Cassie stared at the unmoving image of Leonora, and once again felt her blood chill. Leonora was the owner of Millstone Grit. Or rather she must be the co-owner with her husband, because in the pictures Cassie had seen of the horse in the sporting press, she had failed to recognise the owner’s colours.
Leonora owned the now co-favourite for the 2,000 Guineas.
Leonora owned the only horse which on paper Cassie knew was capable of beating The Nightingale.
As Cassie continued with the preparation of her own horse, she occasionally wondered why Leonora hadn’t raised the subject when she had visited Claremore before Christmas, or when she had telephoned Cassie in the New Year. Perhaps she assumed that Cassie already knew, and was waiting for Cassie to mention it. Whatever the reason, Cassie knew the omission was quite deliberate. Leonora was far too skilled a card player to miss any chance of a bluff, a double bluff or a finesse.
Her ploy may well have been intended to worry Cassie, to shake her confidence at a vital moment. But in fact it had quite the opposite effect on her rival, who became only more determined to succeed.
‘It’s been rather like shooting in the dark up till now,’ Cassie told Mattie as they watched Nightie’s last piece of work before his first race of the season. ‘But now I can see what’s in my sights—’
Cassie smiled, while her son looked round at her.
‘I thought it was the Derby that was in your sights?’ he asked.
‘It was. And it still is,’ Cassie replied. ‘But this has kind of altered things somewhat.’
‘You mean it’s no longer “just a race”?’
‘You got it, Mattie. This isn’t “just a race” any more. This, to mix my metaphor, is a whole damn new ballgame altogether.’
The Nightingale thundered past them, nostrils flared and ears pricked, and with Dex perched in perfect balance on the horse’s withers.
Cassie and Mattie’s watches clicked to stop, and they both looked at the times.
‘Wow,’ said Mattie.
‘You said it,’ Cassie agreed. ‘And that’s still only three-quarter speed.’
The going was perfect for the Gladness Stakes, the sun and April breezes just sufficiently drying out the worst from the showers which had fallen earlier in the week. The field of ten runners included all the best of the native Guineas hopes. Once again the big horse went down very scratchily to the start, but this time, the ‘whisper’ being so strong about the Claremore hot-shot, the punters weren’t to be denied, and The Nightingale started the 4/6 favourite. Dex rode the race absolutely to his orders, keeping the big fellow loping along on the outside, well free of trouble. For those in the stands who’d put their money where their mouths were, it must have looked for a moment that the jockey had left it too late, because there was a very audible gasp from the packed crowd as the leaders kicked for home, with the odds-on favourite still idling half a dozen lengths adrift. Then inside the distance Dex just shook up the big horse, and in a matter of a few strides it was all over, The Nightingale getting up and winning by three quarters of a length.
Not a lot of so-called experts spotted the ease with which the big dark horse won. They had already fixed in their mind’s eye the facility of Millstone Grit’s Ascot victory and the distance by which he had achieved it, and so consequently, although the Telegraph called Nightie’s win ‘clever’, and The Times reported that ‘Cassie Rosse’s big horse seemed to win as he liked’, the consensus of opinion was that the horse looked idle, and was unlikely to stay with the blistering gallop Millstone Grit was sure to get at Newmarket. As a consequence, Millstone Grit was installed as favourite at 5/4 for the Guineas, with The Nightingale available at 11/8.
Only Sporting Life read the Curragh Race accurately.
After the way the Claremore horse strolled home at the Curragh, it’s no longer a question of who’s going to win the 2,000 Guineas, but who’s going to come second. The Nightingale played with a very high-class field, and when Dexter Bryant simply shook the reins at him, the big horse at once lengthened his stride and strolled away from Bless Me Father and Levitation, who were both all out at the post.
The reporter then went on to discuss the time of the race, which was only half a second outside the Curragh record for seven furlongs, and concluded very confidently that The Nightingale would win at Newmarket at the beginning of May ‘with one leg tied behind his saddle’.
