Potential Danger

Potential Danger

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘HOW much longer, Mum?’

Kate Seton looked down into her daughter’s face, alive with the excitement and impatience of a ten-year old, on the threshold of a much promised treat, and wishing the miles of their journey away because of it.

Once, she too had been impatient of this long journey from London to the Yorkshire Dales, but her anxious need had been to travel away from the Dales, not to them, and she had been eighteen and not ten.

That she had also been pregnant and terrified was something she preferred not to think about today. The journey home was not just a treat for Cherry; it was also something of a fence-mending exercise with her own parents. She sighed faintly and closed her eyes, blotting out the familiar landscape of summer greens.

They had travelled through the once great industrial heartland of the country and had emerged into the tranquil greenery of a land that bore its scars of age and hardship proudly.

Like its people. Like her parents.

‘Mum, will my grandfather really be there to meet us?’

All the anxiety of a child who had learned not to expect too much from the adult world was in Cherry’s voice, and it hurt Kate to hear that uncertainty.

‘Yes, he will,’ she assured her.

And he would. If her father said he would do something, do it he would. It was a trait inherent among the farming community of the Dales, bred into them by their environment and necessity.

She watched Cherry while her daughter stared excitedly out of the window. She had named her Cherry because she had been born in the month of May when the cherry trees were in blossom. It had been for Cherry’s sake that she had left the Dales, and it was now, ironically, for her sake that she was returning.

‘And we really will be staying with Granny and Grandpa for all the summer holidays, won’t we?’ Cherry asked her anxiously, diverted from the study of the unfamiliar scenery to question her mother.

‘Yes,’ Kate answered her calmly, but inside she was far from feeling calm. How would her parents react to this grandchild they had never seen?

Eighteen, unmarried and pregnant, she had left home in disgrace after announcing her pregnancy to her parents.

Her father had a very strict, unbending moral code; it had driven David, Kate’s elder brother, to leave home at seventeen and to roam the world before finally settling down in Canada. She had been twelve at the time that David had left, and her father had seen his son’s departure as a desertion of his duty to follow him on the farm.

Setons had farmed in Abbeydale since the days of the Reformation, clinging to their upland pastures with the same tenacity as the sheep they bred, and to John Seton it was unthinkable that his only son should want to break away from a tradition that had endured for many hundreds of years.

With the hindsight of adult perception, Kate could see how her father’s crippling disappointment in David’s desertion had tainted his life and coloured his attitude towards her.

He had been a strict father, but not oppressively so; after school she had been expected to help out around the farm, sharing her mother’s chores of raising chickens and selling eggs, cultivating the kitchen garden in the walled lea of the house where they grew fresh fruit and vegetables, but she had hated the restrictiveness of her existence.

Perhaps that was why she had worked so hard at school, knowing that the opportunity to go to university would be her only means of escape.

If there was one thing her father respected, it was education, and so when the time came, albeit reluctantly, he had driven Kate down to the station to see her off on the journey that would take her away from the farm for ever.

How lonely and terrified she had been those first few weeks at Lancaster University; how very different the reality from her imaginings. The other girls were so much more sophisticated than her; she felt excluded and alone.

And then she had met Silas.

‘Mum, did my father come from the Dales?’

Her head snapped round, the dark green eyes she had inherited from a Scottish ancestress wide and vulnerable.

By what uncanny mental telepathy had Cherry picked up on her thoughts and asked her that question?

Cherry rarely mentioned her father. She knew that she was the result of a brief liaison her parents had shared while at university, and she accepted the fact that her father had no place in her life, nor wanted one, without any apparent concern. So many of the children she was at school with were in the same position that it was barely worthy of comment.

How different things had been ten years ago when Cherry was born. How her father had ranted and railed against the shame an illegitimate grandchild would bring to their name. Such things didn’t happen to Setons… To be sure, there had been the odd rushed marriage in the family’s history, the odd seven-months child; but in those days modern mores had not yet reached the Dales, and there had been no way Kate could have stayed at home and kept her child.

And so she had taken the only option open to her. She had walked from the farm to the local station, half blinded by her own tears; terrified beyond belief by what she was doing, but urged on by the inherent stubbornness that was part of the Seton heritage. She was not going to give up her child.

