Larkrigg Fell

by Freda Lightfoot

  ‘Did I ask for one? We can talk terms.’

  ‘But...’

  ‘We’re family, aren’t we? Tam and I had no children of our own. But Lissa was as dear as any daughter could be. We thought of her as our own for all she was adopted, not even that, only fostered. And you are hers. So why shouldn’t you have it?’

  For one glorious moment Beth almost accepted on the spot. Her love of Broombank was equal to Meg’s own and nothing would give her greater pleasure than to live there, with Andrew, for the rest of their days. But then she remembered. ‘There’s Sarah. What about my twin sister?’ How could either of them have forgotten Sarah?

  ‘Is she interested in farming?’

  ‘No, but...’

  ‘Then Sarah will make her own life, probably in a city, and with that young man whom I don’t approve of.’

  ‘I know you never cared for Pietro, but really he can be very sweet and kind.’

  Meg’s lips pursed ominously. ‘We’ll agree to differ on that, shall we? What I can’t understand is why he had to buy Larkrigg Hall. What on earth is he going to do with it?’

  ‘Family is important to him. Sarah says he’s been given some money and wanted somewhere for them to come back to from their travels. The rest of the time he looks upon it as an investment, and will continue to let it.’

  Meg lifted her chin with characteristic defiance. ‘I’ve made my views clear to both of you, on more than one occasion, that I do not trust Pietro Lawson. However, the less we think about that young man the better, in my opinion. I doubt they’ll stay around for long. And Broombank would be of no use to her.’

  ‘I know she’s selfish and demanding, and ridiculously irresponsible at times, but she is still my sister, with equal rights and all that.’

  Meg smiled, radiant and loving. ‘No need to worry. I thought Sarah would prefer hard cash.’

  Beth laughed. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘I’ll see she gets her fair share, all in good time. Nevertheless, I believe I may be allowed to dispose of my property, together with my precious luckpenny of course, as I think fit. Speak to Andrew. Send him to see me and we can discuss terms.’

  Beth put her arms about her grandmother and hugged her. ‘Oh, Meg. I do love you.’ And she danced her round, making the children chortle with delight at the sight.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  ‘No!’ Andrew said. ‘Absolutely not!’

  Beth stared at him. ‘You can’t turn this down. It’s too good an opportunity. Exactly what you’ve prayed for. Your own farm.’

  His face was more grimly set than she had ever seen it, lines etched deeply at each side of his mouth, drawing it ominously down. ‘Never.’

  Beth felt suddenly, desperately sick. What was happening to them? What hope was there for their marriage to survive if he wouldn’t even meet her half way.

  ‘Why do you have to be so obstinate and proud? Why, Andrew?’

  ‘I’m surprised you need to ask. Because its nowt to do with me. Broombank is your grandmother’s farm, not mine. I’ll not accept charity.’

  ‘Charity? I’ve told you, Meg isn’t offering you charity. She has more sensitivity than that. She says you can come to terms and agree a fair price for the stock and machinery. You’d have no trouble getting a mortgage, it’s a sound business. But yes, the house and land will be my inheritance. What of it? It’s common sense to keep it in the family. Wouldn’t you have liked your own to have done the same with Cathra Crag?’

  ‘That was different.’

  ‘Why, because you’re a man? Don’t turn chauvinist on me, Andrew. We have enough problems. And what do I know about farming? I’m not Meg. You’re being over-sensitive and stupid.’

  ‘So you’re back to calling me names, are you?’

  Beth swallowed her anger, fighting disappointment and, taking a firm grasp of his arms, gave him a little shake. ‘Listen to me for a minute. Listen properly before sounding off. I came happily to Cathra Crag because it was your family home. Now you can come to mine. You can live at Broombank with me. I know you’re a proud man and I love you for it but there’s really no need ...’

  ‘You what?’

  She gazed in dismay at the open scorn on his face, the look of scathing disbelief in his eyes. In that instant she felt cold fear clench her stomach. It was going all wrong. This should have been a happy moment and instead her life was falling apart. The aching void between them was growing ever wider, as if it could never be bridged.

