Ticket to Ride (Eventing Trilogy Book 3)

by Caroline Akrill

  This being settled, and I having resigned myself to the fact that it was the instruction, not the accommodation, that was more important, I set out to explore the Duke of Newcastle.

  My Ideal Home for the next four weeks was pretty squalid and a far cry from the luxurious centrally-heated chalet I had imagined. Leading off from the nasty sitting room, which doubled as a dining room, was a cramped hallway which managed to contain a further six doors. Four of these led into four identical little cells each containing two narrow divan beds separated by the sort of hateful little bedside cupboards which used to house a chamber pot. These didn’t, because struck by the alarming possibility that the Duke of Newcastle might not even be blessed with indoor sanitation, I checked.

  On top of the cupboards were bedside lamps made from Chianti bottles topped by fly-blown pleated paper lampshades, and the only other furnishing was a metal dress rail which presumably served as a wardrobe. All this made my bedroom at Havers Hall, with its half-tester bed, its carved wardrobe and coffin chest, positively palatial.

  On the door of each cell was a notice. It said:

  No smoking, alcohol, boots, food,

  electric kettles or male persons

  permitted in the bedrooms.

  It was signed by the chief. As I continued my tour of inspection I found many more similar notices also signed by the chief. In the bathroom, with its chipped porcelain and rotting lino, there was one posted to the hot water cupboards.

  This immersion heater must NOT be

  left on all night.

  ELECTRICITY COSTS MONEY.

  And in the dismal cubby hole that proclaimed itself the kitchen, yet another was sellotaped to the door of the refrigerator.

  This refrigerator MUST be defrosted

  every THREE days. Biological specimens

  and worm counts are NOT to be kept in

  this refrigerator, it is for foodstuffs

  ONLY.

  One wall of the kitchen was lined with open shelves stacked with saucepans with defective handles and odd lids. There were some piles of miscellaneous plates and mugs, and a drawer revealed a selection of assorted cutlery. In a cabinet, fronted with sliding doors of yellowing frosted glass, I found a half-empty packet of cereal, a jar of solidified Horlicks, and a vast selection of Hissey’s pickles. Since Hissey’s Pickle Company was sponsoring the scholarship course, this was a neat touch, but there was no sign of anything we could actually eat.

  It was only when I opened the back door that I found a large carton bearing the grand inscription PROVISIONS FOR THE DUKE OF NEWCASTLE. I lifted the lid cautiously and saw a cold chicken, salad vegetables, milk, butter, bread, instant coffee and other welcome things. At least, I told myself as I carried the carton into the sitting room to show the others, it’s an improvement on the Fanes’ mutton stew.

  4

  To Horse!

  We were just breakfasting off the remains of the Duke of Newcastle’s chicken, and wondering what had happened to the other scholarship students, when there was a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” Alice shouted, “we’re all decent!”

  The door opened to reveal a tall girl in an immaculate cream woollen suit and a fur jacket. She had glossy brown hair coiled into a neat bun. Her nose was rather too long, and her eyes were set close together which had the unfortunate effect of making her look like a snooty sheep. She smiled at us brightly.

  “Good morning,” she said in a superior, school-mistressy sort of voice, “I’m Selina Gibbons.” She craned her well-groomed neck round the door in order to survey the room and the smile vanished. “What a frightful place,” she said in distaste. She came inside, lifting her expensively shod feet up rather high, as if she expected to step into something unpleasant.

  “Would you believe it,” Alice said in surprise, “Selina Gibbons. I heard you’d broken a leg.”

  “I can hardly have broken a leg, can I?” Selina said sweetly. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, would I? Otherwise my leg would be in plaster, wouldn’t it?” She looked at Alice and frowned slightly. “Ought I to know you?” she wondered, then, before Alice could open her mouth to reply: “No,” she decided, “I rather think not.” She peeled off the thinnest of leather gloves. “Do you think one of you could help me with my bags?” she said, adding, as none of us moved to do so, “If you would be so kind.”

