by Дик Фрэнсис
I felt a great and undeserved sense of release. I hadn't wanted to come to Lambourn again: I'd avoided it from guilt and unwillingness to risk stirring Emily to an ill will she had in fact never shown. I had shied away habitually from the memory of her baffled eyes.
Her actual words to me had been tough. 'All right then, if you want to live on a mountain, bugger off.' It had been her eyes that had begged me to stay.
She'd said, 'If you care more for bloody paint than you do for me, bugger off.'
Now, more than five tranquillising years later, she said, 'I wouldn't have given up training racehorses, not for anything.'
'I know.'
'And you couldn't give up painting.'
'No.'
'So there we are. It's OK now between us, isn't it?'
'You're generous, Em.'
She grinned. 'I quite enjoy saintly forbearance. Do you want something to eat?'
It was she who made mushroom omelettes in the kitchen, though when I'd lived there I'd done most of the cooking. We ate at the kitchen table. She still had a passion for ice cream: strawberry, that evening.
She said, 'Do you want a divorce? Is that why you came here?'
Startled, I said, 'No. Hadn't thought of it! Do you?'
'You can have one any time.'
'Do you want one?'
'Actually,' she said calmly, 'I find it quite useful sometimes to be able to mention a husband, even if he's never around.' She sucked her ice-cream spoon. 'I'm used to being in charge. I no longer want a live-in husband, to be frank.'
She stacked our plates in the dishwasher, and said, 'If you don't want a divorce, why did you come?'
'Ivan's horses.'
'That's crap. You could have asked on the phone.'
The Emily I'd known had been forthrightly honest. She had rid herself of some of the owners she'd inherited from her father because they'd sometimes wanted her to instruct her jockeys not to win. There was a world of difference, she'd said, between giving a young horse an easy race to get him to like the game, and trying to cheat the racing public by stopping a horse from winning in order to come home next time out at better odds. 'My horses run to win,' she said robustly, and the racing world, with clear-eyed judgment, gave her its trust.
It was tentatively, therefore, that I said, 'Ivan wants me to make Golden Malt disappear.'
'What on earth are you talking about? Do you want some coffee?'
She made the coffee in a drip-feed pot, a new one since my days.
I explained about the brewery's financial predicament.
'The brewery,' Emily said tartly, 'owes me four months' training fees for Golden Malt. I wrote to Ivan personally about it not long before his heart attack. I don't like to bitch, but I want my money.'
'You'll get it,' I promised. 'But he wants me to take the horse away from here, so that it doesn't get sucked in and sold prematurely.'
She frowned, 'I can't let you take it.'
'Well… yes you can.'
I stretched down the table to reach the folder I'd brought with me and handed her one of the certified copies of the power of attorney, explaining that it gave me authority to do as I thought best regarding Ivan's property, which one way or another definitely included Golden Malt.
She read the whole thing solemnly and at the end said merely, 'All right. What do you want to do?'
'To ride the horse away from here tomorrow morning, when the town and the Downs are alive with horses going in all directions.'
She stared. 'Firstly,' she said, 'he's not an easy ride.'
'And I'd fall off?'
'You might. And secondly, where would you go?'
'If I tell you where, you'll be involved more than maybe you'd want to be.'
She thought it over. She said, 'I don't see how you can do it without my help. At the very least you need me to tell the lads not to worry when one of the horses goes missing.'
'Much easier with your help,' I agreed.
We drank the coffee, not talking.
'I like Ivan,' she said finally. 'Technically he's still my stepfather-in-law, same as Vivienne is still my mother-in-law. I see them at the races. We're on good terms, though she's never effusive. We send each other Christmas cards.'
I nodded. I knew.
'If Ivan wants the horse hidden,' Emily said, 'I'll help you. So where do you plan to go?'
'I bought a copy of Horse and Hound in Newbury,' I said, taking the magazine out of the folder and opening at the pages of classified advertisements. "There's a man here, over the Downs from here, saying he looks after hunters at livery and prepares horses for hunter 'chases and point-to-points. I thought about phoning him and asking him to take my hack for a few weeks. For four weeks, in fact, until a day or two before the King Alfred Gold Cup. The horse would have to come back here, wouldn't he, so he could run with you as trainer?'
