by Fiona Walker
‘Only one thing for it,’ she told him dryly, selecting a skittles ball. ‘You’ll have to win the Grand Slam, starting with Kentucky.’
‘No chance of that.’
‘Why not?’ She suddenly grew animated. ‘You have a great horse waiting over there, you’ve been sober for weeks and you’re running each morning – don’t deny it because I’ve seen you. You’ve had the best coaching, support, ownership and expertise in the country at your disposal for months now. The least you can do is win the first leg.’
‘Never been a leg man.’
Faith looked regretfully down at her endless slim legs and sighed, pressing her chicken fillets together instead as she bowled out her skittles with one toss. ‘Just be grateful you’re going to Kentucky.’
‘You’re invited too,’ he pointed out, fingers strumming against his cheekbones as his tarnished-silver eyes stared at her indignantly.
She laughed. ‘Don’t talk crap. I have no money and no time off.’
‘All paid for.’
‘I have a full-time job.’
‘Time off was arranged weeks ago.’
‘Says who?’
Rory cocked his head, looking offended. ‘Your horse, of course.’
‘Eh?’
‘Haven’t you been keeping an eye on the webcam?’
‘Since when did my horse have a webcam?’
‘I told you about it as soon as we got back. It’s on the postcard I gave you. I wrote the address down.’
Faith didn’t have the heart to admit that she couldn’t decipher his handwriting, even after many years of reading his feed charts at Overlodes. The postcard had been propped up on her bedside table since his return so that its picture was the first thing and the last thing she looked at each day, but the reverse was gobbledegook.
When Rory dropped her back at Lime Tree Farm he insisted on coming inside to assist in firing up Penny and Gus’s ancient Mac. Showing unexpected reserves of patience throughout the technical glitches born of sluggish broadband and their combined ignorance of computers, Rory finally helped Faith locate the Johanssen’s website with its live link to her stallion in his Virginia des res.
‘This is their summer barn,’ Rory explained, clicking the mouse for her. ‘The horses all relocated there from MC’s Florida place just before we flew home. There! Looks settled, doesn’t he?’ There was a surprisingly proud catch in his voice as he watched Faith’s horse eat hay on screen. ‘I asked Stefan to put him in this stall when I heard they had a camera in there.’
‘Why?’
‘Take a closer look.’
She squinted at the screen.
Pinned above Rio’s hay manger, curling from the damp and dust, was a big sign that read: Come and see me win in Kentucky, Mum. Your tickets are booked.
Faith re-read it a dozen times before she started to take it seriously. ‘You want me to go to America?’
‘Blued my pocket money on a ticket, so I sure hope so,’ he affected a Yankee accent.
She stared at him, realising what exactly he’d done for her. And what’s more, he’d done it weeks ago, when he was still in America. She felt giddy.
‘Why?’
‘You’re the owner.’ He patted her on the shoulder with a respectful bow of his head, before looking up winningly through his lashes, a sheepish smile breaking on his face. ‘And I need a groom.’
‘You’re not serious?’
He looked suddenly doubtful. ‘Well, I could ask Stefan and Kirsty if they can spare somebody, I guess …’
‘Like hell you will!’ she whooped. ‘I’m going to Kentucky!’
So delirious with excitement that she couldn’t think straight, Faith kissed Rory a hundred times on his face, cheeks, lips, hands and even knees until he had to bat her away and tell her to go to bed.
‘I hope your boyfriend won’t mind you being away,’ he said as he was leaving.
‘What boyfriend?’ She laughed. ‘I have no time for stupid things like that.’
‘Of course,’ he agreed heartily, ‘stupid of me to even think it.’
Faith was far too distracted to notice the relief in his face.
‘I’m going to Kentucky!’ she shrieked again, thundering up the stairs to her attic and inadvertently waking the entire house.
Riding home on Hugo’s quad bike, which he’d taken to borrowing on a regular basis, Rory also felt pretty delirious.
Lough had to tell him off for singing ‘Whip Crack Away!’ at top volume in the lodge cottage bath. He bounded into bed that night feeling as though he’d just won the Mogo sponsorship deal, not been excluded from the race.