  ‘I tried to tell you once before, but there never seemed the right moment. Then you came home saying you’d lost your job.’ She leaned against him, loving the warm strength of his body. ‘I do love you. Oh, Andrew, it was a revelation to me when I watched you with that sheep. It came like a wonderful realisation that I’ve loved you all along. I know we didn’t start off too well. I had that silly crush on Pietro and it clouded my judgement. But I fell in love you, ages ago, and never realised it until just recently.’

  She was laughing up into his face, waiting for him to laugh with her, to take her in his arms and kiss her and say how delighted he was. Then they could go to bed and she would show him how very much she meant what she said.

  To her complete horror the corner of his lip curled, and his next words hit her like a rock.

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it, how everything fits so neatly into your requirements? You decide you want a bairn so you take me to your bed. Now you want Broombank, so you’ve decided the best way to persuade me is to tell me that you love me. How very convenient.’ Then he pushed her from him and walked from the room.

  They barely spoke to each other for a whole week after that. Everything had become twisted in his mind and Beth knew that nothing she could say would alter his feelings. His pride was hurt. But she was hurting too.

  She went through the motions of a normal routine, cared for her children, spent a couple of hours three mornings a week with Tessa at the workshops sewing her moccasins, and her nights trying not to think about the emptiness in her life.

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t given you an answer yet,’ she told Meg. ‘I need to give Andrew time to think about it.’

  ‘There’s no rush.’ Meg asked if it would help if she spoke to Andrew herself but when Beth declined, she readily agreed to wait, saying she’d enough to worry about right now with the sheep rustling. ‘Thirty more have gone missing this week already.’

  ‘This is getting ridiculous. And dangerous,’ Andrew said, when Beth passed on the news. ‘The man is out of his mind.’

  ‘Man, what man? Are you saying that you know who it is?’

  ‘Of course. Don’t you? Think about it, Beth. We never had any trouble until Pietro and Sarah came back.’

  ‘You’re accusing my own sister of stealing Meg’s sheep?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Andrew sighed with excessive patience. ‘I’m accusing Pietro Lawson of being so screwed up over losing you, that he’d go to any lengths to seek revenge.’

  Beth stared at him dumbstruck. Pietro declaring he still loved her and was jealous of her husband was one thing, hating them enough to steal Meg’s sheep was quite another. ‘I don’t believe it. I’ve never heard such nonsense in all my life. Pietro would never do such a thing.’

  ‘You mean you’d rather believe him than me?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that.’ But in effect that was exactly what she did mean and they both knew it.

  It was eating him up inside. She was starting on another affair with him, he could tell. Hadn’t he seen them together out on the fell, the Italian kissing her right there in the open and she not protesting one little bit. Why else would she look so guilty when he’d met her on the path? Ever since that day they’d grown further and further apart.

  Andrew had always known that she didn’t love him. From the first he’d accepted that he was second best. Why should he believe that her feelings had changed? Now she pretended that she’d loved him all along but had been too dazzled by Pietro’s beauty and his
flattering charm to realise. He didn’t believe a word of it. It hurt him deeply to think so, but it seemed that his lovely Beth was every bit as greedy and selfish as her sister.

  How could there be any love between them when they scarcely spoke, tip-toeing about each other like strangers, eating meals in complete silence, and sleeping like blocks of ice in the same bed.

  They’d very nearly had another row at breakfast this morning when he’d told her he and Meg were planning to head up over Larkrigg to look for the lost sheep.

  ‘Why would they be at Larkrigg? Pietro has nothing to do with all of this. Nothing at all.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘He isn’t like that. He wouldn’t steal. However vain and greedy he may be, he’s not a thief.’

  ‘You know him that well, do you?’

  ‘I believe him to be honest.’

  ‘Yet he has kept your sister dangling for years. Why is that, d’you think? If he doesn’t want to marry her, why doesn’t he leave her alone? Particularly if he still fancies you. Is that the action of an honest man?’

