Anne McAllister: Blood Brothers

“That,” he said, “is exactly why it’s going to be fun.”

How hard could it be?

Gabe was determined to look on the positive side. There was no point, after all, in bemoaning his impulsive decision. He’d said he would do it, and so he would. No big deal.

Randall apparently did this sort of thing all the time-dashed in on his white horse-no, make that, sped in in his silver Rolls-Royce-and rescued provincial newspapers from oblivion, set them on their feet, beefed up their advertising revenues, sparked up their editorial content, improved their economic base and sped away again-just like that.

Well, fine. Gabe would, too. No problem. No problem at all.

The problem was finding the damn place!

Gabe scowled now as he drove Earl’s old Range Rover through the gray morning drizzle that had accompanied him from London, along the narrow winding lane banked by dripping hedgerows taller than his head.

He’d visited the ancestral pile before, of course, but he’d never driven himself. And he’d always come in the middle of summer, not in what was surely the dampest, gloomiest winter in English history.

He’d left way before dawn this morning, goaded by Earl having said something about Randall always getting “an early start.” He’d done fine on the motorway, despite still having momentary twitches when, if his concentration lapsed, he thought he was driving on the wrong side of the road.

It had almost been easier when he’d got down into the back country of Devon and the roads had ceased having sides and had become narrow one-lane roads. His only traumas then came when he met a car coming in the other direction and he had to decide which way to move. Finally though, he found a sign saying BUCKWORTHY 3 mi and below it STANTON ABBEY 2 mi.

He turned onto that lane, followed it-and ended up on a winding track no wider than the Range Rover.

He felt like a steer on its way to the slaughterhouse-funneled into a chute with no way out.

And there was an apt metaphor for you, he thought grimly.

The lane twisted again, the hedgerows loomed. The windshield wipers swept back and forth, condensation rose. Gabe muttered under his breath.

Where were the wide-open spaces when you needed them?

“Damn!” He rounded the next blind curve and found himself coming straight up the rear tire of an antiquated bicycle that wobbled along ahead of him.

He swerved. There was no time to hit the brakes. The rider swerved at the same time-fortunately in the opposite direction.

Gabe breathed again as he passed, leaving the bicyclist, who appeared to be an elderly woman swaddled in a faded red sweater over more clothes than were necessary to get through a Montana winter, staring after him, doubtless unnerved, but fortunately unscathed.

It wouldn’t have done to have flattened a local.

“I thought you intended to save the Gazette, not make headlines in it,” he could well imagine Earl saying sarcastically.

Earl had openly scoffed when Gabe had proposed to take care of things and be back in a week.

“ A week? You think you’re going to turn ten years worth of sliding sales, bad management and terrible writing around in a week? ”

“Well, two, then,” Gabe had muttered. How the hell was he supposed to know? He’d never saved a newspaper before. He barely even read them-beyond checking the price of steers and maybe glancing at the sports page.

“Two months,” Earl had said loftily. “If you’re clever.”

Two months? Gabe had stared. “I have to be back for calving and branding come spring!” he protested.

“Guess you’ll have to leave it to Randall then,” Earl had said with a bland smile.

Like hell he would!

He’d said he would rescue the Gazette. And damn it, he would. No matter how long it took.

He knew Randall, too, thought he’d blow it. He’d spent half the night before Gabe left giving him advice. “Just go in there and lay down the law. Speak authoritatively.”

“Be the lord and master, you mean?” Gabe said derisively.

“Exactly. Speak softly but carry a big stick.”

“Teddy Roosevelt said that.”

Randall blinked. “Did he? Well, he must have stolen it from us.” Then he’d clapped Gabe on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine. Everything will be right as rain if you just…well, no matter. If you can’t, you just ring me up.”

“No, I can’t,” Gabe said smugly. “You’ll be in Montana.”

That was the other part of the deal. Gabe would do his job if Randall would oversee the ranch.

“Nothing to it,” Gabe had reassured his cousin, though Randall hadn’t looked all that cheerful at the prospect. “Piece of cake.”

And this would be, too, he assured himself. And if it wasn’t, he’d get it done anyway. He’d show both Earl and Randall. He was tired of having everybody think he couldn’t last at anything for longer than eight seconds.

But one look at Stanton Abbey when he finally found it, and Gabe thought if he made eight seconds he’d be lucky.

He’d last visited Stanton Abbey when he was ten. He was thirty-two now. It hadn’t changed. Of course, twenty-two years in the life of Stanton Abbey was a mere blink of an eye.

The original building was seven hundred years old if it was a day. There had been additions over the years. The damp dark stone building sat on the hillside like a squat, stolid Romanesque stone toad with slightly surprised gothic eyebrows.

The surprise no doubt came in part from having had a Tudor half-timbered extension grafted onto one side and a neoclassical wing tacked onto the other. Since the eighteenth century nothing had been added, thank heavens. The upkeep on what was already there had kept two hundred years of Stantons busy enough.

Gabe had never really envied Randall the earldom. His first adult look at Stanton Abbey gave him no reason to change his opinion. In fact he wondered that Randall hadn’t said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” long ago.

When he was ten, Gabe had thought Stanton Abbey an endlessly fascinating place. He and Randall had chased each other down long stone corridors, had hidden from Earl in the priest’s hole and had raced to see who could first get through the garden maze.

Anyone who ventured into the garden now, Gabe thought as he stared at the brambles and bushes, had better mark a trail or he’d never be seen again.

Randall had tried to warn him.

“It’s a bit overgrown,” he’d said. “We keep up with the house. Got to, you know. It’s a listed building, grade one, and all that. And Freddie’s done a wonderful job with the renovations. Still, every time I go down it seems some timbers need replacing-and there’s been a spot of bother with the rising damp.”

Rising?

Drowning, more like. Gabe could feel it permeating his bones. Had he really committed himself to living here for the next two months?

In a word, yes. And he wasn’t about to turn tail and run. Earl would never let him live it down.

Well, if Randall could do it, so could he.

He’d just find Freddie the caretaker to let him in.

Frederica Crossman was not expecting visitors.

That was why she was still in her nightgown and down on her hands and knees on the stone-flagged floor of Stanton Abbey’s dower house at ten o’clock on Monday morning, trying to coax her son Charlie’s on-loan-from-school-over-the-Christmas-holidays rabbit out from under the refrigerator.

Charlie was supposed to have taken it with him, but he hadn’t managed to catch it before he left for school this morning.

“It absolutely has to be back today, Mum,” he’d told her, “or I’m toast.”