“Heavens no,” Jean tinkled. “She’s getting up there, you know. She still does some teaching but not much riding anymore. I ride the farm horses, show and sell, you know. Elsie only rides her own horse—and he’s a Trakehner, imported from Germany… she rides him Prix St. Georges. Isn’t that something! At her age! She used to ride Thoroughbreds too, when she was younger… but of course she wants a quieter, more well-behaved sort of horse now. And it’s paid off. Not many women riding at her level in their senior years, you know?”
I murmured something to convey how deeply impressed I was with Elsie’s golden years of riding, while valiantly trying to cover up my disappointment. A hunter/jumper barn, with this princess running around flashing those fake smiles? That’s not what I had signed up for at all. I was nearly twitching with my need to get away from the lovely plastic-featured Jean and slip into the security and privacy of Tiger’s stall, and I’d only been here five minutes. I had to survive multiple months of this character, to get Tiger to the Thoroughbred Makeover?
And what was I going to do with him after that? Take him back to Cotswold and let him dissolve into a maniac again?
I gave my head a little shake to straighten out my thoughts again. Anything after the Thoroughbred Makeover didn’t matter yet. Only what came before. “I’m sure you’d like to get out there and ride,” I began, trying to slip past Jean and make my escape.
Unfortunately, it seemed Elsie had appointed Jean to make sure I was comfortable as a boarder at Roundtree. “Let’s just make sure you know everybody first!” she announced, and took me by the arm. I bit back a sigh and allowed her to steer me towards the center of the barn, where a few cross-ties were set back alongside the tack rooms and office.
Jean’s first order of business was to introduce me to the other boarders who were there in the middle of the day—Kelly, Maggie, Chrissy, and Melody. If I hadn’t expected to encounter other boarders at eleven o’clock on a Thursday morning, I tried not to let it on, while secretly I wondered what their husbands were doing for a living. I supposed they could all be married to racehorse trainers, too. I didn’t ask, instead trying for a joke with those matching names. People just loved jokes. They’d think I was funny and we’d all get on famously.
“Nice to meet you, Kelly, Maggie, Chrissy, Melody.” I turned to Jean. “I’m surprised you don’t go by Jeanie.”
Crickets.
Jean just looked a little confused, as did Maggie, Chrissy, and Melody, but then Kelly snorted with laughter. I threw her a grateful smile.
“My husband said the same thing once,” Kelly laughed. She was round and middle-aged, her short brown hair run through with gray. “I told him to hush up making fun of our names, because we’re a beautiful poem when we ride together. He said the best poems don’t rhyme. Men. If it isn’t on the golf course, it doesn’t mean a thing to him. You married?”
Not a racetrack wife, then. But I liked her rougher style; Jean’s ice-cold beauty and precise speech was making me so jumpy I wasn’t sure I’d be able to buckle on Tiger’s halter right now. “I am, and my husband would say the exact same thing,” I agreed.
“Oh, haha, that’s very funny,” Jean said out of the blue, and Kelly and I both turned very slowly to look at her. Jean remained oblivious. She was ready to move on. “Let’s go over the arena rules!” she announced cheerfully, and took me off to point out the arenas’ finer points and explain that we rode left-rein to left-rein, and riding lessons took precedence in the jumping arena, and faster horses should stay to the inside. The usual. The things we learned in the kindergarten of riding lessons.
“It seems pretty straight-forward,” I said when she was done. “Like the other barns I’ve ridden at. I’ve been riding since I was a kid,” I added, so that she understood I wasn’t going to flub up all the normal courtesies riders paid one another, just because I was some racetrack hick. “I evented and—”
“But your horse is very green, isn’t he?” Jean interrupted. “I hope you won’t be having any trouble with him. If he’s bad-tempered, you might want to ride him when the arena’s empty. Just because so many of us are preparing for shows, and we wouldn’t benefit from having a worked-up horse while we’re training.”
I blinked. “Of course. He’s green, but he’s not bad.” That’s only half a lie. “I won’t get in anyone’s way.”
