The Enchanted

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Eighteen nine and the horse is yours,’ Padraig said.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Flanagan.’ Anthony sighed. ‘It’s a nice enough animal, but not at that sort of money. Now my son and I have a plane to catch.’

  ‘Eighteen five hundred,’ Padraig offered. ‘And that’s it.’

  ‘Thank you but no thank you. If the horse sticks, you can always give me a call in England.’ Anthony gave Padraig his card, then shook his hand. ‘He’s a nice little horse and I’m sure he’ll pick up a race somewhere.’

  From the look on both Padraig’s and Yamon’s faces it was as if they had insulted Mother Ireland herself, while Kathleen, with a face like a thundercloud over Dingle Bay, took her precious charge back to his stable.

  ‘Time to mosey along,’ Rory muttered. ‘If you fancy keeping your scalp.’

  With one last nod Anthony and Rory hurried off to their car and made good their escape.

  Exhausted by his recent experiences, Anthony settled down to sleep as Rory headed the car for Cork airport, and Rory had to defer the questions he had stored up to ask, every one of which concerned the little horse.

  But they didn’t get very far before the matter was once again brought to their attention. Just as they were clearing Cronagh town itself, a desperately battered old truck pulled out in front of them and came to a halt. Forced to stop, Rory saw Padraig Flanagan behind the wheel with the giant Yamon sitting beside him, head bent and knees up almost under his chin. Oblivious of the fact that he was causing a minor traffic jam, Padraig got out of the truck and came round to the passenger window of the hire car, on which he rapped his knuckles sharply in order to wake Anthony.

  ‘Fifteen thousand five hundred,’ he barked through the still closed window. ‘Fifteen and a half thousand of your guineas and the horse is yours!’

  Anthony frowned for a moment, then shook his head and instructed Rory to drive round the obstruction and be on his way. Padraig got back in the driving seat of the truck and followed them, sounding the horn constantly.

  Forced to another stop ten miles on by a flock of sheep wandering across the road, in his driving mirror Rory saw Padraig hop out from the cab once again to appear at his father’s window.

  ‘Ah but you’re a hard man, Mr Rawlins,’ Padraig gasped. ‘Fourteen thousand flat says the horse is yours.’

  ‘I really don’t have that sort of money to spare, old man,’ Anthony said firmly. ‘Drive on, Rory.’

  With the road ahead now clear of sheep, Rory floored the accelerator, leaving Padraig throwing his battered old hat to the ground in despair. Half a mile on, they joined the main trunk road to Cork where driving as fast as he safely could Rory left the battered old farm truck miles behind them.

  Reaching Cork airport in plenty of time, they returned their hire car then went to check in. There was a good hour still to spare before their flight, so they went to the café and had something to eat and a couple of cups of strong coffee. Settled at a table overlooking the runway neither of them was aware of the two figures stealing up on them quietly from behind.

  ‘Eleven thousand five hundred, Mr Rawlins, sir,’ said Padraig’s voice softly in Anthony’s ear. ‘The very final offer.’

  Anthony didn’t even look round. He just eyed his son, winked, finished his coffee and yawned. ‘Nine thousand seven hundred and fifty,’ he said finally. ‘English guineas.’

  ‘Ten thousand five hundred.’

  ‘Ten thousand flat,’ Anthony replied. ‘Not a penny more.’

  ‘Done,’ Padraig agreed, and spat on his hand. ‘You’re a hard man, but a decent one, and I have the papers here.’

  Sitting himself down, he produced a bundle of papers including a bill of sale from his top coat pocket, together with an old cracked biro which he handed to Anthony.

  ‘You have yourself the best horse in Ireland.’ He nodded. ‘Good luck with him now. And may he bring you joy.’

  Anthony leafed quickly through the papers then signed the bill of sale.

  ‘Dad …’ Rory said quietly.

  ‘In a minute, old man,’ Anthony muttered as he wrote a cheque. ‘First things first.’

  ‘Dad,’ Rory persisted.

  ‘Hush now,’ Padraig cautioned. ‘Your father’s busy here.’

  Anthony handed the cheque over, then gathered up the sheaf of papers.

  ‘The passport, Dad?’ Rory said quietly.

  ‘Rory.’ His father looked at him, clearing his throat. ‘I do know what I’m doing.’