The home money started to pour in for the Irish second favourite, and Cassie, although her security system was, she hoped, second to none, took the precaution of hiring extra guards and dogs, to keep away any unwelcome visitors from the yard. Every move the horse made was now done under carefully arranged surveillance and protection, even though at Claremore they were in the fortunate position of not having to leave the estate to get to the gallops, since both the turf and the all-weather strips were safely contained within Claremore’s stone walls and high fences.
Nonetheless, two lads stayed awake in shifts outside Nightie’s box, and the close-circuit television never slept either.
As it happened, it wasn’t The Nightingale who went wrong before the Guineas. The day before the big race, Millstone Grit went down in his box with what appeared to be an attack of colic, which as the public afterwards learned, posed an enormous problem for Jonathan Keating, his trainer. Under the rules of racing, no medication can be administered to a horse the day before a race, and in order to relax muscular and intestinal spasms of a horse suffering from colitis, it is necessary to inject an antispasmodic drug. So Keating was faced with a set of unenviable choices. He could hope it was just a mild attack and do nothing. If that hope proved valid, the horse would recover quickly and by himself, and be able to race the next day. He could do nothing in the hope that it was indeed a mild attack, be proved wrong, and lose his best horse with a twisted gut. Or he could inject the horse, thus ruling out the possibility of the horse dying, but also of the favourite being able to run in the Guineas.
He wisely chose the better safe than sorry path, and had his vet inject the horse. As it happened, it was a bad attack of colitis, and it took more than just an antispasmodic drug to save him. It took all the skill of one of Newmarket’s top vets and the faithful round-the-clock attentions of the horse’s devoted lad.
The punters, however, did not see it that way, and the eleventh-hour withdrawal of the favourite was not taken well. Jonathan Keating was subjected to some terrifying verbal abuse on his arrival at the course and, deciding in disgust to miss the race and return immediately to his home, was then knocked unconscious by a full and flying beer can. He was rushed off to hospital where they had to put eight stitches in the wound to his head.
There were also reports in all the morning papers of a full-scale row between Leonora and Keating, the former accusing the latter of ill-considered thinking and overhasty action with regard to the treatment of her horse. Keating was reported as telling Leonora she could always take her horse elsewhere, and the latest rumour buzzing round the course was that was exactly what Mrs Charles C. Lovett Andrew intended to do.
Mrs Charles C. Lovett Andrew was also highly noticeable by her absence from the racecourse.
Happily, The Nightingale had journeyed well, and was so relaxed when Liam pulled him out of his stable on the morning of the race that it might have seemed that the horse had been in Newmarket all his life. Dex rode him in a gentle exercise canter and the big horse worked as he always did, easily and sensibly.
‘You can count your money, folks,’ Dex said as they put the horse up for his breakfast. ‘There’s nobody going to beat my fellah.’
On the way to the parade for the race, the French horse played up and, breaking ranks, aimed a kick at The Nightingale before his jockey could pull him back into line. The kick, which, had it landed might well have broken one of Nightie’s’ legs, missed the Claremore horse by inches, thanks mainly to Dex’s quick reactions. But the incident unsettled the Irish horse and he started to sweat up profusely, which was mos
t unusual for a horse already renowned for his extraordinarily mature temperament, so much so that by the time the horses were being led out in alphabetical order, The Nightingale was beginning to shake almost uncontrollably. Rather than upset the favourite perhaps irrevocably, Dexter, gambling on nothing worse than a heavy fine, pulled his horse out of line and cantered him slowly down to the start prematurely.
‘What in hell is he doing?’ Cassie asked Matt as they watched the incident from the stands. ‘Does he want us to lose the race before it’s even run?’
But fortunately for Dex, the French horse was now behaving so badly, rearing and plunging in the middle of the course, that all the other horses had broken line and were making their way to the start in any order they liked.
Cassie swung her glasses back down the course and focused on her horse. With great relief she saw Dex had cooled him right down and was walking the last two furlongs to the starting stalls. By the time all the runners had reached the start, and the roll was being called, Nightie’s ears were pricked again, and Dex was quietly stroking his neck, talking to him all the while.
