Fortune's Lead

by Barbara Perkins

  ‘Can I come?’ Mamie Laidlaw asked. She had a nasal drawl of ugly proportions, though I supposed, charitably, that she couldn’t help it. I decided not to be outfaced by a teenager who was plainly hoping to see me used as a butt for comedy, and put on a pleasant smile.

  ‘I think you’d better not. If we’re going now we’ll have to stay in Henning for lunch. I’ll go and warn Mrs. Mott. Essie, are you coming? You’ll have to change.’

  ‘Okay. Mamie, leave Jimbo where he is in the far paddock, and tell Phil what he’s doing there, will you?’ Since I had accepted her challenge, Essie seemed to have decided to accept mine. She gave me a slightly mischievous look, and waited for a moment to give Mamie some more instructions before following me towards the house. I thought grimly that she had better play fair if she expected to get me up on a horse. We were supposed to get her a dress suitable for a cocktail party, and a dress we would get. This time, too, it wouldn’t go the same way as had the silk sheath ordered by Henry for his daughter from Harrods—to Sarah Ann.

  Somehow Essie and I had got into a state of complicity over the things I didn’t tell Henry. It struck me, as I went into the house, that I was behaving as a kind of buffer state—and that my tendency to keep the peace between them had an almost stepmotherly air about it ... I squashed the thought quickly: I had been quite successfully forgetting the gypsy nonsense. Animals (horses and dogs); a dark man whom I shouldn’t trust (Kevin, definitely); and an older man whose name began with H, there might be; but all that didn’t give me any excuse for believing in the foolishness of a short journey with my heart’s desire at the end of it. In fact, much as I liked Henry, I couldn’t avoid the uneasy feeling that thirty years’ difference in our ages rather put him out of the running as a heart’s desire ... and living in his house for three weeks gave me no excuse for letting my imagination run away with me.

  Determinedly banishing superstitious thoughts, I went to explain to Mrs. Mott about lunch, reassured myself that I had sufficient cheques to purchase anything Essie might need (Henry would reimburse me later: besides, some of the stores in Henning carried Thurlanger accounts), and collected a remarkably meek Essie from her room. She went on being meek even when I reminded her that her underwear could do with re-stocking, and was surprisingly amenable about trying things on when it came to the purchase of a dress. Being slight and beautifully proportioned, she had a wide choice of things which would fit her without alteration; and if she didn’t take much interest in my final choice (two dresses, since I had her in a good mood and might never again) she did at least keep silent in the face of an assistant who expected her to be burningly interested in fashion. When we came out of Henning’s newly fashionable boutique I looked at her curiously, and asked,

  ‘Don’t you really care what you’re going to wear? People are going to see you in them, after all!’

  ‘Only people I already know,’ Essie retorted practically. ‘Besides, Pa says you’ve got dress sense, or something, so you’re bound to be righter than I am. Now—’ she looked at me challengingly, ‘about those jeans you’re going to buy—for you!’

  ‘A bargain’s a bargain. But I’ll only keep my half if you keep yours, and don’t waste my time by giving these dresses away!’

  ‘All right, I’ll keep ‘em. Sar’Ann’s mum’s beginning to have doubts about her, d’you know that? Says she can’t be all she should be if she keeps getting given expensive clothes.’ Essie chuckled wickedly. ‘One thing about you, Shah, since you came you’ve learned to be as bossy as the rest of us! I wasn’t sure if you’d take the dare about riding Jimbo, but you needn’t be scared, you know—he’s as quiet as a lamb!’

  We bought the jeans. Essie, I gathered, really thought she was doing me a kindness in persuading me to learn to ride; no amount of protests had so far convinced her that I preferred to view horses from a distance. Still, since she had managed to accept that as her father’s secretary I should help her choose her clothes, I would have to accept (probably) falling off a slippery beast with ignominy, in a good cause. I only hoped the ground I fell on would be soft.

  An hour after we arrived back from Henning, I landed on the far from soft ground for the third and final time. Essie had insisted that I kept my half of the bargain straight away—and I had agreed, after ascertaining that Mamie had gone home, Kevin’s car wasn’t in the garage, and even Phil Mott was elsewhere. An audience, apart from Essie, I would not have. Jimbo had looked enormous and far from lamb-like when Essie led him up to me, but I gritted my teeth and let her help me mount. She had a remarkably strong hoist for someone of her size, and had to rescue me from going straight over the other side. Then Jimbo developed a state of boredom at my inactivity and kept putting his head down to crop the grass, which was all right until he did it at an unexpected moment. Essie assured me that her cousin Dominic said no one could do anything on a horse until they had fallen off at least once, and helped me up again. This time we managed to walk, and then trot—a tooth-jarring experience which ended when Jimbo stopped again, too suddenly, and I fell off for the second time.

