by Fiona Walker
‘It’s an electronic floor cleaner,’ Janine told her proudly. ‘You’ll find it’s all ready for you.’ She beckoned them in, spotting too late that the robot had left more puddles than a new puppy and massacred the Persian rug.
Not that anyone noticed. They all missed a beat as air brakes hissed outside and a horsebox rolled into the yard.
‘That’ll be Mummy.’ Alice clicked her low heels together. ‘Better break the news.’
‘Let me go,’ insisted her sister, who was a head taller and an octave deeper, yet looked at least a decade younger, with remarkable blue eyes that flashed warily as one of the men in suits appeared in the doorway.
‘I’m afraid I need someone to sign forms.’
‘I’ll do that,’ snapped Alice. ‘You talk to Mummy, Pax. Make sure she understands what she has to do. Have we got anything stronger to offer people than tea, Pip? Whatever it is, pour me a large one.’ She stomped back in without waiting for an answer.
Pip held back until the red-haired sister had hurried outside, muttering to Janine: ‘Have you done the cellar yet?’
‘It’s next on the list,’ the cleaner assured her. ‘Carly will go down there while I give the late Captain’s bedroom a thorough clean.’ As Carly opened her mouth to protest, she lifted a long talon, hissing, ‘Fifty quid. Free nail art. Crash course in lamping.’
Carly glared at her, thinking how much more fun it would be to fit Jimmy Choofs on the feet of beautiful horses belonging to pretty, witty Cotswold wives, like Petra Gunn.
*
Ronnie parked her lorry in the smaller stable quadrangle, spotting something dart beneath the arch to Big Yard that might have been Lester legging it, but equally might have been one of the youngsters that were crowding at the gate there to watch her, a small fox terrier to their fore snarling furiously at Ronnie’s dogs.
Appalled to find that her horses appeared to have been stuck in their stables for almost twenty-four hours, she bit back her anger when she saw how contented and well rested they looked, their beds spotless, coats gleaming from being brushed to best velvet nap. It was a blisteringly hot day, sunlight bouncing off the cobbles, yet inside their boxes it was cool, the back windows all tilted open to let what little breeze was available circulate. The horseflies would be maddening out in the little paddocks at this time of day. She couldn’t wait to get them home to the rolling twenty-acre field they shared with her old campaigner Dickon. His was the neck her unwept tears needed to find.
She stooped to feel along the sorrel mare’s tendons, which were prone to blowing up like frankfurters after competing. But they were cool and slim as bow strings. Fitting that at that moment a voice as sweet as a cello said: ‘Hello, Mum.’
Ronnie looked up to see a silhouette over the half-door, all wild hair and slim shoulders. ‘Pax!’
Her younger daughter was the family diplomat. Even grief-stricken, sleep-deprived and sent out on a solo bomb-disposal mission, she had a smile that soothed souls.
Ronnie’s heart crammed itself between her ribs and climbed up them into her throat so that she had no breath. Her voice was a one-note tin whistle when she said: ‘Before you say anything, I’m devastated. I love you and I want nothing, nothing, from this place.’ She hurried out of the stable.
Stepping back, Pax nodded, eyes mistrustful, like a hare’s. ‘Grumps made that quite difficult.’
‘Death rarely makes life easy for those left behind.’
‘Will you come inside the house?’ Pax entreated.
Ronnie shook her head. ‘I’d only wind up Alice.’
‘You’re probably right. It’s so busy with cake-eating in there, you’d think we were on the Open Gardens walk-around route – and Pip Edwards now appears to be having the place fumigated.’
‘She’s very efficient.’
‘Grumps insisted he only kept her on because saying, “Tootle pip, Pip” amused him so much, but he depended on her totally by the end.’
They fell silent, riding out a brief swell of grief that gripped them both.
They could hear the farrier’s rasp working rhythmically. Ronnie’s little dogs raced back from the Big Yard with hoof trims clenched in their teeth.
Pax broke the silence: ‘The funeral will be held a fortnight today.’ She added quickly, ‘If that suits you too.’
‘Of course.’
