The Inheritance: Racy, pacy and very funny!

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked rudely, her eyes narrowed in suspicion. Tatiana knew Gabe was one of the leading voices against her in the village. She also knew that when her father had been alive, Gabe had tried relentlessly to convince Rory to sell off parcels of Furlings’ land. She didn’t trust him an inch.

‘Just being neighbourly,’ lied Gabe. ‘How about you?’

I live here, Tati wanted to shout. It’s my fucking house. But she managed to restrain herself.

‘I’m collecting a painting. My grandmother’s portrait. One of the few pieces of my inheritance that wasn’t stolen from me,’ she added caustically. Belatedly catching sight of Angela, she introduced herself, extending the hand not holding the painting with regal disdain.

‘Tatiana Flint-Hamilton.’

‘Oh!’ Angela smiled warmly. ‘Hello. I didn’t know you were coming. I’m Angela. I’m so sorry about the mess. You should have called.’

‘Should I indeed?’ Tati’s voice quivered with resentment and hostility.

‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ Angela blushed. ‘I just meant …’

‘Don’t apologize,’ Gabe Baxter interjected. ‘It’s your house.’

Tati shot him a look that would have turned a lesser man to stone.

‘Besides, you’re quite right. Tatiana should have called.’

‘Don’t you have a ewe that needs lambing, Gabriel?’ sniped Tati. ‘Or an episode of The Archers to listen to? Gabriel’s terribly rustic,’ she added patronizingly to Angela and Jason. ‘A real local character. If you ask him nicely, I expect he’ll come round and do a spot of Morris dancing for you, won’t you, Gabriel? It’s really quite adorable.’

Gabe’s features hardened. He looked at his watch.

‘My goodness, is that the time? You’d best get home to your rented cottage, Tatiana. It’s almost coke-o’clock.’

Blushing scarlet, Tatiana pushed past him and stormed out, throwing the painting into the back seat of her Mini Cooper and driving off. Gabe Baxter followed swiftly after, promising to come back and call on Brett at the weekend.

Once the door closed behind him, Angela and Jason exchanged shocked glances.

‘Is everybody in Fittlescombe so … dramatic?’ Angela asked Mrs Worsley.

Or so attractive? thought Jason. Watching Gabe and Tatiana going at it was like watching a pair of peacocks fanning out their tails for battle. Terrifying but beautiful.

‘No ma’am,’ said Mrs Worsley with feeling. ‘I can assure you that most of your neighbours are quite normal, sane and friendly people. Miss Flint-Hamilton – Tatiana – I’m afraid she can bring out the worst in folk. Especially around here.’

Angela bit her lower lip anxiously. She’d already heard whispers in the village about Tatiana’s legal challenge to the will. Brett had assured her that the legacy was watertight, and Furlings was theirs. But having seen Tatiana in the flesh, Angela got the strong sense that Rory Flint-Hamilton’s daughter was a force to be reckoned with. Perhaps Brett had underestimated her?

‘You don’t think she plans to cause trouble, do you?’

She looked at Mrs Worsley nervously.

‘Unfortunately Mrs Cranley, Tatiana’s done nothing but cause trouble since the day she was born. And since she turned fifteen …’ She rolled her eyes heavenwards. ‘Her father was always too soft on her, bless his soul. Try not to worry, though,’ she added, noticing Angela’s tense expression. ‘She’s full of hot air about the will.’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘Oh, yes. She would need the support of the whole village to be able to launch a challenge, and she certainly hasn’t got that. Even if she did, Mr Flint-Hamilton was a clever man, and a thorough one. These so-called loopholes are all in Tatiana’s head.’

‘I do hope so,’ said Angela.

The thought of packing everything up and returning to Sydney, Tricia and their old life now was more than she could bear.

Twenty minutes later, pushing open the stiff door of Greystones Farm, Tatiana collapsed on the ugly, brown sofa feeling exhausted and depressed.

It had been a pretty devastating two days.

Unable to afford a decent London lawyer, she’d retained a local, Chichester man, Raymond Baines of Baines, Bailey & Wilson. Their meeting yesterday had been less than Tati had hoped for.

‘To be perfectly honest with you, Miss Flint-Hamilton, I don’t believe you have a case.’

Short and bald, with thick, owlish glasses and a distinctly passive, mild-mannered, absolute-opposite-of-a-go-getter-lawyer demeanour, Ray Baines looked at his would-be client steadily.

‘But I already have half the village behind me,’ Tati protested. ‘The tide of local opinion is definitely turning. Nobody wants some upstart Australian installed at Furlings. I made good headway running the fete committee, and by the time it comes to court I’m sure I can—’

‘It won’t matter,’ Raymond Baines cut her off, not unkindly. ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you.’

‘Are you saying you are unable to act for me, Mr Baines?’ Masking her disappointment with anger, Tatiana bristled with aggression.

‘No, Miss Flint-Hamilton. I am able to act for you. And technically speaking you are correct. We could mount a challenge based on the premise that Furlings was subject to an ‘effective’ entailment which your father had no legal authority to break. However I am advising you that it is my legal opinion that such a challenge will fail. With or without local support.’

‘Yes, but you don’t know that. You only think it.’

‘I think it very strongly.’

Tatiana knew she was clutching at straws. But drowning as she was in a sea of shattered hopes, she had no choice but to clutch on regardless.

‘What are your fees, Mr Baines?’

