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

by CL Skelton

  Sam said, ‘If you’re going to be here, you might as well be useful.’ He indicated a stack of his extensive library and a paper carton. Mick grumbled but got down on his knees and began packing books, one-handed, in place. He paused now and again, looking at titles and puffing at his pipe.

  ‘You read these things?’ he said suddenly.

  Sam looked up over the painting he was carefully wrapping in hessian. ‘No, I just use them to prop the walls up,’ he said with a grimace, wiping dust from his face. ‘Of course I read them.’

  Mick nodded, resuming packing. ‘You’re brighter than you look,’ he said, finishing the box, and reaching for string to tie it. Sam grinned and said nothing. He was getting used to Mick.

  Mick rocked back on his heels, looking at the next stack of books. He said, ‘Aye, lad, we’re going to miss you.’

  Sam was busy. He spoke mildly, still carefully packing the painting. ‘I’m not going that far.’

  Mick laughed softly, chomping his pipe-stem, ‘Yes, you are. Further than you think.’

  He caught Sam’s attention then, and he said slowly, getting to his feet, ‘It’s just a house, Mick.’

  Mick smiled wisely, looking up at him, ‘Aye, lad. Just a house. An’ your sayin’ that says just how far you’re going.’

  He seemed quite unperturbed, but Sam was deeply disturbed because there was something unbudging and final about the way it was said. Eventually he asked softly, laying the wrapped painting on the desk, ‘Mick, do I have to lose my friends because I’m going home?’

  Mick was very thoughtful. He wasn’t about to make a ready kind answer that he couldn’t keep to. At last he said slowly, ‘Nay, lad, happen not.’

  ‘Will you come to see me?’

  Mick laughed, waving his one hand in a light-hearted gesture of fending. He said, ‘Hold on, I didn’t say nothing about that.’

  ‘Will you come to see me?’ Sam said again. He was not laughing, and his eyes were immensely sad.

  Mick nodded again, softening, ‘Aye, I’ll come. If’n you let me sit in t’ kitchen, like we done once before.’

  Sam agreed. He knew he had to, and that was as far as Mick would ever come, and then but rarely, to the kitchen door of Hardacres, but no further. He returned, saddened, to his work, thinking how every step of his life seemed to cost him some unexpected price that he had found hard to pay.

  ‘When’s the big wedding?’ Mick asked then, lightly, as if unconsciously to underline the point.

  ‘December,’ Sam said, distracted yet, bent over his books.

  ‘Where’ll it be?’ Mick said. He seemed not to notice, or not to acknowledge, Sam’s change of mood.

  ‘Oh, London, of course.’

  Mick puffed at his pipe. ‘Wouldn’t uv thought uv course,’ he said.

  Sam looked up, startled. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Who lives in London?’ Mick said. ‘Bride? Bride’s parents? Groom?’ He shrugged, refilling his pipe. Sam hadn’t exactly thought about that. London had seemed obvious. Janet was a London person, when she wasn’t being a New York or a Hollywood person. She belonged to big places, with big names and bright lights. But her parents, Albert and Maud, did maintain a small house outside Scarborough, for when they weren’t on the road. Jan’s mother lived in Scotland. Jan himself made his home in Hull, when he wasn’t in London at the Dean Street flat, which was really Sam’s anyhow. He had to acknowledge then that London was only logical by default.

  ‘There didn’t seem to be anywhere else,’ he said. ‘It’s to be a Register Office wedding anyhow and they’ll have the reception in one of the big hotels. Claridges, I suspect. It’s Janet’s favourite.’

  Mick relit his pipe. He was sitting on the floor amongst stacks of Sam’s books, occasionally placing another in a crate. ‘Didn’t think your kind uv folk had weddings in hotels,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean, my kind of folk,’ Sam said testily. Mick was unimpressed.

  He said, ‘Big house folk. Now don’t get uppity. That’s what you are an’ that’s what you’ve always been. Never mindin’ this little sabbatical you’ve taken the last seven, eight years.’

  ‘Where’d you learn words like that?’ Sam said, surprised.

  ‘Talking to you. Answer the question.’