“I’m sure we’d all appreciate that.” Jean gazed out over the arena. “This is a small farm, but we have big careers ahead of us. I’m showing Marcelle in the High Jumpers all through HITS, and hoping to get into our first Grand Prix class by the end of the festival. He’s a very talented jumper. Elsie says he’s got the most potential she’s ever seen. Did you know she trained in Germany and France? And competed internationally? She knows what she’s talking about.”
I muttered that I had, although the truth was that while I knew very little about Elsie, I was finding I was loathe to let Jean think she knew a single thing more than I did. The teenage rival instinct was strong.
We went back to the barn so that Jean could take out Marcelle to school in the jumping arena. She was nice enough as she took her horse’s halter and cross-ties off, and her smile, as she expressed hope once again that Tiger and I would not disturb them in their schooling, was sweet as sugar.
I went into Tiger’s stall, where my retired racehorse was blissfully crunching through a pile of hay, and buried my face in his neck.
Which, I thought a little later, pulling strands of mane from my sweater, was exactly what I had done when I was a kid, once the mean girls were through with me.
Fortunately, though, Tiger seemed happy, and that was all that mattered.
Or so I kept telling myself, as I avoided doing anything that involved leaving his stall, including fetching his grooming kit and getting him cleaned up for a ride.
I waited until Jean had warmed up Marcelle and was taking him around the jumping course before I even bothered tacking up Tiger. He’d never been cross-tied, so I looped his lead-rope in a quick-release knot around one of the stall bars, and groomed him in his stall. If the other women bustling around the barn thought that was weird, none of them said so. I saw a horse walk by once, his hooves clopping on the concrete aisle, but Tiger’s stall was near the end and the cross-ties and tack room were in the middle of the barn, so I was largely left alone. I had plenty of free time to imagine all the things they might be whispering about me, of course.
Tiger was content to be tacked in his stall, as he’d been groomed and saddled and doctored in his stall for his entire life anyway, and by the time I had my hard hat buckled and my vest zipped up, he was nearly asleep, dozing against the slack in his rope. I had to give his head a little wiggle to lift it up before I could put the bridle on. “I like this version of Tiger,” I whispered, fastening up the noseband and throat-latch. “Could this carry out to the arena as well?” There was no round pen here, and he didn’t know how to lunge. I was going to have to mount up cold, hoping that the foundation work back at my own farm was good enough.
I took a deep breath, said a little prayer to the horse gods, and slid Tiger’s door open. He followed me into the aisle with an eager step, ready for adventure.
Everyone seemed to have gone out to the arena by now. The barn was deserted except for a groom sitting on a hay bale, working her way through a Subway sandwich. I paused as we came up to her, and she politely put down her sandwich and smiled at me. She looked like she was about sixteen, tan and pony-tailed and basically a younger version of me. “I like your horse,” she said. Her southern accent twanged like a banjo.
“Thank you!” That was the first time anyone here had complimented Tiger, and it made me feel warm inside. Behind me, Tiger commenced rubbing his face on my shoulder, as if to make sure the groom didn’t make the mistake of thinking he was polite or anything. I shoved him off. “I’m Alex,” I added.
“Tanya.” She held out a dirty hand and I shook it with my own dirty hand.
“You’re not
one of the ee’s,” I said, grinning, and she looked mystified. “Your name doesn’t end in ee,” I explained hastily, lest she think I was insane. “Like Kelly, or Elsie, like everyone else—” I pointed out the end of the barn aisle to the arena, where the women were riding in companionable little pairs.
Tanya figured it out. “Oh, that’s right. You’re not the only one’s noticed that. Elsie thinks it’s funny, the two girls that run her barn, me and Jean…”
“Jean helps run the barn?” Somehow I’d missed that.
“Barn manager,” Tanya said, nodding. “And show rider. Elsie doesn’t show much anymore. Jean goes to the shows, rides the sales horses. I stay here and clean up after everyone.”
“Ah.” That explained Jean’s propriety air.
“She’s very good,” Tanya went on. “But stuck up, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I don’t. So, do you ride?”
