* * *
Sir Robert Cranbrook glared across the table. Even from his wheelchair and ravaged by a stroke he was an impressive man, but his hand shook as he snatched the pen his lawyer offered and signed away centuries of power and privilege.
‘Do you want a sample of my DNA, too, boy?’ he demanded as he tossed the pen on the table. His speech was slurred but the arrogant disdain of five hundred years was in his eyes. ‘Are you prepared to drag your mother’s name through the courts in order to satisfy your pretensions? Because I will fight your right to inherit my title.’
Even now, when he’d lost everything, he still thought his name, the baronetcy that went with it, meant something.
Hal North’s hand was rock steady as he picked up the pen and added his signature to the papers, immune to that insulting ‘boy.’
Cranbrook Park meant nothing to him except as a means to an end. He was the one in control here, forcing his enemy to sit across the table and look him in the eye, to acknowledge the shift in power. That was satisfaction enough.
Nearly enough.
Cranbrook’s pawn, Thackeray, hadn’t lived to witness this moment, but his daughter was now his tenant. Evicting her would close the circle.
‘You can’t afford to fight me, Cranbrook,’ he said, capping the pen and returning it to the lawyer. ‘You owe your soul to the tax man and without me to bail you out you’d be a common bankrupt man living at the mercy of the state.’
‘Mr North…’
‘I have no interest in claiming you as my father. You refused to acknowledge me as your son when it would have meant something,’ he continued, ignoring the protest from Cranbrook’s solicitor, the shocked intake of breath from around the room. It was just the two of them confronting the past. No one else mattered. ‘I will not acknowledge you now. I don’t need your name and I don’t want your title. Unlike you, I did not have to wait for my father to die before I took my place in the world, to be a man.’
He picked up the deeds to Cranbrook Park. Vellum, tied with red ribbon, bearing a King’s seal. Now his property.
‘I owe no man for my success. Everything I am, everything I own, Cranbrook, including the estate you have squandered, lost because you were too idle, too fond of easy living to hold it, I have earned through hard work, sweat—things you’ve always thought beneath you. Things that could have served you. Would have saved you from this if you were a better man.’
‘You’re a poacher, a common thief…’
‘And now I’m dining with presidents and prime ministers, while you’re waiting for God in a world reduced to a single room with a view of a flower-bed instead of the park created by Humphrey Repton for one of your more energetic ancestors.’
Hal turned to his lawyer, tossed him the centuries-old deeds as casually as he would toss a newspaper in a bin and stood up, wanting to be done with this. To breathe fresh air.
‘Think about me sitting at your desk as I make that world my own, Cranbrook. Think about my mother sleeping in the Queen’s bed, sitting at the table where your ancestors toadied to kings instead of serving at it.’ He nodded to the witnesses. ‘We’re done here.’
‘Done! We’re far from done!’ Sir Robert Cranbrook clutched at the table, hauled himself to his feet. ‘Your mother was a cheating whore who took the money I gave her to flush you away and then used you as a threat to keep her useless drunk of a husband in a job,’ he said, waving away the rush to support him.
Hal North had not become a multimillionaire by betraying his emotions and he kept his face expressionless, his hands relaxed, masking the feelings boiling inside him.
‘You can’t blackmail an innocent man, Cranbrook.’
‘She didn’t have to be pushed very hard to come back for more. Years and years more. She was mine, bought and paid for.’
‘Hal…’ The quiet warning came from his lawyer. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Sleeping in a bed made for a queen won’t change what she is and no amount of money will make you anything but trash.’ Cranbrook raised a finger, no longer shaky, and pointed at him. ‘Your hatred of me has driven you all these years, Henry North and now everything you ever dreamed of has finally fallen into your lap and you think you’ve won.’
Oh, yes…
‘Enjoy your moment, because tomorrow you’re going to be wondering what there’s left to get out of bed for. Your wife left you. You have no children. We are the same you and I…’
‘Never!’
‘The same,’ he repeated. ‘You can’t fight your genes.’ His lips curled up in a parody of a smile. ‘That’s what I’ll be thinking about when they’re feeding me through a tube,’ he said as he collapsed back into the chair, ‘and I’ll be the one who dies laughing.’
* * *
Claire Thackeray swung her bike off the road and onto the footpath that crossed Cranbrook Park estate.
The No Cycling sign had been knocked down by the quad bikers before Christmas and late for work, again, she didn’t bother to dismount.
She wasn’t a rule breaker by inclination but no one was taking their job for granted at the moment. Besides, hardly anyone used the path. The Hall was unoccupied but for a caretaker and any fisherman taking advantage of the hiatus in occupancy to tempt Sir Robert’s trout from the Cran wouldn’t give two hoots. Which left only Archie and he’d look the other way for a bribe.
As she approached a bend in the path, Archie, who objected to anyone travelling faster than walking pace past his meadow, charged the hedge. It was terrifying if you weren’t expecting it—hence the avoidance by joggers—and pretty unnerving if you were. The trick was to have a treat ready and she reached in her basket for the apple she carried to keep him sweet.
Her hand met fresh air and as she looked down she had a mental image of the apple sitting on the kitchen table, before Archie—not a donkey to be denied an anticipated treat—brayed his disapproval.
Her first mistake was not to stop and dismount the minute she realised she had no means of distracting him, but while his first charge had been a challenge, his second was the real deal. While she was still on the what, where, how, he leapt through one of the many gaps in the long-neglected hedge, easily clearing the sagging wire while she was too busy pumping the pedals in an attempt to outrun him to be thinking clearly.
Her second mistake was to glance back, see how far away he was and the next thing she knew she’d come to an abrupt and painful halt in a tangle of bike and limbs—not all of them her own—and was face down in a patch of bluebells growing beneath the hedge.
Archie stopped, snorted, then, job done, he turned around and trotted back to his hiding place to await his next victim. Unfortunately the man she’d crashed into, and who was now the bottom half of a bicycle sandwich, was going nowhere.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded.
‘Smelling the bluebells,’ she muttered, keeping very still while she mentally checked out the ‘ouch’ messages filtering through to her brain.
There were quite a lot of them and it took her a while, but even so she would almost certainly have moved her hand, which appeared to be jammed in some part of the man’s anatomy if it hadn’t been trapped beneath the bike’s handlebars. Presumably he was doing the same since he hadn’t moved, either. ‘Such a gorgeous scent, don’t you think?’ she prompted, torn between wishing him to the devil and hoping that he hadn’t lost consciousness.
His response was vigorous enough to suggest that while he might have had a humour bypass—and honestly if you didn’t laugh, well, with the sort of morning she’d had, you’d have to cry—he