by Fiona Walker
Never had two children been inserted into a double buggy faster, the baby carry-sack and nappy bag hooked on to each handle. Carly jumped into her trainers as she unlatched the door and – ignoring the sulphurous waft of cheap perfume coming in through the cat-flap and a muffled voice calling, ‘Only meee!’ – made her getaway through the front door, Jackson still asleep on her shoulder.
Even though it was further to walk to see the foals, she pushed the buggy straight for the path that ran alongside the allotments, avoiding the only road out of the estate. It passed next to the playground from which she could already hear the first of the day’s loud screams and tribal cries – fist-bumps, headlocks, swing-throwing and insult-trading among the under-sixteens.
*
As the Saddle Bags trotted along the main lane leading out of Compton Magna, a car engine approaching behind them made the horses’ ears prick back. It was travelling far too fast, Abba booming out from within.
‘Brace yourselves, it’s Pip Edwards!’ Gill thrust up her crop hand to ask the driver to slow down as they regrouped to a single-file walk, swinging around in their saddles as a small blue hatchback careered into view.
The car raced towards them, the riders hurriedly flattening their horses tight against the steeply banked verge below a row of thatched cottages, setting off a barking dog. Bridge’s grey pony barged forwards in horror, springing up the bank and cowering under the mossy eaves.
As the car roared past, ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ at full blast, the horn gave a cheerful beep that sent Petra’s chestnut mare up the bank too, dislodging a hanging basket. It landed neatly in her arms, like a trophy bowl at a horse show. It contained a set of door keys.
‘What is it with that woman?’ she complained, hanging it back up while the Redhead snacked on a window box. ‘You’d think she’d drive more carefully past horses, given she works at the stud.’
‘Pip Edwards has no horse sense whatsoever,’ said Gill.
Petra gave Bridge a lead, carefully slithering down the bank, leaving long hoof tracks in the storm-pummelled turf. Behind her, Bridge’s pony jumped clean off the top, like a newcomer at the Hickstead Derby.
‘Isn’t she a groom there?’ asked Petra, as they rode on. Pip Edwards had appeared on her radar around a year ago as part of a short-lived local writing circle she’d agreed to help. Petra often saw her little blue car race past her driveway as it flew along the lane between Compton Bagot, where Pip lived in a bungalow that had belonged to her parents, and Compton Magna, where she worked at the august old stud. Its big-barrelled mares and bounding foals were as much a village landmark as the standing stones in the church meadows they were riding past now.
‘Goodness, no.’ Gill drew back her chin. ‘Officially Pip’s the Captain’s part-time housekeeper. Unofficially she’s a private carer who co-ordinates his healthcare visits, cooks him nice soft food and monitors his gout.’
‘She runs a service locally for old folks,’ Mo elaborated. ‘Shopping and baking cakes for them. Home Comforts, it’s called.’
‘That’s a kind thing to do,’ said Bridge, as the grey barged ahead.
‘She’s a menace around horses,’ said Gill, catching up to block out the wellies from a passing commuter, all the Bags waving gratefully as the car slowed. ‘She “helps” old Lester, the stallion man, on the yard in her spare time, but she just holds him up – and the stud’s hopelessly understaffed as it is. All the vets dread her being there on a visit, fussing around and getting in the way. We call her the Understudy.’
As they rode on, they looked across the hedged fields to Compton Magna’s famous stud, a vision of honey-coloured, horse-filled loveliness – apart from the car now speeding along its distant furlong of poplar-lined driveway.
The Percy family had run the stud for more than a century, breeding quality hunters and hacks. Small, blond and fierce, far more interested in four legs than four walls, the beauty of their home was largely wasted on its occupants. The splendour of their horses, however, was legendary.
‘I’d work there.’ Bridge sighed. ‘Sod HR.’
‘Not an easy man to work for, the Captain,’ said Mo. ‘How Lester’s stuck it out all these years is a mystery. Must have the hide of a Hereford bull.’
