by Fiona Walker
Driving in convoy along Interstate 81 as dawn broke, the journey reignited Faith’s spirit of adventure, while the weariness that she had felt when putting her watch back five hours and keeping going with precious little sleep melted away. Cowboy hat tilted over her face, feet up on the dash, she felt her heart soar.
Having travelled out with Faith and Rory to Washington Dulles from Heathrow, Hugo had very little left to say to them and dozed through most of those early miles. Yet Rory and Faith had no trouble keeping up the flow of conversation as they cruised along, talking about tactics for Rio, what they needed to get out of the event, his long-term plans and all the training that Rory had put in earlier in the year in Florida.
They paused only to catch their breath as the sun finally spilled over the horizon, revealing the Appalachian Mountains in all their glory, as green as a pile of giant emeralds.
After breaking for a huge brunch that could have fed Faith for a month, Hugo took over the driving and his travelling companions carried on talking non-stop, while he gritted his teeth and tried to tune them out.
When they finally followed Vegas into the Kentucky Horse Park entrance, Faith gasped with delighted astonishment as she took in the magnitude of the place and the atmosphere. The venue was beyond her wildest imaginings, but then again everything about the States was beyond her imaginings. Even a day before the official start of the Rolex Kentucky Three Day Event, the atmosphere was absolutely buzzing.
As they drove through the park, skirting around a boggling number of arenas, sand tracks and tree-lined avenues and seemingly endless white-railed paddocks stretching away into the distance, she found herself gripping Rory’s hand. To her surprise, he gripped tightly back. He had turned very pale and suddenly gone quiet as the scale of the task ahead of him started to sink in.
This was no muddy, friendly English event. This was all-American, super-efficient eventing on a mammoth scale at a tailor-made show site. The security alone seemed never-ending as they reached the stables office and went through the rigmarole of passport and preliminary veterinary checks, being issued with security wristbands and stable numbers while the grooms walked the horses in hand before finally locating their stalls, laying beds, brushing away the sweat and dust of the long haul, checking water and forage and unpacking trunks. All the time, familiar faces swooped in to say hello, to slap Stefan and Hugo on the back, kiss Kirsty and be introduced to Rory and then Faith. To her, the faces were the stuff of legend – international heroes, Olympic medallists, world champions and other eventing superstars who had been her pin-ups since early childhood along with dressage and showjumping heroes. She loved being called an owner, although her wristband meant she knew that it was her groom’s hat she’d be sporting for the coming days as she supported Rory through the biggest challenge of his competitive life. Pia would double up her care for Kirsty’s horse with looking after Oil Tanker, whose dressage time and cross-country slot were at opposite ends of the running order, with Björn looking after both of Stefan’s rides.
Having had only a short time in Virginia to sit on their horses again, Rory and Hugo were keen to get straight on and stretch them through the park, leaving the others to set up a temporary home from home in the campsite at the far eastern reaches of the main boulevard that ran through the park, separating the southerly ‘In field’ from the northerly ‘Out field’, through which the majority of the four-mile cross country course ran.
There was so much to take in that Faith pressed her nose to the window like a child at a safari park as Björn drove the Ranger and trailer to the campsite for her, chatting easily in his strange, lilting voice about his ambitions to ride for Sweden one day.
‘You want to ride for England, yes?’ he asked her.
‘Oh, not really – just well enough for the people I love to take notice.’ She suddenly felt stupidly shy, and not just because strapping, blond Björn looked like a pin-up. Tiredness was stripping her of energy, and the ability to think straight.
The campsite was arranged in a figure-of-eight of neat, tree-lined lots, many already filled with high-tech horse trailers, others by RVs belonging to eager eventing fans. Björn reversed the trailer into the lot beside Vegas, which had already been uncoupled from its monster truck and was having its nose hydraulically lowered to create an amazing, private double bedroom for the husband and wife team.
