The Auditions

by Stacy Gregg

  Alice gave her a wave as she sped past her, and she knew there were no hard feelings. Alex seemed shocked when he saw Georgie pull up alongside him, but he wasn’t one for dirty tricks. And besides, Georgiehadn’t actually beaten him yet. There were still the three jumps to come.

  The first proper fence, the trakehner, now loomed a hundred metres ahead and Belle was still pulling. Georgie’s hands were rubbed raw through her gloves from holding on to the mare in the early stages of the race and she knew she didn’t have the strength to fight against her any longer. She let Belle have her head and they took the trakehner at a full gallop. All Georgie could do was hang on as Belle flew it easily and kept on galloping.

  “Good girl!” She gave Belle a slappy pat on her sweaty neck and took hold of the reins again. The water complex was coming, but first Georgie would have to swerve to get past Kennedy who was right in their path.

  This time, Kennedy couldn’t fight back. Versace’s stride was flagging. The horse was tired and Belle powered past him as if they were standing still.

  Georgie wasn’t thinking about Kennedy any more. She was utterly focused on the water complex. As Georgie took a firm grip on the reins Belle fought her, sticking her head way up in the air. They couldn’t jump like this! Georgie was forced to give up the fight and let the mare do it her way. Belle flew the bank into the water and never broke out of a gallop as she churned through the pond and sprang up out the other side.

  Only the coffin remained before the finish line. Belle was back in full gallop. Directly ahead of them Georgie could see the log at the top of the bank and immediately beyond it, that massive drop down the steep slope to the ditch below. Tara had made it perfectly clear. This jump needed to be taken at a canter. They had managed to make it through the water complex but there was no way they could bluff it through the coffin. If Belle came in at a gallop they would crash into the ditch.

  Four strides out, Georgie knew she had two choices. She could turn the mare off now and incur a refusal and twenty faults. Or she could ride on, risking Belle’s safety and her own and gallop the log fence to plunge down the bank to the ditch below.

  All the way around this course she had been pretending to herself that this moment would never come. But it was unavoidable and she had to face herfear. She was only too aware that her mother had once made the wrong decision and had paid the ultimate price.

  She took a deep breath. The truth was, she would never know how her mum had managed to get the jump so wrong that day. But it didn’t matter. Whatever had happened, that was in the past. Georgie had to make her own choices and her own mistakes. And in that moment she knew what she had to do. She was going to jump.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Georgie was a brave rider, but not a foolish one. When she made up her mind to jump the coffin, she knew what she was doing.

  The last time she had faced this fence she had panicked and pulled the mare off. Not this time. They were three strides out from the jump, which left her enough time to make things right. Georgie sat back heavy in the saddle and, with all her strength, gave a sharp jag on her left rein. Up until now, she had been trying to get Belle back under control by pulling on both reins. It hadn’t worked because the mare had leaned against Georgie’s hands and kept galloping. The sudden jerk on only one rein was enough to catch the mare in the teeth, so that she reeled back anddramatically slowed down. However, she also veered sharply to the left!

  The next two strides were a blur. Georgie somehow managed to pull back on the other rein to correct Belle’s line then she urged the mare on so she was once more powering ahead. Belle took the log on a perfect forward canter stride and together they flew down the slope towards the ditch below. Georgie put her legs on firmly and Belle leapt. The mare had her ears pricked forward as she cleared the ditch, then cantered back up and out over the log at the top of the bank.

  The smile on Georgie’s face said it all as she rode towards the finish line. She had beaten the coffin! The crowd gave her a huge cheer as she galloped on and she couldn’t resist punching the air as she crossed the finish line. She hadn’t won the race by any stretch–nearly half a dozen of her classmates had crossed the line well ahead of her. But she had beaten the one person that mattered. She had come home ahead of Kennedy Kirkwood.

