To the Hilt (9 page)

Now, more than five years later, she put her newly written list for the head groom in the message box outside the back door. She let out her two Labradors for a bathroom run and walked round the stable yard to make sure that all was well. Then she came in, whistled for the dogs to return to their baskets in the kitchen and locked the doors against the night.

All so familiar. All so long ago.

She gave me two traveling rugs to keep warm on the sofa and said calmly, “Goodnight.”

I put my arms round her tentatively. “Em?”

“No,” she said.

I kissed her forehead, holding her close. “Em?”

“Oh,” she said in exasperation, “all
right.”

She no longer slept in the big bedroom we’d shared, but in the old guestroom, in a new queen-sized romping ground suitable for passing fancies.

She had slotted a new, luxurious bathroom into what had once been her father’s dressing room. Downstairs the house might be as I remembered it, but upstairs it was not.

“This is not a precedent,” Emily said, taking off layers down to a white lace bra. “And I don’t think it’s wise.”

“Bugger wise.”

“You obviously haven’t been getting enough.”

“No, I haven’t.” I switched off the lights and drew back the curtains, as I’d always done. “How about you?”

“I’m known as a dragon. There aren’t many with the guts of Saint George.”

“Do you regret it?”

She rustled out of the rest of her clothes and slid naked between the sheets, her curved shape momentarily silhouetted against an oblong window of stars. I took off my clothes and felt ageless.

“Rumors run round Lambourn like the pox,” she said. “I’m bloody careful who I let into this room.”

We stopped talking. We had never, I supposed, been inventive or innovative lovers. There had been no need. Front to front with hands and lips and tongues we had shivered with sensual intense arousal, and that at least hadn’t changed. Her body to my touch was long known and long forgotten, like going back to an abandoned building: a newly explored breast, familiar concave abdomen, hard mound of pelvis, soft dark warm mystery below and beyond, known secretly but never explored by spotlight, since, in spite of her forthright public face, she was privately shy.

I did what I knew she liked, and as ever my own intensest pleasure came in pleasing her. Entry was easy, her readiness receptive. Movement strong and rhythmic, an instinct shared. When I felt her deep pulse beating, then too I took my own long moment; sometimes in the past it had been as good as that, but not always. It seemed that in that way also we had grown up.

“I’ve missed you,” she said.

“I, too.”

We slept peacefully side by side, and it was in the morning in the shower that she looked at my collection of bruises with disbelief.

“I told you,” I said mildly. “I got mugged.”

“Trampled by a stampede of cows, more like.”

“Bulls.”

“OK, then. Bulls. Don’t come downstairs until the first lot has gone out.”

I’d almost forgotten I was there to steal a horse. I waited until the scrunching hooves outside had diminuendoed into the distance and went down for coffee and toast.

Emily came in from the yard, saying, “I’ve saddled and bridled Golden Malt. He’s all ready for you, but he’s pretty fresh. For God’s sake don’t let him whip round and buck you off. The last thing I want is to have him loose on the Downs.”

“I’ve been thinking about anonymity,” I said, spreading honey on toast. “Have you still got any of those nightcaps you put over their heads in very cold weather? A nightcap would hide that very white blaze down his nose. And perhaps boots for his white socks ...”

She nodded, amused. “And you’d better borrow a helmet from the cloakroom, and anything else you need.”

I thanked her and went into the large downstairs cloakroom where there was always a haphazard collection of jackets, boots, gloves and helmets for kitting out visitors. I found some jodhpur boots to fit me (better than sneakers for the job), and tied my hair up on the top of my head with a shoelace before hiding the lot under a shiny blue helmet. I slung round my neck a pair of jockeys’ goggles, the big mica jobs they used against rain and mud ... fine disguise for a black eye.

Emily, still amused, said no one would recognize the result. “And do borrow one of those padded jackets. It’s cold on the Downs these mornings.”

I fetched a dark-colored jacket and said, “If anyone comes looking for the horse, say I had authority to take him, and I took him, and you don’t know where he is.”

“Do you think anyone will come?” She was curious more than worried, it seemed.

“Hope not.”

