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THE FAMILIES ACCEPTED the news with a surprising lack of drama. Bert and Anna were still high on wedded bliss, which softened the blow of the unexpected announcement. The cottage looked homely now, with Anna’s pictures on the walls. It was snug and crammed full with all their furniture. Anna jumped up from her squashy armchair, which was angled beside Bert’s faithful Windsor, and hugged her daughter tightly. ‘I’m going to be a grandmother twice in a year!’
Alexander shifted his weight from foot to foot and wore a broad smile. Bert lifted his eyebrows.
Hettie and Alexander went straight to the Hall from the cottage. It was only a short walk past the barn and onto the wide, curving drive. The grass was damp in the wake of a spring shower, and the bronzes and greens of the ancient trees stood bright against the opal sky.
Alexander’s step was purposeful now. He lifted his hand, as if to take Hettie’s, but then let it drop back to his side. ‘Okay?’
‘Yup! One down, one to go.’
The house was unusually quiet, and their feet echoed on the flagstone tiles in the entrance hall. ‘James!’
They heard hurried footsteps. ‘Hush, you’ll wake Sophie, I’ve only just put her down. Hettie! We’re in here, come through.’
James stood up slowly from his place at the kitchen table. Hettie and Alexander glanced at each other. ‘Have we come at a bad time? Is Mother not here? Where are the kids?’
Grace filled the kettle and answered over her shoulder. ‘She’s taken them to the pictures. No, it’s not a bad time, it’s a blessed relief to be interrupted. We’re only talking around in circles.’
Alexander pulled a chair from the kitchen table and sat himself. ‘Ah, the will?’
‘Of course. That’s all we talk about now.’
‘Well, we’ve got some news that might distract you.’
Grace and James fell on the announcement with the hunger of those worn down by bad news. ‘So we will be related after all! Our children will be cousins!’
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WHEN HETTIE AND ALEXANDER had gone, Grace stood behind her husband and rested her hands on his shoulders. ‘So, did I understand that right? They’re going to raise this child on some sort of timeshare scheme?’
James chuckled. ‘That’s what I heard. Is it awful that my first thought was that the baby will be Bert’s grandchild, so if all else fails there might be a chance of Draymere returning to the Melton name eventually?’
‘The Melton-Redfern name you mean, or was it Redfern-Melton?’ Grace dropped a kiss on the top of her husband’s head. ‘Yes, it is truly awful of you. But it’s also an awfully good point.’
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ALEXANDER WENT BACK to see Celia, later, on his own. They walked out to the walled garden. She carried a basket over her arm to harvest some new potatoes for the evening meal. She smiled and kissed him when he told her, but bent over the potato furrows, she frowned as she listened to his explanation of how it was going to work. ‘C’est n’importe quoi!’
He caught her under-breath mutter. ‘It isn’t nonsense, Mother. It’s a plan.’
‘You should be planning to marry her.’
‘I suggested that...’
‘“Suggested!”’
He thrust his hands into his pockets at her scornful return. She straightened, and he took the potato-filled basket from her. ‘She said no! How is that my fault?’
She stretched her eyes wide at him. ‘She said no, and you think that’s not your fault?’
Alexander opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. He shook his head as they walked slowly back to the house, winding along the narrow grass paths between the vegetable plots until they reached the gravel in front of the greenhouse. Alexander stopped. ‘Ok, so that is my fault. But she still said no.’
Celia smiled and patted his arm. ‘Voilà! So, only you can change her mind.’
They stood for a moment, in silence, both looking at the Hall. The sun had broken through late in the day, and a noisy wren rejoiced at its arrival. Celia turned to face him. ‘And while I’m speaking my mind, and you, for once, are listening, there’s something else I must tell you. I’m putting my house on the market and moving back to Draymere. Not, as you put it, to reclaim my place—’
‘I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘—but so that I can put the money towards the damned inheritance tax. I can’t bear to think of you all losing this place.’
‘That won’t happen, surely?’
She patted his arm. ‘For the sake of all my five grandchildren, I truly hope not.’
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HOME ALONE IN THE GATEHOUSE that evening, Alexander thought about calling Ewan and telling him that he’d return to work sooner than he’d said, now that he was back from Porth Wen. He changed into his running shorts and laced his trainers on. The air was soft as he stepped outside, and he walked, rather than ran, the perimeter of the lawns, striding on up to the paddocks where the yearlings were grazing in the evening light, flicking their tails at the clouds of midges that hovered above the grass. Could he tell people about the baby now? Some unfamiliar instinct made him want to shout it out. He broke into a comfortable jog. Dora barked at a rabbit as it ran for cover.
