Blackpeak Station Read online

  Charlotte smiled back. It wasn’t a very good joke, but you had to love Nick for trying. ‘Yeah, thanks.’

  Andrea still hadn’t returned when Nick came back with the coffees. The drizzle had pretty much stopped. Feeling the need for fresh air, Charlotte opened the Prado’s door and swivelled round in her seat, leaning out to survey the strip of parked cars and tourist buses outside the souvenir shops, her flimsy ballet flats resting on the door sill. Nick leaned beside her, sipping his flat white.

  With a low grumble, a silver Porsche nosed into the opposite park, its hood up against the rain. Charlotte watched the driver get out. He looked young, not much older than Nick, and she was surprised to see he was wearing a shirt and tie.

  ‘Armani,’ sighed Nick, as the man slipped his suit jacket on. ‘Nice.’

  The driver stretched his broad shoulders back, straightened his elegant mauve silk tie, and buttoned the jacket over his narrow hips. Charlotte didn’t know much about suits, but she had to agree that he wore it well.

  As if reading her thoughts, he looked up, straight across the road and into her face. Charlotte felt herself blush, but, for some reason, her eyes wouldn’t drop. The man had no such problem. He looked her over lazily, a half smile at the edge of his mouth, as if he already knew her well and there was nobody but them in the car park.

  ‘Armani-guy is totally checking you out,’ whispered Nick, amused. ‘You should invite him to Dad’s wake.’

  Charlotte, conscious suddenly of the shortness of her skirt, jammed her knees together. She had put on the only ‘dress’ she possessed, a simple black tunic, over a black polo neck, but her mother had flatly refused to allow the black denim leggings she usually wore underneath. ‘I won’t have you in jeans, Charlotte,’ Andrea had sniffed. ‘Not today.’ So now there was nothing between her long gangly legs and the stranger’s gaze but opaque tights and a few metres of thin air.

  ‘Luke?’ The passenger door of the Porsche opened and a pair of dangerously high, black patent boots swung out. ‘Can you make mine a decaf soy latte?’

  ‘Whoa,’ gasped Nick, as a Vogue-cover blonde unravelled herself from the car. ‘Will you look at that? I hate this guy.’

  Charlotte, looking away at last, was inclined to feel the same.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, seeing Andrea emerge from the hotel. ‘Mum’s coming back.’

  Nick climbed into the driver’s seat. ‘I wonder what a guy has to do,’ he said, still watching the sports car in the rear-view mirror, ‘to get one of those.’

  ‘A Porsche?’

  ‘Sure.’ Nick smirked. ‘Let’s go with that.’

  Andrea opened the door. ‘Right,’ she said briskly. ‘We’d better get going.’

  There was a decent turnout for the service. The men of the district had scrubbed up well, with barely a checked shirt in sight. None, perhaps, could actually claim to have been a friend of her father’s — but no one looking around the aptly named Church of the Good Shepherd today could doubt that John Black had been well respected.

  As they followed the hearse up to the cemetery, the rain came down in earnest. Charlotte and Nick flanked their mother at the grave, taking an elbow each, and the three of them watched the high country earth thud down on John Black’s coffin. Behind them, solid as the hills, stood Rex and Kath. Andrea, as she had done for most of the week, leaned against Nick, sobbing quietly. Nick was concentrating on her, but his own eyes were red, too. Charlotte squared her shoulders and set her jaw. Her father hated a fuss. And she was sick of crying.

  Rain’ll do the property good, she thought. A week or two of it now would set them up nicely for summer.

  The wet mourners gathered back at the hotel for the after-match function, where a brisk demand for whisky soon cleaned out the open bar.

  ‘How’s your mum doing?’ asked the local GP, finding Charlotte alone in an empty space while Andrea chatted to the McKnights from Poverty Hills and Nick queued for the bar.

  Charlotte watched her mother, now making a round of the room, a plate of club sandwiches in her hand and just the right amount of bravely handled grief mixed in with the smile on her face.

  ‘She’s getting better,’ she replied. She scanned the room, hoping for a glimpse of Nick or Rex. ‘Um, I should probably just go and check if she needs a hand.’

