She suddenly wondered why he’d come alone – no trainer, no rider, no expert adviser, not even a camcorder. It was unheard of in her experience, especially for a relative newcomer to eventing. Most deals like this took weeks if not months of delicate negotiations, usually brokered by at least one agent. She was reminded of the premiership striker who had famously bought two of the country’s top dressage horses for his young wife as a wedding present and driven them home to her in a custom-built horsebox painted with his club’s colours. The highly strung, highly trained horses, accustomed only to expert professional riding, had soon frightened their novice owner and themselves so much that she lost interest. When she fell pregnant the horses were thrown out in a field where they had stayed for three years before being sent to some backwater auction, a million pounds’ worth of horseflesh and talent sold on as unwarranted hacks to the highest cash bidder.
‘Hugo’s the only one who rides Heart.’
‘Then we’ll start with the other one.’
Tash felt nausea rise as she looked up at Fox’s clever red head and high sloping shoulder and knew she couldn’t hope to ride him. He might be easy, but she’d had a baby four days ago and was incapable of mounting stairs easily, let alone a horse. Her boobs were throbbing as her let-down reflex went into overdrive; her scar had been stretched and strained by all this activity and her painkillers were wearing off, making her feel sicker by the second. She could feel the blood seeping between her legs and her support stockings were itching so madly beneath her leather boots that she wanted to plunge them in the nearest water trough.
Instead, she forced a smile to match his, sales girl to awkward customer.
‘I’ll go and rustle up a jockey,’ she said politely, making it sound as though she was going to fling together Frankie Dettori as a light snack. ‘I promise I won’t be long. Would you like a drink while you wait? There’s a kettle in the office there, and a fridge with cold drinks if they haven’t all been snaffled. I’m sorry, it’s self-service.’
‘I can handle it.’ He waved her away, already pulling a phone from his pocket. ‘Thanks.’
She turned to lumber back to the house, tears of pain in her eyes, tempted to just lock the doors and hide until he went away.
*
The trademark smile dropped away when Tash went out of view and Dillon turned to look at The Fox once more, but the horse had returned to his haynet and was presenting his bum to his potential purchaser.
‘Bloody idiot,’ Dillon cursed himself under his breath.
He’d only diverted to Berkshire today to avoid the gathering storm clouds back home, figuratively and literally. Whisked to Paris the previous night to perform in a studio with talk-of-the-town French singer Lola Lèvres on a live link to the MTV Video Music Awards in Hollywood, Dillon was not feeling his best. He and Nell had been having a text row for almost twenty-four hours now, sparked by the fact that he refused to take her with him to Paris, knowing she’d be bored and would jealously snub poor little Lola, who might look like a horny porn star and had already been dubbed the new Amy Winehouse, but was in fact rather sweet and innocent, and guarded by alarmingly over-protective parents. Having insisted that the PR, Tania, and all the other record label hand-holders stay away, Dillon had been overridden continually by la famille Lèvres to the point that he’d practically become a backing singer to the pouty princess in the live link – not great billing for a man still in the number-one slot in thirteen countries. It had been a wearying trip. Dillon hadn’t slept in thirty hours, had eaten outside his body clock, had longed for a drink more than ever and had spent far too long with the sound of his own backing track, studio talkback, rapid-fire French and helicopter rotors shuddering through him.
Now he tilted his head up to the flawless sky and let the sun bake his face for a moment. The roses clambering around the eaves of the buildings smelled incredible. It was a beautiful spot. If he knew about it, his father would no doubt try to snap it up to add to his country-house collection. Pete had once famously boasted that he wanted to buy a stately pile in every English county: ‘I want to be a rich country gent, and these days any rich cunt can be gentry.’ It was a very Pete Rafferty epigram.
Dillon winced at the memory. His father and family were was due to move to his newly refurbished Cotswolds house any day now, and he regularly found himself wishing that the three-quarters of an acre of retiled Abbey roof was being struck by lightning that very minute.
