homely task of making a pot of tea. An unfamiliar sound caught her ears and she traced it to a dishwasher discreetly concealed by an oak panel that matched the rest of the kitchen.
‘Your mother’s not getting any younger,’ her father said gruffly, noticing her astonishment. ‘Time was when I hoped that David would change his mind and come back, but it looks like your mother and I will be the last Setons to live here, and I don’t want your mother dying before her time through overwork.’
Kate could scarcely conceal her astonishment. What had happened to the stern, unyielding father who had never allowed either of his children to see any hint of what he might think of as weakness?
‘Times change, lass,’ he said heavily, as though he had seen into her mind. ‘And sometimes they bring hard lessons. I was wrong to say to you what I did. Driving you out of your home like that… Hasty words spoken in the heat of the moment, and both of us too proud to back down, eh?’
Kate had never thought of it like that, never seen in her own refusal to risk rejection by getting in touch with her parents a mirror-image of her father’s notorious pride, but now she saw that he was, in part, right.
‘It took your mother to make me see sense, and thank goodness she did. Yon’s a fine lass you’ve got there. It will do your mother good to have someone to fuss over besides me and the shepherds.’
As he finished speaking Kate heard a whine outside the back door, and to her astonishment her father opened it to let in the dog who had accompanied him to the station.
‘No good in the open, this one,’ he told her slightly shamefacedly. ‘I should have got rid of him, but I hadn’t the heart. Spoiled him to death, your mother has.’
But Kate noticed, when her father carried the tea-tray through into the sitting-room, that it was at his feet that the dog lay.
With Cherry in bed, Kate felt oddly vulnerable and uncomfortable. She had left this house in fear and misery eleven years ago, and now she was back, but how could those years be bridged?
It proved to be astonishingly easy. It became apparent to Kate that there was scarcely a single feature of her and Cherry’s lives that Lydia had left untold, and that her mother was almost as familiar with the regular pattern of their lives as she was herself.
Lydia had been a good friend to both of them, Kate recognised.
Quite what she had hoped to achieve by her precipitous flight to London she didn’t really know, but after two terrifying days and nights of living rough she had suppressed her pride and gone to see her godmother.
Lydia had not, as she had dreaded, insisted on Kate going home, or even agreed with her parents that her pregnancy must be hushed up and her child adopted. Instead she had offered Kate and her baby a home with her for just as long as they needed it.
A career woman with no ties, she had adapted remarkably well to the responsibility of a pregnant teenage girl, Kate thought. It had been Lydia who had encouraged her to go back to her studies and complete her degree, who had insisted on sharing the care of Cherry with her so that she was free to do so, and who had also encouraged her to buy her own small flat once she had finally got a job, thus giving both her and Cherry their independence.
Not once had she ever asked about Silas, and not once had Kate mentioned him. So why start thinking about him now? What was the point?
Her mother hadn’t been wrong to remind her of her father’s habit of early rising, Kate reflected ruefully the next morning when the sound of her father whistling to his dog woke her from her slumbers.
Without even going to the window, she could picture the scene in the yard below: her father in his ancient tweed jacket, crook in one hand, as he summoned his dog for the start of their day’s work.
On a summer morning like this he would be working the fells, checking on his sheep and preparing his dogs for the Dales Show.
As she lay there, other sounds penetrated her consciousness; the muted baaing of the wool-sheep in the paddock on the far side of the house; the cackling of her mother’s hens and then the impatient roar of her father’s voice as he called his dog to order.
They hadn’t had a sheepdog yet unable to resist the temptation of trying to round up the hens, and Kate grinned to herself as she burrowed deeper under the blankets. As a teenager she had cherished every extra stolen moment in bed in the mornings, but this morning she couldn’t recapture that teenage pleasure. Instead she found she was thinking about her mother, who would be busy downstairs.
Groaning at the extra burdens of conscience that adulthood brought, she started to get up, pausing by her window and frowning as she heard Cherry’s excited voice floating up to her from the yard.
‘I’m up, Grandpa. Can I come with you?’
‘You’ll have to ask your mother about that,’ she heard her father growl. ‘And you’ll need something inside you first.’
‘But you will wait for me, won’t you?’ Cherry persisted, and Kate found that she was holding her breath, praying that her father wouldn’t hurt Cherry’s feelings by refusing her request.
Half of her was already prepared for it when he said brusquely, ‘The fells are no place for someone who doesn’t know them,’ but then, to her surprise and relief, he softened his refusal by adding more gently, ‘You go in and speak to your mother and have your breakfast, and then later on you can come and watch while I put Laddie through his paces in the paddock. Not that it will do the stupid creature the least bit of good. Never make a champion… Too soft, that’s what he is.’
Kate was downstairs by the time Cherry came in, her small face alight with excitement.
‘Mum, I’m going to help Gramps train Laddie,’ she told Kate importantly.
And because she loved and understood her, Kate overlooked the small exaggeration and said instead, ‘Are you, indeed? Well then, you’re going to need something to eat first, aren’t you?’
Cherry had always had a healthy appetite, but already the upland air seemed to have sharpened it, and Kate saw the pleasure touch her own mother’s face as Cherry devoured the meal Jean had made for her.
‘You should have let me do that, Mum,’ Kate protested quietly, when Cherry had gone upstairs to clean her teeth. ‘You’ve got enough to do already.’
‘It’s no trouble. It’s a long time since I’ve had a young one to cook for,’ she added quietly, and somehow her words underlined the loneliness of their lives, making Kate guiltily conscious that she could and should have done more earlier to heal the rift between them.
For too long she had retained her childhood perceptions of her parents and her father’s anger, and now it hurt her to acknowledge that she might have been guilty of deliberately holding on to her own anger and resentment. They were both so patently thrilled with Cherry, and she made up her mind there and then that she would see to it that she made it up to both Cherry and her parents for all the times together they had missed.
When her father came back later in the morning, Cherry rushed out to join him.
Watching her daughter skipping happily at her grandfather’s side with the black and white collie, plumy tail waving happily from side to side as it followed them, Kate felt an unexpected prickle of tears sting her eyes.
