The horse’s owner, an Arkwright cousin, had confused the enquiry by backing his horse every time — win or lose — with the same amount of money. The horse’s owner had asked his jockey and trainer not to tell him what outcome to expect so that his joy or disappointment would be — and look — genuine.
Over the years, mostly with lesser horses than Fable, the conspiring trio of owner, trainer and jockey had salted away substantial tax-free harvests.
On the Friday of the Winchester Spring Meeting they were as a team still open to suggestions. They hadn’t decided whether Fable was out to win or lose. They doubted he was fast enough ever to beat Lilyglit, but, annoyingly, no one had so far bribed them to let him prove it. It looked disappointingly to the Ark-wrights as if Fable would have to perform to the best of his ability and try for second or third place money.
Such honesty ran against all the Arkwright instincts.
Number 3. Storm Cone
On the Friday morning of the Winchester Spring Meeting, two hours at least before Christopher Haig began shaving with concentration and dreaming his dreams in his bathroom, Moggie Reilly slid away from the sweat-slippery nakedness of the young woman in his embrace and put a hand palm downwards on his alarm clock to cut off its clamour.
Moggie Reilly’s head throbbed with hangover, his mouth dry and sticky in the aftermath of too carefree a mixture of drinks. Moggie Reilly, jump jockey, was due to perform at his athletic peak that afternoon at Winchester racecourse in two hurdle races and one three-mile steeplechase but, meanwhile, the trainer he rode for — John Chester — was expecting him to turn out for morning exercise at least sober enough to sit upright in his saddle.
Friday morning was work day, meaning that horses strengthened their muscles at a full training gallop. Old hands like Moggie Reilly — as lithe as a cat and all of twenty-four — could ride work half asleep. That Friday he squinted into his own bathroom mirror as he sought to revive his gums with a toothbrush and summoned up at least an echo of the lighthearted grin that had enticed a young woman between his sheets when she should have been safe in her own bed on the other side of the racing town of Lambourn.
Sarah Driffield: now there was a girl. There was Sarah Drif-field, undeniably in his bed. Undeniably, also, he hadn’t spent the few horizontal hours of his night in total inactivity. What a waste, he thought regretfully, that he could remember so little of it clearly.
When he’d pulled on his riding clothes and made a pot of strong coffee, Sarah Driffield was on her feet, dressed and saying, ‘Tell me I didn’t do this. My father will kill me. How the hell do I get home unseen?’
The inquisitive eyes of Lambourn awoke with the dawn. The tongues wagged universally by evening. Sarah Driffield, daughter of the reigning champion trainer, did not seek publicity concerning her unplanned escapade with the wickedly persuasive jockey who rode for John Chester, her father’s most threatening rival.
Grinning but awake to the problem, Moggie Reilly handed her the keys to his car with instructions not to move out until the horse population had trotted off to the training grounds. He told her where to leave the car and where to hide its key, and he himself jogged on foot through the town to John Chester’s stable, which did his hovering hangover minor good.
Sarah Driffield! His whole mind laughed.
It had all been due to a birthday party they had both attended the evening before in The Stag, one of the Lambourn area’s best pubs. It had been due basically to the happy-go-lucky atmosphere throughout and specifically to the last round of drinks ordered by the host, that had mixed disastrously with earlier lager and whisky.
Tequila Slammers.
Never again, Moggie Reilly vowed. He seldom got drunk and hated hangovers. He remembered offering Sarah Driffield a lift home, but wasn’t clear how they had ended at his home, three and a half miles from The Stag, and not hers, barely one. In view of his alcoholic intake, Sarah Driffield had been driving.
Moggie Reilly, though within the top ten of jump jockeys, wouldn’t normally have looked on Sarah Driffield as possible kiss-and-cuddle material, admittedly on account of her father’s power, status and legendary fists. Percy Driffield’s well-known views on suitable company for his carefully educated nineteen-year-old only child excluded anybody who might hope to inherit his stable by marrying her. He was reported to have already frightened off shoals of minnows, and his daughter, no fool, used his universal disapproval as her umbrella against unwelcome advances. Which being so, jogged Moggie incredulously, which being so, how come the gorgeous Miss Driffield, the unofficial tiara-chosen Miss Lambourn, had climbed the Reilly stairs without protest?
John Chester observed the wince behind each step of his jockey’s arrival but did no more than shrug. The fast gallops got done to his satisfaction (all that mattered) and he offered a tactics-planning breakfast on his Winchester runners.
At shortly after eight-thirty, while Wendy Billington Innes, twenty miles away, still sat in frozen and helpless disbelief on her dressing stool, John Chester, bulky and aggressive, told his jockey that Storm Cone was to win the fourth race, the Cloister Hurdle, at all costs. Moggie must somehow achieve it.
John Chester had been doing his sums, and the prize money of the Cloister Hurdle would put him into leading position on the stakes-won trainers’ list. The big prizes were sparse at that time of year, as the main part of the jumping season was over: the very last was on the following day, Saturday, but Percy Driffield had no suitable runners. With luck John Chester could win the Cloister and stay ahead of Percy Driffield for the few weeks that were left.
John Chester ached to be leading trainer, and to humble Percy Driffield.
‘Find a way,’ he told his jockey, ‘of beating that bugger Lilyglit. He must have a weak spot somewhere.’
Moggie Reilly knew all about Lilyglit, having followed the bright chestnut twice past the winning post on other occasions. He doubted that Storm Cone would ever beat Lilyglit, but had more tact than to say so. He ate dry toast to keep his weight down and let John Chester’s wishful thinking roll over his head.
Sarah Driffield drove Moggie Reilly’s car back to park it outside The Stag, as he’d asked, and hid its key out of sight in a magnetic box.
As it was daylight she took the shorter path home across fields that she had shunned the previous midnight, and was sitting in the kitchen, showered, changed and eating breakfast when her father returned from seeing his horses gallop.
Percy Driffield, shedding jacket and helmet, merely asked if she’d had a good time at the birthday party.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she answered. ‘Moggie Reilly very kindly-drove me home.’
Her father frowned. ‘Don’t encourage him.’
‘No.’
Tequila Slammer, she thought. A pinch of salt on the tongue, toss back a jigger of neat tequila, suck a slice of lime. She had felt liberated. Sleeping with Moggie Reilly had become a fun and ‘why not?’ thing to do. She searched her conscience for guilt and came up with only a smile.
Percy Driffield talked compulsively about Lilyglit. ‘Damn fool owner wants to sell him. I’ve told him he needs to insure him, but he keeps putting it off. Why don’t very rich people insure things? Valuations invite crooks, he says. Jasper Billington Innes, nice enough, but daft. You’ve met him often, of course. I told him Lilyglit is a Champion Hurdle prospect, given another year. I can’t think what’s got into the man. He sounded panic-stricken on the phone yesterday evening, telling me to find a buyer at once. At least wait until after he wins the Cloister Hurdle, I said, but he’s afraid of Storm Cone, at better weights in the handicap. He seemed to think I could make some sort of suggestion to Storm Cone’s jockey. Not a chance. I told him to try it himself.’