When crossing the Channel earlier, his pilot had received reports that storms were making flying conditions hazardous north of the
M4 and had asked Dillon if there was anywhere he’d like to make an unscheduled stop. At which point Dillon had finally bothered to start reading the thirty-five texts he had received from Faith in the past two days, and which contained details of the Beauchamps’ wonder horse. Faith, being better organised than his own PA, had naturally attached every contact number available for the Beauchamps, plus email, a postcode reference and even GPS coordinates. She was unbeatable, a ray of sunshine poking from the stormy Lodes valley sky. He wished she wasn’t going away to Essex.
He thought about calling her now to cheer himself up, but settled for picture-texting instead.
‘Oi – you,’ he held his phone over the stable door.
Lifting his tail slightly, The Fox let out a drum-rolling fart and carried on munching his hay.
Dillon made kissing noises to attract his attention until, with a deep sigh, the horse consented to pose, turning around and thrusting his head obligingly from the door, dropping hay all over Dillon’s hair which was still sticky from the heavy wax coating it had received from the Paris stylist.
Reaching up to remove a piece that had fallen on to his brow, he realised that he was still wearing the barbell Nell had given him before he set out for Paris, specially designed by Chopard at great expense to her specific instructions. He secretly hated it. ‘They make beautiful rings, too,’ Nell had said so leadingly that he couldn’t help but laugh.
But that laughter, and his continued refusal to take her to Paris, had sparked the ongoing storm, the eye of which he was languishing in now. Poor, darling, beautiful Nell. She so wanted a whirlwind romance and a Vegas wedding, but he just wanted to go steady with the girl next door.
Sending the picture of The Fox to Faith, his fingers hovered over the keys before he quickly typed a message to Nell.
Life’s too short. No more arguing. Paris hell without you. I love you. Riding out the storm and counting the minutes until I see you. Will bring present. xxx
After the message had winged itself away, he cursed himself for that final sentence. He was always promising the same to his daughters and Fawn constantly gave him a hard time for it, pointing out that they loved him without bribery and corruption. Now he’d need another unscheduled stop. He didn’t have a present – Nell was
hardly likely to appreciate the white label first pressing of Lola Lèvres’s collaboration with legendary rap producer Marley X, or the clutch of studio freebies he’d grabbed for the girls in the farm office.
He looked at The Fox and blew out through his lips, unscrewing the brow barbell. ‘Know where I can buy a bunch of flowers round here?’
The horse turned away.
His neighbour with the heart-shaped star was bobbing his handsome head up and down furiously behind the grille, mad eyes boggling. He was liked a caged tiger.
‘You and me both, mate,’ Dillon sighed, walking forwards to scratch the horse’s black muzzle through the bars. ‘You should like it here – this place is great. I love it. I could live here.’ The centre of attention at last, Cœur d’Or relaxed and looked almost mellow, lifting his big nose to sniff Dillon’s hair. ‘“Heart of Gold” was a great track.’ He started singing a few bars.
The horse dropped his nose, eyes wide again.
‘Yeah, maybe I’ll transpose the key if I ever do a cover,’ Dillon agreed, turning to gaze enviously around him again. Haydown was a great find, a secret rapture. Dillon felt like a kid slotting a new platform game into a console, knowing that there could be hours of new excitements to explore here, wanting to see them all at once. He couldn’t remember feeling like this since first arriving at his Lower Oddford farm.
Apart from the telephone bell ringing out unheeded and unanswered every few minutes, the only sound he’d heard since he’d arrived on the yard were horses snorting, insects buzzing and bird-song.
He thought about Tash Beauchamp and her peculiarly gentle but abrupt manner, her strange eyes and her hidden tears. He felt bad that he’d snapped his fingers to make her show him two horses when really he was just idling away an afternoon, but she was infuriatingly odd, obviously in pain yet killingly secretive and upper class about it. It was red rag to a bull. Dillon was still in green-room mode, tired and tetchy from being sideswept by the Lèvres family in Paris. Buying power was an easy fix now that he had so few addictions left.
On cue, Faith texted back.
BUY HIM BUY HIM BUY HIM!!!!
The message from Nell was queuing behind it:
What present?