She nodded absently, looking where my finger pointed.
'I'm not sending Golden Malt to him,' she announced. 'That man's a bully, horses go sour on him, and he thinks he's God's gift to women.'
'Oh.'
She thought briefly. 'I have a friend, a woman, who offers the same service and is a damn sight better.'
'Is she within riding distance?'
'About eight miles across the Downs. You'd get lost on the Downs, though.'
'Er… you used to have a map of the tracks and gallops.'
'Yes, the Ordnance Survey map. But my map must be seven years old. There are a lot of new roads.'
'Roads may change, but the tracks are seven thousand years old. They'll still be there.'
She laughed and fetched the map from the office, spreading it out on the kitchen table. 'Her yard is west of here,' Emily said, pointing. 'She's quite a good way away from Mandown, where most people exercise the Lambourn strings. She's there, see, outside the village of Foxhill.'
'I could find that,' I said.
Emily looked doubtful, but phoned her friend.
'My yard's so full,' she said, 'could you take an overflow for me for a week or two? Keep him fit. He'll be racing later on… You can? Good… I'll send one of my lads over with him in the morning. The horse's name? Oh, just call him Bobby. Send me the bills. How are your kids?'
After the chit-chat she put down the receiver.
'There you are,' she said. 'One conjuring trick done to order.'
'You're brilliant.'
'Absolutely right. Where are you sleeping?'
'I'll find a room in Lambourn.'
'Not unless you want to advertise your presence. Don't forget you lived here for six months. People know you. We got married in Lambourn church. I don't want tongues wagging that you've come back to me. You can sleep here, on a sofa, out of sight.'
'How about,' I said impulsively, 'in your bed?'
'No.'
I didn't try to persuade her. Instead, I borrowed her telephone for two calls, one to my mother to tell her I would be away for the night but hoped to have good news for Ivan the next day, and one to Jed Parlane in Scotland.
'How are you?' he said anxiously.
'Living at a flat-out gallop.'
'I meant… anyway, I took the police to the bothy. What a mess.'
'Mm.'
'I gave them your drawings. The police haven't had any other complaints about hikers robbing people around here.'
'Not surprising.'
'Himself wants to see you as soon as you return. He says I'm to meet you off the train and take you straight to the castle. When are you coming back?'
'With luck, on tomorrow night's Highlander. I'll let you know.'
'How is Sir Ivan?'
'Not good.'
'Take care, then,' he said. 'So long.'
Emily, deep in thought, said, as I put down the receiver, 'I'll send my head lad out with the first lot, as usual, but I'll tell him not to take Golden Malt. I'll tell him that the horse is going away for a bit of remedial treatment to his legs. There's nothing wrong with his legs, actually, but
my lads know better than to argue.'
They always had, I reflected. Also, they faithfully stayed. She trained winners; the lads prospered, and did as she said.
She wrote, as she always did, a list of which lad would ride which horse when the first lot of about twenty horses pulled out for exercise at seven o'clock the next morning, and which lad would ride which horse in the second lot, after breakfast, and which lad would go out again later in the morning with every horse not yet exercised. She employed about twenty lads - men and women - for the horses, besides two secretaries, a housekeeper and a yard man. Jockeys came for breakfast and to school the horses over jumps. Vets called. People delivered hay and feed and removed manure. Owners visited. I'd learned to ride, but not well. The telephone trilled incessantly. Messages whizzed in and out by computer. No one ever for long sat still.
I had been absorbed into the busy scenery as general cook/dogsbody, and runner of errands, and although I'd fitted in as best I could, and for a while happily, my own internal life had shrivelled to zero. There had been weeks of self-doubt, of wondering if my compulsion to paint was mere selfishness, if the belief in my talent was a delusion, if I should deny the promptings of my nature and be forever the lieutenant that Emily wanted.