He was about to text Faith to remind her to pack her party dress when a text message came through from Dillon, making contact after many weeks of silence: Hope all okay with horses. Sorry money late – girls in office snowed under. Cheque on way. Good luck in Kentucky. D. He read it in amazement, marvelling at the serendipity.
The phone rang in his hands.
‘Chéri, it is too bad you are so low.’ MC’s voice was a deep, sexual purr. ‘I am going to cheer you up next week, non? I am on the ground jury at Kentucky so I will see you there. I am looking forward to it, chéri.’
Rory felt a quiver of anticipation course through him.
Chapter 56
‘It’s the big party at Haydown next week,’ Sylva purred throatily at Dillon during one of their rare phone calls, which she was conducting via speakerphone in her powder blue kitchen while her documentary team filmed her. ‘Just checking you’ll be back?’
‘I’ll try,’ he promised. ‘Berry has chicken pox and her mother’s away filming, so it depends how she recovers.’
He was predictably in the States, almost his second home, where he was staying with his ex in-laws in Malibu. Sylva didn’t for a moment object to the amount of time he devoted to his daughters and to maintaining close links with their mother’s family – she only wished her own children’s fathers were as conscientious – but it played havoc with any attempt at a normal relationship. Not that anything about their relationship was remotely normal, from the imprudent announcement of their engagement to the ongoing civility between them, while all around the press slavered for scraps and their respective families went into overdrive.
Mama was still planning the wedding of the century, spending hours poring over brochures and dress designs, ordering his and hers Swarovski Grenade rings the size of gulls’ eggs.
‘But he hasn’t really proposed,’ Sylva pointed out after Rodney and his team had left.
Mama batted the objection away. ‘It’s publicity, maika. We all know that. And you will marry him.’
Yet, up close and personal, Sylva wasn’t so sure. She had loved Strawberry when they married. And Jonte had been exciting and a fantastic lover, if incapable of keeping his dick in his pants for more than a week on a film set. She’d cared deeply for both and borne them children. Dillon Rafferty, on the other hand, was boorish and twitchy in person, banging on about farming and food, uninterested in clubs, parties and the high life; he didn’t even drink or take drugs. He was a very dull rock star, especially compared to his father. When Sylva had met Pete she’d known instantly that he had the power to snap her lingerie straps with one come-here click of his fingers.
As her darling Jules had foretold, Pete was the real deal, with his manic laugh and globe-trotting life. He was edgy rather than twitchy, a truly dangerous man rather than a bad boy, and head-spinningly untrustworthy. While Dillon’s testosterone-packed smile was legend, his father didn’t need to smile to ooze sex appeal.
But Pete was not the member of the Rafferty family driving the groom’s side of the wedding train; that was his young wife Indigo, who played for the cameras quite brilliantly. She might guard the castle gates very closely when her husband was around, but he was most often in Ireland these days, and while he was away Indigo had made it her mission to cultivate her stepson’s fantasy fiancée, for whom she had played matchmaker in the first pla
ce. She was a faultless stage manager, granting the tabloids limited but enticing telephoto opportunities, along with Sylva’s film crew, who were gracefully but firmly manipulated along with their subject.
It had started with an open invitation for Sylva and her family to use the Abbey’s new indoor pool and fitness rooms, and to ride the horses kept there. A series of shopping trips followed, along with pampering sessions at Eastlode Park, all accompanied by their many children, the nannies and the oleaginous child psychologist Dong. Most recently, Sylva had found herself joining Indigo on a succession of more intimate girls’ lunches. Mama insisted Sylva go along, maintaining that the friendship could prove as beneficial to her as Posh’s was to Mrs Cruise. The paparazzi certainly chased these photo opportunities eagerly, and Sylva was riding high IFOJ as a result of the alliance, but she was growing tired of the headlines that claimed she was best friends with her future mother-in-law when she barely knew her future husband.
