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

by CL Skelton

  ‘What’s he working at?’ Vanessa asked. ‘Imagine, “Defrocked monk seeks employment”. It must have been awfully tricky.’

  ‘Hardly defrocked, Vanessa,’ Harry chided.

  Jane smiled brightly and said, ‘I suppose it wasn’t easy. Anyhow he’s managed.’ She raised her glass again, as if in salute to the distant Sam. ‘He’s in a chip-shop. Frying fish,’ she said.

  Another silence fell on the beautiful drawing-room, as its occupants stood about with lowering jaws.

  ‘Surely never,’ Rodney murmured at last.

  Jane looked at him, and then around the room, with her slow grin spreading. Her eyes met Harry’s and he also started to grin.

  ‘What’s t’ bother then?’ she asked. ‘Happen us Hardacres ’ave done worse.’

  Chapter Four

  The Rose at Kilham occupied an attractive site at the end of the village, with its own small garden at the rear facing on to a small stream with tidy, grassy banks. Even in November there were flowers in the small borders, and a few remaining red roses on the tall climbing bush by the front door. The building itself, of native limestone, was long and low, so that the upper floor was barely full height, with shortened windows peering out under the lowering brows of the uneven, mossed-green slate roof. Jane pointed it out to her driver, who had recognized the pub already from the faded wooden sign above its door, and he pulled up in front of the many-paned bay window. The blue van drew up behind.

  Jane got out of the taxi and, rather than approaching the door, stepped carefully out into the deserted street, peering in fading light at the faintly suspect slope in the roof-tree. She walked slowly around the gable end of the building and inspected the stonework, prodding a convenient piece of wood at the edge of one window, and casting a jaundiced eye upwards to one cracked chimney pot. ‘Oh, Philip,’ she said to herself. ‘A lamb to the slaughter.’ She imagined she could hear the faint chortling of the estate agent all the way from York.

  Then squaring her shoulders unconsciously at the prospect of the mighty reclamation project ahead, she walked back to the front of the building and rapped sharply on the door. She was aware, as she stood awaiting a response, of the subtle twitch of lace curtains in the cottages across the street. She smiled to herself. Oh yes. They’d be laughing, too.

  The door swung in suddenly and a tall, broad-shouldered man with thinning sandy hair stepped half-out, staring blankly at her in the twilight. Then he recognized her and opened both arms out wide. He was dressed in a huge rough-knit jumper and tweed plus-fours, with thick stockings and brogues, and for a moment Jane found it hard to believe she was actually looking at Philip Barton.

  ‘Jane,’ he shouted. ‘Eh, but it’s grand to see you. Here lass, let’s look. Aye, but yer lookin’ gradely.’

  ‘What?’ said Jane, blinking. Philip of the London-tailored suits and life-long urbanity had suddenly blossomed into a salt of the Yorkshire earth.

  ‘Oh Daddy, must you,’ groaned a plaintive adolescent voice from behind him. ‘You sound so impossibly gauche.’ Philip stepped aside, looking faintly hurt, and Ruth, his fifteen-year-old daughter, squeezed past him as if afraid to let her stylish full skirt even brush against his offending tweeds. ‘Oh, Aunt Jane, he’s just intolerable since we’ve come here. I’ll die if any of my London friends ever see him. Not that that’s likely,’ she moaned, with a mournful cast of her eyes heavenwards. ‘I’ll probably never see any of them again.’

  She looked dimly up and down the narrow street, where the soft outlines of the cluster of little buildings now faded into furry dusk. ‘Oh, this place!’ She shrugged and grabbed Jane’s hand, pulling her inwards as if to escape from some invading horror. ‘Quick,’ she cried, with mock desperation, ‘talk to me. Is the world still out there? Stands Scotland where she stood? Oh God, Aunt Jane, I feel like Robinson Crusoe.’

  Philip was still standing in the doorway, breathing ostentatious deep breaths. ‘Smell that,’ he cried, excitedly tugging at Jane’s other arm. ‘Nowt but good country air. Eh, lass, yon’s t’ life.’ Ruth pushed the door closed, half on her father’s brogue, with a grimace of distaste.

