by Stacy Gregg
Riley turned round. “No, Georgie. It’s my fault. I should never have turned up at the dance or brought you stupid flowers.” He looked embarrassed. “I’ve gotta go.”
“Riley, please.”
But Riley wasn’t listening. He had walked out of the stables and the next thing Georgie knew, she could hear the sound of the horse truck starting up. By the time she reached the doorway he was already steering the truck out of the main gates and driving away.
*
“Well, I’m totally Team Riley,” Emily announced at breakfast the next morning. “Who does James think he is?”
“Uh-uh,” Daisy disagreed as she scooped up a forkful of scrambled eggs from her plate. “It’d be a total pain in the neck trying to date a boy who doesn’t go to school here. You’d hardly ever see him, whereas if you go out with James you can see him all the time, plus he’s good-looking and a really good rider.”
“Uh, guys?” Georgie stared at them in disbelief. “I don’t actually have a choice in the matter. Riley isn’t even speaking to me!”
“Well that settles it,” Daisy said triumphantly. “Team James wins.”
Georgie groaned and pushed her bacon and eggs aside, her appetite completely gone.
“Where is Alice anyway?” Emily asked.
Alice, as it turned out, was already at the Burghley House stables. The girls found her there, talking to a man with a clipboard in his hands. The man was wearing a dark green shirt with the words Billington’s Transport written on the pocket in curly gold embroidery.
His truck, which was parked outside, was also dark green with the same words painted on the side.
“Sign here,” he told Alice, passing over the clipboard. The man headed round the back of the truck to lower the ramp.
“What’s going on?” Georgie asked.
“Dad’s polo ponies have arrived!” Alice said.
“But where’s your dad?”
“He was going to drive them here from Maryland himself, but he was too busy,” Alice shrugged. “He put them on a transporter instead.”
Georgie and Alice watched as the truck driver lowered the ramp.
“Any idea what horses are inside?”
“Nope,” Alice said. “Dad’s got so many polo ponies, I’ve pretty much lost track. Most are used as broodmares once they retire from competition, but some are too old to have foals, or aren’t suitable for breeding. They’ve been turned out in the paddocks so Dad said I could use them.”
As they were talking, the man in the green shirt stepped up the ramp to bring out the first two mares.
“Ohh,” Alice said. “It’s a bit like waiting to see what your Christmas gifts are, isn’t it?”
The first two horses down the ramp were both chestnuts, and even though their manes were long and scraggly and their coats were coarse, Georgie could see that they were compact and muscular, with perfect conformation for playing polo.
“That one’s Jada,” Alice said pointing to the chestnut with the narrow white stripe on her nose. “She’s an excellent polo mare. The other mare with the white star and the stocking on her near hind, is Estrella. They’re both quite old, but they used to be two of Dad’s fave ponies. He’s had two foals out of each of them.”
“Where do you want them?” the man asked Alice as he stood at the bottom of the ramp holding the horses.
“Let’s just tie them all up by the stable block for now,” Alice said.
Georgie took the two chestnuts from the driver and tied them up while the man went back up the ramp. He emerged a moment later with the next two horses, a dark bay and a smallish-looking dun mare with a black dorsal stripe. When Alice saw the dun mare, she shrieked with delight.
“Ohmygod! It’s Desiray!” She walked over to the little dun, who was only about fifteen hands high. “I was hoping Dad would send her! I learned to ride polo on Desiray – she’s a Quarter Horse/Thoroughbred cross. She used to be Dad’s best mare in her heyday – she was on the US team that won the Admiral’s Cup.”
Alice gave Desiray a firm pat on her rump and the mare put her ears flat back and stamped a hoof in anger at having her personal space violated. Alice giggled at her moody antics. “She’s a bit grumpy on the ground, but she’s still got all the moves – totally a made pony,” Alice said.
The last two horses off the truck were both dark bays. “Vita and Violet,” Alice said. Vita turned out to be the prettiest of the two, a mare with a perfect star on her forehead and with four white socks. “She’s a really good galloper,” Alice said, patting Vita on her neck.
