The Seatons and the Bucklands
– owners of some of the Haydown event horses
Penny and Gus Moncrieff
– old eventing cronies of the Beauchamps, based in nearby Lime Tree Farm, perennially bickering and broke
Angelo and Denise
– landlords of The Olive Branch in Fosbourne Ducis
Niall and Zoe O’Shaughnessy
– Penny’s sister and her actor husband, parents of young twins
India and Rufus Goldsmith
– Zoe’s children from her first marriage
Marie-Clair ‘MC’ Tucson
– France’s first lady of eventing, living part-time in the States with her wealthy husband
Stefan and Kirsty Johanssen
– Swedish event rider and his Scottish wife, based in the States
Lucy Field
– the UK’s top-ranking female event rider, a flirty blonde
Brian Sedgewick
– Team GB’s three day event chef d’équipe
Julia Ditton
– ex event rider turned BBC commentator
Venetia Gundry
– Haydown’s most lascivious livery
Gin and Tony Seaton
– keen event followers and erstwhile owners
The Bitches of Eastwick
– the Beauchamps’ lazy Labradors
The Rat Pack
– Hugo’s terriers
The Roadies
– the Haydown guard dogs
Beetroot
– Tash’s ancient, eccentric mongrel
Event horses Sir Galahad and gutsy Oil Tanker, plus home-bred siblings The Fox, Cub and Vixen, Tash’s kind-hearted mare Deep River, fearless Cœur d’Or, beautiful stallion Rio, faithful old White Lies, the brilliant Humpty, and far too many others to mention …
Melbourne Three Day Event, five years earlier
The mare was not the easiest of rides. She pulled hard, skewed left over fences and spooked away from the crowds. It was like riding a small, charging rhinoceros.
In Melbourne as part of a whistle-stop tour to promote their training manual,
Be Champions the Beauchamp Way
, Tash and her husband Hugo had taken up Australian rider Sandy Hunter’s offer of rides at Victoria’s legendary three day event, the second oldest in the world. Sandy had been sidelined by injury at the last minute and her horses, fit and ready to run, were at the Beauchamps’ disposal. It was an irresistible offer; a top-ten result would be great for publicity. Hugo loved the challenge of chance rides, but Tash far preferred piloting her own horses, whom she knew and trusted after years working together.
Snort, snort, snort, thump, thumpety, thump – jump!
The little mare was a rubber ball that bounced around before take-off and never landed the same way twice, but boy could she jump. She ballooned a fairly inconsequential ditch and wheeled left, leaving Tash dangling for a moment, all her weight off centre before those famously long, grippy lower legs and those iron-girder stomach muscles set her right and she kicked on towards the big crowds around the water.
Riding high on adrenalin and positive energy was familiar territory to Tash. She and Hugo had been on the crest of a wave all year, and today was no exception. As soon as she had finished riding across country they were booked for radio interviews, a lecture demonstration and then a sponsors’ dinner, at which they would speak. Tomorrow morning they would sign copies of their book before the final show-jumping stage of the competition. As soon as that was over they were flying out to Perth to continue their book tour on the west coast. Garnering publicity was still an alien concept to Tash. This was what she knew best.
Snort, snort, snort. Snatch snatch snatch. Head flying up, duck, dart, crouch
.
Utterly focused, contained between leg and hand, the mare prepared to take off at the big log in front of the water. Then, at the last minute, she spotted the wet expanse beyond and seemed to hang in the air, momentum dropping away from her, reluctant to get her feet wet.
With an almighty combination of willpower, voice and inner prayers, Tash propelled the black mare far enough forwards to tip her athletic body into the drink and through it in several sloshing strides until they were out the other side, skewing over a narrow log that would have unseated a lesser rider.
The spectators gave an appreciative roar and whooped applause at the sight of such good horsemanship.
Tash, who loved the Australian eventing crowd – so raucous yet knowledgeable – patted the mare on the neck and then held up her hand in gratitude to the banks of cheering faces just a few feet away, flying past as she galloped away.
