Blackpeak Station

by Holly Ford

  ‘Taking my name in vain, ladies?’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Jen, helping Charlotte up out of the bath.

  ‘It’s not nice to sneak up on people, you know,’ added Charlotte, having regained her seat.

  Luke grinned. ‘I didn’t sneak — you just didn’t hear me coming.’

  ‘Well, what are you doing here, anyway?’ demanded Jen.

  ‘Looking for the toilet.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘What are you two doing here, more to the point?’

  Charlotte shot a glance at Jen. ‘We’re hiding from the Crompton kids.’

  Luke shuddered. ‘You should try spending an hour and a half in the back of a helicopter with them.’ Sitting down beside Charlotte, he pulled out his phone. ‘I’ve got a couple of episodes of Entourage on here. How about you — any supplies? Magazines? Board games? Whisky?’

  There was a knock on the door.

  Charlotte tried not to laugh. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Charlie? What’s going on in there?’

  ‘Rex? Is that you?’

  ‘Of course it’s bloody me!’

  Jen opened the door. ‘Quick, before anyone sees.’ She pulled him inside.

  Rex looked around in disbelief as she locked the door behind him.

  ‘Here they are,’ he said grimly, some seconds later, ushering them back into the kitchen.

  ‘Where on earth have you been?’

  Charlotte started — she’d never heard Kath speak sharply before in her life. ‘We, um …’

  ‘The toilet was blocked,’ said Luke smoothly, taking his seat. ‘It’s all right, we managed to fix it.’

  Erica shuddered and put down her spoon.

  ‘I don’t like pavlova,’ Jack said.

  ‘Would you like some ice cream?’

  ‘Only if it’s chocolate.’

  ‘Can I go riding now?’ Bella returned to the attack.

  Mindlessly, Charlotte watched Jack deliberately drip chocolate ice cream onto the table.

  ‘Don’t go on about it, Bella,’ Crompton said. ‘Charlie said you could go after lunch, didn’t she?’

  ‘Actually,’ Charlotte took a deep breath, ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea for Bella to ride the horses here. They’re far too strong for her, and they haven’t been ridden for weeks. I wouldn’t want her to get hurt.’ Not fatally, anyway, she added to herself.

  ‘They don’t look dangerous,’ said Crompton uncertainly.

  ‘But she said I could ride!’ howled Bella. ‘She said, didn’t she, Mummy?’ She turned to Charlotte, fixing her with a livid blue gaze. ‘You’re a liar! I hate you!’

  ‘Bella!’ Erica reproved mildly. ‘Don’t be rude.’ She, too, turned to Charlotte. ‘Don’t you think she could go for just a little ride? I’m sure it can’t be dangerous, and she’s been looking forward to it so much.’

  Charlotte restrained her temper with an effort. ‘Well, it’s up to you. Just don’t blame me when she falls off.’

  ‘I never fall off,’ said Bella haughtily. ‘Do I, Mummy?’

  ‘Pavlova?’ said Luke, sliding the plate in Charlotte’s direction with a smile.

  Defeated, Charlotte and Jen set out for the horse paddock after lunch — old Archie was the quietest horse they had, but even so, he had no intention of working today, and it took them fifteen minutes to corner him and get a bridle on him.

  ‘I wanted that one!’ protested Bella, pointing to a dashing young chestnut colt doing a fair impression of a rodeo act in the far corner.

  Charlotte gritted her teeth. ‘This is Archie. He’s a much nicer horse.’

  ‘He’s ugly. I want the chestnut one. Mummy?’

  ‘This one does seem awfully big,’ Erica said doubtfully.

  ‘They’re all big,’ snapped Jen. ‘They’re horses, not little girls’ ponies.’

  ‘I bet I can ride better than you,’ Bella spat. ‘I want the chestnut one.’

  Jen looked at Charlotte. ‘Well, I suppose we could catch Jupiter for you …’

  ‘But he hasn’t been broken in yet, so I don’t think that would be a very good idea,’ said Charlotte, glaring at her.

  Jen smiled sweetly in return and placed the saddle on Archie’s back, giving him a hefty knee in the stomach as he threatened to blow himself out. Part draught, Archie stood at a good eighteen hands. They lifted Bella onto his back. She peered dubiously down at the ground.

