Riding Star (11 page)

“No,” Georgie shook her head. “We're the same. You're a talented rider, Riley – you could be at this school on a scholarship if you weren't such a… snob.”

“I'm a snob?”

“Yeah.” Georgie was really winding into her argument now. “You're a reverse snob. You won't go out with me because I go to a good school. What's that about?”

“Well, that's about me being an idiot – obviously!” Riley shot back. “Because I thought after that dance that you were my girlfriend and then suddenly I find out you're going out with his majesty with the polo mallet.”

“How can I go out with you if you never call me?” Georgie was astonished. “I thought you'd dumped me! And his name is James and he's really nice; you don't know him.”

“But I know you,” Riley said. “And I know that you shouldn't be with him. You should be with me!”

Alice suddenly appeared at the door. “Hey, Riley, we've got Marco on at last—” she stopped in mid-sentence when she saw the look on Georgie and Riley's faces.

“I can't talk about this any more,” Riley said. He cast a sorrowful glance at Georgie and the grey mare. “So long, Princess,” he said. “Take care.”

*

“Well, I'm glad to see the back of him!” Daisy said, dusting off her hands dramatically as she walked back into the stable block.

Georgie looked miserable.

“Daisy!” Alice said. “Try and have some tact!”

“What?” Daisy said. “I meant Spinner! Not Riley.”

Daisy stuck her head over the loose-box door and took a good, hard look at Princess.

“That's quite a horse!” she said. “And Riley just swapped her for Spinner? What was he thinking?“

Alice looked sideways at Georgie, but didn't say anything.

“Shall we include Princess in the workout roster?” Emily asked. “The Round Robin knockout tournament is in two weeks. That doesn't give us much time to start training her.”

“Let's give her today to settle in first,” Georgie said. “I'll hog her mane and start her off on some stick-and-ball tomorrow.”

While the others went off to get their training session underway, Georgie mixed Princess a feed.

Marco had always been vicious at feeding time and you had to keep a careful eye on him in case he attacked you. But Georgie could see that Princess wasn't like that. The mare had a gentleness about the eyes that made Georgie trust her. She slipped the feed bin into the rack on the wall and then stood beside the mare as she ate.

As she stood there in the loose box she looked down at the polo ring on her finger. She'd got it covered in sugarbeet when she was mixing the horse feed. She slipped it off and wiped it on her shirt.

The ring hadn't even been on her finger long enough to leave a mark. It was as if she had never worn it. She stared at the ring for a moment longer and then, as if coming to a decision, she put it in her pocket and went to tack up Belle.

A
t boarding school, trying to avoid someone was almost impossible. So why was it that when Georgie actually wanted to run into James Kirkwood he was nowhere to be seen? On Sunday night she'd lingered at the dining hall, taking ages to eat her dessert, just in case he turned up late. Then she'd dawdled on the driveway as the girls walked past Burghley House, walking as slowly as humanly possible, but still he didn't appear.

Georgie knew she wouldn't run into him on Monday morning since James was a year ahead of her and not in any of her classes. It wasn't until the afternoon when she was at the Burghley House stables getting Princess ready for her polo lesson that she finally saw him.

With the Round Robin less than two weeks away she needed to launch into Princess's training straight away. She needed to try the mare out on the field to get a sense of her ability.

Georgie had done up her tendon boots and was just finishing off an Argie knot on Princess's tail when she had that strange feeling you get when you're being watched. She looked up and started in surprise when she saw James leaning over the Dutch door, smiling at her.

“Ohmygod, you scared me!” Georgie said.

“Did I?” James asked.

Georgie returned to her tail plaiting. “So where have you been?” she asked. “I didn't see you at dinner last night.”

“I got a last-minute pass out,” James said. “Dad flew in from New York – he took Kennedy and me out for a family dinner.”

“Nice.”

“Anything is better than the dining hall,” James said airily.

He cast an eye over the grey mare in the stall.

“Got a new horse?”

Georgie nodded. “Her name's Princess.”

She finished the tail plait and then did three neat twists, like a chignon, before tying off the ends so that the tail was tucked up.

“She's a good-looking mare. Where did you get her from?”

Georgie had known that this would be his next question. And she also knew that James wasn't going to like the answer.

“I exchanged one of my other horses for her.” James frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I swapped horses with Riley. He took Marco and he gave me Princess.”

“This mare is Riley's horse?”

“Well, not technically,” Georgie said. “She's mine now. We traded.”

“I thought you told me that you weren't seeing him any more.” James's tone had turned defensive.

Georgie shook her head. “You said you didn't want me to see him. I never agreed.”

“So you're hanging out with him behind my back? He's been here again, in these stables, after I told him to stay away?”

