What did impress people about Moody—what invariably intimidated them into respectful silence and circumspection—were his burning dark eyes, full of his intelligence and, not so occasionally, his anger and meanness. He glared at the tall, silver-haired jockey. The man looked away, and then at his watch.
“Mr. Moody!” said a new voice on the phone. “How’s your weekend going?” Wolfenson’s eagerness was as annoying to Moody as the security officer’s lethargy.
“Anything going on I need to know about? Aside from the shoot-’em-up in Central America?”
“No sir. Well, Senator Reidy called. Said there was a problem with the Earth Treaty, but he was handling it.”
The handsome jockey was watching him, frowning slightly.
“What problem?”
“He said he was having some trouble with Senator Sorenson, that he might be backing away from his commitment. He said not to worry; he’d take care of it Monday.”
“Monday! The goddamned committee may take a vote on the thing Tuesday morning! Where is Sorenson?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Then why are you there? Where’s Reidy?”
“He said he was spending the weekend on some boat. He called from Annapolis.”
“Find out what boat! Have him call me!”
“Yes sir!”
Moody hung up without a further word. The gentleman jockey straightened.
“It’s all yours,” Moody said, as close as he would come to apologizing for keeping the man waiting.
“Thank you, Governor,” the man said, politely.
The fellow was at least aware of the fact that Moody, before he had become the president’s chief of staff, had been the Democratic governor of the state of Maryland, much as that seemed to matter in Virginia.
“S’all right,” Moody said.
The people of the horse country were as tribal as the Scottish clans and as feudal as medieval England. The ruling families—Lynwood Fairbrother’s in Dandytown, the Arundels in Middleburg, and the Mellons in Upperville—were as powerful in their way as the barons of the Magna Carta. Their wives and daughters controlled the social life of their communities absolutely, presiding over the rituals and pageantry of the steeplechase races, horse shows, and fox hunts like queens and countesses at court.
The breeders, trainers, and riders were nobility, too. Kitty Beveridge of Middleburg and Alixe Percy of Dandytown had won so many firsts in area horse shows that the ribbons strung from their stable tents at area competitions resembled the battle pennants flying at medieval tournaments. Young Patrick Worrall of the Sheppard-Worrall stables had taken two Virginia Gold Cups before he was twenty. Speedy Smithwick of Middleburg had won more than a hundred races. Captain David Spencer Showers, the silver-haired rider Moody had encountered by the telephone but not recognized, had won more than thirty major events, despite a foreign service career that had kept him abroad for years at a time.
Horse country was a kingdom unto itself, running through the Piedmont and rolling foothills of the Appalachian Mountains from South Carolina all the way up to New York’s Hudson River Valley. Virginia was the heart of this kingdom. The other states within the realm had their own aristocracies, but none were so proud or ancient as the Old Dominion’s. Speedy Smithwick was not only many times a champion; one of his forebears had sold Robert E. Lee his legendary horse Traveller. The Dandytown horse farm Captain Showers struggled to maintain had been in his family since before the American Revolution. In Washington, he was just another midlevel State Department bureaucrat. Here in the horse country, he was a chevalier, a knight, a mounted noble.
The famed steeplechase course designer Raymond Woolfe had once written: “Steeplechase horses are the bravest and most severely tested of their species (now that the war horse is obsolete). They are in a real sense, the last horse warriors. Their riders, by the same token, are the last of the tournament knights. In a world getting short on tradition and individual spirit, steeplechasing still offers men and women a rare opportunity to roll the dice for that fleeting taste of glory. The stakes laid are the ultimate, life itself, but in a single day, in a single encounter, they can thumb their noses at the everyday routine and dare to do what most of their fellows shy away from for a lifetime. Through the danger they feel their mortality, an uncommon sense of what it is to be alive, and they feel that it is a prize worth the risk.”
A woman had once given that quotation to Showers before a major race. He still carried it, as fighter pilots might a lucky piece.
