I went out there to join her, and found her gazing blind-eyed over the racecourse, her thoughts obviously unwelcome.
‘Princess,’ I said.
She turned her head, her eyes focusing on my face.
‘Don’t give up,’ I said.
‘No.’ She stretched her neck and her backbone as if to disclaim any thought of it. ‘Is Helikon all right?’ she asked.
‘Dusty said so.’
‘Good.’ She sighed. ‘Have you any idea what’s running next week? It’s all a blank in my mind.’
It was a fair blank in mine also. ‘Icefall goes on Thursday at Lingfield.’
‘How did Helikon fall?’ she asked, and I told her that it wasn’t her horse’s fault, he’d been brought down.
‘He was going well at the time,’ I said. ‘He’s growing up and getting easier to settle. I’ll school him next week one morning to get his confidence back.’
She showed a glimmer of pleasure in an otherwise un-pleasurable day. She didn’t ask directly after my state of health, because she never did: she considered the results of falls to lie within the domain of my personal privacy into which she wouldn’t intrude. It was an attitude stemming from her own habit of reticence and, far from minding it, I valued it. It was fussing I couldn’t stand.
We went inside for some tea, joining Danielle, Litsi and Beatrice, and presently Lord Vaughnley appeared on one of his more or less regular visits to the princess’s box.
His faint air of anxiety vanished when he saw me drinking there, and after a few minutes he managed to cut me off from the pack and steer me into a corner.
I thanked him for his packet of yesterday.
‘What? Oh yes, my dear chap, you’re welcome. But that’s not what I wanted to say to you, not at all. I’m afraid there’s been a bit of a leak... it’s all very awkward.’
‘What sort of leak?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘About the film you made of Maynard Allardeck.’
I felt my spine shiver. I desperately needed that film to remain secret.
‘I’m afraid,’ Lord Vaughnley said, ‘that Allardeck knows you sent a copy of it to the Honours people in Downing Street. He knows he will never again be considered for a knighthood, because of your sending it.’ He smiled half anxiously but couldn’t resist the journalistic summary: ‘Never Sir Maynard, never Lord Allardeck, thanks to Kit Fielding.’
‘How in hell’s teeth did he find out?’ I demanded.
‘I don’t know,’ Lord Vaughnley said uncomfortably. ‘Not from me, my dear fellow, I assure you. I’ve never told anyone. But sometimes there are whispers of these things. Someone in the civil service... don’t you know.’
I looked at him in dismay. ‘How long has he known?’ I said.
‘I think since sometime last week.’ He shook his head unhappily. ‘I heard about it this morning in a committee meeting of the charity of which Allardeck and I are both directors. He’s chairman, of course. The civil service charity, you remember.’
I remembered. It was through good works for the sick and needy dependents of civil servants that Maynard had tried hardest to climb to his knighthood.
‘No one in the charity has seen the film, have they?’ I asked urgently.
‘No, no, my dear fellow. They’ve simply heard it exists. One of them apparently asked Allardeck if he knew anything about it.’
Oh God, I thought; how leaks could trickle through cracks.
‘I thought you’d better know,’ Lord Vaughnley said. ‘And don’t forget I’ve as strong an interest in that film as you have. If it’s shown all over the place, we’ll have lost our lever.’
‘Maynard will have lost his saintly reputation.’
‘He might operate without it.’
‘The only copies,’ I said, ‘are the ones I gave to you and to the Honours people, and the three I have in the bank. Unless you or the Honours people show them... I can’t believe they will,’ I said explosively. ‘They were all so hush-hush.’
‘I thought I should warn you.’
‘I’m glad you did.’
It explained so much, I thought, about Maynard’s recent behaviour. Considering how he must be seething with fury, just pushing me down the steps showed amazing restraint.
But then... I did still have the film, and so far it hadn’t been shown to a wider audience, and Maynard really wouldn’t want it shown, however much he had lost through it already.
Lord Vaughnley apologised to the princess for monopolising her jockey, and asked if I was still interested in more information regarding Nanterre.
‘Yes, please,’ I said, and he nodded and said it was still flickering through computers, somewhere.
‘Trouble?’ Litsi asked at my elbow, when Lord Vaughnley had gone.
‘Allardeck trouble, not Nanterre.’ I smiled lopsidedly. ‘The Fieldings have had Allardeck trouble for centuries. Nanterre’s much more pressing.’
We watched the last race, on my part without concentration, and in due course returned to the cars, Litsi and Danielle, deserting the Rolls, saying they were coming with me.
On the walk from the box to the car park, I stopped a few times to take the weight off my foot. No one made a remark, but when we arrived at my car, Danielle said positively, ‘I’m driving. You can tell me the way.’
‘You don’t need a left foot with automatic transmission,’ I pointed out.
‘I’m driving,’ she said fiercely. ‘I’ve driven your car before.’ She had, on a similar occasion.
I sat in the passenger seat without more demur, and asked her to stop at a chemist’s shop a short distance along the road.
‘What do you need?’ she said brusquely, pulling up. ‘I’ll get it.’
‘Some strapping, and mineral water.’
‘Aspirin?’
‘There’s some here in the glove compartment.’
She went with quick movements into the shop and returned with a paper bag which she dumped on my lap.
‘I’ll tell you the scenario,’ she said to Litsi with a sort of suppressed violence as she restarted the car and set off towards London. ‘He’ll strap his own ankle and sit with it surrounded by icepacks to reduce the swelling. He’ll have hoof-shaped bruises that’ll be black by tomorrow, and he’ll ache all over. He won’t want you to notice he can’t put that foot on the ground without pain shooting up his leg. If you ask him how he feels, he’ll say “with every nerve ending”. He doesn’t like sympathy. Injuries embarrass him and he’ll do his best to ignore them.’
Litsi said, when she paused, ‘You must know him very well.’
It silenced Danielle. She was driving with the same throttled anger, and took a while to relax.
I swallowed some aspirins with the mineral water and thought about what she’d said. And Litsi was right, I reflected: she did truly know me. She unfortunately sounded as if she wished she didn’t.
‘Kit, you never did tell me,’ Litsi said after a while, ‘why it annoyed Maynard Allardeck so much when the princess said her horses always jumped well at Sandown. Why on earth should that anger anyone?’
‘Modesty forbids me to tell you,’ I said, smiling.
‘Well, have a try.’
‘She was paying me a compliment which Maynard didn’t want to hear.’
‘Do you mean it’s because of your skill that her horses jump well?’
‘Experience,’ I said. ‘Something like that.’
‘He’s obsessed,’ Litsi said.
He was dangerous, I thought: and there was such a thing as contract killing, by persons unknown, which I didn’t like the thought of very much. To remove the mind from scary concepts, I asked Danielle if she’d managed to tell Beatrice that Monday was her last evening stint.
Danielle, after a lengthy pause, said that no, she hadn’t.
‘I wish you would,’ I said, alarmed. ‘You said you would.’