Having thanked Björn, who then took one of the little mopeds that the Johanssens had transported in a locker on the cavernous Vegas and whizzed back to the stables, Faith took a better look at her sleeping quarters. Her legs now feeling like lead, she clambered inside the trailer and studied the very cosy mattressed sleeping area in the gooseneck nose, and the little sofa bench that converted to a miserly single bunk for her. It was hardly the stuff of romance, but to Faith it was the most heavenly opportunity she’d ever had, better than a weekend in a Ritz penthouse suite with anybody else. She and Rory were shacked up together in a small tin box. It was a dream come true.
She climbed up on to the sleeping platform to try it out just once before Rory claimed it, stretching out and imagining his body where hers was now, his steady, deep breathing, his wonderful smell and long, languid limbs.
Within seconds she was asleep.
Rory didn’t notice her there in the shadows when he dashed in to change out of his breeches before going to meet MC, who had sent him several hot texts insisting that he must visit her hotel room before her husband flew in and before she had to be back on show wearing her official cap as a member of the ground jury.
Right now I am wearing nothing but my Dutch cap, her last message had read. Rory wasn’t sure he found the image quite as erotic as she intended – it conjured pictures in his head of MC dressed in Amish costume.
Faith didn’t wake up until after seven; it was dusk outside. She had a crick in her neck. The trailer smelled horribly of cigars and Bourbon, a legacy from the show-jumpers who owned it. Feeling nauseous, she groped her way into the little toilet cubicle, but she hadn’t hooked up the electricity and water yet so the pump wouldn’t work to wash her face, nor could she turn on any lights because the leisure battery was flat. Back in the living area, she fell over Rory’s breeches, which he’d left where he’d stepped out of them. She hadn’t even realised that he’d been back.
Björn and Pia were presiding over a barbecue that was smoking only marginally more than Stefan and Hugo, who were sitting in folding chairs in front of Vegas, which had sprouted awnings and pods galore and was lit up like its city namesake, even sporting fairy lights and rows of Swedish flags. Both men had bottles of beer.
‘Don’t tell the wife.’ Stefan grinned, fag dangling from his thin, smiling lips as he reached behind him into a cool bag and held up a Bud for her. ‘She made me give up smoking three years ago.’
‘I insisted Tash give up’ – Hugo took a long drag – ‘but she didn’t return the favour, alas.’
Faith politely shook her head to the proffered beer.
‘Kirsty’s in the shower.’ Stefan nodded towards the trailer, slotting the fresh bottle in his jacket pocket. ‘I turned the water pressure right down so I have longer to enjoy my sins, but she’ll be out soon and we’ll eat. We didn’t want to wake you earlier, you poor lamb. You must be bushed and there’s a lot of action ahead.’
‘Where’s Rory?’ Faith asked awkwardly, the smell of cigarettes combined with charred raw meat making her want to retch. ‘Has he gone to check on the horses?’
‘Hardly,’ Hugo drawled. ‘He’s still taking his French oral.’
‘He’s what?’ she asked dubiously.
‘Marie-Clair.’ Stefan sighed nostalgically, having himself once engaged in an apprenticeship with eventing’s premier lady rider in and out of the saddle.
Faith looked from him to Hugo for clarification, although a spasm of pain in her heart had already confirmed the worst.
Hugo raised his eyebrows at her, suggesting the subject was better closed, but she needed to lay it o
pen.
‘Are they lovers?’
He fixed her with his cynical blue gaze, but his eyes retained an edge of compassion. ‘I’d hazard a guess that he’s currently sitting through an optional talk on international codes of practice in eventing, poor lovesick bastard. Her husband’s due to fly in by helicopter any minute to co-host the FEI delegates’ dinner, so he might as well come back to eat.’
Rory didn’t come back to eat, however, and as true darkness fell barbecues disbanded and all-important pre-competition sleep got underway. Faith’s texts went unanswered. Hugo set off for his hotel in a golf buggy that one of his sponsors had procured for him for the event and which looked faintly ridiculous whirring away decked in their advertising banners, but certainly made the schlep from the campsite to the hotel a great deal speedier. Vegas glowed a little less brightly as the outside lights shut down, followed shortly afterwards by the little advent calendar windows one at a time.
Faith trailed to the stables to check on Rio. He was lying down on his plump bed, limpid eyes looking up at her curiously, as though wondering why she had bothered to pop by when he was obviously so content.