  ‘The boy’s right, Mr Rawlins,’ Padraig said, putting a hand to his inside pocket and producing an equine passport. ‘I nearly forgot it meself, so I did. There now.’ He handed over the document. ‘It’s been a rare pleasure, and may your shadows never grow less.’

  Then the Irishmen were gone, even more suddenly than they had arrived.

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten the passport,’ Anthony grumbled, suddenly feeling very tired. ‘And old Flanagan knew as well I did no passport, no deal. That’s just the way it is.’

  ‘But you hadn’t – we hadn’t checked it, Pop.’

  ‘We heard how he was born back at the yard, and the horse is obviously thoroughbred.’

  ‘I don’t remember hearing the breeding.’

  ‘You were probably still six sheets, old lad. By … who was it? And what was the mare again? Mananan’s something or other. Mananan’s Girl, that’s it. By some stallion of his neighbour’s that I’ve never heard of – King of the Sea, that’s the boy. By King of the Sea out of Mananan’s Girl.’

  ‘You won’t be able to put that on the racecard,’ Rory said, handing his father the open passport. ‘You’re going to have to put by King of the Sea out of mare unknown. The dam wasn’t registered.’

  Anthony frowned at him, then studied the passport.

  ‘Well, that’s not the end of the world. She’ll be in the part-bred register, no doubt.’

  ‘Whether she is or not, Pop, I’m thinking it doesn’t exactly bolster the horse’s value. If you’re thinking of selling him on, or finding an owner.’

  ‘He’s a cheap horse, Rory. And even with an unregistered dam—’

  ‘A useless unregistered dam,’ Rory corrected him. ‘And an equally useless sire, if you don’t mind my saying.’

  ‘We should still be able to sell him on, perhaps for as much as twenty. People are throwing money around these days. After all, he is Irish, and all they want at the moment in England are Irish horses.’

  ‘Big, well-bred Irish horses with some form. And what do you mean by we should be able to sell him on?’ Rory threw his father a droll look.

  ‘Figure of speech, old boy, figure of speech,’ Anthony said, swallowing hard as he felt a pain hit him mid-chest. ‘And there’s our flight called.’

  Anthony suffered his first heart attack on the plane just as they were coming in to land. By the time they got him off the plane and into an ambulance he was suffering a second one. His life, hanging by a thread, was saved only by the speed and efficiency with which he was transferred to the nearest hospital, where he was placed in intensive care.

  ‘Any idea of his chances?’ Rory waylaid a doctor at the first available opportunity. ‘He’s always been a pretty tough character.’

  ‘He’d need to be, Mr Rawlins.’ The doctor looked past Rory to someone else coming towards him. ‘That second attack was severe. Nine out of ten on the graph, I would say.’

  Despite being warned that there was little chance of his father’s recovering consciousness that night, Rory stayed at the hospital as long as he could, hoping in some helpless way that if he stayed around so would his father. Finally, in the very smallest of the small hours, he drove himself back to Fulford Farm, the emptiness of the roads giving him plenty of time to try to sort his thoughts out.

  On the morning they had left for their trip to Ireland Rory had received a letter informing him that he had won a scholarship to study at the famous Savarese school of art in Florence. Of course he’d applied for it, although w
ith no more than the faintest hope. At nearly twenty-eight years of age he knew it was high time he knuckled down, but he also knew he was getting far too long in the tooth to be a student. Naturally, being well aware that his father wanted him to take over at Fulford, he had said nothing to Anthony about Florence or the scholarship, not even when Anthony raised the subject on their drive to the airport. Now his father’s sudden illness meant that Rory was faced with a very real dilemma. Basically, sell up Fulford, or take over.

  If his mother Evelyn had not died in a terrible train crash only eight years before, everything would have been very different. They had been such a happy family. His father and mother had been devoted to each other, and because of Evelyn’s seemingly everlasting patience and understanding as well as her innate good humour his father had managed his small yard with considerable success, even achieving a third in the Grand National.

