Seedtime and Harvest (The Apple Tree Saga Book 5) Read online

  Linn’s eagerness overflowed. She went to fetch the paper at once and Charlie, as he ate his supper, read the advertisements she had marked.

  ‘The one at Etherington’s nearest. You can get there by bus from Overbridge. Or, if you wait until Saturday, I can take you in Clew’s van.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t wait until then!’ Linn said. ‘We shall go tomorrow, Dad and me.’

  ‘You won’t settle anything, though, not till I’ve seen it, will you?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Of course we won’t.’ Linn sent him a sidelong glance. ‘I know what’s wrong with you!’ she said. ‘You don’t like to be left out of things!’

  ‘No, well,’ Charlie said. He had finished his cottage pie and was looking down at his empty plate. ‘Any chance of a second helping or are you too busy to think of such things?’

  ‘You!’ she said, springing up at once. ‘I’ll box your ears if you don’t watch out!’

  She herself had no appetite. She was too full of plans and ideas. She could think only about her farm which she pictured, green and neat and trim, somewhere out near Etherington. Her eagerness was shared by them all and they sat up late, the four of them, talking about the legacy and the great plan resulting from it.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Robert said. ‘It all seems too good to be true, somehow.’

  ‘It does, that’s a fact,’ Charlie said. ‘I can hardly believe it myself. But your mother’s soon got used to it. Just look at the way she’s sitting there, with us three men gaping at her, hanging on every word she says. There’s money written all over her and it’s already giving her some sort of style.’

  ‘What nonsense you talk!’ Linn said, but she was enjoying it all the same. Her face was flushed with excitement. She could hardly wait for tomorrow to come.

  Lying in bed, late that night, her head in the crook of Charlie’s shoulder, she told him what her father had said about using the money to buy a garage.

  ‘Did he say that? That was good of him. But the little farm is a better idea. I shan’t have trouble getting work, not so long as there’s cars on the road, and the pay is good, considering.’

  ‘That’s what I told him,’ Linn said. ‘A farm was the first thing I thought about. I set my heart on it straight away. And it is my money, after all.’

  Stirring, she turned her body to his, and they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  The farm at Etherington was a disappointment; so was the one at Spatesbridge; the first was eight miles from the nearest good road, the second was close to the River Ail and was apt to be flooded in wintertime; so Linn and Jack went to Overbridge and called on the three land-agents there, collecting lists of farms for sale.

  They travelled a good many miles in the next few weeks, but of the twelve small farms they viewed, none was suitable to their needs. On this the house was much too big; on that the house was tumbling down; on this the water supply was condemned; on that the fields were terribly steep, the farm being perched on the side of a hill. In fact, as Linn said to Charlie one night, the farm she had pictured in her mind, neat and trim and clean and good, was nothing so far but a will o’ the wisp.

  Early in June the money came. Linn opened a banking account and was given a cheque-book in return. She took it home and locked it away.

  ‘Five hundred pounds in the bank!’ Charlie said. ‘How does it feel to be so rich?’

  ‘The money won’t be there for long. It’ll have to come out when we find our farm.’

  ‘Ah, when!’ Charlie said. ‘You seem a long way from finding it. Maybe I’d better come round with you.’

  ‘What difference would that make?’

  ‘I might see points that you and Jack miss.’

  ‘I don’t think Dad misses much.’

  ‘Two heads are better than one, and I was brought up on a farm, remember. My father always said there was no such thing as a bad farm ‒ only bad farmers, he used to say.’

  Linn was tired and rather cross. The disappointments were wearing her down. She answered Charlie irritably.

  ‘Your father went bankrupt, didn’t he?’

  ‘Not through bad farming,’ Charlie said. ‘And what’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Oh, never mind!’ Linn said. ‘I’m just a bit grumpy, that’s all. All that way to Woollerton and just for nothing yet again!’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Charlie said, ‘you’ll find a place in time, I suppose.’

  But all through June and early July her journeys with Jack were equally fruitless.

  ‘Any luck yet?’ Robert would ask, coming home from school, and Charlie, coming home from work, would ask the same thing in a different way: ‘Found your little Utopia yet?’