Golden Malt eyed me with disillusion from inside his nightcap. Emily gave me a leg up onto his back and at this point looked filled with misgiving.

“When the hell did you last sit on a horse?” she asked, frowning.

“Er ... some time ago.” But I got my feet into the stirrups and collected the reins into a reasonable bunch.

“How often have you actually ridden since you left here?” Emily demanded.

“It’s all in the mind,” I said. Golden Malt skittered around unhelpfully. It looked a long way down to the ground.

“You’re a bloody fool,” she said.

“I’ll phone you if anything goes wrong ... and thanks, Em.”

“Yes ... Go on, then. Bugger off.” She was smiling. “I’ll kill you if you let him get loose.”

I’d reckoned that the first three hundred yards might be the most difficult from the point of view of my deficient riding ability, as I had to go that distance along a public road to reach the track that led up to the Downs. But I was lucky; there were few cars on the road and those that were had drivers who slowed down for racehorses. I touched my helmet repeatedly in thanks and managed to steer a not-too-disgraceful course.

No one wound down a window and called to me by name or linked the camouflaged horse to Emily. I was just on one of hundreds of Lambourn equine residents, large as life but also invisible.

Golden Malt thought he knew where he was going, which helped at first but not later. He tossed his head with pleasure and trotted jauntily up the rutted access to the downlands which spread for fifty miles east to west across central southern England—from the Chiltern Hills to Salisbury Plain. I felt more at home on the Downs than in Lambourn itself, but even there solitude was rare: strings of horses cluttered every skyline and trainers’ Land-Rovers bumped busily in their wake. Lambourn’s industry lay out there on the sweeping green uplands in the wind and the prehistoric mornings. I had thought that they would be world enough: that I could live and work there ... and I’d been wrong.

Golden Malt began to fight when I turned him to the west at the top of the hill, instead of continuing to the east. He ran backwards, he turned in small circles, he obstinately refused to go where I tried to point his head. I didn’t know whether expert horsemen with legs of iron would have forced him to obey in a long battle of wills: I only knew that I was losing.

I remembered suddenly that one day I’d stood beside Emily on the trainers’ stand at a race meeting watching one of her horses refuse to go down to the start. The horse had run backwards, cantered crabwise, turned in circles, ignored every instruction and used his vast muscle power to make a fool of the slight man on his back. And that man had been a tough experienced jockey.

Across the years I heard Emily’s furious comment, “Why doesn’t the bloody fool get off and lead him?”

Oh Em, I thought. My dear wife. Thank you.

I slid off the stubborn brute’s back and pulled the reins over his head, and
walked
towards the west, and as if his entire nature had done an abracadabra, Golden Malt ambled along peacefully beside me, so that all I had to worry about was not letting him step on my heels.

Emily’s anxiety that I would get lost on the bare rolling grassland didn’t take into consideration the boyhood training I’d had in following deer across unmapped Scottish moorlands. The first great rule was to determine the direction of the wind, and to steer by its angle on one’s face. Stalking a deer was only possible if one was downwind of him, so that he couldn’t smell one’s presence.

The wind on that particular September day was blowing steadily from the north. I headed at first straight into it and then, when Golden Malt was used to its feel, veered slightly to the left, plodding purposefully across the green featureless sea as if I knew my bearings exactly.

I could see glimpses of villages in the lower distances, but no horses. When I’d walked about a mile I tried riding again, scrambling clumsily back into the saddle and gathering the reins; and this time, as if unsure in his isolation from sight and sound of his own kind, Golden Malt walked docilely where I asked.

I risked another trot.

No problem.

I crossed a footpath or two and skirted a few farms, setting dogs barking. There was no great need for pinpoint accuracy at that stage of the journey because somewhere ahead lay the oldest path in Britain, the Ridgeway, which still ran east to west from the Thames at Goring Gap to West Kennet, a village southwest of Swindon. Although from there on it had disappeared, it was likely the Druids had walked it to reach Stonehenge. True to its name it ran along the highest ground of the hills because once, long before the Romans came with Julius Caesar, the valleys had been wooded and prowled by bears.

In the age of cars, the Ridgeway path beckoned walkers, and to lone horse thieves it was a broad highway.

