‘In that case,’ Tyrone said, ‘let’s go and try out that new horse of yours.’
Cassie had a few butterflies in her stomach, as she followed Tyrone, who was running up the stairs in front of her. But she also felt a buzz of that old excitement: the thrill she used to feel at Mary-Jo’s when they would get up at dawn and run out through the dew-soaked pastures to catch their ponies.
She kicked her shoes off in the bedroom then suddenly stopped when she caught sight of herself for the first time in a mirror since she had been dressed by Tyrone the night before. The dress was indescribably beautiful, so superbly cut, and such a vivid colour, that she could understand why she had won quite so many compliments. She half-turned, so that she could see the back, and saw that it was scooped out very low, and that the bustle Tyrone had carefully draped over her head was a wonderful swathe of silk which fell in a fold at the back of the gown. She turned herself round once, then twice, and felt she was still in Tyrone’s arms, and dancing.
Tyrone appeared from the bathroom in a cotton polo neck jumper, doing up his breeches. Cassie was standing, still in her black silk stockings, buttoning up a dark blue wool shirt. Tyrone pinched her bottom as he passed her on his way to the wardrobes.
‘I’ll see you later,’ he grinned.
Then he sat on her dressing-table stool and watched her, while he pulled his highly polished old riding boots on to his long, elegant legs.
They got the horses ready themselves, as the yard was barely awake. Tomas was in the feed room, mixing the first meal of the day, and the lads were beginning to make their way in to muck out and get their own horses done. Cassie pulled her new horse out of his box and ran her hand down his neck and back. He was perfectly made, not much higher than 15.2 hands, and quite lightly framed. He regarded her steadily with a very kind eye while Cassie started to groom him, and hardly fidgeted at all until she found a ticklish spot on his stomach.
Tyrone brought her over a brand new saddle and bridle.
‘He’s been fitted for the saddle,’ he said, ‘and it’s perfect. Don’t worry if it squeaks a bit. It’ll need to be ridden in.’
Soon both the horses were ready and tacked up. They looked a picture in the early morning sun, their coats gleaming and their manes and tails watered and brushed. Cassie checked her girths and Tomas arrived to give her a leg up.
‘How does he feel?’ Tyrone asked her as they walked round the yard. ‘You look absolutely right for him.’
‘Don’t worry about him,’ Cassie replied. ‘You should be asking how I feel.’
‘You look a picture!’ Tyrone laughed. ‘You were made for each other!’
Then he squeezed his horse on ahead and led her out of the yard.
‘We’ll go back up towards the house,’ Tyrone said dropping Old Flurry back alongside her, ‘so that you can get a good feel of him. Then you can give him a trot in the paddock.’
They walked up the avenue of trees on the two horses, where they had walked so many hundreds of times on foot. Cassie’s new horse was impeccably schooled, as Tyrone had promised he was, coming down on to his bit once Cassie asked him correctly, and walking out as soon as she squeezed him lightly with her leg.
‘Like I said,’ Tyrone smiled. ‘You look a picture.’
They trotted in the paddock, the young horse throwing her up a little higher from the saddle than Cassie had expected.
‘He’s got a very bouncy trot!’ she called to Tyrone.
‘Perhaps that’s what you should call him then!’ he replied. ‘Bouncer!’
‘Why not?’ Cassie agreed, changing rein and trotting him in the opposite direction. ‘I think it suits him!’
Gone were all the butterflies now, as Cassie suddenly felt her confidence return. The little horse moved so beautifully and so obediently that it was hard for Cassie to believe she wasn’t riding a ten-year-old dressage horse.
‘Sheila certainly knows her business,’ she said, as she slowed the horse to a walk.
‘Nobody can make a horse like her,’ Tyrone agreed. ‘We’ll see you at the Dublin Horse Show yet.’
They decided to go up into the hills, up the gallop cut along the side of the field where Cassie had been run off with on Old Flurry, and then beyond the stone wall and right up on to the ridge, where they were to rest and look back down at Claremore. When they got to the foot of the gallop, Tyrone asked Cassie whether or not she wanted to canter.
