The Last Baronet

by Caroline Akrill

  THE LAST BARONET

  Caroline Akrill

  Other books by Caroline Akrill

  Non-fiction:

  Not Quite a Horsewoman

  Showing the Ridden Pony

  Fiction:

  Eventer’s Dream

  A Hoof in the Door

  Ticket to Ride

  Make Me a Star

  Stars Don’t Cry

  Catch a Falling Star

  Flying Changes

  Published by The Fane Press

  Copyright © Caroline Akrill 2016

  Illustration and cover artwork © Emma James

  The right of Caroline Akrill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of the eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.

  This is a work of fiction.

  The author would like to stress that that no character

  in this book relates to any person living or dead

  and that all incidents are entirely imaginary.

  For everyone at Cooper’s Farm:

  Emma, Andy, Toby, Amy and Max

  (not forgetting Saffi, Molly and Bee)

  Author’s Note

  My father had a dance band in the forties and I grew up with the music of the age. Although I have had my pop, rock and classical favourites since, my heart still belongs to the music of the forties, to the age of Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin.

  I so wanted Letitia to sing these evocative, sentimental, yet heartfelt songs, and to speak to you through the lyrics, but I was utterly defeated by the complexity of the copyright and permissions jungle surrounding the music industry. In one case a search for the copyright owner revealed almost 3,000 entries that I could examine ten at a time. I was referred to companies who charge hefty fees for researching and obtaining permissions. My attention was drawn to terrifyingly complex legal cases over copyright that have been dragging on for years.

  In the end I wrote my own lyrics and, believe me, you only realise how clever these deceptively simple lyrics are when you try to match them.

  So if you are minded to look for the music to I Remember You, try I’ve Forgotten You, Just Like I Should. Similarly, for It’s a Brand New Day Tomorrow, try It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow. I believe Silver Threads, published in 1873 (lyrics by Eben E Rexford, music by H P Danks) is out of copyright. If it isn’t I had better get myself a good lawyer...

  Orchard Cottage

  Semer

  2016

  ONE

  ‘...and so, not to put too fine a point on it,’ said the representative of the National Westminster Bank, ‘the Rushbrokes of Rushbroke are no longer considered a viable risk, and the bank want their money back.’

  In the ensuing silence, Francis Hercules Sparrow, recently assigned to the branch expressly to identify and resolve myriad difficulties left in the wake of a devoted, long-serving, but overly sympathetic (Francis would have used the word gullible) predecessor, tapped at a keyboard on his desk. A pound sign appeared on a screen, followed by a sum running into six figures.

  Sir Vivian Valentyne Rushbroke of Rushbroke, family motto Prudence Before Valour, looked away hurriedly. He didn’t like this new man or his new-fangled computer thing. He concentrated his attention instead upon the carpet between his cracked, but well-polished shoes, hand made by Lobb thirty years ago when life had been less complicated. It was good carpet, thick and springy, the colour of old port; still red, but faintly brown at the edges. Observing that his shifting feet had produced a foam of loose fibres Sir Vivian supposed it to be new; its purchase probably made possible by the bloody scandalous interest on his overdraft. There had not been new carpet at Rushbroke within living memory, nor was there port in the cellar, which was fifteen inches deep in stagnant water and colonised by newts. The situation was dire, the prospect dismal, and there was bugger all to say. Yet some response was evidently expected, and so a few appropriate words had to be found.

  ‘Wanting is all very well,’ Sir Vivian said. ‘Wanting is easy. Getting is a different kettle of fish altogether.’

  Francis Sparrow frowned. In his rather too shiny pinstripe, with his sleeked-back hair, his bead-bright eyes, and his brown, bony fingers, an ornithologist would have considered him more starling than sparrow, but bird-brained he was not. Many interviews had taken place since his arrival; each had been conducted with practical, hard-hitting efficiency; every single difficulty had been resolved to the board’s complete satisfaction. ‘The bank do have ways and means of obtaining payment,’ he said in a sharp tone.