When I reached it I almost missed it: trotted straight across and only belatedly realized that I’d been expecting more of a production than a simple rutted track. Indeed, I retraced my steps and stopped Golden Malt for a rest while I looked around for helpful signposts, and found none. I was on high ground. The track ran from east to west, according to the wind. It was definitely a path. It had to be the right one.

Shrugging, I committed the enterprise and turned left, to the west, and trotted hopefully on. All paths, after all, led
somewhere,
even if not to Stonehenge.

I had chosen a longer route than essential in order to avoid roads, and it was true that the Ridgeway didn’t represent the straightest line from A to B: but as I didn’t want to get lost and have to ask the way and draw attention to myself, I considered the extra time and miles well spent.

The path turned southwest at roughly where I expected and led across a minor road or two and, to my relief, proving to be the real thing, delivered me to Foxhill.

Emily’s friend took my quiet arrival for granted. “Mrs. Cox,” I said, “says she will call in here one day to pick up the saddle and bridle.”

“Fine.”

“I’ll be off, then.”

“Right. Thanks. We’ll look after the old boy.” She patted the chestnut neck with maternal and expert fondness, and nodded to me cheerfully as I left, not querying my assertion of thumbing a lift back to Lambourn.

I thumbed a lift to Swindon instead, however, and caught a train to Reading, and called on a powerful area bank manager who wasn’t expecting a padded jacket, jodhpur boots and a shiny blue riding helmet with jockeys’ goggles.

“Er ...” he said.

“Yes. Well, I’m sorry about the presentation but I’m acting for my stepfather, Sir Ivan Westering, and this is not my normal world.”

“I know Sir Ivan well,” he said. “I’m sorry he’s ill.”

I handed him a certified copy of the power of attorney and Ivan’s Alternate Director letter, which, although much creased by now through having been folded into my shirt pocket for the cross-country expedition, worked its customary suspension of prompt ejection, and, smooth man that he was, he listened courteously to my plea for the workers at the brewery to receive their wages as usual for this present week, and for the pensioners to be paid also, while the insolvency practitioner, Mrs. Morden, tried to put together a committee of creditors for a voluntary arrangement.

He nodded. “I’ve already been approached by Mrs. Morden.” He paused thoughtfully, then said, “I’ve also talked to Tobias Tollright. He told me you would come here on your knees.”

“I’ll kneel if you like.”

The faintest of smiles twitched in his eye muscles, and vanished. He said, “What do you get out of this personally?”

Surprised, I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything, a feeble absence of answer that seemed not to bother him.

“Hmph.” He sniffed. He looked at his fingers. He said, “All right. The wages checks will be honored for this week. We’ll allow the pensioners seventy-five percent. Then we’ll see.” He stood up, holding out a smooth white hand. “A revelation doing business with you, Mr. Kinloch.”

I shook his hand and breathed deeply with relief on the way out.

With an hour and a half to spare before the intimidating prospect of my appointment with Mrs. Margaret Morden, fairy godmother to near-bankrupt Cinderellas, I bought more throwaway razors, a small tube of shaving cream and another comb—the Euston collection being still in London—and in a pub tried to put a tidier face on things. Nothing but time, though, would unblack the eye. I drank half a pint of King Alfred’s Gold to get reacquainted with what I was trying to save and turned up promptly on the lady’s threshold.

A word or two had gone ahead of me, I gathered, as she knew at once who I was and welcomed me without blinking. The power of attorney was yet again carefully inspected, a certified copy accepted and ready to be filed away, and a copy of Ivan’s letter taken, as had been done also at Tollright’s firm and the bank. Mrs. Morden gave me back Ivan’s open sesames and requested me, in my turn, to sign an authorization for her to act for the brewery. This was not handshake-gentleman’s-agreement-land, this was paper-trail responsibility.

Mrs. Margaret Morden looked somewhere in the ageless forties, and was not the severe businesswoman I’d expected. True, her manner was based on self-confidence, and formidable intelligence shone in steady gray eyes, but she was dressed not in a suit but in a soft calf-length dress of pink and violet printed silk, with a ruffle round the neck.