  She sidled off and, spotting Rex’s rugby club jumper through a gap in the crowd, made a bee-line for it. Nick interrupted her progress halfway.

  ‘Hey, you’re not going to believe who Mum’s talking to,’ he said, thrusting a glass of wine into her hand.

  Charlotte craned her neck. ‘Who?’ And then she saw him. Or rather, it. The elegant back of a dark Armani suit draped between her and her mother.

  ‘No way!’

  ‘Way,’ corrected Nick. ‘It’s him. I checked. Minus the blonde, unfortunately.’

  Andrea waved at them over Armani-guy’s shoulder. Charlotte took half a step back, but Nick blocked her retreat and put his arm round her waist, sweeping her across the bar.

  ‘Charlotte!’ her mother said, with a commendable attempt at brightness. ‘This is Luke Halliday from Cooper Liddell Sachs. Luke, this is my daughter, Charlotte.’

  ‘And your son, Nick,’ added Nick, with a smile.

  ‘Hi.’ Up close, Armani-guy had thick black lashes around green eyes and a face that was only saved from prettiness by a square, stubble-shadowed jaw and the severity of an almost military haircut. ‘I’m sorry about your father,’ he said — a low, expensive, boarding-school purr. He studied Charlotte, his eyes flitting down, very briefly, to her legs. ‘You know, I feel like I know you from somewhere. Before the church, I mean.’

  ‘The car park,’ said Nick. Charlotte trod on his foot.

  ‘Oh yes.’ One side of Luke’s mouth, Charlotte noticed, curled down when he smiled. A small muscle twitched there. ‘I remember now.’

  ‘Is your friend here?’ she asked.

  ‘No, she’s gone up to the room. I just came in to pay the firm’s respects — Suzy didn’t want to impose.’

  ‘Luke’s come all the way down from Christchurch,’ Andrea explained. ‘Just for today.’

  ‘It’s the least we could do.’ Luke laid his hand on Andrea’s arm. ‘John was a special client. If there’s anything the firm can do — anything at all — you just let us know, okay?’

  ‘Wasn’t it nice of them to send someone?’ said Andrea, when Luke moved away.

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Nick sniffed. ‘I guess at least they waited till Dad was under the ground before touting for business.’

  Andrea glared at him, but Phyllis McKnight swooped in and stole her away before she could reply.

  ‘How do you mean?’ Charlotte asked him. ‘What kind of business?’

  ‘They think we might sell up. They want to help us invest the profits.’

  ‘Would there be that much?’

  Nick shrugged. ‘Six million, seven maybe, with a decent wind behind us.’

  ‘Jeez.’ Charlotte blew out her cheeks. She’d never thought of her family as rich — at least, not compared to a lot of the girls she’d gone to school with. Sure, she had a credit card and a Ballantynes account, but the Blacks drove a Toyota, not a Porsche Cayenne, and they never took family holidays anywhere, never mind spent their winters in France. The Excel spreadsheets she helped her father create told the story of a hand-to-mouth struggle to survive. Some years they were ahead, some behind, and any surplus funds there might be vanished into the property like light January rain.

  Six million! How was she ever going to raise half of that? How could anybody? Absentmindedly watching Luke’s pinstriped back as it receded towards the lobby, Charlotte wasn’t prepared for the moment — just as he reached the doorway — when he turned and looked back. Crap. Caught again. And there it was, that look, the one that made it feel like her dress was peeling off of its own accord. What were you supposed to do with a look like that? She’d never got one before. And then the curled-down smile, that little
pouty twitch of his lip. She’d give a lot to know what he found so damn amusing.

  ‘Charles? Hello?’ Directly in front of her, Nick swayed theatrically. ‘Come on, Mum’s waving us over. She wants to go.’

  Nick drove them slowly back to Blackpeak. Conversation was once again sparse, and although he was the instigator of most of it, even Nick was more quiet than usual. Andrea stared out of the window as if she was seeing the landscape for the first time. She looked exhausted. In the back seat, Charlotte’s eyes drifted shut. She didn’t wake up until they turned off the main road onto shingle and the rain-cloaked hills of Blackpeak filled her gaze.

