Netherwood by Jane Sanderson

Author:Jane Sanderson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780748129416
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2011-09-28T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 30

Mitchell’s Stone Ground Flour Mill, just off – aptly enough – Mill Street, had ceased production five years before, finally driven out of business by the Barnsley British Co-operative Society, which was producing better flour and selling it for less. Those workers who were willing to travel were given jobs at the Co-op’s mill in Summer Lane, Barnsley, and the rest were out of work. But even those who grumbled at their lot knew that Mitchell’s flour was of a poor grade; take a fistful from the sack and it crumbled to dry dust, whereas Co-op flour was strong and pure. It held the shape of your clenched hand and showed the indentations of your fingers. Eve would use nothing else.

She liked the old Mitchell’s building, though, and the part of Netherwood it stood in. It was the highest part of town, where the air was fresher and the sky clearer. Mill Street itself was wide and well-paved with an almost affluent feel, partly because it was home to two of Netherwood’s most appealing shops: Walker’s Confectioners, its long bow window chock full of glass jars of boiled sweets and boxes of toffee, fudge and coconut ice, and Allott’s High Class Bakers, with a fancy delivery dray and horse parked permanently outside the shop. The horse was a local landmark, but its teeth were rotten from two decades of being fed mint humbugs by Mrs Walker. Mitchell’s Mill sat off this main thoroughfare at the end of its own walled lane, officially unnamed but referred to by locals as Mitchell’s Snicket, and from the front it had the look of a fine old house, except for the gabled wooden gantry jutting out at the centre of the third storey and the peeling fascia declaring its original use. It was a sandstone building, heavily grimed but still attractive, with generously proportioned sash windows and an arched entrance in the middle, wide enough to allow a coach and horses to pass through to the rear courtyard. In a flat, smooth stone above the arch were inscribed the initials EHN, a reference to the father of the present Earl Hoyland of Netherwood, who commissioned the building and equipped it for business. It would have saddened him greatly to see it now, unused and down-at-heel. Absalom Blandford was all for demolishing it, but something – sentimentality, optimism, perhaps a little of both – had made Teddy resist.

And now, as he sat opposite Eve Williams in the sun-filled morning room, his instinct to preserve the old mill suddenly made sense to him. Her proposition was extremely interesting: that he invest in her fledgling business to allow it to flourish. She was such a plucky individual, he thought, as he watched her struggle to articulate her unformed ideas. She could teach his feckless son a thing or two about strength in adversity; sent for the summer to the family’s Scottish seat, Tobias had reacted with lamentable pique, all but stamping his feet like Isabella in a temper when he learned his fate.

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