Just behind the barn, a tiny little fieldstone cottage, a relic of the Cracker era, gleamed yellow and white against the green pines along the back property line. Off to the right of the barn, a patchwork of paddocks was scattered over the gentle hills, each one connected by cross-country fences: coops and fieldstone walls and two-rail fence sections.
Within the paddocks, jumps had been cleverly set up wherever nature could support them. There was a hanging log set between two oak trees, a water complex in the hollow of two hills, an Irish bank atop a small ridge, and dozens of other little fences scattered everywhere.
Hard to our right was a dressage ring and a jumping ring, as the website promised. A winding stream made its way through the paddocks and widened into a shimmering little pool, dancing with cattails, near the barn.
All around the property, sheltering it from the neighboring farms, the oak trees and pines grew thick and full. It was a tiny little haven, hidden from prying eyes and the roar of traffic, where a girl could just get away from the rest of the world and enjoy a little time with her horse.
Oh, and use all of the jumps and the dressage arena to train hard, of course.
“It’s a miniature horse park,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “Absolutely amazing use of space.”
“Awesome, right?” Kerri pulled the truck up beside the handful of other cars alongside the barn. “Let’s go see if Elsie’s in the barn. That’s her truck over there.” A venerable old Ford dually sat at the far end of the parking area, its dark blue body gleaming under the wintry sun. I spotted a few stickers on the back window, including a Trakehner breed logo. I frowned. That’s not encouraging. The warmblood community was rarely fond of Thoroughbreds, and especially not those Thoroughbreds fresh off the track.
Well, it was too late to turn back now, and Kerri had sworn the owner wouldn’t mind Thoroughbreds. I squared my shoulders and followed her swinging pony-tail out of the short-cropped grass of the parking lot.
As soon as I walked into the central aisle of the barn, I found myself blinking in the dim half-light. I wasn’t in love with the center-aisle barn as a general rule—as a racetracker I’d grown used to the open walls and back-to-back stalls of the shed-row style barn, and I liked the breezes and sunlight shed-rows afforded the horses. I did have to admit, though, that this barn was a lot warmer than mine was right now. I wondered if it was cooler in the summer. It was certainly darker. There were a few translucent panels in the steel roof, but what it really needed was for someone to just switch on the lights.
The stall fronts were barred—again, a very traditional sort of show barn set-up, with little square openings in one corner for a feed scoop to slip through. A few horses pushed their noses through the feed doors as we walked by, whickering their hellos. Kerri paused by the second horse down the aisle, who shoved his big dark nose into her palm, fluttering his nostrils against her skin. “This is Legacy,” she said before planting a kiss on the white snip between his flaring nostrils. “A school horse. I rode him once with my friend. He dumped me in the water, yes he did, yes he did.” Her voice descended into baby-talk. “Legacy’s a bad pony, yes him is!”
Legacy seemed content to rest his nose in Kerri’s palm, breathing her in. He didn’t seem like a bad pony, but water jumps can make good horses do crazy things. I remembered that much from my eventing days.
“Oh, I hear we have visitors out there!”
I looked up the aisle and saw a small woman coming out of what must have been a tack room in the middle of the barn. Kerri waved. “Hello Elsie! It’s Kerri! And I brought my boss Alex!”
“Ah, Kerri, where have you been? I have not seen you in so many months.” Her accent was slightly foreign, as if she had spent time overseas. It wouldn’t be too unusual for a successful trainer, though. Our influences were very European.
“Or years. I went to school, and now I work at Cotswold Farm, for Alex Whitehall. You know who she is, don’t you?”
“Alex? I have heard of Alex Whitehall, but I am thinking it was not your Alex?” The woman walked up, her features slowly becoming clear in the gloom of the unlit barn. I wished she’d flip on the lights already.
