Hardacre's Luck (The Hardacre Family Saga Book 2)

by CL Skelton

  It saddened her, deeply. Not for herself ‒ Madelene, even after all these years, was French to the core and English tradition meant nothing to her ‒ but for Harry. Harry loved the place passionately and lived now in genteel poverty to maintain it, and yet Harry must know that if the icy grip of tightening financial straits did not get him then time itself undoubtedly would. For though Harry Hardacre had bodily heirs, and more than one, he had no spiritual heir. No one in the family regarded the old place as anything other than bricks and mortar, out of date and increasingly comfortless. Harry alone held within him the warm living soul of Hardacres and knew it would be extinguished on the day he died.

  Madelene stared moodily at the dust-marked toe of her pale-beige calf shoe, feeling morose and sad for Harry to such a degree that she had almost forgotten her hurry and the reason for it. For the first time since yesterday, when Terry had telephoned, she had briefly forgotten young Sam.

  The chastening thought of him flooded back, rekindling her haste. She jumped up and brushed down her swirlingly feminine beige New Look skirt. She would have to walk. She took two determined steps with the peevish stride of one who never ordinarily walks further than from the doorstep to the motor car at the kerb, when a distant sound broke through that of the rustling of leaves and squawking of peafowl; a sharp patter of hoofbeats down the gravel drive.

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ Madelene said, turning to the sound, knowing she was about to be rescued.

  The horse, a tall bay with what Madelene, whose tastes ran to fast motor cars and pretty dresses rather than horses, would call ‘black trim’, cantered around the bend where Madelene had met the peacock. The rider, a woman in precisely tailored hacking gear, reined in, and the horse came to a quick well-disciplined halt and stood puffing steamy breath into the frosty air. The horsewoman was Harry Hardacre’s daughter Vanessa, a large-boned plain woman devoid of make-up, her shoulder-length greying brown hair worn straight and usually, as now, tied back tightly beneath a riding hat. She looked puzzled, and her eyes moved slowly from Madelene in her beige suit and high-heeled pumps to the red MG in the ditch and back to Madelene. She blinked once, in careful assessment.

  ‘Having a spot of bother, old girl?’ she said.

  ‘I am in this stupid ditch because of your father’s idiotic bird, and I am fifteen minutes late already, and it is more than a spot of bother,’ Madelene declared.

  ‘Does it still go?’ Vanessa said warily, looking down at the immobile car. She had the same lack of interest in motors as Madelene had in horses.

  ‘Whether it goes or not is not the point. I’ll need Noel and the tractor to get it out. And I must see your father at once.’

  Vanessa blinked again. Madelene waited for Vanessa to suggest she ride off for help, but Vanessa was still engrossed in the grounded MG. She appeared to be considering the possibility of having to shoot it.

  ‘Vanessa, I must get to the house. Could you possibly …?’

  ‘Give you a ride behind? Oh, I don’t know, Gold Flake is not very keen on doubles. Liable to toss us both,’ she added cheerfully. She returned her mournful gaze to the car.

  Madelene shook her head. For all the years she had known Harry’s daughter, she had found it impossible to make any point clear to her. Vanessa lived in a world of horses and tack and mucking out and bedding down and seemed to comprehend nothing else. At times Madelene had been most grateful for her obtuseness; at forty-four Vanessa, though a married woman and even a mother, had never imagined anything between Madelene and her father but familial loyalty.

  ‘I have absolutely no desire to ride on that animal,’ Madelene said. ‘If you would be so kind as to ride up to the house and find Harry with the motor …?’

  ‘What a good idea,’ Vanessa said brightly. ‘Back in a jiff. Toodle-oo old thing.’ She cantered off on her mission of mercy and Madelene sat down again on the wing of her MG. She watched the disappearing horsewoman and sighed. Thank God for Rodney, she thought, blessing Vanessa’s husband, a man every bit as equinely inclined as Vanessa herself. Surely no one else in all of Yorkshire, or England, or the world, would have married the silly fool.