‘Of course!’ she replied. ‘Why? Don’t you?’
‘No racing now!’ Tyrone warned her. ‘You tuck yourself in behind us, and we’ll just give him a bit of a stretch.’
Tyrone kicked on Old Flurry, and the horse set off straight into a canter. Cassie steadied her youngster, and trotted him a few strides first, before sitting down and asking him to canter on. The response was immediate, as the horse tucked his hocks under him and set off after Old Flurry. Cassie steadied him, and to her delight the horse came back. For a moment she’d been afraid. Not frightened, she found, but afraid that the horse wouldn’t listen to her and take off after Tyrone’s. Now she had him nicely settled, and let him out a notch so that he could stride up the hill and enjoy himself.
She was catching Tyrone’s horse hand over fist as they pulled up, long before the high stone wall.
‘Well?’ he asked her.
‘Well yourself,’ Cassie grinned.
‘He seemed to go sweetly enough.’
‘He’s – how do you say? He’s a dote.’
Cassie patted her new horse’s neck.
‘You’re quite a sight on a horse, Mrs Rosse,’ Tyrone said. ‘Remind me not to let you out hunting unaccompanied.’
Then they swung their horses through a gap in the wall and cantered easily up the rise until they reached the ridge. Tyrone reined back, as did Cassie, and they turned their horses around so that they could see the beauty that was Claremore spread before them, bathed in the early morning sunlight.
‘I doubt if there’s anywhere on God’s earth as lovely as this place on a fine summer morning,’ Tyrone said. ‘What do you think?’
‘Tomas says this is the spot God rested when His work was done in the Creation,’ Cassie replied. ‘That fold in the mountains there! That’s where Tomas says He laid His head!’
‘Tomas was taken to kiss the Blarney stone when he was a day old,’ Tyrone grinned. ‘Now what’s the matter?’
Cassie was frowning, with her hand to her neck.
‘My locket,’ she said.
‘What about it?’
‘The locket you gave me. It’s gone.’
‘It can’t have gone, Cassie. It must have fallen down inside your shirt.’
Cassie looked.
‘It hasn’t, Ty. It must have come off when we started cantering. I know I had it on before we got into the field, because the chain was caught on a button.’
Cassie looked around her hopelessly.
‘I don’t know what I’ll do if I’ve lost it.’
‘We’ll buy you another one.’
‘It won’t be the same.’
‘Didn’t you do up the safety chain?’
‘I thought I did.’
‘Come on then,’ Tyrone sighed good-humouredly, ‘let’s go and find it.’
‘Tyrone – it could be anywhere!’
‘Then say a prayer to St Anthony!’
Cassie did so as they slowly retraced their steps, both of them bent over the sides of their horses and searching the ground. They turned back into the field, and walked slowly towards the end of the gallop, Tyrone ahead of Cassie.
Cassie was on her fourth or fifth Hail Mary when she heard Tyrone give a cry.
‘Here it is!’ he called. ‘I’ve found it!’
He reined his horse back as Cassie trotted hers up to join him. She saw the sun catching the locket as it lay in the short grass at the very end of the gallop. It must have fallen off as she pulled up, maybe still caught up round a button, and coming undone as she sat back to rein the horse back
.
‘Oh thank God!’ she cried. ‘Thank God, Tyrone! I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d lost that!’
‘Did you say a prayer to St Anthony?’ Tyrone asked as he kicked his feet out of his stirrups.
‘You bet!’ Cassie laughed. ‘I said more than one!’
Tyrone was on the ground, behind Old Flurry, as he bent down to pick up the locket.
‘There you are!’ he called up. ‘God is kind!’
Which were the last words Tyrone spoke. As he started to straighten up, something vicious must have stung Old Flurry because the horse suddenly and totally uncharacteristically stamped and kicked out violently. His hoof caught Tyrone on the side of his head, spinning him round completely, and knocking him off his feet and on to his back in a second. Cassie leaped from her horse and rushed over to where Tyrone lay on his face in the grass. She was aware of someone somewhere calling his name over and over again and screaming, but she wasn’t aware that that person was her.
