The Last Baronet

by Caroline Akrill

  The next day Tony could hardly walk. He lurched round the office in agony, quite unable to sit at his desk. He sent his secretary out to buy him a soft cushion. It didn’t make any difference. His thighs and posterior took a full week to recover.

  He had to invent a gym membership to explain it away to Mary.

  For his lesson the following week he wore an old anorak instead of the Melton Full Hunt Coat.

  The week after that he took the velvet cover off the skull cap.

  TWENTY SEVEN

  ‘Are you ready for this?’ Nicola asked.

  The solemn little person with pigtails standing beside Anna nodded. Anna hoped she was doing the right thing, springing it on everyone like this. But Nicola had thought it the best thing to do. Get it over with. Kill two birds with one stone. Well, the first stone would be easier to cast than the second.

  Nicola opened the door.

  In what was now the residents’ lounge, with its well-upholstered sofas and coffee tables, sat several people: Vivian and Lavinia, Nicola and Rupert, Len and Sadie. Without any hesitation the small person with pigtails went in first; positively dived in. The lounge might have been a swimming pool on the hottest of days. She had been waiting for this moment. Living for it. Counting the days. She was wearing her favourite white fleece top and the leopard print tights she considered her best, her very best and most suited to the occasion, together with her new patent leather ankle boots. She seemed to have taken charge. She looked around at the gathering. Assessing. Deciding. She was six years old.

  ‘This is Grace,’ Anna said. ‘My daughter. She’s been in foster care until I could provide a home for her. I thought it was time, well, more than time perhaps, that you met.’ It sounded far too matter of fact for such a momentous introduction.

  Eyes widened. Grace beamed. Rupert stood up, opened his mouth, then closed it and sat down again. His face was ashen. Even Sadie, who had got to her feet in welcome, didn’t know what to make of it. She sat down abruptly and looked at Len for reassurance.

  Everyone appeared to have been struck dumb. ‘Perhaps we had better introduce ourselves,’ Nicola suggested.

  ‘But I already know who everybody is,’ Grace protested. ‘I could tell you, if you like. It could be a sort of a game, couldn’t it? A guessing game?’

  ‘We talked about you all the time,’ Anna explained. ‘We spoke all the time about Rushbroke… about family.’

  ‘Why don’t you do that, Grace.’ Len was the first to find his voice. ‘Welcome to Rushbroke.’ He looked at his son’s anguished face. Unexplained absences, he thought. Oh My God.

  Grace pointed to Nicola. ‘I already know my Aunt Nicola and she trains horses. I’m having riding lessons and when I don’t fall off so much, we are going riding together, but I won’t be riding the horse that runs through hedges.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Nicola said. ‘We shall find you a nice quiet pony.’

  Remembering that it was rude to point, Grace went over to where Vivian was sitting and touched his knee. ‘You are a baronet, which is very special, and you are my Grandfather, and if you are not quite that, then I would really, really like you to be.’

  Vivian tried to smile but found his mouth wouldn’t move. He nodded.

  Tears were pouring down Lavinia’s cheeks. She looked at Vivian in wonder. She said ‘Vivian, you found her, you darling man, you absolute darling, darling man.’ She held out her arms to Grace. ‘Come here, come to me my dearest, dearest child; my own dearest lost child, come home to me at last.’

  Grace looked at Anna. Anna nodded. Quite desperately she wanted to say to Lavinia, no! I am your lost child! Yet what good would it do? And if Grace could open a window in Lavinia’s mind, however briefly, however skewed the view, what did it matter if the homecoming, the welcome, skipped a generation?

  Grace kissed Lavinia dutifully on the cheek. From the pocket of her fleece she produced a tissue and dabbed gently at her Grandmother’s cheeks. ‘I’ve been having piano lessons for ages,’ she said. ‘We could play duet, if you like.’ Lavinia put her arms around the child and held her tightly; too tightly. Anna could not move. It was Nicola who detached Grace from Lavinia’s grip. ‘Let her finish the guessing game and then you can have her back,’ she promised. Lavinia took Vivian’s hands and raised them to her cheek. ‘You, dear, dear, man. Thank you. Thank You.’ Vivian, bewildered, looked to Anna for guidance.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she told him. ‘Whatever she believes is fine.’

