Samuel Morningside sat in the cabin of his new Can-Am Traxter off-road buggy and surveyed his land. Penny, his young sheepdog, sat panting beside him. The Herdies were on the fellside, munching the landscape to within an inch of its life, and his job this afternoon was to check a few of the stone walls. Skilled tradespeople were few and far between nowadays, and soon he’d be hard pushed to find anyone willing or able to do the task.
Stone walls landscaped the hills of the Lake District and Samuel’s land was no different, but it took deft craftsmen to maintain it. A master stonemason could select pieces of rock and boulder that fitted perfectly together, their weight holding the structure together for centuries. It was the very end of the season when building stone walls could be attempted, down to the cold, nothing else. Spring and summer were the ideal times to get it done, but this October was relatively warm, and he thought he might as well have a go at filling some of the worst holes.
He was conducting a final check to see which walls might need some form of serious repair, come the spring. In the back of the Can-Am he had a load of Borrowdale stone. The slate quarry on his land churned out enough mass for him to build a thousand stone walls, but it was more lucrative for him to sell that on. Slate stone walls looked pretty, but his Herdies weren’t fussy.
He stopped at the top of the creek, and from his vantage point he could see all the way across to the seemingly benign summits of Skiddaw and Blencathra in the north, which looked like sleeping giants. To the south, on a fine day such as this, he could trace the whole Helvellyn range in the distance, from Clough Head, across to the three Dodds and beyond. The hills sloped down to valleys and at the bottom, great lakes nestled hidden and silent. It was his favourite place on the farm and had been since he was a boy. He and Arthur, his younger brother, used to come up here with their father, on a battered old tractor, sat in the back of the trailer, rolling about with laughter as they jostled and fought for the prime spot. Sometimes, their father would go faster if he had a clear run across a field and they’d pretend they were inside a washing machine, flinging themselves to one side of the trailer and back again.
Some things had changed since then, but not all of them had.
The landscape hadn’t, along with the secrets it kept. It had, of course, been cleaved in half when their father died, and the farm suddenly ripped asunder. It had been Percival Morningside’s wish that the farm remained in the hands of his bloodline for centuries to come, and his two boys had done their best with the land they had, but each had dramatically different ideas about what the future should look like.
Percival was buried out here, in the grounds of their private chapel, true to his wishes, but Samuel never went there. It was on Arthur’s land now; his farm having been renamed Promise Farm. The new title had made Samuel smirk with condescension over his brother’s flighty ideals and those of his young wife. It hadn’t lived up to its lofty epithet; there was no promise of anything over that way. Percival had known it when he split the land. So had Samuel.
His pride had prevented him from ever raising the issue of the grave with his brother. As far as he knew, the slate headstone, extracted from their own quarry, was still there, possibly lopsided by now, and overgrown, and perhaps covered in sheep shit. From here, Samuel could see the chapel roof, and could just make out the small stone cross on top. He could also see the nursing home: an eyesore on the land.
But Arthur’s land was no good for farming, so it was no surprise that he eventually developed it. It was only the apparent success of the place that came as a shock. Percival knew his sons well, or he thought he had. He’d given Samuel the more lucrative of the two hemispheres, and Arthur knew it. He felt it keenly. They’d barely spoken since. But from local gossip, Samuel heard that Promise Farm, and the nursing home, made a profit somehow.
Arthur had surprised everyone with his business nose, to the extent that folk doubted it was even him behind it. It was more likely to be his wife who had a sense for money, like a shark for blood in the water. Beryl was an outsider from the start. Not only was she a wanderer and a loner who Arthur had met when he was lost in his own sorrow and self-pity, but she didn’t fit into the Morningside way. She was sharp, not homely like a good farmer’s wife should be, and she was loud, not demure. But her worst sin was that she was skinny, and she was in charge. Samuel was unclear if she was even English, never mind Cumbrian, unlike his own wife who he’d known since they were seven years old.
Samuel cut the engine and slid out of the cabin, bracing for the impact on his knees, which weren’t getting any younger. His heavy boots didn’t help, and his doctor had told him he should wear soft soles. He was told to take it easy but saying that to a farmer was like telling a mama to choose between her sons. At sixty, he should be thinking about retiring, but there was nobody to take the reins after him, and Dorian, his only son, wasn’t fit.
He stood for a moment, surveying what Percival had nourished for half a century before him, and the familiar sadness at what Arthur had done welled up inside him. Predictably, he hadn’t made much of the farming up there to the north, which Samuel cast a disapproving eye over now. Instead, he’d cooked up various hare-brained schemes to make money, no doubt egged on by his punchy foreign wife. Traditional arable farming was always going to be too much like hard work for his little brother. In fact, Beryl was from Cornwall, but, to Samuel, she might as well have been from the moon.
He approached the stone wall and looked behind him for Walker, his brown Labrador. But he tutted as he remembered he wasn’t there with him. The animal had been by his side for fourteen years, but he hadn’t come home two days ago. He missed the mutt, and he could tell that Penny did too. Walker usually trotted beside the Gator, slower of late, but always there. Each morning, since he’d last seen him, Samuel had searched the expanse of his land, believing him to be injured, or exhausted, or both. His pride prevented him from searching Arthur’s land, or even telling him. At fourteen, Walker was in his swan song, and Samuel knew that his time was close, or maybe it had come already. He didn’t dwell on it and concentrated on the wall. Dogs wandered off all the time, and soon came back. That’s what he told himself.
He paused and scratched his head. Gloria, his wife, said he did that when he was in deep thought. He joked with her that he did it to make his hair grow back. It never did. So, he covered it with a flat cap, like Percival used to wear. It dislodged as he scratched the side of his scalp and he straightened it. The military style Shemagh had been his father’s. Percival had brought it back from the deserts of Africa after his service there in the Second World War. It was gnarly and faded, like the old man himself. But even Percival Morningside hadn’t lived forever.