  ‘Are you all right, darling?’ asked Erica anxiously.

  ‘Of course I am. Don’t be silly, Mummy.’ And before they could stop her, Bella had dug her little heels hard into Archie’s sides and was off.

  He had his moments, but Archie was a nice-natured horse. Hardly able to feel the small weight on his back, he saw no reason not to get back to what he’d been doing before he was so rudely interrupted. Having walked a few paces, he put his head down and began to graze.

  Prostrated across the horse’s massive neck, Bella squealed, first in fright and then in fury. Watching her saw at Archie’s mouth with the reins, Charlotte felt her own mouth harden. She was just about to intervene when Archie decided he’d had enough. Jerking his head up, causing Bella to drop the reins, he trotted towards the fence. Bella screamed. Alarmed, Archie stopped. Bella catapulted over his neck, landing on her back in the grass. Archie resumed his grazing.

  ‘Oh my God!’ screamed Erica.

  Shaking with laughter, Charlotte tried to reassure her. ‘She’ll be fine, she just landed on the grass.’

  ‘Michael, she’s not moving! Do something! She could have broken her back!’

  Crompton jogged over to his daughter. Charlotte and Jen followed at a more leisurely pace.

  Bella gazed up at them, sobbing her fright. ‘Daddy, I can’t breathe!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Charlotte, as kindly as she could. ‘You’re just winded.’

  ‘Don’t listen to her,’ hissed Bella. ‘It’s all her fault — she did it on purpose.’ The whininess returned to her voice. ‘Help me, Daddy, it hurts, it hurts.’

  ‘Shh now, you’re okay.’ Crompton helped her sit up. ‘Nothing broken, is there? Come on, up you get.’

  ‘I can’t! It hurts too much.’

  ‘Okay, okay, Daddy’ll carry you, then.’

  When Charlotte and Jen got back to the homestead, having finally managed to catch Archie again and unsaddle him, they were informed — rather stonily — that Bella was lying down.

  ‘The poor little thing’s really knocked about,’ added Erica with a glare.

  ‘Well, I did warn you,’ said Charlotte.

  Erica walked out huffily. Crompton sat down at the table and let out a huge sigh.

  ‘Sorry about that. Erica lets the kids get away with murder. Should have listened to you in the first place.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ She summoned a smile. ‘So. What would you like to do for the rest of the afternoon?’

  ‘Well, Erica wanted me to take Bella to the doctor to check for concussion …’ Charlotte stared at him in disbelief. He smiled. ‘… but I managed to talk her out of it. She’ll want to stay with Bella, though, of course. Perhaps you and I could go for a tour of the farm?’

  She jumped at the chance to be rid of the other Cromptons for a few hours. ‘Sure — shall we go now?’

  ‘Me too!’ A shrill shriek rose from under the table. ‘Me too, Daddy!’

  ‘Well,’ said Jen, ‘I’m off to the woolshed. Have a good time.’

  Charlotte stopped the truck at the top of the ridge and climbed out of the cab. The silence of the hills wrapped around her, soothing her frayed nerves. Even Jack was quiet. Having whined constantly for the first half hour of the tour, he’d turned a bit green as the track got rougher, and subsided into the occasional moan of ‘Daddy, I don’t feel well’ before finally going to sleep.

  Crompton, untangling himself carefully from Jack, got out and stood beside her. In front of them, the golden tussock stretched over wave after wave of hills, away and up to the alps, snow-capped agai
nst the blue sky. Already, the valleys were in shadow.

  ‘Christ, it’s barren, isn’t it?’ Crompton shivered. ‘You’d hardly think sheep could live on it.’

  Charlotte was silent.

  ‘Beautiful, though,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘in a way. Great view of the mountains. What’s the heli-skiing like up there?’

  She smiled to herself. It wasn’t for everyone, this country — and just as well. Too many eyes could suck the soul out of a landscape, reduce it to postcard size. ‘If you look this way, you can see the flats and the homestead.’

  He turned, with obvious relief, to the more manageable view, the ordered spread of paddocks with their toy-town buildings, the river gleaming silver between the willows before the tussock rose again on its far side. ‘Pretty. How much of it is our station?’

