'I'm known as a dragon. There aren't many with the guts of St George.'
'Do you regret it?'
She rustled out of the rest of her clothes and slid naked between the sheets, her curved shape momentarily silhouetted against a window oblong of stars. I took off my clothes and felt ageless.
'Rumours run round Lambourn like the pox,' she said. 'I'm bloody careful who I let into this room.'
We stopped talking. We had never, I supposed, been inventive or innovative lovers. There had been no need. Front to front with hands and lips and tongues we had shivered with sensual intense arousal, and that at least hadn't changed. Her body to my touch was long known and long forgotten, like going back to an abandoned building: a newly explored breast, familiar concave abdomen, hard mound of pelvis, soft dark warm mystery below and beyond, known secretly but never explored by spotlight since, in spite of her forthright public face, she was privately shy.
I did what I knew she liked, and as ever my own intensest pleasure came in pleasing her. Entry was easy, her readiness receptive. Movement strong and rhythmic, an instinct shared. When I felt her deep pulse beating, then too I took my own long moment; sometimes in the past it had been as good as that, but not always. It seemed that in that way also we had grown up.
'I've missed you,' she said.
'I, too.'
We slept peacefully side by side, and it was in the morning in the shower that she looked at my collection of bruises with disbelief.
'I told you,' I said mildly. 'I got mugged.'
'Trampled by a stampede of cows, more like.'
'Bulls.'
'OK, then. Bulls. Don't come downstairs until the first lot has gone out.'
I'd almost forgotten I was there to steal a horse. I waited until the scrunching hooves outside had diminuendoed into the distance and went down for coffee and toast.
Emily came in from the yard, saying, 'I've saddled and bridled Golden Malt. He's all ready for you, but he's pretty fresh. For God's sake, don't let him whip round and buck you off. The last thing I want is to have him loose on the Downs.'
'I've been thinking about anonymity,' I said, spreading honey on toast. 'Have you still got any of those nightcaps you put over their heads in very cold weather? A nightcap would hide that very white blaze down his nose. And perhaps boots for his white socks…'
She nodded, amused. 'And you'd better borrow a helmet from the cloakroom, and anything else you need.'
I thanked her and went into the large downstairs cloakroom where there was always a haphazard collection of jackets, boots, gloves and helmets for kitting out visitors. I found some jodhpur boots to fit me (better than trainers for the job) and tied my hair up on the top of my head with a shoelace before hiding the lot under a shiny blue helmet. I slung round my neck a pair of jockeys' goggles, the big mica jobs they used against rain and mud… fine disguise for a black eye.
Emily, still amused, said no one would recognise the result. 'And do borrow one of those padded jackets. It's cold on the Downs these mornings.'
I fetched a dark-coloured jacket and said, 'If anyone comes looking for the horse, say I had authority to take him, and I took him, and you don't know where he is.'
'Do you think anyone will come?' She was curious more than worried, it seemed.
'Hope not.'
Golden Malt eyed me with disillusion from inside his nightcap. Emily gave me a leg-up onto his back and at this point looked filled with misgiving.
'When the hell did you last sit on a horse?' she asked, frowning.
'Er… some tune ago.' But I got my feet into the stirrups and collected the reins into a reasonable bunch.
'How often have you actually ridden since you left here?' Emily demanded.
'It's all in the mind,' I said. Golden Malt skittered around unhelpfully. It looked a long way down to the ground.
'You're a bloody fool,' she said.
'I'll phone you if anything goes wrong… and thanks, Em.'
'Yes. Go on, then. Bugger off.' She was smiling. 'I'll kill you if you let him get loose.'
I'd reckoned that the first three hundred yards might be the most difficult from the point of view of my deficient riding ability as I had to go that distance along a public road to reach the track that led up to the Downs; but I was lucky, there were few cars on the road and those that were had drivers who slowed down for racehorses. I touched my helmet repeatedly in thanks and managed to steer a not-too-disgraceful course.
No one wound down a window and called to me by name or linked the camouflaged horse to Emily. I was just on one of hundreds of Lambourn equine residents, large as life but also invisible.
Golden Malt thought he knew where he was going, which helped at first but not later. He tossed his head with pleasure and trotted jauntily up the rutted access to the downlands which spread for fifty miles east to west across central southern England - from the Chilterns to Salisbury Plain. I felt more at home on the Downs than in Lambourn itself, but even there solitude was rare: strings of horses cluttered every skyline and trainers' Land Rovers bumped busily in their wake. Lambourn's industry lay out there on the sweeping green uplands in the wind and the prehistoric mornings. I had thought that they would be world enough: that I could live and work there… and I'd been wrong.
Golden Malt began to fight when I turned him to the west at the top of the hill, instead of continuing to the east. He ran backwards, he turned in small circles, he obstinately refused to go where I tried to point his head. I didn't know whether expert horsemen with legs of iron would have forced him to obey in a long battle of wills: I only knew that I was losing.
I remembered suddenly that one day I'd stood beside Emily on the trainers' stand at a race meeting watching one of her horses refuse to go down to the start. The horse had run backwards, cantered crabwise, turned in circles, ignored every instruction and used his vast muscle power to make a fool of the slight man on his back. And that man had been a tough experienced jockey.
Across the years I heard Emily's furious comment, 'Why doesn't the bloody fool get off and lead him?'
Oh Em, I thought. My dear wife. Thank you.
I slid off the stubborn brute's back and pulled the reins over his head, and walked towards the west, and as if his entire nature had done an abracadabra, Golden Malt ambled along peacefully beside me so that all I had to worry about was not letting him step on my heels.
Emily's anxiety that I would get lost on the bare rolling grassland didn't take into consideration the boyhood training I'd had in following deer across unmapped Scottish moorlands. The first great rule was to determine the direction of the wind, and to steer by its angle on one's face. Stalking a deer was only possible if one were down wind of him, so that he couldn't smell one's presence.
The wind on that particular September day was blowing steadily from the north. I headed at first straight into it and then, when Golden Malt was used to its feel, veered slightly to the left, plodding purposefully across the green featureless sea as if I knew my bearings exactly.
I could see glimpses of villages in the lower distances, but no horses. When I'd walked about a mile I tried riding again, scrambling clumsily back into the saddle and gathering the reins; and this time, as if unsure in his isolation from sight and sound of his own kind, Golden Malt walked docilely where I asked.
I risked another trot.
No problem.
I crossed a footpath or two and skirted a few farms, setting dogs barking. There was no great need for pinpoint accuracy at that stage of the journey because somewhere ahead lay the oldest path in Britain, the Ridgeway, that still ran east-west between the Thames at Goring Gap to West Kennet, a village south-west of Swindon. Although from there on it had disappeared, it was likely the Druids had walked it to reach Stonehenge. True to its name, it ran along the highest ground of the hills because once, long before the Romans came with Julius Caesar, the valleys had been wooded and prowled by bears.