Back in her putrid-smelling caravan, too proud and humiliated to ask for help hooking it up to the water and electricity, Faith cleaned her teeth in the dark without rinsing and fought tears of indignation.
I’m his horse’s owner, she thought furiously. Rio’s the reason he’s here.
It was almost midnight by the time Rory finally crept in, falling over his own tangled breeches which Faith hadn’t moved.
She listened, every nerve alert as he fumbled about in the dark searching for his bag, clearly gave up and clambered up on to the his bed.
Wide awake now, she couldn’t bear to wait through the silence for his sleep-breathing to begin.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Is that you, Faith?’
‘Of course it is. Who else d’you think’s in here? Mary King?’
‘I wasn’t sure of the sleeping arrangements.’
‘Where have you been?’ she repeated.
‘I tried to blag my way into some godawful dinner, but they were all ancient old eventing bores and they didn’t want me there, so I walked the cross-country course instead.’
‘In the dark?’
‘Always find it the best way to memorise it. If you can find your way around in the dark, you have the edge.’
‘Didn’t anyone try to stop you?’
‘Only the ditch monsters and the ground disappearing from under my feet. There are a lot of drops out there.’
‘Are you drunk?’
‘No. Nothing but Coca-Cola and sweet nothings have passed through these lips tonight. Can I go to sleep now?’
‘One last thing …’
‘Hmm …?’ His voice was thick with slumber.
‘Did you and MC have sex?’ It sounded horribly clinical, but she could think of no other way of asking it.
‘None …’ he mumbled, making her heart leap hopefully, ‘… of your business.’ And he was asleep.
Chapter 59
Tash put pressure on Beccy and Lem to eat supper with her each evening during the Kentucky run, determined to keep the laptop on the kitchen table throughout with links to updates of the scores, the Twitter feeds of sports journalists and riders, live video streaming and radio buffering, and even the gossipy forums. She insisted it was good for morale and team spirit, but in reality she didn’t want to risk being alone with Lough. Later in the week they would be away competing together, but the cramped camaraderie of shared quarters in the lorry park held less danger for her than the intimacy of time spent in his company amid Haydown’s many rooms and acres, especially after dark.
It was difficult enough riding in such close proximity by day. Whenever he and Toto fell into step alongside her and River in the arena, she suddenly found sitting trot impossible because the seat of the saddle seemed to have built up a static charge. She avoided hacking altogether, her head filled with far too many involuntary images of frolicking naked with Lough among the wild hyacinths in the beech wood. Instead, she threw herself into work and hosted big kitchen suppers.
She pulled out all the culinary stops with tastebud-soaking roasts and her range of killer puddings. Lemon readily accepted the invitation, dragging Beccy in his wake.
‘We could see all this in the stables flat,’ Beccy grumbled, not liking any control her stepsister exerted over her life – and Lemon’s – these days. ‘My laptop’s higher spec than this.’
‘Yeah, but your cooking’s not a patch, and there’s a dishwasher here,’ Lemon pointed out as he tucked into a vast plate of mouthwatering food.
Beccy took consolation in the fact that Lemon liked winding Tash up so much, teasing her that Hugo and Rory must be up partying each night with all those slim-thighed all-American eventing girls. Tash pretended to make light of it, but Beccy could see it made her agitated, because she’d distractedly add grated cheese to the buttered carrots, or put out horseradish sauce with the puddings instead of cream. But despite the odd gaffe, the food was undeniably good.
On Wednesday both horses sailed through the initial vet check, and Tash’s supper guests went online to look up photographs of Rory and later Hugo running alongside their horses in what the Americans called ‘the jog’ while she cooked and updated them with the latest news from Hugo.
‘They schooled in the stadium this afternoon. You can get lost in there. It’s bigger than a cricket field. Tanker was fine, but Rio was all over the place – they couldn’t get him in. Hugo thinks Stefan’s got the horse too pumped. They’ve galloped the legs off him now to try to settle him, but they only get that hour in the stadium to school and that’s gone, so tomorrow is do or die.’ She added vats of cream and butter to celeriac and sweet potato mash.