  One Friday evening, surprisingly, Charlie came home at six o’clock.

  ‘I reckon I’ve found your farm,’ he said.

  Linn stood and faced him, her hands on her hips, and Jack looked up from his newspaper.

  ‘It’s a place over near Mingleton, fifty acres, mostly grass. It’s already been a poultry farm but the people have gone so of course there’s no stock. But there’s hen-coops there, twelve of them, and there’s a few huts that’d do for pigs. There’s a bit of an orchard behind the house ‒ apples and pears and a few plums ‒ and the house itself is in good shape although it’s been empty quite a while.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about it.’

  ‘So I should. I’ve been over there.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us first?’

  ‘I had the chance of a lift with Pete Hale. It was him that told me about the farm. He had business in Mingleton and offered to take me in his car.’

  ‘Haven’t you been to work at all?’

  ‘Of course I’ve been to work!’ Charlie said. ‘I took a few hours off, that’s all. But I’ve certainly got some catching-up to do. I must go back when I’ve had my tea.’

  Linn, as she drew up the fire in the stove and placed three kippers in the pan, listened while Charlie described Stant Farm. Now and then she put in a word and Jack, too, had questions to ask. Charlie was able to answer them all.

  ‘I thought we’d go over tomorrow afternoon, all four of us, as it’s Saturday. We have to get the key from the neighbouring farm and I said we’d be there at half-past-two. Clew says we can borrow the van.’

  ‘It seems you’ve got it all arranged.’

  ‘There’s no point in wasting time.’

  ‘Fifty acres is too big.’

  ‘Not if it’s going cheap, it’s not.’

  ‘How cheap?’ Linn asked.

  ‘They’re asking six-pound-ten the acre but I reckon they’ll come down on that.’

  ‘Why should they come down on it?’

  ‘Because it’s stood empty for nearly a year and the land has got a bit run down.’

  ‘The usual story,’ Linn said. She turned the kippers in the pan. ‘We’ve seen quite a few places like that, in the past two months, Dad and me.’

  ‘You wait till you see Stant Farm! It’s just what you’re looking for, no doubt of that, and a nice little neighbourhood round about. I talked quite a bit with the Triggs next door ‒ they’re the ones that’ve got the key ‒ and I said you’d be sure to be interested.’

  ‘Did you indeed?’ Linn said.

  ‘You don’t sound any too thrilled about it.’

  ‘I don’t like being rushed into things.’

  ‘Laws!’ Charlie said. He glanced at Jack. ‘If that’s what you call being rushed no wonder you haven’t found a place!’ He sat down at the table and began cutting slices of bread. ‘You’ll like Stant Farm. I know you will. And if we play our cards right I reckon we’ll get it for a song.’

  ‘What do you mean by “we”?’ Linn asked. She forked a kipper onto a plate and put it on the table in front of him. ‘I thought I was the one who was buying the farm.’

  ‘Why, yes, certainly. You’re the one that’s got the money.’

  ‘Just for a moment,’ Linn said, ‘it seemed to me you’d forgo
tten that.’

  Charlie’s smile died from his lips.

  ‘Look,’ he said. He was suddenly hurt. ‘You don’t have to go and look at the place if you don’t want to. It seemed a pretty good buy, I thought, but it’s no odds to me one way or the other.’ He picked up his knife and fork and cut the head and the tail from his kipper. ‘You go ahead and find your own farm. It’s no odds to me where we go. It’s only the place I shall live in, that’s all!’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Linn said. She placed the other two plates on the table and hung her oven-cloth up on its nail. ‘It’s just that you are rather inclined to run things ‒’

  ‘Not any more!’ Charlie said. ‘I shall keep out of it from now on!’

  ‘How can you keep out of it if you’re driving us over to Mingleton?’

  ‘Oh, I’m driving you over, then? I’m allowed to do that much in the Great War?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said again.

  Her father came to sit at the table and she glanced at him with a little smile.

  ‘Charlie’s in a mood,’ she said. ‘See if you can put things right.’