Then she was down on her knees, pulling at Tyrone. The noise of the someone who was screaming Tyrone’s name was louder now in her ears, louder and louder as she turned Tyrone over and saw the dead stare that was in those deep blue eyes. Above one eye his temple was kicked in, and there was a dark trickle of blood running from his nose and the side of his mouth. The noise of the person shouting stopped and there was sobbing now, a deep breathless sobbing, as Cassie cradled Tyrone’s head in her arms and tried to call to him through the sound of the person crying. But he didn’t reply, and he didn’t move. His blue eyes looked back up at her, unwaveringly, unblinking, with all the laughter gone from them. Tyrone, the voice was crying. Tyrone, Tyrone, speak to me. Speak to me, Tyrone. Please say something. Please. Please please, my love, please just say something.
But his voice was silent now. The voice that had sung to her and wooed her, that had laughed and teased, that had roared horses home and whispered to her as he loved her in the night, that deep and wonderful voice that had thrilled her every time she heard it speak or call or sing – that voice was gone now, gone now and silenced for ever more.
And when she realised that, the sound of the person who had been calling his name stopped, and the sound of the person who was crying became louder and louder as Cassie put both her arms around her own love’s beautiful crushed head and cradled the terrible silence to her.
Interim One
The Present
Early on a Tuesday morning in June, a small group of people stand high up on Epsom racecourse, at the top of the back straight, half a mile away from the Derby start. It is a fine, clear morning, with the dew still on the grass. Below them, on the heath and in the enclosures proper, preparations are already under way to accommodate and entertain the anticipated record crowd of racegoers; but this is of little or no interest to the group of people standing by the rails, just above the point where the course begins to fall away to the world-famous Tattenham Hill. Their eyes are trained on the two horses which are coming towards them at a good swinging gallop.
At the front of the group stands a woman, dressed in a well-worn but still smart three-quarter-length fawn gaberdine with a faded sheepskin lining. She is hatless, and the early morning breeze ruffles her long dark hair. Beside her stand two men, one white-haired and with a back rounded from years of riding strong horses at work, the other a small, dapper man, in a brown trilby and a short overcoat similar to the one the woman is wearing. The rest of the group consists of a man with a lightweight television camera, another with a microphone and a third with their ancillary equipment.
The woman and the man in the brown trilby are watching the horses through their race glasses with intense interest, while the white-haired man, ignoring his binoculars, stands appraising the approaching animals, smoking a cigarette.
It takes the horses approximately a minute to cover the uphill four furlongs. Even after the hundreds of horses the three people at the front of the group have watched gallop over the years, they still thrill as much as they ever did as these horses race by them, their hooves pounding the turf, their nostrils flaring and their jockeys perched in perfect balance high on the horses’ withers.
Every one of the group swings round as the horses gallop by, and watch as the jockeys ease them carefully down to a canter, then a trot, and finally a walk, lest they should jar their precious charges’ legs.
The man in the brown trilby takes his hat off and runs a hand over his now almost hairless head.
‘Well?’ he says to the woman. ‘Do you think we’ve just seen the winner of tomorrow’s Derby?’
The cameraman swings his camera into position to record the woman’s reply.
‘It will take an exceptional horse to beat him,’ she answers.
‘Like yours.’
‘Like mine.’
‘So you’re quietly confident?’ the man enquires, with a charming smile.
‘I’m quietly terrified,’ the woman replies, very seriously.
‘The name of the horse,’ the interviewer continues. ‘He’s by your own stallion Commitment, a grandson of your foundation stallion Celebration, out of the mare Last Waltz who was by Song. So why was he called the Nightingale? I understand it has some rather special significance for you.’
‘It will have,’ the woman agrees. ‘It will have a very special significance, John, if tomorrow afternoon I hear the Nightingale called home first.’
