‘But we’re withdrawing Rio. I have to notify the ground jury.’
She unzipped the suit carrier. ‘Yes, yes, but first you have to present Whitey.’
‘No – I can’t poss—’ He was forced to shut up as she pulled a Tattersall-checked shirt over his head.
As it slid down, warm Rory smells floated up through the open neck and she had to take a few moments to compose herself again before snapping at him to do his cuffs up.
‘Where did you get these clothes?’ she sneered as she almost garrotted him with a tie he’d got as a free gift when renewing his tractor insurance.
‘The feed merchant mostly,’ he admitted while she reached up to straighten his hair before making him hold out his arms like an aeroplane so that she could put on a beige suede waistcoat.
‘It’s so old fogey.’ She buttoned him up and stepped back.
‘Faith!’ Lemon was shouting urgently. ‘They need you to go to the arena now!’
‘Go on then.’ She gave Rory a push.
‘But, I—’
‘You take Whitey. I can’t possibly run in these heels.’
‘But you’re riding him.’
‘No I’m not. I’ll talk to the stewards now and get the substitution sorted, along with Rio’s withdrawal. You just make sure this horse trots up sound.’ She turned as Lemon hurried Whitey across the grass towards them.
The Tannoy was shouting for Whitey now.
‘Go, go, go – they’ll eliminate us otherwise!’
Rory knew there was no time to argue. His loyal Whitey was soon trotting like a show hunter at Royal Windsor. There was no question that the horse was sound and full of running, dragging Rory all the way to the arena.
‘You quite sure about this?’ Lemon peered up at Faith, who was way over his head height, especially when she had her high heels on.
She nodded. ‘He
has
to win the Grand Slam.’
She dashed after Rory, with Lemon panting behind.
‘He won’t do it on that old thing.’
‘He can!’ she defended hotly, wobbling in her spiked boots.
‘I can help fix it for you,’ Lemon panted beside her.
‘Yeah,’ she laughed, putting on a burst of speed as she heard Whitey announced in the arena, and sprinted the last twenty yards just in time to see her beloved pair trot up.
Lemon was left standing in her wake, already out of puff.
‘I can fix it for you!’ he repeated, but he was out of earshot.
A moment later he heard ‘White Lies – pass!’ and a smattering of applause.
‘Fuck you then!’ He turned back to get Lough’s horse ready.
The rest of the Lime Tree Farm and Haydown horses sailed through the vet’s inspection, along with Whitey.
To Rory’s amazement, there was no objection to his last-minute substitution. Event riders were notorious complainers if protocol was breached or favours seen to be granted, and just getting it past the ground jury was a tall order. ‘What did you tell the officials?’ he asked Faith, awed by her powers of persuasion.
‘That I’m expecting your baby and have high blood pressure,’ she replied, before belting off to meet her mother.
Tash and Hugo rode their dressage tests on the Thursday within twenty minutes of one another. In his current combative state of mind, Hugo had wanted to complain about the running order, which had meant that Franny was run ragged trying to ensure that two horses and their riders had everything they needed to warm up almost simultaneously, but Tash talked him out of it, pointing out that it looked unsportsmanlike.
Traditionally, all the big players came late on in the order, even though it was supposed to be a random draw, but this time Tash and Hugo were aware that they had been relegated to the graveyard slot to do battle, the apparent snub reflecting their slipping popularity and rankings.
Oil Tanker picked up on the atmosphere and showed off to disastrous effect, believing that his airs above the ground were far more entertaining than all the boring technical stuff that he was being asked to do. No matter how carefully and sensitively Hugo rode him, theirs was always going to be a mediocre score and well below their best.
Tash was pulling on her tailcoat as he came out. ‘Bad luck.’
For a moment his focused blue eyes met hers and she felt a spark of the old connection.
‘You show them what we’re capable of,’ he muttered, taking off his topper and propping it under one elbow as he rode the horse away to cool off, certain he’d blown any real chance of victory.