  Mandy jumped up and began to haul in a set of matching suitcases from the doorway. Selina was already in the hall looking for her bedroom. The rest of us exchanged stunned glances across the breakfast table. It didn’t take Selina long to inspect the Duke of Newcastle but although she was clearly somewhat discomforted by what she had seen, she seemed determined to put a brave face on it. She looked disapprovingly at the litter of crusts and milk bottles on the table. “I have breakfasted,” she informed us, recoiling slightly as she noticed the chicken carcass, “so please don’t trouble on my behalf.”

  “How very fortunate,” Alice commented in a dry tone, “because there’s nothing left anyway.”

  Selina favoured Alice with a tight little smile and stepped around us in order to inspect the rota. I wondered what her reaction would be when she discovered that she was expected to take her turn with the cooking and the washing but she made no comment. She seemed more interested in everyone’s names.

  “Vivienne Tintoft,” she exclaimed, “not one of the Tintofts, surely? Not the Tintoft family who own the departmental stores?”

  Viv, who had been spooning up the sugar left at the bottom of her coffee, dropped the spoon into the mug. “Come to think of it,” she said, “my old man is in the retail trade.”

  “Really?” Selina looked round, interested.

  Viv nodded. “He’s got a market stall down the Mile End Road.”

  Selina wrinkled up her long nose as if she had just come into contact with a bad smell. “A market stall?” she said, appalled.

  “That’s right,” said Viv cheerfully. “Handbags, belts, Indian sandals; you know the sort of thing.”

  Selina looked pained. “I’m not exactly sure that I do,” she said.

  Annemarie, who had been listening to all this with a bored expression on her face, now looked at her watch and announced that it was ten minutes to ten. There was a sudden flurry as everyone made for their cells because we were due for a briefing from the chief in the lecture hall at ten o’clock. Somehow I had found myself sharing a cell with Annemarie, and as we jostled one another for the benefit of the tiny spotted mirror on the wall, Viv appeared looking distracted.

  “I can’t share a room with Selina Gibbons,” she groaned, “she’ll drive me barmy. She’s in there now lining the drawers with tissue paper and looking for fleas in the mattress. She’s even brought her own sheets and pillowcases.”

  “I’ll change with you, if you like,” I offered. The truth of the matter was that I didn’t feel I could face four weeks of Annemarie as a bedfellow. She had snored hideously and unceasingly all through the previous night until I, sleepless and distraught, had longed to be back under the faded tapestry bedcover at Havers Hall. Yet when I had mentioned it in the morning, she had denied it so vehemently that I half-believed I had dreamed it. I knew I would never dare to bring up the subject again.

  Before she could object to sharing a room with Viv, I left Annemarie sole use of the mirror and went to inform Selina that I was her new cellmate.

  “Whoever shares a room with me,” she remarked, as soon as I put my nose inside the door, “must be tidy. I do insist upon an orderly room.” One of her smaller cases had turned itself into a typewriter. This seemed to be a surprising item of equipment to bring on a scholarship course, and Selina, following the direction of my eyes, snapped the lid shut.

  “I do have rather a lot of personal correspondence to attend to,” she said by way of explanation, “private correspondence,” she added, as if she suspected I might be the kind of person who had a penchant for reading other people’s letters. I withdrew.

  We
all arrived at the lecture hall together and sat down, taking up half of the first row of chairs. We were only five seconds ahead of the chief, who marched down the centre aisle in his gleaming boots and gave us a curt nod. He took up a position behind an ecclesiastical lecture stand and shuffled an array of papers.

  “I shall not delay you long,” he said, looking at us sharply, as if we were already late for three appointments and had really no right to be sitting there at all.

  “So kind,” Selina murmured. “It does take one a little time to settle in.”

  The chief stared at her as if he found her comment totally incomprehensible. “Hand out these sheets to the rest of the students,” he rapped, “Miss er…” he paused to look down his list of names.

  “Gibbons,” Selina supplied. ‘Selina Gibbons.” She took the proffered sheets and graciously handed one to each of us.