  Fortunately for Madelene, waiting less than patiently amidst the beech wood, Noel Hardacre, Vanessa’s elder brother, was at that moment clattering down the drive from the stable square behind the house on his tractor. He met his sister just at the point where the woods gave way to a long, dramatic sweep of lawn that drew the eye unerringly to the vast, square red-brick mansion at the crest of the hill. Vanessa had no eye for beauty and did not even glance at the majestic display of carefully managed greenery and softly ageing brick and stone. She had lived her entire life at Hardacres, apart from her school years of course, and it was utterly mundane to her. It existed for herself, and for Rodney, only as a spacious background for their equine obsession. There were rooms in the big house that she had not bothered to enter for years.

  She reined in Gold Flake to a sharp trot and hailed her brother. Noel tipped his head, indicating that he had heard, was annoyed at being asked to listen and was not stopping, anyhow.

  ‘Whoa, there,’ Vanessa shouted to both her brother and the horse. She stopped directly in his path and, disgruntled, he stopped as well. She had not forgotten Madelene’s abandonment, but a new thought struck her that was infinitely more important. She saw at once that Noel had the plough attached to the tractor, fierce blades swung up clear of the road. ‘Where are you going with that?’ she asked suspiciously, eyeing it.

  ‘Bottom field,’ he said. Noel, despite his gentle, scholarly father, and his public-school upbringing, had lived all his life as a Yorkshire farmer, seemingly only happy when physically engrossed in the tough struggle to make the once-lavish estate pay for itself. He worked with his hands every day of his life, and sought out the company of others who did so as well. As he aged, alone in touchy bachelor eccentricity, his accent coarsened, his dress grew shabbier, and even his face seemed to take on rough lines of its own. A year ago he had abruptly moved his uninspired belongings right out of the mansion house that he would most likely inherit and installed himself in a farm labourer’s cottage on his own estate. It was just one more of his extraordinary and anti-social ways and at the time hardly caused a ripple of surprise among those who knew him well. Noel was beginning to be regarded by all around as ‘a reeght queer ’un’. Vanessa was unimpressed either by his eccentricity or his renowned temper.

  ‘And what, may I ask, do you intend to do with it in the bottom field?’

  Noel screwed up his lean face in a slow amused grin. ‘Aye well,’ he said, still grinning, ‘thought this tractor had the makings of a good point-to-pointer. Thought I’d set her at that big hedge Rodney’s always putting horses over, and see if I can get ’er to jump.’

  ‘Noel,’ Vanessa spluttered, her face reddening. ‘Noel, that is very unfunny. You know very well the Hunt uses that field every meet. What are you up to?’

  ‘The Hunt did use it. Tomorrow she’ll be my winter wheat.’

  ‘Winter wheat?’ Vanessa exclaimed. ‘Since when do we grow winter wheat?’

  ‘Since tomorrow. Come on now, girl, move that walking glue factory. Some of us have work to do.’

  ‘Noel, you will not plough up our bottom field. Rodney won’t allow it. I won’t allow it. I’ll see Father. I’ll see Father right now.’ She turned the horse around in a dancing circle, muttering, ‘Winter wheat in the bottom field. I’ve never heard the like.’

  ‘Father’ll allow it, all right,’ Noel shouted over the continuing roar of his tractor engine. ‘Father wants the bills paid.’

  ‘Ridiculous,’ Vanessa stormed, and then as Noel rumbled off she remembered Madelene. She galloped after Noel in triumph. ‘Besides, you can’t plough just now anyhow.’

  ‘Can an’ bluidy shall.’

  ‘No.’ Vanessa cut ahead of him again and he slammed his brake on and lost his temper.

  ‘Get that bluidy useless beast out of my way or I’ll run it down.’<
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  ‘You can’t plough today because you’ve got to haul a car out of a ditch,’ Vanessa gloated.

  ‘What bloomin’ car? What ditch?’

  ‘Down there,’ Vanessa pointed an imperious finger. ‘Madelene’s in the ditch.’ She paused. ‘She’s not very pleased.’

  Noel stared down the silent, curving driveway. ‘In the ditch? How the hell …?’

  ‘I think she was trying to miss a peacock,’ said Vanessa in a small voice.