A girl ran out of the crowd, the press later reported. A pretty girl: blonde, dressed in a vest, skirt and flip-flops, not the normal hardy spectator on a brisk June day. She ran straight in front of the mare.
All Tash could remember was a blur of blonde hair and pale skin in her path. She heard her own cries of warning, the crowd gasping and shouting, and felt the wrench of the rein in one hand as she pulled the mare sharply left and the contradictory twist of half a ton of muscle, momentum and power beneath her as the mare swerved right. The girl was almost underneath them, so close that she must have felt the heat of the horse’s skin and breath. The mare stumbled, flailed on her knees and struggled to stay upright.
A man in an All Blacks hoodie hurled himself from the crowd just in time to grapple the blonde girl to the ground and pull her away from the mare’s dancing legs, the two of them rolling across the muddy turf to safety.
Thrown off balance, Tash was only stopped from falling over the horse’s left shoulder by her solid black neck swinging suddenly upwards and smacking her firmly on the crown, knocking her back into the saddle as the mare scrambled to her feet. Disoriented, yet still moving forwards in a lurching canter, they carried on towards
the next fence while the girl and her dark saviour disappeared into the throng as quickly as they had appeared. Soon another competitor was splashing through the water to distract the crowd.
Somehow Tash managed to get the mare around the rest of the course, but she had no memory of it. Amazingly she finished within the time and retained her top-ten position on the overnight leader board.
Her head injury wasn’t spotted for almost twenty-four hours. She could walk, talk and function fairly normally, and insisted she was okay despite a screaming headache and increasing nausea, both of which she put down to the stress of their schedule and the early days of pregnancy. She didn’t complain because she didn’t want to let anybody down.
The radio interviews had passed in a blur, the demo even more so, but Hugo naturally took control and helped her out when she was tongue-tied, which was often the case in public, despite her private gregariousness.
He had also carried her through their after-dinner speech; he had always been the raconteur, his audience in stitches as he regaled them with scurrilous tales from ten years at the top of the sport. Nevertheless, immediately afterwards he took his wife to one side, blue eyes anxious, and said they must call a doctor. He’d never seen her so grey.
‘No!’ Tash was adamant, great yawns racking through her. ‘I just need to go to bed.’
The next morning she felt as though she’d been drugged. Her contact lenses wobbled in her eyes and she couldn’t see straight. There was a foul taste in her mouth. Her swollen breasts ached in sympathy with her pounding, pounding skull.
Schooling the little black mare before breakfast, she had to get off to throw up three times. She felt increasingly spaced out and couldn’t purely blame it on morning sickness and nerves. She disliked being the focus of so much attention, not all of it positive. Talk at Werribee Park was all of the ‘Melbourne Martyr’ and who she might be, a blurred photo of the man in the hoodie pulling the blonde from under the mare’s hooves was on the front of every newspaper sports section, his identity as mysterious as the girl whose life he had saved. The media were hasty to draw comparisons with suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, who had run out in front of a Derby field, yet
nobody knew what, if anything, this girl had been protesting about. In the gossip-loving lorry park, malicious tongues had already started wagging, suggesting that the blonde might be a spurned mistress of Hugo’s.
Any rumours certainly didn’t put off the crowds that flocked to the trade stands later that morning, eager to meet the sport’s golden couple, the legendary ‘Beauchampions’.
‘I’m such a dolt, I can’t even spell my own name right,’ Tash joked as she battled nausea throughout the book signing, painful cramps starting to claw at her belly.
‘Remember me?’ one buyer asked as he thrust his book towards her.
His face swam in front of Tash’s eyes. Lovely face. Big, dark eyes – very honest and appealing, like a young Robert Downey Junior, she thought vaguely as she took the book and wielded her pen.
‘Who shall I sign this to?’ Her own voice was getting smaller and smaller in her head.
She couldn’t hear his reply at all.
‘I’m sorry? Who did you say?’
‘Like the Scottish loch, only spelt the Irish way.’
‘The Scottish loch … how lovely …’ She smiled up at him, pen twirling and eyes crossing.
Then she uncrossed her eyes with great effort. ‘I know you.’
He nodded, the beautiful brown eyes so molten they could be fresh from a Lavazza machine.