Raymond Baines told her. The number was modest, a tiny fraction of what Tati’s godfather’s firm would have charged for the same service. But it would still represent a dent in Tati’s meagre savings that she could ill afford.

‘Savings’ was perhaps the wrong word for the few thousand pounds remaining in Tatiana’s bank account. Having split from Piers, her latest wealthy lover, and moved out of his Belgravia flat, Tatiana had taken the jewellery he’d given her, along with any other gifts from former paramours she suspected might be of value, and auctioned the lot at Christie’s. The resulting windfall had been enough to pay off her debts, rent Greystones for six months, and leave a modest sum to fund a legal battle with the Cranleys.

Unfortunately, she would need a lot more than a modest sum. At a minimum, she would need full access to the pittance of a trust fund her father had deigned to leave her. That would mean crawling cap-in-hand to St Hilda’s new headmaster, Harry Hotham’s replacement, to beg for a job. So far Tati’s pride had prevented her from availing herself of this much-needed source of funds. It was bad enough having to leave London and return to Fittlescombe, but that was a necessity. Ending it with Piers meant she’d lost the roof over her head, and rents in any part of London where she might actually want to live were astronomical. Still, if the court case dragged on as long as Raymond Baines seemed to think it might, the fact was she was going to need a job of some kind. And as the school job was the only one that unlocked her trusts, this was the obvious path to take.

The prospect terrified her. Tatiana Flint-Hamilton had never worked a day in her life. As for teaching, she wished she shared her godfather’s faith in her abilities. Or her father’s, for that matter. The simple truth was that she no more knew how to control a class full of children than she knew how to mill flour or discover a cure for cancer.

She’d hoped that going back to Furlings today and seeing the new owners installed there might revive her fighting spirit and boost her courage. Remind her that the fight was worth it. In fact, all it had done was make her desperately sad. The fact that the Cranley family seemed so nice and friendly, and so ensconced already, only made Tati feel worse. Mrs Worsley was already firmly on their side, defending their right to be there like the wretched dragon that she was. It didn’t seem to bother her in the least that Furlings might end up in the hands of a boy named Jason with a sister who, if local gossip was correct, appeared to have been named after a berry. Granny Flint-Hamilton would be rolling in her grave! As for Gabe Baxter, he was little more than a jumped-up farmhand himself. It was hardly any wonder that he was pro-the Cranleys, already hanging around Furlings like a bad smell. People like Gabe ran on envy the same way a car runs on petrol.

Shit-stirring little Bolshevik. I wonder what he’s after, exactly?

Getting up from the sofa, Tati wandered into the kitchen and put the kettle on, more for something to do than anything else. It was a long time since she’d felt so profoundly alone. Greystones, the farmhouse she’d rented, was simply furnished, almost to the point of sparseness, and Tati had brought nothing with her from London, beyond some bed sheets and a preposterously expensive couture wardrobe, wholly unsuitable for country life. Her shoe collection alone, more than fifty pairs of Jonathan Kelsey, Manolo Blahnik and Emma Hope stilettos in a rainbow of gleaming, candy colours, would have been enough for a deposit on a house like this one, if only she’d spent her money a little more wisely. Then again, she’d assumed she would always be rich. And why wouldn’t she? How was she supposed to know that her vengeful bloody father had been plotting to disinherit her all along, in some sort of macabre, sick joke from beyond the grave?

Having never put roots down anywhere other than Furlings, it had never occurred to Tati to acquire furniture or clocks or books or favourite cushions, the things that would have helped to turn a house like this into a home. She hated the poo-brown sofas, and the incongruously modern, sixties-style Ikea plastic chairs around the dining-room table. As for her landlady’s rugs, they were so vile – swirly affairs in orange and lime green and other colours that had no place in a beautiful, Grade II-listed Sussex hall house – that Tati had rolled them all up on the day she’d arrived and stacked them en masse in the back of the garage. The original flagstones and wide-beamed oak floors beneath were infinitely preferable. But without a single rug of her own to warm the place up a bit, the overall effect was one of bareness. Stark and barren, like a tree stripped of its leaves after a storm.

The kettle switched itself off with a click, the steam from its spout fogging up the kitchen window. Tatiana wiped the glass clean with her sleeve and looked out into the garden. It was a stunning day, blue-skied and clear, like the summers of her childhood. Greystones Farm was really little more than a cottage on the outskirts of Fittlescombe, but its garden was enormous, its various sections – rose garden, orchard, vegetable patch and lawn – tumbling into one another willy-nilly, as each exploded and overflowed with colour and scent and fruit and life. There must have been a planting plan once, a design. Tatiana could see where the crumbling walls and overgrown beech hedges had once delineated and organized more than an acre of space. But now, untended, other than a weekly lawn-mowing by old Mr Dryer from the village, the garden was a joyously jumbled eruption of blossoms and greenery. Gazing out at it, watching a rabbit skip about in the white carpet of fallen apple blossom, even Tatiana’s spirits lifted a little. Making herself a cup of Earl Grey and two slices of toast and honey, she pushed open the back door and wandered outside.

Could I be happy here? She wondered, savouring the deliciously sweet, buttery toast as she strolled through a towering row of hollyhocks. Tati hadn’t lived in the countryside, or spent more than a week at a stretch here, since her childhood. And those weeks had always been spent at Furlings, riding her beloved horse, Flint.