  She hid a shudder at his choice of pronoun. ‘The main road you can see there, on the other side of the river? That’s the eastern boundary. The alps are the station’s boundary to the west, and the tops of the ridges at each end of the valley are the northern and southern boundaries.’

  ‘As far as the eye can see, eh?’

  ‘A bit further, actually. That hill over there’ — she pointed — ‘that’s Black Peak itself. If we stood on top of that, then we’d see the whole station.’ It’d been a long time since she’d done that, she thought, suppressing an image of a hot Land Rover bonnet and her small self pressing close to her father’s bush shirt.

  ‘Not much flat land, though, is there?’

  She couldn’t help but smile. ‘There never is on a high country station.’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ said Crompton wryly.

  ‘We’ve got enough, though. We can winter over more stock than a lot of places around here, and that’s all that counts.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  They stared down at the river flats in silence. Charlotte sat down on a tussock. Crompton, having carefully surveyed the ground, did the same. She picked at a strand of grass.

  ‘Why are you lending me money?’

  He laughed. ‘You’re not exactly a loss to the diplomatic corps, are you?’

  ‘Sorry.’ She blushed. ‘It’s just — well, it seems like an odd investment for a man like you …’

  ‘A man like me?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘I back anything I think’ll make me money. And nothing that won’t. It’s that simple.’

  ‘But there must have been any number of things you could have put your money into,’ she persisted, against her better judgment. ‘Why this?’ And why am I interrogating him? If there’s a reason, he obviously doesn’t want to tell me.

  Crompton kicked at the grass. ‘I liked the idea of having a stake in a high country station, I suppose. It’s sort of — romantic, historic, I don’t know.’ He paused, staring into the distance. ‘Everything I have, I got for myself, by myself. My parents had nothing. My father worked on a factory line.’ He snorted. ‘Forty-five years, he was there, and never even made foreman — never got a raise that didn’t come through the union.’

  Charlotte nodded, hoping sympathy was the right expression to have on her face — where the hell was all this going?

  ‘I left school at sixteen with nothing. And here I am’ — a note of satisfaction crept into his voice — ‘at fifty, a wealthy man. A self-made man, as they say.’

  This is not the first time he’s told this exact same story, she thought to herself.

  ‘Now, let’s take you,’ he continued. ‘Everything you have, you got from your father. And he got it from his father, and so on. Your family hasn’t had to work for it for generations.’

  Charlotte was almost too taken aback to be offended. ‘Um, we’ve had to work pretty bloody hard to keep it.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ He waved her objection away with an airy hand. ‘And I know, you’re trying to do something with it now. But the point is, you’re old money. You come from a long line of rich men — respectable men. You’ve got class.’

  Ah — so that’s where he was heading.

  ‘I could buy and sell the lot of you. But you still look down on me.’

  ‘I don’t look down on you.’ And he sure as hell couldn’t buy her — except … oh … well, not all of her, at least.

  ‘Okay, maybe not you. But a lot of them. They have their clubs, you know, clubs that guys like me don’t get invited to join, and their old school ties …’ He shrugged, then grinned. ‘Sorry. Bit of a hobby horse of mine. I get carried away.’

  ‘It’s okay. I get it.’

  Crompton smiled his doubt.

  ‘I know what it’s like to be left out of the club,’ Charlotte added softly.

  He looked at her, reappraising. ‘Yeah. Maybe you do.’ He shifted awkwardly on his tussock. ‘My bum’s gone to sleep sitting on this thing.’

  She laughed. ‘Come on, let’s head back down.’

  Back in the kitchen, Kath was sweating over a sink full of new potatoes.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ Charlotte offered. There was nothing like other people’s bad manners, she thought, to show up your own.

  Kath stared at her. ‘You?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Actually, I’m just about finished, thanks.’ Kath paused and frowned. ‘Oh, that’s right — I’ve been meaning to ask you, where’s Luke going to sleep?’

  Charlotte grimaced. Yep, that was the question.

  ‘Do you want to put him in your mum’s room? The Cromptons are in the guest room, and the kids are in Nick’s. We could put him in with them, I suppose. Or do you and Jen want to share, and give him Jen’s room?’

  ‘I’ll have a chat to Jen.’