  At my third try I managed to stay on for longer. Lightheadedly (perhaps I was concussed) I decided that horses were better from on top of them than might be supposed: at least they couldn’t kick you or mow you down when you were in the saddle. Encouraged, I tried to obey Essie’s stream of instructions—though what she meant by getting into rhythm for a trot eluded me, and all my bones seemed to be getting detached from one another, as Jimbo bounced me inelegantly up and down. It was a fit of rashness which led me to try Essie’s suggestion to go faster, and attempt a canter. That didn’t last long—and this time when I came off I did it thoroughly. I landed on one hand, which went backwards with a sickening wrench, shooting needles of pain up my arm. In my other hand, remarkably, I still held the reins, so that Jimbo stopped obligingly and came back and nuzzled me. I remembered abruptly that horses were large, unfamiliar, unreliable beasts, with teeth—though it had to be admitted that Jimbo was blowing at me rather than biting me. As Essie arrived beside me I looked up at her, grimaced with pain, and said,

  ‘Does your cousin Dominic advise going on until you break something? Or do you think a sprain’s enough? And please—c-could you take this animal away?’

  ‘Oh, lord! Let’s have a look at it.’ Essie shouldered Jimbo out of the way—which was one comfort—and came down beside me. ‘Hm, it looks a bit limp—’

  ‘Don’t start examining it,’ I said sharply. ‘I know a sprain when I’ve got one. So if you don’t mind, I’ll go in. But fair’s fair, and I did what you asked, so you can’t say I didn’t. I’ve just given you a nice demonstration that I’d never make a horsewoman under any circumstances, haven’t I?’

  ‘You didn’t do at all badly for a first try, at your age,’ Essie said generously, helping me up, but she was giving my wrist a worried look. ‘Kev’ll say I ought to have remembered that some people just can’t do things.’ We were beginning to move towards the stables, and I bit back a snort which she mistook for an exclamation of pain. ‘How bad is it? Oh dear, Pa’s not going to be too pleased, is he? Hey, that sounds like Kev’s car coming—we can get him to bind it up, anyway—’

  ‘Quotations from your cousin Dominic I can stand. Ministrations from your cousin Kevin I cannot. So you can oblige me by keeping quiet about it,’ I told her hastily. There was one comfort, at least: Kevin hadn’t been here earlier to see me hit the ground with repeated thumps. Essie, apparently unaware that it was Kevin I objected to rather than the ministrations, gave me an approving if still rather worried look.

  ‘Good for you, not to want a fuss. It’s all right, Kev’s driven straight to the garage, so we’ll get in before him. And you soak sprains, don’t you?—we can do it upstairs, in my bathroom.’

  Remembering her store of bandages, and that it was my left hand not my right which was suffering so that I should be able to cope with it myself, I agreed that we could manage. Quite apart from my wrist, I was beginning
to feel the effects of my other falls as we went into the house—not to mention the stiffening of what felt like a thousand unfamiliarly-used muscles—so that my intended speedy progress up the stairs became an agonized crawl. What, I wondered bitterly, had ever possessed me to take up Essie’s challenge? I was still wondering when Mrs. Mott appeared on the gallery in front of us, and we were squarely caught.

  ‘Oh, good gracious, Miss Armitage, whatever have you done to yourself?’ she exclaimed, as she set eyes on my dishevelled form, and the wrist which I was cradling against my other arm. ‘As white as a sheet, you are!—Oh, Miss Essie, you never put Miss Armitage up on a horse?’

  ‘I thought I’d like to try it,’ I heard myself say, defensively. ‘So I asked if I could. But I’m quite all right—’

  ‘Ssh, Mottie, don’t make a fuss. We’re just going to fix it up. It was my fault, though, I suppose,’ Essie admitted.

