‘I love you too,’ he breathed.
Soon they were asleep, two inverted commas curled around a shared sentiment.
Cross-country day at Burghley provided near-perfect conditions, bright sunlight countered by a light breeze that cooled the competitors and drew record crowds to the magnificent park, its four-star track laid out through rolling turf like jewels set in the plushest green velvet.
It was only when one apparently insignificant fence on the course began to claim scalps that mutterings of dissent started spreading through the stabling and the competitors’ tent. The new complex, ironically sponsored by a health insurance company, consisted of two big tables set at oblique angles. Some of the riders walking the course earlier in the week had complained about the awkward, curving four strides between the elements, with no provision to turn a circle, but it was generally agreed that the distance was probably fair if ridden well.
Then really good riders started falling off. There were stops on the course every half hour, with competitors held up while the victims and debris were picked up and patched up, all due to this one obstacle. Ambulances rattled back and forth to collect casualties.
When Gus, ‘Mr Stick-on’, came back with a bloodied nose and smashed front teeth, leading his first horse behind him, tension really grew among the rest of the entrants. Rider representatives were sent off to talk to the ground jury; several less experienced combinations withdrew.
Out in the park warming up, Tash and Hugo didn’t fully appreciate the extent of the carnage taking place on course. Not speaking much, but catching one another’s eyes with ridiculous regularity, they took their horses for a quick blast at gallop and then a slow cool-down to the perfect tick-over to get ready to concentrate on the big jumping questions as soon as they were out on the course.
In the collecting ring and at the start, however, talk was all of the controversial tables fence. The rider representatives were pushing hard for a turning circle to be allowed between the two elements to increase safety, but the debate was still raging as Hugo was counted down.
‘I think I should ride it as planned.’ He looked to Tash for confirmation.
They both knew the alternative route was incredibly long and absurdly time-wasting.
Oil Tanker and Deep River were both scopey, accurate and experienced horses that jumped in a free-flowing rhythm. Fences like the tables were bread and butter to them.
But something in Tash hesitated as Hugo was counted down from ten, his blue eyes still on her and not the first fence, where they should be.
She knew that their loved ones were out there in the crowd: their children, her mother and father and their families, her sister and brother and Hugo’s disreputable mother propping up the Pimm’s tent. She didn’t want to let any of them down, but she didn’t want to frighten them either.
‘… three … two … one …’
‘Take the long route!’ she suddenly shouted as Hugo got the ‘go’ and streaked off towards the Burghley Overture fence with an appreciative set of whoops and claps from the gathered crowd.
He hadn’t heard her.
‘The combination in front of you has withdrawn,’ an official told Tash, ‘so you can either wait for your official start time or go a little sooner if you’re ready – the Beeb are live streaming so they do appreciate as many horses on the course as we can manage. There have been a lot of hold-ups.’
It was always lethal to tell Tash that somebody was relying on her. She couldn’t do enough for them.
‘Of course I can start.’ She smiled, looking around for her family. At last she spotted them, Ben holding Cora, dressed in her fairy wings, on his shoulders, while Amery was bounced in Sophia’s arms wearing a hat shaped like a horse’s head with mad eyes and ears at fantastically wonky angles.
So full of love she thought she would take off over the course like a helium balloon, Tash suddenly relished the idea of setting out straight after Hugo across country and chasing him down. The sooner she and River finished, the sooner they could all be together.
‘Count me down whenever you’re ready,’ she told the starter, heading into the box.
The crowd cheered loyally as she set off. Cora waved her fairy wand.
For just a few minutes, she and Hugo were on the course together.
Tash flew the first few galloping fences before dropping down the huge step at the tricky Leaf Pit and over a skinny box into open country once more.
Then, just as River had put in a thrilling flyer at the trakehner, she saw an official on the course waving a flag at her.
She pulled up the mare, feeling suddenly icy with fear. ‘Is it Hugo?’
‘Not sure – I’ll find out what’s going on,’ the steward started gabbling into his walkie talkie and then walked off to consult with his cohorts, glancing uneasily over his shoulder at Tash.