  Ruth, until a week ago, had been a student at one of London’s nicer girls’ day schools. She was a tall girl looking, to Jane’s eyes, surprisingly sophisticated in her soft dark blue skirt and pale blue twin-set. Her hair, dark brown like her mother’s, was set in a smooth bob, just tucked in at the edges and held in place by a strand of velvet ribbon. She walked down the dark corridor leading to the kitchens of the pub with exaggerated care, conscious of herself and her new female grace. Jane followed behind, watching the bounce of soft curls on Ruth’s shoulders with a small smile of pleasure. It had always delighted her to see the young come of age.

  ‘How’s your mother?’ she asked.

  ‘Frantic,’ said Ruth. ‘She’s been scrubbing the kitchen cupboards all day. They were full of toadstools.’

  ‘Dear me,’ said Jane, treading carefully on a patch of worm-eaten floorboard that sagged beneath her foot. ‘And your brother and sister?’

  ‘Out enjoying good country air,’ Philip put in from behind.

  ‘More fools they,’ said Ruth.

  Jane was about to ask the girl what arrangements had been made for her schooling when there was a sudden piercing shriek from the depths of the building.

  ‘Good God,’ said Jane. ‘Is that Emily?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Philip, excusing himself past her. ‘Happen we’ve got trouble.’ He pressed on into the dark depths of the pub towards his wife’s wails of distress.

  ‘Happen,’ said Ruth, with another grimace, ‘we’ve more than you think.’

  Jane smiled and patted the girl’s shoulder and then hurried by to see if she could be of some assistance. She followed the shrieks, joined now by Philip’s sharp barks of command, pure London now, his Yorkshire affectation sacrificed to the urgency of the moment.

  She found a half-open dark-stained door and gave it a gentle push. Behind was a long, frugally furnished kitchen, with a large worn refectory table in its centre and a pair of ancient deep sinks, below which her niece Emily, generally a woman of definite elegance, was all but invisible behind a geyser of spraying water. Soaked from the top of her once neatly-waved hair to the toes of her good kid shoes, she was gamely struggling to cap the gushing pipe with her bare hands while Philip, a picture of manly fortitude, was dashing back and forth with a wrench in his hand shouting, ‘Right, pet, I’ve got it now, pet, hold on!’

  Jane stepped quietly into the rain of water, lifted the wrench from Philip’s hand on one of his circuits of the scene, directed him out of doors to the mains water-cock, and quietly got to work.

  Half an hour later, with everyone newly dried and freshly dressed, they were all sitting in the kitchen drinking tea, while Philip eulogized the astounding pressure of good Yorkshire water mains. Ruth’s eyebrows rose regularly to brush her pert little fringe and Emily, her hair in pin-curls and a kerchief, sat stirring her tea with an expression of wounded martyrdom. Jane, contemplating the future of The Rose at Kilham, was privately giving even money that it would fall down in a cloud of dry rot or be burnt down by Emily, when the outer kitchen door banged open. She looked up to the refreshing sight of two smiling faces. Ruth’s sister and brother, Olive who was thirteen, and Paul, just eleven, burst into the room, swinging conkers on strings and shouting in unison about entirely different subjects. Both were rosy-cheeked from the November air, and deliriously excited by whatever village games they had joined and Jane, for one, thought that in spite of Ruth’s protestations the country was already doing them a world of good.

  ‘Mum, I’ve met a super girl, her name’s Ailey and she has a pony.’

  ‘A cart-horse,’ said Paul. ‘And she’s really frightfully stupid. She doesn’t know anything. Eeh by gum,’ he said in a splendid mimicry that his father must have envied, ‘nowt but kintra yokels.’

  ‘Don’t mock the afflicted,’ said Ruth. But Paul grinned, opened his
mouth wide and began to sing in a delightfully clear childish voice,

  On Ilkley moor bar t’at

  On Ilkley moor bar t’at

  On Ilk-ley moor bar t’aat.

  He danced around happily, his face rubbery with expression, swinging his strung conker in an arc about his head. ‘Eeh, Da’, what’s t’ matter wi’ floor?’ he cried, ‘’s all weet.’

  ‘I think,’ said Jane to Philip, ‘the lad could teach his father a thing or two.’

  Emily flared up suddenly and shouted, ‘That’s enough now, Paul. It isn’t funny any longer. Just speak English like the rest of us.’ She sighed, and turned to Jane with a wan smile. ‘Oh, do let’s talk about something other than Yorkshire. How’s the North? How’s Heidi? Has she opened the new inn yet?’ She looked with pointed sourness at her husband and added, ‘I do hope it’s nothing like this.’

