He was always doing this, invoking Eve at every opportunity then watching Amos’s face for clues.
‘Yer mam ’as bigger fish to fry,’ Amos said, an unsatisfactory result for Seth; he wanted a straightforward agreement.
‘Bigger pies to bake, you mean,’ said Eliza, who was still at a very literal age.
‘That an’ all,’ said Amos. He pulled his cap lower on his head and stared out gloomily from under the peak. The wild west was melting away, Indians and cavalry on the same side now as the props were dismantled and the horses led away.
‘Amos?’ said Eliza.
He looked down at her upturned face and she smiled gappily. Her front milk teeth were long gone but there was still no sign of their replacements. It gave her a soft lisp, so that Amos was Amoth.
‘Right then, toothless Aggie,’ he said. ‘Thpud or thauthage?’
The earl had thrown himself into the Mitchell’s Mill project with the zeal of a man who had money, energy and ample time on his hands. Three months after the contracts between himself and Eve Williams had been drawn up – by a stunned but obedient Absalom Blandford – the renovations were all but complete. Stonemasons, carpenters, builders and painters had swarmed over the building every day for weeks. Alfred Hague, the earl’s electrical engineer, was brought out of the pits to do the wiring, enigmatically threading and twisting his strange brown cables under floorboards and up channels in the plaster of the walls; a small crowd assembled and applauded when, for the first time, the wall lights were switched on.
The great gristmill had been fetched down from the upper floor – in itself a full day’s work for fifteen labourers – and placed as a centrepiece in the rear courtyard. Lord Hoyland was wondering if it might not be turned into a water feature. He rather hoped Clarissa might show an interest, if he could only winkle her out of the drawing room, but the weather had turned poor and she seemed to be temporarily hibernating. The fine arched windows, front and back, had been reglazed, and the frames rubbed down and repainted. The wooden gantry – on consultation with Eve, much to her bewilderment – was to remain; there would be little or no use for it, but it was attractive enough, and was, after all, part of the town’s history. The wisteria-clad colonnade had been pretty much left alone. Once it had been swept of dead leaves and mopped free of bird droppings, the original floor tiles were properly revealed, black-and-white chequered like a giant chess board. Its inherent glory needed no improvement and when the tradesmen left for the day and Eve was alone there, she sometimes gave in to the urge to perform a short, celebratory tap dance on it.
New timbers had been laid on the upper floors and waxed to bring out the grain, and there were York stone flags in the kitchen. The ranges – four of them, brand new with a showroom shine – were of the old, coal-fired type, which was what Eve was used to and what she very much preferred. Mr Hague had talked about electric ovens, but Eve had had the final say. Electricity might well be cleaner, she told him, but nothing could turn a pie crust brown like a coal fire.
There was a long work surface running down the centre of the main kitchen, with a cool marble top for pastry-making and three butler sinks set into wooden stands with blue-and-white tiled backs and storage cupboards beneath for soap, dishcloths and pot brushes. Everything, every single thing, was brand new. Eve, given carte blanche to furnish the kitchen with what she needed, had been directed by the estate to Micklethwaite’s Household Emporium in Sheffield, proud purveyor of high-class kitchen goods; the bill was to go directly to Mr Blandford.
‘Them ’oylands ’ave more money than sense,’ Eve had said to Anna as they wandered together through the hallowed halls of Micklethwaite’s. It was a fine old establishment, two-storeyed and with none of the clutter and chaos that generally characterised such enterprises. The goods were displayed in tasteful fashion on fine tables and dressers, so that even the most workaday items achieved the status of an exhibit. There was a country house smell of beeswax and Eve, noting the yards and yards of polished wood panelling on the walls, wondered which poor soul was given that job once a week. Not the uppity Miss who seemed to be keeping them under surveillance at the moment, she’d wager. The place was quite unlike any Eve had ever been into; a showpiece of a shop, all gloss and gleam and outrageous prices handwritten on linen tags.
‘Look at this,’ she said to Anna. ‘I mean, a wooden spoon’s a wooden spoon. Why pay a ha’penny more ’n you ’ave to?’
She plucked the spoon, a perfectly ordinary example of its kind, from its Cornishware jar and stroked its curves. They were waiting for the attentions of the assistant manager, a Mr Francis Micklethwaite, who was expecting their visit but had been detained, as he told them in a fruity basso profundo dripping with regret, by ‘an erroneous delivery at the rear of the premises’. The two women were happy enough to stroll through the shop while the crisis was dealt with, but Eve was discovering that a lifetime of thriftiness was a hard habit to break, even when she was spending someone else’s money.
She waved the spoon at Anna. ‘You can get four o’ these at this price from Eli at t’market,’ she said.
Anna took it from her and adopted the affected air of a connoisseur. ‘But look at grain, so beautiful, and handle, so slender. Probably it stirs all by itself.’
Their mirth was coolly regarded by the supercilious young woman watching their progress. Hilary Kilney, great-niece of the orig
inal founding Micklethwaite, was steeped in her own sense of superiority. On this occasion, however, she was at a distinct disadvantage; she had no idea why Eve and Anna were there, and was quite certain that they had no good reason to be.
She coughed, and the two women looked at her properly for the first time. Miss Kilney had presence, a brass name badge and a fine silk blouse. Eve felt a little awed. Not so Anna. Three hard years on the breadline in Grangely had been merely a passing phase in her life, not a defining one; it hadn’t made so much as a dent in her self-esteem. Shop assistants were her social inferior, of that she had no doubt.
Miss Kilney said, ‘Can I help you?’ politely enough, but her expression belied the courteous question. She wore an unpleasant smirk and held her head rather too high, as if sniffing out fresher air.
Netherwood01 - Netherwood Page 22