  ‘You must put things right your own selves. You’re both fully grown, the pair of you, though to hear the way you’ve been going on you might be two children of ten years old.’

  ‘Both of us or is it just me?’

  ‘I’m taking no sides,’ Jack said. ‘I’ve got more sense than taking sides when a man and his wife are having words.’

  But Linn knew by his straight look that he held her to be in the wrong and, taking her place at the table, she did her best to make amends.

  ‘I’ve never been to Mingleton. What sort of place is it?’ she asked.

  Charlie was silent, ignoring her. Jack had to answer her instead.

  ‘It’s a good enough place in its way. It’s got a market and plenty of shops and a railway station and all that.’

  ‘How far is it from here?’

  ‘I’d say thirty miles. Perhaps thirty-five. Charlie can tell you better than me.’

  ‘Charlie’s still in a mood,’ she said.

  ‘Oh no I’m not!’ Charlie said.

  ‘Then why aren’t you talking to us?’

  ‘Because I’ve got nothing to say, that’s why. I’m keeping mum, for safety’s sake.’

  But Charlie was not one to sulk for long. His sense of humour prevented it. He removed a fishbone from his mouth and looked at her with a sidelong glance.

  ‘Anyway, you should know by now! ‒ I never could eat a damned kipper and talk at the same time!’

  The atmosphere was eased between them. He was soon himself again. And when he left to go back to work he said: ‘You’ll like Stant Farm. I know you will. It’s exactly what we’re looking for.’

  ‘Yes, well, we shall see,’ Linn said.

  The house at Stant Farm was very small; no more than a cottage, as Linn remarked, with two rooms down and two up and a lean-to scullery at the back; but it was a solid, forthright place, built of the local Flaunton stone and, with its roses climbing the wall and its scented jasmine over the porch, it had a beguiling prettiness. Of the two windows in the kitchen, one looked out on the steep farm track and down to the lush green valley below, where, hidden among the trees, the little loop-line railway ran, close beside the River Mew.

  Although the farm stood on a rise, its six fields were level enough, and were sheltered from the prevailing wind by an ash copse and a belt of young pines. Above the pines lay another small farm, Slipfields, and above that again was the open common locally known as Flaunton Heath. Below Slipfields and Stant, surrounding them, were the bigger farms with their great open fields, and Charlie, walking about with Robert, pointed them out to him by name.

  ‘That’s Piggotts, just below, and over there is Innings,’ he said. ‘Beyond Innings is a farm called World’s End and down the side of the valley, there, is a farm called Flag Marsh.’

  Robert was interested in the big farms. He stood for some time looking out over Piggotts, where the haymakers laboured in the sun, and then strolled down as far as Innings to see what breed of sheep they had there. In fact, as Charlie laughingly said, Robert paid more attention to the surrounding farms than he did to Stant itself.

  ‘This is the place we’ve come to see! Aren’t you interested in it?’ he said.

  ‘You bet I am!’ Robert said. He looked at Charlie with shining eyes. ‘And to think that mother can buy it outright! A house and fifty acres of land! I still can’t believe it, even now.’

  To him Stant Farm was a perfect place. He hoped his mother would feel the same. But down there, on the bigger farms, was where he would go looking for work when the time came for him to leave school.

  He and Charlie, exploring Stant, poked into the hedges and ditches and tried to discover how the land-drains ran. The hedges were badly overgrown and the ditches needed digging out and in the lowest field of all, where the land-drains had long fallen in, the pasture was sour and choked with reeds. All the field-gates were in ruins, and the track leading down from the farm to the road was deeply rutted, in need of repair. But the land, for the most part, was in good heart, and in five of the six fields the grass was still sweet and green, for the ‘keep’ had been sold to a neighbouring farmer and his cattle were grazing even now in the two fields next to the house.

  ‘Come on, young Rob,’ Charlie said, ‘let’s see what your mother and granddad think.’

  The four of them came together again in the little garden in front of the house. The sun shone fully upon them there and even the wind, which came from the east, breathed on them with a hot dry breath, bringing with it the smell of the hay that was being turned in the fields at Piggotts.