Heart hammering, keeping the mare moving as best she could to ensure her muscles stayed warm and relaxed and ready to start jumping again, Tash strained her ears for more information, but there was nothing. Then, before she had a chance to find out what was happening, she was re-started on the course.
She struggled to get River into a rhythm once more as the big questions came at them thick and fast in this section of the park, her mind one horse ahead on the course, wondering where Hugo was.
The mare was sharp and precise but they were increasingly disconnected. They separated a marker flag from a fence corner, corkscrewed sideways over a skinny and then tripped in the water at the Trout Hatchery, almost tipping under. Splashing back out to an encouraging cheer from the crowd, she kicked on up the hill.
Then it was the tables. She sighted her line as she had planned on her course-walks and had talked through with Hugo the night before.
‘Go the long route,’ a voice told her. ‘Go the long route.’
But she hadn’t walked it well enough. This route looked much more straightforward. There was nothing obvious to make it tricky, nothing apart from the huge gouged skid marks in the turn at the second element take-off revealing how many valuable mistakes had been made there.
As she came over the first table and swung the mare left, she sighted the tree that she was going to use to line up her take-off point. Where was her stride? Where
was
her stride? It was looking far too long.
One … two … three …
River couldn’t possibly take off from the point Tash set her at, yet there wasn’t enough room to put in another stride before the huge table. Clever, careful and eager to preserve her legs and her mistress, River had no choice but to stop, rising up as she cranked back her huge momentum, back legs sliding under her.
Tash would have stayed in the plate were it not for a small, yappy dog choosing that moment to burst out of the crowds and fly at the mare’s fetlocks. Already off balance, River shied away and practically sat down on one haunch, pitching Tash out behind her and cramming her up against the solid side of the table for a brief, horrifying moment, her head twisted on to her shoulder, trapped between solid timber and horseflesh, her hips and legs pinned under her struggling horse’s back end.
The directors in charge of the live streaming immediately cut away and a howl of terror and worry went up in both the competitors’ tent and in front of the main video screens where huge crowds were gathered.
There was another long stop on the course, and as soon as the air ambulance landed from depositing one casualty in Peterborough, it was given another.
Afterwards, riders were told that they were allowed to circle between the tables.
Tash didn’t want to go to hospital and protested vociferously when they strapped her to a stretcher for her first trip in an air ambulance as a patient. Clamped into a neck brace, she looked up at a sign that read ‘DO NOT PANIC – YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER’ above her head, intended for patients who recover consciousness en route to the hospital.
Tash had not lost consciousness, nor indeed did she feel injured, although the air travel made her quite queasy. As she was wheeled through echoing hospital corridors, grateful to be away from the deafening helicopter blades, she told the paramedics that yes, she knew her name and what day it was, and no, she had no neck pain and could feel all her limbs, although she had some sharp pains in her lower abdomen.
She was initially examined by an Indian doctor in a private side room, prodded and questioned at length before her neck brace was removed and she was moved in to the main Accident and
Emergency unit to be left unattended in a cubicle, handed a small pot and asked to provide a urine sample when she felt able.
‘Why?’ She wondered if the FEI had brought in even more covert random drug testing.
‘Dr Singh was most insistent,’ the staff nurse told her, heading through the curtain to check on a neighbouring patient.
Shuffling off her examination couch, she went to find a loo, handing her sample back to a nurse when she returned. She sat back down on her allotted bed.
In the neighbouring cubicle a very familiar voice was complaining that he absolutely had to get discharged and get back to Burghley to check how his wife had done.
‘Hugo?’
The curtain swept aside and there he was, lying on his side in a bed in nothing but a skimpy surgical gown as blue as his eyes.
‘What are you wearing?’
‘They cut me out of my breeches,’ he explained. ‘A rather overzealous new nurse seemed to think I had a smashed pelvis like Beccy and might be bleeding internally, whereas in fact it appears to be a bruised coccyx and another ruddy cracked rib. You?’
‘Suspected drug-taking, or maybe diabetes.’ She held up her palms in confusion.
Hugo sat up, tapping his fingers impatiently on the metal frame of the bed, eager to leave.
