‘But Pom and Berry are coming!’
‘Their mother’s flying over with them and she’ll be in the London house, so I might as well stay there. It’s easier for me to see them that way.’
She shuffled further away from her documentary team, lowering her voice. ‘Zuzi will be devastated. She has been so desperately looking forward to seeing your girls. She always mentions Pom and Berry in her prayers each night.’
That hit him where it hurt.
‘She has had such a traumatic little life,’ she went on in a heartfelt
whisper. ‘Her father in Slovakia has just forsaken Hana for another woman. They are trying to keep it from Zuzi, but children have an instinct about these things.’
That would surely score another body blow, Sylva decided, with Dillon unable to avoid painful parallels with his daughters’ suffering when his own long-distance marriage crumbled.
‘Is Hana okay?’
‘Hana?’ Sylva struggled for a moment to register what he was talking about. ‘Oh, fine. They did not love each other for many years. She is better here with me and Mama.’
‘Your family mean everything to you, don’t they?’
‘They must come first.’ ‘I’ll be there on Sunday with the girls.’
‘You will join me at the hotel on Saturday night?’
‘No. I can’t leave London. We’ll meet at Badminton.’
Sylva felt that, in the circumstances, it was as good as she could hope for – another play-date, this one played out in public at least.
At Calcot Spa, Sylva and Mama enjoyed massages, facials, manicures, body wraps and polishes on the first day, while Hana and the nannies entertained the children in the crèche and took them for adventures in the grounds. On Friday, Sylva worked out in the gym and swam hundreds of lengths in the pool, Mama had an eyelash tint, fake tan and cellulite treatment, and a protesting Hana was frog-marched to the spa for a facial and hot-stone massage.
By Friday night, when they tucked into veal sweetbreads in the Conservatory restaurant, there was a curious unity between the mother and daughters. Then Hana made a comment that shattered the family truce.
‘Why do you want to marry a man who does not want to marry you?’ she asked her younger sister calmly over vanilla-poached peaches.
Mama’s squawks of protest were interrupted by a text message arriving from Dillon.
Will be in studio all tomorrow day & night. Can’t make Badminton.
Sylva narrowed her eyes murderously. She might have guessed he’d wimp out. She already had a contingency plan, and so she immediately texted Indigo, suggesting a family outing that weekend.
D stuck in recording studio, but I know you and P can talk him round
.
Her thumb criss-crossed her phone’s touch screen, its long acrylic nail scratching against the glass.
Would be so lovely to spend more time with all my new family, and D needs a treat. Can you help?
It was a bold move, Indigo could easily call her bluff and checkmate, but Sylva doubted she would deny herself the opportunity to cash in on her recent mother-in-law gamesmanship. It was Indigo who had started the engagement rumour, after all. She liked to play as much as Sylva. If she wanted to see it through, she knew how important it was to make sure that Sylva and Dillon were seen together in public, and soon.
She replied in seconds:
Wicked stepmother on case
.
Sylva giggled, earning curious looks from Mama and Hana. Indigo rarely betrayed a sense of humour, laughter being the enemy of smooth skin, but when she did Sylva found her almost human.
Not pausing for a beat, she put an urgent call through to her personal hair stylist.
‘Gary will come here tomorrow,’ she told Mama afterwards. ‘I am going blonde again.’
Mama’s face lit up, having thought the brunette very drab. Sylva was a good girl, and professional to a fault. If she couldn’t guarantee the top-ranking headlines that she ideally wanted to come next week, from an appearance with ‘fiancé Dillon Rafferty’ at Britain’s biggest equestrian event, then she could at least try to avoid slipping BKK by eliciting the media’s interest with a new hair colour. Now
that
was dedication.
The atmosphere – and weather – at Badminton had already tested the Haydown team to the limit. Both dressage days were marked by unseasonally chilly temperatures and gusty showers, making the horses crabby and disobedient.
Hugo performed his first test in a hailstorm and came out with a cricket score on Sir Galahad. Twenty minutes later, in sideways rain, Lough and his scratch ride, Koura, picked up an equally unimpressive clutch of penalties by rearing after the rein back and
fly-bucking through the flying changes. Both men were so hellbent on beating one another that they over-focused and over-pressurised their mounts.