The espresso eyes and Scottish lochs started swirling again.
She remembered nothing beyond that.
A few hours later the medical team broke it to Hugo that, as well as mild concussion, his wife had suffered a miscarriage.
Tash would dream of lochs quite a lot in coming weeks. In her childhood, when her parents had still been together, the French family had taken a house on the banks of Loch Fyne every August, where they had walked, talked, guzzled oysters and entertained vast groups of friends. Years later she and Niall – her ex – had once had a disastrous attempt at rapprochement on the edge of a loch. Most recently Hugo had taken her salmon fishing near Loch Lomond, and she had loved it with an unexpected passion – from the long
walks along river banks, to delicious picnics, to the tweeds and kinky rubber waders, to the endless lovemaking during long evenings in the croft. Their baby had been conceived there.
She coped with the loss with what others took to be characteristic common sense, but in fact hid great well of sadness and self-blame.
She said all the right things if asked. She knew that almost all miscarriages were nature’s way of preventing a wretched life. She knew that it was probably always going to happen with this particular pregnancy; it was nothing to do with carrying on competing and maintaining a hectic work schedule, it was just fate taking control. Yet still Tash secretly felt that it was her fault.
She lost a great deal of weight, became listless and withdrawn, stopped phoning friends or painting, and her riding became so unfocused and slapdash that Hugo banned her from top competitions for the rest of the season after a succession of three crashing falls at advanced events.
‘We lost the first life we created.’ He took her in his arms six weeks after Melbourne, as he did night after night, and enfolded her beneath the angle of his jaw. ‘I loved that little shared bit of us, just as I love every bit of you. And I will fight for all of us more now, for you and for our children. We
will
have children, Tash.’
Tash wanted to believe him so badly, and his words did help enormously, but some scales had fallen irretrievably from her eyes with that lost child and, with each barren month that passed after Melbourne, she mourned motherhood a little more.
The stray girl from the crowd and that moment of chance, of near-fatality, haunted her for years to come. She played what very little of it she remembered over and over again in her head but she could never remember enough to paint a full picture. As pregnancy continued to elude her she felt she was being punished for not stopping that day. She threw herself back into her riding, reaching the top-ten in the FEI world rankings for the first time and joining Hugo on the national squad. Her top horse and prolific stallion, The Foxy Snob, became the highest point-scoring horse in history and, to Hugo’s mild pique, got more fan mail than any of them. Yet her lost chance at motherhood was never far from her mind, however momentous the highs, affectionate the support and prolific the accolades.
Almost three years later she received an anonymous letter, postmarked the Solomon Islands. Written on woven, hand-made paper, in a beautiful indigo script, it simply read:
A heart was lost in Melbourne; it will always be lost. So many locks and not enough keys; it’s easier to be lost than found. But I will make amends. Pax nobiscum
.
When he read it Hugo was all for calling in a private detective, believing his wife to be stalked. Tash told him not to be so silly and tucked the letter among her keepsakes in a shell-studded box she kept at the bottom of her wardrobe.
Just days after receiving it she conceived Cora.
When a small puddle suddenly appeared beneath her in the Waitrose queue, Tash Beauchamp thought that her waters had broken a fortnight before her due date.
It was only after her checkout lane had been closed, the in-store janitor and duty manager called, and half the neighbouring staff and customers alerted to the prospect of a live birth in aisle five, that the true cause of the ever-expanding pool beneath Tash’s trolley was discovered.
Her fresh deli pork and sage kebab sticks had broken through their wrapping and speared a carton of pineapple juice, which was splashing everywhere. The smell was unmistakeable.
‘Shame,’ the manager lamented as Tash, eighteen-month-old Cora and their shopping were relocated to another till. ‘We’ve never had a birth here – a couple of deaths, several proposals and a nasty case of ABH in the freezer section just last month, but no babies. You could have called it Rose if it was a girl. Imagine the ambulance arriving while you’re in the last stages of labour, desperate to get to hospital – “Not yet, baby Rose. Wait. Wait, Rose!”; Waitrose. Getit?’