‘There are more riders in here than the competitors’ tent,’ Tash giggled. ‘I spotted two on my way to the lavatory.’
‘Christ.’
‘We’ll have to hire a minibus to get back to Burghley,’ she pointed out cheerfully, suddenly shot through with the strange high that sometimes comes after a fall, when one realises how lucky one is and that it’s all going to be okay.
Her joy was infectious, making Hugo laugh.
‘Come here.’ He shifted along the bed to make room.
She crossed through to his cubicle and perched on the bed beside him, taking his hand. ‘I’d never have forgiven myself if something truly bad had happened to you just now and we hadn’t made our peace.’
He ran his fingers along hers. ‘I’m bloody tough.’
‘We’re all fallible, all make mistakes.’
He looked at her levelly, eyes still bearing tiny ice chips of mistrust. ‘Are we talking about our riding here?’
‘Nothing happened with Lough.’ She gripped his hand tighter.
‘I know,’ he conceded, eyes softening at last. ‘I was a bloody fool not to trust you. I thought he’d won you away from me.’
‘It wasn’t a competition, Hugo.’
He looked away, muscles tensing in his cheek. ‘It was. You were the prize.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The night I asked him to ride for Haydown, Lough got me all wrong. Christ, Tash, you don’t want to hear this.’
‘I certainly do.’ She looked at him, eyes wide. ‘You not telling me about it has hardly helped, has it?’
He ran a hand through his hair, looking away remorsefully. ‘I got in a spot of trouble in a bar, had my drink spiked, shot my mouth off. Lough thought I was a dick. I
was
a dick, quite frankly. I’d just won gold, my wife was having our first son any day and I felt invincible. I can hardly blame Lough for turning the screw. I was all over the place.’
‘And you offered me as a prize? For what? Getting to the top of the FEI rankings?’
He shook his head violently, turning to look at her and take her hand, blue eyes fierce with regret. ‘We made a bet that got totally out of proportion. He told me that I deserved to lose you. I said I’d like to see him try.’
‘Oh God.’ Tash covered her mouth with both their hands as the truth dawned. ‘You think that’s what he set out to do all along?’
Hugo brushed his thumb along her cheek. ‘I didn’t know what to think at first, quite honestly. But I was still glad he was arrested: I hoped they’d lock him up for good. Then he turned up just days before I had to leave for the States and I saw that he hadn’t just come to teach me a lesson. He was a man on a mission, head and heart locked on target. I have no idea what had changed in him, but it was terrifying.’
‘The Beccy texts,’ Tash sighed.
Hugo looked at her curiously. ‘I hated leaving you behind with him. I was already fed up with being away so much. Every time I came back I felt like more of a stranger.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You were always so preoccupied.’
‘I
am
always preoccupied,’ she admitted, ‘but a big part of that preoccupation is you – you are a full time preoccupation, Hugo.’
‘Perhaps we need pre-occupational therapy?’
She stroked his thigh. ‘We do need to make some changes.’
He nodded. ‘I’ve decided to spend more time at home schooling and coaching from now on. There’ll be no winter training in the States unless we go as a family. In fact, I’m not going to compete overseas any more unless you and the children are with me; the same in the UK. We’ll make it work for all of us. Team Beauchamp. I’m miserable without you all by my side. We’ll build a crèche in the bloody horsebox if we have to,’ he laughed. ‘It might catch on: enough eventers travel with their kids these days.’
‘We’ll be crèche test dummies.’ She laughed too, leaning across to nuzzle his shoulder. ‘I can see it now: ball pits in the tack lockers; nappy changing on the ramps; Shetlands tackling miniature cross-country jumps. We’ll never have any privacy for nookie, of course.’ She slid her hand higher up his thigh.
‘We’ll make damned sure we do.’ He covered her hand with his, turning the battered wedding ring on her finger, looking at her seriously, blue eyes alight with hope. ‘We can make life better, Tash.’
‘We will make it better.’ She stetched up to kiss him, sliding her hand higher so that it disappeared beneath the blue gown, ‘Crikey, you’re not wearing any pants.’