  ‘Ways and means?’ Sir Vivian looked up from the carpet in a vaguely startled manner, glancing round the office as if half-expecting thuggery to emerge from the filing cabinets. ‘Ways and means?’

  ‘We could force you to sell. There is a legal charge. We do have the power.’

  ‘Power, eh? As well as ways and means.’ Sir Vivian raised his untrimmed eyebrows as if in admiration at such a display of verbal omnipotence. He lifted his tweed-clad shoulders in a gesture which might, or might not, have been intended as apologetic. ‘Won’t do you any good though. There’s nothing left to sell.’

  ‘Come, come, now; there must be something.’ Francis Sparrow forced a note of optimism into his voice. ‘Some valuable little painting hanging in a gloomy corner; a stack of old porcelain in the back of a disused cupboard. Is there no family silver tucked away?’

  ‘Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have I give thee.’ Sir Vivian shook his head. ‘The silver went in the fifties. After that we were down to plate. We did find a good épergne that brought in a tidy sum a couple of years ago. Thought I’d done rather well until it turned up in a sale catalogue with a reserve of six times what I’d been paid for it. You can’t win, you know. They’re all crooked in the antiques game; dealers; sale rooms; even the big auction houses. Untrustworthy, the lot of them. All tarred with the same brush.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Francis Sparrow swiftly. ‘What about the pictures?’

  ‘Gone.’ Sir Vivian looked glum. ‘All gone. There’s absolutely nothing left at all. Nothing of any value, anyhow. Anything worth selling went years ago.’

  Francis was rather afraid that this might be the truth. He had, after all, perused the Rushbroke file. He had already noted how, particularly over the last two decades, periodic attempts had been made to reduce the debt by stripping the estate of its assets. Several quite substantial sales had indeed arrested the rise of the borrowings for a while but, inevitably, had failed to resolve the underlying cause of the problem, which was that Sir Vivian’s income, apart from the bare minimum of statutory pension, was practically zero. Now, as Francis contemplated his latest client, his frown deepened.

  In the 1980s the elderly country landowner fallen upon hard times was hardly a new phenomenon; it had become so familiar it was almost a cliché. The manifestation always took the same form wherever it was encountered: inevitably male, the once upright frame spare and slightly stooped, the cavalry twill trousers threadbare, the ancient shoes buffed to a fierce shine. There would be a Norfolk jacket in an indeterminate mud-coloured tweed, a Jermyn Street shirt frayed at the neck and the cuffs, and a neatly trimmed moustache tending to yellow like the tail of an old grey horse. Below sprouting eyebrows, faded blue eyes would be watery and vague.

  It seemed to Francis Sparrow that there was a similar difficulty waiting for him in every posting all over England, wherever his trouble-shooting travels took him, sometimes more than one. Men who had never known what it was like to have a job, who had never needed employment. Men who had no business acumen, no professional qua
lifications, and no comforting company pension, steadily sinking into a quagmire of failed investments, dwindling capital and crumbling assets; men with no prospects and no future, who had outlived their era and were, according to their temperament, bewildered, infuriated, contemptuous, or frightened, of the new. Inevitably in such situations no solution could be entirely painless, and now, obliged to confront the even more than usually catastrophic affairs of Sir Vivian Valentyne Rushbroke of Rushbroke, Francis Sparrow, for once, was not confident.

  ‘Perhaps we should be looking towards the disposal of some of the remaining furniture?’ he suggested. ‘Might there be one or two interesting pieces left? Would there, for example, be a few dining chairs of early Chippendale you could bear to part with? A choice oriental lacquer cabinet? Could there be a particularly fine long-case clock ticking away in the hall?’

  Sir Vivian made a sound which might have been a snort of mirth, but then again, could just as easily have been derision. ‘Not a hope! Talk to Pendleton Antiques across the road if you don’t believe me. Old Pendleton lived off Rushbroke furniture for years. Now the place is stripped to the bone he’s reduced to selling imitation brass fenders and nasty little leather-topped tables. Reproduction, the lot of it, light as a feather and no use to anybody. Knocked for six the minute the dog wags its tail; absolute bloody rubbish. No, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Anything half way decent would have been sniffed out by Pendleton years ago. Went though the place with a bloody toothcomb. Didn’t miss a trick.’