  Grace, in the meantime, was eyeing Len; considering him, her head on one side. ‘You must be my Uncle Len, because this is Sadie, and Sadie will be my friend because Sadie is friends with everybody.’ Grace knelt down and put her arms around Sadie who gave her a large slobbering lick.

  Grace moved onto the last person in the room. ‘And you are Rupert.’ She looked round the room just to be sure. ‘You must be Rupert because there’s nobody else left.’

  ‘I’m Rupert,’ he agreed in a strained voice. ‘Although at this particular moment I would much prefer to be someone else.’ He looked across at Anna, not vengefully as might have been expected, but in devastation. He looked absolutely destroyed; totally heartbroken. ‘To be perfectly honest, Grace, I would prefer to be anyone else in the whole world, rather than me.’

  Anna bit her lip. Two birds with one stone and this was the final one. Was it too late? Was Nicola’s confidence misplaced? She had no idea what Rupert’s reaction was going to be.

  Grace looked at Rupert in concern. ‘Can’t you just be Rupert for a minute? Because I can’t ask my question if you are going to be someone else.’ She looked anxiously at Anna, who nodded encouragement. ‘You see if you really are Rupert, Mummy wants me to ask if you might like to be my Daddy. Because I don’t actually have one. And most people do.’

  Having said this and waited for an answer that failed to materialise, Grace looked round the room in consternation and then at Anna with accusation; her face puckered with disappointment; with the injustice of promises previously made and suddenly revealed to be false. ‘You said they’d be pleased!’

  ‘They are pleased!’ After the first stunned moment of incredulity, Rupert had shot to his feet. ‘We are pleased! We are all incredibly pleased! We are so bloody pleased we are bloody speechless!’

  ‘Then why is everybody crying?’

  TWENTY EIGHT

  It was evening. They sat alone at the plank table holding hands across it. Grace, cock-a-hoop about her new family, had been returned to her foster home to tell her somewhat bemused foster parents all about her day. They would be devastated to lose her but had known it was going to happen and were prepared for it. They would not lose touch; there would be visits back and forth, hopefully for a lifetime.

  ‘I know I should have told you earlier, but I didn’t know how I felt about you, not really; not until Nicola…’

  ‘I have a lot to thank Nicola for,’ Rupert said ruefully. ‘I’m sorry. I was lonely and unhappy and Nicola has a knack; she made it better, at least for a while. I could almost believe she was you. Now I know why.’

  Anna wondered if Nicola had also made it better for the corn merchant, the vet and the blacksmith, but would not tell Rupert about this until much later. ‘I don’t blame you. I was at fault. I should have explained the situation. I should have been more open but there was a lot going on.’

  ‘There were a lot of secrets. Too many. I had no idea. Looking back, knowing what I know now, I should have seen it; I should have realised there was a bloody good reason for you to do what you did. I must have been blind.’

  ‘You thought I was out of my mind.’

  ‘Whatever I thought, and sometimes it wasn’t good, I never stopped loving you, Anna. Not for a moment.’

  ‘I’m very lucky. I know it now.’

  ‘I’m the lucky one. I have you, and you, Anna, are all I have ever wanted. I even have a family, and we will have a house. I can hardly believe it.’

  ‘We are all a family.’
And they were. It had been Anna’s dream, this family. And now the dream had become a reality. Lavinia, Vivian, Nicola, Anna, Grace, Rupert, Len, even Sadie. They were a family. ‘And this is a family business.’

  ‘And we have to make it work. We will make it work. We won’t fail, Anna, I promise you.’

  ‘The only thing that still worries me is Nicola and the stable development. I know we have to do it. She knows we have to do it. But she won’t talk about it. It’s so hard on her. Everyone else has gained, but Nicola has lost even what she had. It isn’t fair. I broke my promise.’

  ‘I’ll talk to her. See if I can persuade her to let us build her a new stable block. Nicola is a bit like you though, in that respect; she’s deep. Nicola is not easy to read; it’s hard to get under the surface. Anyway, leave it to me. I need to talk to her anyway to make sure things are OK between us. I want to thank her. I probably owe her an apology too – an explanation anyway.’

