Authors: Davie Henderson
Kate blushed, feeling like a naive little girl if not a ditzy blonde, and realizing just how far out of her depth she was.
“I won’t presume to tell you what to do or what not to do. I’ll just do my best to make sure you’re in possession of all the facts and understand their implications before you make your mind up,” the lawyer said. “Fair enough?”
Kate nodded.
“Good. Now, from what you’ve said—and, if you’ll forgive me saying so, the slightly dreamy look in your eyes as you said it—I take it that you’d prefer not to sell?”
Kate nodded again.
“I can’t say I blame you, because it’s a lovely little part of the world. But I have to caution you against letting The
Cranoch’s beauty blind you to its problems. Don’t get me wrong, the estate has a lot going for it; but it’s also got an awful lot working against it.”
“After walking around it this morning, I find that hard to believe.”
“I’m afraid I have to look at it in terms of balance sheets rather than scenic beauty, Lady Kate. You said you run a small business?”
“Yes, but nothing on this scale.”
“The scale might be different but the principles are exactly the same. In a nutshell, The Cranoch is like a shop that’s been losing money for about 50 years. It was highly profitable as a sheep run in the early 1800s; then as a hunting estate up to the 1930s.
“But once Colin Chisholm took over … Well, he wanted his privacy, for reasons Finlay has no doubt explained. He wasn’t prepared to share Greystane with paying guests and so, as factors, our hands were somewhat tied. We did our best to market The Cranoch as a holiday venue to the huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ set, but we could only offer accommodation in the crofters’ cottages. The people who follow those pursuits want to be waited on hand and foot in the big house; they’re not prepared to put up with bed-and-breakfast in a crofter’s cottage.”
“Didn’t you explain all that to Mr. Chisholm?”
“At every opportunity. But, rather than follow our advice, he chose to keep the estate afloat by literally selling off the family silver piece by piece. Not just the silver, but the
objet d’art
that had been collected over the years when the family’s finances had been in a somewhat sounder state.
“Unfortunately, I have to inform you that we’re now at the stage where there’s no family silver left to sell.”
“Your hands wouldn’t be tied with me, Mr. Cunningham,” Kate said, smiling because she felt the problems weren’t as insurmountable as his earlier words had led her to fear. “I wouldn’t mind sharing Greystane with guests if they were helping make the estate a going concern. In fact, I might even enjoy the company,” she told him, having visions of meeting and maybe mingling with actors, sports stars, and minor royalty.
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” Archibald Cunningham said. “Take Greystane: it’s four hundred years old and in the most exposed location imaginable, so it needs constant care and repair. Unfortunately, Mr. Chisholm could barely afford to do the little jobs, let alone the big ones.
“Then there’s the estate itself. It’s a common misconception that a sporting estate is basically an area of unspoiled wilderness, and that looking after it is just a matter of letting nature run its course. In fact a good sporting estate might look wild but it’s anything but a wilderness. It doesn’t happen by itself, and doesn’t just look after itself. In its way it’s as manufactured and manicured as a golf course, with the natural balance distorted to favour one or two target species and a single predator.”
“The paying guest.”
“Indeed, the paying guest. To maintain that artificial
balance you’ve got to juggle dozens of different factors, each of them affecting the others, all of them needing to be constantly kept in check.”
“And at the moment the balance of The Cranoch isn’t quite what it should be for a sporting estate?”
“To carry on with the golfing analogy, if you’ll forgive me—the game’s a passion of mine, if not an obsession—The Cranoch is closer to a pitch-and-putt course than to Pebble Beach, and Greystane House is closer to a caddyshack than the clubhouse at Augusta. I hope I’m not overstepping the mark by speaking so bluntly, but I’d be remiss not to.”
“I understand,” Kate said, trying hard to keep the disappointment from her voice and the tears from welling up in her eyes.
“In short, it’s sorely neglected, Lady Kate: not just Greystane but the whole estate. You’d have to spend a considerable amount of time and money on them to attract the sort of people who pay top dollar,” the lawyer told her.
“Even if you can afford to meet all those one-off costs and get Greystane and the estate into first-class shape, you’d then be faced with increased running costs to maintain them in that condition.”