  Francis did not doubt it. After all, the Pendleton Antiques account was also handled by the National Westminster. Nevertheless he eyed his client steadily. He was perfectly aware that it was possible to underestimate the aged in situations such as this. Nothing should ever be assumed. Nothing could be taken on trust. The air of distrait might or might not be authentic. The client could be either a genuinely hopeless case, no longer capable of managing his affairs, or he could be a cunning old fraud, trading on his years, cleverly concealing irresponsibility and indifference behind a facade of wool-gathering senescence. ‘I don’t suppose there is any more land?’ Francis enquired in a careful tone. ‘Some little pocket you may have overlooked?’

  The question was followed by a silence which lasted rather too long to be comfortable. ‘I asked you if there was any more land,’ Francis said eventually. ‘I was wondering if there might be a few acres left, a few disposable acres? A modest plot?’

  Sir Vivian sat like a stone. His silence seemed to gather around him, thickening and expanding until it filled the room, until the very air was swollen with expectation, but still he said nothing.

  ‘Sir Vivian,’ said Francis, ‘I need your cooperation. I must have an answer to my question. I do need to establish whether or not there is any remaining land.’

  Sir Vivian was reluctant to answer but the question could hardly be avoided. Indignation overcame his resolve to sidestep this most mendacious and emotive issue by meeting it with a contemptuous silence. ‘How the devil can there be any more land?’ he exclaimed. ‘How, in God’s name, can there be any more land when you and your blasted cohorts have sold the entire estate piecemeal from under my feet!’

  Irascibility was always a promising development. Francis, feeling he might be getting somewhere at last, welcomed it. He inclined forward on his perch. ‘All of it? The entire estate?’

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’ Sir Vivian was outraged. ‘When you are responsible for it? When every last acre of my estate has been sold to a madman? On your advice! At your instigation!’

  Francis Sparrow uttered a small chirrup of condolence but his gaze sharpened. ‘Every acre? Am I to understand that there is nothing left at all? No small parcel of land you could sell?’ He met Sir Vivian’s glare with equanimity, noticing how his client sat stiffly upright in his chair, observing the fierce expression in the old blue eyes which, quite suddenly, appeared neither watery nor faded. ‘Sir Vivian, you are quite, quite, sure there is no more land?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure! The land’s gone, I tell you! If you want to know where it’s gone ask my cretinous neighbour, ask Williamson! You do realise the man is stark staring mad? That he’s a bedlamite? You know he’s deranged? Has nobody bothered to inform you that all of my land, the whole of my estate, is now in the possession of a raving lunatic? Haven’t you read the blasted files?’ Sir Vivian demanded contentiously. ‘Don’t the bank keep any bloody records? Haven’t you done your homework!’

  ‘I am aware,’ Francis said smoothly, ‘that parcels of land have been sold off at intervals over the years.’

  ‘Then you know damned well there’s nothing left, so what’s the point in banging on about it? There is no more land!’ Sir Vivian declared with explosive emphasis, ‘and that is all there is to it!’

  ‘I see.’ Francis folded his arms upon the desk and assumed a grave demeanour. ‘In that case...’ he leaned forward in a deliberately confidential manner as if to ensure that his words were heard exclusively by his client, as if the office might be alive with eavesdroppers, although they were quite alone. ‘In that case, I very much regret to inform you that the National Westminster Bank will have no alternative but to call in the overdraft and arrange for the remaining estate to be sold in order to defray the debt.’ Francis paused for a few strategic seconds to allow the full import of his words to take effect, then, ‘I’m talking about the house and garden now,’ he added. ‘I’m talking about Rushbroke Hall itself.’ As he had hoped, reaction was immediate and vigorous, banishing all traces of senility.