  But then Anthony’s sweet-tempered wife had been killed because some idiot had made a terrible mistake with a set of points, and everything, right up until this present moment, had subsequently gone downhill, not fast, but bit by little bit, unwinding itself; Anthony losing his grip, Rory not on hand as much as he should have been, reluctant to muscle in on a grieving father. Wrong decisions had been made, the farm income had declined, staff had left unexpectedly and, on top of it all, compensation for victims in the rail accident had been interminably delayed because of the usual series of appeals, counter-appeals and counter-counter-appeals in the wake of the official report. Then when the money had finally been paid over, sums that were far too little in the opinion of most people, much of the received capital had to be utilised in helping make good damage already done to Fulford Farm, all of which had added up and brought them to this moment.

  He unlocked his father’s office door and went and sat behind his desk, in his chair. He had to get a grip. He had to get a grip and make decisions, in case his father never recovered.

  First things first, he thought. First he would have to do something about the apparently useless horse his father had bought in Ireland. To buy an undersized and inexperienced horse with no notable breeding, regardless of how much had been drunk, seemed to Rory to be yet another example of the kinds of wrong decisions that had brought Fulford to its current state of near bankruptcy.

  He stared round the room at the photos of the old glory days, of fine horses winning their races, of owners being presented with cups, of his mother and father and himself standing smiling beside horse after horse and owner after owner, remembering the good days, the happy ones, the times when the future had seemed safe and secure. Not like now. Now his father lay dangerously and possibly mortally ill, his mother had long been gone, and the yard was all but on its last legs, with yet another owner about to remove two decent horses and the only incomer being an undersized Irish squib. Something had to be done, but what that thing was for the life of him Rory could not imagine.

  He could send the incoming animal straight to the sales, of course, but given the provenance of the creature he doubted whether they would get more than two thousand pounds for it. He sighed and scratched his head with a pencil in the faint hope of firing some sort of inspiration, but nothing was forthcoming. He was absolutely sure that his father had no old friend or owner on his books who was looking specifically for a small and underbred horse. Those in the know liked their steeplechasers to be big, athletic and strong enough to do the job, which this Irish horse was most certainly not, failing, it would seem, on all counts. What his father could have been thinking when he finally agreed to buy it was beyond Rory’s comprehension – and, on top of everything, at this particular moment when thanks to the wretched government and the latest set of restrictions from Brussels, farming was in such difficulties that Fulford Farm could not support Fulford Racing Ltd, as it had so often done previously.

  ‘If the old man gets better, the way things are we’re going to have to shut up shop and buy him a nice little warm air bungalow,’ Rory sighed to himself, watching the dawn break. ‘Failing some sort of miracle.’

  He stood up, and was about to turn off the office light when his eye was caught by a photograph of his mother. She was on her favourite hack, a part Welsh part thoroughbred bay gelding, the wholly delightful old Brown Jack. She was smiling happily into the camera, totally relaxed, as was her horse, the sunlight catching at the sheen of Brownie’s coat and the polish on his mother’s immaculate black riding boots. Behind them stretched the lush green of the summer paddocks and the light ochre of the cereal fields beyond, the whole a picture of elegant ease, a study of one of the most intrinsic elements of English country life, a beautiful woman on a fine horse in the fold of the countryside.

  But there was something else about the picture, something that held Rory back. It was as if his mother was trying to talk to him, to send him a message.

  ‘I must be tired,’ he said to himself, as his dog Dunkum stretched himself out at his feet, ready to move back to the warmth of the kitchen. ‘I must be imagining things. Photographs do not speak.’

  Yet there was something most definitely in his head, and the more he listened the more he heard his mother’s pretty voice. Remember, Rory, she was saying. Just remember we never know where our good luck is coming from.

  What good luck? he wondered as he let Dunkum and himself out of the office just as the stable clock outside struck six, finding himself for once at odds with his mother. He did know one thing: any luck they might be getting would most certainly not be contained in the horse transporter that would shortly arrive at the stables from the Emerald Isle.

  Chapter Three

  Grenville

  By now Grenville Fielding had resharpened every Venus HB pencil in the small silver container on his dark-green-leather-topped partner’s desk, trimmed the dirty edges from his Staedtler Tradition eraser, carefully polished with a tissue the gold nib on his Parker 51 fountain pen – a present from his father on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday exactly twenty-five years ago – arranged his ivory ruler in a perfect parallel with the black leather correspondence folder that sat dead centre on the desktop, shot the cuffs of his freshly laundered and ironed dark blue and white striped shirt, and finally adjusted his Garrick Club tie before sitting back to review the day’s play.