  Beth searched her mind for a reasonable answer, but could find none. ‘I’ll go to see him, ask him straight out about the sheep.’

  Andrew laughed, his voice sounding unusually cruel and hard, as if she had again hurt him by not accepting his word. ‘Aye, go on, you ask him. And let me know what he says. It should be interesting.’

  ‘Why won’t you believe that I no longer love him, probably never did; that it was just some stupid teenage crush?’ she burst out in a last desperate plea.

  ‘I just don’t.’

  She sank on to the sofa amid the baby clutter and put her hands to her face. ‘Then there’s nothing left for us, is there?’

  There was a pause before he answered. ‘If you say not.’

  He’d left her then, filled with a sudden wave of self-revulsion, and an overwhelming weariness that seeped right to the heart of him. He’d heard her crying as he’d walked away, but if she absolutely refused to see any wrong in the man, how could he believe in her? In Andrew’s opinion Pietro Lawson was deliberately trying to steal Beth from him. He’d treated Sarah appallingly, disrupted all their lives and could well be responsible for the loss of Meg’s sheep. Beth still saw him as some sort of god. Beautiful, untouchable, incorruptible.

  Beth took her troubles to Ellen as she always did, and was surprised to find very little sympathy.

  Ellen was so stunned by what Beth told her, she almost forgot the lapwing she was tending in her hand, nearly dropping the poor creature to the floor. ‘You told Andrew that it was really him you had loved all along, after you’d asked him to accept Broombank?’

  ‘Y-yes.’

  ‘Dear heaven, girl, have you no sense? Can you blame the lad for refusing to believe you? What dreadful timing, Beth. The man has his pride. No wonder he doesn’t trust you. Particularly with that young fancy-pants prancing about the place, sending you wistful glances.’

  ‘Wistful glances? I haven’t seen any wistful glances.’

  ‘Then you haven’t been paying attention.’ Ellen finished fixing the splint on the bird’s wing and slid it safely into a cage, then gave Beth a withering look. ‘I’ll put the kettle on. It’s time we talked.’

  As they sat on the doorstep of the cottage, watching the grass grow as Ellen described it, they did indeed talk. And it took all of Beth’s strength not to run away from what Ellen was saying.

  ‘He’s been following you everywhere, as he always used to. Stalking you, isn’t that what they call it? I’ve noticed. Meg certainly has. No doubt Andrew has too. However proud and stubborn the man may be, he can see what’s right in front of his own nose. Pietro Lawson is back to his old game.’

  ‘Old game? What are you talking about?’

  ‘You surely didn’t imagine that you ever had a say in the course of events, do you? Young Lawson thinks only of himself. He didn’t care which of you he got, because he never intended to keep either one of you.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘He used each of you as a pawn to make the other jealous. Playing one off against the other to make you both miserable. That was the whole object of the game, nothing to do with which of you he really loved.’

  Beth stared at her, stunned. ‘You’re saying it was all deliberate on his part?’

  ‘Yes, Beth. It was all planned most carefully to the last detail.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘It’s an uncomfortable fact to take on board, I can see that. No young girl likes to think she’s been used. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you.’

  ‘You talk about Pietro as if he had no heart, no feelings.’

  ‘Mebbe he hasn’t, not the same as normal folk anyway.’

  ‘But he must have loved us. He was desperate to marry me.’

  Ellen went to her animal feed table and, picking up a knife, took out her anger in chopping cabbage leaves. She’d promised him she wouldn’t tell, but she’d kept silent long enough. This little lass was in danger of losing everything. She’d not stand by and see her hurt. ‘It was all show, a ploy that suited his purpose.’

  Beth sat hunched on the doorstep, struggling to understand. Ellen came back to put her arms about the girl’s thin shoulders.

  ‘It was Lawson who smashed up my cages, and tore up my cottage. I’d guessed what he was up to and he didn’t like that. He saw me as a threat and tried to frighten me off. Only I wouldn’t go.’

  ‘But why would he do that?’

