Blaze and the Dark Rider (17 page)

At the end of the day as Issie unsaddled Blaze she thought about the past few weeks and everything she had been through. She had lost her horse and now she had her back. After that, a little thing like the Interclub Shield shouldn’t really matter much to her at all. Yet she still found herself thrilled with the idea of being in the team and she felt butterflies in her
tummy even thinking about the competition. The Interclub was this weekend. They had just a few more days to prepare. She slid the stirrup leathers up on her saddle and undid the girth, then moved around to the other side of her horse and slid the saddle off.

As she slipped the bridle over Blaze’s ears she spoke softly to her. “Now that you’re back we have a competition to win,” she told her. “Are you ready, girl?”

Blaze nickered in reply and Issie laughed. “Yeah, me too!” she said.

With the bridle hanging down from her shoulder and the saddle slung over her right arm she walked over to the tack room. The team would all be leaving their horses and gear here until the day of the Interclub rally so that they could fit in one more training session before the event.

In the tack room, Issie slid her saddle on to the wooden saddle horse. She thought about the training session today and how furious Araminta had been when her daughter hadn’t made the team after all. Araminta’s fury had only confirmed Issie’s suspicions.

It was more than a coincidence, Issie thought, that all these accidents had started happening after
Araminta arrived at the pony club. Issie had seen some pushy pony-club mums before but this was extreme. It was scary how much Araminta wanted Morgan to ride in the Interclub. Was she really so determined that she would go to any lengths to get rid of anything that stood in her way? Did that include sabotaging other riders who were chosen ahead of her own daughter? Issie remembered Francoise describing the stranger in the tack room that night as “a woman with dark hair”. It all made sense. It had to be Araminta.

Issie looked around the tack room. If Araminta was causing the accidents would she give up now? No. Araminta wasn’t the sort to give up. She would make one last effort to get rid of the competition and get her daughter in the team. Only this time, Issie would be ready for her.

That evening, after her mum had gone to bed, Issie snuck down to the kitchen and packed her backpack with everything she would need. She had a silver Thermos filled with the leftover soup from dinner in
case she got hungry. Her mum had bought her a new torch for school camp, and she put that in too, checking the batteries to make sure they still worked. She also borrowed her mum’s mobile phone just in case, and put in the throw rug off the sofa to snuggle under if it got cold. Then she strapped her backpack on to her back, grabbed her bike out of the garage and set off.

As she cycled along the backstreets that led from her house to the pony club, she began to wonder if what she was doing wasn’t a little mad. Perhaps Annabel’s stirrup leather had really been an accident after all. And was she sure that someone had tampered with Blaze’s feed? Even if Araminta really had tried to sabotage the team, that didn’t mean she would be back tonight. Issie was beginning to have real doubts about her plan. Then, as she parked her bike up by the pony-club gate, she saw a silvery shadow in the nearest paddock and heard a low whinny calling out to her. Mystic was here!

The little grey came closer, tossing his mane and snorting. He seemed distracted and nervous, Issie thought, and she realised that she had made the right decision to come to the pony club tonight. If Mystic
was acting like this then something had to be wrong. The grey gelding trotted over to Issie, snorting and quivering with tension.

“Easy, boy” she soothed, although she knew that she was just as nervous as he was, and she was saying this mostly to calm herself down. Issie peered out into the blackness of the horizon. She could just make out the shapes of the horses grazing in the far paddock.

“Mystic, you go keep close to them,” she whispered to her horse. “Look after Blaze. I’ll be all right here by myself.”

Mystic seemed to understand her instructions. He wheeled about instantly and cantered off, his head held high. Issie watched him blurring into the shadows as he reached the other horses. She heard another horse, perhaps it was Blaze, calling back to him, her soft whinny carrying clearly in the crisp night air.

Issie looked back at her bike. It was too obvious to leave it here leaning up against the fence. She didn’t want anyone to know that she was already here. But it was too heavy to lift over the fence and she didn’t have a key to the paddock gate. She would have to hide it somewhere.

She decided to shove it into the hedge on the other side of the gravel driveway by the club gates. It turned out this wasn’t as easy as she thought, but eventually she found a gap and with a little effort she managed to wedge the bike into the hole. She hunted around and found a couple of branches to prop in front of it to hide it completely. Satisfied with her work, she walked back to the pony-club gate, climbed the rungs, swung herself over and headed for the clubroom.

She found her way to the tack room easily in the dark without even having to resort to the torch in her backpack.
I’ve been sneaking about here so often I can find my way in the dark
, Issie thought to herself. She found the tack room key easily this time too and opened the door.

It was pitch black inside and she reached for her torch. She didn’t want to switch the light on in case someone saw it and got frightened off. She turned on her torch briefly to make sure that she’d locked the door again after herself. Then, once she was inside with the door shut behind her, she turned it on one more time to find a spot just behind the saddle horses where she could snuggle down in her blanket and take
out her Thermos of soup for a midnight feast while she waited.

It wasn’t the most fun way to spend an evening, Issie thought as she tried to get comfy, sitting here alone in the pitch dark, in a creaky old tack room. She curled up under the blanket for a bit, and then got bored and filled herself a cup of soup. Luckily her mum had just made a big pot of homemade chicken and vegetable that night, which was her favourite. She wished she had packed some juice and maybe a chocolate bar as well. She put the lid back on the Thermos and settled down to wait.

Issie must have dozed off so she wasn’t sure what time it was when she heard the sound of footsteps outside the tack-room door. The noise instantly woke her up and she panicked, fumbling around underneath the blankets to find her torch.