Now, more than five years later, she put her newly written list for the head lad in the message box outside the back door. She let out her two Labradors for a last run and walked round the stable yard to make sure that all was well. Then she came in, whistled for the dogs to return to their baskets in the kitchen, and locked her doors against the night.
All so familiar. All so long ago.
She gave me two travelling rugs to keep warm on the sofa and said calmly, 'Goodnight.'
I put my arms round her tentatively. 'Em?'
'No,' she said.
I kissed her forehead, holding her close. 'Em?'
'Oh,' she said in exasperation. 'All right.'
CHAPTER FOUR
She no longer slept in the big bedroom we'd shared, but in the old guest room, in a new queen-sized romping ground suitable for passing fancies.
She had slotted a new luxurious bathroom into what had once been her father's dressing-room. Downstairs the house might be as I remembered it, but upstairs it was not.
'This is not a precedent,' Emily said, taking off layers down to a white lace bra. 'And I don't think it's wise.'
'Bugger wise.'
'You obviously haven't been getting enough.'
'No, I haven't.' I switched off the lights and drew back the curtains, as I'd always done. 'How about you?'
'I'm known as a dragon. There aren't many with the guts of St George.'
'Do you regret it?'
She rustled out of the rest of her clothes and slid naked between the sheets, her curved shape momentarily silhouetted against a window oblong of stars. I took off my clothes and felt ageless.
'Rumours run round Lambourn like the pox,' she said. 'I'm bloody careful who I let into this room.'
We stopped talking. We had never, I supposed, been inventive or innovative lovers. There had been no need. Front to front with hands and lips and tongues we had shivered with sensual intense arousal, and that at least hadn't changed. Her body to my touch was long known and long forgotten, like going back to an abandoned building: a newly explored breast, familiar concave abdomen, hard mound of pelvis, soft dark warm mystery below and beyond, known secretly but never explored by spotlight since, in spite of her forthright public face, she was privately shy.
I did what I knew she liked, and as ever my own intensest pleasure came in pleasing her. Entry was easy, her readiness receptive. Movement strong and rhythmic, an instinct shared. When I felt her deep pulse beating, then too I took my own long moment; sometimes in the past it had been as good as that, but not always. It seemed that in that way also we had grown up.
'I've missed you,' she said.
'I, too.'
We slept peacefully side by side, and it was in the morning in the shower that she looked at my collection of bruises with disbelief.
'I told you,' I said mildly. 'I got mugged.'
'Trampled by a stampede of cows, more like.'
'Bulls.'
'OK, then. Bulls. Don't come downstairs until the first lot has gone out.'
I'd almost forgotten I was there to steal a horse. I waited until the scrunching hooves outside had diminuendoed into the distance and went down for coffee and toast.
Emily came in from the yard, saying, 'I've saddled and bridled Golden Malt. He's all ready for you, but he's pretty fresh. For God's sake, don't let him whip round and buck you off. The last thing I want is to have him loose on the Downs.'
'I've been thinking about anonymity,' I said, spreading honey on toast. 'Have you still got any of those nightcaps you put over their heads in very cold weather? A nightcap would hide that very white blaze down his nose. And perhaps boots for his white socks…'
She nodded, amused. 'And you'd better borrow a helmet from the cloakroom, and anything else you need.'
I thanked her and went into the large downstairs cloakroom where there was always a haphazard collection of jackets, boots, gloves and helmets for kitting out visitors. I found some jodhpur boots to fit me (better than trainers for the job) and tied my hair up on the top of my head with a shoelace before hiding the lot under a shiny blue helmet. I slung round my neck a pair of jockeys' goggles, the big mica jobs they used against rain and mud… fine disguise for a black eye.
Emily, still amused, said no one would recognise the result. 'And do borrow one of those padded jackets. It's cold on the Downs these mornings.'
I fetched a dark-coloured jacket and said, 'If anyone comes looking for the horse, say I had authority to take him, and I took him, and you don't know where he is.'
'Do you think anyone will come?' She was curious more than worried, it seemed.
'Hope not.'