It was a long time since Tash had trotted into an arena with grandstands and crowds on the scale of Burghley, and even on the first day of dressage, just before lunch, the crowd lit up to see a well-known name returning to the big time on her lovely, rangy liver chestnut mare whose ears practically met in the middle as they trotted around the perimeter of the white-boarded rectangle, waiting for the judge’s signal.
It wasn’t the most polished test that she had ever ridden, but given her long absence from this level, she acquitted herself well and the crowd clapped and cheered as though she was still anchor of the British team. She felt enormously grateful to them.
As she walked River out on a long rein, acknowledging them with a self-conscious wave, she realised just how much she had missed the buzz. She was amazed to find tears in her eyes.
She rode out into the park to cool the mare after her efforts in the arena cauldron, her tails slung over the pommel of her saddle.
Hugo and Oil Tanker appeared at her side. ‘Well done.’
‘Thanks.’ She smiled across at him, on far too much of a high to care if he was foul-tempered or not.
They both knew that the running order had been carefully orchestrated to create maximum tension, pitching the shaky, gossiped-about husband and wife team against one another on the first day. Yet, far
from adding to the strain between them, it brought them closer together. Out in the park they debriefed, sharing details of their tests and how their horses felt for the next day, slipping back into old, familiar habits as they slid forward a gear in communication without realising it. The emotional thaw was setting in at last.
Once their horses were back in Franny and Fudge’s care they returned to the horsebox to change out of their tails. Rory was lying on the seating, fast asleep in front of the racing on the little flat-screen TV, Twitch on his lap. Sleep was his coping mechanism at times of great stress, and it always amazed his peers that he could nap during the day at a three day event. He’d been training with Anke all morning, an exhausting process in itself, but the added mind-warp of seeing Faith standing beside her mother had opened the tap on his adrenalin and drained it out of him. He didn’t even stir when Tash realised he was lying on her change of clothes and pulled them out from under him.
Twitch watched Tash and Hugo with interest as they stripped out of their breeches and into jeans. They watched one another too, but warily, eyes stealing glances while the other thought they weren’t looking.
They walked the cross-country course again, together this time, sharing their thoughts about lines of approach, optimum speed and take-off points, turns and strides and sight lines, talking in low voices.
‘If you’re clever, you can swing River out to try to make a stride here,’ he told her at the Discovery Valley, a tricky combination deep in the parkland’s undulating terrain. ‘The bounce could be too tight for her.’
Tash, who had been planning to go for the bounce, knew he’d probably saved her a run-out.
It was familiar territory and they stayed rigidly focused and on topic. They hadn’t pooled resources like this for such a long time that it felt liberating. They needed one another’s judgement more than they needed to protect their personal pride.
While the couple were out on the course the lorry park gossip was ruthless.
‘They are finished,’ predicted Lucy Field.
After the last horse of the day had exited at A, the dressage tallies were totted up. The Beauchampions’ dressage scores were much
further down the order than they would have been in their heyday, just a few short years earlier.
Yet that night Tash and Hugo slept facing one another for the first time in weeks. They had finished on an identical score. There could be no argument about that.
The Burghley organisers had got what they had hoped. Tash and Hugo were the story of the night, making it on to the national newspapers’ sports pages the next day, when the focus would shift to Rory and his Grand Slam dream.
Had Rory been riding Rio, his dressage would have been one of the last on the Friday afternoon, in among the cluster of elite riders to guarantee maximum attention for his Grand Slam bid. But, having substituted for Faith on White Lies, he rode in to the arena in the relative cool and quiet of an early slot.
Dressage had never been Whitey’s forte, and during his long partnership with Rory they had struggled to overcome nervy, cumbersome tests riddled with errors. But the old racehorse had been in training with Faith for almost a year now, a far more classical and precise rider and he had reaped the benefits. Rory, meanwhile, had been in training with the best event riders in the world – Hugo, Janet Madsen and MC among them – plus he’d had a last-minute fuel injection from dressage Olympian Anke. He was still a rough diamond, but he could sparkle on his day. He was sitting on his comfort horse, his teddy bear that was as familiar as his bed at home. He had everything to prove and lose, yet he knew the horse owed him nothing and it was such a joy to ride him in front of a crowd again that he pushed for those extra moments and marks that Anke had been harrying him for all the previous day.