  ‘No, it wasn’t, it was mine.’ For some reason, I felt stubbornly inclined to be heroic. Perhaps it was the assumption in Mrs. Mott’s voice that Miss Armitage should never have been allowed near a horse: true enough, but somehow uncomplimentary. ‘I’ll be all right once I’ve—I’ve had a bath and bound a few things up.’

  ‘You can have a bath in my bathroom, then you won’t run the risk of meeting Kev. Mottie, be a love and get Charlotte’s things from her room for her—’

  ‘Mr. Kevin’s just the person you need, if you ask me,’ Mrs. Mott said, looking doubtfully at my wrist. ‘If he’s in by now, and I thought I heard his car—’

  ‘She doesn’t want him, he’ll prose. Do be a dear, Mottie,’ Essie said cajolingly, ‘we can cope, truly.’

  ‘I don’t know what Mr. Thurlanger will say, I’m sure,’ Mrs. Mott said, but she bustled off towards my room rather than downstairs to summon Kevin. A few minutes later she had delivered my towel» dressing gown, and various words of advice through Essie’s door, had been reassured by that young woman that we could manage, and had gone away again.

  I felt slightly more human, if horrifyingly stiff, by the time I had soaked in a hot bath in Essie’s bathroom. I had confirmed to myself that my wrist wasn’t broken—in fact as a sprain it probably wasn’t as bad as it had felt at first—had instructed Essie how to help me bind a tight cold compress round it for the moment, and managed to bathe with it balanced on the soap-rack. Essie regaled me through the open door with tales of injuries sustained by her cousins, on the Ballyneelan stud where she had grown up with the oft-quoted Dominic, Conway, and Thomas, who were Kevin’s brothers. I couldn’t help thinking it was no wonder Essie had grown up more boy than girl amongst that lot. She had found a firm bandage of the right width for me by the time I emerged with every muscle creaking from the bathroom, and stood by to help while I performed as neat an example of strapping as I could manage on myself. In fact, I seemed to have won her approval altogether by my conduct of the afternoon, despite my clumsiness on Jimbo. She had been accepting me pleasantly enough, but now she seemed prepared to concede that I had courage, and therefore more good points than she’d originally thought.

  I thanked her drily, and she gave me a grin.

  ‘Oh, well, you are a towny, after all, and you look like one. Pa’s always going on in a dreary way about being feminine, and I thought you might do the same. London bores me to death. Still, we made a bargain, so I’ll wear a dress and sip a cocktail and listen to people prosing on Saturday, to keep my side of it—in fact I’ll be so ladylike you won’t know me! That’ll give Pa a surprise, won’t it?’

  I went away wondering whether Henry would really prefer to have had another sort of teenage daughter, addicted to coffee-bars and pop music instead of horses. Or one given to protest marching and playing the guitar. Or drugs and sex. It seemed to me that Essie, like me, had her good points. Though while I changed with painful slowness into something suitable for dinner, and remembered whose fault it was that I was in this state, I wondered why I thought so...

  I arrived downstairs to find trouble. Mrs. Mott had not been as discreet as we might have hoped, and Kevin, his back to the cowl-shaped fireplace, was delivering some biting comments to a sulky Essie. I wished I didn’t have to negotiate the stairs under his sardonic and singularly unsympathetic gaze, but I managed it with, I hoped, a reasonable degree of dignity. It was some relief to find that Henry wasn’t down yet to notice my stiff movements and my bandaged wrist, but I thought I would probably be able to convince Henry that it was all rather amusing and due entirely to my own foolishness. Kevin would probably be sarcastic—and sounded it. He informed me that I had only myself to thank and that I was lucky I hadn’t broken my neck, and said curtly that I had better let him take a look at my wrist. I refused, equally curtly. He then dropped all pretence of politeness and told me (counting, I supposed, on the safety of Henry’s absence) not to be even more of a fool than I looked, which rallied Essie to my defence.

  ‘Oh, shut up, Kev! Shah isn’t a fool, and she did jolly well, considering! Pa always says I haven’t got any manners, but yours are far worse! And what makes you think you know everything, anyway?’

  ‘I certainly know more about fractures than you do, and it’s quite possible that Charlotte ought to have that wrist X-rayed. I also know better than putting a complete beginner up without giving her the first idea how to stay on, which you, apparently, don’t!’

