To Hear a Nightingale

by Charlotte Bingham

And review it he did, hardly able to keep the crow from his voice. Tyrone had often remarked that ‘Old Flann’ wouldn’t be happy until he himself owned Claremore, and that he had been wildly jealous of Tyrone ever since he had first taken Tyrone on as a client. Of course, Claremore was totally out of Flannery’s financial reach. Unless, of course, the bank foreclosed, and the estate was sold off at an absurdly low price in order to pay its remaining creditors, namely the bank. At which point, no doubt, ‘Old Flann’ would be the first and the very last to bid at the auction.

  ‘So even though as you say, Mrs Rosse,’ Flannery was concluding, ‘that your prospects are improving, and your hopes for the forthcoming race season run high – I have to say it appears to me, and please don’t misunderstand me, because you know that I am only here to help you – but it does appear to me you may well be requiring some further help from the bank.’

  Cassie deliberately fingered the large emerald brooch she was wearing, in order to draw Flannery’s attention to it. It was worth well over a thousand pounds, and Cassie hired it from a pawnbroking cousin of Tomas’ every time she had an interview at the bank. The pawnbroker charged her five pounds for the day, which was exorbitant to say the least, but invaluable as visible collateral.

  And sure enough, Flannery now had his eyes fixed on the beautiful brooch.

  ‘I have no need, dear Mr Flannery,’ Cassie replied, ‘to avail myself of your very kind offer. In fact, I’m in the happy position of being able to pay off a lot of what I owe you.’

  While she spoke, Cassie had opened her purse, and had started to lay wads of notes on the desk in front of her. She glanced up to find that Flannery, as she had hoped, had immediately transferred his gaze from the brooch to the two thousand pounds she was laying on the desk.

  ‘Gracious. How much do we have there?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Around two thousand pounds, I imagine. A hundred pounds at 20/1. Yes, that’s two thousand pounds, isn’t it?’

  Cassie looked up at him, as she took the last elastic-banded bundle of notes from her purse. Then she put both hands below the desk and crossed her fingers tightly.

  ‘This was the result of a flutter then, Mrs Rosse?’ Flannery enquired.

  ‘This, Mr Flannery,’ Cassie replied, ‘is no flutter. You’re looking at an almighty gamble.’

  Which indeed it was. Cassie and Tomas had hatched the plan together, in the hope of buying more time, the time they needed either to prepare a horse to win, or to back someone else’s certainty. But with the season only just about to start, it would be a good month if not longer before they could be certain of finding a ‘good thing’. So they had persuaded the ever-affable Joe Coughlan to lend Cassie two thousand pounds in cash, just for the afternoon. If the gamble paid off, Cassie promised Coughlan he could have a week’s free training for his four horses. Joe Coughlan had laughed and dismissed the notion.

  ‘For what?’ he’d said. ‘What do I have to lose?’

  ‘Two thousand hard-earned pounds, Joe,’ Cassie had warned him, ‘if Flanelly Flann decides to take the money off me.’

  ‘He won’t,’ Tomas had stated quite categorically. ‘For he wants you out of Claremore. And if he thinks you’ve started gambling, then he’ll want you to keep the money for you to go away and lose it. Which if you were a gambler, you most surely would.’

  And now the chips were down. Flannery was staring at the piles of money, while making his conclusions. Then he looked up at Cassie who was busily pretending to repair her make-up with the aid of her lipstick and powder compact. She smiled blithely at him, as if the money didn’t mean a thing, then continued carefully to lipstick her mouth.

  Flannery stared back at the money, and then picking it all up, stacked it in front of him.

  Cassie’s blood chilled, but she barely glanced away from her handheld mirror.

  ‘No, no,’ Flannery suddenly said, tapping the bundles into better shape, ‘no, there’s no reason at all for you to pay the bank back early. That’s not the reason I wanted to see you at all. No no, while your position, financially, is still a little precarious, I wouldn’t hear of such a thing.’

  ‘Dear Mr Flannery,’ she protested, ‘you must take it. We don’t want head office getting cross with you. That would never do at all.’

  Flannery hadn’t thought of that. But this reminded him. He remembered that the annual audit was coming up, and he had already received a letter from Dublin to the effect that he must review all outstanding overdrafts, and call in those over a certain limit. Cassie’s was well over that limit.

