The Country Escape (4 page)

Dollar could see the inconvenience of having the old lady’s ageing pets on the doorstep, particularly if the sanctuary expanded or, worse, got a
public licence: then donkey-hugging children would witness Seth’s shooting party return from having bagged all six breeds of native deer. Dollar was not an animal lover, and saw just as little benefit in patting and kissing them as she did in shooting them, but at least the latter provided food as well as facilitating big business deals.

‘It is simple,’ she said calmly. ‘You must arrange
to have all the old animals euthanized.’

Seth looked appalled. ‘I can’t do that!’

‘Why not? We can make it look like natural causes and stage it over several weeks.’

‘Absolutely not.’ He was regarding her with such horror that Dollar realized she might have let her dislike of animals cloud her judgement, along with her eagerness to solve the problem. Now he thought she was
a dog assassin. He was strangely fond of dogs – cartoon ones at least.

‘I think paying off the charity is the only option,’ Seth said decisively. ‘The legal route could take years. The only other way to get vacant possession would be if the woman living there marries.’ He returned to the Brides List spreadsheet with a heavy sigh and enlarged a photograph of a very pretty girl who looked
no older than eighteen, tilting his head thoughtfully as he admired it.

He was about to consult her opinion on Shivani, a medical student from Uttar Pradesh, Dollar realised. She turned her tablet back on and resumed play, admiring the definition in Dougie Everett’s upper body.

The blond actor was from one of those blue-blooded British families who lived in houses like Eardisford,
she remembered. She’d recently read an interview with him in
Vanity Fair
in which they’d quoted him saying all sorts of politically incorrect things about politics, women and hunting. It was also the interview in which the news of his engagement to Kiki Nelson had broken and Dougie Everett had gone from unknown to the name on everybody’s lips.

In sharp contrast to Seth, Dougie seemed eager
to marry. He’d been engaged twice in as many years, and clearly had a thing for leading ladies, his previous fiancée having been British actress Iris Devonshire, whom he’d met on set when he was still a humble stuntman working on the
Ptolemy Finch
fantasy series. That engagement had been broken when bad-boy Dougie failed to change his ways, and Dollar suspected the same would happen with Kiki,
an earnest, preppy actress from old Hollywood stock, notoriously intense and a fervid social networker. His engagement to Kiki had undoubtedly helped his burgeoning acting career. The two had recently sizzled off the screen in a big-budget remake of
High Noon
. By the time it was previewing, though, rumours were already circulating that Dougie was behaving badly again. He’d recently been quoted
as saying Hollywood bored him and that he missed ‘British mud, girls, good manners and fox-hunting’. Most of all, he said, he missed the team of stunt horses he’d left behind in England.

Seth was taking a long time to look through Shivani’s details, studying more photographs of her with her family. She listed her hobbies as dancing and cooking, Dollar noticed, gritting her teeth. He would
tire of her just as quickly as Dougie Everett would tire of Kiki Nelson. Perhaps she should advise him on the Brides List after all. But if she did, there would only be one name on it: her own, with the right to take his name too. Denied that, she would have nothing to do with it. She looked away quickly. On screen, Dougie was vowing to avenge his chin-flicking lover’s murder by taking on the seven
quests set by the evil king.

‘Perhaps I should set all the girls on this Brides List a quest,’ Seth shouted, so she could hear. He was familiar with the film because she watched it so often when they travelled.

‘I can’t see Shivani riding the seven peaks of the Mohevthrian Mountains while being chased by a two-headed dragon and a green dwarf.’

‘I was thinking of something
more cerebral, more feminine.’

‘Candy Crush?’ She felt her anger boil beneath the surface, certain this was a deliberate humiliation. Anything those women could do, Dollar could do better. She had a degree from Harvard and a body desired by the world’s richest arms dealer. She could cook beautiful North Indian cuisine and arrange conferences in four time zones without blinking an eye. She
could solve the problem of the covenanted farm on his new estate in no time if he’d only let her dispatch a few furry friends to the big paddock in the sky.

From the cockpit, Deepak announced that there was some turbulence ahead. Moments later, Dollar and Seth were thrown back in their seats through a series of stomach-dropping jolts, the Brides List and medieval movie crashing together
as one tablet cannoned into another. Dougie’s head was freeze-framed on screen mid-yell. Looking at it, Dollar had another idea to solve Seth’s problem.