“You don't actually have the right to order him off school property, James,” Georgie replied. “It's not like you own Blainford.”

“We own quite a lot of it. My family paid for the library,” James countered.

“Well the next time Riley comes round I'll make sure he doesn't borrow any books,” Georgie said.

“Is that supposed to be a joke?” James said. “There's not going to be a next time, Georgie. I don't want you seeing him.”

“James,” Georgie said, “is this really about Riley? Or is it about you owning me like you own the library and everything else around here?”

“What are you talking about?” James's eyes blazed with anger.

Georgie knew it was too late to back down now. “The other day, when you asked me out, was it because you really wanted to go to the movies with me or were you just trying to outdo JP?”

James frowned. “You think I'm going out with you just to mess with JP?”

“No,” Georgie said, “I think you asked me out to mess with JP and then you gave me that ring because you were jealous of me and Riley.”

Georgie reached into her pocket and pulled out the polo ring. “Here – I want you to take it back.”

She handed him the ring and watched as James closed his fist round it until his knuckles turned white. “So that's it? You're dumping me for some loser who doesn't even go to Blainford?”

“It's not just because of Riley,” Georgie said. “I don't think we should ever have got back together. Things have been weird between us.”

James glared at her. “You are so ungrateful. I take you back, despite everything you've done. And now you do this? Kennedy was right – you're not good enough to date a Kirkwood!”

“Hang on a minute!” Georgie's eyes widened. “You dumped me because you were too stupid to realise your own sister was pulling your strings. Then you wanted me back – but only because you were jealous of JP and Riley. And now you're upset because my dumping you is going to make you look bad? Oh, and do tell me again about how special the Kirkwoods are – I never get tired of hearing about that!”

Georgie grabbed Princess by the reins and unbolted the door to the loose box, but James blocked her way.

“Georgie, you don't want to do this. If you get on the wrong side of me I have the power to make your life hell at this school.”

Georgie laughed. “Make it hell? Where have you been for the past term?”

She pushed past him, led Princess out of the loose box and mounted up. As she trotted the mare down the corridor she suddenly felt very glad that she was on her way to play polo. She had never felt quite so much like hitting something before in her life.

*

Georgie was running late and she was still shaken from her fight with James when she arrived at polo class.

“Are you all right?” JP muttered to her.

“I'm fine,” she told him. “I'll tell you about it later.”

“We're having a proper match today,” Heath Brompton told the class. “We'll split into four teams and use two fields.”

Georgie raised a hand. “Sir, can I be excused from the teams? Is it all right if I just play stick-and-ball by myself up the sidelines?”

Georgie would have loved to have joined in the game to let off steam, but she knew it was the wrong thing to do. Princess had never played polo before and Georgie had to ease her into the game gently.

And so she looked on enviously while the other riders played proper chukkas on the main fields and she kept Princess on the sidelines, working her back and forth, getting her accustomed to being near the mallet and the polo ball, and testing her speed and responses.

As she left the field Heath Brompton barked at her, “If you can't take the heat, Parker, perhaps you should consider getting out of the kitchen.”

It wasn't until she was untacking Princess that Georgie finally twigged what he meant.

“Heath thinks I skipped the game because I'm scared of falling off again!” Georgie told the others when they met for stick-and-ball after school. “So now he thinks I'm a coward!”

As if to make up for it, Georgie played fast and furious in the stick-and-ball session that afternoon. The girls were training in earnest now and all sixteen ponies were given a workout. After over an hour of nonstop charging up and down the field on different ponies Georgie was exhausted. As they walked back down the driveway to the boarding house that evening she felt like her legs were going to buckle underneath her.

Back at Badminton House she collapsed on her bed. “I can't move.”

“We have to move,” Alice groaned. “We have to get dressed and go to dinner.”

“I'm not going,” Georgie said.

“Because you're too tired?”

“No. Because I've just split up with James and if I go to the dining hall I'm bound to see him.”

“You've what?” Alice sat bolt upright again on her bed. “When did this happen?”

“Just before polo class. I was going to tell you, but I didn't want to make a big scene in front of the others.”

“Was it an ugly break-up?” Alice asked. “Or are you still friends?”

“If by friends you mean has he threatened to ruin my life and make me miserable for all eternity at Blainford, then yeah,” Georgie replied, “we're still friends.”

“So you're never eating again?”

“Can you smuggle me back some food?”

“Georgie! It's lasagne night. Where am I going to put it? In my pockets? Pull yourself together and let's go.”

From the moment Georgie walked into the dining hall the murmur rose up from the Burghley House table. She heard her name being called across the dining room by boys she didn't even know, but she didn't turn round. She didn't give them the satisfaction of looking at them when she got pelted on the back of the head with peas throughout the dinner.