  ‘He could always sleep over at our house, I suppose — or at the cottage, or in the quarters, though I can’t see him liking that much …’

  No, thought Charlotte, neither can I.

  ‘I’d have made up a bed, but I didn’t know where you’d want him …’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll sort it out.’

  Kath wiped her hands on a tea towel. ‘Thanks, dear — just as long as you let me know.’

  ‘Do you know where he is — Luke, I mean?’

  ‘Outside talking to Erica last time I saw him.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She found Luke on the front verandah, reading one of her books in the shade of the wisteria.

  ‘Hi.’

  He put the book down lazily and smiled his teasing smile. ‘Hi.’

  She sat down on the step beside his chair. Further down the garden, she could see Erica Crompton stretched out on a sun lounger and Michael rubbing lotion into her back. Charlotte struggled for the right question, the proper phrasing, to get at what she needed to know — why was Luke here? For Crompton? Or for her?

  ‘How are you, Charlotte?’

  She gave a little inward groan. How did he do that? Make a perfectly normal question sound so … what, sexy? Suggestive? Gut-twistingly hot? She stared up at him, sitting there so relaxed in her mother’s cane chair. Oh God, those were the same jeans he was wearing when he … she shook herself.

  ‘Good, thanks. How are you?’

  ‘You look good. I’ve missed you, you know.’

  ‘Have you?’ Somehow the sarcasm got lost between her brain and her mouth.

  ‘Yes.’ The green eyes caught her. ‘I have.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming, for Christ’s sake?’

  The corner of his mouth twitched. ‘I wanted to surprise you.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Besides, if I’d asked, you might have said no.’

  She tried to will some steel into her gaze. ‘I might.’

  His eyes moved slowly, deliberately, over her mouth, the line of her jaw, then snapped back, full force, into hers. ‘Would you have said no?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He leaned forward. ‘And now that I’m here? Aren’t you pleased to see me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her voice seeme
d to be getting smaller.

  Reaching down, Luke ran a finger under her chin, tilting her face towards him. Helplessly, she felt her lips part. He kissed her gently, then drew back, looking questioningly into her upturned face, a trace of amusement in his eyes.

  Oh fuck it, she thought. I am pleased to see him. And he knows it, too, the bastard. ‘Well, maybe I am,’ she told the eyes, grudgingly.

  ‘Good,’ he said softly, taking her hand and guiding it over his jeans. ‘Because I’m very pleased to see you.’

  God, he certainly was. Just in time, she remembered the Cromptons were out on the lawn. ‘Kath wants to know where you’ll be sleeping,’ she smiled.

  ‘Sleeping?’ He recaptured her hand. ‘I don’t know about that. But come here and I’ll show you exactly where I’m going to spend all night.’

  ‘One day down, one to go,’ groaned Jen after dinner, sprawled across an armchair next to the unlit fire, massaging her temples. Across the lounge, Charlotte glanced at the clock. It was ten o’clock. Having tried and failed to get the children to bed so many times Charlotte had lost count, Erica had finally dragged her husband off to give them a good talking to, and Rex and Kath had run for the hills as soon as the dishes were done.

  ‘Where’s Luke?’ asked Jen, without enthusiasm.

  ‘Gone to get a bottle of Scotch from his bag, I think.’ He and Crompton had quickly exhausted Blackpeak’s supply.

  ‘Ah.’ Jen examined the upholstery. ‘And where is his bag, exactly?’

  Uh-oh. ‘My room,’ Charlotte muttered.

  ‘Christ, Charlie, what do you see in him? I mean, I know he’s pretty, but — seriously?’

  Charlotte laughed. ‘I don’t know — there’s just something about him. It’s like he’s magnetic, or something.’

  Jen rolled her eyes. ‘Just be careful, that’s all I can say. It’s all a game to men like that — and you’ll probably end up losing.’

  Hmm. Was that what this was — a game? ‘Well, maybe that’s part of what I like about him, too,’ she smiled. ‘The challenge.’

  ‘Talking about me again, ladies?’ Luke stood in the doorway, holding a whisky bottle.

  ‘Christ, I wish you’d stop doing that,’ hissed Jen. ‘How long have you been standing there?’