The Enchanted

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Goody.’ Lynne laughed. ‘I shall stand outside wherever it is—’

  ‘Portman Square,’ Rory volunteered.

  ‘I shall stand outside Portman Square and throw rotten eggs at all of them.’

  ‘And I shall be there right by your side, my dear,’ Constance assured her. ‘What an awful lot of flotsam.’

  ‘Oh, my,’ Alice said as they all waited to be presented with the Gold Cup. ‘I’ve just remembered the children.’

  ‘I didn’t know your kids were here, Alice,’ Lynne said, as Edwin Armstrong beckoned them to come forward to receive the most coveted trophy in National Hunt racing.

  ‘They’re not.’ Alice smiled. ‘But I do hope they were watching.’

  One of them had been. Although Joe and Georgina were unable to get to the course itself because of Joe’s work and the children’s schooling, Joe watched it in a betting shop round the corner from his office while Georgina managed to watch at home, having persuaded her friend and neighbour to do the return school run. By the time The Enchanted was making his effort up the hill Georgina was standing on the sofa screaming so loudly that two passers-by – thinking someone was being murdered – rang her doorbell to make sure everything was all right.

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ Georgina laughed. ‘God, I’m sorry – it’s just – it doesn’t matter. Yes it does!’ she suddenly shouted at the two utterly nonplussed strangers standing staring slack-jawed at her. ‘Yes it does matter! My mum’s horse has just won the Cheltenham Gold Cup!’

  As she tried to persuade the bewildered but now beaming young couple to come in for a celebratory drink Georgina’s phone rang.

  ‘Hi!’ she said happily as she answered it. ‘Hi – Chris! Chris – were you watching? You were watching, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, well, no actually,’ Christian confessed with an embarrassed laugh. ‘I mean I actually forgot.’

  ‘You what? You forgot?’ Georgina repeated in disbelief.

  ‘Yeah, I know, sis. But honestly, at that price – like one hundred and fifty to one? I thought, Come on – what sort of a no-hope is that? So I forgot – yeah.’

  ‘But he won, Chris! Mum’s horse won!’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Chris laughed. ‘Why I’m ringing. I was in Horrids – in the audio and television department looking at stuff and there was Mum all over the screen. Getting this little gold cup. I mean – what? But he wasn’t anywhere near one hundred and fifty to one, sis.’

  ‘No, you dibbock!’ Georgina laughed. ‘But you had him at a hundred and fifty to one! Like me! That’s what an ante-post voucher is, apparently – that’s the price we had him at. You realise how much money you have just won?’

  ‘You are kidding me,’ Christian said, his whole tone of voice changed. ‘Seriously? You really are kidding me.’

  ‘I am not kidding you, Chris,’ Georgina assured him. ‘You are a rich young man.’

  ‘Fantastic.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘No – fantastic, sis. I mean wow.’

  ‘You bet, bro. So too do I.’

  ‘Hey!’ Christian said, as if suddenly realising something. ‘This is cool – because you know what this means, right? This is cool because it means I can pay Mum back what I owe her.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so, Chris,’ Georgina replied. ‘I don’t think either of us is ever going to be able to do that.’

  Epilogue

  MAY

  Turned Away

  Summer came early. April was fine and warm, with little rain, but May simply burst into spring which in two weeks became summer. Kathleen and Rory roughed their newly crowned champion off as soon as the celebrations had died down and turned him out in his favourite paddock with plenty of company. At first, as if back home in Ireland, he had hardly strayed from the area around the gate, happy to graze on the fresh spring grass that was already full of goodness but seemingly loath to turn his back on human company. But a week or so later he was gone from the gate, and when Kathleen went to check his welfare morning, noon and night she would find him in what had fast become his favourite spot, a shady oasis afforded by two enormous horse chestnut trees under which lay a shallow spring-fed pond from which Boyo and his playmates could drink and in whose mud they could lazily roll and cool.

  The oddest thing was that he no longer looked smaller than his companions. It was as if the race had made him grow taller, and when Rory and Kathleen had put a measuring stick to him, something they had never done in fact, just in case he turned out to be as small as his critics would have him be, they found to their delight and astonishment that in his shoes he stood at fifteen hands three, no longer the size of a milk pony. His six months as a racehorse had certainly brought him on, although nothing did so to such purpose as his magnificent, heroic and famous run in the Gold Cup. When the four owners and their trainer had stood admiring him in the unsaddling enclosure they had all remarked on how much more of a horse he seemed to have become, which they say is often the way with winning horses. They look like winners. They look stronger for their race. They look altogether bigger for their victory – and Boyo was no exception. As he had stood there proudly in the enclosure with the steam of his efforts rising from his heaving flanks and the breath of his labours steaming from his flared nostrils, he had looked mighty. Not tall, not huge, not statuesque, but strong and mighty, as if his victory had already transformed him from a good athletic and burly sort of racehorse into the near mythic creature he was to become, the winner of twenty-eight races including two Cheltenham Gold Cups, three King George VI Steeplechases, one Whitbread Gold Cup and an Irish Grand National, the last two named races being the only two handicaps in which he ever ran, notable contests he won carrying top weight, the Whitbread by an easy four lengths and the Irish National by a jaw-dropping ten. But now as his first summer at Fulford Farm unfolded, and as if mindful of the battles that lay ahead of him, Boyo switched himself off and grew fat on the fine farm grasses, coming back into his stable to sleep the day away when the sun got too hot and being turned out in the fields at night when all was cool and the flies had gone.