He’d check with Hettie first. Strange not to be with her, after the shared experiences of the last few days. Her arrival in Wales, and coming home to tell the families, then seeing that tiny beating heart on the scan monitor. Now she was back at the bungalow, and he was here... Of course that was his fault. He’d spent the last ten months trying to push her away. No one to blame but himself. And yet, still, she’d come after him and shared her momentous news.
He would always be grateful for that.
The stillness of the evening felt too gentle to be disrupted by running. At the top end of Paddock Wood he paused and looked around. He remembered coming here as a boy, with his father, to check on the pheasants in their runs. His father pointed out the boundary of their land and put names to the fields that surrounded them. Walter’s Acre, Frog’s Mead, and Bomb Site, where a WWII plane had off-loaded before crash landing.
The crater had softened and grassed over in the intervening years. The incident remembered only by the village elders. His father had been a boy at the time. Alexander doubted that future generations would even notice the smoothed-out hollow in the middle of the field. He felt the sudden ache of loss as he walked back down the hill.
And there was the Hall, the handsome dowager who’d stood through all the manmade dramas that unfolded around her, sedate in her dignity. Surely they wouldn’t lose this place.
He couldn’t believe that was really what their father had intended, but he understood only too well the danger of reckless decisions made in anger, of thoughts corrupted by bitterness. Drink and his subsequent stroke had prevented William Melton from returning to his senses, precluding him from putting things right. But maybe Alexander had the chance to do that for him now.
His pace quickened. If his mother was willing to sell her house, there must be more he could do. For James and Grace, but more than that, for Artie and Fred, for Gog and Sophie. For his own child and all the children to come after. His feet took him to Bert’s cottage. There was one matter he could get a grip on right now. When they knew the worst of the situation, they’d be fully armed to move forwards from it. He tapped on the cottage door before going inside. No need to stand on ceremony. Bert’s door had always been open to them.
Bert half rose from his Windsor chair and sank back down again. Alexander squeezed through the narrow gap between the sofa and the sideboard and sat facing Bert. He declined Anna’s offer of a drink, and she discreetly took herself off to the kitchen.
Bert winked. ‘Not come to ask for my stepdaughter’s hand in marriage, have you? Cos rightly, you’d want Anna for that.’
Alexander smiled wryly and shook his head. ‘She doesn’t want my hand, Bert, but that’s not what I’ve come to talk to you about. James doesn’t know I’m here, and I’d hate for you to think any of us doubted your word—’
‘Ah, this blessed will!’
‘Things have changed for you, Bert. You’re married now, a family man. None of us would think the less of you if you wanted to change your mind about leaving Draymere to us. All I’m asking here is, would you think on it again and give us your decision? So that we all know where we stand and can make our plans for the future.’
Bert shifted in his seat, reached down beside the arm of his chair and retrieved a well-leafed Farmers Weekly magazine. ‘Now, you might be surprised to hear that I have been thinking on it, so I’m glad you brought it up. Two things what have changed with my current situation that I’d like to know your view on.’
Alexander leant forwards and clasped his hands together. He nodded for Bert to go on.
‘One, I’d like to know that Anna will be allowed to stay in this cottage, after I’m gone.’
‘Of course!’
Bert brandished the rolled-up magazine. ‘And two, now I’m not sure about this, cos I don’t do law an’ that, but I was reading this piece in the Farmers Weekly about inheritance planning, and I think it says that I can sign some sort of variation. To pass the lot on now and jump a generation. I might have got that wrong. I read it twice, and I’m still not sure I made sense of it. Tell James to look at it. A deed of something or other. Here, I kept the article. Page twenty-three. I’ve turned the corner over.’ He passed the magazine to Alexander.
Alexander did run to the Hall, and James actually hugged him when he’d finished re-telling his conversation with Bert. ‘The cottage – he must have it! I’ll be damned, Alexander. You and Bert might have saved us.’
James got straight on the phone to Ted. ‘Family meeting! When can you get here? This weekend. Yes, bring Anju. We’ll... hang on.’ He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and shouted to Grace in the kitchen. ‘Grace, can we do a barbecue or something at the weekend? Ted and Anju, Anna and Bert, Mother, Alexander and Hettie?’
Grace’s voice carried back to them. ‘A barbecue? Oh yes, how wonderfully bijou! I’ll have to buy a barbecue, or maybe we could build one...’ She started calling out a list. ‘Some of those delicious sausages from the farm shop; strawberries, of course; and we could set out the croquet on the lawn and fill up the paddling pool...’
