To the Hilt

by Dick Francis

  I said lightly, “I’m engaging a bodyguard.”

  “Al!” She sounded exasperated. “Look out for Surtees. I mean it.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to talk to you, though, about Golden Malt.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Safe enough, but it will be better if I move him again, and I need your knowledge and advice. I’ve borrowed Ivan’s copy of Horses in Training and sorted out four trainers who look possible, so if I tell you who they are, will you give me your opinion?”

  “Fire away.”

  I named the four trainers and again asked what she thought.

  “Two of them would be OK,” she said slowly, “but look up Jimmy Jenkins.”

  I looked him up and objected, “He has too many horses.” I counted. “Thirty-six.”

  “Not anymore. He’s been ill. He’s halved his yard ... told some of the owners to take their horses away temporarily, but it looks as if it might be forever. He and I are good friends. The real advantage of going to him is that he has two yards, and one of them is now standing empty. Tell me his phone number and I’ll see what he says.”

  I read out the phone number and asked, “Would the horse be able to race from there in your own name as its trainer?”

  “Well, Jimmy’s a licensed trainer himself; no problem there. The horse could detour to my yard in Lambourn on the day of the race to pick up the colors and tack and his usual groom. I could inform the Jockey Club in advance, and as the owner, Ivan, is a member, I can’t see there being any difficulty.” She thought briefly. “From the secrecy point of view it’s always the grooms that are the leaky sieves. It’s not deliberate disloyalty, they just talk in the pubs.”

  “And one of your grooms talks to Surtees.”

  She sighed. “If I knew which one, I would give him disinformation.”

  “That’s a thought.”

  “Give me ten minutes and I’ll phone you back.”

  I waited quite a while by the phone, loitering and repelling a resentful woman who wanted to use the end instrument of the row, not one of the vacant others. She had fierce words to say. When Emily at last rang, the resentful woman still hovered, black beady eyes full of ill will.

  “It’s all fixed,” Emily said. “Sorry I was so long. I told Jimmy the whole situation. He’s a hundred percent trustable if you trust him first. He says he’ll put Golden Malt in his empty yard, and to avoid the chatty groom business, the horse will be cared for and exercised by Jimmy’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who’s already an amateur jockey and knows when to keep quiet. There’s no need for his regular grooms even to know Golden Malt is there; the yards are at opposite ends of the village. What’s more, it’s not a busy training area. Jimmy’s gallops aren’t the best, though it hasn’t stopped him training a lot of winners in his time. I said you’d get there sometime this afternoon, and ... er ... I promised the training fee would be inflated. Jimmy didn’t want to hear of it, but I insisted. He could do with a bit extra, though he’s too proud to ask.”

  “He’ll get it,” I said.

  “Yes. I knew you would agree.”

  She gave me directions to the village and said Jimmy had said I should look for a square white house with bronze flaming-torch gateposts, and I should ring the front doorbell, not go round to the back.

  “OK.”

  “I’ll phone Jimmy later for news. Don’t worry, I won’t do it from home. And I told him not to phone me.”

  “Brilliant.”

  “Do you really think my phone is bugged?”

  “Don’t take the risk.”

  We said goodbye and the baleful old witch shouldered me out of the way to reach her preferred public phone. Everyone to their own obsession, I supposed. Impossible to dislodge fixed ideas. There were six unoccupied instruments she could have used.

  I returned to Ivan’s house, detouring to a newsagent’s for a copy of Horse and Hound and an up-to-date road map, and to my mother’s and stepfather’s bemusement I told them in detail about the shenanigans in Emily’s yard and my travels with Golden Malt.

  I said, “Emily has arranged for a trainer friend of hers to look after your horse and keep him fit so he can run in the King Alfred Gold Cup. If you agree with what we’ve planned, I’ll transfer Golden Malt to the trainer this afternoon. The horse will be in very good hands and it would be only by exceptionally bad luck that Surtees would discover where he is.”