“Yup! I’m Elsie’s working student. Going to be an eventer someday. Just jumping Novice right now, but Elsie might let me move up next fall.” Tanya looked delighted at the thought. She grinned. “My parents both ride Western. They think I’m crazy, but I’m going to show them. Jean thinks I’m crazy too, because she thinks I ought to be show-jumping like her. But I like a good gallop.”
“Good for you. Galloping is where it’s at, but showing your parents is pretty awesome too.” I got Tanya’s ambition and the way it was colored a little with proving her loved ones wrong. There wasn’t anything mean-spirited about that. Showing my parents I wasn’t crazy and could make it in the racing game had been a big motivator for me, too.
And look at me now, ma and pa! Standing in a boarding stable, about to go out and ride in a dressage arena, just like you wanted. Life was very confusing sometimes.
Tiger, bored of waiting through an interminable Girl Conversation, suddenly gave me another massive head-butt, which nearly sent me flying into Tanya and her hay bale. Tanya carefully moved her Subway sandwich to one side, reminding me that she probably didn’t enjoy much of a lunch break with someone like Jean in charge. Time to let her get back to that sub.
“I better be going. Enjoy your lunch!” I wrestled Tiger’s head around, pulled my breeches up where he’d pushed them down over my hip bone, and dragged him out to the dressage arena’s in-gate. The arena was regulation-size and complete with its dressage letters marked around the edges, but it had a full-size three-board fence around it, not just a little white plastic chain like you had at the horse shows. For that, I was grateful. I wasn’t sure Tiger would recognize the boundaries presented by a tiny chain four inches off the ground. He’d barely recognized the boundary presented by a six-foot solid pine wall, back in the round pen.
I paused by the gate, looking around, and spotted a wooden mounting block nearby. I was grateful for that, too. Long accustomed to getting a leg-up, I still wasn’t steady on mounting Tiger from the ground, and I didn’t really trust him to stand still while I made the attempt. He was already pulling his head around, looking this way and that, fascinated by the other horses in the jumping arena, by the leaping Marcelle and the quietly trotting and cantering workmates. It wouldn’t do for me to mess up my mounting and be swinging around from the side of the saddle in front of all those riders—and Jean.
“You’ve been here three days,” I told Tiger quietly, leading him up to the mounting block. “Plenty of time to get used to seeing the other horses out here. And now all you have to do is be nice and let me get on and take you for a little walk. That’s it! Can you do that without embarrassing me?”
By now, Tiger had seen the mounting block and decided that it was something he could do without. He snorted his way up to the scary wooden stairs-to-nowhere, blowing his nostrils alongside it, then lifting his head and turning up his lip in a flehmen face. I sighed and let him do his thing, even though the giggles I could hear from the jumping arena had to be directed at us.
After a minute or two of inspection, Tiger consented to stand alongside the mounting block, although he still cocked his head so that he could keep a wary eye on it. You never can tell with mounting blocks, he was thinking. I maneuvered myself over to the steps, praying he wouldn’t take off while I had such a tenuous grasp on the reins, and climbed up.
Tiger sidestepped away and turned so that he was facing me.
“Goddammit, Tiger,” I told him, and he snorted again, his ears pricked as he waited for me to do something normal, like get off the weird stairs-to-nowhere and take him someplace for a gallop. He was probably wondering where the track was at this crazy place.
I hopped down and walked him in a circle around the mounting block. “Now stand,” I said firmly when I had him positioned once again next to the block, and climbed up again. I reached out a toe towards the stirrup…
…Tiger sidestepped away and buried his muzzle in my chest.
“Goddammit, Tiger!”
I led him up the mounting block again and didn’t even get my foot in the air before he had swung around and was blinking at me innocently.
“Goddammit, Tiger,” I sighed.
We tried once more, and this time Tiger waited until my foot was in the stirrup to swing his haunches around to face me. It was go-time.