After taking his turn at the phone, Showers went into the bar, embarrassed when his entrance prompted a scattering of applause. He had ridden in two races that afternoon, winning one of them and losing another only after taking a bad fall on a timber jump. He was walking now with a slight limp.
The most enthusiastic applause came from two women at a corner table, Alixe Percy, his neighbor and lifelong friend, and young Becky Bonning, who lived on Showers’ farm and helped him with his few horses.
“David!” said Alixe, her broad, booming voice loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room. “Where the hell have you been? Upstairs with a lady?”
Alixe was a large, bluff, cheery, and reflexively profane woman whose family predated even Showers’ in Virginia. Her vast, sprawling horse farm, the next up the road from his, was one of the largest estates in Banastre County, almost as big as Lynwood Fairbrother’s. She was Showers’ best friend in the horse country. In their youth she had been something more than that. Sun, weather, work, and strong drink had coarsened her beauty, which had once been considerable. Alixe was into her fifth bourbon whiskey of the night, though by no means ahead of everyone else in the room. Back in Washington, especially among the foreign officers at State, wine and mineral water were now the rule. Here the custom still ran to whiskey and gin—on celebratory nights like this, by the bucket.
Showers was in no mood for wine or mineral water. After making a slight bow to the ladies and pulling up a chair, he ordered a straight scotch from the girl who hurried up to take his order.
“I was down at the barns,” he said to Alixe. “Asleep. By myself. The doctor gave me something for my knee and it knocked me out.”
“Leg still hurts, eh?” said Alixe. “A few more spills like that and you’ll have to retire to carriage driving, like that geezer Prince Philip.”
“Are you all right?” said Becky, with almost wifely concern. “We went ahead and ate without you.”
“I’m fine,” he said. She seemed excited. It couldn’t have been just because of his winning an unimportant race.
Becky Bonning was very young, barely more than twenty, a stocky, pleasant-faced girl with sun-bleached hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her features were a trifle too horsey for anyone to call her pretty, but she came close, especially when she was happy and animated. She had large, quick blue eyes, and an enormous smile, which she turned on Showers as he sat down. Becky was probably the best rider in the county, though she competed only in horse shows, her interest in racing limited to Showers’ efforts. Fanatical in her devotion to animals, she was troubled by the danger and cruelty inherent in steeplechasing, and utterly despised the blood sport of fox hunting, even though Showers belonged to the Dandytown Hunt.
The captain—Showers carried the title as a member of the Virginia National Guard—stretched out his injured leg, wincing slightly.
“I am getting too old for this,” he said.
“You didn’t have a bad day,” said Becky. “You had a win.”
“I’m not going to pay off the mortgage winning three-thousand-dollar purses for other owners.”
“Depends on the fucking race, dear heart,” said Alixe. “Did Fairbrother talk to you about riding Moonsugar in the Dragoon Chase tomorrow?”
The Valley Dragoon Chase, with a $15,000 purse, was the biggest race of the weekend. Showers’ father had won a Virginia Gold Cup, but never the Dragoon Chase, and never the Old Dominion National Cup, the bigge
st race of Dandytown’s fall season.
“He talked to me about it,” Showers said. “Hasn’t made up his mind.”
“That’s a big horse,” said Alixe. “He’ll need a big rider.”
Showers flexed his leg. “He needs one who can stay in the saddle.”
“You’ll be all right,” Becky said. “You just spend too much time behind a desk.”
The waitress brought Showers his scotch. Becky watched carefully as he took his first sip.
“I have a surprise for you,” she said. “We’re rid of Billy. He’s agreed to the divorce. He’s coming for the last of his things tonight.”
Billy Bonning was her husband. Becky had run away from home to marry him, or used him as an excuse for running away from home—in any event, her first big wrong decision as an adult. Showers had let them live on his farm, a mistake in the case of Billy. He was not only a lout, but collected guns and swords and watched X-rated horror movies late at night on a VCR when Showers was away in Washington. Sometimes Vicky Clay came over to watch them with him. She was Bonning’s sister.
“Thank God,” he said.
“Tell him the other surprise,” Alixe said.