  ‘Besides,’ Cassie continued, ‘if you don’t take all this money, I could go and lose it all. I could. Just as easily as I won it. And just as quickly.’

  Flannery hesitated. People who gambled were fools. Women who gambled were even bigger fools. Cassie, like her husband gone before her, was quite obviously now a gambler. He pushed the money back to her.

  ‘You wouldn’t be such a silly girl,’ he said with a little smile. ‘Now come along, and I shall buy you lunch at the hotel.’

  Cassie put the money back in her purse with as much reluctance as she could muster, while Flannery fetched her fur coat. This time as he slipped it back on her, his hand brushed one of her breasts.

  He held the office door open for her, his puffy white cheeks once more slightly tinged with pink.

  ‘In the midst of death,’ Cassie thought to herself, ‘we are in farce.’

  ‘He almost proposed to me over lunch!’ Cassie told Tomas as they did evening stables. ‘“Now I’m aware this is neither quite the time nor the place, Mrs Rosse, to be telling you this. But sooner or later it may occur to you that in a big house such as Claremore, you’re going to get maybe a little bit lonesome.” Can you imagine, Tomas?’

  ‘I cannot, Mrs Rosse,’ Tomas replied. ‘I’d sooner see you marry into English royalty.’

  ‘It’s as bad as that?’ Cassie laughed. ‘Gracious, I thought my dislike for the dirty old man at the bank was bad enough!’

  They finished their round of inspection, which nowadays took less than a quarter of the time it had taken when Tyrone was alive, because now between them they had only ten horses in their charge. Leonora’s defection had left the yard almost half empty, and then ten months ago a mystery virus had finished off where Leonora had started.

  Cassie had determined to take over the running of the yard shortly after Tyrone had been killed. But since under the rules of racing, as a woman Cassie wasn’t allowed officially to train, the licence had to be taken out in Tomas’ name. Cassie had made her decision known to Tomas some time after the funeral, at the time of year when they were usually beginning to rough the horses off for the winter. Tomas hadn’t argued, or queried her reasons. He had just nodded, and quietly gone about his work as if it was the most natural decision in the world, and even though the Jockey Club was showing no sign of relenting their Men Only training rule.

  ‘I know nothing at all about it, you understand,’ Cassie had warned him. ‘Nothing whatsoever.’

  ‘Who does when they start, Mrs Rosse?’ Tomas had replied. ‘The main thing is you know how to feed ’em. And that’s a good head start for you.’

  ‘I know how to feed them?’

  ‘No. But I do.’

  Tomas had then touched his old cap and disappeared into the feed room to weigh out his secret recipes.

  But then one morning the following May, when Cassie was first in the yard in the morning as always, in the first box she opened up she had found a horse dying. It was a big three-year-old chestnut colt called Interim, and the day before he had been in such apparent high spirits he had bucked his work rider off on the way to the gallops and had taken all the catching. Now he was standing with his head hanging down by his knees, his eyes sunk back into his skull with a ribbon of white showing, and his breathing was fast and shallow.

  ‘At least he’s not gone down,’ Tomas muttered, inserting the thermometer in the horse’s rectum. ‘That’s the good news. The
bad news is this fellah’s not our only invalid.’

  ‘Who else?’ Cassie asked, with an urgent look.

  ‘Mr Toad, Whirlybird, Rockin’ in Rhythm and Annagh Bridge.’

  By dawn next morning, four of their best horses lay dead in their boxes. Their vet, Niall Brogan, was baffled, saying that he’d never seen horses drop down dead so quickly. He’d come out the instant Cassie had called him, and shot the horses full of antibiotics. But the moment he inspected them, he told Cassie that it would be touch and go. Interim, who was apparently the worst case, survived, but more by luck than judgement. Cassie had sat up with him in his box, since he seemed the most likely to die, and, tiring of sitting on an upturned water bucket, she’d pulled in a bale of hay. After a couple of hours, the horse had suddenly started nibbling the hay, and didn’t stop for the next eight hours, the crucial hours, as Niall Brogan had warned them they would be, and as a consequence of his greed the horse didn’t go down. Instead he kept wearily nibbling while Cassie stroked his neck, and kept squeezing a soaking sponge into his mouth to stop him dehydrating completely. By midnight the horse had turned the corner.