“But it was profitable in the past,” Kate said, clutching at straws.
“It’s a different world now,” Archibald Cunningham said. “The extra hired hands you’d need would expect to be paid far more than the estate workers and domestics who worked for a pittance back in the ‘good old days’. In
other words, your income would go up, but I don’t think it would go up nearly as much as your expenses. You’d still have a crippling revenue gap, Lady Kate.”
“Are you effectively saying that my only realistic option is to sell?”
“I’m saying that if you want to avoid selling you have to come up with a way to close the revenue gap, or else subsidize The Cranoch’s constant loss-making from a source of income outside the estate. I don’t know if perhaps your shop near San Francisco would be able to do that?”
Kate laughed, but with irony rather than humor.
Picking up on the irony, the lawyer said, “I take it that’s a ‘no’.”
“The shop makes enough to support me and my father, but that’s about it. Anyway, I get the feeling from what you’ve said that I’d have to sell my share in the shop just to pay for the immediate repairs Greystane’s going to need.”
“Quite possibly. There’s a rather long list of things Mr. Chisholm put off that can’t be ignored for much longer.
“As I said, if you want to hold on to The Cranoch you’ll have to come up with some way to boost its income. I’m afraid it’s a bit beyond my remit—not to mention imagination—to make any suggestions in that respect. It’s really more of a job for a business consultant, but it’s a Catch 22 situation.”
“How do you mean?”
“The good consultants don’t come cheap, so the times when you need their services the most are the times when
you’re least able to afford them.”
Kate felt all her romantic notions crumbling to dust as Archibald Cunningham explained the harsh realities of the situation. She knew that if worse came to worse she’d still leave Scotland a relatively wealthy woman, yet somehow she also knew that she’d be unhappier than before she’d ever heard of Greystane and The Cranoch. Suddenly Kate was no longer worried whether the man sitting across the desk from her thought she was a ditzy blonde, a dreamy romantic or a dumb American, and the tears were running down her cheeks.
She expected Archibald Cunningham would barely be able to keep the mockery from his face, given that he had a somewhat sardonic expression at the best of times. However, the solicitor reached into the breast pocket of his pinstriped jacket and brought out a linen handkerchief for her, and there was genuine sympathy in his voice when he said, “I’m sorry I can’t be more positive, Lady Kate, but I wouldn’t be doing you any favours if I wasn’t brutally honest. You’ve been presented with something that must be like a bit of a dream come true; I have the unpleasant task of making you face the reality of it.”
Kate wiped her eyes with the handkerchief, feeling even more like a little girl now as she said, “I’m just so disappointed. It was better than a dream, Mr. Cunningham. When I looked out of my bedroom window in the tower I felt like I was a princess in my own little fairytale castle. I’m sorry, I know that must sound so stupid.”
“No need to apologize—I understand. I’m not saying you have no choice other than to give up Greystane and walk away from Glen Cranoch; all I’m saying is that it’ll take no little imagination to think of a way to keep it.”
Trying to get her act together, Kate said, “What other sources of income does the estate have?”
“Not many, I’m afraid. There are a dozen crofts—little mixed farms run by the tenants to feed their families and the laird or lady, earn a little spending money and pay a token rent—but that’s all it is, a token rent. There’s no real money in it for the crofters or the estate. The crofts are really just a way for people who love the land to be able to live on it, and for the estate to employ at least a handful of essential workers it couldn’t afford to pay in cash. They’re almost like a last remnant of the old days, when people paid rent by giving service and a share of their produce to the clan chief,” he said. “You could always try raising their rents but, realistically, they couldn’t afford to pay. They barely get by as it is.”
Kate wiped away the last of her tears and, thinking about the terrible events Finlay had related that morning, said, “Raising the rents isn’t an option, Mr. Cunningham.”
The lawyer nodded. Looking at some notes he’d made on a yellow legal pad, he said, “There’s some revenue from timber, supplying a few specialist local markets—quality furniture-makers and the like—on a small scale.”