He took another photograph, this time of the horse with the
heart-shaped star lifting his soft black lip in a distinctly Elvis fashion, and he almost sent it to her, but something made him stop and regroup. Gift horses weren’t great ideas, especially ones at this high a price. His father had once bought a mistress a rare black Falabella stallion the size of a Labrador, only to discover that the lease on her Chelsea garden flat didn’t allow her to keep it there and London livery was over a grand a month, regardless of the incumbent’s size. The poor mistress had died of an overdose just a few weeks after the Rockfather had dispensed with her services. The stallion had then been given to a very ungrateful ten-year-old Dillon, who’d fed it variety of his father’s drugs before losing interest when it failed to die, explode or do anything much, other than eat. Amazingly, Black Sabbath was still going strong at twenty-eight, in a small paddock in the grounds of his father’s castle in Ireland. The mistresses were still as plentiful as the houses his father owned, and all were lavished with regular presents. If Dillon wasn’t careful he would find himself going the same way and he knew it. In the modern world a rich man could buy favour far more quickly than he could earn it but, as he knew from his own childhood, buying a child’s love was less straightforward if one hadn’t the time to back up the extravagance. His father had sold out on that front years ago.
Buying a horse was similarly fraught with difficulties because they had no notion of their own value and no gratitude for anything beyond food and shelter. To a horse, ownership was a non sequitur. They were obedient, brave and noble servants to their riders because their trust had been earned, slowly and patiently.
Until recently, the only other horse Dillon had owned had lamed him for life. He wasn’t about to buy another gift horse without looking in its mouth very carefully indeed.
And so, instead of sending Nell the photograph of Cœur d’Or he sent her a blurry shot of something pink, firm and slightly hairy with a distinctive pink pip at its centre.
What in hell’s that?
she texted back with obvious alarm.
My heart
he wrote simply, having held the phone up inside his T-shirt and snapped his chest where he imagined his heart to be.
It’s yours
.
He looked at his phone for a long time waiting for her response.
The silence spoke volumes.
‘Who’s that on Fox?’ Gus Moncrieff asked his wife as they rattled through the outer courtyard and under the clock tower on their ancient Land Rover. ‘Bloody awful leg position.’
Penny automatically reached out to take the steering wheel from her husband as he lifted both hands to his face and struggled to light one of his endless successions of cigarettes. Pulling the wheel sharply left to avoid a free-range terrier, she didn’t take her eyes off the rider in the ménage to their right.
‘Tash’s sister, I think.’
‘Sophia doesn’t ride, does she?’
‘No, the younger one, the horsy stepsister. Rebecca, isn’t it?’
‘I thought she ran away to become a Tibetan monk?’
‘She came home via a rather hefty jail sentence for drug trafficking. But we don’t. Talk. About. It. Tash and Hugo have taken her on as a working pupil.’
Gus whistled, succeeding in lighting the cigarette this time.
‘Put that out,’ Penny ordered, relinquishing the wheel. ‘We are here to visit a newborn child, remember?’
‘You can go into the house to reconnoitre. Tash is bound to have a boob out or something. And I want to check this out first.’ Gus parked the Land Rover beside the arena, where a solitary figure was leaning over the rails. He jumped out, proffering an arm. ‘Hello! Gus Moncrieff.’
Sighing, Penny clambered out too, not catching the name of the man by the rails as he introduced himself to Gus.
‘And this is the wife,’ Gus waved his cigarette arm in her direction, still squinting critically at the horse and rider on show.
Flashing a quick smile Penny also turned to regard Beccy on Fox.
Gus was right, her lower leg was atrocious and judging by the colour of her face and the heavy breathing, she was monumentally unfit. Her shoulders were tense and she had a rather hollow back. But there was a lot to like. Her hands were lovely and soft, her chin nice and high and her seat deep and well connected. She could go a long way with a seat like that. The Fox certainly seemed to appreciate her and was going very sweetly indeed.
‘Super horse.’ She sighed jealously. ‘Super, super horse.’
Gus nodded. ‘D’you know some American offered Hugo a hundred grand to use the beast’s DNA to clone him?’
Penny snorted at the thought. ‘He turned him down. Said they’d have to clone Tash too because this horse had the best possible start in life thanks to her and that’s why he’s so perfect.’ She sighed enviously again, shooting Gus a resentful look because he would never dream of acknowledging her help like that. ‘There’ll be no clones of this amazing creature.’