Early on the second day, The Fox gave Rory an easier ride than his stablemate, despite a hailstorm during his canter work, and the pair raised the stalwart dressage crowd’s spirits with an electric test, only marred by the rider’s over-cocky bows and winks to the judges, like Liberace flirting over a piano.
Left to his own devices away from the Hugo-Lough grudge match, Rory was on a roll and loving the attention his Kentucky win brought. To his delight, Marie-Clair had flown in to catch some four-star action en route to her stud in France, supporting one of her coaching protégés, a young French rider called Kevin, and checking in with her British interest.
They watched the other Haydown contenders from the stands. Hugo scraped into the top ten on a volatile The Cub and Lough raised his game too, riding Olympic horse Rangitoto with iron will to end the day in seventh, but neither competitor was happy, and MC was quick to proclaim why.
‘Zey ride wiz zeir cocks. It is always a mistake – like driving wiz your nose, huh?’
Rory flashed a smile, not entirely certain what she meant. She was frighteningly like Eric Cantona at times.
‘And your cock?’ she demanded, earning some shocked looks from near by seats.
‘Entirely at your service,’ he told her in an undertone, spoken into his collar like a spy.
‘Good. I book a hotel for tonight.’ She stood up. ‘You lie fourth, I sink.’
‘You mean there are three others sharing your bed before me?’ Rory gulped, unhappy with the idea of queuing up for his French mistress, however irresistible he found her lessons.
‘On the leaderboard, Rory,’ she laughed throatily, blowing him a kiss. ‘You are fourth after ze dressage, but always first in my heart, as I am in yours,
non
?’
‘Of course.’ Rory blew a kiss in return before setting off to the temporary stables to feed Fox a roll of Polos and give him a thank-you pat. Crossing back through the park, he half hoped he would bump into Faith and be able to share the news of his top-five slot
with her, but she was nowhere to be seen as he returned to the Beauchamps’ horsebox to pack his things.
Paranoid that their trysts would be discovered by the scandal-loving British eventing crowd, MC had booked a B&B several miles away using a false name. Rory loved that the guesthouse’s owner called him Monsieur Nom de Plume without apparent irony.
‘Zey will talk about us still, of course,’ MC predicted minutes later as she undressed Rory with consummate skill, fingers as deft with buttons as a catwalk stylist changing a male model. ‘Now you are winning, you weel be on everybody’s lips.’
‘Do you really think so?’ he asked, hoping nothing bad was being said about him in the Lime Tree Farm lorry, parked in the prime Badminton pitch it had occupied for over a decade, like the central tepee in a Native American encampment. The Moncrieffs were notorious gossips, so their lorry was a campfire for all-comers.
‘
Absolutement
.’ MC removed his trousers faster than a casualty nurse treating a minor burn. Then she dropped to her knees. ‘But tonight, you are only on my lips,
chéri
.’
Rory closed his eyes ecstatically, deciding on balance that he didn’t mind being talked about if it involved lip service like this.
But talk in the lorry park that week was not about Rory and MC. Nor was it still debating the identity of Lucy Field’s married lover, a topic that had kept the scandalmongers speculating for two seasons now. It was all about the Tash-Hugo-Lough love triangle. Rumours were running riot, with claims that Lough and Tash had been spotted kissing in the ha-ha at Hyam Hall, canoodling behind the bushes at Larkhill and fornicating against the orangery at Belton.
‘It’s all such rubbish – Tash didn’t even go to Belton,’ Penny Moncrieff complained to Gus. ‘Where on earth do they get it from?’
Gus coughed uncomfortably, but said nothing.
By the Friday night, Tash and Hugo, sharing a rented cottage on the edge of the estate with the children and au pairs, were feeling so much tension from the obvious scrutiny that they were under, that they were barely speaking.
On Saturday, the weather flipped sides and was unexpectedly hot, throwing cross-country preparations into disarray as the going changed from soft to sticky. Riders grumbled about the stamina-sapping ground, the risk of injury and slippages. Everybody knew
that the toughest course in the world would take no prisoners in ideal conditions, let alone in punishing heat and with claggy going.
‘They’ll come home exhausted, if at all,’ Julia Ditton, commentating for the BBC, predicted darkly. The first two horses on the course bore this out by retiring early.