“Couldn’t we make more by supplying bigger markets further afield?” Kate asked, more in hope than expectation
because she guessed there must be some reason why such a course of action wasn’t already being followed.
Sure enough, the lawyer said, “The Cranoch’s hillsides are too steep, the forest not really extensive enough, the roads in and out too poor to make it a real money-earner. You can’t supply the big buyers with the bulk they need and, even if you could, you can’t compete on price.”
“Have you not got any good news for me, Mr. Cunningham?” Kate asked.
“There is a silver lining to all the clouds,” he said. “I know you’d rather not sell, but if you decide you have to, there’s a buyer who’s expressed the sort of interest that’s likely to translate into an offer it would be difficult to refuse.”
“No matter how much money I was offered for The Cranoch, I wouldn’t find it difficult to refuse.”
“I understand that, Lady Kate, but you have to face up to the fact that you won’t have a choice unless you can come up with a way of turning the estate around.
“Anyway, this party has been interested in The Cranoch for some time. They wanted to meet Colin Chisholm to make an offer but he had no use for money—he was too old to spend it. They must have been keeping an eye on the situation, though.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The day after Mr. Chisholm’s death notice appeared in the local newspaper they were in touch with me, as executor of the estate, asking to arrange a meeting; and then Finlay reported seeing a stranger ‘snooping around’, taking
lots of photographs of Greystane and the glen and obviously out for more than a walk. He turned up again the next day, and Finlay confronted him—rather angrily, by all accounts—because he guessed the man was checking out the estate, circling like a vulture.
“Anyway, I didn’t want to meet with the prospective buyer until I’d had this talk with you.
“As luck would have it they called just before you arrived, saying they’re in the area at the moment and asking if they could meet me to discuss the estate. I suggested a business dinner at five o’clock in The Caledonian Thistle Hotel, just around the corner, so that if you’d like to hear what they have to say it won’t involve you in another trip into town. If you’ve got other plans, though, or would rather let me act as intermediary and give you the lowdown later, that’s fine.”
Kate sighed heavily. Fighting back the urge to dismiss the offer of a meeting out of hand, as Colin Chisholm had done, she said, “I suppose there’s no harm at least hearing what they have to say.”
“Indeed not. I don’t have to be present other than to introduce you, but I would strongly recommend that you let me sit in. These people have a thousand little tricks for pressuring you into making on-the-spot decisions you might regret later. They might well say there’s a time limit on their offer, come up with some apparently plausible reason why the deal has to be done tonight or by noon tomorrow or 5 p.m. on Friday, when in truth that’ll almost certainly not
be the case. They’ve been interested in the estate for over a year, by my reckoning, so the chances are they’ll still be interested in it a few weeks or months from now.”
Kate nodded to show she understood.
“But I wouldn’t wait too long,” the lawyer cautioned.
“Why not?”
“While it’s not a good idea to accept an opening offer, if you leave the unpalatable decision until you can’t hang on any longer they’ll take you to the cleaners because they’ll be the ones bargaining from a position of strength. They’ll sense your desperation, because that’s part of what they do, and they’ll move in for the kill without mercy, because that’s another part of what they do.”
“Just exactly who are
they,
Mr. Cunningham, and why are they so interested in Glen Cranoch?”
“They
are Yeoman Holdings, a London-based development company. As for why they’re so interested in Glen Cranoch in particular, that’s a little harder to say because their portfolio is so wide. From what I can make out, it seems to cover everything from residential developments through to commercial and leisure interests.” Archibald Cunningham looked at his watch and said, “It’s just coming up to four o’clock now; how about if I meet you in the hotel bar about ten to five and we’ll go into the restaurant together?”
Kate nodded.
“I have another client at four, but you’re most welcome to pass the time in the waiting room, and I’ll get Mrs. Cunningham at the desk there to bring you a coffee.”
“Thanks, but Finlay’s waiting to drive me back to The Cranoch. I better let him know what’s happening.”
“On the subject of Finlay—and Miss Weir, for that matter—they’re likeable souls, but you can’t let the tail wag the dog.”
“What do you mean?”
“This has to be about what’s best for you, Lady Kate, not what’s best for them.”