Chapter Seventeen
Claremore
1969
The sweat streamed down off her forehead and into her eyes, stinging and half-blinding her. Beneath the four layers of clothing she was wearing, she could feel the it coursing down her back and between her breasts. But her breath was coming good and strong and regular, and her legs and arms, despite the one-pound lead racing weight she had clasped in each hand, were still pumping rhythmically. So Cassie kept on running.
She turned for home, up the last hill with the gates of Claremore in her sights. Only the hill and the drive now. Four hundred and sixty strides up that hill, which had seemed an endless mountain when she’d first started running it, and then the last eight hundred and ninety paces up and round the pot-holed drive.
Turning in the gate Cassie raised one lead-weighted arm and wiped the river of sweat from her eyes. It was March, and everywhere there were daffodils, waving in the stiff wind which blew in Cassie’s face as she headed up the private road between the home paddocks. She was aware of the myriads of yellow flowers either side of her as she ran, but they no longer heralded spring and warmth and happiness. Spring was now just another of the four seasons, bringing with it yet more hardship and, for all Cassie knew, yet more heartbreak.
The first thing she heard as she ran into the house and up the stairs was Mattie coughing. She paused on the stairs, sweat-soaked and weary, and wondered why on top of everything else her beloved little boy should have been found to have had asthma. It had started quite suddenly, so suddenly and so violently one night almost exactly a year ago that Cassie thought he would be dead before she could get him to the hospital. Tomas had driven them there as fast as he could, but as Cassie sat cradling the child in her arms, the breath seemed already to have left his body.
But they saved him. It was touch and go for two days, while Cassie sat by his side in the hospital, watching while he slept, and treasuring every visible breath, but they saved his young life. Now Cassie stood outside the nursery door, and braced herself, while she stood listening to the cough which was racking her son’s little body. Sometimes in the night, when Cassie was exhausted from the day, but because of her grief unable to sleep, Mattie would be coughing and Cassie would block her ears, begging him silently to stop. Then she would stumble out of bed and go into the nursery, and lift up her son, who would be lying on his pillow white-faced with black-ringed eyes, clutching the sheets tightly in his little hands in an effort to stop himself coughing. Cassie would take him back to her bed and he would put his small arms round her neck, and they would finally fall
asleep together.
Now she stood about to go into the nursery and see what she could do for him, knowing in fact that there was nothing. Doctor Gilbert had been wonderful, never failing her when she called him out, arriving at all hours in his battered old Ford, to bring comfort to Mattie and usually to Cassie as well. After he had attended the child, he and Cassie would sit in front of the kitchen stove and drink a whisky each from his hip flask.
‘It’s probably an inherited weakness,’ he once told Cassie. ‘We can only guess, because of course we don’t know the medical history of his parents proper. And the weakness might not even be in this generation. It could be TB either side of the family generations ago. No wonder they call it the Devil’s Disease. It’s a devil to treat, and the very devil to have.’
Of course they did everything they could for Mattie. Everything they could afford to do. Cassie and Erin dusted his room twice or three times daily with a wet duster; the carpet was removed from the nursery and replaced with oiled lino; his woollen blankets were replaced with cotton ones; an extra half length of sheeting was sewn on to the top bed sheet; and all the woolly furry toys were removed, until it seemed to Cassie that what had once been such a warm and welcoming room now looked like a prison cell.
And still he coughed. When he had a bad attack, he coughed day and night, and Cassie would sleep on a mattress on his floor. Most nights the child would have trouble sleeping, so Cassie would sit beside him on the bed, both of them propped up by his pillows, and she would read to him until finally in the early hours he would fall back into an uneasy slumber, while Josephine slept next door in Cassie’s bed in the spare room.
Cassie had moved out of the main bedroom, unable to face the memories which were locked fast within it. She had taken all her things out, leaving Tyrone’s clothes still hanging in his wardrobe, with his shoes and boots in neat rows underneath. Then she had turned the key in the door and moved herself into the spare room next to the nursery.
Erin was already in there when Cassie opened the door, sitting reading to Mattie, who was lying in his bed like a little white ghost. He smiled when he saw Cassie, and his large brown flecked eyes lit up.
To Hear a Nightingale Page 46