Page 51 of The House at Hope Corner
The study door was still open, and on shaking legs she went to close it before pulling her chair around the desk to sit beside Ned. She took his hands in hers and kissed them.
‘I love you,’ she whispered, praying that it was enough, and then she prepared herself to have her heart broken.
A slow tear tracked its way down Ned’s cheek. ‘I don’t even know when it started,’ he began quietly. ‘A few years ago now… Our equipment was too old and we had to refit the milking parlour to keep up with regulations. The dairies were demanding more and more but paying less and less, but we had no choice if we wanted to keep going. I don’t think we ever fully recovered from that. From then on things just snowballed. We were constantly on the back foot, trying to do the right thing by our cows but losing out financially because of it. That’s still the case…’ He shuddered. ‘I’d rather sell the whole herd than resort to dairy’s “dirty secret” even though it’s the only way to claw back any money. Or rather, to stop any more of it flowing down the drain.’
Flora tilted her head. Debt she understood, but dirty secrets?
‘When you think about it, it’s kind of ironic that you’re a vegetarian. I’m marrying a girl who doesn’t like killing things and yet it’s by doing what we believe to be the right thing that we’ve got into so much trouble…’
‘Now you’ve completely lost me,’ she said. ‘Sorry, Ned, but what are you talking about?’
‘Killing male calves as soon as they’re born.’
She shook her head. She really didn’t want to get into an argument about the ethics of eating meat. That wasn’t what this was about. But then she realised what Ned had said. Her head snapped up.
‘You dowhat…?’
Ned was quick to jump in. ‘No,wedon’t… it’s something we swore we would never do, but it’s becoming common practice again. We’re a dairy farm, Flora, think about it. Cows only give milk when they’ve had young, so we breed from them, but it’s only the female calves that are useful to us. The male calves are raised and sold on later, but they’re not bred for their meat and so we get very little for them. In fact, it costs us more to rear them than we get back when we sell them.’
‘So you’re saying that other farmers…’ She trailed off, making a cutting motion across her throat. ‘As soon as they’re born?’
Ned nodded. Flora felt physically sick. ‘And it’s this that has put the farm in debt?’
‘Partly, yes. It’s certainly what’s kept us in debt. It’s a vicious cycle.’
Flora looked at his bowed head and twirled the ends of her hair through her fingers. She didn’t want to give Ned a hard time, though; he wore his shame as if the word was written through him like a stick of rock.
‘But what I don’t understand is why, if you were in debt, you didn’t do something about it? Couldn’t the bank help you out or something, just until you got back on your feet?’
There was silence for a moment and she could see Ned’s jaw working.
‘Oh God, you did, didn’t you? That’s what this is about, you owe money to the bank…’
But Ned shook his head violently. ‘I wish we did,’ he said bitterly. ‘It would have been so much simpler.’ He hung his head again. ‘What I did was just plain stupid. I kid myself sometimes that it was because we were desperate, and I was scared, worried about the effect the stress of being in debt was having on Dad, but actually I was just incredibly stupid, and naive… and so I took the easy way out. If I’d have stopped for a minute to think about Caroline’s offer, I’d have seen it for what it was – part of her game plan – and now of course, all the things I should have thought about are coming back to haunt us.’
Flora’s stomach gave a lurch. She had almost forgotten that her talking about Caroline was how the conversation had started, and now here she was again.
‘Caroline?’ She could feel the dread beginning to bloom in the pit of her stomach. ‘Ah, I see,’ she said quietly. ‘She lent you the money, didn’t she? What did she do, ask Daddy?’
There was no reply.
The pieces of the jigsaw were beginning to come together. ‘So, Caroline lends you the money, or rather, her father does, and now what? What could they possibly want in return…?’ She stared at Ned, her brain racing ahead. And then it came to her. Of course, it was obvious. ‘We’re sitting right in the middle of what he wants, aren’t we? More land to add to his empire…’ And then another thought occurred to her. ‘Oh my God… Fraser doesn’t know about the loan, does he?’
Ned’s shoulders dropped even lower. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘And I know we should have told him, but somehow I thought I could resolve it all without him ever knowing. Which just goes to show how pathetic I really am. That’s why those invoices were hidden. They were never entered into the accounts, but paid using the money that Caroline’s father lent us. Dad knows we’re still struggling but he doesn’t know the half of it.’
‘Oh, Ned…’
He held up his hands. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know; you don’t need to tell me. But at the time it made perfect sense. I could see the effect that all of this was having on Dad’s health and I honestly thought that by keeping it to ourselves, Mum and I were at least saving him that anguish. Except that now of course he’s more poorly than ever, and I can’t bear to think what it might do to him when he does find out.’
‘But you are going to have to tell him, Ned.’ Flora looked at the beaten expression on his face. ‘Because even though every fibre of my being is telling me that under no account must Caroline be allowed to gain anything from this situation, the fact of the matter is that you now owe her father a considerable amount of money. And given that you have no way of being able to pay them back in the foreseeable future, in effect they already own a good portion of your land…’ Her mind was freewheeling.
‘But there must be a way to resolve all of this,’ she said resolutely. ‘And I’m damned if I’m going to let them win, so we’re just going to have to bloody well find out what it is.’
As soon as she said it, the vision she’d had for the farm came back in a flash, a dream that up until now she’d thought was just a wild flight of fancy brought on by an overexcitable imagination. But could it really be the way out of all this? She sat up straight, needing to think.
‘Flora?’ Her sudden movement brought Ned out of his own reverie. ‘Are you okay?’
She stared at him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think I am.’ She shook her head. ‘Oh, but you’re going to think I’m completely mad…’ She touched a hand to his face, pressing her thumb to his tears. ‘I’ve had an idea, not just now, it came to me a few days ago and I dismissed it, but now…’ She lifted her head and shut her eyes, trying to capture the images that she’d seen so vividly from Grace’s garden. ‘Actually, it wasn’t an idea, more like a vision,’ she added, feeling a swell of excitement rise within her.