  Sam leant back against the clawed feet of the big old desk and said slowly, getting Mick’s gist at last, ‘Now wait just a minute. I know what you’re aiming at and the answer is no. I’ve done my bit for King and Country where this little love-match is concerned. I think I’ve behaved pretty damned well, if you don’t mind me saying. I’m even standing up for him at the wedding, like the perfect gentleman you say I’m supposed to be. But that’s it, final. No more.’

  ‘Gentleman, my arse,’ said Mick. ‘You went harin’ down to London like a bat out a bluidy hell, all set to beat the hide off uv Jan when you found out. An’ don’t deny it, because I know all about it. And t’ only reason you didn’t was because he beat the hide off uv you first. So don’t tell me you’ve done yer honourable bit. Happen you owe him a favour yet.’

  ‘Happen I damn well don’t,’ Sam said. He picked up the nearest book at hand and threw it at Mick, who caught it agilely in his big hand. He dropped it on to his broad knee and turned it cover upwards. He grinned devilishly and read aloud, ‘Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ. Guess you haven’t read this one yet.’

  ‘Go to bloody hell, Mick. Get out of my flat, and come back when you’ve learned to stay out of other people’s affairs.’

  Mick just sat, grinning, waiting perhaps to be thrown out.

  ‘God damn,’ Sam said. He reached up to the desk and pulled down the telephone, setting it on the floor. He dialled the London number of the Dean Street flat where he suspected, correctly, he’d find his business partner. ‘Jan,’ he said, ‘yes, fine, thank you. Jan, I’ve been thinking,’ he looked murderously at Mick. ‘Seems a damn shame to spend money on hotels and all when I’ve got so much room at Hardacres. It is rather a lovely house for a party … of course I mean the wedding, Jan, what else?’ He waved an angry fist at Mick who was laughing so much he could barely hear Jan’s response. ‘Of course you can. You must,’ he said, with sudden conviction that had nothing to do with Mick. ‘You’re family.’ There was a silence while Jan spoke and Mick chortled behind his hand. Sam said finally, ‘Well, treat it as a wedding present. You’re damned well not getting another, you know. I mean, I’ve already given you the bride.’ He laughed then, softly, at something Jan said, and quietly hung up the phone.

  ‘Right, you lopsided bastard,’ he said to Mick. ‘Now get out.’

  Mick got to his feet, grinning. ‘Was going anyhow,’ he said ambling to the door. ‘Too damn much work around here, any road.’

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ Sam asked sourly.

  ‘Nowt,’ Mick said, still grinning. He raised his one hand and lightly touched his forelock. ‘Mr Hardacre. Sir.’

  He went out, and closed the door behind him with a respectful, gentle click.

  Three days before the wedding a foot and a half of snow fell on the East Riding. No one minded, other than Noel, who spent the time trudging up to the hills bringing feed to stranded cattle and sheep. Most of the rest of the family were already gathered at Hardacres for Jan and Janet’s wedding, and for Christmas, and those that weren’t were ferried in from the nearest unsnowy railway stations and airports by a fleet of varied Hardacre vehicles. The old house was graced with a magnificent blanket of white, and the beech woods were a fairy land.

  Sam found a fir tree on the estate to decorate for Christmas and he and Jan went out for it through the snow, with Janet gamely driving the tractor, unbeknownst to Noel. They felled their tree and dragged it home, stopping along the way for a three-sided snow-fight that left them as snow-caked and delighted as playing children. The tree was tall enough to reach half-way to the roof of the galleried great hall, and they set it up there with immense difficulty, burying the fine old rugs in leftover
snow, and nearly wiping out the ancestral portraits in the process. Vanessa, busy draping holly around everything like a deranged woodland muse, stopped and stared as the tree swung, swaying, into position and said, surveying the general damage, ‘If Father could see this he’d be turning in his grave.’

  Sam was on a ladder half-way up to the roof, draping electric lights around the tree. He thought a moment and shouted down. ‘That would take real talent, Vanessa.’

  She sniffed, shocked, and hung holly over the portrait of her mother over the hall fireplace, eyeing it morosely. Christmas always made Vanessa wistful, a turn of sentiment hard to imagine with her pink-cheeked hearty face. Christmas, likewise, made her brother Noel thoroughly bloody-minded. But then, almost everything did.

