She came out of the west at full gallop, pounding along the flat within yards of the sea, the bay’s hoof-thrusts sending up little spurts of sand, the rider pitched forward in the jockey’s huddle that Yeomanry riding-masters had been at pains to eliminate from the seats of recruits. She was wearing a white blouse and a grey riding skirt and she was hatless, thus breaking another riding-school rule in her madcap gallop along the water’s edge. As he saw her she set the horse at a drift-log and sailed over it and then, without checking her stride she swung left, heading directly for the hummocks on which he stood, whirling in a flurry of sand and breasting the incline at such a pace that it seemed to Craddock she would sweep past him on to the sand-hills beyond. He tightened his rein, thinking that the grey might bolt in pursuit, but suddenly she brought the horse up short, rearing it back like an Arab executing a mounted salute and he saw then, from his position twenty feet above, that she was smiling and had recognised him before he had seen her approach along the beach.
She called, in a loud, clear voice, ‘Mr Paul Craddock, I believe!’ and he raised his hat as the grey sidled forward and descended to the beach.
‘I saw you half-a-mile away,’ she said, with her tight, slightly ironic smile. ‘That’s a good horse you have! When you get his fat down and corn him up he’ll carry twice your weight all day! Where’s Rudd?’
‘Still asleep in bed,’ Paul said, ‘or he was when I left him.’
Was it his fancy that a change of expression registered a little of her suspicion when she realised he was alone? He felt unsure of everything about this hard, compact parcel of energy but she continued to look straight at him, as though his presence here on a public beach early in the morning required an explanation. He knew then that this was the sign he had been awaiting, that, notwithstanding his uncertainty and fear of ridicule he would this very day be master of Shallowford, and Grace Lovell’s landlord to boot. He said, gravely, ‘I’m buying the estate. I’m taking over Shallowford,’ and was surprised by the firmness of his voice. ‘Will you be attending the sale?’
She stared at him, not resentfully as in the nursery, or ironically, as when she had whirled to the foot of the hillock but with a frank curiosity, as though he had been a curious object left on the beach by the tide.
‘You’ve been a farmer?’ she asked at length, dropping her glance to his breeches and military boots.
‘No,’ he admitted, ‘I don’t know a thing about farming. I’ve been overseas nearly three years and after that I was in hospital but from what I hear the Lovells weren’t farmers either!’
She laughed at this, throwing back her head and squaring her shoulders. He said, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. You were a relation I believe?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘not really and anyway it’s true. Neither Sir George, nor Hubert, nor my Ralph cared a row of beans about what went on here, so long as rents were paid, but I suppose you’ll be buying it for the hunting?’
‘By no means,’ Paul said, ‘though I shall hunt, providing I have time.’
She looked genuinely surprised at this. ‘Why shouldn’t you have the time? If you can afford to buy Shallowford you must have all the time in the world.’
He said, convincing himself rather than her, ‘I’m partially disabled, but at twenty-three I don’t care to look forward to a lifetime of idleness. I suppose that sounds pompous but I don’t apologise. Months on your back gives a man a chance to think and there should be a better use for capital than to make more money, and dissipate the interest cutting a fashionable dash. I believe I might be using mine on a place as old and potentially fruitful as this valley and I think I’d enjoy doing it.’
It was strange, he thought, that he could speak so freely to her, whereas he had been unable to clarify his thoughts to experienced men of the world, like Zorndorff and Rudd, both people who wished him well. It occurred to him that this might be because she was of his generation and then his mind fastened on her words ‘my Ralph’ and this, he thought, might be the key to her brooding presence in the nursery, implying as it did that she too was confused and, to an extent, dissatisfied with her life. She interrupted his conjecturing with, ‘How badly are you disabled, Mr Craddock?’
‘Enough to deny me the chance of doing what I wanted to do, take a permanent commission. I had a bullet through the knee joint. It’s healed now, and in time I shall be ninety-five per cent fit, but it was enough to get me thrown aside as a crock!’
‘You’re bitter about that?’
