Page 9 of The Affairs of Ashmore Castle (Ashmore Castle #2)

The men gathered at the gate and surveyed the cattle. They were ordinary, undistinguished brown cows, but on the bony side, a couple so elderly their udders were pendulous and brushing the grass. ‘Don’t you have twelve head?’ Adeane asked, having counted.

‘Clover’s in the cowshed, with garget,’ Bunce said resentfully.

‘I know that one,’ said Richard. ‘Inflammation of the udder, isn’t it? Lord, the names you country people have for ailments!’ he added aside.

‘Thass right,’ Bunce grunted. ‘She’s allus been susceptible to it.’

‘We’ll come back with you, if you don’t mind, and have a look at the farm buildings,’ Giles said. ‘Adeane thinks there might be some repairs that need doing.’

Bunce wasn’t ready to be pleased. ‘And stick the cost onto my rent, I don’t doubt.’

Richard sought to distract him. ‘That field back there, all the bracken. Shouldn’t it be cleared?’

‘The Six Acre? I don’t graze it,’ said Bunce.

‘’S a cornfield by rights. Grew wheat there until ninety-five.

When you could get thirty-five shillun a quarter.

Now you’d be lucky to get twenty. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.

Can’t afford to grow wheat for twenty shillun a quarter.

Might as well give it away – it’d come cheaper’n paying labour to plough and sow and harvest it. ’

‘Why not turn the field into proper pasture, then?’ Richard suggested, addressing himself to Adeane.

It was Bunce who answered. ‘ I can’t afford to clear and seed it!

’ he said indignantly. ‘Price o’ seed what it is – and I haven’t got the labour, anyhow.

Had to let our cowman go last Michaelmas.

There’s only me and the missus and our John now.

And he’s talking about leaving. Get a job in town, he says.

Send money home. Bah!’ He spat sideways to show what he thought of that.

‘Let’s move on, Giles,’ Richard murmured to his brother, ‘before this fellow has me so depressed I cut my throat.’

Hundon’s, Bunce’s farmhouse, had once been a small manor-house, dating from the fourteenth century, but half of it had fallen or been taken down over the years and the wood used to make outbuildings.

What remained made a tall, narrow, crooked and infinitely shabby dwelling for the farmer and his family.

Mrs Bunce was as thin as her husband, depressed and depressing in a sacking apron, hair coming down, and a drip at the end of her long, red nose.

But she knew her manners, curtsied to Giles and asked the gentlemen in.

‘We gotter dropper parsnip wine somewheres,’ she suggested vaguely.

‘Thank you, Mrs Bunce, you’re most kind, but we really haven’t time,’ Giles said, with manners of his own.

‘And we mustn’t take you away from your work.

’ A small grubby child of indeterminate sex had appeared behind her, and the lurchers rushed to greet it, making it laugh in astonished pleasure as it patted various bits of them and had its face washed in reciprocation.

The men carried on with their inspection.

The farmyard had once been cobbled but now was mostly mud, with large inconvenient holes filled with yellow water.

It was flanked on two sides with outhouses that seemed to have been patched and repaired by a vigorous but inexpert hand, and on the third with a small alp of a midden.

The hay barn was virtually empty; the mangold clamp entirely so.

The cowshed had the same kind of floor as the yard – full of holes where urine and faeces pooled.

It was windowless, but there were holes in the roof that let in some light, and illuminated the suffering cow, which stood on a the bare dirty earth floor and held one foot off the ground – lame as well as sick.

‘You know,’ said Adeane to Bunce, whose hands were back in his pockets, ‘you wouldn’t get so much garget – or lameness – if you kept the place cleaner. Look at the muck on the floor and in those holes. It’s a wonder they’re not all down with it.’

‘Ar, all very well for you to talk, mister,’ Bunce said.

‘Got no money for repairs, and no time to do it neether. Had no labour for haymaking last summer. John and me done what we could, but we couldn’t get it all in before the rain come and spoiled it.

Now hay’s near gone, and the grass ain’t good enough yet without extra feed, but what can a man do?

Hedges need laying, got no labour for that, neether. ’

‘I see your bull box is empty, and he wasn’t out with the cows,’ Adeane said.