As the little plane bucked over the Gujarat, she hurriedly outlined her idea. ‘It involves a quest and an arranged marriage,’ she explained, in her most laconic monotone, ‘of which I am sure you will approve, although we must first recruit
somebody who is neither cerebral nor feminine.’

‘Do you promise there’ll be no dead animals?’ He looked wary.

‘Only the ones that Igor and his friends wish to kill.’

The plane finally levelled out and they resumed a calm cruising altitude. ‘Excellent. What do you need me to do?’

She picked up her tablet and admired the very blue eyes and very white teeth. ‘I think I
would like to meet Dougie Everett after all.’

‘Jesus, it’s like Downton Abbey!’

Having envisaged a quaint country manor in front of a duck pond, Dawn hadn’t anticipated the sheer scale of Eardisford lording over its miles of parkland, woodland, farmland and lakes. Nor had
she grasped quite how remote Lake Farm was. Having assumed Kat’s farmhouse would share party walls with the main house, given the furore the family had kicked up about it being annexed in the old lady’s will, she was amazed when they drove a good half-mile past the stately pile along a sunken lane, passing several sets of grand entrance gates, then entered woods that ran alongside a river. They
crossed a grand red-brick bridge and Kat pulled up. To one side of the car lay the vast rain-pocked surface of a lake; the other side dropped steeply away to the fast-flowing water. ‘This is it,’ she said proudly, jumping out to open yet another gate.

Dawn could see a lot of trees and water, but no house. Several pheasants were strutting around. ‘Are they part of the sanctuary?’ she asked,
as Kat climbed back in.

‘No, they come across from the shoots – Russ is like the Pied Piper of pheasants. Trevor’s one of ours, though.’ She nodded at a peacock that was watching them suspiciously from a tree stump. ‘He’s a much better guard dog than this lot.’ She glanced back to the two terriers and Labrador sleeping on the old blanket on the back seat.

Dawn had already been introduced
to the dogs in the car, sharing her seat with deaf Maddie and incontinent Daphne – they’d stopped twice on the way home for comfort breaks. She’d also met a stiff-hipped Labrador which needed a ramp to get in and out of the boot. She’d thought him gorgeously kissable until he’d panted close up and his halitosis had almost floored her.

Kat explained that she’d left the two lurchers in the
house because they always tried to eat the car if shut in it.

‘Jesus, what are they?’ Dawn was gaping at two huge hippo-like beasts wallowing in a muddy enclosure in the woods alongside the track.

‘Well, they were supposed to be micro-pigs. I think.’ Kat steered around pheasants and potholes. ‘Constance’s nephew gave them to her for her eightieth birthday, but they turned out to
be a lot more maxi than expected. They’re full-blown Vietnamese pot-bellies and now weigh in at about fourteen stone each – and that’s after a get-fit diet.’

They drove along the edge of the lake, the far side of the track opening out into pastureland with railed paddocks to one end, where several horses were grazing, with a few sheep and a muddy duo which looked to be halfway between the
two.

‘Shetland ponies – they’ve terrorized several generations of Mytton-Gough children. They’re both at least thirty,’ Kat explained. ‘There was a little Welsh pony too, but she died just before Christmas.’

‘What happened?’

‘Old age – she went to canter across the field when I put hay out and keeled over of a heart attack. She didn’t suffer, so it was a good way to go. She’d
have been in her thirties.’

‘Spice Girls, watch out.’ Dawn whistled, turning to look at Kat. ‘It must really hurt that they’re all old and dying.’

‘They’re all old and
alive
.’ Kat laughed, always a glass-half-full girl. ‘They’re having a great old age. That’s why I’m here. I’m seeing them through their dotage with dignity, as Constance would have.’ She turned to point at two rugged
horses pulling hay from a big metal feeder in the corner of another paddock. ‘That old grey hunter is “lame but game”, Constance used to say – if the hunt comes past he tries to join them. He even managed to swim across the lake once, and naturally Sid followed.’ She pointed at a scrawny-necked, balding bay with mad, milky cataract-blind eyes. ‘He was once a racehorse and is about thirty with raging
sweet-itch, bless him. Can’t see a thing, but happy to follow his grey friend everywhere. And that’s Sri.’ Her voice changed from humour to reverence as she looked across at the chestnut and white horse standing alone at the far end of the field, proud and aloof. ‘Now she
does
rule the roost. She’s a Marwari. Constance brought them over from India before the war and used to breed them. See the
ears? The tips meet like an arch.’