  Ivan said slowly, “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble.”

  “Well ... the horse is yours. You asked me to look after your affairs, so ... er ... I try.”

  “For your mother’s sake.” A statement, not a question.

  “Yes ... but for yours, also. You don’t approve of the way I live, but you have never been ungenerous to me, and you would have taken me into the brewery, and I don’t forget that.”

  He looked at his hands and I couldn’t read his thoughts; but when I asked if I could borrow his car for the afternoon, he agreed without conditions.

  Via the classified advertisements in the Horse and Hound and the road map and the telephone, I arranged to meet a four-horse traveling horse van (the smallest of a prestigious firm) in Phil’s yard in East Ilsley, and there loaded Golden Malt for the last leg of his journey.

  Phil and I shook hands again, mutually pleased, and, asking the van driver of the top-class transport firm to follow Ivan’s car as arranged, I led him southwards and eastwards along secondary roads until we arrived somewhere near Basingstoke in a village that looked as if it had never seen a racehorse. But there, in the village’s main street, stood a square white house with copper ftaming torches on the gateposts.

  I stopped the car, the horse van braking to a halt behind me, and went to ring the front doorbell, as instructed.

  A thin, smiling middle-aged man opened the door in welcome. His skin had the gray tautness of terminal illness but his handshake was strong. A pace or two behind him stood a short fine-boned girl whom he introduced as his daughter, saying she would drive through the village in the horse van and settle Golden Malt into his new home. He watched approvingly as she climbed into the high cab beside the driver for the journey, and he invited me into his house, eyeing Ivan’s expensive car with reassurance and telling me that Emily had said she was sending her “special groom” to ensure the safe transit of a special horse.

  Jimmy Jenkins asked why I was smiling. Was I not Emily’s “special groom”?

  “I’m married to her,” I said.

  “Really?” He looked me up and down. “Are you that painter feller who ran off and left her?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Good Lord! Come this way. Come this way.”

  He hurried down a hallway, beckoning me to follow, and led me into his office, furnished, like most trainers’ such rooms, with ranks of framed photographs on the walls. He stood and pointed in silence, but I didn’t need his directing finger: among the clutter hung a painting I’d done and sold four or more years earlier.

  As always when I saw my own work freshly after an interval, I felt a mixture of excitement and shock. The picture was of a jockey plodding back to the stands after a fall, disappointment in his shoulders, a tear in his grass-stained breeches. I remembered the intensity of feeling in the brushstrokes, the stoicism and the loneliness of that man’s defeat.

  “Feller I trained for couldn’t pay his bill,” Jimmy Jenkins explained. “He offered me that picture instead. He swore it would be worth a fortune one day, but I took it because I liked it. Whether you realize it or not, that picture just about sums up a jump jockey’s life. Endurance. Courage. Persistence. All those things. Do you see?”

  I said lamely, “I’m glad you like it.”

  He thrust out his chin, a defiant gesture against an imminent and inevitable fate.

  “That picture keeps me going,” he said.

  I drove back to London, having briefly checked on Golden Malt in his isolated splendor, Jimmy Jenkins’s daughter tending him with years
of experience showing.

  The horse van driver had already unloaded and gone, as agreed with his firm. The hiding of Ivan’s horse should, barring accidents, be complete.

  I left Ivan’s car in its underground lair and returned to his house to learn that Patsy had spent the afternoon with him complaining that I had attacked Surtees so murderously as to leave him concussed, that I had committed child abuse against Xenia, and had brazenly stolen Golden Malt for my own illegal ends, such as holding him for ransom.

  “I listened to her,” Ivan said judiciously. “Is my horse safe?”

  “Yes.”

  “And a ransom?”

  I said tiredly, “Don’t be silly.”

  He actually laughed. “I listened to her, and she’s my daughter, but when she went on and on about how devious and dishonest you are, I slowly realized that I’ve truly been trusting you all along, that my inner instinct has held firm, even though to you I may sometimes have shown indecision. I love my daughter, but I think she’s wrong. I said once impulsively that I wished you were my son. I didn’t think I meant it when I said it. I do mean it now.”