She walked right up to us and stopped beneath the faint glow from a translucent panel in the roof above, so that I could get a decent look at her tiny frame, her sharp features, her shining boots and dark olive breeches. She wore a polo shirt, neatly tucked in beneath a brass-studded leather belt; her hair was gray and closely cropped around her head; her tanned skin was wrinkled and she wore no makeup. This was one of the old guard, then. I knew her type from my childhood. I extended a hand and waited to be judged.
Elsie’s hands remained behind her back for a beat while she studied me—my short ponytail, my Cotswold polo shirt with a green horse kiss just above my left breast, my dirty jeans, my scuffed paddock boots—and then she gave me a short nod and offered me her own hand. I grasped the calloused little hand and received a lesson in just how strong a grip could be. Elsie was kind of terrifying.
She was also kind of inspiring. I wouldn’t mind being this scary when I’m old.
“You are the one they say abandons the horses?” Elsie’s accent was odd, rather stilted, as if she had been born in New England but then spent most of her life amongst a variety of Europeans, Australians, and possibly a Russian or three, and took the most interesting parts of each language for her own use. “The one they say leaves the horses in the swamps.”
Play nicely. “Yes, they say I do,” I said with a rueful smile. “But I don’t abandon horses. It’s all false. Exaggerations and lies.”
She considered me a moment longer, narrowing her eyes. Then she decided. “That is good to know,” she said, and took her hand back before mine was crumbled to dust in her grasp. “I read your story in the magazine. You say you retire all your horses and have a model retirement program. I admired that. I was disappointed it might not be true. I am happy to know it is.”
“It’s all a smear campaign,” Kerri broke in. “They were looking for a scapegoat, and Mary Archer gave them one.”
“Mary Archer?” Elsie looked sharply at Kerri. “She’s involved with this?”
“You know Mary Archer?” I asked, but no one paid me any mind.
“We’ve had a few run-ins with her,” Kerri said. “She hates Alex like poison.”
“She is poison,” Elsie declared. “Any horse she has had, is poisoned. She is no good.”
I decided I liked Elsie quite a lot.
We toured the farm inside and out, from the big freezers that could hold ten bags of grain and were impossible for a horse to open, to the cross-country course set in the paddocks, clambering over the coops and stone walls set between the fences. A few boarders showed up to ride their horses as the afternoon shadows grew long, and Elsie nodded gravely at each of them as they rode out to the arenas, their horses impeccably turned out in white polo wraps, white saddle pads, and shining leather tack.
We watched as one of Elsie’s students took her horse around the show-jumping course, hopping through a three-foot-six course with aplomb. Her horse, a block-headed bay with a roached mane that made his head seem even bigger, never missed a spot, never missed a lead, and halted perfectly after a round twenty-meter circle at the end.
“Fantastic,” I sighed, letting out the breath I’d been holding. I couldn’t ride like that, not a chance. That door had closed a long time ago.
“They are good,” Elsie allowed. “I may let her go Preliminary in a few more months.”
“Alex, you rode Prelim, didn’t you?”
I shook my head at Kerri. “Nothing so grand. I was always on green horses. They were usually sold before I got anywhere.”
“Well then,” Elsie said crisply, “You should be doing just fine with this new retiree of yours.”
“I’m not, though. That’s the whole point.”
Elsie nodded, her eyes still on her student in the arena. “A change of scenery will do him good. Who knows, may
be if you keep this one, you’ll be on the way to Preliminary yourself.”
My eyes followed the rider and her bay horse as they took a gymnastic combination, jumping a one-stride, a bounce, and then three long strides to a big spread of an oxer. It was a taxing series of fences, requiring the horse to expand and contract his body like an accordion. The hammer-headed bay moved like a leopard, the picture of grace and athleticism, and the girl on his back barely seemed to move. They made the difficult jump sequence look as effortless as water flowing down a channel.
I could scarcely remember the last time I’d jumped a horse over a fence, or had the occasion to sit so quietly and beautifully in the saddle. I shook my head ruefully, remembering the collection of motley off-track Thoroughbreds and auction bargains I’d grown up riding. It was possible that I’d never had the opportunity to present such a picture of perfect equitation. I’d probably always been hunch-backed and chair-seated, on the defensive, ready for anything that day’s bronco might throw my way.
The woman on horseback took her horse in one final circle, the bay collected into a taut bundle of muscle, profile vertical to the ground, hindquarters reaching nearly to his girth. Then, she sat still and straight and tall, and the horse dropped to a perfectly square halt. She sat like a statue atop his back, as if they were posing for their monument in the National Mall.
I sighed.
I couldn’t ride like that if I trained for ten years. My muscles wouldn’t know how to hold themselves so tall and proud. They’d be waiting for the horse to drop the pretense and act the fool. They’d be screaming at me to get into a defensive mode and protect myself.
It was silly to feel this jealous—I could stick to tough horses and I didn’t have to look good doing it.
Riding like that wouldn’t do me any good when I was taking a racehorse out for a two minute lick.
But, damn, it was sure was beautiful.
I heard laughter and realized that I had been missing a conversation between Elsie and Kerri. I stepped a little closer and smiled, as if I’d been in on the joke. Elsie smiled back at me and went on with her story. “I said to her, my dear, I don’t care if that horse was sired by a hammerhead shark, you can’t pass up that kind of talent! And so she bought him, but she had the last laugh when she named him.”
Kerri guffawed.
“What’s his name?” I asked, giving up any pretense that I’d heard the whole story.
“Jaws,” Kerri laughed. “Just Jaws. She shows him under that and everything. He has some fancy German name but this girl’s like, who cares. I like her already.”
“Jaws isn’t that crazy a name when you ride around on a horse named The Tiger Prince.”
Kerri went on laughing. “Everyone who names horses is insane,” she snorted. “You included.”
“I didn’t name him!”
Elsie harrumphed for attention. She was ready to get on with business.
“Bring your horse here, dear,” she said firmly. “I think we need a Tiger Prince around here. And I would not mind kicking dirt in the eye of that Mary Archer.” She smiled charmingly, but I saw the steel in her eyes.
I have a new ally.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was strange to drive to another farm after the morning training was done.
Almost as strange as it had been to settle into the boarding stable’s tack room, to put my old jumping saddle and some bins of grooming supplies I’d cobbled together from the training barn into a locker, to snap a lock on the closed doors and look around at the other lockers, wondering what sort of tack they held.
Almost as strange as it had been to walk away from Tiger’s stall while he ate hay within, already accustomed to eating hay from a pile on the floor instead of from a hay-net hanging from his open stall door, and leave him to the care of strange grooms I didn’t know.
Almost as strange as it had been to see his empty stall in the yearling barn, the straw swept out and the buckets removed. A stall stripped clean and left bare—that was the sure sign of a horse that was gone for good. It was what you saw when a horse was sold, or a horse died. It was haunting and lonely, and it made me wince every time I passed it.
Now I was going to see him, and work him, while I was still in a riding sort of mood. Looking for distractions, I’d done some riding during morning training this week, and I’d been on three already this morning. Nothing too crazy, just well-behaved two-year-olds who had already been in training for six months. They were well on their way towards adulthood. They knew how to gallop, how to change their leads (mostly), how to stand in the starting gate without having a panic attack.
(And no one had jumped out of their skins when Mary Archer’s horses galloped by in the opposing direction. It was becoming routine, another part of the morning. Those neighbor horses over there, doing the same job we were doing, what of it?—that was how our horses were starting to reason. It was enough to make me stop thinking that she’d moved there just to do me wrong and make my life miserable. After all, there were easier ways for her to do me wrong and make my life miserable, without engaging in real estate transactions and setting up a new training barn.)
If it was strange to drive to another farm, it was stranger still to walk into the barn and see new faces there. Not just new faces—different faces in every way from what I was used to. There were so many other women, women in breeches and tall boots or half-chaps, women in bright polo shirts and carrying grooming boxes and jumping saddles, a woman with the buckle of her hard hat dangling below her chin while she fastened up the throat latch on a massive warmblood, as he stood patiently in a set of cross-ties. Women everywhere, because just as males dominated the racing scene, females dominated the showing scene. The estrogen in the barn might have been palpable; I felt nervous, like I was walking into a broodmare pasture at breakfast time. It would be all hooves and teeth until they decided to accept me as one of their own.