With its Queen Anne symmetry, as perfect as a tapestry sampler, the Captain’s house was considered by many to be the loveliest in the Compton villages. To its left was a high-walled Victorian kitchen garden filled with beet and carrots. To its right, two Cotswold-stone stable-yards, gleaming from cobbles to clock-towers, led out through wide arches to a hundred acres of curving pasture, with a hidden valley, bluebell woods and bubbling brooks, the very embodiment of green and pleasant. Jocelyn Percy, its paterfamilias, known to all as the Captain, was a widower in failing health who rarely ventured out.
‘The place is surviving on a shoestring,’ Gill told them, in an undertone. ‘Ann Percy was the only one who could ever balance the books and that was mostly to rest her gin glass on, God rest her soul. He’s quite lost without her.’
‘How long ago did she die?’ asked Petra.
‘It must be coming up for two years,’ Mo recalled. ‘There was a fire, wasn’t there, Gill?’
‘That’s right. Not long after Pip started.’
‘Maybe she bumped her off,’ whispered Bridge in mock-horror.
Petra adopted a movie trailer voiceover tone: ‘Her ambitions to become the next Mrs P knew no bounds. Her path ruthless, her victims stood little chance – especially if she was at the wheel of a Nissan Micra.’
‘It’s like Kind Hearts and Coronets,’ chuckled Mo.
‘Maybe she and old Lester are in cahoots,’ Bridge suggested excitedly. ‘The Fred and Rose West of the Comptons.’
‘You lot are awful!’ Gill gasped, her eyes glowing.
Petra grinned, relaxing at last as the Bags refocused from Safe Married Crushes and hanging baskets to village scandal again.
2
From the feed room, Lester heard the shriek of a clutch and the groan of gears, obliterating the Handel Violin Concerto playing on his dusty old stereo. It was a familiar prelude to morning stables. There was a time when it would have made him hurry off to check the top field’s fencing, but he’d trained himself to stand his ground, and now almost looked forward to the gap-toothed smile and the cake tin appearing.
He called his fox terrier, Stubbs, ensuring the little bearded sentry was well away from the arrivals yard as a small blue car careered in, like a detective appearing at the scene of a crime, tyres hissing through storm puddles.
‘Sorry I’m late!’ Pip leaped out, a blurry vision in a bright pink fleece, zipped up against the dewy morning chill. Lester’s vision – which had been gradually worsening this year – no longer picked out the little moles on her neat, snub nose and chin, but there was no mistaking the huge downturned eyes and picket fence of small teeth being bared at him.
‘Had to get Mr Thorne out of bed and drop off some shortbread. He has family visiting for Open Garden Week and all his hollyhocks were flattened in last night’s storm. Wasn’t it a corker? He says another’s on its way and then we’re in for a heatwave, which is the wrong way round, isn’t it? I baked extra biccies for us and brought you a cake. I’ll do nets, shall I?’
‘If you like.’ He returned to the feed room and Handel, his mouth watering at the prospect of Pip’s biscuits, the lightest and most buttery imaginable. As the Captain was fond of saying, ‘It doesn’t matter how bloody awful the woman, the cook is the last one you shoot in the jungle, Lester.’ Pip had been housekeeping at Compton Magna Stud for almost two years, during which the Captain had retreated between the leather blinkers of his wing-chair in his study, drinking too much, watching the racing and grieving his late wife. He was increasingly reliant upon Pip as his health worsened and her Teflon coating was as tough as her bakeware when it came to tolerating his foul temper.
Lester was more tolerant of pug-like Pip and her voluntary extra hours than th
e Captain was, although, like his boss, he seldom showed much gratitude, accepting her company with long-suffering patience, aware that to give Pip any encouragement would be to have her under your feet for ever, like feeding treats to a yard cat. She was self-obsessed, overbearing and occasionally very foolish, and she never stopped to think or ask, but she had batteries that never went flat, which made her useful. She just worked and talked. Non-stop.
She was talking now, despite being three stone-walled bays from him. He could just make out her voice rising and falling from the hay store, no doubt full of tales of her pensioners and her summer plans for day trips and picnics for them all. She seemed to have included him in those. He was still working out how to extricate himself. Ignoring her seemed his best bet.
