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many onlookers and journalists that for a full hour afterthe bodies came up, the wives of the deceased couldn’t be found in the crush.
    ‘Aye, it’s a bad business,’ said Clem, again. ‘Anyroad, best be off.’ He was uneasy now, anxious to be on his way; all he’d intended was to pass on a bit of gossip. He walked to the door, then turned and tipped his cap at her. ‘Good day, lass.’
    ‘Quiet, mind,’ called Eve as the door closed but she said it absently, without conviction, then, standing idle for a rare minute in her warm kitchen, she reluctantly allowed her thoughts to journey into the past.

    Eve was a Grangely girl born and bred, and when Arthur found her twelve years ago at the chapel dance, people had warned him off her because everyone knew that nothing good came out of Grangely. Arthur knew it too and yet there she had been, proving otherwise.
    In Eve’s home town, miners and their families lived cheek-by-jowl in squalid housing, built in haste from cheap, yellow brick which fifty years on had taken on the colour and the smell of the coalface. The town was owned by a syndicate of Birmingham businessmen who paid other men to run the pit, and who probably couldn’t have picked out Grangely on a map. It was a place riddled with misery and sickness, a bad beginning for a child, a bad end for an adult, but what saved Eve was an extraordinary resolve – formed in childhood, hardened in adolescence – to rise above it. Her feckless drunkard of a father had hanged himself out of self-pity when the death of his wife left him with sole charge of five children, and Eve, at thirteen, took over. She sent twelve-year-old Silas to the pit in place of his father and tried to raise the little ones herself, then watched helplessly as they died of typhoid, oneafter the other, with such terrifying speed that for days afterwards Eve kept forgetting they’d gone and, remembering, would be stricken with new grief. She and Silas would sit together of an evening and plan a future away from the leaden, hopeless grind of Grangely, though neither of them knew quite how bad it had been until they had escaped. When she married Arthur – relief flooding her body as she repeated the vows and heard him do the same – Silas upped and left, heading on foot for Liverpool where he hoped to find work at the docks or on a merchant ship. He was sixteen by then, sharp as a tack and all but penniless. He promised her a bunch of bananas from the West Indies if he ever got there, but they never came; at least, they hadn’t yet. She liked to imagine him somewhere hot and exotic and the fact that she heard nothing from him sustained the possibility that she still might.
    These memories of another world were as indelible as etchings on glass, but they were fainter now than they once had been and were losing their power to cause Eve pain. She had learned to relish the small details of her life, and she did so now: the warmth of the range that she leaned against, the comforting smell of new bread and beef gravy. These everyday blessings were plentiful but none the less precious for that, and she offered up a prayer of thanks for her own good fortune. Then she poured a mug of hot, strong tea for Arthur and climbed the stairs to wake him.

Chapter 4

    I t had surprised and pleased the earl that his wife had raised no insurmountable objections to his plans for the twenty-first birthday celebrations of their eldest son Tobias. Given her aversion to encouraging the masses, he had expected an attack of the vapours at the suggestion that a party should be held on a scale never before seen in Yorkshire. There would be thousands of guests, from the highest-born aristocrat to the lowliest tenant. Clarissa had only insisted that there must be strict segregation, and her husband had agreed; even Teddy Hoyland couldn’t countenance the Duke of Devonshire stripping the willow with a Netherwood scullery maid. But nevertheless every family, however mighty or