‘What, Sampson? Owd bugger up and died last back-end. Left me in a fix. Winscott up at Topheath wants payin ’ for a loan of his bull.’

Richard caught Giles’s eye and made a throat-cutting gesture, which Giles rightly ignored. ‘Now, Mr Bunce,’ Giles said, ‘I want to help you get this farm back on its feet.’

‘Ar, then up goes my rent, I don’t doubt,’ Bunce said savagely.

‘Not until you can afford it,’ Giles said.

‘What’s good for the land is good for both of us.

Things have been allowed to slip in the last few years, but this is good farming country at heart, and if we put our minds to it, we can get it back in shape.

I want my tenants to work with me, not just for my benefit but for their own.

I’m ready to invest in the estate, to get it to the point when it’s able to pay me back. ’

‘What’s “invest” mean when it’s at home?’ Bunce asked suspiciously, but, affected by Giles’s obvious good will, he added grudgingly, ‘My lord. What d’you mean to do?’

They would have to have time to work out a plan, so now was not the moment to make specific commitments.

Adeane cast Giles a warning look, but Giles only said, ‘We will have to work that out, Bunce. But for the moment you can tell your wife that I shall repair that hole in the farmhouse roof as soon as possible.’

‘Oh, you noticed that? Well – my lord – I don’t deny she’ll be pleased about that. I could’ve got up there with a bit o’ tar paper, if I’d had the time. But there’s not enough hours in a day as it is, and that’s a fact.’

As they rode away, Richard said, ‘What’s a fact is that the more a man complains about having too much to do, the less he does of it.’

‘That’s true, sir,’ Adeane said approvingly. ‘There’s an old saying: if you want something done, ask a busy man.’

Giles felt unaccountably sorry for Bunce. ‘When a person gets thoroughly miserable, a sort of inertia sets in. I can understand it.’

‘Well, he’s got to buck up,’ Adeane said from behind them, ‘or we’ll have to look for another tenant.’

‘Is he a good farmer?’ Giles asked.

‘He was ,’ Adeane said cautiously. ‘It’s a shame to see that place go down. But you know how it is, my lord, improvement costs money, and without improvement, less money comes in. It’s a vicious circle.’

‘Then we shall have to make it virtuous again,’ said Giles.

They continued in silence, and Giles, riding in front, looking round him, was aware of an unexpected feeling of contentment.

He was as little given to introspection as his mother, but for different reasons: she believed so completely in her own rightness that self-examination was unnecessary; he merely found it boring.

But on this fine spring day, with the cloud-shadows bowling across the newly green land – his land – he noticed his contentment enough to analyse it.

He couldn’t deny he had enjoyed the various hunting parties they had hosted since Christmas, but now the season was over he was glad to get back to work.

The emotional turbulence of the previous year was behind him.

He had been resentful of being forced to take up this life at all.

Then he had been forced to seek a rich wife and had hated the necessity.

And while trying to do his duty he had fallen in love with someone he couldn’t have, and that had been the worst of all.

But now the complexities of managing something as intangible and irrational as ‘feelings’ – his own and other people’s – were done with, and the problems he had to grapple with were solid and practical.

The land needed to be improved, and now he had the money to do it – Kitty’s money.

And with Adeane’s advice and his own ability to absorb and learn, he was going to make the Ashmore Estate into a model.

He was going to create something – and to create was man’s most basic instinct.

Yes, and speaking of creating, he had a child on the way: a son – he hoped – who would inherit whatever he succeeded in making.

There was a little corner of his satisfaction that was generated by the expected child, but in his absorbing days he rarely thought about his wife.

Last year there had been a period when he had discovered, for the first time, the pleasure of sexual intercourse, and could hardly get enough of it.

He had been grateful to Kitty for her part in it, but now she was pregnant and it was verboten , he had almost entirely forgotten about it.

Sex had been nice, but it wasn’t important in the scheme of things.

And ‘love’ was a delusion and a trap. He never allowed himself to think about Nina. His was a man’s world, and he had his job to do. He trusted Kitty to do hers – to bring forth a child – but for the rest, she belonged to that messy last-year world of emotions. He lived somewhere else now.