  ‘She didn’t fall all that hard—’

  ‘She wouldn’t need to. No doubt,’ he said, giving me a dangerous look, ‘it was a valiant attempt—to fit in—’

  ‘Anyone’d think I’d put her up on Thunder, the way you’re going on,’ Essie said sulkily—saving me from the inclination to tell her cousin in the most lethal terms exactly what I thought of him. Instead I resolved to hang all the stockings I possessed round the washbasin, dripping: a minor form of irritation, but at least it should annoy him. ‘You do fuss, Kev! We were only—’

  ‘Putting a stranger and a complete beginner up on Thunder would be a sure way to kill her,’ Kevin retorted. I thought, bitterly, that he might sound a little less as if he thought it an interesting idea. ‘You may bounce, but I don’t suppose she even knows how to fall. Besides, she’s too thin to have the least—’

  ‘Quarrelling voices are something I detest,’ Henry said, making one of his leprechaun-like sudden appearances on the gallery above us and beginning to come down. As an alternative to Kevin’s cool assumption that he could describe my figure as he liked, he was extremely welcome. He gave Kevin a look of disapproval and added, ‘I wonder how many times I have to mention to you, Kevin, that I do not want your dogs in the house? I found them in here only this morning, and I’ve warned you several times that animals of that size belong elsewhere!’

  ‘I’m afraid that was me,’ I said guiltily. I saw Kevin give me a look of surprise, but honesty forced me to defend him, however unwillingly. I was aware that he didn’t know how often his dogs accompanied me in his absence, and felt myself flushing. ‘Bess and Royal were with me, and I didn’t realize they shouldn’t be—I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, do you find them acceptable, Shah? In that case I suppose I shall have to allow it,’ Henry said blandly. ‘I hadn’t realized you were fond of them. Very well then, as long as they don’t stray upstairs or into the drawing room, they may come in. But, my dear girl, you haven’t got a sherry. And have you hurt yourself? Why did no one tell me? Kevin, find Shah a chair, at once!’

  He became all concern; and the fuss he made of me, together with his disconcerting decision to allow Kevin’s dogs into the house on may account, made me take care to avoid Kevin’s eyes. I made the lightest story I could (without admitting just how badly I had performed) out of Essie’s attempt to teach me to ride, and hoped that the alert look in Henry’s eye as he glanced from me to Esther didn’t mean he had guessed it had been a challenge. I did my best not to look too stiff when we moved into the dining-room, but I was glad of Henry’s sympathetic suggestion that I should go straight to bed after dinner. H
e would even have called Mrs. Mott to escort me upstairs before she went home for the night, but I refused hastily, assuring everyone that there was no need for any kind of fuss. Henry himself waited to see me up the stairs after the others had gone through to the library. As I paused to say goodnight to him, he gave me an unwontedly serious look.

  ‘Shah, my dear, I don’t wish you to think you have to run risks on Esther’s account,’ he said quietly. ‘It horrifies me to think you might have hurt yourself badly. In asking you to try to make friends with Esther and influence her, I didn’t intend for you to do anything like this. You’re already doing your job quite as well as anyone could expect.’

  ‘I’ve done very little, so far,’ I pointed out, and added, ruefully, ‘You did tell me not to try to ride! I certainly won’t again—but it was my own fault!’

  ‘Esther mentioned that you’d been shopping with her today,’ he said, a disconcerting awareness in his eyes.

  ‘Trying to approach her with subtlety instead of inviting rebellion by playing the heavy father may be one thing, but there are limits. I do have some influence over her—quite enough, I believe, to prevent her from committing murder!—so please don’t believe that you can’t appeal to me to exert authority over her!’

  ‘I—I don’t. And I’m sure she wouldn’t dream of murdering me. We really get on very well,’ I said hastily. ‘I—I just had a fancy to try riding since I’ve never done any, that was all. But,’ I smiled at him wryly, feeling my stiffness all over, ‘if there’s one thing I’ve proved, it’s that horses and I are incompatible!’

  ‘But apart from that, you could say that you were enjoying yourself here?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course.’ I wasn’t quite sure if I was, but it would have seemed impolite to say so, in the face of his obvious concern. ‘It’s—very comfortable, and I don’t have nearly enough work to do!’

  ‘I shall have to take better care of you,’ he said decisively, smiled at me, and added, ‘I’m so glad you’re going to stay. You know, Shah, I have a feeling that I should very much dislike to lose you. Goodnight, my dear, and I hope your aches and pains will be feeling better by morning!’