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.

Like its people. Like her parents.

‘Mum, will my grandfather really be there to meet us?’

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.

‘Yes, he will,’ she assured her.

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.

And then she had met Silas.

‘Mum, did my father come from the Dales?’

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.

Kate shook her head. ‘No.’

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

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Potential Danger Penny Jordan

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

Potential Danger

Penny Jordan