Sylva found Dong’s strange, watchful presence an impediment to the natural flow of conversation, and she thought he was a toadying sham, but Indigo trusted him implicitly. Just five feet to her six, they were an incongruous pair, but they seemed devoted to one another. Both apparently loved the sound of his quasi-Californian drawl.
‘Dillon is your classic madonna–whore complex, just like his father,’ he told them over lunch of clear soup and noodle toast at Eastlode Park. ‘Distant mother, now deceased, making him put some women on a pedestal – the sort he perceives as a mother or a wife, almost desexualising them – while other women he sees as no more than depositories for his jizz.’
‘And which category are you suggesting I fall into?’ Sylva demanded.
‘Hard to tell.’ He eyed up her breasts. ‘Superficially whore, because that is your public image, but you are also a mother, of course.’
‘What exactly are your qualifications?’ Sylva fumed, but Dong was impervious to any attack.
Her friendship with Indigo was as brittle as her love affair with Dillon, and both women were well aware that theirs was a careful game of chess being played out in front of the full media glare, with the kings held back for now. Sylva appreciated the challenge of taking on a grand master, at least. By contrast, what she had with Dillon felt like an online chess quickie in which both players had walked away from their keyboards. Their names remained up on screen, but they had no control over their pieces and no real care. Each just wanted to wait for the other to give up first and then log off.
For Mama’s sake, Sylva tried very hard to stay in play for the Beauchamps’ party. It was important that she and Dillon were seen out in public together soon. And she was surprised to find herself looking forward to seeing eventing’s premier couple again; they provided the rare combination of a husband she found attractive and a wife she genuinely liked. That Sylva had once tried to poach one from the other didn’t bother her now that she had Dillon caught in a snare. She could trust herself to behave impeccably. Surely taking him back to that beautiful house where they had first flirted over a champagne shooting lunch would give the lacklustre romance a little fizz at last?
She had her dark hair extensions re-applied, her natural blonde roots touched up to match and her lips plumped in anticipation, then enjoyed a lengthy Bond Street shopping trip with Indigo, who talked her into a very sexy Galliano smock matched with thigh-high suede boots instead of the more modest, retro Chloé cocktail dress she’d been favouring. ‘Dillon will love this.’
‘Are you sure?’ Sylva turned round and the smock’s diaphanous fabric swirled, revealing the first tawny curve of her Fake-Baked buttocks. ‘They’re quite a conservative crowd, darlink.’
‘Dillon will love it, won’t he Dong?’ Indigo consulted her oracle, who was sitting in a plush velvet chair in the corner of the dressing room, sipping green tea.
He peered over his thick-rimmed spectacles. ‘His father would love certainly it. Like son like father.’ He thickened his Sino-American accent to make the Spoonerism sound like a Confucian proverb.
‘There you go.’ Indigo rested her case.
Sylva opened her mouth, about to protest that Dillon wasn’t like Pete at all and hardly had the same taste, but then she looked at her reflection again and changed her mind. The dress did look sensational.
‘It would work better with blonde hair.’ Indigo was studying her critically.
Their eyes met in the mirror.
‘I’ll go blonde again for the wedding,’ Sylva said evenly.
They shared half-smiles, barely perceptible amid the Botox-frozen perfection of their faces.
Watching them, Dong steepled his manicured hands to his nose and whispered, ‘The dye is cast.’
Sylva wasn’t sure what he meant, especially when, two days later, Dillon phoned to say that Berry was no better and Fawn’s filming had been extended by a week so he couldn’t get back in time for the party. Trying to sound serene, Sylva insisted that was fine and she would go alone – or, better still, take her new best friend Indigo with her.
‘Good luck.’ Dillon’s laughter inflamed her bottled anger. ‘My stepmother is allergic to horses.’
‘But she has a dozen at the Abbey.’
‘One in every colour, yes. She collects them, like children. She gets somebody else to handle them, just as she does the children.’
Indigo’s reaction to Sylva’s request that she be her plus-one bore this out. ‘Who are these people?’ she demanded as they bobbed in the Abbey pool, surrounded by nannies and children as usual.
‘Lovely sporting heroes.’