  “Without a broken leg,” Alice commented in a low voice, “if you would be so kind.”

  Selina gave her an icy look and sat down, folding her legs neatly under her chair like a professional model.

  “Have you seen this?” Annemarie hissed in my ear. “We have to be out in the yard by six o’clock, and we have to go out running for half an hour every day – running,” she repeated in a scandalized voice.

  “Silence, if you please!” the chief barked. “This is a briefing, not a ladies’ coffee morning!”

  Annemarie snapped upright in her chair.

  “This morning,” said the chief, “we shall begin with an assessment period in the indoor school. There will be a break for lunch, followed by a further assessment of a restricted nature on the cross-country course. I shall be assessing capabilities, potential and fitness, not only of yourselves, but of your horses...” he frowned at us in turn as if to signify that this may well be a short assessment as there was probably precious little to assess, “after which I shall draw up individual tables of exercise, work, and feeding for your horses, and set each of you appropriately timed periods of running, lunging without reins and stirrups, and riding, to produce maximum fitness and performance with a view to competing in the junior trial at the end of the month.” He looked at each of us carefully to see how we would react to this punishing regime. We stared back at him in silence.

  “Until I have worked out your individual programmes,” he continued, “you will kindly follow the daily schedule.”

  “Which daily schedule is that?” Selina enquired sweetly.

  “The daily schedule sitting on your lap,” the chief snapped.

  “Oh, I see,” Selina said, undismayed, “I do beg your pardon.”

  Alice sniggered.

  “You may now return to your quarters in order to change for the assessment lesson.” The chief stared at Alice and narrowed his eyes. Alice stared back. The chief averted his gaze hastily. “I shall expect you to report to the indoor school in fifteen minutes precisely,” he commanded.

  “I may be a little longer than that,” Selina informed him, “I have yet to unpack.”

  The chief’s face took on a slightly darker hue. “Miss Gibbons,” he said, “I repeat, I expect to see you in the indoor school in fifteen minutes.”

  Selina gave him a brave smile. “Very well,” she promised, “I shall do my best.” She got up to leave.

  “Kindly remain seated until I give you permission to rise!” the chief bellowed.

  Selina sat down again with a bump. Now it was her turn to look at the chief as if he might be insane. It occurred to me that he didn’t appear to have had much practice in dealing with the cream of the cream.

  “Rather natty, don’t you think?”

  Selina pulled a pair of breeches over her long, thin, elegant legs. They were cream, with Velcro fastenings and soft, pale suede strapping from seat to calf, absolutely identical to the pair lying swathed in tissue in the bottom of my drawer, awaiting my first three-day event.

  Resignedly, I took out my second best. Selina was already sporting a tweed coat by Weatherill, and had unpacked a pair of long riding boots which, even without looking, I knew would be handmade by Maxwell. One could never compete; it would be ridiculous to try.

  “As a matter of interest,” I asked her, attempting to cram my hair into a net without the benefit of the mirror because Selina was already firmly installed in front of it, fiddling with a silky cravat, “why did you try for a scholarship? Why didn’t you just pay for your training, and do the whole thing in comfort?”

  Selina stabbed at the cravat with a gold stock pin. “Because one does rather like to feel that one has been accepted on merit,” she said in a reproving tone, “not simply because one can foot the bill.”

  We made our way past the muckheaps, their familiar sweet, sickly smell shot through with powerful whiffs of ammonia, on our way to the high-powered frenetic efficiency of the yards where staff and working pupils alike were engaged in an unceasing round of activity. People hurried up and down the walkways, carrying saddles, draped with bridles and headcollars, half-buried under mounds of coloured rugs and striped stable blankets. Horses clopped in and out, springboks flew above the gravel, wooden water pails waited in rows beside the taps, hay nets were being stuffed and weighed in the barns, leather was being soaped in the tackrooms. In the large open-fronted boxes at the end of each row, electric groomers or clippers whirred busily, and from somewhere came the distinctive acrid smell of burned horn which told of a blacksmith at work.