‘Poor thing.’ Dawn looked at the horse, which had a pretty dished face, with a big white blaze and unusual wall eyes, brighter blue than any tinted contact lens. ‘Can’t she get them pinned or something?’

The track turned back towards the woods, dropping sharply towards a gully, at the base of which a fast-moving stream was bridged by a stone-based
ford, the car wheels sending up great waves as they crossed it.

‘Thinking about it, I might not bring a car here,’ Dawn muttered, as they bounced up the rutted track and into open pasture again. No wonder Kat’s sporty coupé – which Dawn remembered Nick cleaning every weekend – was looking like it had just taken part in the Dakar Rally. ‘Is there an easier way in?’

‘They’re all kept
locked apart from the causeway at the other end of the lake, but that’s flooded and wouldn’t take a car anyway.’

Dawn looked across at Kat’s determined profile. ‘Don’t you find it frightening, being close to all this water?’

‘When I first came to Eardisford, I refused to go near the lake,’ she admitted, slaloming around the ridge above a deep ravine through which the brook fell in
great silvery white ribbons. ‘It was Constance’s favourite place – she was always asking me to row her across to the farmhouse, but I couldn’t even walk over the bridge.

‘She’d used Lake Farm as a retreat when she was first married, and filled it with memories of India. She got quite angry when I kept refusing to take her there, and threatened to go it alone. She could barely walk by then,
but I knew she meant it. That prospect was more frightening than the water, so I… well, I dared myself, I guess. As soon as I found out what was here, I knew I could cope. It’s a magical spot.’

A dwelling had been recorded on the site of Lake Farm in the Doomsday Book, at a time when the biggest meander in this stretch of the river Arrow still flowed freely along a half-mile arc that wrapped
itself around fifty acres of spring-filled pasture and woodland. In those days, there was no lake, but over the intervening centuries, the river had found a short-cut across the open side of the arc, and the oxbow lake had started to smile on its own.

The farmhouse stood in roughly the same spot as its predecessors. With thick woods behind it, the fish-filled lake in front and fertile red
Herefordshire soil beneath, it was a rich source of food and had been a ripe spot to settle, long before the lords of the manor had arrived to lay claim to the higher ground from which the main house now looked down on its humble predecessor. Parts of the main Lake Farm building were five-hundred-year-old oak lath and lime plaster, and in its time it had served as farm, fishery, battle outpost
and artist’s retreat. The same Edwardian who had burned down a great deal of the main house had been a rare champion, fashioning the farm as a bolthole in which to seduce his mistresses, landscaping the lake and securing its banks, creating divisions for the duck-flight ponds to either side with bridges. To the east he had commissioned the grand causeway leading across it from the parkland, with magnificent
lime avenues mirroring one another on each bank. Complete with water cascades and stone statuary, the causeway bridge was now too dangerous to use except in the driest months, and only then by foot, the planking too rotten to take the weight of cars. The only practicable way to get to Lake Farm without a 4x4 or boat, these days, was via the ford leading in from the west where the brook
that fed the oxbow gurgled off through the woods to join the millstream, then raced on to the river. The Edwardian had even planted an arboretum for privacy, beefing up the old woods and the lake’s banks with rare specimens and flowering shrubs, although many of the trees had blown down in the gales of 1987. Now the little farmhouse could be seen in winter from the upper floors of the main house.

But unlike the magnificent exterior to the main house, which an admirer could walk around to find beauty, balance and architectural gems at every turn, Lake Farm was only attractive from the front: its intricately half-timbered façade had been carefully preserved so it would not offend the grandees looking out across the parkland, the ancient farmstead peeping from the woodland behind the
lake, lattice windows twinkling and smoke curling from chimneys. The water had crept ever closer over the years, now almost covering the small jetty and turning what had once been a pretty front garden into a bog meadow of wild irises, bulrushes and watercress. The farm’s fenced paddocks and hedged pasture meadows stretched to the river behind it, like a green Inverness cape, and woodland bristled
to each side, from the weeping willows at the water’s edge through the Edwardian arboretum to the vast-trunked oaks, one of which Constance had claimed to be the oldest in Herefordshire.

Dawn, who arrived via the back tracks at the farmyard, thought the place looked thoroughly depressing. To the rear, Lake Farm was flat-faced and mean-windowed, covered with pipework and loose wires, and
shadowed by red-brick outbuildings that sagged lopsidedly around a muddy yard. This was where Kat parked her car and let the dogs pile out before squelching off to fetch Dawn some wellingtons so that she could cross the twenty yards of stagnant water and sludge to the house.