‘No,’ he admitted, truthfully, ‘I’m not bitter, or not any longer.’ He returned her steady gaze and asked ‘Are you bitter? About Ralph Lovell getting killed?’
The question disconcerted her. He saw that at once, for she looked past him and seemed to be considering whether to protest at his curiosity.
‘I don’t know what Rudd’s told you about Ralph,’ she said, ‘but whatever it was it was prejudiced. Rudd hated the Lovells and I imagine he had good reasons for hating them.’
‘Yes, he did,’ Paul told her, ‘and I happen to know those reasons, Miss Lovell, for he made a clean breast of them as soon as I arrived.’
She seemed surprised at this, so he went on, before she could comment, ‘They never let him forget an incident that led to his resigning his commission, but I’ve been under fire myself, and if Ralph Lovell had survived I daresay he would have found it easy to understand Rudd when he came home. I like Mr Rudd and I mean to keep him on as agent.’
‘I see; and have you got any plans for your tenants?’ she asked, slyly. ‘I’m one, you know, at least my father and stepmother are; we live up there,’ and she pointed with her crop.
‘Well, I won’t put up the rent, if that’s what you’re hinting at,’ Paul said and she laughed so that Paul thought it was a long time since he had heard a more musical note. Her laughter had resonance, and sounded as free as the birdsong he had heard at the window an hour before.
‘Look here, Mr Craddock,’ she said, ‘I’d like you to know that I honestly wish you luck, and also that I’m sorry I was very rude back at the house the other night. I ought to be grateful to you really, I’d gone there to eat another helping of nostalgic pie. Your appearance gave me something else to think about.’
‘You were unhappy over Ralph Lovell’s being killed? That’s nothing to apologise for, is it?’
‘Ralph was killed a long time ago,’ she said, ‘and I haven’t had your chance to come to terms with the future. I’ve been feeling altogether too sorry for myself and it really doesn’t do to start living in the past at my age. You’ll be attending the sale, of course?’
‘Yes,’ he said eagerly, ‘I shall bid for some of the things I might need up there. Furniture, fittings and tack especially. I daresay Rudd will advise me now that I’ve finally made up my mind.’
‘You mean he doesn’t know?’
‘That’s right,’ Paul said, ‘I really came here this morning to decide. You just happen to be the first to hear, Miss Lovell,’ and he smiled.
The hand holding her crop shot up to her mouth and her lip touched the ivory handle, so that she suddenly looked like a child, puzzled by an unexpected turn of events. Then he saw the two bright spots appear on her cheeks once again and before he could say another word she clapped her heels to the flanks of the bay and dashed past him to the top of the sandhill. The grey whipped around, almost unseating Paul so that he was obliged to concentrate on the horse for a moment; then, looking up, he saw her again, sitting her horse in the precise spot where he had been when he had watched her gallop along the water’s edge. She was smiling down at him like a child who had confounded her elders by a piece of showing-off and as he pulled the grey around she lifted her hand in a salute and swinging round galloped over the crest of the hill and out of sight in a few seconds.
II
Rudd received the news calmly enough until Paul added that he woul
d like him to remain as agent on a three-year contract at a starting salary of three hundred a year. Then the agent’s phlegm deserted him and he got up, standing by the open window with his face turned away and his hands clasped behind his back.
‘You don’t have to do that,’ he said gruffly, ‘you could manage very well on your own after a year.’
‘I should be an idiot not to take advantage of your experience,’ Paul told him. ‘You would be doing me a favour by staying.’
At that Rudd swung round and said earnestly, ‘Well then, I accept, and I must say it’s damned generous of you, Mr Craddock! I won’t pretend that I should find it a big wrench to leave here. As I said, I haven’t been all that happy but I’ve always loved the place. There’s been indifference here, and plenty of sloth too, but I still think the place could respond to a little care and imagination. You know what they say about a woman who is loved? She takes on self-confidence and beauty, and I’ve always thought this could happen here. Anyway, I’ll promise you two things. I’ll give you honest advice, and my heart will be in the job!’