Golden Malt eyed me with disillusion from inside his nightcap. Emily gave me a leg-up onto his back and at this point looked filled with misgiving.
'When the hell did you last sit on a horse?' she asked, frowning.
'Er… some tune ago.' But I got my feet into the stirrups and collected the reins into a reasonable bunch.
'How often have you actually ridden since you left here?' Emily demanded.
'It's all in the mind,' I said. Golden Malt skittered around unhelpfully. It looked a long way down to the ground.
'You're a bloody fool,' she said.
'I'll phone you if anything goes wrong… and thanks, Em.'
'Yes. Go on, then. Bugger off.' She was smiling. 'I'll kill you if you let him get loose.'
I'd reckoned that the first three hundred yards might be the most difficult from the point of view of my deficient riding ability as I had to go that distance along a public road to reach the track that led up to the Downs; but I was lucky, there were few cars on the road and those that were had drivers who slowed down for racehorses. I touched my helmet repeatedly in thanks and managed to steer a not-too-disgraceful course.
No one wound down a window and called to me by name or linked the camouflaged horse to Emily. I was just on one of hundreds of Lambourn equine residents, large as life but also invisible.
Golden Malt thought he knew where he was going, which helped at first but not later. He tossed his head with pleasure and trotted jauntily up the rutted access to the downlands which spread for fifty miles east to west across central southern England - from the Chilterns to Salisbury Plain. I felt more at home on the Downs than in Lambourn itself, but even there solitude was rare: strings of horses cluttered every skyline and trainers' Land Rovers bumped busily in their wake. Lambourn's industry lay out there on the sweeping green uplands in the wind and the prehistoric mornings. I had thought that they would be world enough: that I could live and work there… and I'd been wrong.
Golden Malt began to fight when I turned him to the west at the top of the hill, instead of continuing to the east. He ran backwards, h
e turned in small circles, he obstinately refused to go where I tried to point his head. I didn't know whether expert horsemen with legs of iron would have forced him to obey in a long battle of wills: I only knew that I was losing.
I remembered suddenly that one day I'd stood beside Emily on the trainers' stand at a race meeting watching one of her horses refuse to go down to the start. The horse had run backwards, cantered crabwise, turned in circles, ignored every instruction and used his vast muscle power to make a fool of the slight man on his back. And that man had been a tough experienced jockey.
Across the years I heard Emily's furious comment, 'Why doesn't the bloody fool get off and lead him?'
Oh Em, I thought. My dear wife. Thank you.
I slid off the stubborn brute's back and pulled the reins over his head, and walked towards the west, and as if his entire nature had done an abracadabra, Golden Malt ambled along peacefully beside me so that all I had to worry about was not letting him step on my heels.
Emily's anxiety that I would get lost on the bare rolling grassland didn't take into consideration the boyhood training I'd had in following deer across unmapped Scottish moorlands. The first great rule was to determine the direction of the wind, and to steer by its angle on one's face. Stalking a deer was only possible if one were down wind of him, so that he couldn't smell one's presence.
The wind on that particular September day was blowing steadily from the north. I headed at first straight into it and then, when Golden Malt was used to its feel, veered slightly to the left, plodding purposefully across the green featureless sea as if I knew my bearings exactly.
I could see glimpses of villages in the lower distances, but no horses. When I'd walked about a mile I tried riding again, scrambling clumsily back into the saddle and gathering the reins; and this time, as if unsure in his isolation from sight and sound of his own kind, Golden Malt walked docilely where I asked.
I risked another trot.
No problem.
I crossed a footpath or two and skirted a few farms, setting dogs barking. There was no great need for pinpoint accuracy at that stage of the journey because somewhere ahead lay the oldest path in Britain, the Ridgeway, that still ran east-west between the Thames at Goring Gap to West Kennet, a village south-west of Swindon. Although from there on it had disappeared, it was likely the Druids had walked it to reach Stonehenge. True to its name, it ran along the highest ground of the hills because once, long before the Romans came with Julius Caesar, the valleys had been wooded and prowled by bears.