There was the sound of keys in the lock. She threw the blanket off and crouched down low behind the saddle horses and waited.

The door opened. Issie looked up between the saddles and saw the figure of a woman, her long hair silhouetted against the night sky. The woman
reached up for the light switch and just as she did, Issie stood up from behind the saddle horse. As the lights came on there was a moment of stunned silence as Issie finally stared the mystery in the face.

“It’s you…But why…?” Issie found herself too dumbstruck to finish her sentence. She looked at the dark-haired figure standing opposite her. Not a woman, as she had thought, but a young girl, just like her. It was Morgan Chatswood-Smith.

Issie couldn’t believe it! Morgan? Illuminated by the tack-room light, Morgan stood in the doorway. When she saw Issie she froze to the spot in shock. Then her face turned dark with anger and she glared at Issie. It was the same look Morgan had given her when Avery had thrown her off the team in favour of Issie.

Issie’s face looked just as shocked as Morgan’s at first. She had been expecting Araminta to walk through the door. After Araminta’s furious outburst during training, Issie had been convinced that she was the one responsible for sabotaging Annabel and trying to poison Blaze.

Issie realised now that she had been thinking about this all wrong. She began to play back the events of the
past months in her mind. When Francoise had said she saw a woman with dark hair in the tack room that night, Issie had assumed the woman was Araminta but it could easily have been Morgan. And then there was Blaze’s poisoned feed. Of course! When Issie talked to Morgan at team training she had instantly assumed that Blaze wasn’t there because she was sick.
She must have thought that her poisoned horse feed was the reason for Blaze being off the team
, Issie thought.

It was all making sense now. “Have you been doing all of this, Morgan?” Issie asked. “Was that you in the tack room that night? Did you cut Annabel’s stirrup leather? Poison Blaze’s feed?”

Morgan nodded.

“But why?” Issie asked. “Morgan, why? Do you really hate us all that much? You could have killed Annabel! You could have hurt Blaze too!”

As Issie said this, the dark expression on Morgan’s face crumpled into one of total misery and she burst into tears. “Stop saying that! I know that now! I never meant to do it. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I just wanted to ride in the Interclub so badly. All I could think about was making the team…”

Issie shook her head. “But why hurt Annabel? What did she ever do to you?” she asked.

Morgan’s voice was shaky. “I never meant to. I thought if Annabel couldn’t ride then Avery would put me in the team. I just wanted her to get a fright. I never thought she’d end up in hospital. And then, after all that, Avery didn’t put me in the team anyway. He picked stupid old Natasha instead.

“Anyway, I decided that if one of the horses got sick then he wouldn’t have any choice—he would have to make me a team member. I was the only reserve left. So I put the selenium in the feed. When Blaze didn’t turn up for training that day I thought she must have been sick because of what I did to the horse feed, and then I got worried that maybe Blaze was really sick and I didn’t mean to hurt her and it was all my fault and the whole thing was such a mess, but it was too late by then and I couldn’t stop it…”

Morgan’s sobbing made it hard for her to speak.

“Hey, calm down. It’s OK,” Issie said. “I get it. You didn’t mean to do it. Things got out of control. But I just don’t understand. Why would anyone want to be in the team that badly?”

Morgan pushed her dark hair back off her face and wiped her eyes roughly with the sleeve of her jumper. “Of course you don’t understand!” she snapped at Issie. “You don’t have your mum pushing you all the time, telling you that you have to be a great rider like she was.”

She took a deep breath, trying to calm down before she spoke. “Do you have any idea what it’s like for me being the daughter of ‘famous rider’ Araminta Chatswood-Smith? It’s awful! All I ever hear about is how great my mum was and what a star she was in her day. No one ever really wants to know me—they just want to talk about her.” Morgan took another deep, quivery breath. She was still crying though and big tears rolled down her cheeks as she spoke.

“The worst of it is that I always disappoint Mum,” she said. “I try my best. I really do. But I’m not as good as her. I get scared on the showjumping course, Issie. I don’t think I can ever ride over big jumps like she did when she was a girl. I don’t think I’m good enough. And then I came here and all she could talk about was how ‘back in her day’ she had been on the team that won the Interclub Shield. And I started
thinking that if I could make the team and help win the shield too then maybe I would finally be as good as she was.”

Morgan looked down at her boots. Her voice turned very quiet now. “All I ever wanted was to be on the team. I just wanted to make her proud of me.”

There was a long time where neither girl spoke and all that could be heard was Morgan blowing her nose and making little damp sniffy noises as she tried to stop crying. And then Issie spoke. “You realise that Annabel is in hospital because of you?” she said. “And Blaze could have been really sick too if she’d eaten that horse feed.”

Morgan nodded. “I know. I am so sorry. I never wanted to hurt Annabel or Blaze. I just got so, well, obsessed about winning and making the team. I went a little crazy.”

“Why did you come here tonight?” Issie asked.

“I was going to steal some of the gear,” Morgan said. “I figured if you couldn’t find your saddles and stuff then you wouldn’t be able to ride and Avery would have to put me back in the team at the last minute.”

Issie nodded. Despite everything that Morgan had
done, as they stood there together in the tack room it was hard not to feel sympathy for her. All she had wanted to do was to please her mother, to live up to her expectations. Maybe, Issie realised, having a horsy family wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

“I’m really sorry, Morgan, honestly,” Issie said, “but I have no choice.” She reached into her backpack and pulled out her mobile phone.

“Are you calling the police?” Morgan snuffled miserably.

“No, I’m afraid it’s worse than that,” Issie said. “I’m calling your mother.”