Constance had stopped using it as a retreat and occasional guest cottage in the mid-eighties when husband Ronnie
died. Since then, it had housed several long-term tenants, falling into increasing disrepair. In the years leading up to her death, it had been uninhabited and storms had battered it yet more, breaking down the Edwardian’s landscaped defences. The lake had seeped into the cellars and even the ground floor when it rained hard.

Nothing could have prepared Dawn for the inside of the house,
which reeked of damp dog and charred wood. There wasn’t a straight line in the building, from the bowed, smooth-worn quarry stones underfoot, to the bulging, misshapen walls and gnarled beams and the sagging ceilings. Despite the work that had gone into drying it out, it was far from watertight, and this week had been the wettest of the year so far. Drips ran down the walls, through the light fittings
and plopped in through the rattling windows. Compared to Dawn’s cosy little terrace, it felt glacial. The logs and kindling in the big inglenook were damp and refused to take when Kat waved a match at them; the night-storage heaters were stone cold, as was the hot-water boiler; there was minimal furniture and no curtains, apart from an incongruous collection of throws and wall hangings in one
corner that looked as if it had been stolen from an Indian restaurant after a particularly drunken night out.

It reminded Dawn so vividly of
Withnail & I
that she expected Uncle Monty to shimmy through a door in a silk dressing-gown at any moment.

Giving up on the fire, Kat stood up, threw out her arms and beamed at her. ‘This is home. Now can you understand why I never want to leave?’

Dawn shuddered and pulled her coat tighter, stepping towards the latticed windows overlooking the lake, which acted like a kaleidoscope, fragmenting the huge expanse of water, trees, parkland and the grand house in the distance into an impressionist’s painting of leaf, lake and light. Even rain-lashed and grey-skied, it was breathtaking.

‘I can understand why you lived there.’ She
gazed up at the grand Jacobean façade.

‘We had to duck the falling plaster every time we passed through the main hall. Constance lived in two rooms on the third floor with four oil heaters, and a tennis racquet to hit mice. It is seriously falling apart.’

‘And this place isn’t?’ Dawn looked around the chilly room. ‘Shall I call
DIY SOS
or will you?’

‘It’s had lots of work
done,’ Kat said defensively. ‘Constance sold a William Hodges to pay for it.’

‘Surely you can’t sell people in this day and age. That’s slavery.’

‘It was a landscape of an Indian palace,’ she said witheringly, aware that Dawn was winding her up. ‘It was supposed to pay for the repairs here, but she died before it was complete and work stopped when the legal wrangle started about
the ownership of the farm.’

Dawn eyed the many pans and bowls strategically positioned around her to catch drips. ‘So who pays for the roof to be mended now?’

‘That’s my responsibility,’ Kat explained, as she boiled an ancient enamel kettle on an even more historic range. ‘The family won’t have anything to do with it now, which I guess is understandable if a bit depressing. At least
they seem to have stopped trying to bully me out. The charity trustees are local do-gooders who are all very sweet but they’re more obsessed by whose turn it is to bake biscuits for committee meetings than getting things done, and they won’t let me take in other old animals or seek proper funding until we know who is buying Eardisford. Constance’s will ensured the house is so tightly tied to its
land and farms it can’t be split up, which limits the market.’

Dawn had a certain sympathy for the Mytton-Gough children, hamstrung by their mother’s many clauses while their inheritance mouldered as a depreciating asset. ‘If the old biddy knew it would have to be sold after her death, who
did
she think would buy it?’

Fetching down mugs, Kat confessed, ‘Royalty.’ She laughed at Dawn’s
cynical expression. ‘It’s true! She thought it would suit one of the princes to raise a family. The most recent rumour I heard is a Beijing manufacturing magnate buying a quiet weekend retreat for his son at LSE, but the village is full of rubbish. Last week it was a Hong Kong property tycoon.’

‘Lots of Chinese whispers, then?’

She grinned. ‘Whoever it is, you can bet Dair knows
something.’

‘Dair?’

‘The estate manager – he runs the fishery and the shoots.’

‘You know a man called Dair?’ Dawn whooped. ‘You are
kidding
me?’

Kat laughed, pulling the whistling kettle from the hob. ‘I think it’s short for “Alasdair”. He’s Scottish.’

‘Even better! Please tell me he’s rich and handsome. Is he single?’