  My mother embraced him with uncharacteristic delight and he stroked her arm happily, content to have pleased her. I saw in both of them the youthful faces they had left behind, and thought I might paint that perception, one day soon.

  There was time after that for the three of us to eat dinner calmly before I left for the night train. We drank wine in friendship, Ivan and I, and had come nearer than ever before to an appreciative and lasting understanding. I did believe, against all previous experience, that Patsy could not henceforth sow overthrowing doubts of me in his decent mind.

  He insisted on returning to my care the unopened envelope containing the codicil to his will.

  “Don’t argue, Alexander,” he said. “It will be safest with you.”

  “We won’t need it for years. By then it will be out of date.”

  “Yes. Perhaps. Anyway, I’ve decided to tell you what’s in it.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I need to,” he said, and told me.

  I smiled and hugged him for the first time ever.

  I hugged my mother, and went to Scotland.

  chapter 10

  To my surprise Jed was waiting at Dalwhinnie in the dawn. Himself had telephoned my mother late the previous evening, he said, and she’d told him I was on the train. Himself wanted me to go directly from train to castle, a command automatically to be obeyed.

  On the way Jed told me that I now had a new bed and a new armchair in the bothy (chosen by Jed, paid for by Himself) and I was to write a list of other things I would need. My uncle would foot the bill unconditionally.

  “But he doesn’t have to,” I protested.

  “If you ask me, he feels guilty. Let him atone.”

  I glanced at Jed sideways.

  “A shrink, are you?” I asked.

  “He told me you wouldn’t think, let alone suggest that he ought to make good your losses. I explained that you’d cleared out the bothy and he had me get that pile of muck removed. I hope to God the Hilt wasn’t hidden in it.”

  “Your prayers are answered. Where’s the painting, the one in the sheet?”

  “In my house, with all the other things you gave me.”

  I sighed with relief.

  “Flora looked at it,” he said. “She says it’s the portrait of a ghost.”

  Flora, his wife, had “the sight,” the ability deep in the Scottish gene pool of being able sometimes to see the future.

  “The word ‘ghost’ means spirit,” I said. “If Flora sees a spirit, that’s what I painted.”

  “You make it sound so prosaic.”

  “It isn’t finished,” I said.

  “No. Flora said not.” He paused. “She said she saw that ghost weeping.”

  “Weeping?”

  “She said so.” He sounded apologetic. “You know how she gets, sometimes.”

  I nodded.

  Weeping and Dr. Zoë Lang weren’t concepts that sat easily together, and I had no intention of trying to paint regret, but only a statement that while the outer shell aged, the inner spirit might not. The task was hard enough already. Weeping for lost youth would have to be a sequel.

  As before I found Himself in his dining room eating toast. He raised his big head at my entrance and gave me his formal greeting.

  “Alexander.”

  “My lord.”

  “Breakfast?” He waved a hand.

  “Thank you.”

  There were three places laid that morning, one used. James, I learned, had already gone out on the moors.

  “He wants a round of golf,” Himself said. “How about this afternoon? He’s leaving tomorrow. I’ve asked Jed to fix you up with wheels, and also with a portable telephone of your own, and don’t object that you can’t recharge the batteries. Jed is getting you extra ones and he’ll call on you every day with replacements. It may not be to your liking for solitude, but please humor me in this.”

  He looked at my silent face and smiled. “You would no doubt die for me as your clan chief. You can suffer a portable telephone.”

  “Put like that...”

  “You can go back to your damned paints tomorrow.”

  Resignedly, I ate toast. The old feudal obligations might be thought to be extinct, but in fact were not. The freedom of the wild mountains that I so prized was my uncle’s gift. I owed him an allegiance both decreed by my ancestry and reinforced by present favors, and besides, I liked him very much.