  ‘Well, my dear,’ Jane soothed, ‘all old buildings have their little quirks. I dare say Heidi will have a few wrinkles to iron out, too.’ Even as she said it she was inwardly thanking heaven that Heidi had had the foresight to have her small property in Strathconon thoroughly surveyed before she, with Jane’s financial assistance, went through with the purchase. At least there weren’t going to be two architectural disasters in the Hardacre ménage just now. Heidi herself, though perhaps Jane’s closest friend, was no doubt the most distant member of the Hardacre circle, not family at all, but linked to them all just the same by a peculiar turn of fate, now almost forgotten by everyone. Jane doubted that Ruth, for instance, could even explain what relation her ‘Aunt Heidi’ bore to any of them, or why, since 1935, she had been part of their lives.

  For Jane, the connection with Heidi Muller was much older, and much deeper. Although they, too, met for the first time in a Munich ghetto in that year, Jane and Heidi had known of each other since the Great War, and had corresponded regularly throughout the twenties and early thirties. As was natural to women of their era, they had met through their husbands, who were both naval officers, Jane’s in the Royal Navy, and Heidi’s in the Forces of the Kaiser. It might be supposed that two such gentlemen, on the eve of the Great War, would be unlikely to speak, much less form a friendship, the ties of which would hold for forty years. But in truth, on the spring day in 1913 when Sir Ian Macgregor and his youthful bride entertained Lt Karl Muller of the German armoured cruiser Scharnhorst, aboard HMS Monmouth, riding at anchor off Hong Kong, no one knew themselves to be on the eve of anything. They were two small cogs in the world’s two mightiest navies and each, proud of their own and respectful of the other’s, regarded themselves as natural kin, with more in common than ever appeared to hold them apart. They had formed that sudden, brief, quicksilver sort of alliance that can occur between men of divergent backgrounds but common aims. Addresses were exchanged, promises made, healths drunk and an agreement made to surely meet again.

  For the two men the meeting, or at least a meeting of the kind they envisioned, for they eventually ‘met’ indeed, in a grimmer way entirely, was never to come about. Scharnhorst sailed suddenly, leaving Jane and Ian with an odd feeling of a companionship untimely ended, and when next the two ships drew near together, it was October of 1914, in the South Pacific, over angry guns. Monmouth was the first victim but Scharnhorst, within days, met a similar fate in the South Atlantic. The two men who had been friends in Hong Kong now both lay in the Antarctic waters for ever, each leaving behind in their warring countries a young widow and fatherless child. Jane’s Peter was born in November of that year, and in June of 1914 Heidi Muller, who had shared at a distance her husband’s pleasure in his Scottish friends, had given birth to a son, whom his parents named Ian after Ian Macgregor. Throughout the year letters had been exchanged, letters filled increasingly with sorrow as war between their native lands loomed closer. Now, with both their husbands dead, the two women, one English, one a German Jewess, instinctively grasped and held the one link with their lost loves, a friendship that they refused to allow to die. Throughout the war they boldly, and each against the wishes of their husbands’ disapprovingly patriotic families, sent letters through neutral Switzerland. After the war, Jane leapt at the chance to help Heidi, struggling in the chaos of her defeated nation, by sending parcels of clothing and food. Later, as years passed, she wrote encouraging letters, trying to comfort the young widow who found that in the new Germany, her status as honoured war-widow was more and more eroded by the acid of anti-Semitism. Concerned, but in truth not fully comprehending, Jane kept her steady stream of cheery letters and useful packages flowing until one grim day in 1933 first one, and then all the others were returned with a grim official stamp: No Such Person At This Address. At first assuming a mistake, later, something worse, Jane began a long campaign to learn the fate of her vanished friend. Letters, inquiries, visits to consulates, all in the end led nowhere. Eventually, with the feisty determination that had become part of her since Ian Macgregor’s death, she packed her bag and with her son, now the young Lord Macgregor, set off for Munich in search of Heidi herself. It was a journey of discovery in many senses, where Jane saw with her own eyes what Heidi in her pathetic, frightened letters had been trying to tell her. It led in the end to the ghetto where Munich’s Jews, Heidi among them, had been herded. She was alone, in desperate poverty, her young son Ian long since taken from her to some unknown prison for political offenders. Thus the two women, whose husbands had long ago been briefly friends, met for the first time and embraced like sisters, in a shabby room, on the eve of yet another war between their nations. Finding all official channels closed to them, Jane and Peter Macgregor smuggled Heidi across the Swiss border and home to England and to Hardacres, where for some time she had stayed, before moving North to the Macgregor estate with Jane. She had remained there ever since, saying she felt close to everyone she had lost there. She insisted on working, and had supported herself modestly by cooking in a local inn for some years until, with Jane’s ready assistance, she had, just this year, set herself up in a business of her own, a German-style hostelry that promised hospitality among the Scottish hills with the added pleasure of good European cuisine. Jane had no doubt that she would succeed, certainly much less doubt, anyhow, than about Philip Barton’s enterprise in the East Riding.