  ‘I doubt it. Nicola knew what she was doing. She knows how it was. Bringing Grace here today, introducing her like that; getting her to ask the question; it was all Nicola’s idea.’

  ‘Grace is wonderful. Grace is brilliant. She is going to be so happy here. Spoiled rotten probably.’

  ‘And you really don’t mind that…’

  ‘That I’m not her biological father? No. Grace is part of you; Grace is part of our story; yours and mine. She comes as part of the package. Dad is besotted. I’ve never seen him as happy in years. He’s absolutely made up.’

  ‘Did he tell you he’s going to do up the gardener’s cottage?’

  ‘He did. I’ve pulled rank and told him he’s got to do the lodge first. He’ll keep the team working on the cottages until we get the final detailed plans through for the development. It’s all worked out brilliantly.’

  ‘So now there’s just Nicola.’

  ‘Yes. There’s just Nicola.’

  *

  David Williamson was on his way to the plucking shed with the wages when he heard the unmistakable whine of a chainsaw coming from the direction of his Christmas tree plantation. Having already steeled himself to enter the plucking shed (the stench of entrails and hot wax never failed to turn his stomach) he was rather anxious to get it over with, but the sound of the chainsaw stopped him in his tracks.

  It was a late December afternoon and dusk, but there was light enough for him to look down across the lane into the plantation in time to observe a magnificent specimen of Norwegian Spruce (left standing because it was considered too large for the domestic market) begin first to vibrate, then to rock violently from side to side, before falling to the ground with an audible crash very near the spot where Sir Vivian Rushbroke of Rushbroke was standing alongside his ancient Rover, to which was attached a flatbed trailer previous utilised by the Hon. Nicola to hawk stable manure around the local gardening community.

  This was not the first outrage of the day. Earlier, David Williamson had watched through his binoculars as the woman with the intense gaze and the frightening make-up who told fortunes at the annual church fete, assisted by the village mute, cut great boughs of berried holly from his trees, and dragged away severed branches of ivy from their trunks. The ivy was perhaps not entirely to be regretted, being parasitic, invasive and actively damaging to its host, but it was his ivy nevertheless, as was the berried holly his holly, and the Norwegian spruce currently being manhandled on to the trailer by the village mute assisted by a grey-haired man with a black Labrador at his heels, his tree. There was no doubt about this at all in David Williamson’s mind. Right was on his side. The law of the land was on his side. In theory it should have been a simple matter to obtain justice but in practice the local constabulary were unhelpful, to say the very least, and when it came to tackling the Rushbrokes face to face he knew himself to be totally inadequate. A confrontation with even one Rushbroke, the Hon. Nicola for example, caused him to become intensely overwrought, rendered him almost completely inarticulate, and inevitably left him feeling deeply distressed. As a result, all he could do was stand back and watch as his property was openly plundered and violated. It was an impossible situation, but when it came to taking direct action against the Rushbrokes, David Williamson was helpless.

  Of course, David Williamson seethed. David Williamson twitched, trembled and positively shook with anger. Of course, his instinct was to jump into his Land Rover, race down the drive, burst into the plantation and challenge the thieving scoundrels on the spot; his instinct was to make a fight of it. But his physical health and mental state were delicately balanced. He dare not risk it. After all, he knew from previous experience that such a confrontation would be to no avail. He knew in advance what their argument would be, how they would protest that although he, David Williamson, now owned the land, the holly trees had been purchased and planted by a previous generation of Rushbrokes, and as for the Christmas tree plantation, why the infant trees had been planted by Sir Vivian’s own hand within the last decade, so how could they, the Rushbrokes of Rushbroke, custodians of the land for centuries, possibly be begrudged what was practically theirs by divine right?

  David Williamson watched as the tree was secured on the trailer. He watched the old car draw away accompanied by some energetic acceleration and a plume of black smoke from the exhaust. David Williamson watched as his magnificent Norwegian spruce made stately progress along the Rushbroke drive. He could see, quite clearly, the pale wound of the trunk where the tree had been amputated several feet from the ground, leaving only a circlet of branches still attached to the root in the plantation.