  He wanted to know what I’d been doing in the south, and he kept prodding me for details. I told him fairly fully about the codicil, about Patsy’s chatty involvement with Oliver Grantchester, about the discovery of Norman Quorn’s body, and about my fracas with Surtees in Emily’s yard.

  “Two things emerge from all that,” he said eventually. “Surtees is a dangerous fool, and where is the brewery’s money?”

  “The brewery’s auditor can’t find it.”

  “No,” he said thoughtfully, “but can you?”

  “I?” I no doubt sounded as surprised as I felt. “If the accountant and the bankruptcy lady say finding it is impossible, how can I, who knows next to nothing about international transfers, how can I even know where to begin?”

  “It will come to you,” he said.

  “But I don’t have access ...”

  “What to?” he said, when I stopped.

  “Well ... to whatever is left of Norman Quorn’s office in the brewery.”

  He wrinkled his forehead. “Would there be anything still there?”

  “If the dragons didn’t guard the gates, I’d take a look.”

  “Dragons?”

  “Patsy, and the brewery’s manager, Desmond Finch.”

  “You would think they would want the money found.”

  “But not by me.”

  “That woman,” he said, meaning Patsy, “is a menace.”

  I told him of the friendly evening I’d spent with Ivan, and he said that my stepfather seemed to have come to his silly senses at last.

  “He’s a good man,” I observed mildly. “If your son James told you over and over again for years and years that I was trying to worm my way into your regard and your will, would you believe him?”

  Himself thought long and intensely. “I might,” he at last acknowledged.

  “Patsy is afraid of losing her father’s love,” I said. “Not just her inheritance.”

  “She’s in danger of bringing about what she fears.”

  “People do,” I agreed.

  The two of us made a complete circuit outside of the whole castle and its wings, as he liked to do, only to find on our return, outside the entrance door the family now used, a small white car that drew from him frowns and disgust.

  “That bloody woman.”

  “Who?”

  “That Lang woman. She lives on my doorstep! Why did I ever ask her here?”

  Himse
lf might rue the day, but I was fascinated to see her again. She and her eighty-year-old wrinkles climbed out of the car and stood stalwartly in our path.

  “She has joined the conservationists who look after the castle,” Himself said. “Joined them?-she rules them. This past week she’s somehow got herself appointed chief custodian of the castle’s historic contents ... and you can guess what she’s chiefly after.”

  “The Hilt,” I said.

  “The Hilt.” He raised his voice as we approached the white car. “Good morning, Dr. Lang.”

  “Lord Kinloch.” She shook his hand, then looked me briefly up and down, unsure of my name.

  “My nephew,” Himself said.

  “Oh, yes.” She extended her hand again and shook mine perfunctorily. “Lord Kinloch, I’ve come to discuss the Treasures of Scotland exhibition being planned for the Edinburgh Festival next year ...”

  Himself with faultless courtesy showed her not into the dining room this time, nor into his private room, but into the fairly grand drawing room into which his best pieces of furniture had been moved at the time of the handover. Dr. Lang eyed two French commodes with a mixture of admiration for their beauty and workmanship and disapproval of their private ownership. She believed, as she said later, that they should have been included in the transfer, despite their having been personally bought and imported by a nineteenth-century Kinloch earl with cultured taste.

  My uncle offered sherry. Dr. Lang accepted.

  “Al?” he inquired.

  “Not right now.”

  Himself took a polite tokenful. “The flying eagle,” he said cheerfully, “will look magnificent in the Treasures of Scotland.”

  The flying eagle stood in the castle’s main entrance hall, a splendid treble-life-sized marble sculpture with wing feathers shining with gold leaf, the wings high and wide as if the fabulous bird were about to alight on the onyx ball at its feet. Transporting the flying eagle to the Edinburgh exhibition would mean cranes and crates and a slow low-loader. Himself had been heard to remark (tactlessly) that the castle’s conservationists still had charge of the eagle only because its weight made stealing it difficult.