  All of the twelve riders had made it home safely in the end. They had spent the past hour washing down their horses, then scraping them with sweat scrapers and rugging them up before walking them for half an hour to cool down. Now the horses were all back in their fields or stalls and the young eventers were sitting nervously on hay bales at the back of the stable block, waiting for Tara Kelly to read their class rankings. She had their fates in her hands as she addressed the class.

  “I’m doing this in order,” Tara told them. “The best riders will be called first. When I call your name, I’ll be giving your class ranking.”

  Georgie got the shock of her life when she heard who had crossed the line before anyone else.

  “Emily Tait!” Tara Kelly said. Emily beamed with pride at her first place. There was a round of applause from the class, but Nicholas Laurent wasn’t clapping. He was fuming.

  “It’s not fair,” he complained, “she rides a Thoroughbred. Of course she will win in the steeplechase. Her horse is built to run and mine is built to jump.”

  “Oh suck it up, Laurent.” Alice rolled her eyes at him.

  Nicholas Laurent had taken the number two place in the class rankings. He had been followed by Cam and Daisy, who were tied for third as they had crossed the line together. Incredibly, Mitty Janssen had come fifth. She was beaming from ear to ear because her big Swedish Warmblood had jumped so well.

  Georgie had risen all the way up through the numbers to come in sixth. Right behind her had been Alex Chang, who had ridden aggressively over the last three fences to take out seventh place in front of Alice in eighth. Matt Garrett had been ninth and he looked miserable about it, while Arden, in tenth, looked positively thrilled to have made it around at all.

  The final two places were the ones that mattered. Because today, one of the riders in the final two would be eliminated.

  “Kennedy Kirkwood,” Tara Kelly said. “Will you please stand up?”

  At the back of the hay bales, in the shadows, Kennedy got to her feet. As she stood up, a snigger rosefrom a few members of the eventing class. Kennedy, normally so glamorous and immaculate, was a mess. Her wet hair was clinging like damp rope to her sodden back protector. Her white shirt and jodhpurs were soaked through and covered in mud.

  Kennedy had encountered a problem at the water jump. “She wanted to jump it one way and Versace decided to go the other!” Alice murmured to Georgie.

  “Hey, Kennedy,” somebody shouted out, “I love what you’ve done with your hair!” There was another outburst of sniggers and giggles but Tara Kelly silenced them.

  “Kennedy,” she said, “you were the last one across the line today, and you are to be considered for elimination.” The class went quiet. “Isabel Weiss,” Tara said, “would you also please stand up.”

  At the front of the class, Isabel stood up. She looked Tara in the eye as the instructor spoke to her.

  “Isabel, you rode well today, but you retired on the course at the water complex and didn’t cross the finish line.” Isabel nodded. “I told you all at the start of this term that I expected to expel at least one student frommy class after the mid-term exam.” She looked at Kennedy and Isabel. “That student will be one of you.”

  The tension was unbearable. As Georgie watched the girls waiting for Tara’s decision, she wanted to shout out that Kennedy deserved to go, that she had pushed her off her horse in the middle of the course. But she knew she couldn’t prove it.

  “Isabel,” Tara said. “You are more accustomed to riding dressage than battling it out on the eventing field. Over the past four weeks however, you’ve proven to me that you can be a competent jumps rider. But I wonder if you have the courage that cross-coun
try will ultimately demand of you?

  “Kennedy,” Tara continued. “You came into my class as the top rider from the US auditions. But being at the top means there is only one place to go. You’re a born showjumper and yet from day one you have expected to naturally become the queen of the cross-country. I think today you’ve seen that this is not the case. Every rider needs to fight to stay at the top.”

  She already knows how to fight, Georgie thought. Kennedy was looking down at her feet and snivelling.

  Tara paused. “Kennedy … you’re still in. I’m giving you a second chance to prove yourself. I’m sorry, Isabel, but you’re out.”

  It was hard to believe that one of their classmates was gone.

  “I feel so sorry for Isabel,” Daisy was saying as they walked up the driveway to dinner that evening.

  “Not as bad as I feel,” Georgie said. “If she hadn’t stopped to help me up maybe she would have tackled the water jump after all.”