  ‘He’s borne a grudge against your family for years, all because his grandfather, Jack Lawson, didn’t get Broombank. Not that Jack cared. He wasn’t interested in farming, and he betrayed your lovely, loyal grandmother, cheated on her with Kath Ellis, leaving the girl pregnant with your mum, Lissa. Jack settled in Italy after the war and we thought we’d heard the last of him. Then his grandson turned up to inflict the greatest hurt he could, to take revenge for imagined slights against his family. You and Sarah made perfect targets. I used to see him creeping about the woods, watching you, and watching Meg down at Broombank. So I stalked him. I’m good at stalking. He was obviously planning summat in his nasty little mind. Happen he’s still at it. Happen that’s why he’s come back.’ Her quiet gaze challenged Beth, who gazed back, horrified by all she has heard.

  ‘I won’t believe it. I can’t believe he would be so calculating.’

  ‘Ask Sarah. Ask your sister why they’ve come. I’ll warrant it’s for their own interests and not yours.’

  Beth went straight to Sarah. The only way to clear this matter up was to face her with it, head on. Her sister had never cared much for confrontations but she must face this one.

  She found her chatting with Meg in the kitchen and as soon as was politic, managed to get her outside on the pretext of a walk along the lane.

  Spring gentian, purple saxifrage and bright eyed stitchwort were in bloom but for once Beth paid no heed to the beauties of nature.

  ‘What is this problem that has brought you back to Lakeland, Sarah? I’d like to know.’

  There was a short, telling silence. ‘OK. I’ll tell you. I can’t have any children. There. That’s the blunt truth, plain and simple. I had an abortion when I was seventeen. Never told anyone. Mom would’ve gone wild. Unfortunately it wasn’t of the best quality and somehow I got damaged. I’m barren. Isn’t that the word?’

  Beth was stunned. This was the last thing she’d expected. ‘Oh, Sarah. I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Try - I’m sorry.’

  ‘Of course I’m sorry. I was worried you might be sick, or it was some sort of emotional problem that you wanted to talk over with me, something to do with Pietro. Not anything like this.’ She sat on the stile and stared bleakly at her sister, her heart filled with compassion.

  Sarah gave a hard, bitter laugh. ‘It’s both of those things in a way. Pietro badly wants a child, a son, naturally, but a child of either sex will do. He says it’s his right.�
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  ‘His right?’

  ‘Family is very important to him, and if I can’t give him one, then he sees no reason to marry me. Simple as that.’ She plucked a hawthorn leaf from a branch and tore it to shreds.

  Beth watched her, appalled. ‘But that’s awful. You don’t marry someone because they can or cannot give you a child. He surely doesn’t mean it?’

  ‘Oh, he means it all right. He’s not a young boy eager for marriage any more. He’s changed, or perhaps he always was this calculating, and we didn’t notice. I’m not sure. Anyway, he says he can afford to pick and choose, so why should he choose me? Unless I can give him what he wants: a family.’ She turned to Beth and her face looked pinched and cold, as if it were death white beneath the tan. ‘I can’t imagine life without him, Beth. I need him. Yes, me, the girl who swore never to commit herself to a man.’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘I love him, you see, and I must have him. No matter what.’

  ‘Yes, I do see.’

  She leaned on the stile and gazed out over the countryside, hearing the song of a lark getting itself into a frenzy over their nearness. ‘You’re quite right, there is a reason for our being here, and this is it. Pietro wants a child, and I want Pietro. So since I can’t provide one, I’ve come to you, my own twin sister, to ask you for one. You must have the child for me.’

  The silence this time was awesome, stretching into eternity. Then Beth shook her head, a dazed look of disbelief on her face. ‘You can’t be serious. Is this is some kind of sick joke?’

  ‘I was never more serious in my life. You have two children, no doubt had them as easy as sneezing, and I can’t even have one.’ Beth watched in dismay as tears ran from the violet eyes, down over the lovely cheek bones. Sarah never cried. This must be hurting her deeply. Even so ...

  ‘You can’t hand out children as if they were sweets. What exactly are you asking of me? To sleep with him?’