  ‘I’m so glad for her,’ Emily said with genuine feeling. ‘I know it’s been what she’s wanted for years. You are a dear, Aunt Jane. And coming down here to rescue us, as well. I’m really most terribly grateful.’ Emily was brightening under the effects of the warmth of the cheery fire in the old-fashioned kitchen grate, and the tot of whisky that Philip had poured in her tea. ‘I suppose I am being rather a moan, aren’t I?’ she smiled at Philip whose face relaxed into a broad hopeful grin. ‘It’s really not such a bad place. The bar is lovely with the inglenook. And at least I have Philip and my children around me.’ She paused, thoughtful. ‘I could just weep for Heidi. Is she still trying to find him?’

  Jane nodded. ‘She always will be, I know. I’d be the same. I’m really far more fortunate. I mean, over Peter. Of course, I never …’ she paused, swallowing a sudden surge of emotion, ‘I never saw his body, never could stand at a graveside … but I did know at least for certain that he was dead. They saw him go down. I spoke, even, to the pilot who watched. I knew he couldn’t have survived. It was terrible to hear, but at least I have that certainty. But Heidi, poor Heidi, will spend the rest of her days looking for her son. We all know he’s dead. How could he not be dead? He was probably dead in 1933, the day the SS took him away. What chance would he have had? A nineteen-year-old, a Jew and a political offender. She had no contact from that day, and I’ve always thought they simply killed him. Oh, Heidi knows too. She must know, in her heart. But until she has proof she will keep searching, and any proof there ever was was certainly lost in the war years.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s happier that way?’ Ruth ventured, her young face reflecting an innocent curiosity over these events of another era. ‘Perhaps it’s nicer believing he’s
alive.’

  Jane shook her head sharply, ‘No, my dear. It is not nicer. It is a slow twisting of a knife. That is all.’

  ‘Did she hear again from the Red Cross?’ Philip asked. ‘I thought she was following some lead.’

  ‘Yes, she heard. It was another Muller. And his first name was Isaac. The initials were all that they had in common. He was dead, too, anyhow.’ Jane shook her head abruptly, not wishing to think any more, just now, about Heidi’s hopeless search. ‘Do tell, Emily, how is Maud?’

  Emily laughed. ‘Battening down the hatches, I suspect. Mother’s coming to visit.’

  ‘Is she indeed?’ Jane said, interested. ‘I thought she’d sworn off Hollywood.’ She smiled to herself. Helen Hardacre, Joe’s widow and Emily’s mother, was possibly the only human being on earth for whom Jane had not a whit of sympathy. In fact, her own harshness towards the woman whom she had always felt had driven her oldest brother to a suicide’s grave, quite frightened her. From time to time she tried, mentally, to dredge up the memories of Helen’s past, her early youth as a factory girl, child of a brutal father, victim of one of Joe’s own factories’ harsh regime, to justify the woman she had become. But she was never able to make the trick work. After all, her own logic returned, Mary Hardacre too was the child of a brutal home, and as misused as Helen had ever been, and Mary was kind and gentle all her days.

  ‘Yes,’ Emily said. ‘We all thought that. It seems, you know, that the reason for that fracas at Dinardo’s was Brannigan chasing some little blonde into the kitchens or some such place in full view of the assembled company. I mean, he is a fool. Surely he should know, if anyone, that Mother will stand for anything but public humiliation. You’d think he’d know which side his bread was buttered.’ She stopped short suddenly, aware of the curious eyes of her children.