  “It’s not your fault, Georgie,” Alice said and then added, “but Isabel must be devastated.”

  “Uhh, is that how devastated looks?” Emily asked. Ahead of them, queuing up at the door was Isabel. She was laughing and larking about as she re-enacted the elimination scene to the great delight of her dorm mates from Stars of Pau. It turned out that Isabel was neither surprised nor upset by her expulsion from Tara Kelly’s class.

  “I am a dressage rider,” Isabel shrugged, “I neverwanted to be an eventer, but my instructor back home told me that I had to take Tara’s class because she was the best in the business.”

  Half a term of eventing was more than enough for Isabel who had now swapped to a classical long-reining class.

  “We’re going to miss you,” Georgie told her.

  “Ja,” Isabel shrugged, “you’ll get over it. Wait ‘til you see the German class rankings. I whipped all of you!”

  After dinner, Georgie, Daisy, Alice, and Emily sat together in the living room at Badminton House with mugs of hot tea and chocolate biscuits recounting their rides around the point-to-point. They relived the hairy moments and shrieked with laughter at stories of neardisasters that were averted just in time.

  Georgie had laughed along with them but she found it hard to join in the storytelling. It was impossible for her to describe how she had felt, especially when she had confronted the coffin.

  She had asked so much of Belle and the mare had performed brilliantly. Jumping the coffin had been a rite of passage for both of them. It was almost as if theyhad left behind their past and formed a real bond at last. Georgie couldn’t believe how lucky she was to have a horse that she adored every bit as much as Tyro.

  Lucinda had been thrilled when Georgie called and told her about their point-to-point victory. She laughed when Georgie told her that instead of taking time out to celebrate, Tara had warned the class that there would be another exam at the end of the term and this time she promised it would be much tougher!

  “Typical Tara!” she said. “There’s never time to celebrate. She’s always looking to the next fence.”

  “I’m so glad you’ve bonded with that mare,” Lucinda told Georgie. “It sounds like she’s a fantastic horse. And sixth in the class is a brilliant ranking to begin the year on. Your mother would be very proud.”

  Having used up her evening phone call quota, Georgie had emailed her exam news to her dad. Typically, he was most excited about her maths mark–she had come third in the class rankings, a fact that Dr Parker was enormously pleased about.

  Are you sick of the gruel yet? Lily had written in her latest email. She was still convinced that Blainfordsounded like a total nightmare. I can’t believe you’ve got in trouble for walking on some poxy patch of grass again!

  It had seemed like a great thing to do at the time, but now Georgie regretted storming off across the quad in front of Conrad. She had hoped Conrad might have forgotten, but then she saw the latest fatigues list had her name on it and knew she had no choice but to accept her fate and turn up at four o’clock to take her punishment.

  At three fifty-five she stood by the archway next to the Great Hall with three other junior students, all of them boys from Luhmuhlen House. “I got caught talking during assembly,” one boy told her.

  “I didn’t muck out my horse’s stall,” another one admitted.

  The third boy, like Georgie, had mistakenly trodden on the quad. “It’s just a bit of grass,” he groaned. “I don’t know why they make such a fuss about it.”

  By five minutes past four they were all getting restless. “Do you think if there’s no prefect then we can just go back to the dorm?” one of the boys suggested.

  “Too late,” another one groaned, “here he comes.”

  Georgie turned to see Conrad walking along the footpath beside the quad–and James walking beside him.

  “Hey, Parker,” James gave her a grin.

  “What are you doing here?” Georgie asked.

  “I’m on fatigues,” James said giving her a wink.

  Conrad kept walking and the students, including James and Georgie, fell into line behind him. “Follow me,” Conrad instructed. “We’ve got some hay bales to move down at the stables.”

  As they walked around the quad, Georgie tried to hang at the back of the group so that she wouldn’t have to talk to James. But he slowed down intentionally, so that he could walk alongside her.

  “Who gave you fatigues?” Georgie asked.