“What about Violet?” Georgie asked.
“Violet, not so much,” Alice rolled her eyes. “She’s a bit of a slug actually. She wouldn’t have been my first choice on the truck, let’s put it that way.”
They put the new mares away in their loose boxes next to the racehorses that they had bought at Keeneland the day before.
With the addition of Alice’s six mares, the Badminton House ponies now occupied a large chunk of the Burghley House stalls. Georgie walked up and down the row, checking on the new horses. “It’s so weird. We have an instant polo team.”
Alice nodded. “If we count Dad’s horses, the Thoroughbreds and Will, Belle and Barclay we’ve got enough to ride four horses each for four chukkas. We can put our name down on the Round Robin Tournament roster.”
The Blainford Round Robin was the yearly school polo competition. It was held in two phases. The first round in three weeks’ time was a knock-out competition, followed the next weekend by the finals.
“We’ll never be ready that soon,” Georgie pointed out. But Alice wasn’t going to be dissuaded. Back at the boarding house she spent the rest of the morning composing a training schedule.
“We have to crack into training straight away if we’re going to stand any chance,” she told the others as they gathered round, trying to decipher the colour-coded grid that listed dates and riders’ horses’ names in various squares.
“I’ve made a timetable for each of us.” Alice passed the bits of paper round the group. “We’ll do stick-and-ball training every day after school. We’re each working three horses every session, and I’ve rotated the horses between us so we should have them ready to play by the time the tournament begins.”
“This is brilliant!” Emily was poring over her timetable, trying to understand it. “So, when does training actually begin?”
Alice pointed to the first square at the top of the page. “Today.”
*
The Dupree horses needed a day to recover from their long truck journey so the girls decided to trial their new Thoroughbred acquisitions first.
Georgie was relieved to see that the Thoroughbreds were more relaxed, having had a couple of days to settle into their new home. Their eyes were no longer out on stalks as they walked the Burghley House corridor, but they were still tense and twitchy as the girls tacked them up in their new gear – a complicated arrangement of gag bits, martingales and surcingles.
Emily wasn’t certain about the new kit either.
“These saddles are weird,” she said as she threw one across her mare’s back. “They’ve got no kneepads.”
“Polo saddles don’t have kneepads,” Alice said. “It makes it easier for the rider to move around to swing the stick.”
Georgie’s first mount for the day was the young bay mare with the ewe neck that she had bought off Bart O’Malley. The mare’s racing name was Lear Jet, so Georgie had shortened it to Jet. She was an extremely edgy mare and as Georgie mounted up, Jet was so anxious her flanks were trembling.
“Easy, Jet,” Georgie reassured her as she asked the mare to walk on.
Talking softly to the mare, Georgie walked her back and forth up and down the corridor as the other girls tacked up. She had almost got Jet calmed down, when she made the fatal mistake of leaning over the polo mallet stand and reaching in to grab herself a mallet. At the sight of the bamboo stick in her rider’s hand Jet assumed she was in for a
beating. Before Georgie could stop her, she had backed away in a total panic and kept on backing up all the way down the corridor!
“Jet!”
Georgie kicked the mare forward, trying once again, but Alice shook her head. “You won’t get her near that stand. She thinks the polo stick is a whip.”
Georgie dismounted and led the mare forward, but as soon as she took a stick in her hand the whites of the mare’s eyes showed and she backed away in a frenzy once more.
“She’s not going to make much of a polo mare if I can’t hold a stick anywhere near her!” Georgie was frustrated.
“Forget about the stick today,” Alice suggested. “Just ride her without one.”
Admitting defeat, Georgie rode Jet without a mallet out on to the polo fields. At least the mare had a nice canter, she thought as she urged her on to ride in a steady circle. Jet’s ewe neck meant that she tended to run like a giraffe with her head held high, but Georgie eventually got her going nicely on the bit, cantering in a good, steady circle.