With a lot of luck and very little grace, I found myself in the saddle even as Tiger spun around in a hard circle, trying to figure out what on earth I was doing. By the time I had my right foot in the stirrup, he had accepted that I was mounted up and was ready for business. What he didn’t notice was that I was holding the reins, one-handed, at the buckle. No problem for Tiger: he took off at a brisk canter, head held high, heading away from the deserted dressage arena and directly towards the hustle and bustle of the jumping arena, where Marcelle was still leaping around the course, the perfect Jean sitting chilly in the saddle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
When Tiger burst into a canter, I shouldn’t have been thrown wildly off-balance. After all, riding horses that bolt from halt to gallop is kind of my thing. Problem was, I still wasn’t used to the broad expanse of the jumping saddle, which seemed to do more to mask my horse’s movements than anything else. In an exercise saddle, I always felt like I was practically riding bareback, and it was very hard for a horse to surprise me when I could feel every twitch of every muscle. The jumping saddle, with all its flaps and pads and blocks, gave Tiger a real edge when it came to throwing surprise moves.
I have to admit, and this pains me, that I flailed like a beginner when Tiger took off. I fell backwards against the cantle, my legs shooting out wildly in front of me, and it wasn’t until I got my heels down and used the stirrups as leverage that I was able to reach forward with my right hand and grasp the reins just at Tiger’s withers. I slid my left hand forward from the buckle until it met my other hand, then dropped them both to his rising and falling withers and sank the weight of my upper body onto my fists.
Instantly I was up above Tiger in a familiar spot, the modified two-point position of the exercise rider. Once he felt me there, he moved into a bigger and bolder gallop, pushing his mouth down hard against the bit, confident that I’d hold him there and let him counterbalance, confident that he was doing the right thing.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to just stay there in that moment, in that stride, because it felt so perfect and right. It was where Tiger and I had always had our meeting of the minds, where we felt most at home. It was our happy place, that balanced gallop. Feeling it again, I didn’t want to give it all up and learn something new. I wanted everything to stay the same. I knew that Tiger felt the same.
That was when I heard Jean’s angry shout, and realized how rapidly we were coming up on the jumping arena, and how astonished the horses inside were by the sight of the new horse galloping towards them.
Shocked into action, I stood straight up and reined back as hard as I could, my boots jammed against the stirrups, my hands high, and Tiger opened his mouth and shook his head and tried to dig down against me for a little buc
king action, but I was the more determined of the two of us. Mortification can be a compelling motivator. Tiger wasn’t embarrassed; quite the opposite, he felt like a million bucks, and so he was gracious in defeat, dropping down to a choppy trot and then a bouncy walk just as we came up to the arena.
It was a quick recovery, but not quick enough. In the arena, Jean was out of the saddle, picking up one of Marcelle’s hooves. I saw a few scattered jump poles a few feet away. He must have spooked and hit the fence. Now I was going to catch it.
Marcelle, however, wasn’t paying any attention to Jean’s ministrations as she sought for a sore spot in his foreleg. All five horses in the jumping arena, Marcelle included, were far too distracted by Tiger and me. They regarded us with wide eyes and pricked ears. They couldn’t have looked more astonished if their jaws had dropped open—as some of their riders’ jaws had done. The other four riders had pulled up along the rail and were bunched together, watching the show Tiger and I had put on for them. No one seemed to have noticed that Marcelle had taken a bad fence, or that Jean thought he was injured.
“That was beautiful,” Kelly told me admiringly. “If my horse took off like that I’d probably go right over his ass and hit the ground. You just sort of sprung into it.”
“I couldn’t do that,” one of the others, Maggie or Chrissy or Melody, agreed, and there were nods.
Well, how about that.
“That was exactly what I was talking about,” Jean said coldly, walking Marcelle up. The warmblood was hot despite the cool gray day, sweat foaming up on his neck, but his walk was even and smooth, without a trace of a head-bob. He hadn’t hurt himself when he’d smacked the jump rails; something told me that was just Jean’s theatrical way of showing everyone what a danger Tiger was to the rest of them. “You have to be able to control that horse, or I’m going to ask you nicely not to ride him when I’m schooling. I can’t afford for Marcelle to go lame because your racehorse can’t behave.”
Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4) Page 20