Becky beamed. “You’re going to buy a horse at the auction tomorrow night.”
He smiled. “I can’t afford the horses I own now,” he said.
“It’s a stallion. From a very good line. Do you know how good a line? His third dam was Queen Tashamore.”
She uttered the last two words brightly, as though they were a magic formula guaranteeing eternal happiness.
Showers lowered his glass slowly. “Third dam” meant the stallion’s great-grandmother. Queen Tashamore was the last horse Showers’ father had let go when he’d finally been compelled to sell off all his bloodstock to pay off debts. She was the finest brood mare the Showers family had ever owned.
“I didn’t notice any such horse in the catalogue,” he said.
“He’ll be in an addendum they’ll put out tomorrow night before the auction. Vicky Clay told me about him.”
“Vicky?”
“She heard Bernie Bloch talking about him, saying he’d go for a low bid. She didn’t know why he was interested, but she thought you’d be. Queen Tashamore!”
Bloch, a Baltimore billionaire newly come to steeplechasing, was sitting with a group of sycophants at a big table in the center of the room. Vicky Clay was his trainer. Vicky’s brother Billy had just gone to work for Bloch as well, after Showers had ordered him off his farm.
“Bernie Bloch wouldn’t know Queen Tashamore from Flicka,” Alixe said. “Common, common, common.”
“If Mr. Bloch is interested in that horse, there’s no point in my trying to bid on him,” Showers said.
“You don’t know that!” said Becky. “He might not bid at all. And if you don’t someone else might pick him up for five or ten thousand. How would you feel then?”
“Since I don’t have five or ten thousand, just fine. Becky, I haven’t even seen this horse.”
“Let’s go look at him.”
“Not tonight.”
“In the morning.”
He smiled. “All right.”
“The captain may be tired in the morning,” said Alixe. “Her Ladyship approacheth, with a slight list.”
She was looking past his shoulder. He turned, a little anxiously, to see a woman coming toward them with wobbly step but great purpose.
Her name was Lenore Fairbrother, and, if Dandy town had a reigning monarch, she was it, though less a Queen Victoria than a Charlotte the Mad. Some twenty years younger than her almighty husband, Lynwood, she would have been of consequence in the community even if she was not married to the town’s richest man. A native Virginian born to land and horses, if not all that much money, she was a remarkable beauty famous for it not only in Banastre County but Richmond, Washington, and London—cities she had invaded and conquered through clever marriages, including one to a knighted barrister, and her legendary parties, one of which had lasted a full week and been the cause of three divorces. Though now Fairbrother’s wife, she had kept the title “Lady,” and insisted everyone use it, at least now and again.
An almost anorexically thin woman, tending to boniness, but possessed of most wonderful bones, Lenore had very fine English features and wore her long, ash blond hair held back from her face with a gray silk hair ribbon that matched the color of her eyes. She was wearing a summery floral print Laura Ashley dress with lavender sash and shoes, the ensemble a little too young for her and much more suitable for the royal enclosure at Ascot than rural Virginia. She carried a drink in one hand and a beribboned picture hat in the other, as though for balance. She had known Showers since childhood, but it had seemed odd to many in Dandytown that he had been one of her many husbands. Not her sort. Practically no money.
“David, you wretched swine,” she said, stumbling to his chair. “You haven’t spoken to me all day, even though I cheered for you till I was hoarse—as hoarse as a horse.”
He started to rise, but she abruptly sat down in his lap, causing him to wince.
“What’s the matter, darling?” she asked. “Did I hurt your little thingie?” Her accent was more than a little English, though she hadn’t moved to that country until she was thirty. She was now nearly forty, and her beauty, of a sudden, was beginning to go.
Showers flushed, but said nothing. She sipped from her drink, peering over the rim of her glass at the other women at the table.
“Hello, darlings,” she said. “Are you as bored tonight as I am?”
“I’ve never been that bored in my life,” Alixe said.
Becky just stared at Lenore bleakly. Showers seemed decidedly uncomfortable.