To his absolute delight, he came away with the best score of the morning session. It didn’t matter that his spot at the top of the leaderboard was almost immediately usurped by Stefan on his great horse Thor, and then later pushed further down the order by Lough and Rangitoto, Sonja Ricker and another German rider, Kevin the French boy wonder and Gus on his second ride. Seventh after dressage at Burghley was a dream come true, even if it wasn’t quite the Grand Slam fairytale lead the media longed for.
He walked the cross-country course a final time with Anke, which wasn’t perhaps ideal because she saw each fence from a dressage
perspective and gave him long technical lectures on line and approach when his instinct – and knowledge of the horse – just said ‘keep straight and kick on’.
‘I thought Faith was going to walk with us?’ He managed to get a word in as they stood in front of the Lover’s Leap, a big galloping ditch and hedge of such gapingly straightforward magnitude that Anke had no tips on approach or prowess whatsoever, other than saying something in Danish that Rory was certain was an oath.
‘I would have liked that too.’ She sighed, tilting her head from one oblique degree to the other as she studied the beautifully clipped birch. ‘But she insists she must stay away from you.’
‘Why?’ he asked forlornly, hopping down into the ditch which was as deep as his shoulder and so wide a tractor could drive along it. ‘Has she got something catching?’
‘She’s had something catching for many years,’ Anke said as she walked backwards, her head still angled. ‘But she is very infectious right now. Do you think it would help set the horse’s quarters underneath him to make a half halt about three strides away here,
ja
?’
Still standing in the ditch, his head barely visible to Anke, Rory stared up at the yawning blue sky between take off and hedge. ‘I think it would help more to give the horse a bloody big boot in the ribs three strides away, frankly.’
‘Shame on you,’ Anke tutted, but she secretly knew that she would personally be booting for Denmark, eyes tight closed. She hadn’t walked a four-star course with a competitor before and it was a very humbling experience. She had never seen anything as terrifying in her life as these huge, unforgiving timber fences to be taken at galloping speed with lightning reactions from horse and rider required at all times. Close up, they took her breath away. She was terribly relieved that Faith was no longer going to try to jump them.
‘I underestimated you,’ she told Rory when they finally walked back in front of the spectacular Burghley House to re-evaluate the last two fences on the course.
‘Oh yes?’ he asked vaguely, hoping that Faith had got Whitey fit enough to get here with fuel still in his tank. He was descended from a long line of fantastic staying chasers and could count Desert
Orchid among his close cousins, but without the fittening work he was nothing.
‘My daughter is a wilful girl,’ Anke was saying. ‘She sets her mind on something and she cannot let it go, you know?’
‘Oh, I know.’ He wondered whether she was with Dillon tonight, but the thought made him too miserable to ask.
‘For a long time I thought she had set her mind on something very impractical and wasteful,’ she half-laughed, ‘something that would hurt her very deeply in the end.’
‘Eventing is much safer these days,’ Rory assured her. ‘I know you would prefer that she did straight dressage and that’s such a great talent in her that she may do it one day, but this sport is like nothing else.’ He held up his arms to their spectacular surroundings. ‘And I really do think Faith has what it takes to make a very good event rider.’
‘Oh, I agree.’ Anke nodded almost tearfully. ‘She will make a very good event rider. But will he make her happy?’
But Rory had moved of earshot as he strode up to the big, arched Land Rover fence at the end of the course and imagined the euphoria of sailing through it with just seconds to spare. Cutting things fine was one of his specialities.
Now sharing unlucky thirteenth spot on the overnight leaderboard, Tash and Hugo slept facing one another again, edging a little closer this time. She could feel his breath on her nose, an idle fingertip touching her.
In the darkness she lay wide awake, her eyes open, feeling his breath on her lips, her heart so swollen in her chest that it seemed to drop anchor through the bed, a near shipwreck of a marriage almost washed up on rocks yet still somehow floating.
‘I love you,’ she whispered.
It was a long time before she realised that his eyes were open as well.