“Just ignore them,” Alice said sympathetically. Daisy and Emily banded round her for support as they walked out of the dining hall and stayed by her side, ignoring the taunts that followed them all the way down the driveway.

James had already succeeded in turning the whole of Burghley House against her.

*

For the rest of the week, James and the Burghley boys didn't ease off on their hate campaign against Georgie. There wasn't a meal in the dining room that didn't end with her picking food out of her hair. The infamous seagull squawks – a Burghley hazing tradition – became a constant as the girls walked home each night.

“You should tell the headmistress,” Emily said.

“Tell her what, Emily?” Georgie groaned. “That a boy is picking on me? That's exactly what he wants me to do.”

Far better, Georgie thought, to suffer in silence. And James wasn't the only thing making her unhappy – she still desperately missed Tara Kelly's classes. Alice, Emily and Daisy were super-tactful around her and tried not to talk about cross-country at all, but now and then they would forget and let slip a bit of gossip about what sort of fences they were jumping or who was at the top of the class rankings. Disturbingly, Georgie kept hearing Kennedy Kirkwood's name being mentioned in the same breath as ‘clear round'. It was too awful to think that the girl who got her kicked out of class might now be dominating the rankings.

On Thursday Georgie arrived at her first class of the morning to find Daisy, Emily and Alice poring over the notice board in the quad.

“They've posted the teams for the Round Robin Knockout next weekend,” Daisy said.

“Georgie,” Emily said. “Before you look at it you have to promise that you won't get upset.”

“Why would I get upset?” Georgie frowned.

“Because we're playing a Burghley House team…” Emily said, “… and James Kirkwood is in it.”

Georgie groaned. “Well at least my life can't possibly get any worse.”

“Yes, it can,” Daisy said. “Conrad is in the team too.”

*

Strangely enough, knowing that they were playing against Burghley actually cheered Georgie up. The polo field was the perfect place for some very public revenge. If James thought that Georgie's breaking up with him was embarrassing, just wait until she smeared the polo field with him!

All the girls were determined to beat the Burghley House boys and prove that Badminton House deserved to have a polo team. They had been riding for two hours every day after school and some nights Georgie's legs ached so much that she could barely walk up the driveway for dinner. Alice remained the stand-out player on the team, but everyone had raised their game. Emily had become adept at her long shots and taking the ball swiftly up the sidelines – which made her a natural in the number four position. Daisy stayed at number one, upfront where she could take shots at goal. She had biceps like a rock by now and she never gave away any ground to the opposition no matter what. Alice was in the coveted number three jersey and Georgie was in a roaming position at number two.

What the girls really needed though was some actual real game experience and it was Emily who suggested a friendly match against Luhmuhlen.

“Your team needs some proper play before the competition,” Emily said to Alex at breakfast, “and so do we. We could treat it like a real game. Four full chukkas. Just like the Round Robin.”

“We can have the friendly game after school on Friday,” Alice added. “Then rest the ponies on the Saturday before the real Round Robin begins on Sunday.”

“Sounds great,” JP agreed.

Cameron was more cautious with his enthusiasm. “OK, but you need to be aware that we're treating this just like a proper match. We can't go easy on you girls.”

“Yeah,” Alex agreed. “The other boys aren't going to cut you any slack on the field when the real games begin so it wouldn't be fair if we let you get away with stuff. Don't expect us to stop play just because you've broken a nail or something.”

“Gotcha,” Alice stifled a laugh. “No special treatment.”

*

The ‘friendly' match between Luhmuhlen and Badminton was carnage. But not the sort that the boys had anticipated. It was seven-nil to the girls by the end of the third chukka. Alex and Cameron didn't know what had hit them.

“Can you tell your girlfriend to be a bit more careful?” Cameron whined to Alex as they mounted up on their fourth ponies to end the match. “She knee-barged and caught me square on the thigh!”

“If you ladies could possibly pull yourselves together to play the last chukka,” JP groaned, “then at least we can potentially save ourselves the supreme embarrassment of losing without any points on the board?”

“Plus the embarrassment of Tara Kelly watching as we lose,” Alex added, pointing out the dark-haired figure standing on the sidelines.

Tara had been watching the match since the first chukka began, but as the riders were about to take to the field for the fourth and final round she wrapped her coat round her and walked off the fields.

Georgie hadn't noticed Tara's presence on the sidelines. She was far too focused on the game. She had been playing brilliantly and two of the seven goals so far were hers. For the final chukka she was riding Princess, who was fast becoming her favourite polo pony. She had been the last to finish tacking up, and the others were waiting to start play as she rode the dapple-grey mare on to the field to take up her position.