  ‘The hell you are!’ Sir Vivian reared up in his chair like a startled warhorse. ‘The hell you are not!’

  ‘Regrettably, I can see no other solution.’ Feeling no regret whatsoever, Francis leaned back in his chair and regarded his client with satisfaction masked by a bright-eyed severity. ‘For your own sake as well as our own we cannot afford to allow the situation to become any worse. The overdraft has been increasing at the rate of thirty thousand pounds per annum, without taking into consideration any interest, commissions, or management charges. Soon it will have outstripped the value of your equity; equity which, as you will surely agree, is not as substantial as it once was.’ Beadily confident, skilfully assured, Francis moved in upon his prey. ‘I don’t suppose there is any more land?’ he enquired again in a more conversational tone. ‘A few remaining acres? Some saleable little plot you may have been reluctant to relinquish?’

  Sir Vivian, breathing heavily, cheeks dangerously reddened, sank back into his chair, inwardly consigning Francis Sparrow to the banked fires of hell, and that too comfortable an end for him. But at the same time, sportsman that he was, he could not help but feel a sneaking regard for him as an opponent; he was a sly little devil this one, and clever with it. All his talk of ways and means; for your sake as well as ours; the damnable suggestion that Rushbroke Hall should go under the hammer – it was all bloody hogwash! The oily little bugger had known about the home paddock all the time! The banks were certainly recruiting a different type these days. There had been no slick city tactics employed by the previous manager; no threats, however fraudulent, no nonsensical talk of force and power, of ways and means. Old Langham may have been a duffer in many ways; couldn’t shoot to save his life, for all his much-flaunted ownership of a Game Conservancy Holland and Holland, but he had been a decent enough fellow for all that; the sort of chap who had been ready to concede that nobody was to blame for the situation, that little could be done; that one was simply a casualty of the times, like the victims of inner-city muggings and the long-term unemployed.

  But this cocky little smart-arse was a different sort of animal, and, Prudence Before Valour being bred in the bone, one had to tread carefully if one was to successfully circumnavigate this particular issue. Sir Vivian was not about to part with the home paddock. On this he was resolute. He knew that if he was persuaded to strip the estate of its only remaining land he would have diminished and devalued the property entirely. For wha
t was the use of a manor house without any ground to call its own? And there was another, a more important reason why he was determined not to sell. On these last five bald acres, Nicola, his only child, schooled delinquent equines for a meagre living. The pittance she received for her painstaking, dangerous, and (it had to be said) sometimes fruitless, labours, only just covered the running costs of the stables. If he allowed himself to be pressurised into making this final sacrifice, what then for Nicola? And what difference would it make anyway? Any proceeds would be swiftly appropriated by the bank, and after that? No, he was not going to sell. There had to be another way. ‘There is no more land,’ he said calmly, but with finality. ‘So we shall have to look for an alternative.’

  Francis Sparrow raised a sceptical and questioning eyebrow.

  ‘There’s always an alternative. Always has been.’

  ‘Until now, perhaps.’ Francis favoured his client with a thin smile. ‘I am aware of your previous enterprises. I have done my homework; I have studied your file.’

  ‘He that hath pity on the poor lendeth to the Lord,’ Sir Vivian pointed out.

  ‘I believe the Old Testament also states that the borrower is servant to the lender,’ Francis replied smartly. ‘Perhaps you could enlighten me as to what manner of alternative enterprises you have in mind on this occasion?’ Francis endeavoured to fix his client with a steely gaze, but Sir Vivian was evasive. In lieu of a reply the old man averted his eyes and, through the discreet grey slats of a venetian blind behind his interrogator, observed Lady Lavinia Rushbroke of Rushbroke crossing the street in a purposeful manner carrying a shopping basket.

  ‘I understand that you have already attempted to cultivate mushrooms in the cellars with quite disastrous results,’ Francis said in a severe tone. ‘There was also, I believe, an ambitious scheme for the manufacture of organic apple juice, and yet another catastrophic project involving the purchase of hives and bees.’