‘We thought it best to allow extra time for Tim to get back, plus there’s the coroner’s report, and everyone’s away on holiday. Alice thinks a small family ceremony best. She’s being a bit spiky about you getting involved, but I can calm her down.’
‘It’s fine. I’ll keep a low profile.’
‘I know you probably don’t want to talk about the stud and Grumps’s will, but—’
‘You’re right, I don’t. It’s far too soon.’ She snatched up a pair of travelling boots and let herself back into the stable, the voice in her head hissing, Run, run, run. Her father was taking control, as she’d known he would, the consequences all-consuming. ‘I’m loading my horses.’
‘We have to talk about it, Mum.’ Pax’s slim silhouette watched over the door. ‘There’s no money to pay the running costs here. If we don’t sort things out quickly, it spells disaster.’
‘Fine.’ She strapped boots onto the mare with deft tugs. ‘What do you need me to do?’
‘Alice saw the solicitor this morning. Grumps has left his entire estate in trust. You benefit from a life interest, which means that you’re the only one entitled to profit from the stud and its assets, but you can’t sell any of it.’
‘I know this.’ Ronnie reached for another boot, leaning back as the horse waggled a padded leg. ‘How do I give that back?’
‘You resign as a trustee, but you have to name a successor or, if not, the other trustees must agree one.’
‘Will you do it?’ She stepped back outside for the other two boots.
‘I already am one – we all are. You’re the only one of us with the life legacy.’ Pax sounded like a teacher, trying to get a reluctant child to understand the seven times table. ‘That gives you special privileges.’
‘Can’t I renounce them?’ Back in the stable she crouched beneath a shower of hay, attaching front boots.
‘It’s not that simple. When I say you’re the only one with a life legacy, I mean you’re the only family member, but there are others to whom Grumps left an irrevocable trust. It confers on them less power, but they’re safe for their lifetimes basically, and effectively in our care. Lester’s one.’
Ronnie straightened up, looking again at the immaculate straw banks and spotless water buckets. Oh, Lester. ‘Of course. Daddy would want him looked after.’ Letting herself out, she could hear him buzzing around on the quad-bike somewhere, herding young-stock back up a field track, making good his escape. They were both frightful cowards. Run, run, run urged the voice.
Pax cleared her throat awkwardly. ‘It’s not just Lester.’
‘Not the funny little housekeeper, surely.’ She moved along to the next stable, stooping for another set of boots.
‘No, not Pip, much to her pique – Alice is convinced she wanted to be the next Mrs Percy. There are almost twenty additional life trusts in total. All are individually named in the will. I had no idea he called his favourite broodmares after female politicians.’
‘Shirley Williams was his favourite.’ Hugging a travel boot to her chest, Ronnie half sobbed, half laughed as she realised what the Captain had done. ‘The silly old fool. Oh, God, Daddy, you had to keep calling the shots, didn’t you, even the knacker man’s?’ She let her gaze run around the empty stables, once filled with a face at every door and a brass name-plate below it, now safeguarded for the care of Maggie, Nancy, Barbara and a host of others. ‘Nothing sentimental about breeding, he always said.’
‘He’s been pretty unsentimental about which bloodlines he wants saved,’ Pax told her, watching as her mother put on both boots upside down, too tearful now to see what she was doing. ‘I�
��ve got a copy of his letter of wishes for you to take back with you, along with the will. Not all the mares are listed by any means. The letter’s very specific. He only just stops short of drawing up feed and turn-out charts. We all thought he’d lost interest in the horses after Granny died, but he’d been plotting this all along.’
Ronnie put the boots the right way up and pressed her forehead against a warm, hairy chestnut knee, breathing. She’d only known his wishes in the broadest terms, never realising just how meticulously he had planned it. Run, run, run, the voice in her head screamed.