‘I don’t think I can watch,’ Cassie told her son, putting her glasses down.
‘Girls,’ Mattie sighed.
Cassie picked her glasses back up.
‘They’re under starter’s orders!’ the commentator announced, ‘and they’re off!’
The Nightingale was drawn two off the rails on the far side of the straight mile. He was so fast out of the stalls that Cassie saw that Dex had to take a pull at him to settle. But the horse was such a sensible animal that he at once took note of his rider, and dropped back to settle near the rear of the tightly bunched field. The French horse Pastiche, who had caused all the trouble, was taking them along at a rattling good gallop, which was sure to find out those horses who didn’t genuinely get the trip. There certainly could be no excuses for it being ‘a funny sort of race’. All the horses and jockeys concerned knew they were in a proper contest.
Pastiche dropped away three furlongs from home, and at the Bushes, Pat Richards set Never Mind alight, and the horse responded by lengthening and going two lengths clear. Biopic, the quietly fancied third favourite, set off in pursuit, with Cimeno, one of the outsiders, matching him stride for stride.
Dex, meanwhile, was lying about sixth, two off the rails, and apparently blocked behind a wall of three beaten horses.
Then coming into the dip, The Nightingale appeared as if by magic in the centre of the course, Dex having smoothly switched him out from his cover and shown him daylight. As soon as he shook him up, The Nightingale knew he meant business, and for the first time in his life slipped into top gear. The result was sensational. The sudden acceleration, coupled with the big horse’s enormous stride, made the leading three horses, who only one second before would have appeared to have had the finish between them, look as though they were treading water.
The Nightingale swallowed them up, with Dex riding him out only with hands and heels, to win by 2½ lengths.
Cassie asked her son to lead the horse in, but he refused, as did Josephine, who had been excused from rehearsals for her new play and had arrived two minutes before the ‘off. And so to tumultuous cheers from the punters, and a positive avalanche of Irish hats in the air, Cassie Rosse from Westboro Falls, New Hampshire, led in Claremore’s and her own first Classic winner.
‘What a race,’ Brough Scott said to her on television shortly afterwards.
‘What a horse,’ Cassie smiled.
‘Is he the superhorse everyone is saying he is, Cassie?’
‘Ask me that after Epsom, Brough, or at Longchamps in October.’
‘You think he’s that good, do you?’
‘From the way he won today,’ Cassie replied, ‘I’ll be lucky if I ever have another horse half as good as this fellow.’
‘And of course he’s homebred, just to make the fairy tale complete.’
‘He’s homebred and made, absolutely. And I don’t think you’ve seen the best of him yet.’
Brough Scott paused as he consulted a slip of paper he’d been handed off camera.
‘Hills go even money for Epsom, and the Tote 5/4,’ he told Cassie.
‘I’d take the 5/4, wouldn’t you?’ Cassie smiled. ‘You won’t get that on the day.’
‘Will he handle Epsom? He’s a very big horse.’
‘They’re always either too big or too small, aren’t they? Until they win. And then they’re just right. He’ll handle Epsom. I’ll make sure of that.’
The last remark passed unnoticed by everyone, except the staff at Claremore. They knew its significance, and they knew, like their Guv’nor, that Nightie would handle Epsom all right.
Because Cassie, an unconventional woman in a conventional man’s world, did not always respect the orthodoxies of her profession. When Tyrone had been alive, she had always been bombarding him with questions about certain training practices she privately considered either archaic or just downright illogical.
‘Why, for instance,’ she had often asked him, ‘if people aren’t certain their horses will stay say seven furlongs or a mile, why don’t they school them seriously over that distance instead of waiting till they race in public and wasting the punters’ money when their horses run out of steam?’
‘Because that’s what we call leaving your race on the gallops,’ Tyrone had sighed.
‘Nonsense,’ Cassie had countered. ‘It’s simply because it’s the way you’ve always done it.’