  ‘Well?’ Charlie said. ‘What do you think?’ His face was screwed up against the sun and his blue eyes were narrowed into slits, looking keenly out at Linn from under their jutting, light-coloured brows. ‘I see you’ve been round pretty thoroughly.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Linn said. ‘I would’ve liked a bigger house.’ Looking at it, she shielded her eyes, putting one hand to the brim of her hat and bending it down in a shadowing curve. ‘I would have liked three bedrooms,’ she said, ‘so that Dad and Robert needn’t share.’

  ‘It don’t worry me, sharing,’ Jack said.

  ‘No, nor me,’ Robert said.

  ‘It’s much more land than we really need. More than half will be going to waste.’

  ‘Not if we run things right,’ Charlie said. ‘With fifty acres to play with, we can even grow corn to feed our stock.’

  ‘It’s all so badly neglected, too. Just look at those hedges, all overgrown. As for the outbuildings at the back, there’s scarcely a roof on one of them!’

  ‘That’s all to the good, in a way. It means we can beat them down on the price.’

  ‘Yes, but what a lot of work!’

  ‘We’ll get it done in time,’ Charlie said. ‘At least the house is in pretty good shape, considering it’s been empty a while.’

  ‘Why did the other people go?’

  ‘The old man got sick. Then he died. His wife’s gone to live with her son in Wales.’ Charlie pointed up towards Slipfields. ‘I heard about it from the Triggs when I called to pick up the key,’ he said. ‘You’ll like the Triggs. They’re a nice old pair. They’ll be good neighbours, I’m sure of that.’ Down in the valley a train clacked past. They saw its smoke above the trees.

  ‘I don’t like the railway being so close.’

  ‘Why, it’s only a single-line track, that’s all. There’s only five or six trains a day. And that’ll be an advantage, too, if we want to send stuff away on the train. The Triggs send eggs to Baxtry from here. The milk-train stops at Scampton Halt.’

  ‘You’ve gone into it all very thoroughly.’

  ‘I reckon I’ve covered the essentials all right.’ Charlie, with a grin, looked at Jack. ‘It’s about a mile to Scampton from here and about the same to Flaunton,’ he said, ‘and it seems there’s good pubs
in both of them!’

  ‘What about the shops?’ Linn asked.

  ‘The grocer at Scampton delivers out here, and he sells just about everything. There’s a school for Robert in Mingleton ‒ that’s only two miles across the fields ‒ and Sam Trigg says there’s a garage just outside Scampton that’s been advertising for a mechanic. I thought of calling on the way home to see if the job is still open.’

  Charlie reached up to the climbing rose and broke off one of its crimson blooms. He held it under Linn’s nose and she sniffed at it in an absent way. He put in into his buttonhole.

  ‘But it all depends if you like the place. You’re the one who’s buying it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said again. ‘It takes a lot of thinking about.’ She stared away, over the fields, trying to see them as her own. The decision was suddenly frightening to her and she turned to her father in search of guidance. ‘Dad?’ she said. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I reckon you could do worse,’ Jack said.

  ‘But could I do better, that’s the point?’

  ‘You might if you go on looking, perhaps, but the farms we’ve seen so far ent been a patch on this one.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what!’ Charlie said. ‘Rob and me will stroll up to Slipfields and take the key back to the Triggs. You and Jack have another look round. It’ll give you a chance to talk things out.’

  ‘Yes, all right. You go on up.’

  Linn and her father were left alone. She watched him as he filled his pipe.

  ‘What do you really think of it?’

  ‘I’ve already told you what I think.’

  ‘Robert likes it. There’s no doubt of that. But he is just a bit inclined to agree with everything Charlie says.’

  ‘There’s no harm in that,’ Jack said, ‘so long as Charlie’s in the right.’

  ‘If he is. I wish I knew.’

  ‘You beginning to have second thoughts about spending your money on a farm?’

  ‘Oh, no, it isn’t that.’

  Jack struck a match and lit his pipe. In the brilliant sunlight, the flame was almost invisible. He threw down the match and trod on it.

  ‘Maybe you’d like the place better,’ he said, ‘if you’d been the one that found it.’