Watching her, Lough said nothing. Covertly observing him from the far end of the table, Beccy found her heart going out to him, understanding that as much as it hurt him to be there, he couldn’t keep away. She felt much the same as she tried to blot out the noise of Lemon eating, making appreciative humming noises as he gobbled down the softest, sweetest roast pork. The way Lough’s eyes almost devoured their hostess when she wasn’t looking upset Beccy deeply. She knew nobody ever stared at her like that, not even Lemon. Increasingly, she found her own eyes drawn to the Devil on Horseback, so incongruous to her in a domestic setting. His hair had grown quite long now. He clearly hadn’t had a cut since he’d arrived in the UK and it swept around his head in dramatic Beethoven fashion – not sleek and floppy like Hugo’s, but a great sea crest of turbulent waves and tumbling black surf. It was far too untamed and disturbing.
‘You need a haircut,’ she told him.
He looked at her in surprise.
‘I’d steer clear of Bed Hedz in Marlbury,’ she recommended kindly.
‘Thanks.’
‘I’m pretty good at cutting hair, aren’t I Lem?’
‘So so.’ Lemon spoke with his mouth full, already reloading his fork.
Beccy shot him a hurt look. ‘I cut yours.’
‘You run the clippers around my Mohawk, yeah.’ He reached up to touch his yellow fin, winking at Tash. ‘Great chow, Mrs B.’
Beccy flushed, her indignation rising. Lemon was deliberately winding her up. She might not have mastered cooking, but she liked to think her hairdressing skills at least were drawing level with those of her stepsister these days. ‘I’ll cut your hair,’ she offered Lough now.
‘If you like.’ He looked uncomfortable.
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Sure.’
She looked at Lemon victoriously. He gave her a ‘your funeral’ look and turned to Tash again. ‘So tell me, who’s the hot redhead with Hugo in all the vet inspection photos?’ He nodded to the laptop, open at the end of the table. The screensaver had kicked in and the Windows logo was floating around the screen. Lemon gave the mouse a nudge with his elbow and a photograph flashed up of Hugo and a pretty woman
leaning their heads together as Rio trotted past.
‘Oh, that’s Stefan’s wife Kirsty. She was a work rider at Lime Tree Farm years ago.’ Tash carefully didn’t add that she was also Hugo’s girlfriend at the time. She eyed the photograph closely. They did look alarmingly intimate. She’d been too busy cooking to study it properly.
‘Luscious-looking bird.’ Lemon sighed, earning hurt looks from both Tash and Beccy. ‘They’re obviously great mates.’
‘We’re all close.’ Tash cleared her throat and glanced at Lough, then looked hurriedly away. His eyes were so easy to fall into.
As soon as pudding spoons were settling back into bowls with hearty congratulations, and Beccy and Lemon made leaving noises, she announced loudly that she had to call Hugo to see how the course had walked and so they must all go, and could they do night-check for her?
Lough’s eyes didn’t meet hers as he thanked her for supper and wished her goodnight.
Hugo wasn’t answering his phone so Tash went upstairs for a shower and an early night, forcing herself to read three more chapters of a very stolid racing biography before yawns finally raked her jaws and she fell asleep to dream that she was buried up to her neck in the sand arena with Dillon Rafferty’s helicopter about to land on her head while Hugo and Kirsty ran naked around the Haydown cross-country course.
On the Thursday of Kentucky, Lough and Tash competed four horses at a small novice trials in Hampshire. With nobody on the ground to help them, it was a difficult juggle. Tash’s heart-skipping jumpiness around Lough wasn’t improved by having to change at high speed and in such close quarters between phases that she got regular eyefuls of his muscles and tattoos and he walked in twice to find her flashing her sports bra. Hopelessly distracted, Tash set off across country on one of Hugo’s insane ex-racehorses with the wrong bit in his mouth and consequently had no brakes whatsoever. Perhaps inevitably, the increasing speed with which he was pelting into fences took its toll and they caught a leg at a big set of rails, propelling her out of the saddle and practically into the lap of the fence judge. Eliminated and muddied but otherwise unscathed, she took the horse back to the horsebox park, relieved at least that it was her last ride of the day.