  As for his human friends, all was as well with them as it was with himself. Constance insisted on accompanying Anthony to America for his operation, flown there in Harrington Lovell’s private jet and back again after the procedure had been successfully completed. Meanwhile, Harrington and Alice, his soon to be wife, found a fine but manageable house in a little-known part of Somerset where they would spend the rest of their days in peace, quiet and deep contentment. Grenville and Lynne married but went on living exactly as they had been, happy to keep Grenville’s elegant Knightsbridge flat for their London life and Lynne’s spacious country apartment for their rural days. Grenville ceased his dabbling in the world of investments, on Lynne’s suggestion founding a racing club for people who could not afford to buy horses or even legs of horses but wanted the fun of ownership. In the first season the club had fifty subscribers, a membership that ten years later had swelled to over twenty thousand happy punters. The Fieldings had two children, neither of whom had the slightest interest in horses, their daughter becoming an opera singer and their son a chef.

  As for the boys across the wather, there was never a race The Enchanted ran when the money wasn’t down. Cronagh prospered, and the citizen who prospered most was Padraig Flanagan, thanks initially to the fact that Rory credited him with the breeding of his Gold Cup winner in his post-race press conferences, a credit that soon brought the dealers, bloodstock agents, pin-hookers and well-heeled owners to the door of his modest smallholding in south-west Cork, an establishment that thanks to the continued wondrous success of The Enchanted, ten years later had grown into one of the most successful small stud farms in Ireland. The fact that neither the so-called sire or dam of The Enchanted had lived to see their son’s first success had no bearing on the events whatsoever, for all the horse people wanted was to be privy to the skills and the magic of a man already rumoured to be a singular breede
r of outstanding national hunt horses. This was a reputation that Padraig very quickly and truly deserved, himself and Liam going on to breed the dual winner of an Irish Champion Hurdle and three fine and strong steeplechasers that all went on to win at the Cheltenham Festival, which perhaps only goes to show that as far as equine breeding goes, very often the stud book is as much use as a tuning fork is to the tone deaf.

  When Anthony returned from America with his life expectancy greatly increased, decisions had to be made about the future of Fulford Farm.

  ‘The first thing I would like to do and intend to do, as it happens, Dad, is to get married,’ Rory told him.

  ‘I would have to say that is one of your better ideas, Rory,’ Anthony replied. ‘And after that, what then?’

  ‘That rather depends on what you’re going to do.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to enjoy myself,’ Anthony told him. ‘Connie and I have got one or two things we’d like to do and a couple of places we’d like to go and see, but before I can do that, I have to know what’s to become of the yard.’

  ‘I can go on running it, if it’s all right with you. Or rather we can. Kathleen and I, that is,’ Rory said, taking Kathleen by the hand.

  ‘And that’s all? That’s it, is it?’ Anthony sighed. ‘You’re just going to train horses for the rest of your days and do nothing else.’

  ‘No, of course he’s going to do something else, Mr Rawlins,’ Kathleen reassured him. ‘In fact, if I have anything to do with it, soon he’ll not be training the horses at all.’

  ‘Is that so, Katie?’ Anthony laughed. ‘Mind you, I rather thought it might be.’

  ‘He’s to spend the rest of the summer painting,’ Kathleen said.

  ‘Are you going to Florence after all, old man?’

  ‘And no, he’s not,’ Kathleen chipped in. ‘That has been decided against.’

  ‘By herself here,’ Rory said, indicating Kathleen with a nod of his head.

  ‘Rory can paint horses like nobody’s business,’ Kathleen continued. ‘Haven’t I already got him half a dozen commissions, and in a couple of years won’t Mr Rory Rawlins here only be one of the top equine artists in the country?’

  ‘With no time to look after the yard,’ Anthony commented.

  ‘Go on.’ Kathleen laughed. ‘Now you know well enough who’ll be doing that, Mr Rawlins. And if it’s all right with you, I can’t think of anything I would want to do more.’

  ‘It’s very all right by me,’ Anthony said mock-seriously, ‘as long as you stay as beautiful as you are and don’t turn into another Eddie Rampton.’

  ‘Fat chance,’ said Rory.

  So while Kathleen trained, Rory drew and painted, and in time they had three children, two daughters and a son, their son’s most notable achievement being the riding to victory of one of his parents’ horses at Aintree in the Foxhunter’s Steeplechase, otherwise known as the Amateurs’ Grand National.

  And all this time Boyo continued to run his heart out and to enjoy doing so.

  ‘When he stops enjoying it, that’s the day we retire him on the spot,’ Rory and Kathleen agreed, and indeed the day finally dawned when the great horse was retired to grass, though not because he was no longer enjoying his races, but because he developed arthritis. He spent the rest of his days being as mollycoddled as he would allow, which wasn’t very much since even though his legs were stiffening and his back was aching the one thing Boyo could not abide was being shut in his stable doing nothing. So whenever the weather allowed, the horse was given the freedom of the field, well rugged up in winter and always brought in when the flies became bothersome. Never short of company, he ran with the youngsters Kathleen introduced to him and taught them his ways, and he tended to the older racehorses, making sure their well-earned holidays were spent with as few interruptions from the youngsters as possible. He was parent and nanny goat, guardian and grandfather, a perfectly tempered animal who looked after his pastoral kingdom with great care and compassion.

  His favourite spot to lie was a fold in the home paddock just under the shade of the biggest of the chestnut trees, a haven to which he would take himself off to sleep when the aches in his bones became too much and finally when the sun could do his discomforts no more good. It was there that Kathleen and Rory found him late one summer evening, fast asleep for ever now, his life over, his great and indomitable spirit having been quietly taken away by a tall and beautiful young man with eyes the colour of coral, to be returned to the kingdom under the seas where his heart had always belonged.