  Noel stared. Then he slammed his fist on to the steering wheel of the tractor and shouted, ‘Bloody damn women. Bloody damn animals. Horses, peacocks. Ye’d think I was running a bloody zoo.’ He thrust the idling machine into gear and, still cursing, clattered off down the long drive. Vanessa gave a smug smile of satisfaction at his enforced detour, and whirled Gold Flake about and galloped off to her father and the rescue of the bottom field.

  Harry Hardacre, Vanessa’s father and bemusedly unassuming patriarch of the Hardacre family, was at that moment enjoying the special pleasures of a lovely autumn day from the quiet shelter of his favourite room: the oak-panelled, book-lined library. It was a room that, throughout his father’s tenure of the house, had remained dustily abandoned, just as it had for the previous decades under the domain of the undoubtedly better-bred, but hardly better-read Sir John Wildebore. But when Harry inherited Hardacres the library became its heart. From boyhood, books had been his delight; and now, as old age approached, they were his refuge.

  Harry rose from his chair by the fire and stretched awkwardly, shaking his bad leg, which stiffened always as he sat, and walked with a pronounced limp to the tall window that reached from knee level to near the twelve-foot ceiling. Watery thin sunlight came through, distorted by the natural deformities of the old glass, showing up dusty streaks on the interior of the pane. Harry looked at the streaks ruefully; they were a reproach, but one to which he was powerless to respond. The two ageing village ladies who, with Cook, now comprised the sum total of Hardacre household staff, could hardly be criticized for missing a window. They were, however, Harry would readily admit, precisely all he could afford. His only concern was that in the near future it was not impossible that one of them, too, might have to go. He put the thought from his mind, not wishing to dwell either on it, or its larger implications.

  He let his eyes stray over the gardens again, his left hand gently caressing the broad depth of wall in the window alcove, feeling comforted by its ancient luxurious solidity. He glanced up to the high, beautifully moulded ceiling, finding it impossible to regret its graceful height, even though the house was proving daily more difficult to heat.

  He put that thought too, aside, and returned his eyes to the lawns, marvelling, as he always did, at how quickly they had recovered from their wartime devastation, when patriotic duty had obliged him to plough them up for corn. He remembered that day as if it were yesterday, himself on the tractor and Hetty and Madelene watching from the terrace. The thought of Hetty stirred him. He drew out his watch, wondering if he should wake her for tea or let her sleep. He decided on the latter. If he woke her, she would make a brave effort and come down to join them, but by dinner time she would be exhausted. Better those spare few hours in the evening, when they could laugh and talk over their meal and pretend everything was yet as it once was.

  Hetty, or rather Hetty’s failing health, was the one true cloud on Harry’s horizon. All other concerns he could, with a practised talent, shove gently aside, smooth over with happier thoughts. But his wife’s slow descent into invalidity was always with him, like the dull bone ache of his crippled leg. In the depths of his heart Harry Hardacre carried his wife’s pain as if it were his own.

  He could not remember even now when it had begun, at what point Hetty’s general listlessness, her numerous unexplained small miseries, had crystallized into real ill-health. At times it seemed as if Hetty had always been ill, right from the beginning of their marriage. He could not honestly recall a day since he met her, when first she came to Hardacres as Nanny to his so recently orphaned children, when Hetty had displayed true bodily well-being. It was certainly true that within a year or two of their wedding day Hetty’s complaints, her back, her ‘female problems’, her headaches, her nerves, had resulted in a retreat to separate beds. A less honest man than Harry Hardacre might have used that early estrangement as just cause for the long-standing affair with Madelene, as partial cause it certainly was. But Harry knew he would have loved Madelene regardless; indeed Hetty’s health had been instead the one firm tie that had brought him hastening back from Madelene’s bed again and again, on the bowed wings of guilt. He often wondered, had Hetty been tough and strong, as tough and strong as Madelene, would he have left her and Hardacres and all that was precious to him for the sake of love?

