Bonecrack

'Afraid not. Can't rule it out, though. Can't rule it in, either. Sorry.'

'It can't be helped.'

'But the blood test,' he said. 'I've had the results, and you were bang on target.'

'Anaesthetic?'

'Yep. Some brand of promazine. Sparine, probably.'

I'm no wiser,' I said. 'How would you give it to a horse?'

'Injection,' Dainsee said promptly. 'Very simple intramuscular injection, nothing difficult. Just punch the needle in anywhere handy. It's often used to shoot into mania patients in mental hospitals, when they're raving. Puts them out for hours.'

Something about promazine rung a highly personal note.

'Does the stuff work instantly?' I asked.

'If you give it intravenously, it would. But intramuscularly, what it's equally designed for, it would take a few minutes, probably. Ten to fifteen minutes on a human; don't know for a horse.'

'If you injected it into a human, could you do it through clothes?'

'Oh sure. Like I said. They use it as a standby in mental hospitals. They wouldn't get people in a manic state to sit nice and quiet and roll their sleeves up.'

CHAPTER NINE

For three weeks the status at Rowley Lodge remained approximately quo.

I heavily amended my father's entry forms and sent them in, and sold six of the half shares to various acquaintances, without offering Lancat to any of them.

Margaret took to wearing green eye shadow, and Susie's friend reported that Alessandro had made a telephone call to Switzerland and didn't wear pyjamas. Also that the chauffeur always paid for everything, as Alessandro didn't have any money.

Etty grew more tense as the beginning of the season drew nearer, and lines of anxiety seldom left her forehead. I was leaving a great deal more to her judgement than my father did, and she was in consequence feeling insecure. She openly ached for his return.

The horses all the same were working well. We had no further mishaps except that a two-year-old filly developed severe sinus trouble, and as far as I could judge from watching the performances of the other forty-five stables using Newmarket Heath, the Rowley Lodge string was as forward as any.

Alessandro turned up day after day and silently rode what and how Etty told him to, though with a ramrod spine of protest. He said no more about not taking orders from a woman, and I imagined that even he could see that without Etty there would be fewer winners on the horizon. She herself had almost stopped complaining about him and was watching him with a more objective eye; because there was no doubt that after a month's concentrated practice he was riding better than the other apprentices.

He was also growing visibly thinner, and no longer looked well. Small-framed though he might be, the six stone seven pounds that he was aiming to shrink his body down to was punitive for five foot four.

Alessandro's fanaticism was an awkward factor. If I had imagined that by making the going as rough as I dared he would give up his idle fancy and depart, I had been wrong. This was no idle fancy. It was revealing itself all too clearly as a consuming ambition: an ambition strong enough to make him starve himself, take orders from a woman, and perform what were evidently miracles of self-discipline, considering that it was probably the first time in his life that he had had to use any.

Against Etty's wishes I put him up one morning on Archangel.

'He's not ready for that,' she protested, when I told her I was going to.

There isn't another lad in the yard who will take more care of him,' I said.

'But he hasn't the experience.'

'He has, you know. Archangel is only more valuable, not more difficult to ride, than the others.'

Alessandro received the news not with joy but with an 'at last' expression, more scorn than patience. We went down to the Waterhall canter, away from public gaze, and there Archangel did a fast six furlongs and pulled up looking as if he had just walked out of his box.

'He had him balanced,' I said to Etty. 'All the way.'

'Yes, he did,' she said grudgingly. 'Pity he's such an obnoxious little squirt.'

Alessandro returned with an 'I told you so' face which I wiped off by saying he would be switched to Lancat tomorrow.

'Why?' he demanded furiously. 'I rode Archangel very well.'

'Well enough,' I agreed. 'And you can ride him again, in a day or two. But I want you to ride Lancat in a trial on Wednesday, so you can go out on him tomorrow as well, and get used to him. And after the trial I want you to tell me your opinion of the horse and how he went. And I don't want one of your short sneering comments but a thought-out assessment. It is almost as important for a jockey to be able to analyse what a horse has done in a race as ride it. Trainers depend quite a lot on what their jockeys can tell them. So you can tell me about Lancat, and I'll listen.'

He gave me a long concentrating stare, but for once without the habitual superciliousness.

'All right,' he said. 'I will.'

We held the trial on the Wednesday afternoon on the trial ground past the Limekilns, a long way out of Newmarket. Much to Etty's disgust, because she wanted to watch it on television, I had timed the trial to start at exactly the same moment as the Champion Hurdle at Cheltenham. But the strategem worked. We achieved the well-nigh impossible, a full scale trial without an observer or a tout in sight.

Apart from the two Etty and I rode, we took only four horses along there: Pease Pudding, Lancat, Archangel, and one of the previous year's most prolific winners, a four-year-old colt called Subito, whose best distance was a mile. Tommy Hoylake drove up from his home in Berkshire to ride Pease Pudding, and we put Andy on Archangel and a taciturn lad called Faddy on the chestnut Subito.

'Don't murder them,' I said, before they started. 'If you feel them falter, just ease off.'

Four nods. Four fidgeting colts, glossy and eager.

Etty and I hacked round to within a hundred yards of where the trial ground ended and when we had pulled up in a useful position for watching, she waved a large white handkerchief above her head. The horses started towards us, moving fast and still accelerating, with the riders crouched forward on their withers, heads down, reins very short, feet against the horses' moving shoulders.

They passed us still going all out, and pulled up a little further on. Archangel and Pease Pudding ran the whole gallop stride for stride and finished together. Lancat, from starting level, lost ten lengths, made up eight, lost two again, but still moved easily. Subito was ahead of Lancat at the beginning, behind him when he moved up quickly, and alongside when they passed Etty and me.

She turned to me with a deeply worried expression.

'Pease Pudding can't be ready for the Lincoln if Lancat can finish so near him. In fact the way Lancat finished means that neither Archangel or Subito are as far on as I thought.'

'Calm down, Etty,' I said. 'Relax. Take it easy.

Just turn it the other way round.'

She frowned. 'I don't understand you. Mr Griffon will be very worried when he hears-'

'Etty,' I interrupted. 'Did Pease Pudding, or did he not, seem to you to be moving fast and easily?'

'Well, yes, I suppose so,' she said doubtfully.

'Then it may be Lancat who is much better than you expected, not the others which are worse.'

She looked at me with a face screwed up with indecision. 'But Alex is only an apprentice, and Lancat was useless last year.'

'In what way was he useless?'

'Oh- sprawly. Babyish. Had no action.'

'Nothing sprawly about him today,' I pointed out.

'No,' she admitted slowly. 'You're right. There wasn't.'

The riders walked towards us, leading the horses, and Etty and I both dismounted to hear more easily what they had to say. Tommy Hoylake, built like a twelve-year-old boy with a forty-three-year-old man's face sitting incongruously on top, said in his comfortable Berkshire accent that he had thought that Pease Pudding had run an excellent trial until he saw Lancat pulling up so close behind him. He had ridden Lancat a good deal the previous year, and hadn't thought much of him.