She realised with a start that she hadn’t answered Cherry’s question and that her daughter was regarding her curiously.

’No… no… he didn’t,’ she told her truthfully, and then added in warning, ‘Don’t mention him to your grandparents, Cherry, will you?’

‘Did they know him?’ Cherry asked her, obviously puzzled by her instruction.

Kate shook her head. ‘No.’

And it was true. Her parents had never met Silas. She had been planning to take him home with her at Christmas. They had been going to announce their engagement, or so she had believed. God, she had been a fool… But what was the point in thinking about that now? She had been a fool as so many naïve girls were fools and would go on being fools. It was impossible to change human emotions, and girls would continue to fall in love and give themselves in the intensity of that love, to men who were simply using them to satisfy the immediacy of their sexual urges.

She reached out and pushed her daughter’s thick, dark hair back off her face. Cherry’s hair was a legacy from Silas. It had that same raven’s wing sheen, and her eyebrows his expressive lift.

She had the green Seton eyes, though, set in a face whose delicate heart shape promised to mirror her own, once the softening influence of childhood disappeared.

Her own hair was a dark, rich red and thickly curly. It vibrated with its own electric intensity, and Silas had often teased her that she was so small and tiny because all her strength went into her hair.

That was one way in which she and Cherry were not alike. Cherry promised to be tall like her father. One day, her daughter was going to be an extremely beautiful woman, Kate reflected, and it was Silas’s loss that he would not be able to witness the wonder of that woman emerging. Kate was determined that her daughter would be a woman of the eighties—feminine, warm, intelligent, honest, self-reliant—and she wondered briefly and treacherously how she would compare to Silas’s other children: those two dark-haired boys whose existence she had never even guessed at in the days when she had been drunk on love and pleasure, and believing that Silas belonged to her alone.

Heady days; days which would have been little more than a memory, perhaps, if it hadn’t been for Cherry.

It seemed odd now to remember that she had ever been such a creature of passion and intensity that she had conceived a child.

Those fires had long ago burned out, smothered by layer upon layer of panic, pain, confusion, and the sheer hard work of building a life for herself and her child.

‘I wish Aunt Lydia could have come with us, don’t you?’

Aunt Lydia was in fact Kate’s godmother; the true fairy-story kind of godmother, who had taken her in as a homeless, terrified eighteen-year-old, stood by her through Cherry’s birth, supported, advised and, most important of all, loved them both. And now, finally she had been the active force in breaking down the barriers of the eleven-year-old silence between Kate and her parents.

Knowing quite well that Cherry’s comment sprang from a sudden surge of nervousness at meeting the grandparents she had never known, Kate responded carelessly, ‘Aunt Lydia hates the countryside, love, you know that. Can you honestly see her in wellies and muddy fields?’ she asked mischievously.

Lydia was a town creature, all brittle, elegant bones and long, polished nails, her outward appearance belying her kind nature.

How she and her mother had ever become friends in the first place, never mind kept that friendship alive for over thirty years, was a mystery to Kate, but somehow they had.

They were really in the Dales now, travelling through long upland valleys, green with pastures, and the odd stand of trees, dotted with small, clinging, stone farmhouses.

Cherry was fascinated, almost glued to the carriage window.

Kate had lost count of the number of times her daughter had asked her about Abbeydale and her grandparents since that Christmas telephone call.

Initially, she herself hadn’t wanted to come; she was frightened that doing so would arouse too many painful memories. But Lydia had reminded her gently that there were others whose feelings must be considered, Cherry in particular.

‘She’s a Seton, Kate,’ she had pointed out quietly. ‘She loves the countryside. Times have changed. Illegitimacy isn’t the slur it was. Your father was wrong in behaving as he did, but he and your mother both miss and love you.’

‘Cherry wants to be a vet,’ Kate had responded illogically, and she had seen Lydia smile, that secret, pleased smile that showed she knew she had won a victory. And so here they were, within minutes now of the meeting she had been secretly fearing ever since it had been arranged.

The train slowed down, crawled through a tunnel and emerged into the golden sunlight of the July afternoon.

The small station was bedecked with hanging baskets and flowering plants, its name picked out proudly in fresh paint, but, as Kate got up to collect her things and usher Cherry towards the door, she saw no sign of her father on the platform.

