‘I wish it,’ I said.
‘Very well... but I do hope nothing appalling will happen.’
I said we would try our best to prevent it, and asked if he would mind having a guard in the house every day during John Grundy’s off-duty hours.
‘A guard?’ he frowned.
‘Not in your rooms, Monsieur. Moving about. You would hardly notice him, but we’d give you a walkie-talkie so you could call him if you needed. And may we also install a telephone which records what’s said?’
He lifted a thin hand an inch and let it fall back on the arm of the wheelchair.
‘Do what you think best,’ he said, and then, with an almost mischievous smile, the only glimpse I’d ever had of the lighter side within, he asked ‘Has Beatrice got you out of the bamboo room yet?’
‘No, Monsieur,’ I said cheerfully.
‘She was up here this morning demanding I move you,’ he said, the smile lingering. ‘She insists also that I allow Nanterre to run the business as he thinks best, but truly I don’t know which of her purposes obsesses her most. She switched from one to the other within the same sentence.’ He paused. ‘If you can defeat my sister,’ he said, ‘Nanterre should be easy.’
By the following mid-morning, I’d been out to buy a recording telephone, and the guard had been installed, in the unconventional form of a springy twenty-year-old who had learned karate in the cradle.
Beatrice predictably disapproved, both of his looks and his presence, particularly as he nearly knocked her over on one of the landings, by proving he could run from the basement to the attic faster than the lift could travel the same distance.
He told me his name was Sammy (this week), and he was deeply impressed by the princess, whom he called ‘Your Regal Highness’, to her discreet and friendly amusement.
‘Are you sure...?’ she said to me tentatively, when he wasn’t listening.
‘He comes with the very highest references,’ I assured her. ‘His employer promised he could kick a pistol out of anyone’s hand before it was fired.’
Sammy’s slightly poltergeist spirits seemed to cheer her greatly, and with firmness she announced that all of us, of course including Beatrice, should go to Ascot races. Lunch was already ordered there, and Sammy would guard her husband: she behaved with the gaiety sometimes induced by risk-taking, which to Litsi and Danielle at least proved infectious.
Beatrice, glowering, complained she didn’t like horse racing. Her opinion of me had dropped as low as the Marianas Trench since she’d discovered I was a professional jockey. ‘He’s the help,’ I overheard her saying in outrage to the princess. ‘Surely there are some rooms in the attic’
The ‘attic’, as it happened, was an unused nursery suite, cold and draped in dust-sheets, as I’d discovered on my night prowls. The room I could realistically have expected to have been given lay beside the rose room, sharing the rose room’s bathroom, but it, too, was palely shrouded.
‘I didn’t know you were coming, Beatrice, dear,’ the princess reminded her. ‘And he’s Danielle’s fiancé.’
‘But really...’
She did go to the races, though, albeit with ill grace, presumably on the premise that even if she gained access again to her brother, and even if she wore him to exhaustion, she couldn’t make him sign the contract, because first, he didn’t have it (it was now in Litsi’s room in case she took the bamboo room by force) and second, his three co-signers couldn’t be similarly coerced. Litsi had carefully told her, after Nanterre’s telephone call and before my return from Devon, that the contract form was missing.
‘Where is it?’ she had demanded.
‘My dear Beatrice,’ Litsi had said blandly, ‘I have no idea. The notary’s briefcase is still in the hall awaiting collection, but there is no paper of any sort in it.’
And it was after he’d told me of this exchange, before we’d gone to bed on the previous evening, that I’d taken the paper downstairs for his safe-keeping.
Beatrice went to Ascot with the princess in the Rolls; Danielle and Litsi came with me.
Danielle, subdued, sat in the back. She had been quiet when I’d fetched her during the night, shivering now and again from her thoughts, even though the car had been warm. I told her about Nanterre’s telephone call and also about her uncle’s agreement with Litsi and me, and although her eyes looked huge with worry, all she’d said was, ‘Please be careful. Both of you... be careful.’
At Ascot, it was with unmixed feelings of jealousy that I watched Litsi take her away in the direction of the princess’s lunch while I peeled off, as one might say, to the office.
I had four races to ride; one for the princess, two others for Wykeham, one for a Lambourn trainer. Dusty was in a bad mood, Maynard Allardeck had again turned up as a Steward, and the tree of my favourite lightweight saddle, my valet told me, had disintegrated. Apart from that it was bitterly cold, and apart from that I had somehow gained another pound, probably via the railway sandwich.
Wykeham’s first runner was a four-year-old ex-Flat racer out for his first experience over hurdles, and although I’d schooled him a few times over practice jumps on Wykeham’s gallops, I hadn’t been able to teach him courage. He went round the whole way letting me know he hated it, and I had difficulty thinking of anything encouraging to say to his owners afterwards. A horse that didn’t like racing was a waste of time, a waste of money and a waste of emotion: better to sell him quick and try again. I put it as tactfully as possible, but the owners shook their heads doubtfully and said they would ask Wykeham.
The second of Wykeham’s runners finished nowhere also, not from unwillingness, as he was kind-hearted and sure-footed, but from being nowhere near fast enough against the opposition.
I went out for the princess’s race with a low joie de vivre rating, a feeling not cured by seeing Danielle walk into the parade ring holding onto Litsi’s arm and laughing.
The princess, who had been in the ring first, after seeing her horse saddled, followed my gaze and gently tapped my arm.
‘She’s in a muddle,’ she said distinctly. ‘Give her time.’
I looked at the princess’s blue eyes, half hidden as usual behind reticent lashes. She must have felt very strongly that I needed advice, or she wouldn’t have given it.
I said, ‘All right,’ with an unloosened jaw, and she briefly nodded, turning to greet the others.
‘Where’s Beatrice?’ she asked, looking in vain behind them. ‘Didn’t she come down?’
‘She said it was too cold. She stayed up in the box,’ Litsi said: and to me, he added, ‘Do we put our money on?’
Col, the princess’s runner, was stalking round in his navy blue gold-crested rug, looking bored. He was a horse of limited enthusiasm, difficult to ride because if he reached the front too soon he would lose interest and stop, and if one left the final run too late and got beaten, one looked and felt a fool.
‘Don’t back him,’ I said. It was that sort of day.
‘Yes, back him,’ the princess said simultaneously.
‘Frightfully helpful,’ Litsi commented, amused.
Col was a bright chestnut with a white blaze down his nose and three white socks. As with most of the horses Wykeham was particularly hoping to win with at Cheltenham, Col probably wouldn’t reach his absolute pinnacle of fitness until the National Hunt Festival in another two weeks, but he should be ready enough for Ascot, a slightly less testing track.
At Cheltenham, he was entered for the Gold Cup, the top event of the meeting, and although not a hot fancy, as Cotopaxi had been for the Grand National, he had a realistic chance of being placed.