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THE FAMILY MEETING was more optimistic than any of late, but Grace didn’t join them this time. She was too busy stringing bunting across the garden. Anju had been put to work hanging jam jars in the trees and dropping a single nightlight into each of them. Artie, Fred and Gog turned the filling of the paddling pool into a water fight, and Celia tracked Sophie as she crawled across the lawn, retrieving tightly clasped handfuls of grass from the baby’s fist before she put them in her mouth.
In the study, their optimism carried them through the agreement to put Bert’s cottage into his and Anna’s name and, at Ted’s suggestion, to give the neighbouring cottage to Celia. The mood fell a little as they braced themselves to tackle the final item on their impromptu agenda. ‘So, what do we sell to raise the money for the death duties?’
Alexander spoke up. ‘I’ve come up with a plan for that. We sell the practice to the Melton and Jones Partnership.’
‘But you’d own it anyway.’
‘I would, but I’m talking about the business buying us out. The banks would fund a mortgage, I’ve already spoken to them, and it would give all the partners security for the future. It’s worth upwards of a million now, so with the proceeds from Mother’s house—’
‘Anju and I could chip in, if the bank lets us increase our mortgage.’
‘Come to that, we could mortgage the Hall.’
There was a moment of contemplative silence.
‘By Jove, you know, I think we might have done it.’
Alexander leant back in his chair and folded his arms. The corners of his mouth turned up, and he crossed his legs at the ankle. ‘With the added bonus that none of our children will have to worry about death duties, because everything we have will belong to the banks.’
They carried their lifted spirits to the barbecue. The mood was contagious, aided by the warmth of a gentle, summer evening and the pretty decorations that ringed the trestle tables set out on the lawn. The children shrieked joyfully, the splash of water and muted crack of croquet mallet brought the air of country fair to the Draymere gardens.
‘You’ve made it look so pretty. You really are a clever thing, darling.’ James put his arm around Grace’s shoulder. ‘I don’t suppose you remember the fêtes we used to have at Draymere? The whole village came, and half the county if the sun was out. This reminds me of that. Happy days. I can’t think why they stopped.’
Grace leant her body against his. ‘I’ve seen the photos. Snoop giving pony rides, and stalls on the lawn. You children in fancy dress.’
‘That’s it! Mother got thoroughly carried away with those outfits, and Father always judged the produce in the horticultural tent. He did love the fête. In his element, lording it up. I remember him getting boisterous on homemade cider and dolling out fivers to all and sundry.’
‘It sounds like a tradition that should be brought back. All this...’ Grace cast her arm expansively across their view of the mellow grounds, the manicured grass, the chaotic tumbling flowerbeds and sculptural ancient trees. ‘All this, all our good fortune in living here, should be shared with the village.’
James squeezed her. ‘You’re right. We’re going to be skint, you know that, don’t you? By the time we’ve paid off—’
‘Hush. Just look around you, James.’ Bert was sprawled rather awkwardly in one of the deckchairs, sipping a mojito and laughing at Anna and Celia as they tried to keep check of Sophie in the paddling pool without getting a thorough soaking from Fred and Gog. Hettie and Alexander were complaining loudly as Artie trumped them at croquet, and Ted and Anju had settled on a garden bench, ringed by blowsy roses. Their heads were close in conversation and their hands affectionately linked. The jam jars glowed magically in the falling light. ‘We’re the wealthiest people in the world.’
The smell of burning sausages brought them back to the moment. ‘Grub’s up!’ James yelled.
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TALK OVER DINNER RETURNED to the fête, boosted by sentimental memories from Bert (who had decided he liked mojitos) and interjections from Anna and Celia, who recalled the fêtes with fondness. William’s name slipped ghostlike into the telling, touching their recollections with wings so gentle they caused barely a ripple.
Alexander smiled at Hettie. The children were drunk on life and the thrill of being up past their bedtimes. The adults were tipsy on fresh-minted rum and rose-tinted nostalgia. Only Hettie was sober, Alexander almost so in support of her sacrifice. ‘Would you stay at the Gatehouse tonight?’ he whispered.
Hettie didn’t need to think before she responded. ‘I’d love to.’
They found each other’s hands under the table and their fingers linked together.
‘Even sober?’ His thumb traced hesitant circles on the palm of her hand.
She grinned at him. ‘Sober and stupidly randy. I’ve decided the only solution is to trust you with my body.’