Next out was Hugo’s first horse, Sir Galahad. The duo seemed set to defy the pessimists, streaking round in Hugo’s inimitable, quick-witted style. But disaster struck when the horse tripped badly on a loose leg boot in the middle of the bounce into the lake and chested the second element, propelling Hugo out over the jump and into the water.
‘Now there’s a sight you don’t see very often!’ Mike Tucker chortled delightedly on the live commentary as Hugo waded out to catch his horse. ‘Beauchamp taking a swim!’
‘Hot day. Nice to cool off,’ Hugo managed to joke through gritted teeth when Julia Ditton dashed up to him with a microphone at the end of his round.
There was no laughter back at the stables when Jenny examined the cause of the fall. The straps of the boot had been cut.
‘I put them on myself, and taped them before you warmed up,’ she said. ‘They were fine.’
‘Could anybody else have got at them before the start?’ Hugo demanded.
‘No – I mean, we were all there checking everything and putting on the leg grease, me, Beccy – and Lem was there for Lough, helping out.’
‘Was Lough near by at the time?’
Jenny nodded. ‘We should complain to the stewards.’
He waved the idea away. ‘Waste of time – we can’t prove anything. Just looks like sour grapes.’
Jenny cleared her throat awkwardly. ‘Beccy has been … very strange all this week.’
It was true that Beccy couldn’t stop crying, and wouldn’t tell anybody why. She kept locking herself in the loo of the horsebox and refused to come out.
‘Okay. Say nothing, but don’t let her near Cub from now on. I’m going to get out of these wet things.’
Tash, who’d seen the fall on the screen in the supporters’ tent and
had been running around trying to find Hugo ever since, was handicapped by Cora who had become very clingy lately and refused to leave her mother’s side, but weighed a ton to carry and was far too slow and unsteady to walk any distance. She finally tracked him down at the horsebox, changing into dry clothes.
‘Are you okay?’ she gasped breathlessly, Cora dangling round her neck.
‘Never fucking better,’ he hissed as he pulled a T-shirt over his head.
For once not telling him off for not wearing a Mogo top – or pulling him up about swearing in front of Cora – Tash let the wriggling toddler slither to the floor. ‘I’ve just seen Jenny. She says it was deliberate.’
‘Looks like it.’
‘I think you should withdraw Cub. It’s too dangerous.’
He held up his hand to quieten her as the distant cross-country commentary announced that Lough Strachan had cleared the first fence and was away. ‘Lover boy’s on course if you want to watch.’
‘Please don’t say that,’ Tash said, not noticing that Cora had appropriated her father’s spare cross-country helmet and was filling it with food from the fridge as a make-believe picnic basket.
They walked back towards the supporters’ tent in silence. Hugo had several hours before he needed to start warming up Cub, and wanted to face the commiserations of his fellow riders straight away to get it over with. He also secretly hoped to watch Lough suffer a similar fate on the big screen.
But Lough gave an exemplary performance, piloting the unfamiliar ride around his first-ever Badminton as though they’d been a partnership for years, taking all the direct routes, picking out the most brilliant, economic lines and the best of the ground to preserve the horse’s legs. They galloped through the finish inside the time to be greeted by enormous cheers of support, particularly from the female spectators. Lemon bounced up and down like a rubber ball as he took over the horse to cool him down and loosen off while Lough was hailed from all sides by the excited owners and fellow New Zealanders.
It had been a breathtaking bit of riding. His was the first penalty-free clear round of the day; to go inside the time had been thought impossible until now. Anybody who had not yet realised that Lough
Strachan had arrived in the UK and was a force to be reckoned with, was now left in no doubt that the Devil on Horseback was here.
Swept away by the hysteria of the supporters’ tent, Tash felt jubilant. Seeing the man she’d been training with finally start to get the recognition he deserved, she urged Hugo to come with her and the children to congratulate him too: ‘Let’s bury the hatchet, show a united front. We can get past all this nonsense.’
‘Since when was trying to steal another man’s wife nonsense?’ He stood up and marched out.
By the time she’d gathered Cora in her toddler reins, Amery in the buggy and all their paraphernalia to follow him, he’d disappeared from sight.
Spotting Veruschka and Vasilly at a burger van, she apologetically handed over her children and dashed straight to the stables. But Hugo wasn’t there, only Jenny, plaiting up Cub.