So when her time had come to take control of Claremore, and whenever she had a horse in her care she wasn’t sure would get a certain distance, she would have a mixed gallop with some of Willie Moore’s string, having converted Willie to her way of thinking.
‘Look,’ she’d told him, ‘if you want to race them over seven furlongs, gallop them over seven. If you want to race them over a mile and a half, gallop them over a mile and a half. You don’t have to take them racing clip. Take them the same speed as you normally work them. Three quarters speed. And the ones who are going best at the end are going to be the ones who are going to get the trip best on the course.’
So far, with the exception of the rogue horses who never did any work at home, saving it all for the races, Cassie had proved herself right. When she announced that a Claremore horse got a mile and two, it invariably did. And she never once used as an excuse for a horse of hers that got beaten that it was because it didn’t get the trip.
‘Horses get bored too,’ she’d told Tyrone. ‘They shouldn’t be standing in all day. Arkle used to help round up the sheep on the farm. Old Pat Sullivan told me he used to hack his horses five miles to the races and win on them. We’re too soft on our lot. They’re mollycoddled. They should all be doing more. Toughening up. Keeping their minds open.’
And so her horses swam, and were turned out in the paddocks on warm afternoons, and were exercised twice a day, the more uppity ones having half an hour on the lunge or the horsewalker besides their twice-daily constitutional. And if they were fit, they raced as often as possible, the only proviso being that they had to have the ground they liked.
‘I’ve seen too many good horses being ruined by being made to run on the firm,’ she told Mattie. ‘Your father wouldn’t do it, and neither will I. Claremore horses don’t race on concrete.’
By the same right if any of her horses were to run at Epsom, then they had to learn how to gallop down hills.
Hills were one thing Cassie did not have to construct at Claremore, for she was surrounded by them. What she did do, though, was create a Tattenham Hill and Corner in County Wicklow. And oddly enough, although it was perfectly visible to the eye of any visitor, invited or uninvited, the long-railed drop Cassie built down the side of the hill behind the house itself rarely raised any curiosity whatsoever.
Tomas had called it Herself’s Folly, and when Cassie had broached the idea to him, had suffered one of his minor fits of apoplexy and asked her if she wanted to break all her horse
s’ legs or what?
‘If they’re going to break a leg coming down hill, Tomas,’ she’d answered him, ‘I’d rather they learned not to do it at home.’
‘Dear God in heaven,’ Tomas had sighed. ‘You’re becoming more Irish than the Irish.’
‘What I mean,’ Cassie had continued, ‘is that people don’t think twice about running their horses at tracks with severe gradients, like Epsom, and Lingfield, and Cheltenham over the jumps. And yet they think you’re crazy if you propose schooling a horse at racing pace downhill. You wouldn’t go out hunting on a horse that couldn’t gallop downhill.’
‘I wouldn’t go out hunting,’ Tomas replied. ‘You need a plate in your head to follow hounds.’
‘Mark my words, Tomas,’ Cassie had warned him. ‘When and if I ever have a runner in the Esom Derby, the one thing we’re going to be sure of is that he can handle the track.’
And so The Nightingale, who’d already been introduced to Claremore’s version of Tattenham Hill, was given two very serious schools along the rise of the hill and down its long left-handed slope.
He handled both outings perfectly. Dexter kept the horse perfectly balanced, the first time making him run down the hill on the rails, with the other horses in front and to the side of him, and the second time making him hit the front as they came off the final bend.
‘The only thing we can’t re-create,’ Cassie said at the daily debriefing, ‘besides the crowds, and the funfair, and that amazing, crazy atmosphere, is the camber of the straight. You’ve ridden it, Dex, so you know it. But what we’ve got to watch out for is tired horses inside you rolling off the rail and coming across the course because of the camber. We have to be on the rail, or one or two off it at most. And we mustn’t be more than eight of the pace coming off that last bend. I’d prefer to see you make your run up on the rails, but if they shut you out, you’re going to have to sail for home a lot earlier than old Nightie’s used to. You get something taking you on the inside who starts to tire and he’ll carry you over to the grandstand.’
To Hear a Nightingale Page 69