  So too it seemed had the star of the yard, Annagh Bridge. His temperature hadn’t hit the frightening heights that Interim’s had, staying steady around about 104° for twenty-four hours, and then slowly descending. But two days later, seemingly over the worst, his temperature again shot up, this time to 106° and twenty-four hours later he too was lying dead.

  All told, out of the twenty-two horses still in training, five died, and ten more contracted the virus. Fortunately Niall Brogan had given every horse a covering antibiotic as a necessary precaution, and those that then contracted the virus subsequently were much less severely stricken and survived. The seven horses who remained uninfected were put at once into isolation, before being removed, once the vet had given them the all-clear, to other yards, and by the end of the season, following a period of convalescence, eight of the remaining ten horses had run in over twenty-four races and all had come nowhere.

  When training started for the following season, the string had been reduced to eight horses. Two of Townshend Warner’s, one of the few owners who had stood by Claremore regardless, Moviola, a new horse of James Christiansen’s, Celebration, whom Cassie had taken back for the winter from Willie Moore, and who due to a sudden attack of ringworm was fortunately in isolation when the virus struck, running out in the home paddocks all by himself, and of course the ever-loyal Joe Coughlan’s regular foursome.

  And somewhere, from this depleted string, Cassie and Tomas had to find their racing certainty.

  ‘If it has to be within a month, six weeks,’ Tomas said, scratching the back of his head, ‘then forget about Celebration, for he’ll not be ready, Moviola’s too big and backward still, all of Joe’s are dogs anyway, so that leaves us Mr Warner’s.’

  They walked first to one of Townshend Warner’s horses and then back to the other. One was Tootsie, a very nice filly by the French stallion Mainspring out of the Irish mare Night Club Girl, who had won eight good races on the flat, and run a close second in the Irish Oaks, and the other was a big strong colt, with all the makings of a fine horse, called Reverse. His dam was a Canadian winning mare called Goody Two-Shoes, and he was the second crop of a barely known North American stallion standing in Maryland called Northern Dancer.

  ‘This could be our boy,’ Cassie said finally, after they had walked hither and thither between the two boxes half a dozen times. ‘When Mr Warner sent him over, he said the agent who found him and bought him said he could be a classic horse.’

  ‘Ach,’ said Tomas dismissively. ‘These fancy-bred American bloody horses, savin’ your presence. What’s it my old sergeant-major used to call it? That’s it. They’re all mouth and trousers.’

  ‘We’ll see about that, Tomas Muldoon,’ Cassie replied, ‘when he does his first serious bit of work.’

  In the office, Cassie looked at her work chart, and saw that Reverse was down for a spin the following Friday. She pinned Pat Ward’s name next to Tootsie, Liam Docherty’s next to Gearhan, one of Joe Coughlan’s ‘dogs’, and Tomas’s up next to Moviola.

  ‘So who’s to ride the big boy?’ Tomas asked.

  ‘I am,’ Cassie answered.

  Tomas ran out of the office after her.

  ‘Have you taken leave of your senses, Mrs Rosse?’ he cried. ‘’Tis riding work we’re talking about! Not hacking out on Bouncer!’

  ‘I have been doing riding work, Tomas,’ she told him. ‘I’ve been doing riding work three times a week for Willie Moore.’

  ‘And who taught yous?’

  ‘Willie.’

  ‘Willie! Willie Moore taught yous? And what was wrong with me?’

  Cassie turned and smiled at Tomas, who was practically hopping up and down with rage.

  ‘I thought if I was going to make a fool of myself,’ she answered, ‘much better to do it away from home.’

  ‘And who’s to say you’ll be able to handle Reverse?’ Tomas persisted.

  ‘Willie Moore does, Tomas. He put me up on Fly In Me Eye last evening, and he said if I could pull him up before Tipperary then I could ride anything.’

  Cassie grinned. ‘I pulled him half a furlong from the end of the gallop. Willie said I’d rewritten history.’

  Cassie had only been able to do so thanks to her winter of preparation: thanks to the six months she’d spent pounding the roads and running up the hills, the weeks she’d spent doing sit ups and press ups and lift ups, to tighten and tauten every muscle in her arms and legs and stomach, and the hours she’d spent crouched, as Willie Moore had shown her, in the proper ‘riding out’ position.