‘I am not interested in them,’ Indigo coolly dismissed. ‘And I am busy. Pete will be here next weekend.’
Sylva found herself perking up. Maybe she would give the party a miss too. She wanted to try a few more of the Abbey’s horses for size for a start.
But Indigo was moving her chess pieces with consummate skill. ‘You must go to America to see Dillon,’ she insisted, swimming around Sylva like a crocodile. ‘He needs to know you care. His father will approve.’
‘Don’t be silly, darlink.’ Sylva made it to the steps and clambered out to consult her jewelled phone. ‘I am working all this week and next promoting my new book. If I fly out on Friday night, I would only have time to meet him for a few hours before flying home.’
‘So romantic.’ Climbing out of the pool, Indigo wrapped herself in a fluffy robe and glanced at Dong, still in his suit on a sunlounger, smiling his enigmatic guru smile. ‘Book a great restaurant. Wear your new dress. The press will go wild. Pete can read all about it in the Sunday papers here; he loves to catch up with his son that way.’
As soon as Sylva got back to Le Petit Château, Mama backed up Indigo’s entreaty with the heavy artillery. ‘I’ll get Pauline to book your flights. You will take the pretty rings as a peace offering, maika. This is a much better surprise for a man than a boring party.’
Sulkily, Sylva acquiesced.
Chapter 57
Five days before the best-planned party in eventing history, Sophia phoned Tash in an apoplectic fit. ‘Why have you cancelled the caterers?’
‘I haven’t,’ she said in surprise.
‘Marysia took the call over a fortnight ago, she tells me – and got confirmation from you in writing. Now they’ve got another booking. We’ll never get another lot at this short notice, not for this number.’
‘We can try,’ Tash urged, wondering who on earth could have forged the letter, and why.
The next day, while Sophia was ringing desperately around her contacts to secure a new caterer, calls and messages started to come through on Tash’s BlackBerry, commiserating for the family loss.
It didn’t take a great deal of detective work to discover that almost half the guest list had been emailed from her phone to say that the party had been cancelled.
‘I didn’t send it!’ Tash promised her sister, knowing that she left the thing all over the place at the yard and competitions, along with a piece of paper tu
cked into the case with the password and instructions because she kept forgetting how to work it. Anybody could have used it.
‘Now we have no choice but to pull the plug,’ Sophia told her in another phone call, which Tash had to take in the downstairs loo to avoid being overheard by an increasingly suspicious Hugo. ‘It’s in disarray and I will not have my reputation tarnished. I’ll discreetly let all the guests know and ask them to all keep schtum so we can rearrange something for a later date. At least Hugo has no idea what’s gone wrong. Just do something low-key instead.’
Working in the outside arena in brilliant spring sunshine later that afternoon, Tash spotted Lough riding across the road towards the downs track and decided to cool off River by joining him as far as the start of the first steep climb. This was one guest not on Sophia’s list who Tash wanted to tell personally, although she had always suspected he wouldn’t come.
Crows were rasping overhead, wood pigeons cooing and amorous hedge birds tweeting at one another closer by as River’s mile-eating walk meant she quickly caught up with her stablemate, hooves quiet on the ridge of green that ran between the still-muddy wheel ruts. To either side of those, the first shoots of nettles and hogweed were starting to uncurl in the verges.
Lough didn’t look round, but he knew she was there because he held up a hand to keep her from talking and then pointed across the pasture field to their left. There, a family of fallow deer were watching them, much closer than they would have ever dared stray had the riders been on foot. Tash could clearly see the pregnant bellies of the does, their limpid eyes watchful.
‘Hugo’s father kept a herd on the parkland – it was all the rage in his day,’ she whispered once they had passed by. ‘But lots escaped in the late seventies and now there are breeding herds all over the downs.’
‘Good for them,’ he murmured. ‘Wild animals should run free, not be a rich man’s pretty playthings.’
‘The local poachers certainly like it,’ she sighed, glancing over her shoulder. ‘They eat a lot of prime venison round here. Lough, there’s been a horrible mix-up.’ She told him about the sabotaged party.