  Janet came in, drying her blonde hair with a towel and cast a critical eye at the tree. ‘Sam,’ she said, with shocked disappointment, ‘not artificial lights. You can’t have artificial lights. We must have candles. They’re so traditional. I insist.’

  He paused in draping the lights and looked at the tree and briefly around the hall. He said, ‘My dear, if you’d just paid for this house what I just paid for this house, I don’t think you’d fill it full of candles and dry tinder.’

  Jan leaned against the wall, assessing the slight list of the tree as if it were a troubled ship and said, ‘Have the candles, my friend. You’re thoroughly over-insured. It might be the best solution.’

  ‘You been looking at the books again?’ Jan nodded, smiling. Sam said, ‘Okay, maybe candles.’ He thought a moment, still adjusting the cable, ‘Or maybe a little gelignite along the west wing. Think you could drop her nice and even, Jan, not ruin my great-grandmother’s roses?’

  Vanessa stared, and whispered in a little-girl voice, ‘Sam? Are you serious, Sam?’

  He laughed, climbing down the ladder, eyeing his tree. ‘Serious as death and taxes, my love.’

  But he wasn’t. He was loving his house as he had never loved it, filling it full of people so that at nights the windows blazed gaily out over the dark gardens and woodlands, and that mystical sense of secret revelry hung over it all. It was meant for that, he knew. To be filled with people, and music and celebration. It should shelter as many as its rooms would allow; all its fires should be lit and burn every day, every one of its myriad chimneys should be blessed with smoke. It was impossible, of course, but he would try. It was a house meant for many and, without many, working together to keep it warm and living, it would slowly, and surely, die.

  Janet Chandler’s wedding was the sort of social event so renowned that it must be secret. Janet was a very famous young woman, which fact, seeing her now in faded dungarees and an old jumper of Jan’s, Sam found a little hard to imagine. From the moment that he and she had become lovers, he had lost that screen image of her that was the only way she existed for so large a world of strangers. But that world of strangers was still out there, and at times like this she must be shielded from them.

  The banns had been posted in Driffield three weeks before, which rather made secrecy impossible, but they had come upon a plan to switch to the Register Office at Beverley at the last moment, and send a decoy party of guests to the wrong one, for good measure. Understanding authorities, and a little family influence, had done the trick, and Vanessa had volunteered to undertake the subterfuge, warming to the idea of ‘throwing them off the scent’, with huntswoman’s verve. Sam kept envisioning a pink-coated and mounted Gray contingent leading a cantering clutch of journalists and movie fans over the hedgerows. The wedding itself was, of necessity, to be strictly private; the bride and groom, their witnesses, who were Sam and Emily Barton, and no one else. The real party would be at home afterwards, with the essential and secretive formalities finished. Sam had thought he would have to lock the wrought-iron gates at the foot of the driveway for the second time in a hundred years, and both because of Janet Chandler. In the end, the snow sorted all that.

  On the morning of the wedding Noel came stomping in, shaking a shower of white off his coat and announced, with his usual malicious delight, ‘Better you than me, mates. No one’s getting down that road today.’

  ‘You’re not serious,’ Sam said. He went out and stood at the back of the house, watching the snow pile up in the courtyard, softening the lines of the Mews and garages.

  ‘Fancy a run up the hill with a few bales of hay like I been doing, to find out?’

  Sam grinned, for once equally malicious, ‘If you’d kept the house and sold the farm, maybe that’s what I’d be doing. Right now, I’m going to sit by the fire.’

  ‘Bastard,’ said Noel, and went stamping off, work-dogs yapping at his heels, into the snow.

  ‘He’s right,’ Sam said to Janet, re-entering the kitchen. She was sitting by the big Rayburn, warming her toes. She was in a dressing-gown, a sensible one made of wool, not the sort of filmy thing she used at one time to wander through hotel bedrooms. ‘He can’t be right,’ she said sharply, glaring out of the windows at the falling snow.

  ‘It can’t do this. I’m getting married today.’

  Sam grinned, ‘It looks like an Act of God, my dear. I think you’d better just come to bed with me instead.’ She straightened slowly and put her feet on the floor. She stared at him for a long time and he fancied he saw for a moment a flicker of the old passion, but it vanished in an instant and he knew he’d not see it again.