Emily emerged from the stables on her first mount of the day – one of the two chestnuts she had bought at Keeneland Park.
“They’re easy to tell apart,” Emily told Georgie. “Nala has a white coronet on her near hind and Jocasta hasn’t got any white at all.”
Emily was riding Jocasta first. The chestnut mare seemed fine as she cantered her around on her own. She didn’t even mind having the polo stick swinging alongside her. The problem came when Emily tried to ride the mare alongside Georgie and Jet. As soon as Jocasta pulled up alongside another horse, she fancied that she was in a race. Instead of turning when they reached the ball, Jocasta leaned against the bit and broke into a gallop. It took Emily a whole lap of the field to slow her down to a trot again and by then Jocasta had a lather of white sweat on her neck and her flanks were heaving. Emily was unperturbed. She had nerves of steel when it came to riding. She often told stories about life back home in New Zealand, most of which seemed to involve riding bareback at a gallop down the beach on young horses that had barely been broken. Being on a strung-out polo pony didn’t worry Emily in the least. But Emily wasn’t an aggressive rider and Georgie was concerned that her natural reticence might count against her on the field and make her stand back from tackling the other team.
Daisy didn’t have that problem. In fact she was almost the opposite. She was so fiercely competitive that as soon as she was on the field she was in attack mode. Riding her bay Thoroughbred Francine, she hardly spent any time warming the mare up before she was practising her shoulder barges, cantering alongside Georgie and yanking on the reins to veer Francine hard to the left so that the horses rebounded off each other’s shoulders like bumper cars.
At one point, Daisy and Francine nearly unseated Georgie with a shoulder barge that came out of nowhere.
“Hey!” Georgie shouted out to her. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Daisy shrugged. “I’ve read the rule book and you’re totally allowed to barge into the other rider – as long as the horses are directly side by side and you don’t cut the other rider off.”
Alice, meanwhile, had tacked up Marco the chestnut gelding and was giving him his first run. Not wasting any time, she took him straight out on to the field and urged him into a fast canter down the long side. She was charging down on a ball with her mallet raised, ready to swing when Marco pulled up suddenly without warning, doing a 180-degree turn on the spot. Alice, who hadn’t been expecting the dramatic change of direction, was flung forward out of the saddle and lost her seat.
It was the first time that any of the girls had seen Alice even come close to falling off. She catapulted straight on to Marco’s neck and had to cling on to stay onboard. Her face was completely white with shock by the time Georgie and the others reached her.
“Did you see that?” Alice said. “He’s totally nuts!”
“I guess that’s why the jockeys called him Spinner,” Daisy pointed out.
By late afternoon, the girls had worked their way through all the Thoroughbreds that they’d bought at Keeneland Park, some with more success than others. Marco was quickly proving to be a nightmare. His habit of spinning round whenever something upset him was proving to be lethal.
“He’s terrified of the ball! He’s almost thrown me at least three times today,” Alice groaned as she un-saddled.
The ponies had worked up a sweat in their first training session and after they untacked their last mounts, the girls took all seven horses to the hose-down bay to wash them down.
There was a notice above the wash bay – clearly installed recently – stating that riders must muck out their stalls every day and keep group areas tidy.
“Do you think it’s a dig at us?” Emily asked as she washed down Jocasta and Nala. “Those Burghley House boys seem pretty sniffy about having to share their stable quarters.”
“There’s nothing they can do about it,” Alice said. “Mrs Dickins-Thomson said we’re allowed to be here.”
“Still,” Georgie said, “I wouldn’t put it past Heath Brompton to try and get us kicked out for being untidy tenants.”
“Then we’d better make sure he has nothing to complain about,” Alice agreed.
They spent ages that afternoon cleaning the yard, mucking out the stalls and sorting their tack neatly on the racks in the storage room. By the time the girls had fed the mares and put them away in the stables, the dirt and sweat that had previously been on the horses had managed to transfer itself on to them instead. They were filthy, smelly and utterly exhausted. Georgie’s jodhpurs were covered in dung and muck. She had the world’s worst helmet hair and she’d been riding so hard her muscles ached.