  ‘Until you can stay like this,’ he’d said to her, demonstrating what he meant, ‘until you can remain motionless like this for fifteen minutes, forget about riding racehorses. That’s if you want to ride them properly.’

  The ‘riding-out’ position meant adopting the orthodox jockey position, but without the benefit of saddle, irons, or horse. You simply stood crouched, with your legs bent at the knees, your thighs parallel to the floor and your hands holding invisible reins. Cassie thought it looked easy until she first tried it, having to straighten up with cramp after only one minute.

  It took her a fortnight before she was able to hold the position for two and a half minutes without moving, six weeks before she was strong enough to hold it for ten and six months before she finally could do it for fifteen minutes. And all this time she was riding. First on Bouncer, whom she would canter for three or four miles with her leathers pulled up four holes and her hands turned over on the reins; then on one of Willie’s school-masters, an ex-racehorse he used to school all his lads; and finally the day came when he put her up on her first two-year-old.

  ‘Remember, Cassie,’ he warned her, ‘what you have under you is even more frightened probably than you.’

  ‘Is that possible?’ Cassie asked, as she felt the colt begin to prance under her.

  ‘You’ve got to give him the confidence, Cassie,’ Willie went on. ‘And that’ll come through your hands. If he feels frightened hands on those ribbons, he’ll cart you into the next county.’

  ‘Why am I doing this, Willie?’ Cassie cried, as the horse bucked and then ran sideways out of the gate with her. ‘I could be in bed, reading a book!’

  Willie had ridden alongside her that morning not only to give her confidence, but also to watch how she went. The young horse gave Cassie a terrible time on the way to the gallops, trying to climb banks and hedges, and shying at everything from a drain cover to his own shadow. Then when they got on to Willie’s gallops, he plunged and tried to run off with her before they’d even settled and checked their girths, and Cassie did well to hold him in check.

  By then her terror had passed. As they walked towards the point where they would start their serious work, Cassie realised that the worst that could happen to her was that she could get thrown and killed, and if that was the case there was
nothing to be frightened of because it meant she would be seeing Tyrone again. So she forgot her fear and concentrated on settling the horse under her, whose sole intention at that moment was either to throw her or bolt with her.

  She relaxed her rein and dropped the horse. He was taken completely by surprise and, finding nothing to fight against, he too relaxed, and started walking round in the circle which Cassie was asking him to do. Willie nodded, and circled after her. Then he reminded his lads of his instructions and called to Cassie to lead off. Cassie collected her horse up, squeezed him on and forward, and as soon as he was cantering nicely she was up in the correct position without a bump. The horse tried to seize hold of his bit now that he realised he was being asked to go, but Cassie fooled him again by refusing to fight him. Instead she softened her hands and tightened her legs, shortening the horse’s stride and bringing him back on the bridle.

  By the end of the first furlong Cassie had him striding out sweetly. Willie was upside her, and he called across to her as they passed the second furlong pole to let him stretch for the last two of the five furlong workout. Cassie did as she was told and as soon as she asked the horse, he quickened nicely, and left Willie’s horse for dead.

  It was then a matter of stopping him, and of doing so without jarring him, or hurting the young horse in the mouth. But he had a good hold of his bit now, and was doing his level best to cock his jaw so that Cassie would lose control of him. But his jockey had done her homework, and rather than jab him in the mouth, she kept herself perfectly balanced in the saddle and slackened her rein off almost completely. As soon as she felt the horse drop his bit, she gathered the reins up again, but so smoothly that the horse didn’t even notice, and having got him back, began to pull him up gradually by tipping her weight further and further back from his centre of gravity, at the same time letting out more rein.

  The young horse came down correctly through the canter, into a good long trot, then finally a walk, as Cassie turned him round at the end of the straight.

  Willie finally ranged alongside once more, pulling his horse up sweetly and carefully. He turned his horse round and walked back in silence with Cassie. Cassie patted her horse’s neck, flicked his mane over, and let out a notch on his girth. What she didn’t do was ask her trainer what he thought. Instead, as they headed the string home, she observed the total silence he was keeping.