  Rushbroke Hall looked enchanting. Every window in the place appeared to be lit and the warm, golden lights were reflected in the moat which surrounded it. The house looked too good to be true, like a magical stage set or a beautiful illustration in a children’s story book. The Rushbrokes were prospering. What was even more disturbing was that their supporters were multiplying. Furthermore, in a matter of days, when Rushbroke Hall opened as a hotel, there would be guests guaranteed to cause further aggravation; blocking the lanes with their expensive cars, trespassing on his land, trampling his crops, quite possibly accompanied by undisciplined children and dogs who would be allowed to harass his livestock. The situation could only get worse. Whichever way he looked at his situation, David Williamson felt that unquantifiable forces were ranged against him.

  Just thinking about it made him feel ill. He walked unsteadily back across the farmyard and pushed open the back door of the house. In the kitchen he sat down at the formica-topped table which still bore the remains of his lunch; half a sliced white loaf and a lump of corned beef on a saucer. There was a big fly on the corned beef and when he waved an arm at it, it rose languorously into the air and lurched around the room making a loud buzzing sound; an out-of-season fly, dazed and disorientated. Eventually it landed in the sink amidst a pile of unwashed plates and saucepans. Somehow the fly was symbolic of the disgust David Williamson felt when he looked around the kitchen. Of course, he was equally disgusted by the state of every room in the house and one day he would do something about it, but not now, not on a day when his energies were quite depleted; not when he was, physically and mentally, so exceedingly plagued and exercised by the Rushbrokes.

  Wearily, he dropped his head onto the table, his face colliding with the wage packets. He had forgotten about the wages and the realisation that he must steel himself anew to face the plucking shed caused him to groan out loud. He wondered, not for the first time, why he had allowed himself to become a farmer when it was obvious that he was totally unsuited to the life. The truth was that it was the only life he knew. The Williamsons had always been farmers and he had grown up with the expectation that he would be a farmer too. Throughout his schooldays he had worked alongside his father not only during the holidays, but also in the early mornings before school began, and in the evenings after it had closed its doors. Small wonder that he had little aptitude for lessons; he had precious little energy left for school work.<
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  Five years ago, when his father had died, he continued to manage the farm almost by default. His mother had died when he was twelve years old. Never robust, she had sickened gradually and almost imperceptibly, so that by the time anyone realised there was something seriously wrong it was already too late. When he had last visited her in hospital she had been blanched and sunken, sucked dry by the cancer. Encouraged by his father, he had held her hand and been terrified by its lightness, by its insubstantiality, by the way the skin had become fragile and transparent like that of a dragonfly, as if it could barely manage contain the veins and the bones within. His mother had seemed to him to be little more than a husk after threshing; recognisable only in the way that a flower pressed for years between the pages of a book is still a fragile approximation of its living counterpart.

  There had been few women in his life since. One or two adolescent friendships which had amounted to very little. A short-lived relationship with the bad-tempered daughter of a neighbouring farmer. Another with the daughter of the garage proprietor in Rushall St. Mary which had seemed promising until she had proclaimed herself tired of village life and taken herself off to a job in London and a bedsit above an Indian restaurant in Crouch End Broadway. Now and again there had been overtures but he had never followed them up. Last year one of the girls in the plucking shed had taken a shine to him and given him a Christmas present of a festive table decoration she had made herself. She had been shy and embarrassed when she had given it to him, and he had been touched. He had placed it on the mantleshelf above the defunct kitchen range and it was still there. Time had reduced it to three twigs and a scrap of dusty ribbon sticking out of a discoloured cube of crumbling oasis. She hadn’t come back this year.

  In the plucking shed the workers toiled at trestle tables set end to end in an approximation of a production line. They were a robust crowd, and needed to be, with no pretentions as to sensitivity. Most were regulars, familiar faces who turned up year after year, glad of the extra cash in hand to help with the expense of Christmas. That each took a turkey home, albeit a damaged one, was an added bonus.