  Rex and Kath were already home, the lights of their cottage shining square and comforting through the trees. The lights were on at the homestead as well — they walked in to find the table set, the stove stoked up and the smell of a casserole drifting from the door. Good old Kath. She couldn’t let them come home to a cold house and an empty oven.

  The three of them ate in silence, broken only by the scrape of cutlery and the occasional clunk of the fire.

  ‘I thought we could all go up to Christchurch with Nick on Thursday,’ Andrea began, after Nick had cleared the plates. It had the ring of a speech she’d been rehearsing in her head for a while. ‘He can get his flight, and Charlotte, you can go back to university on Friday morning.’

  Charlotte started to protest that there was hardly any point going back on a Friday, and that Monday would be a far more logical time to restart, but Andrea cut across her.

  ‘And then I’m going to stay on for a while. Find a place for us to rent. You can move out of the hostel, won’t that be nice?’

  Charlotte felt herself pale. Nick sat back down. Andrea gave them a rather fixed smile.

  ‘But who’ll look after the station?’ asked Nick.

  ‘Rex, Kath, Matt … the same people who run it now. You surely don’t expect me to get out there and do the things your father used to do, do you?’

  ‘Well, no …’ faltered Nick. ‘But—’

  ‘Then there’s no problem, is there?’ Andrea sighed triumphantly, and turned her attention to Charlotte. ‘Think how much nicer it’ll be for you to live at home next year.’

  Charlotte took a deep breath. It was now or never. ‘I’m not going back to uni next year.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Charlotte,’ Andrea snapped. ‘Of course you’re going.’

  ‘No,’ said Charlotte calmly. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Why on earth not?’ Andrea shook her head in confusion. ‘Do you mean you want to take a gap year?’ Charlotte could see the cogs begin to whir in her mother’s brain. ‘I suppose that’s not such a bad idea — a bit of travel would do you the world of good. You could stay with Aunt Ruth in London, maybe. I could go with you, help you get settled in …’

  ‘I don’t want to go to Europe.’

  Nick let out a snort of disgust, but Charlotte ignored him. ‘I’m going to stay here and work on the station.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Do you want to be somebody’s station hand all your life? Because that’s what’ll happen if you don’t finish your degree — and don’t think that you’ll ever own any of Blackpeak, because you won’t. Do you think I don’t know what’s in your father’s will? Nick gets it all, every single acre.’

  Charlotte’s temper snapped. ‘Dad’s dead! He can put what he likes in his will, but he can’t control Blackpeak any more and he can’t control me! I won’t leave here, and you can’t make me.’

  ‘Listen to yourself! You’re not a child any more — you’re twenty years old. You need to face up to your future.’

  ‘That’s right — I’m not a child. It’s up to me what I do, not you. And my future’ — Charlotte spat the word — ‘is going to be here, no matter what you say.’

  No one moved. No one spoke. Charlotte felt her heart pounding, the sting of tears beginning in her eyes. She swallowed hard to keep them down, the noise loud in her ears.

  ‘You don’t have to stay,’ she continued at last, haltingly, determined not to let the tears out. ‘You move to Christchurch if that’s what you want. I can look after myself. I don’t need you or … or anyone else … to take care of me.’

  She got up slowly and walked out of the room, her head high and her breath held until she was alone. Outside in the garden, the stars were out over Blackpeak, and a little moonlight played on the still-snowy peaks. Against the stillness of the night, her sobs sounded like a small girl’s tantrum. She stopped. High in the macrocarpas somewhere, a morepork called a little comfort.

  Charlotte walked through the garden to the front of the house and sat on the top step of the old bullnose verandah, looking out over the wide sloping lawn and down towards the river. At the far end of the garden, a trio of baby rabbits hopped cautiously out of the darkness under the drystone wall, and she sighed. She should really go and get the .22, but right now she didn’t have the energy to shoot them. The night was so still she could hear the river chattering over the stones, and Charlotte’s thoughts turned to the new lambs on the slopes all around. Would there be a late frost? It wasn’t forecast.

  Behind her, she heard the rarely used front door open and shut.

  ‘Hey.’ Nick sat down beside her. ‘You okay? Here, I made you a coffee.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Charlotte took the mug from his hand and sniffed.

