To the hilt [en]

'Good afternoon, Surtees,' I said. 'Having trouble?'

Surtees said with unthrottled rage, 'Tell your wife to get out of my way. That horse is Patsy's, and I'm taking it.'

I said, 'It's Ivan's, and I'm looking after Ivan's things, as you know.'

'Get out of my way!'

'The horse is officially in training here with Emily. It can't race from your stud farm. You surely know the rules.'

'Bugger the rules!'

Xenia, giving me the insolent stare she'd learned from her parents, said, 'You're a thief. Mummy says so.'

She was dressed in riding breeches, navy hacking jacket, polished boots and black velvet helmet, as if for a showground. Not a bad kid. Fair haired, blue eyed, hopelessly spoiled.

'Why aren't you in school?' I asked.

'I have riding lessons on Monday afternoons,' she answered automatically, and then added, 'and it's none of your business.'

Surtees, presumably deciding that argument would get him nowhere, made a sudden rugger charge at me while my head and attention were turned towards Xenia, and with his shoulder cannon-balling into my stomach, knocked me over.

He fell on top of me, seeking to damage. Neither rugger nor any form of contact sport had ever been my choice or capability. I rolled over and over in the gravelly dirt with Surtees, scrambling for a weight advantage, trying to disconnect myself and stand up.

I could sense Xenia jumping up and down and screaming, 'Kill him, Daddy. Kill him.'

The whole situation was idiotic. Farcical. Killing me was definitely outside Surtees's imagination, but the prospect of offering Golden Malt to Patsy as a symbol of his virility and superiority over the hated stepbrother lent him a strength and viciousness hard to deal with.

Neither of us landed a decisive punch. Surtees, as Chris Young had sworn, wasn't the boxing-gym type.

Add in Xenia who, as befitted her clothes, carried a riding crop, and we arrived at a childish form of warfare in which a bodyguard would have lightened the load.

Surtees clutched my hair and tried to bang my head on the ground, which gave me the idea of doing it to him, with equal lack of effectiveness, while Xenia danced around us lashing out with the riding crop which usually landed on me though occasionally on her father, to his bellowing disgust.

I scrambled finally to my feet, but dragged Surtees up with me as he wouldn't leave go. Xenia hit my legs. Surtees tried a sweeping too-slow wide-armed clout to my head that gave me a chance to both duck the blow and get hold of his clothes and fling him with all my strength away from me so that he overbalanced and staggered backwards and, falling, cracked his head against a brick stable wall.

It stunned him. He slid to his knees. Xenia screamed, 'You've killed my Daddy,' though I clearly hadn't, and I wrapped my arms round her writhing little body, lifting her off her feet, and yelled to Emily, 'Are any of these boxes empty?'

'The end two,' she shouted, and struggled to hold Golden Malt in control, the horse stamping around, upset by the noise.

The top half door of the end box stood open, the bottom half closed and bolted. I carried the frantically struggling child over there and dropped her over the lower half of the door, closing the top half and sliding home a bolt before she could climb out.

I unbolted and opened both halves of the vacant box next door and, grabbing the groggy Surtees by the back of his collar and by his belt, half ran him, half flung him into the space, closing both halves of the door and slapping home the bolts.

Xenia screeched and kicked her door. Surtees had yet to find his voice. Out of breath, I went over to Emily, whose expression was a mixture of outrage and laugh.

'Now what?' she said.

'Now I bolt you into Golden Malt's box so that none of this is your fault, and decamp with the horse.'

She stared. 'Are you serious?'

'None of this is serious, but it's not very funny, either.'

We could both hear Xenia 's muffled shrieks.

'She'll upset all the horses,' Emily said, calming Golden Malt with small pats. 'I did think you might ride this fellow away again,' she said. 'I was just saddling him when Surtees came. The saddle is over there, in his box.'

I walked across the yard and found the saddle, which I carried back and fixed in place. There was a full net of hay in the box also, and a head collar for tying up a horse more comfortably than with a bridle. I carried them out and threaded them together with the zipped bag I'd brought, taking out the helmet but slinging the rest over the withers of the horse, in front of the saddle; like saddle bags of yore.

Then I took the reins from Emily and walked with her to the empty box. She went inside and I bolted the bottom half of the door.

'You'd better hurry,' she said calmly. The lads will arrive in less than half an hour for evening stables, and Surtees will have the police looking for you five minutes after that.'

I kissed her over the stable door.

'It will be dark in the next hour,' she said. 'Where will you go?'

'God knows.'

I kissed her again and bolted her into her temporary prison, and hauled myself into Golden Malt's saddle and, buckling on the helmet, set off again onto the Downs.

I needed the helmet for anonymity more than safety. So universal was the wearing of helmets that a head without one would have been remembered, even in a part of the country where horses were commoner than cows.

Golden Malt, to my relief, showed no reluctance to go along the stretch of road leading to the familiar track up to the training grounds, and seemed, if I understood him at all, to be reassured by being ridden and directed, not running loose and having to find his own way home.

Even at four in the afternoon there were other horses around in the distance. Golden Malt whinnied loudly and received an echoing response from afar, which caused him to nod his head as if in satisfaction: he went along sweetly, not trying to buck me off.

The problem was that I didn't know where to go. Surtees might indeed send the police after me, and although they wouldn't try to catch me on horseback like a Wild West posse, at some point or other I would very likely find myself vulnerably back on a road. Out of sight - that was the thing.

I tried to remember the map Emily and I had spread out in the kitchen, but I'd been concentrating on the way to Foxhill then, and I certainly couldn't go back there. Emily had a Patsy-informant in her yard - one of her lads making a little extra money from Surtees -and so, now, maybe, had her Foxhill friend. No good risking it.

The rolling sea of grass on Lambourn Downs was to my eyes featureless. I'd been up there fairly often with Emily in her Land Rover, but it had been five or six years ago. I looked back and could no longer distinguish the track home.

Think.

Monday, late afternoon. Time for all horses to go to their stables for food, for night.

I decided to be ordinary; to conform. It would be the abnormal, like an unhelmeted head, that would draw comment and attention and questions.

I thought again of the Ridgeway. I wouldn't get lost on it.

I might get found on it.

Golden Malt trotted happily the length of Mandown, his regular exercise ground. It was when I stopped at the far end and didn't turn his head back towards home that he grew restive.

I patted his neck and talked to him, as Emily would have done.

'Never mind, old fellow, we're safe out here,' I murmured over and over, and it was the lack of panic in the voice of confidence, that I think calmed him. I was afraid he would by-pass the false front and go instinctively for the underlying doubt, but he slowly relaxed and waited patiently, twitching his ears forward and back as untroubled horses do, leaving his future in my hands.