Pax rubbed tired eyes as Ronnie bustled past in search of tail-guards. ‘This place has been losing money for years, so even if the assets weren’t frozen we’d be selling off the Wemyss-ware to pay the feed-merchant’s bills. It’s all complicated by inheritance tax, in theory minimal because as a farm we get agricultural-property relief, but Granny and Grumps split the title a few years ago to release equity from the house and bail out the stud. They only discovered later that doing so might reclassify the house outside the farm, which means it now gets taxed at top rate, as well as there being a mortgage to pay off. Grumps agreed a land deal with the Austens to cover that. They’re on the case already. Sandy never lets the grass grow.’
‘Hay needs cutting in there anyway.’ Ronnie had stopped listening properly, blood drumming in her ears as she led out her little bay gelding to load in the lorry. ‘What do I sign to make all this go away?’
Pax followed her. ‘Alice wants the trustees to agree to release the house and garden from the trust so that it can be sold as soon as probate is granted. Tim’s been on an open line all morning, saying much the same. The family retains the stables, some paddock land, Lester’s cottage and the stud business, as Grumps wanted.’
Spitting, spuming magma coursed through Ronnie’s veins. Her father’s voice roared in her ears: The house belongs to the stud! You can’t rip them apart! It’s been in the Percy family since it was built!
Not trusting herself to speak, she felt those kind hare eyes on her as she crossed the yard with the horse on a loose lead, bounded up into her horsebox with him, clipped on his bungie, pulled the partition across and stalked back out to find Pax waiting at the foot of the ramp.
‘Is that what you want, too?’ she asked eventually, carefully modulating her anger.
‘It doesn’t matter what I want, Mum.’
‘It bloody does. Don’t let them bully you.’
Ronnie watched her closely as she turned to look up at the house, its walls so brightly gold in the sun that they reflected against her beautiful freckled skin.
‘I’ll go with the majority decision,’ Pax said in that reassuringly deep monotone. ‘If you support the idea, the solicitor seems to think it’s practicable under the terms of the will. Stopping this place going under means thinking fast.’
Her fast-thinking mind now repeating, Run, run, run, like blood thrumming in her ears, Ronnie crossed the yard again and fetched out the mare, a high-stepping astronaut in her moon boots, then swiftly loaded her beside her stablemate.
Pax scaled the ramp to help close the side gates, admiring the chestnut over them. ‘I like this one.’ She’d always had the Percy good eye for a horse.
‘You’d suit her,’ Ronnie told her. ‘No brakes, never falls.’ Pax had also been a speed freak across country.
Ronnie knew her daughter was being far too calm, too measured. The more panic-stricken Pax became, the less of herself she revealed, internalising everything, that perfect balance always maintained, balletic in mind and stature. It had made her an exquisite rider. Like a great stage actress, the terrible nerves that caused her to throw up for hours before big competitions were entirely subjugated in the saddle, her horses never sensing anything but calm confidence.
‘It would help to have your feedback before you go, Mum.’
‘This isn’t a bloody market-research survey.’ Ronnie rubbed her aching temples. ‘Sorry. It’s too soon, Pax, too awful. He died yesterday.’ She scrunched her face up against the pain of acknowledging it all over again, scalding salt water bubbling up into her tear ducts now. ‘It’s obscene to be talking about this at all. His body’s in some anonymous hospital fridge. This is his home. I keep thinking he’s going to shout out of a window to bring a horse in. Right now, I don’t give a stuff about whatever this bloody trust is all about. And I don’t want a small funeral. We have to bury him with honours. He threw the biggest parties here once. Loud jazz. Punch so strong you could light it with a match.’
‘The dogs stealing all the food from the buffet.’ Pax’s voice caught in her throat.
‘Everything stopping to toast the Queen.’
‘Granny horse-trading furiously, the more sherries she had.’
From their standpoint on top of the ramp they could see down into the walled garden, hopelessly overgrown now.
‘She sold three yearlings to the members of the swing band once.’
‘At least one horse was always brought out to jump over the net on the tennis lawn for a bet and one drunk ended up in the carp pond.’
‘And one gunshot could be guaranteed before midnight, usually Daddy telling everyone to bugger off home.’
They caught each other’s eye, a shared smile snatched from despair and striped with regret: parties attended in different lifetimes.
