Free Netherwood by Jane Sanderson Page A

more the children I was thinking of.’ Her face clouded briefly, then immediately brightened.
    ‘Tell you what though, Daddy. I’d love a trip to New Mill with you.’
    He looked down and sawed at his roast beef. ‘Also preposterous.’
    ‘Why? I’d love to. Nothing I’d like more, in fact.’
    The earl looked at his daughter fondly.
    ‘Do let’s,’ she said, sensing weakness.
    ‘It’s no place for a lady, Henry.’
    ‘I’ll go in disguise. Toby’s trousers fit.’
    He raised an eyebrow.
    ‘I shudder to think how you discovered that.’
    ‘Look,’ she said. ‘You won’t get Toby there in a month of Sundays. So take me – in a dress, something dowdy though – and I’ll tell him what he missed. We’ll snare him that way. Make him feel he’s missing all the fun.’
    He smiled. There was perhaps method in her madness.
    ‘Your mother mustn’t ever know,’ he said.
    ‘Marvellous!’
    ‘You’ll need sturdy boots. And a hard hat when we get there.’
    ‘Even better.’ She beamed at him. ‘When do we leave?’
    ‘Meet me at one. I’ll have Atkins keep the motor in the yard so we can slip out the back way.’
    They shared a complicit smile, then gave their food the attention it deserved.

    Saturday was, without any shadow of a doubt, Seth’s favourite day of the week. Eve and Arthur’s eldest was an earnest, thoughtful boy, who spent more time than your average ten-year-old contemplating life and all its facets. So when he settled on Saturday as the first of the seven contenders, it was after scrupulous consideration of the merits of the other six. Even so, his careful list of the attributes of every day put Saturday ahead by an indisputable margin. There was no school, of course – a significant point in the day’s favour but not, in fact, the chief source of the boy’s pleasure. Unlike most of his peers, Seth found schoolwork easy enough to be enjoyable and any dread he claimed to feel on a Monday morning was entirely feigned. His only school-related complaint was Miss Mason’s insistence on openly praising Seth’s ‘thirst for knowledge’ or ‘inquiring mind’, with which unwelcome compliments shesingled him out from the pack. He wondered time and again at his teacher’s failure to understand that the pack was where he wanted to be.
    No, the absence of school wasn’t part of it at all. What Seth loved about Saturdays was the mixed array of special qualities that each one held in varying measure. The smell of a ginger cake in the oven, perhaps, on this one day of the week that Eve baked what she called ‘fancies’; the spring in her tread that meant his mother was neither cross nor tired; an idle quality in the air, a feeling of liberty and leisure that sometimes evaporated if he didn’t make himself scarce quickly enough to escape a chore, but at least existed as a possibility when he first woke; the certain fact that the next day was Sunday and his father’s cap and jacket, with their smells of outside and underground, would still be on the hook with everyone’s things when Seth came downstairs in the morning. All these things, and more, had accumulated over the years in Seth’s subconscious mind to make him treasure the prospect of a new Saturday. And today was more special still, since his father had promised Seth he could accompany him to the knur-and-spell match on Netherwood Common. Not to play, of course; the visitors this time were near-neighbours from Rockingham way and they were a sly lot, not above stamping a good, long ball into the ground so it couldn’t be counted, so there was no room for a novice on the Netherwood team. He would be allowed to carry Arthur’s pummel though, and his prized stash of clay balls, and he was bound to be needed as a seeker – his young, keen eyes could follow the small, white knurs as they flew through the air, no matter how many yards they went, or how awkwardly they landed.
    Arthur, sitting in the tin tub in front of the parlour