Potential Danger

Penny Jordan needs no introduction as arguably the most recognisable name writing for Mills & Boon. We have celebrated her wonderful writing with a special collection, many of which for the first time in eBook format and all available right now.There never would be another man for Kate.London schoolteacher Kate Seton, returning on vacation with her daughter, Cherry, to her parents' Yorkshire farm, was shocked to see Silas Edwards again. Now he was a biologist running a government project on a nearby estate.It was Silas who was responsible for Kate's rift with her family. But Kate could not tell him the truth, nor why she had left him suddenly eleven years before.Once they had almost married. She wouldn't dare to dream that a youthful romance might blossom into mature love.

Potential Danger Penny Jordan

CHAPTER ONE

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?’

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.

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…’

‘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.’

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.

‘Now, lass,’ he told Cherry, ‘you’re on Seton land. What dost tha think o’ un?’

Cherry looked as though she were about to burst with pride and delight, and before Kate could stop her, and regardless of the fact that her father was driving the Land Rover, Cherry flung her arms round his neck and said ecstatically, ‘Oh, Grandpa, I’m so glad that we’re here.’

But her father was careful not to hurt her as he disengaged himself, Kate noticed, and she also noticed the surreptitious way in which he blew his nose only seconds later.

They entered the family farmyard to a cacophany of barking from the dogs, mingling with the cackle of her mother’s hens and the bleating of half a dozen or so huge fat lambs, plainly those which had been hand-reared during the spring and which were now proving reluctant to return to the flock, Kate reflected, recognising the familiar pattern of her childhood.

‘Watch out for the bantam,’ her father warned them as he stopped the Land Rover.

‘A small hen,’ Kate told her, ruefully remembering her mother’s affection for her bantam silkies and the ferocity of the minute males who lorded it over their harems.

‘Don’t tell me that Ma still keeps geese,’ Kate groaned as she heard the familiar alarm sound. In her childhood, even her father had not been safe from the sharp beaks of her mother’s geese, always excellent watchdogs. Their main fault was that it was impossible to teach them to discern between friend and foe.

And then the back door was opening and her mother was standing there. Not really changed at all. Her hair still neat and braided, her diminutive, wiry form still clad in a neat skirt and blouse, covered by an old-fashioned apron.

Across the yard Kate saw the look her parents exchanged, and she was at once a part and yet not a part of a magic circle that concentrated its love on the girl standing uncertainly on one foot as she stared round the unfamiliar yard.

And suddenly her mother’s arms were open and both she and Cherry were caught up in them. Odd how so much strength could come from such a slight form. As she released them, Kate heard her mother saying tearfully, ‘My, but she’s the spitting image of you, John. A real Seton.’

And for the second time that day she was aware, as she had never been aware as a child, of the great love between her parents; for Cherry certainly looked like neither of them, since her features were hers, Kate knew, and her colouring and build was completely her father’s.

But there was no time to reflect any more on Cherry’s physical heritage, because she was crossing the familiar threshold into the the large square kitchen of her childhood, and the years were rolling back. She almost felt she could be Cherry’s age again, just home from school, waiting for David to finish his chores so that they could sit down and eat.

‘It’s lovely to be here, Mum. I don’t think Cherry has talked of anything else since Christmas.’

‘Cherry… what kind of name is that to give the child?’ her father snorted.

And it was Cherry herself who answered him saying brightly, ‘But Mum called me that because the cherry trees were in blossom when I was born.’

They had tea in the large, panelled dining-room that overlooked the gardens at the front of the house. Originally built as a minor hall, the house was much larger than the other stone farmhouses that populated the dale. It had a sunny drawing-room that overlooked the dale itself and, although the ground was barren and the winter winds icy, in the protection of the walled garden countless generations of Seton women had cultivated not only fruit and vegetables, but flowers as well.

The drawing-room was only used on formal occasions, its oak furniture lovingly waxed and its parquet floor polished.

Normally they ate in the large kitchen; and in the summer, as Kate remembered it, their evening meal had often been as late as eight or nine in the evening so that her father could make the most of the long hours of daylight.

Tea was the word used to describe the evening meal in the north, and not dinner, and on this occasion her mother had baked all the things for which she was justly famous in the dale: scones light as feathers from her bantam chickens, bread, still slightly warm from the old-fashioned bread ovens either side of the new Aga and still used by her mother, currant slices, lightly dusted with sugar, summer pudding made from some of the early fruits, the kind of salad that had never dreamed of seeing the inside of a supermarket but came straight from her mother’s garden, and tiny new potatoes, and home-cured ham. All the old-fashioned things she remembered from her childhood, and yet, as she sliced into her mother’s bread, Kate saw that it had been made with wholemeal flour, showing that even up here people were not totally immune to the power of the Press.

Despite the excellence of the food, Kate wasn’t hungry. Cherry was, though, tucking into her food with the healthy appetite of the young.

Already Kate thought she could see a change in her—an opening up, a stretching out and growing—as though somehow she had been cramped in their city life.

Throughout the meal she chatted to her grandparents, telling them about her school and her friends, leaving Kate alone with her own thoughts.

It was disturbing how much Silas was occupying them. She supposed she ought to have expected it and been prepared for it, for, although Silas had never visited her home, the emotional trauma of her own leaving of it was bound to have left a lingering resonance for her sensitive nerves to pick up on.

And yet she had barely thought about him at all in years. He was part of her past, and for Cherry’s sake she could not regret having known him, but the discovery that he had deceived her, that he was married with children, had totally killed her love.

Oh, she had dated—fellow schoolteachers, friends of friends who shared her interest in the theatre and with whom she had enjoyed pleasurable evenings—but there had been nothing like the intensity of emotion she had known with Silas.

Why not? She was emotionally and physically capable of that emotion, and yet, for some reason, after Silas she had had no other lovers, no man in her life who was more than a friend.

Was it perhaps because she had been afraid? Afraid of the vulnerability such a commitment would bring?

In the early years, of course, there had been Cherry. Most men shied away from a woman with a young child, and Kate’s life had been too exhausting to allow her to do anything other than care for her child and complete her education. Without Lydia’s help and love, even that much would not have been possible.

Her old room. Tiny and cosy, up under the eaves, with its uneven walls and sloping ceiling.

‘You’re quite close to her… in the guest room. It’s got its own bathroom now, and I thought you’d prefer that.’

A guest room with its own bathroom. Nostalgia touched her with melancholy fingers. Even here, after all, things changed. She had noticed that her parents had also had central heating installed. A new innovation, indeed. She remembered vividly the arguments when her mother had first tentatively broached the subject. Then her father had flatly refused to even consider it.

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Potential Danger Penny Jordan

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE