by Jilly Cooper
‘Such a sweet horse,’ cried Etta.
‘He is,’ agreed Joey. ‘Ilkley Hall cost a hundred and fifty grand. Doggie cost two grand. It’s what’s inside that counts.’
‘I could run faster than Doggie,’ mocked Chris.
‘I like your pink shirt,’ said Etta.
‘Men in pink, make the girls wink,’ guffawed Chris.
‘This is a delicious drink. How soft is it?’ asked Etta.
‘The Driver’s Friend,’ said Chris piously.
‘You need another to sustain you on the walk home,’ said Joey. ‘Snow’s forecast.’
‘You might see that Beau Regard in your woods,’ warned Chris. ‘Rumoured only to appear in the snow. Loses hisself against the white background, so you can only see the blood and the gashes.’
‘Old wives’ tale,’ snapped Woody, not wanting Etta to be frightened.
‘Craig Green saw a great white thing in the woods last year,’ said Jase.
‘Probably his mother-in-law,’ said Woody.
‘That Romy’s lucky to have you as a mother-in-law, Etta,’ said Joey.
‘Oh heavens,’ said Etta in horror. ‘I forgot I must get back. Thanks for the lovely drinks.’ She fled towards the door.
‘I’ll walk you back,’ said Woody.
‘Good King Wenceslas looked out,’ sang the radio.
King Wenceslas and the vicar, who, seeing Etta and Woody emerging from the Fox, rushed out and invited them in for a cup of coffee.
‘I must go,’ squeaked Etta, and fled.
Returning beaming and hiccuping to Harvest Home, Etta had forgotten the beer, which didn’t matter as Valent Edwards hadn’t turned up. But alas, she had forgotten the potatoes roasting in cream and chutney in the top of the Aga, which had charred and blackened like volcanic waste, and was bawled out by Romy.
‘Chill, Aunt Romy,’ reproved Trixie, who was waitressing and had been at the vodka. ‘You can always enter it for the Turner Prize.’
Later Etta dropped and smashed one of her own gold-leaf-patterned plates when she was serving out the chocolate torte. Martin couldn’t shatter his caring image by yelling at his mother in front of his amused guests, but once they had gone, only writing cheques for a collective £350, he and Romy weighed in.
‘You’ve let us down again, Mother, after all we’ve done to make you welcome. You’re simply not pulling your weight. Not only are we supporting you but we’re also putting so much work into the Sampson Bancroft Memorial Fund because we know how much it means to you.’ Martin glanced up at his father’s portrait, brushing away a tear. ‘You’re letting Dad down too.’
‘Father Christmas, Father Christmas, he got stuck,’ intoned Drummond, who was peering down the stairwell. ‘Coming down the chimney, what bad luck, what bad luck.’
Thank God the whole family were off in the morning, thought Etta, but Romy was bound to leave the dinner-party washing-up and a host of instructions about ironing and cooking.
Lighting her torch, fighting back the tears, Etta wearily set out down the icy path, through the wood to her bungalow. Despite her sadness, her heart lifted at the beauty of snowflakes falling on the bowed willows. This would be a night for the ghost of Beau Regard to appear.
As she dropped downhill, Badger’s Court to her left was in darkness. She could no longer see any lights in the village and shivered. Even ancient, crippled Bartlett and incapacitated Sampson had been a comfort in the old days. If only she still had Bartlett.
She was so exhausted she fell asleep the moment her head touched the pillow, only to be roused by a cannonade of exploding fireworks – perhaps someone was having a party on the Salix Estate. Then she heard screaming and neighing. Was it the ghost of Beau Regard calling her? She pulled her sodden pillow over her head.
Next morning, heaving a sigh of relief to hear cheerful banging and the whine of machinery from Badger’s Court, and happy that she didn’t have to run the gauntlet of Drummond and Poppy, Etta woke to thick snow. The hedge of mature conifers was weighed down and no longer blocked all her view.
Turning on the television, she was greeted by the hideous news that Harvey-Holden’s yard, Ravenscroft, had burnt to the ground during the night. No humans had died, but all the horses had perished. Etta hadn’t liked Harvey-Holden at the party, but felt desperately sorry for him, the owners and all the stable lads. That must have been the screaming and neighing she had heard.
A later bulletin announced that five fire engines had been called to the scene and battled to contain the blaze. Despite so many crews, flames had spread to the tack room and the office, only just sparing the house.
Harvey-Holden’s staff were mostly foreign.
‘We heard the horses crying,’ said a distraught, swollen-eyed Polish stable lass. ‘They were cooked meat when we found them. Even worse, all were lying in the same position, their poor heads pointing away from the fire.’
Etta was appalled: poor, poor Harvey-Holden. She immediately wrote him a letter of commiseration, sending him a hundred pounds she’d saved up for a winter coat.
At first, according to the village shop, the fire had been started by a cigarette in the hayloft. Willowwood swarmed with reporters and the snow still fell. Two days later, news leaked out that Harvey-Holden’s travelling head lad, Denny Forrester, who’d been rowing with his boss at Ludlow, had shot himself, leaving a crazed email. This said he’d been drunk and smoking in the yard because he was so stressed and had set fire to the place because he was so fed up with Harvey-Holden.
A devastated, grey-faced Harvey-Holden then appeared, talking to Chris Vacher on Points West.
‘I cannot think why Denny Forrester did it. Smoking was utterly forbidden in the yard. Denny had been drinking all day; he was upset because he’d screwed up with one of our best horses at Ludlow. He hadn’t been up to the job recently, fretting about his mortgage, and I admit I reprimanded him. But I was very fond of Denny. I’ve lost a good friend and a generally fantastic head lad.’ Harvey-Holden’s voice broke. ‘But how could he have committed a crime of such barbarity? I love my horses, they’re my friends. I thought Denny did too.’
Harvey-Holden’s ratty little face had crumpled, and as he sobbed Etta had wanted to jump through the television set and comfort him.
By contrast to such horrors she was slightly cheered up to get Christmas cards from the Cunliffes, the Travis-Locks, Mr Pocock and Miss Painswick, and strangely comforted to receive a card from the young couple who’d bought Bluebell Hill. They said how blissful they were, and hoped she’d come and see them, adding that Ruthie and Hinton, who’d sent Etta a bottle of sherry, had worked out really well and often spoke of her and hoped she had got a dog.
Dora, who’d been saving up to spend Christmas in Paris with her boyfriend Paris, sent Etta a bottle of Baileys and said wasn’t it ‘the most hideous thing’ about Harvey-Holden’s horses and that ‘revolting Shagger’ would be hopping if he’d insured them.
Niall the vicar, worried that Etta was having Christmas on her own, dropped in, drank most of Ruthie and Hinton’s sherry and reported with round eyes that Ione Travis-Lock had been roaring round the Salix Estate yelling at people to turn off their Christmas lights, and wasn’t Woody the most charming chap?
As Romy and Martin had left for the ski slopes, Carrie Bancroft, determined to extract her pound of flesh, hijacked Etta for a dinner party on 23 December. Guests, mostly high-flyers from the City, had been emailed CVs of the other guests. Alan got drunk.
The party had meant extra beds to be made up in case these guests got snowed in and stayed the night. Etta noticed an open Pill packet beside Trixie’s bed, wondered if it was for the benefit of Marius’s glamorous red-headed stable lad, and would have tackled Trixie if she hadn’t suddenly become so ratty and door-slamming.
Carrie and Alan were off to the Rockies the next day.
‘Much cheaper than Courchevel,’ Alan told the guests. ‘And I won’t have to mortgage the barn every time Trixie has a hambu
rger.’
Trixie had agreed to go with them, but was acting up at the prospect of being stuck with two warring wrinklies for ten days.
Alan was sweet and appreciative about the dinner party. Carrie was ungrateful and very critical. ‘The onions weren’t done, Mum, and the whole thing lacked flavour. You’ve been cooking too much for Romy and Martin.’
Thank God no one needed to stay the night. But once again there was general irritation that the major players, Shade and Valent, hadn’t bothered to answer. So rude. Joey, however, had already told Etta that Valent and Bonny had moved on to the Seychelles.
‘Keeping his eye off the ball, like Mark Antony distracted by Cleopatra,’ mused Etta.
‘Whatever,’ agreed Joey. ‘Bonny ’ates cold weather even more than the country, so they won’t be down for a month or so.’
And it was cold. Etta’s hand had shaken so much that morning she hardly needed to turn on her electric toothbrush.
23
Once again, after midnight, leaving Carrie talking to America, Alan passed out and Trixie locked in her room, Etta, singing ‘Don’t give up now, little donkey,’ set out on the perilous journey down the icy white path to Little Hollow. Her spirits, as before, were lifted by the beauty of the snow. Ancient sycamore and oaks had become suddenly youthful with their twigs thickening and their bent backs wrapped in Arctic fox furs of snow. The weeping willows crouched like shaggy white English sheepdogs. Close up, their tiny buds were flattened against their stems to escape the vicious east wind. Even the towers of Etta’s mature conifer hedge soared like a diamanté cathedral in the moonlight, their branches rising and falling in benediction over her plants.
After the heat of rushing around in Carrie’s kitchen, Etta relished the bitter cold. At least it wasn’t thawing, so the beauty would still be there in the morning. Although her torch was fading, she decided, instead of going in, to take a little ramble in the woods. Suddenly she saw white leaves trembling ahead, and gasped and crossed herself in terror as she caught sight of a horse’s white face drenched in blood – the ghost of Beau Regard.
Forcing herself to move closer, she was horrified to find the ghost was real, a filly tightly roped to a high branch of a willow, with a huge open gash across one closed-up eye. Although desperately weak, she was clearly terrified, shrinking as far away as possible, nearly strangling herself in the process.
Her legs were suppurating and ripped to pieces, her donkeygrey body a mass of cuts and bruises, and as though a musket ball had been gouged out, blood seeped from her neck.
She was also skeletally thin, and from the scraped-away snow and scattered earth Etta could see that someone had been trying to bury her alive but had left in a hurry. In her one open dark eye was total panic and dreadful pain.
What monster, thought Etta in outrage, could have dragged her deep into the wood and abandoned her to her fate on the coldest night of the year?
‘Oh, you poor angel,’ she moaned, tearing off her coat and wrapping it round the filly’s collapsing, shuddering body.
She then tried to untie the rope but in her struggle the filly had pulled the knot too tight. Her body went rigid, trembling at any contact.
Nor could Etta get a signal on her mobile.
‘I’ll be back in a minute, darling, please don’t die.’ Sobbing with rage, Etta stumbled back to Little Hollow, rang Woody and Jase and left a message on Joey’s mobile, telling them where the filly was. Then, snatching a couple of blankets and a knife, Etta rushed back and cut her free. Although she was still trembling frantically and desperate to escape, the filly, too weak to move, collapsed in the snow.
Woody and Jase were there in twenty minutes, held up by the difficulty of getting a trailer into the wood, the wheels slipping and whirring up the snow. At the sound of voices, the filly made another desperate attempt to get up, to hide anywhere, but again she slumped, shuddering helplessly.
Woody and Jase were appalled.
‘Bastards, bastards,’ hissed Jase, who dealt with horses every day but had never seen anything so dreadful.
She was so thin, the whole of her pelvic frame could be seen as well as her spine and ribcage.
‘Only answer is to shoot her.’
‘Oh please no, try and save her,’ pleaded Etta.
Jase pointed towards her neck. ‘Some druggie seems to have attacked her with a chisel,’ then, pointing to her feet, ‘She’s not wearing plates.’
‘We must find somewhere to put her,’ begged Etta.
‘Never get her back through the wood,’ mused Woody, ‘better take her to Valent’s. He’s away another month. There’s a gate up there into Badger’s Court. There’s a downstairs room with a couple of storage heaters we could use. Place’ll be gutted in a few weeks, but Valent likes somewhere to work if he comes down.’
The filly put up no resistance now. Somehow, slipping and swearing, they managed to lift her into the trailer, then bumped her as little as possible over the rough track, as they tripped over tree roots, fallen branches and old bramble cables, before crossing the orchard to Badger’s Court. Here they installed her in Valent’s study, which had a chandelier and an Adam fireplace. The storage heaters were immediately switched on.
It was the only room intact in the building. The floors had been ripped out and the dividing walls knocked down, leaving only a shell with windows and cornices.
In the study, however, which must have been a little drawing room, all the works of Walter Scott still filled a bookshelf. The walls were primrose yellow and on the stripped wooden chimneypiece stood an invitation: ‘Mrs Hugo Wilkinson at Home’.
‘We’ll call you Mrs Wilkinson,’ said Etta.
The filly’s sunken eye, razor-sharp bones and old-fashioned-radiator ribs made her look prematurely aged, but after a glance at her teeth Jase said she was young, probably only three or four.
They decided it was too late to call out a vet. But despite the snow, Woody and Jase proceeded to go east, south and west, bringing water and wood shavings from Woody’s carpenter’s workshop, oldish good-quality hay, because new hay was too rich, from Not for Crowe’s stables and tubing to pour water into her to rehydrate her.
Mrs Wilkinson was soon tucked up in a bed of shavings three feet deep and banked deeper up the wall so she could really snuggle up and not roll over on her back and be unable to get up. Joey flipped when he arrived and caught sight of her.
‘I’ll get the sack. Valent will be gutted.’
‘Room’s going to be gutted anyway,’ reasoned Woody. ‘Poor little girl, keep your voice down, she’s terrified.’
In the light from the chandelier they could now see how hideously cut about and infected was her poor body and how she flinched at any touch, as if awaiting further torture.
‘Who could have done it,’ raged Etta, ‘dragging her into the wood, leaving her to die?’
‘She’s been knocked about the head.’ Jase examined the huge cut across her right eye. ‘Probably lost the sight in this one.’ Then, examining the deep gash on her neck and mopping it gently with disinfectant, he added, ‘Reckon someone gouged out her microchip to escape detection. To have one means she must have been born after 1999.’
As he examined her legs, he shook his head in horror.
‘Think she’s been tangled up in wire, perhaps in a car crash. Gypsies were here last week but they’ve moved on.’
Joey went off to get a camera he kept in his Portakabin: ‘Better photograph the evidence.’
‘She’s so totally starved and dehydrated the most important thing is to get some water into her,’ said Jase, stroking her shoulder.
It was not a pleasant task, inserting tubing into the filly’s nostril and down through her oesophagus. The greatest danger was directing the tube into her windpipe by mistake and drowning her. Jase and Woody held her head and body still as Joey poured the water.
Unable to witness such helpless terror, Etta bolted back to Little Hollow. Then she unearthed Sampson’s duvet, king
-sized to accommodate his massive shoulders, and a yellow, light blue and orange striped duvet cover in his old school colours. On her return Etta taped it up to Mrs Wilkinson’s ears for extra warmth.
Woody had found a kettle meanwhile and produced some very strong, sweet black coffee. ‘Even more delicious than Foxy Lady,’ said a grateful Etta.
By the time they’d drunk it, it was three in the morning and she insisted they went home.
‘So must you,’ chided Joey.
‘You’ve all got to work tomorrow.’
Jase opened the thick Prussian-blue velvet curtains. The snow was still falling softly, wrapping up the world, like Sampson’s duvet round Mrs Wilkinson.
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘No racing, it’s Christmas Eve.’
‘I’m going to stay with her,’ said Etta firmly. ‘Martin and Romy have gone skiing.’
‘I better get back to Mary,’ said Joey. Mop Idle had been jealous in the past of Joey’s roving eye.
‘Thank you all so, so much,’ stammered Etta.
‘We’ll be back first thing,’ promised Woody, thinking of the sailor he’d picked up in Cheltenham and left in his bed, who’d probably robbed him and shoved off by now.
‘I doubt she’ll last the night,’ Jase murmured to the others as they went out into the moonlit rose garden.
24
Etta stayed with Mrs Wilkinson all night, stroking her, praying, watching, worrying, telling her about the lovely life that awaited her if she pulled through.
‘I’ll never let anyone be unkind to you again.’
Despite her fears, Etta felt a strange peace and happiness, remembering her Pony Club days with Snowy, thrilled that she had something to love again. Woody, arriving with a loaf of bread to make toast and a jar of honey, found them both asleep in the wood shavings.
Mrs Wilkinson even accepted a piece of toast.
Later in the morning of Christmas Eve, Jase’s friend Charlie Radcliffe, the most admired local vet, turned up to examine her. The snow and bitter cold had taken its toll. By daylight they could see that her iron-grey coat was brown and crusty from mal-nutrition. She was still too weak to stand or walk on her own but she was eating and drinking.