“I can’t wait to get back to the house,” Alice said as they walked down the driveway together. “All I want to do is have a shower, eat dinner and collapse on the sofa and watch a movie—”
“Ohmygod!” Georgie suddenly froze in the middle of the school driveway.
“Ohmygod what?” Alice frowned.
“I forgot,” Georgie winced. “I mean I totally forgot!”
The other girls looked at her expectantly.
“I’ve got a date,” Georgie groaned.
It was 6pm on a Sunday night and right now, James Kirkwood was standing on the doorstep waiting to take her to the movies.
Chapter Nine
Georgie had never actually been on a proper date before, but she was pretty sure that this wasn’t how they were supposed to begin. She’d stormed past James on the step, muttering her apologies for being so late, too scared to actually slow down and talk to him in case he caught a whiff of the horse dung and sweat.
She would have understood if he’d given up on her after that, but he’d waited while she hastily showered, dressed and tried to resurrect her desperately bad helmet hair. Then they had caught the bus into Lexington in a mad rush and only just made it into the movie theatre in time.
The Lexington Lido was one of those old-fashioned cinemas with plush velvet seats and heavy curtains that pulled back from the screen as the movie started.
The movie was so old that it crackled and scratched on the screen as it played, but Georgie didn’t care. She was consumed by the story. It was all about an English girl about her own age, whose name was Velvet. She was training a racehorse to win the Grand National. Even though some parts of the race itself looked a bit fake, the girl in the movie could ride really well – and her horse was gorgeous!
“Do you think it was really her?” Georgie asked James as they left the theatre afterwards. “You know, did the actress who played Velvet actually ride?”
James nodded. “Elizabeth Taylor did all her own stunts.”
“Now that would be a cool job,” Georgie said. “I would love to be a stunt double.”
“I thought you wanted to be an eventer?” James said.
“I do,” Georgie said. “And a part-time stunt rider.”
“And a polo player?”
“You make me sound l
ike I can’t make up my mind,” Georgie said.
“And you think you can?” James said. There was an edge to his voice as if he wasn’t exactly joking.
Georgie frowned. “I get the feeling we’re not talking about careers day any more?”
James raked a hand through his blond hair. “I’m just wondering if you know what you want, Georgie. And I’m wondering why this Riley keeps turning up. He’s not even a polo player.”
“Riley has contacts at Keeneland Park racetrack. He got us in so we could buy the horses,” Georgie explained. “He was just trying to help.”
“Well if you need any help from now on, you ask me, OK?” James said. “I don’t want Riley hanging around Blainford.”
They were almost back to the bus depot when Georgie spotted a massive poster on the wall of the town hall that featured the graphic blue silhouette of a horse galloping. The poster said: Lexington Bluegrass Cup, February 10-11.
“What’s the Bluegrass Cup?” Georgie asked. “Is it some kind of race?”
James shook his head. “It’s a polo tournament. Lots of the major high-goal players travel to Lexington to play in it. The school usually lets us have a day pass to go and watch.”
He looked meaningfully at Georgie. “I can get us tickets to one of the Patron’s marquees, if you like.”
“OK, “ Georgie was staring at the poster oblivious to James’ flirtations, “but I don’t really care where I sit – and the girls will want to come too. Let’s just sit with the school in the stands and then we can get Cam and Alex and JP along as well.”
“Georgie,” James took her hand and drew her attention away from the poster at last, “I have something for you.”
He put his hand in his pocket, drew out a box and passed it to her.
“What’s this?”
“Open it and find out.”
Inside the box was a silver ring with the Blainford crest on it and a pale blue stone in the centre.
“It’s my polo ring,” James said. “I won it in the Burghley-Luhmuhlen match. The blue stone is the colour of Burghley House and it has my name inscribed on the back of it.”