  “Conrad did,” James gave her a grin.

  “But I thought he was your friend.”

  James shrugged. “Friendship with Conrad has its limits. Let’s just say he got fed up with me so I’m here with you being forced into hard labour.” Then he added, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you for weeks. You’ve been avoiding me ever since the polo match.”

  “I haven’t been avoiding you,” Georgie said, “I’ve just been making sure I’m in places where you aren’t.”

  James laughed. “Is there something wrong with me?”

  “No,” Georgie said honestly. “There’s something wrong with me.”

  She looked up into his blue eyes. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly like Arden and Tori and the showjumperettes.”

  “Oh, I’ve noticed,” James grinned.

  “And your sister can’t stand me.”

  James laughed. “Parker, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to my little sister. I love Kennedy, but she can be a colossal witch sometimes. And she doesn’t get to choose who I can hang out with.”

  “What about Conrad?”

  “Nah, he’s not my type,” James deadpanned. They were walking close and James let his hand brush against Georgie’s hand. She felt her skin tingle as if an electric shock had gone through it but she pretended she hadn’t noticed.

  “So, you got through the first round of eventingexams. I guess it runs in the blood,” James said. “Your mum went to Blainford, didn’t she?”

  Georgie nodded.

  “My dad came here and was this polo star,” James said. “I know what it’s like to have big shoes to fill.”

  “I used to think about that all the time,” Georgie said, “but it doesn’t worry me any more, at least not so much. I’m not going to compete against my mother’s memory. I’m here to be the best that I can be.”

  James arched an eyebrow at this. “So what do you like best so far about Blainford?”

  “Well, I like my new horse,” Georgie said, “and my new friends.”

  “.and the food in the dining hall?”

  “That is most definitely not high on my list!” Georgie groaned.

  “I was thinking you must be getting pretty sick of those dining hall meals by now,” James said.

  “Totally!” Georgie agreed. “I had a nightmare last week that involved being attacked by industrial quantities of macaroni cheese.”

  James laughed. “Well, that settles it then,” he said.

  “You’re coming to dinner at my place.”

&nbs
p; “What?” Georgie was confused. “At Burghley House?”

  “No!” James grinned. “At my house in Maryland. I’m only a weekly boarder. Mom and Dad pick me and Kennedy up and take us home most weekends–when I’m not playing polo.”

  Georgie noticed that James deliberately didn’t mention the private jet.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I can’t promise anything special but Mom makes a pretty good home-cooked meal. Well, actually our chef makes it. But you get the idea.”

  He looked at Georgie. “So what do you say? You want to come and hang out at my place next weekend?”

  When Georgie told Alice the news she shrieked so loud that she startled the horses.

  “Ohmygod! James Kirkwood, the James Kirkwood has asked you out on a date!”

  Georgie groaned, “This is exactly why I wasn’t going to tell you! And, strictly speaking, he hasn’t asked me out. He’s asked me to go to his house.”

  Alice squealed even louder at this. “The Kirkwood house is, like, a total mega-mansion. It’s supposed to be amazing!”

  “I don’t see what the big deal is,” Cam huffed, as he led Paddy out of the loose box. “I mean, what does James have that I haven’t got?”

  “Err, do you want me to write the list or is this multiple choice?” Alice said dryly.

  It was a rare occasion that the three of them had time together to go out hacking after school. It was a pity they couldn’t do this every day, Georgie thought. There were so many bridle paths and the grounds were so beautiful.

  The sun was low in the sky over the bluegrass pasture as they rode under a long row of white-blossomed dogwood trees. The bridle path ran alongside the novice cross-country course and Georgie could see the fences that she had jumped for the midterm exam. None of them held any fear for her now but as Tara had told them, the next challenges would be far greater. As she thought about this, Georgie felt Belle snatch at the bit, wanting to canter.

  Beside her, Alice was having trouble holding Will back as well. “Are you ready?” she asked Georgie and Cam. “Shall we canter?”