  ‘Aside,’ she said, ‘from being blasphemous, that was in lousy taste. I’m getting married today. If you say that tomorrow morning, it will be an invitation to adultery. And that, my dear, is where I draw the line.’ She was deadly serious and he looked down at the floor, chastened.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. He leaned over her and gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek. ‘I stand corrected. Anyhow, tomorrow you’ll be on your honeymoon, and you’ve not told me where you’re going.’

  ‘Can you blame me?’ she said. She rose and stared out of the window, with growing desperation. ‘Why doesn’t it damned well stop?’ she demanded. ‘We’ll never get there in this.’

  ‘I’ll get you there,’ he said.

  And he did, too. He got them there in the Hardacre Land-Rover, with Jan and himself digging it out at intervals of every half-mile or so, and Janet at the wheel. The bride wore dungarees and wellington boots and the groom wore the same. Nobody carried flowers, though Sam did tuck a sprig of mistletoe into Janet’s woollen fisherman’s cap, to give him an extra excuse to kiss the bride. All their elaborate plans and evasions were totally unnecessary; theirs was the only vehicle moving in the East Riding that day. They got back to the house at five-thirty in the afternoon, to find their guests already thoroughly cheerful, having broached the champagne an hour before out of boredom. Albert Chandler, aside from providing his daughter, provided the music as well, and the central core of his once-famous band, now an aged but well-weathered group, performed in the great hall. It was all very late-thirties, with an adventurous leap occasionally up to about 1944. The young stood around amazed, and everybody Sam’s age and over got frightfully sentimental. But Paul Barton, to his uncle’s worshipful delight, stood up in front of the dinner-jacketed ensemble and sang every old number in the book, in the crooner style his parents adored. Paul could sing anything. Emily and Philip got so drunk they fell briefly in love again and went off to a bedroom to celebrate.

  They weren’t the only ones. It was rapidly apparent that, since every road in the county was blocked, nobody was going anywhere that night, not even the bride and groom. Sam didn’t care. There was room for everyone. In the end, Jan and Janet spent their wedding night under his roof, and she would ever afterwards cheerfully, and publicly maintain he’d come along on their honeymoon out of spite.

  Jan was a little shocked at that, as he would always be a little shocked at times by his wife, who came floating down the beautiful staircase, after changing from her snow-covered trousers, in a magnificent gown of brilliant red. ‘I’m an honest tart,’ she said to anyone passing. ‘And i
t’s Christmas, anyway.’ Sam danced with her in the galleried great hall of his house, beneath the Christmas tree, and they made, as always, a stunning couple.

  He saw his mother watching him with a faintly suspicious eye, but he only grinned and circled the floor with his lady again. She knew, and he knew, that there’d be nothing more between them as long as they lived, whatever the world might suppose. In the end, he got immensely but cheerfully drunk, less out of past sorrows than in celebration of Harry’s still splendid stock of champagne, and had no recollection at all of climbing the stairs to bed.

  He woke, some time in a late winter dawn, in the old four-poster bed in the master bedroom of Hardacres with, to his amazement, a young lady in his arms. He drew back from her and stared, at first not even knowing who she was. But then he recalled her as a girl from the village who had served the wedding supper. She was very young, very pretty, and she certainly looked contented enough. He lay for a moment, bemused and sleepily guilty. Then, begging the pardons, simultaneously, of Harry Hardacre and Holy Mother Church, he stretched lazily, wrapped his arms about her soft warmth, and went luxuriously back to sleep.

  It was, after all, a country house tradition of its own.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The small car, a bright red Austin Mini, slowed carefully as it approached the break in the high brick wall that fronted the Driffield road at the edge of the great estate. It came to a halt as the driver studied the big black wrought-iron gates that stood open before the driveway, long grass grown around the rusty hinges. Had the gates been closed she would have just continued, but they were so casually open. Cautiously, like an inquisitive puppy, the little red car nosed its way through the gates and started up the drive. It was November, and the tall elms were shedding their leaves in a soft brown rain. Here and there one stood stark and bare, tribute to the elm disease spreading over England. She looked at them sadly as she drove.