  ‘Whisky,’ he explained. ‘I thought we could all do with one. It’s been quite a day.’

  Charlotte sipped her coffee. ‘You reckon it’s going to freeze tonight?’

  ‘Nah. Nor’wester’s supposed to get up later on.’

  They sat in silence for a while.

  Nick shook his head. ‘I can’t believe you just turned down a year in Europe.’

  ‘You bloody go if you’re so keen on it.’

  ‘Don’t think I wouldn’t. But nobody’s asking me.’ Nick sighed. ‘Come on, Charles, there’s a whole world out there — you really don’t want to see any of it?’

  Charlotte raised her mug to the mountain range glinting in front of them beneath the dusting of stars. ‘The bit I can see from here’s pretty good.’

  ‘It’d still be here when you got back.’

  Charlotte thought for a while. ‘You think Mum’ll really move to Christchurch?’

  Nick shrugged. ‘She’ll get pretty lonely out here on her own without Dad. Anybody would.’ He paused. ‘Have you thought about that?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well … hey, look, I’m not saying your prince won’t come. But he’s going to need GPS and a four-wheel drive.’

  Charlotte smiled. It was probably true that Luke Halliday’s Porsche wouldn’t make it through the ford. And his Italian shoes would get awfully dirty.

  ‘It’s just …’ she bit her lip. ‘I guess I think if I leave here, that’ll be it. I won’t be able to come back.’

  ‘Hey,’ Nick draped an arm round her shoulders, ‘that’s not true. There’ll always be a place for you here, as long as you want it.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Swear.’ He sighed again. ‘You really don’t want to go back to uni, huh?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Okay. As the owner of Blackpeak Station, I’ll make you a deal — once you’ve finished this year, you’ve got a job as my new station manager.’ Even in the darkness, she could sense Nick’s grin. ‘Starting salary’s not much, I’m afraid, but I’m told there’s a pretty good view from the office.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Dead serious.’ Nick winced. ‘If you’ll pardon the expression.’

  Charlotte almost knocked their mugs off the step in her hurry to hug him. It was only later that night, as she lay in bed, that she realised she didn’t feel quite as happy as she should. The owner of Blackpeak Station. Nick. She’d known, all her life, this day would come, and yet now it was here, it was hard to accept. Her brother was sweet to say she could stay. But really, she didn’t just want a place at Blackpeak. She want
ed a part of it, a part that no one could take away.

  Chapter THREE

  A blazing December sun poured in through the window of the Hilux as Charlotte drove home across the scorched river flats, the sill hot beneath her elbow and the tin roof of the woolshed in her rear-view mirror almost blinding. She hummed along to the stereo. She’d been home from university for three weeks, and every morning when she got up, she still had to pinch herself when she remembered that this time she was back for good, not just for the holidays.

  To her surprise, she arrived to find a stranger’s car parked outside the homestead — an old short-wheel-base Land Cruiser in classic eighties mustard yellow.

  ‘There you are,’ exclaimed Andrea as Charlotte walked in. ‘Charlotte, this is Rob Caterham.’ Her mother was looking very pleased with herself, as if the man sitting at the kitchen table was something she’d whipped up with her latest batch of muffins. ‘He’s our new accountant.’

  Rob stood up to shake Charlotte’s hand. Wow. ‘More like an errand boy, actually.’ He smiled down at her, his blue eyes crinkling. ‘They’ve got me delivering Christmas hams to all the clients. Bit old school, but the boss says I’ve got to get to know my way around the place before I’m allowed any accounts of my own.’

  He ran a long, tanned, muscular hand through his mop of wavy blond hair, pushing it back from his eyes. He was wearing a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a faded pair of Levis and he looked, Charlotte thought, more like a poster boy for Speight’s than an accountant.

  ‘I was just saying before you came in,’ Andrea said, ‘that Rob must come and have dinner with us one night.’

  Charlotte glared at her. Could she be any more obvious? ‘I thought you were going back to Christchurch on Monday.’

  ‘Well,’ said Andrea firmly, ‘we’d better make it this weekend, then. Saturday — are you free?’

  Rob shook his head. ‘Sadly, I’m not — it’s very kind of you though. Some other time, I’d love to.’