‘Well that should do for a start,’ said Paul and they shook hands on the bargain, spending the morning touring the Home Farm, which seemed to Paul well administered by Tom Honeyman, a plodding, bald-headed man, whose enthusiasm was reserved for Southdown sheep, for he was descended (or claimed to be) from the Newbury farmer who once won a thousand guineas from the local squire by making a hunting coat from wool sheared from a pair of Southdowns that same day. Honeyman was a widower, with grown children, all farming outside the estate boundaries, and managed the farm with a cowman, three or four boys, and two biblical looking shepherds, known as Matt and Luke, who were twins and, so Rudd informed Paul, unable to read or write. Later they went up to the house to select items of furniture that might be bought in at ten per cent above the reserve price. This seemed to Paul a very arbitrary way of doing business, for the sale had been advertised for the following day, and it occurred to him that bidders might be coming some distance to buy lots that they would now find withdrawn, but Rudd pooh-poohed his doubts. ‘It was laid down in the conditions of sale that anything the purchaser of the estate wanted he was to have,’ he told Paul. ‘The executors are more interested in selling the estate than disposing of the bits and pieces, and anyway, a lot of the stuff here is either worn out or second rate.’ Paul discovered, on closer inspection, that this was so. Most of the furniture was heavy mid-Victorian pieces whereas the carpets were badly worn, except in the main bedrooms which did not appear to have been used much. He had an opportunity, on going round with Rudd, to get better bearings on the house and found it longer and narrower than he had imagined, with a spacious drawing-room, and a dining-room respectively east and west of the entrance hall, a smaller and very cheerful library, stocked with over a thousand books leading out of the drawing-room, a billiard-room adjoining the dining-room, and a warren of passages and pantries about the huge Elizabethan kitchen that still had its great hearth, and antediluvian cooking implements. Kitchen and domestic quarters lay behind the east wing and opened upon a wide, cobbled yard, enclosed by stables and coach house. The woods here began at the end of the kitchen garden, which rose steeply, making the back of the house rather sunless, except in the late afternoon. Behind the garden, which was in good order and enclosed by a mellow brick wall, was an orchard and Rudd said that in springtime this was full of daffodils and narcissi, and that later bluebells grew there so thickly that the ground was a blue mist. Paul asked him if he was fond of gardening and he said no but had an interest in wild flowers, which he was usually reluctant to admit. ‘For a countryman to confess to a liking for wild flowers is tantamount to him saying he opposes blood sports,’ he said with a chuckle.
They went up the backstairs and along the rearward passage to the staff sleeping quarters. Evidence of neglect and decay were everywhere, plaster and paper peeling from the walls and at one place, on the east wall, a wide crack in the ceiling and a hole in the roof of the attic through which they could see the sky. Here the tiny bedrooms, some half-dozen of them, were airless boxes containing little besides an iron cot or two, a truckle bed and a few stools. Rudd told him that when Sir George had been in residence he kept a full staff of servants, sometimes as many as a dozen variously employed as kitchen hands, parlourmaids and grooms, apart from the resident housekeeper and three gardeners, but that when the house was empty all but the gardeners and Mrs Handcock, the housekeeper, were paid off, ‘like a crew engaged for a single voyage’. When Paul asked if this had not caused distress in the area Rudd said that it had, particularly in winter, but that regular work in the Sorrel Valley had never been plentiful and the family had not had difficulty in recruiting casual labour whenever they came down for a hunting season, or the period preceding or following the London season. ‘They wasted money they begrudged putting into the estate,’ he said. ‘I’ve known young Hubert pay out two hundred guineas for a hunt supper here but they paid atrocious wages, spending what they saved on any number of fads, like the old man’s passion for photography. He had a dark-room off the library and his paraphernalia is still there, together with hundreds of photographs he took and developed. You can see what needs spending on the house before you start on the farms but I can find you a good local builder and if we get his estimate right away I daresay he’ll move in and live here until the job’s done. He can sub-contract for the painting and plumbing and we shall need Vicary, the Coombe Bay stonemason. After the sale we can make a plan as to what’s necessary and what, if anything, you would like knocked down or built on.’