  No matter now, he thought. Age had stilled his blood, as Yeats would have it, and now, ironically, he found companionship with both his women as gentle and loving as if each were his wife. Harry Hardacre, at seventy-two, was in many ways a more contented man than ever before in his life. Unlike poor Hetty, he had his health. Indeed his health was better than in his boyhood, when his childhood in poverty had taken its toll, and better than in young adulthood, when the Boer War wounds and the heart-wound of losing Judith had made him frail before his years. Now, like a thin old tree that had weathered much, he had grown surprisingly supple and resilient, able to take long walks over his estate with the aid of his stick, and to indulge in long nights of study alone into the small hours. He hardly needed to sleep at all any more, and was delighted with the spare time his wakeful nights allowed him. A few months ago he had commenced writing a book about his childhood with his itinerant parents and his long-dead brother Joe, just for the pleasure of freezing the past in words.

  He had managed, over the years since his father’s death, to keep both the family and the estate together, no mean feat, and even with finances a constant strain and his mixed bag of Hardacre offspring at odds he felt, just looking over the green lawns on a November afternoon, a distinct thrill of success.

  Still, the need for money was a fact that would not go away, no matter how often he sidestepped it, as clear a fact as the undeniable descent of the Hardacre fortunes since the death of Sam Hardacre, the Herring King. How odd, Harry thought, smiling to himself, his hand still caressing the security of the two-foot-thick wall, that even living in a place like this one could need to worry about money. When he was a child, moving with his parents from rented room to rented room, or following the herring fleet in the old pony cart, sleeping nights in the countryside under the tarpaulin, he had thought that any human being who actually lived in a house at all was rich as Midas. Even a cowman’s cottage, with thatched roof and crumbling chimney stack, was a palace in his boyhood’s eye. Now here he was, Harry Hardacre, living in a brick Tudor mansion and he was one thing his father in all his life had never been: he was in debt.

  Harry sighed and decided to use one of the few rich man’s prerogatives left to him. He went to the old-fashioned velvet bell-pull by the fireplace and rang for tea. Even if it was only Mrs Bennett up from Driffield for the afternoon, she would bring a silver tray laden with the Crown Derby service, and when Madelene arrived they would sit before the fire and talk about the past and the future and the family as if nothing ever would change.

  Thinking of Madelene, he glanced again at his watch, saw that she was even later than usual, and set to wondering again what the urgent matter was that she had refused to discuss in her telephone call earlier in the day. It must truly be urgent, too, or else she would not have come to the house at all. Usually they met in Driffield, where she kept her shop, or he went to her in her little cottage on the fringe of the Hardacre estate. As Hetty failed, Madelene withdrew. She had a great sense of justice and would not intrude upon a fallen opponent.

  Harry strolled across to his desk, piled high with papers as always, and found his eye unerringly making for the stack of unpaid bills. He shuffled them wryly and
then let them fall, with a soft sighing, to the dusty leather surface. Mentally he made another appointment with the bank manager, and mentally he broke it. The trouble with you Hardacres, the bank manager, a blunt man, had said, is you’re all too good at spending money. And the only one of you any damn use at making it was old Sam. Harry wasn’t offended. It was precisely the truth, a truth he had recognized long ago. Therein lay the source of the Hardacre dilemma. Sam Hardacre had begun his working life gutting herring on the Yorkshire fish quays. With wit and ingenuity and a tiny touch of sheer luck, he had moved from gutting fish to selling cooked herring at the racetracks, to owning cafés, and then owning almost every growing business in sight: hotels, railways, cotton mills. He was a young man in a country full of young, untrammelled industry ‒ Britain in the 1880s, a country with fortunes to be made, crying out to be made. And Sam had all it took to make one. And then, Harry thought with a smile, he spawned a family as useless in that respect, as Sam himself was talented. Except for Joe, of course, Harry corrected a little painfully. His brother Joe could make money. Whatever his faults, that wasn’t one of them. But Joe had got caught up in a different kind of country, a different kind of business, the frenetic world of paper money of the New York Stock Exchange. Joe got caught up and carried away, spiralling up and up to the vertiginous heights from which, with so many others, he came crashing down on a day in 1929. Joe Hardacre died in a bloody mess on a New York pavement, an ending that, to this day, his brother Harry found impossible to think about.