Kit

Kit, the eldest of Emma Harte’s sons, moves from an affectionate childhood in a complicated household to a responsible role in the family’s Yorkshire businesses, then becomes one of the four children conspiring against Emma’s control of her empire. He is neither the plot’s originator nor its most imaginative participant: Emma sees him as stubborn, patient, and susceptible to Robin’s influence. His eventual loss of a place in the company’s succession gives the family confrontation a particularly personal edge, since the son who once ran part of the business efficiently ends by accepting a payment rather than a share of its future control.

Identity and Family Background

Emma regards Kit as her eldest son and understands that he has long wanted a place in the stores. She considers him steady and persistent, with the patience to wait for what he wants, but without the imagination or nerve to devise the later scheme against her. In her account, those limitations make him vulnerable to Robin’s direction: Kit can be manoeuvred, and Emma believes his half-brother is doing the manoeuvring.

Kit’s place in the family is shaped by Emma’s different relationships with her children. She considers him alongside Edwina, Robin, and Elizabeth as one of the four older children implicated in the conspiracy, while Daisy remains the child she trusts not to participate. Emma’s reflections distinguish Kit’s practical stubbornness from Robin’s political facility and from the more uncertain roles she attributes to her daughters. This is not simply a division between loyal and disloyal children: the siblings’ alliances and rivalries make the family itself the setting in which the business struggle takes shape.

Childhood and Affection for Paul McGill

In the week before Christmas in 1919, eight-year-old Kit welcomes Emma home by running across the nursery and hugging her legs. He has been painting a Christmas present for her, and his pleasure in the surprise is mixed with anxiety that she might not like it. When he reveals the picture, Emma recognizes a uniformed man as Paul McGill: Kit has painted a dark mark across the man’s upper lip and bright blue eyes. Kit confirms the identification and asks whether the likeness pleases her.

The scene makes Kit’s affection for Paul visible through a child’s earnest, imperfect work. He wants to finish the picture just right and proposes adding a kangaroo and a polar bear, repeating what he understands of Paul’s stories about Australia. Emma gently corrects him about the animal, but Kit remains intent on the gift. His easy attachment contrasts with his dismissive description of Edwina, who has spent the morning reading rather than playing with him. The small exchange establishes an early difference in the children’s temperaments without turning it into a lasting verdict on either sibling.

As Kit grows up, Paul’s place in the household becomes more pronounced. After Emma’s marriage to Arthur Ainsley ends, Kit is away at boarding school, spending half terms and holidays with Emma. He approves of Paul and is devoted to him; he also sheds no tears over Arthur’s sudden disappearance from his young life. Paul, whose gentleness and strength earn the children’s respect, becomes the household’s titular head and a father figure to them. Kit’s later conduct therefore unfolds against a childhood attachment to a man who is not his biological father but who has become central to family life.

Work, Education, and Wartime Experience

Emma steers Kit towards Harte Enterprises and the Yorkshire woollen mills, where he runs the business with a degree of efficiency. The placement suits his qualities as she understands them: diligence and persistence, rather than a gift for retailing or strategic invention. His work is a genuine responsibility, even as Emma’s recollection that he wanted the stores suggests that his eventual role does not entirely match his ambitions.

Kit attends Leeds University after boarding school. He is later a father himself; Sarah is identified as his only child. By the approach of the Second World War, Emma expects Kit and Robin to be called up, while Winston Harte reports that his own son, Randolph, wants to join the navy immediately. The conversation frames the coming wartime disruption through the family’s young men and the likely depletion of Emma’s staffs, but it does not specify Kit’s military unit or duties.

The Dunkirk evacuation brings his wartime danger into sharper focus. Kit reaches Deal on June 3 after being transported across the Channel amid vessels and wreckage. When he later comes home on leave, he tells Emma that he made it by the skin of his teeth and that a guardian angel must have watched over him. Emma embraces him, overcome by relief and by the memory of his father, who had died in France in 1916. Kit’s survival thus joins the immediate intimacy of mother and son to the longer family history of wartime loss.

Alliance with Robin and the Conspiracy

In Emma’s later account of the attempted takeover, Kit is a participant but not the principal strategist. She believes Robin initiated the plot, while Kit supplied the stubborn patience to sustain it. Her judgment is sharpened by her knowledge of Kit’s earlier desire for the stores and by her belief that he lacks the imaginative capacity to devise such a plan independently. His alliance with Robin turns an old ambition into a threat to Emma’s control of the enterprise.

The conspiracy also places Kit within a fractured sibling group. Emma identifies Edwina and Elizabeth as allies of Robin, although she is less certain of Elizabeth’s involvement at first; Daisy, by contrast, is outside the scheme and remains, in Emma’s view, loyal to her. At the family gathering at Pennistone Royal, the conspirators avoid one another, yet Kit and Robin exchange apprehensive glances. Sarah later reports seeing her father and Robin arguing in Stone Hall, both looking furious. Their quarrel exposes the strain inside the alliance: the partners in the plot are not a unified family faction so much as uneasy collaborators.

The betrayal wounds Emma precisely because Kit is her son and because her business has been built over decades of purpose and sacrifice. When Gaye Sloane tells her that her children are plotting against her, Emma is first overwhelmed, then converts anguish into cold resolve. At the later confrontation she tells the four plotters that they underestimated her. Her response is directed not only at their plan but at the family loyalties it violates: they sought control of the empire even at the expense of their own children.

Disinheritance and Final Settlement

Emma’s succession arrangement denies Kit and the other plotters control of Harte Enterprises. She leaves 52 per cent of her shares to her grandson Alexander Barkstone and divides the remaining shares among Sarah Lowther, Jonathan Ainsley, and Emily Barkstone. She explains that placing control in one person’s hands is, in her judgment, the best way to preserve the company and prevent future dissension. Kit is not named among the recipients of those shares, though his daughter Sarah is.

When Emma reveals the disposition, Kit draws in his breath as the implications become clear. Robin protests that Emma has treated the children unfairly and threatens to contest the will. Emma answers by exposing the conspiracy and warning that she anticipated a legal challenge. She has also prepared one-million-pound cheques for each of the four children, while retaining the trust funds established for them earlier. The money is not offered as an unqualified reconciliation: Emma describes it as a purchase, conditional on their signing contracts not to challenge her will.

Elizabeth signs first, Edwina follows, and Robin joins them. Kit is last. Emma notices that his hand shakes and that he cannot meet her eyes. That final gesture is the most intimate measure of his position in the confrontation: he complies with the settlement, but the formal signature does not erase the betrayal or restore his former standing. The boy who once laboured over a portrait for Emma and the adult who helped plot against her remain part of the same family, now divided by the business and inheritance he had hoped to claim.