“David,” Lenore said, after sipping again. “I’ve simply wonderful news. Lynwood wants you to ride Moonsugar in the Dragoon Chase tomorrow.”
Showers studied her carefully. Lenore often made up good news—and bad. “Are you sure? He seemed to have doubts.”
“I am absolutely, positively, certainly sure,” she said. “He decided at dinner. He was going to tell you himself, but he’s wandered off someplace. In any event, my dear boy, you’re to come to our stable in the morning.”
“David,” said Becky, sounding like a little girl denied a promised trip to the zoo. “We’re going to the auctioneer’s in the morning.”
“Well, whoop de doodle do,” said Lenore.
Showers hesitated. “We’ll go there, too,” he said.
“Now for my reward,” said Lenore.
“Your reward?”
“For persuading him!” she said, looking very mischievous. “You don’t think he’d pick a broken-down old has-been jockey with a gimpy leg like you without a little persuading?”
Showers said nothing, aware of how many in the room were watching them. Lenore leaned back unsteadily a moment, then flopped her picture hat onto his head and bent beneath its brim to kiss him.
Becky left the table without a word.
“Who the hell is that guy?” Moody asked.
He had rejoined Bernie Bloch’s party at the big table in the center of the barroom. His wife, Deena, was chattering happily away with Bloch’s wife, Sherrie, and other guests, allowing Moody an interlude to gaze unguardedly at the goings-on at Showers’ table.
“Don’t you know him, Bobby?” said Bloch, a bald, overweight man with huge bags under his dark eyes and the breezy manner of an affable New York cab driver. Improbably dressed in a bright Madras plaid sport coat, lime green pants and blue Lacoste polo shirt, he was Moody’s former business partner and oldest friend. His assets totaled more than, as he would put it, “a unit”—one billion dollars, fifty times Moody’s net worth.
Moody, still staring, shook his head.
“He works for you,” Bloch said. “For your administration, anyway. He’s with the State Department. Captain David Showers, the Sir Galahad of these parts.”
Moody’s memory, usually excellent, had lapsed in this case, but with
a little effort, he made the connection. An image of Showers in a dark diplomat’s suit finally came to mind. The man had indeed been in the White House, attending a meeting Moody had called on the Earth Treaty. He’d been introduced as Spencer Showers, the Spencer likely a middle name. The Ivy League types at State loved to use their middle names, as though it made them special—an American nobility.
Moody recalled further that Showers had seemed fairly sharp, answering intelligently all the questions put to him, and making a sensible suggestion about enlisting the aid of the Canadian embassy in encouraging more support for the bill. Why hadn’t he recognized him? There was too much to remember, running the White House. It was much worse than being governor.
“Where does he get off calling himself ‘Captain’?” Moody asked.
“He is one,” Bloch said. “In the National Guard or reserves or something.”
Moody had been a marine captain in Vietnam, where he’d won the Silver Star. He was still a lieutenant colonel in the reserves, but no one in the White House ever called him “Colonel,” though he’d let it be known that he wouldn’t mind.
“Who’s the woman on his lap?” Moody asked. He had seen her at the steeplechase course that afternoon. She was hardly as voluptuous as Deena, but something about her attracted him. She had a few years on her, but was still a beauty, sleek, like a fashion model, and probably very rich.
“That’s Lynwood Fairbrother’s wife,” Bloch said.
Deena suddenly stopped her chatter. Following Moody’s gaze, she observed Lenore Fairbrother quite intently.
“Do I know Lynwood Fairbrother?” Moody asked.
“You ought to. He’s a player. The biggest name in steeplechasing out here. He also races horses on the flats, up at Pimlico and Belmont. Saratoga, too. He and his wife are part of that Mary Lou Whitney set.”
“He’s just a horseman?”
“Shit no. He owns more coal mines than I do. And a couple of big banks. He was up for ambassador to England when the Republicans were in office, but they withdrew his name because of his wife. She’s got a bad reputation in England. Too many lovers. Too many drinks.”
The Last Virginia Gentleman Page 2