‘I don’t care much about the details of any of it either,’ Pax admitted, her voice climbing scales, as she packed the tears neatly away again. ‘I just want him still here. He fought and fought to keep this place going, and after Granny died he needed us really badly, but we were all so bloody busy and found him so hard to like. You weren’t even allowed to see him.’
Ronnie turned to stroke the white face of her mare, who was prodding her shoulder over the ramp gates, eager to be under engine and away. ‘I saw him, Pax.’
‘When?’
‘Three or four times a year. The last time was about six months ago. Awful lunches when he ate cremated fillet steak cut into tiny pieces and told me what I was expected to do after he died.’
‘Which was what?’
Turning to look out across the yard once more, Ronnie watched a swallow swoop into a dove hole in the stone wall to its nest in the eaves. The second clutch of eggs of the summer would be hatching. It always amazed her the way they waved off their first fledglings and laid the next eggs while the nest was still warm, like busy hoteliers turning around rooms.
‘He told me it was my job to make this place a commercial success again.’
At those difficult lunches, always the same antiquated country-house restaurant near Bath, Jocelyn had chewed his meat with the steady deliberacy of a dog with a mutton knuckle, making no bones of his reasons for commanding Ronnie back when this day came. Aware that his grandchildren would be left with little choice but to sell the stud if it was passed straight to them in its present state, his task was straightforward: Give them something too profitable to sell, girl. It’s your chance to make amends at last. You’re the reason it got like this.
Pax reached back to scratch the chestnut mare’s nose. ‘Could you do that?’
Ronnie couldn’t deny the truth of it, however reluctantly voiced. ‘Pax, I don’t want to come back to live here, and I know you don’t want to ask me to. But, theoretically, yes. I could probably turn it round.’
‘How quickly?’
‘It could take a very long time. And even then there’d be no guarantees.’
Pax sucked her teeth. ‘Even supposing we could afford to take that risk, the others aren’t prepared to wait.’
‘Of course not.’ She started down the ramp. ‘Daddy was always the gambler. He studied pedigree and form. He was relying on the fact that you’re too much of a sentimentalist to want this place broken up, and that contesting a will costs a fortune, which Tim would rule out. That only leaves Alice, and while she would rather sell the house than see me living in it, she’s always ultimately done as her grandfather told her.’
‘And you?’ Pax followed her down onto the cobbles.
‘I’ve always done the opposite.’ Run, run, run.
‘And if we all ask you to come back?’
Ronnie threw up for the ramp. ‘I’ll come back.’
‘You have to hang around for just a bit longer,’ Pax said, in a strangled voice, as she helped her mother faster the Latches. ‘I need to renegotiate.’ She was already running towards the house.
Ronnie sighed and glanced at her watch, whistling for her dogs. She walked them up into the top pasture fields, hoping she might bump into Lester and bury the hatchet for better or worse, but he’d gone firmly to earth. The broodmares drifted around her with polite, tail-flicking interest, each curved belly containing next year’s foal, currently no bigger than a kitten. They were an impressively classy lot, a glossy Munnings oil-painting of perfect sloping shoulders and long necks, her father’s keepers by far the cream of the crop, all old enough to know their jobs without being geriatric mothers. Looking them over, she felt another wash of grief so strong it threatened to take her legs away.
She pulled out her cigarette tin and lit a roll-up, saying a silent apology to her father. If I come back, I will give up. But we both know the chances of that.
Three riders were trotting along the bridleway in the distance, helmet silks bright and bobbled, a woman and two children. Squinting against the sun to watch them, Ronnie recognised the kind-eyed brunette she’d walked back with from the farm shop and her two little daughters. Such a perfect Cotswolds tableau, which she’d never shared with her own children, their early excursions on lead reins more often overseen by her mother and the nanny while she was out competing. She’d made the big profits then, but that was a long time ago when she’d been young and fearless with no regrets. She was none of those now.
11
When Ronnie walked back onto the yard, dogs bounding ahead, Pax was prowling around the lorry with a mug in her hand, a fox terrier growling out from beneath the tack locker. ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded. ‘Your horses have been kicking merry hell out of this thing.’
