The plaster on my eyes was still stuck tight. I tried to scrape it off by rubbing it against the rope on my wrists, but made no headway. The hooks hindered me and bumped into my face, and in the end I gave it up and concentrated again on warming my hands, alternately cradling them between my thighs and thumping them against my knees to restore the circulation.
After a time I found I could move my fingers. I still couldn’t feel them at all, but movement was a tremendous step forward, and I remember smiling about it for at least ten minutes.
I put my hands up to my face and tried to scrape the plaster off with my thumbnail. My thumb slid across my cheek, checked on the edge of the plaster and, when I pushed from the elbow, bent uselessly and slithered away. I tried again. It had to be done, because until I could see where I was going I couldn’t leave the tack-room. It was colder outside, and my ankles were still hobbled, and wandering about blind in those conditions did not appeal to me a bit.
I bent my head down and put my right thumb in my mouth, to warm it. Every few minutes I tested the results on the edge of the plaster and at last got to the stage where the thumb would push without bending. I only needed to prise a corner up, but even that took a long time. Eventually, however, my nail had pushed a flap unstuck which was big enough for me to grip between my wrists, and with several false starts and a fair selection of oaths, I managed in the end to pull the obstinate thing off.
Dazzling moonlight poured through the open door and through a window beside it. I was sitting against the end wall with the door away on my left. Above my head and all round the room there were empty wooden supports for saddles and bridles, and bare shelves and a cupboard on the wall facing me. An efficient-looking stove occupied the corner on my right, with a few dead cinders still scattered on the ground beside it.
From the centre of the ceiling, pale in the moonlight, hung twenty inches of sturdy galvanised chain.
I looked down at my hands. The harness hook glinted with reflected light. No wonder it had been so difficult to break, I thought. The chain and the hook were almost new. Not the dark, old, rusty things I had been imagining all along. I swallowed, really shattered. It was just as well I hadn’t known.
My hands themselves, including the thumb I had tried to warm, were white. Almost as white as my shirt-sleeves. Almost as white as the nylon rope which wound round the hooks. Only my wrists were dark.
I stretched my feet out. More white nylon rope ran from one ankle to the other, about fifteen inches of it.
My fingers wouldn’t undo the knots. My pockets had been emptied; no knife, no matches. There was nothing in the tack-room to cut with. I stood up stiffly, leaning against the wall, and slowly, carefully, shuffled over to the door. My foot kicked against something, and I looked down. On the edge of a patch of moonlight lay the broken link. It was a grotesquely buckled piece of silvery metal. It had given me a lot of trouble.
I went on to the door and negotiated the step. The bucket stood there, dully grey. I looked round the moonlit L-shaped yard. Four boxes stretched away to my right, and at right-angles to them there were two more, on the short arm of the L. Over there too, was the tap; and beside the tap, on the ground, an object I was very glad to see. A boot-scraper made of a thin metal plate bedded in concrete.
With small careful steps I made my way to it across the hard-packed gravel, the cutting wind ripping the last remnants of warmth from my body.
Leaning against the wall, and with one foot on the ground, I stretched the rope tautly over the boot-scraper and began to rub it to and fro, using the other foot as a pendulum. The blade of the scraper was far from sharp and the rope was new, and it took a long time to fray it through, but it parted in the end. I knelt down and tried to do the same with the strands round my wrists, but the harness hook kept getting in the way again and I couldn’t get anything like the same purchase. I stood up wearily. It looked as though I’d have to lug that tiresome piece of ironmongery around with me a while longer.
Being able to move my legs, however, gave me a marvellous sense of freedom. Stiffly, shaking with cold, I walked out of the yard round to the house looming darkly behind it. There were no lights, and on looking closer I found the downstairs windows were all shuttered. It was as empty as the stable; an unwelcome but not unexpected discovery.
I walked a bit unsteadily on past the house and down the drive. It was a long drive with no lodge at the gate, only an estate agent’s board announcing that this desirable country gentleman’s residence was for sale, together with some excellent modern stabling, forty acres of arable land and an apple orchard.
A country lane ran past the end of the drive giving no indication as to which way lay civilisation. I tried to remember from which direction the Mini-Cooper had come, but I couldn’t. It seemed a very long time ago. I glanced automatically at my left wrist but there was only rope there, no watch. Since it had to be one thing or the other, I turned right. It was a deserted road with open fields on the far sides of its low hedges. No cars passed, and nowhere could I see a light. Cursing the wind and aching all over, I stumbled on, hanging on to the fact that if I went far enough I was bound to come to a house in the end.
What I came to first was not a house but something much better. A telephone box. It stood alone, brightly lit inside, square and beckoning, on the corner where the lane turned into a more main road, and it solved the embarrassing problem of presenting myself at some stranger’s door looking like a scarecrow and having to explain how I had got into such a state.
There were a lot of people I could have called. Police, Ambulance or the Fire Brigade for a start; but by the time I had forced my still nearly useless hands to pull the door open far enough for me to get my foot in, I had had time to think. Once I called in authority in any form there would be unending questions to answer and statements to make, and like as not I’d end up for the night in the local cottage hospital. I hated being in hospitals.
Also, although I felt so bone cold, it was not, I thought, actually freezing. The puddles at the side of the road had no ice on them. They would be racing at Ascot the next day. Template would turn up for the Midwinter, and James didn’t know his jockey was wandering around unfit to ride.
Unfit... Between seeing the telephone box and clumsily picking up the receiver I came to the conclusion that the only satisfactory way to cheat Kemp-Lore of his victory was to go and ride the race, and win it if I could, and pretend that tonight’s misfortunes had not happened. He had had things his own way for far too long. He was not, he was positively not, I vowed, going to get the better of me any more.
I dialled 0 with an effort, gave the operator my credit card number, and asked to be connected to the one person in the world who would give me the help I needed, and keep quiet about it afterwards, and not try to argue me out of what I intended to do.
Her voice sounded sleepy. She said, ‘Hello?’
‘Joanna... are you busy?’ I asked.
‘Busy? At this hour?’ she said. ‘Is that you, Rob?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well, go back to bed and ring me in the morning,’ she said. ‘I was asleep. Don’t you know what time it is?’ I heard her yawn.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Well, it’s... er... twenty to one. Good night.’
‘Joanna, don’t go,’ I said urgently. ‘I need your help. I really do. Please don’t ring off.’
‘What’s the matter?’ She yawned again.
‘I... I... Joanna, come and help me. Please.’
There was a little silence and she said in a more awake voice, ‘You’ve never said ‘please’ like that to me before. Not for anything.’
‘Will you come?’