  ‘Good,’ he said to himself after a moment’s reflection. ‘Highly satisfactory, in fact. Could not have come at a better time.’

  To celebrate the new business that had just come his way, he decided he would allow himself his first gin and tonic of the evening a quarter of an hour earlier than usual, assuring himself that if he drank it more slowly than was his habit, in the end it would come to much the same thing.

  ‘It will come to very much the same thing, Grenville,’ he said aloud as he rose to walk slowly to the skilfully distressed Georgian wardrobe that he used as a drinks cupboard. ‘As long as we sip – and do not gulp.’

  Carefully pouring a double London Gin from a silver-plated bar measure over two large cubes of iced Malvern water and adding precisely half a bottle of Slimline tonic to the Waterford tumbler, he dropped in a thin slice of freshly cut lime and then took the drink over to the window that looked out on to the iron-railed garden reserved solely for use of the residents of the square.

  ‘Perfect,’ he sighed, but then quickly stepped back as he caught sight of Lady Frimley walking a pair of small Tibetan dogs in the garden square below, and staring up at his window. When she raised one gloved hand in a vaguely royal gesture, it became really rather too obvious that she had seen him, which meant he was forced to wave back, rather less royally. He even managed a smile.

  ‘She must walk those dogs of hers about twenty times a day,’ he said out loud to himself, still smiling down at the woman far below him.

  Like so many, Grenville had found out that there was only one drawback to living in a smart London square, and that was that the place was still filled with so many of the old guard that you were always dodging sherry parties, not to m
ention invitations to the theatre where one set of crumblies in the auditorium sat enthralled by a cast of another up on the stage, most of whom were seriously trying to remember where they were, or in what play.

  But then living where he did also brought its advantages, since many of the old things around him had chosen him as their investment counsellor. Few invested very large sums, all of them having grown understandably ever more cautious with age, but none the less it all added up to something rather than nothing, and the more it added up the happier Grenville became. A few, such as Lady Frimley, had resisted the temptation to invest, but he had high hopes that she too would finally succumb to his lures, although, as he had come increasingly to realise, success was something of a double-edged sword. The greater his number of investors, the more invitations he received to attend very dull dinners, generally held in ancient restaurants and clubs with old-fashioned menus, peeling wallpaper, and inordinately tiresome company.

  The previous year, Grenville had actually had to take the decision to try to find younger, rather than older, people on whose behalf he could invest. Recent good fortune had come from the word-of-mouth recommendation of one of his clients, the Honourable Pelham Augustus Dashwood, to someone he met in the Long Room at Lord’s, a moderately charming but singularly undistinguished actor by the name of Jeremy Bell, who had recently amassed a small but satisfactory fortune by way of the deaths of two maiden aunts and a homosexual uncle who had owned a modest brewery. Bell was uncertain as to what precisely to do with his new-found wealth, but as is so often the way with actors, had been unable not to mention the windfalls several times en passant to Dashwood, who, by coincidence, had himself come into a certain amount of money as a result of the more than convenient theft of an antique Bugatti racing car he had inherited from his godfather. Dashwood had then kindly recommended Grenville and so Grenville had taken on fresh, rich blood without so much as the raising of a finger.

  As it happened, Grenville was a very wise and happy choice, because he really did have the knack of making money in unexpected places. More than that, he had a brilliant sense of timing, of making an investment at just the right moment – and of course, from Grenville’s point of view, managing someone else’s money was a gift, particularly when it came with no strings attached, just orders to go full steam ahead. The job required a minimum of effort, and yielded a most satisfactory income. Dashwood’s faith in Grenville was completely justified, and so he was soon followed by others of his kind, Old Etonians all – or, as they preferred to say, the alumni of Slough Grammar, this affectation generally followed by a loud bray of undeniably Etonian laughter. Most conveniently of all, Dashwood’s friends still thought it vulgar to talk about their money, and so were more than happy to hand over substantial handfuls of their unearned to be invested by someone they understood from Dashwood was a Chap Like Them, something which, as it happened, Grenville certainly was not. Nevertheless, because Dashwood had made Grenville his investment manager, everyone now thought Grenville was of the same ilk as his sponsor. It was a case of class by association, really.