was only one vehicle in the car park, an ancient Land Rover, with a man standing beside it.
Kate felt the apprehension curl through her stomach. In addition to rearing and breeding sheep, her father trained prize sheep-dogs, and throughout her childhood there had never been one of these animals far from his side. There was one at his feet now, a quiver of intelligent black and white fur, the sight of which transfixed Cherry to the spot in delighted disbelief.
While her daughter studied the dog, Kate studied her father. He had aged—but then, hadn’t they all?—and working in a climate like the Dales, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, took its toll on the human frame, even one as hardy as her father’s.
He returned her look a little defensively, and then, ridiculously, she felt tears prick her eyes and she did something she had never intended to do, practically running across the car park to hug him.
He returned her embrace awkwardly, uncertainly, like a man unused to demonstrations of physical caring, and then released her to say gruffly, ‘Aye, she’s a proper Seton,’ and Kate could have sworn there was just a suspicion of moisture in his eyes as he looked at her daughter.
‘The man at the station said I was the image of my grandma,’ Cherry told him importantly.
Instantly he scowled. ‘That Tom Meadows always had a fancy for your mother,’ he told Kate irefully.
‘Grandpa, is it all right for me to stroke your dog?’ Cherry asked him formally.
Again he scowled, and Kate, well acquainted with her father’s view that dogs were working animals and best treated as such, was astounded to see him suddenly bend and fondle the silky black and white coat with gentle fingers. His hand was gnarled. An old man’s hand, she recognised shockingly.
‘Aye, I don’t see why not. His name’s Laddie.’
Lassie, Laddie, Meg, Skip—those were always the names her father chose for his dogs. A dog trained by John Seton was always in high demand, but for as long as she could remember Kate had never known her father sell a dog to a man he didn’t like.
As Cherry bent down to stroke the dog, crooning happily as his tail beat on the dusty ground, Kate asked, ‘Will you be working him in the county show, Dad?’
‘No, not this one. He’s not much good as a worker.’
He saw the astonishment on her face and added gruffly, ‘Your mother took to him, though, and I couldn’t get rid of him. Sleeps in the house an’ all, he does.’ He scowled horribly. ‘Ought to have had him put down. Dog’s no good if it can’t work…’
Had she not seen with her own eyes the love in her father’s face as he stroked his pet, Kate might almost have believed him.
How many times in the past had she been too ignorant or too immature to see that his gruff manner hid real emotion? She had thought him a cold, hard, man, and so she had run away from him and from her home, convinced that if she stayed he would make her hand over her baby for adoption.
And yet now, as he looked at Cherry, there was pride as well as grief in his eyes; love as well as regret.
‘We’d better get on, then. No use standing about here giving folks cause to gossip. Besides, your ma will be waiting.’
The village hadn’t changed at all. There was still the same bench outside the post office’s wistaria-draped front wall, a meeting-point for the older members of the village. During the day it was normally occupied by the women, but in the evening it was the preserve of the men. Opposite the post office was the village’s single pub, the De Burghley Arms. A rather grand name for a very small and homely building. It took its name from the follower of William the Conqueror who had once owned these lands; a family which had distant connections with Queen Elizabeth the First’s famous minister.
The last de Burghley had left the village just before Kate, in the funeral cortège taking him to the family vault within the walls of their local parish church.
One of his ancestors, robed in the stone mimicry of his Crusader uniform, lay at rest within the church itself; and the church’s stained-glass windows gave testimony to the many de Burghleys who, over the centuries, had given their lives in what they considered to be just causes.
It was her father’s proud boast that there had been Setons in the dale for as long as there had been de Burghleys, if not longer. There was even a story in the family that the first Seton had been a wild raider from the Scottish borders who had tried to steal away one of the de Burghley daughters to hold for ransom, but who had ended up falling in love with her instead, and who had received from his new father-in-law, as the price of her dowry, the lands which the Setons had farmed ever since.
If that was the case, the dowry had not been an overgenerous one, Kate reflected as the engine note of the Land Rover changed and they started to climb the ribbon of grey road between its darker grey borders of dry stone walling.
Her family’s acreage, though large, comprised not the rich pasture lands of the dale bottom, but the unproductive uplands fit only for sheep.
Once vast flocks of sheep had roamed the Seton lands, and in the Middle Ages the Setons had grown wealthy from their profit, but two World Wars and the death of her grandfather had reduced the flocks to a handful of worthless animals.
It had been her father who had had the foresight to see that the future lay in selective breeding, in producing not the world’s wool, but the rams that would produce the flocks which would produce such wool.
Seton rams were famous and prized the world over, but, as Kate knew from her childhood, those early years of establishing their reputation had been hard ones for her parents, with long separations between them while her father travelled, mainly to South America, Australia and New Zealand, doing his own marketing. Her mother remained at home, in sole charge of the farm: her children, the livestock and her husband’s precious ewes and lambs.
Through it all her parents had worked as a team, each selflessly working for the other. They had a relationship which now was considered old-fashioned, with her mother making her husband the pivot of her life.
The farm and their lives together here in the Dales; that had been the total sum of their ambitions. No wonder her father had been so disappointed when David had announced he wanted to be an engineer.
Kate had kept in sporadic touch with her brother and knew that he was married, but as yet had no children. Was that what had motivated her father to mend the breach between them? The fact that Cherry, her daughter, was the only member of the next generation?
Cherry was chattering to her grandfather as though she had known him all her life. Already there was a rapport between them completely unshadowed with the awe in which Kate herself had always held him.
Listening to Cherry talking knowledgeably to him about the sheep—throwing out snippets of facts she could only have picked up from her, Kate recognised—she was both amused and saddened by her daughter’s grave, slightly old fashioned air. Cherry was such a contained, adult child in many ways, and yet in others she was so heartbreakingly vulnerable. This visit meant so much to her; she had talked of nothing else for months, ever since Lydia had dropped her bombshell at Christmas, by announcing that she had been in touch with Kate’s mother and that her parents wanted her to go home, if only for a visit.
Kate ached to remind Cherry that a visit was all it could be, but was reluctant