I paused in the doorway as the faces turned and saw me, feeling my own face heat up and turn red like a film of a tomato ripening in fast-forward. I felt like I had tumbled back in time, to my teenage years, and it was not a good feeling. I was skulking into the boarding stable hoping none of the mean girls had seen me. My teenage years had not been my glory years, unlike some. I had no wish to revisit them.
It was too late to run away and hide—they’d all seen me. Horses and people alike. The warmblood in the cross-ties pricked his ears and nickered, as if he thought he knew me from somewhere else. He would be embarrassed in a minute when I got closer and he realized he’d been saying hello to the wrong person. Well, at least someone had said something.
I picked up my faltering strides and went on into the barn, forcing a smile onto my face, cursing Tiger for his inability to just settle down and work at home. I had my own lovely farm where I didn’t have to face any of my social anxiety. Why did he have to drag me back to the drama of my youth?
“Hello!” the woman with the dangling hard-hat buckle said brightly. “You must be the new girl!”
That was me. I was the New Girl. Lucky me! “I’m Alex,” I said, not nearly as brightly. The words barely came out, actually. I cleared my throat and tried again, meeting with some moderate success. At least she understood me this time.
“Alex… Whitehall, right?” She came forward to meet me, ducking under the horse’s cross-tie, and put out a deerskin-gloved hand, the hide so delicate that she could buckle a bridle while wearing them.
I took the supple deerskin in my own hand and obligingly smiled back at her, studying her all the while. She was tall and thin and young and pretty, with a sweeping golden pony-tail curling around her shoulder, and teeth that were too straight and white to be true. Young and beautiful, was she rich too? I hazarded a side-eyed glance at the horse standing at her shoulder and figured she’d have to be. That was not a cheap piece of horseflesh, and the bridle on his handsome head was marked with the metal stamp of Stubben. The big dark bay stood quietly in the cross-ties, but his gaz
e was attentive, his eyes intelligent. He was the sort of horse that didn’t miss much, and obviously cost a fortune.
“I’m Jean Martin,” she said cheerfully, flashing those white teeth at me again. Her teeth had probably cost a fortune, too, I reflected. “We’re so glad you’re here.” She glanced over at the stall, where Tiger was impatiently running his nose up and down the stalls bars, demanding my attention. “And your—uh—horse.”
I cocked my head, my smile faltering. Did I read her tone correctly? Was that a snide note there? The warmblood nodded his head vigorously, swinging the cross-ties, and we both took a step away. Mine was backwards. Her’s was forwards. I felt like I was already in retreat. “Thanks so much,” I replied, just a hint of questioning in my voice. Are you really implying my Thoroughbred isn’t good enough? “I hope he’s been a good boy.”
Jean laughed. “Oh, well, racehorses are always a trial, aren’t they?”
“What’s he doing wrong?” I asked quickly, hackles rising at the deliberate insult. I’d been nice, hadn’t I? I’d been perfectly nice!
Jean just shook her head, her smile still sparkling, though it perhaps stretched a bit tightly at the corners. “Oh, of course he’s fine. We just don’t get too many Thoroughbreds here. You know, since we mainly show. We have a few eventers, but these days, since Elsie doesn’t compete any more, we mainly stick to hunters and jumpers. And of course we mainly have warmbloods for that.”
“I didn’t realize Elsie didn’t compete anymore.” Somehow none of this had been conveyed to me during the barn tour. Kerri had implied that this was an eventing barn and eventing barns, it seemed, were one of the few places in the riding and showing world where Thoroughbreds were still welcome. Plus there were cross-country jumps everywhere. Plus there was the student who was getting ready to go Prelim…
Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4) Page 19
