There were four children upstairs with a resident nanny: three daughters and a yearling son. Downstairs there was a cook, a housekeeper, a manservant and, in the gatehouse of the estate, a chauffeur-gardener with his housemaid wife and daughter. Wendy Billington Innes managed her large staff with friendly appreciation so that they all lived together without friction. Raised in similar cosseted ease, she knew to a fraction the effort one could expect from each employee and, most importantly, what request would be considered a breathtaking insult.
The house itself was a grand relic of grander times: it allowed everyone comfortable room but was terminally afflicted with dry rot. One day soon, she had thought peacefully, she would move everyone to a new home.
She had brought to her marriage a heavy portfolio of stocks and bonds and, like her mother before her, had thankfully handed it to her husband for management.
At thirty-seven she had reached serenity, if not overwhelming happiness. She could admit to herself (but to no one else) that Jasper, her husband, had been sporadically unfaithful ever since their wedding but, depending on him for friendship, she chose to ignore the true reason for the occasional one-night absences from which he always returned in great good spirits, making her laugh as he loaded her with flowers and little presents. When he came home at dawn empty-handed, as he more often did, it meant only that he’d been gambling all night in his favourite gaming club. He was a good-natured useless man, almost universally liked.
At seven-forty five in the morning on the Friday of Winchester races, as she lay cosily awake, planning her day ahead, Wendy Billington Innes answered her bedside telephone and listened to the voice of the family’s accountant asking urgently to speak to Jasper.
Jasper’s side of the big four-poster bed was uninhabited but, as he often slept in his dressing-room next door when he came home late, his wife went unworriedly to wake him.
Flat sheets; no Jasper.
‘He isn’t here,’ his wife reported, returning to the phone. ‘He didn’t come home last night. You know what he’s like when he’s playing backgammon or blackjack. He’ll play all night.’ She excused his absence lightly, as she always did. ‘When he gets home, do you want me to give him a message?’
The accountant asked weakly, knowing the reply in advance, if Wendy — Mrs Innes — had read today’s financial columns in the newspapers. No, Mrs Innes had not.
Alarmed by then, Wendy Billington Innes demanded to know what was the matter and wished, when she heard the answer, that she hadn’t.
‘Basically,’ the accountant said with regret, ‘the firm of Stemmer Peabody has gone into receivership, which means... I find it difficult to tell you... but it means that Jasper’s fortune — and that of several other people — is, shall we say, severely compromised.’
Wendy said numbly, ‘What does “severely compromised” mean, exactly?’
‘It means that the financial manager to whom Jasper and others entrusted their affairs has pledged all their money as security for an enterprise and... er... has lost it.’
‘That can’t happen!’ Wendy protested.
‘I did warn him,’ the accountant said sadly, ‘but Jasper trusted the manager and signed papers giving him too much power.’
‘But there’s my money,’ Wendy exclaimed. ‘Even if Jasper has lost some of his, we can live on my money perfectly well.’
After an appalling pause, the bad news paralysed her.
‘Mrs Innes... Wendy... you gave Jasper total control of your affairs. You too, perhaps, signed away too much power. Your money has gone with his. I do hope we may be able to salvage enough so that you can live fairly comfortably, though not, of course, as you do now. There are the children’s trusts, things like that. I need to talk to him about his plans.’
When she could get her tongue to speak, Wendy asked, ‘Does Jasper know about this?’
‘He found out yesterday, when the news broke in the City. He is an honourable man. I’m told he’s been trying to raise money ever since, to pay off gambling debts. I know, for example, that he’s trying to sell his racehorse, Lilyglit.’
‘Lilyglit! He’d never do that! He worships that horse. He’s running today at Winchester.’
‘I’m afraid... in the future, Jasper won’t be able to afford to keep racehorses in training.’
Wendy Billington Innes couldn’t bear to ask what else he wouldn’t be able to afford.
Jasper Billington Innes had already been told. Like many in the past who had been dreadfully impoverished by their blameless involvement in the collapse of insurance syndicates at Lloyd’s of London, he was unable at first to understand the reason for, or the extent of, his losses.
He wasn’t stupid, though not very bright either. He had inherited significant wealth, but no brain for business. He had left ‘all that’ to the trusted fellow at Stemmer Peabody, a course of action that had led, the evening before, to an emergency meeting of others facing the same depth of Stemmer Peabody ruin. Women had been furious and weeping: men shouting or pale. Jasper Billington Innes had felt sick.
Honourable in most things, even in the avalanche of calamity, he saw it as an obligation to pay his private debts at once. He wrote cheques to his tailor and his wine-merchant, and to his plumber — not quite enough to clear the whole outstanding sum in each case, but more than enough to prove intent. He could afford his usual household expenses for one more month if he gave all the domestic staff notice at once. That left his heavy debts to his bookmaker and his gaming club proprietors, whose present relaxed behaviour patterns would fly out of the window on hearing the bad news.
All that remained to him of real value, he thought miserably, was his splendid fast hurdler, Lilyglit. His other three jumpers were old now, and worth little.
By midnight on Thursday, he had lost another mini-fortune at the tables, trying lucklessly to play his way out of catastrophe. At four o’clock in the morning, having won back some of his losses, he struck Lilyglit bargains with his gaming creditors that even they recognised as unwise panic measures. They had learned by then of his extreme adversity. They accepted his signature gravely though, and, as they liked him, sincerely wished him well.
Number 2. Fable
While Christopher Haig was shaving on Friday morning, the brothers Arkwright were out in their stable yard, seventy miles to the north, working on Fable, their runner in the Cloister Handicap Hurdle.
In the strengthening light of dawn they tidily plaited the horse’s mane and brushed out his tail, wrapping it tightly in a bandage so that it would look neat and tidy when let free. They painted his hooves with oil (cosmetically pleasing) and fed him a bowl of oats to give him stamina and warmth on the horsebox journey south.
Vernon Arkwright, jockey, and his ten-year older brother, Villiers, trainer, welcomed the farrier who came to change Fable’s all-purpose horseshoes to thin fast racing plates. The farrier took care that his nails didn’t prick the hooves: the Arkwrights had a known talent for retaliating with practical jokes.
The Arkwright brothers, Vernon and Villiers, were as bent as right angles: everyone knew it, but proof proved a vanishing commodity. Fable had reached number 2 in the handicap for the Cloister Hurdle by a zig-zag path of winning and losing as suspect as a ghost’s footprints. Both brothers had been hauled before the stewards to explain ‘discrepancies in running’. Both, with angelic hands on hearts, had declared horses not to be machines. On suspicion rather than evidence Villiers had been fined and Vernon given a short compulsory holiday. Both had publicly protested injured innocence and privately jumped with gleeful relief. The stewards longed to catch them properly and warn them off.