Then, if she could have done so, she would have turned round and gone right back to London. That was where she belonged now. That was where her life lay, teaching as she had done ever since she had qualified.

She enjoyed her work; it held a multiplicity of challenges that constantly re-energised her; she loved the children themselves and she loved teaching them.

The train stopped. She paused before opening the door. No one else got out, and she had a sensation of stepping back in time, of being eighteen again and newly home from university.

And surely that was Mr Meadows waiting to take their tickets?

He had seemed ancient to her at eighteen, but he was probably only in his sixties now, Kate recognised as she handed over the slips of paper with a smile.

‘Your dad’s waiting for you in the car park,’ he told her, eyeing her with friendly recognition. ‘And this is the young ‘un, is it? Spit of your ma, isn’t she?’

‘Am I like Grandma?’ Cherry asked her curiously as they walked through the booking hall.

‘A little…’

Only in that she was like herself, Kate suspected. Her parents were second cousins, Setons both; both spare and wiry, and in some ways very physically alike. Her mother’s hair had never been as red as Kate’s, and it had certainly been nothing like Cherry’s polished waterfall of straight ebony.

There 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 to cloud her daughter’s happiness.

Cherry was a country child and bloomed in a country environment. She herself had ambivalent feelings towards the Dales. She loved them; they were her heritage and no one of any sensitivity, having known them, could cut that knowledge from her soul without destroying it.

But London had been good to her as well. London had provided her with a job, with independence, with a home for Cherry, where no one expressed surprise or curiosity over her lack of a father.

With Cherry herself she had been totally honest, explaining that she had fallen in love with her father, and that, having done so, she had only discovered too late that he was married to someone else.

What she had not told Cherry was that Silas and his wife had two children. She had not wanted to burden her daughter with that knowledge. It was enough that she carried it.

Thank God that was something her parents had never known, especially her father. They had simply believed that she had ‘got herself into trouble’ with someone at university, and that that someone, once he had realised she was pregnant, had turned his back on her. And she had let them think that it was as simple as that.

They were crossing what was de Burghley land now; the great house hidden from them by the trees planted all around it. As they passed the gates, Kate noticed a large notice-board attached to the wall, and the uniformed security guard standing outside the lodge house.

‘What’s happened to the Hall?’ she questioned her father curiously.

De Burghley land ran alongside theirs, which no doubt had given rise to that old story about a Seton having married a de Burghley daughter.

‘Government’s bought it,’ her father told her abruptly. ‘Started up some kind of monitoring unit there, where they do all kinds of special tests. All very hush-hush it is, and no one allowed inside the grounds, or on to the land for that matter, without permission. Opened up about twelve months ago. The man who runs it is a reasonable sort. Keeps himself to himself, but there’s some locally say that it can only cause trouble…’

‘What kind of trouble, Grandpa?’ Cherry asked curiously.

Kate saw her father frown.

‘The sort I don’t know much about, lass,’ he told her heavily, adding for Kate’s benefit, ‘Been a lot of ewes aborting this last year, and then all that business from Russia.’

Having correctly interpreted his remarks as a reference to the Chernobyl disaster which Kate knew from newspaper reports had badly affected lamb and cattle sales for meat, it was Kate’s turn to frown.

She knew, of course, about the nuclear fall-out which had been rumoured to have affected some parts of the area, and of course no one could live in these times and not be aware of the fears caused by such places as Windscale, but to see the concern in her father’s eyes brought the reality of it home to her.

‘You’re not saying that you’ve been affected by nuclear fall-out up here, Dad, are you?’ she questioned him, immediately worried for Cherry, for who knew what effects even minute amounts of radiation could have on growing children?

‘We’re not told. But why else open this research station… and why keep it all so secret? There’s a lot of concern in the village about it, I can tell you. Protest meetings and the like.’

‘And the man who’s in charge of the place—what does he say?’

‘Says there’s nothing to worry about, and I, for one, believe him.’

Because he wanted to believe him, Kate recognised. It would break her father’s heart if anything happened to contaminate Seton land. She heard the pride in his voice as they rounded a turn in the road and passed the boundary that divided the de Burghley acres from their own.