  We had all been out early to feed and muck out our own horses, and I had strapped Legend and washed his mane and tail. He seemed to have settled in perfectly and I found him looking over the top half of his door, interested in everything that was going on, but even so, he caught my step as I approached along the walkway and turned his bay head with its white star shining, and whickered a soft welcome.

  On the front of the lower door was a perspex slot into which a card had been dropped. THE HISSEY TRAINING SCHOLARSHIP it read, and underneath our names, ANOTHER LEGEND, Owner/rider ELAINE ELLIOT. There was a space under this for further information, and although mine was left blank, most of the other cards around the yard had theirs filled in. RUG TEARER one said, and then BOLTS FOOD – LARGE STONES TO BE LEFT IN MANGER, and more unwelcoming, STRIKES OUT WITH FRONT FEET. I was rather glad I couldn’t think of anything to write about Legend.

  The scholarship students had all been allocated boxes in the same yard. Annemarie’s horse, a well-made and compact part-bred Hanoverian, bought in Germany where Annemarie’s father was a British serving officer, was stabled next to Legend. “He is small for an eventer, but he has got a lion’s heart,” she told me fiercely, as we led our horses across the gravel towards the indoor school. “He is good enough for the Junior Olympics, and I mean to get there. We haven’t spent two months at the Reitschule for nothing.”

  As we entered by the sliding doors, the chief was standing in the middle of the school eyeing his watch. “One moment!” he rapped, effectively halting us in our tracks as we began to prepare to mount. “Kindly make a line in front of me, dismounted.”

  We shuffled ourselves and our horses into a line, surprised.

  The chief marched up to Alice who had positioned herself at one end of the line and peered closely at her face. “Better see the nurse,” he said curtly.

  Alice was astonished. “What for?” she demanded, as soon as she could find her voice.

  “Spots,” said the chief, “can’t have a girl with spots. Unhealthy. Might be catching.”

  “Rubbish,”said Alice scornfully, “it’s my age.”

  The chief pointed his stick at her chest. “Button missing,” he observed, flipping open her jacket. His eye travelled downwards. “Boot straps upside down.” He moved on to Mandy, leaving Alice with her mouth agape.

  Mandy stared at the chief like a mesmerized rabbit. She wore her hat with the peak pointing upwards and her awful floppy hair hung out all round.

  “Hairnet?” the chief snapped.

  Mandy jumped and grabbed nervously
at her hair. “I haven’t got one,” she said.

  “Obviously,” the chief said in a dry voice. “Kindly see that you are equipped with one in future.” He reached out and pulled the peak of her hat straight. Mandy flinched. I think she actually imagined he was going to box her ears.

  The chief looked Selina up and down almost approvingly. “Very good, Miss Gibbons,” he said. Selina smiled at him in an ingratiating manner.

  Annemarie was next. She stood like a ramrod with every item of her kit clean and correct and her boots shining like mirrors, but even so, the chief found something to complain about. “Be good enough to remove your earrings, Miss Maddox,” he said sharply. “This a centre of equitation, not a West End nightclub.”

  Beside me, Viv let out a strangled squeak of mirth. Annemarie began to fumble with her ear lobes. “Yes sir,” she said.

  It was my turn. The chief frowned and stared at my neck. I waited for him to say it was dirty, because I hadn’t been able to have a proper wash all day. Every time I had tried to get into the bathroom it had been occupied by someone else. I had ended up washing just my hands and my face in the kitchen sink, over a pile of dishes that nobody would accept responsibility for – the rota not being very specific about things like washing up. However, it wasn’t my neck he was looking at.

  “I would prefer a collar and tie to a roll-necked jersey, Miss Elliot,” he rapped. “This is a formal lesson, not a hack in the park.”

  “I’ll change it,” I promised, “before the next lesson.”

  “You will indeed,” he agreed, and he passed onto Viv.

  Viv’s lips were pressed together and her cheeks were pink with the effort of keeping herself under control, but the chief was more prepared for her than any of us could imagine.

  “Hands to the front,” he barked. “Get them out.”