There was no bathroom—the Lovells seemed to have washed in wooden tubs—but the three main bedrooms at the front of the house were in better repair than the reception-rooms on the ground floor. Two of these bedrooms looked over the paddocks and ford, and a string of smaller guest-rooms, ending in the nursery, faced west. Paul noticed that the scrap screen and the rocking horse were labelled Lots 250 and 251, and he wondered if Grace Lovell would bid for them. In the largest bedroom was a huge four-poster and two or three pieces of late eighteenth-century furniture, including a serpentine chest of drawers, a military chest converted into a wardrobe, and two or three rosewood wig-stands which he said he would buy, together with about twenty lots in the guest-rooms and the rooms downstairs. He also marked down the library furniture and books, promising himself some pleasant winter evenings in what seemed to him the cosiest room in the house. The windows here looked over Shallowford Woods and Coombe Bluff and there was a deep leather armchair promising solid comfort in front of a wide stone hearth. When the list was complete they made their way back to the lodge and Rudd totted up the cost of the items Paul had bought in, making a total of under four hundred pounds. This excluded the grey, the trap and the tack in the harness room, which came to another hundred and fifty, so that Paul told himself he had done a good day’s business, particularly when Rudd explained that all the gardening tools were included in the overall purchase price. That night Paul told the agent the source of his legacy and something of Zorndorff’s part in the adventure. He was frank about his means, thinking it unfair to both of them if Rudd, who would be responsible for the initial outlay, remained in the dark and was tempted to either cheesepare or overspend.
‘Well,’ said Rudd, bracing himself as though to speak an unpleasant truth, ‘I promised you good advice and I’ll give you some right away. Don’t tell anyone else what you’ve just told me—the source of the money, that is, or your association with trade of any kind. You are simply a fortunate young man who has come into a legacy and if you’re wise you’ll leave it at that! There’s nobody in the world so snobbish as the peasant with a straw in his mouth!’ As he spoke they heard the hooves on the gravel of the drive and through the open window saw Rose and Claire Derwent trot past on their way up to the house. Rudd said, with a chuckle, ‘One thing more, Mr Craddock!’ and pointed with his pipe at the disappearing horse-women— ‘Are you the marrying type? O
r committed elsewhere?’ and when Paul admitted that he had never seriously thought of marriage the agent added, ‘Then I’d best warn you of something else while I’m at it! Every filly hereabouts will be anticipating the hunting season by a couple of months or more! There go two who have already started cubbing, so to speak, so sit tight until they move on to draw the next covert!’
It seemed that every man, woman and child as far afield as Whinmouth, and the villages north of the railway line, had taken time off to attend Shallowford House sale. By ten o’clock, an hour before bidding was due to commence, paddocks and forecourt were the scene of a vast picnic, with everyone in their summer best and ranks of gigs, traps, waggonettes and saddle-horses tethered to palings behind the avenue chestnuts. Paul and Rudd made their way to the house through groups of respectful strangers, some of them people Paul remembered having met on his tour. He saw Tamer Potter already refreshing himself out of an enormous flagon of cider, with his three girls gossiping with young men in corduroys under the trees, and their brothers Sam and Smut talking to a man in velveteens, who looked as if he was lecturing them, for he kept making emphatic gestures as Sam looked sheepish and Smut listened with a broad grin on his sunburned face. ‘That’s Melrose, Lord Gilroy’s head keeper,’ Rudd told Paul, as they walked up the drive, ‘giving Smut Potter another of his final warnings! There’s Arabella, with Martin in tow. I daresay she’ll make him bid for one or two of the fancy lots. And there’s Dr O’Keefe,’ and Rudd pointed to a rather handsome old man, in a black frock coat, leaning negligently against a tree, surveying the gathering with contempt. ‘And there’s Lord Gilroy himself, out for an airing after his last spell of gout. He’s a supercilious old rascal but I daresay he’ll be civil enough and suspend judgment on you until somebody gets wind of your connection with a scrapyard! After that he’ll cut you, but you can get along without Gilroy patronage—the Lovells did!’
Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By) Page 10