He cranked up the stereo slightly, scooping the boiled linseed out of the big cauldron in the corner, enjoying the steam rising to his face. It was far too cold for a heatwave, the rain and wind that had washed June into July growing increasingly tempestuous as August drew closer, last night’s storm blowing in like an autumn hurricane. The hay still hadn’t been cut, the yearlings going feral as they waited to move across the lane from their hilly spring pasture onto freshly shorn flat fields as soon as the bales were stacked and taken away. Lester always loved that moment: it spoke of harvest, hunters getting fit and pheasants being released, the count-down to autumn sport. The Captain’s mood would surely pick up at the prospect, even if summer had stubbornly refused to show its face.
*
The Saddle Bags turned up the bridleway that ran alongside paddocks of glossy stud mares, some of which trotted over to snort at them through the hedge, making Bridge’s pony spook away.
‘Where have the foals gone?’ Petra scanned the park-railed field dotted with fat-girthed oaks.
‘Weaned this week,’ Gill said matter-of-factly. ‘They all get shut in a barn and the mums taken away.’
‘That’s awful!’ Petra thought of the tears she’d shed when Charlie had had his way and their boys were sent one by one to his old boarding school – her sleepless nights worrying, the whispered calls from Fitz begging to come home, the equally mournful letters from Ed. She had flatly refused to consider boarding for their daughters, who were younger.
‘They soon get used to it,’ said Gill, sounding just like Charlie. ‘It’s not my preferred method, but the Captain’s always been old-fashioned.’
‘And a tightwad,’ Mo muttered behind them.
‘Ssh,’ Gill said, as though the mares might be offended if they overheard.
‘You’re the one who said he’s cash-strapped,’ Bridge pointed out.
‘It’s a tough time for British breeding. Fortunes change and studs adapt. Jocelyn and Ann Percy had bred three Badminton contenders by the time I qualified as a vet. His father, Major Percy, produced hunters for royalty, his father before him cavalry horses and point-to-pointers. They’ve run Compton Magna Stud for donkey’s years.’
‘Thoroughbred years,’ Petra corrected.
‘Brilliant!’ Gill beamed. ‘Although technically these are now sports horses. Having a Percy horse was once a byword for class, but now that the moneyed owners are all buying direct from the Continent, their stock has fallen. It’s tragic.’
Looking at the beautiful mares floating alongside them, Petra found it hard to believe nobody was buying. They crowded together to watch as the riders waited for Mo to unhitch a gate leading to a wide track, on the far side of which a shimmering sea of corn stretched as far as the horizon. ‘When I was a nipper, all this land belonged to the stud,’ Mo said, holding the gate open. ‘Right the way down to the Fosse it went, fields full of horses and cross-country jumps and hunt coverts. When the Percys sold it, Sanson Holdings ripped out the hedges and ploughed it all up. Must’ve been more than fifteen years ago now.’
‘That was Bay’s fault,’ Gill remembered, as they filed through. ‘The Austens wanted it, but Jocelyn and Ann refused to sell to them on principle because Bay had offended them.’
‘Nothing new there.’ Mo chuckled, swinging the gate closed with a clang. ‘Those two families have been feuding for years. Taking offence at the Austens is sport to the Percys. They’ve always looked down on them. Old money to new.’
‘Like monarchs looking down on oligarchs, you mean?’ suggested Bridge. The little grey danced beneath her in anticipation, knowing they were about to go faster.
Beside her, Petra saw out a flurry of bucks from the Redhead as they all broke into a canter up the steady incline, horses accustomed to the familiar gear changes on the well-worn circuit. She let the mare have her head, imagination sparked by the village’s feuding families. ‘So the Percys and the Austens were once the Montagues and Capulets of the Comptons?’
‘Nothing so romantic.’ Gill accelerated to keep up until the bouncy canter levelled to racing pace. ‘It’s all about land gain not love lost!’ she called, over thundering hoof beats. ‘The Sixty Acres, between the church meadows and Poacher’s Stream, has changed hands more often than Berwick-upon-Tweed, won and lost in Austen wagers and Percy gambles. It used to be part of Manor Farm but the stud has it now. Sandy Austen is desperate to buy it back. Not long ago he offered the Captain two winning broodmares and a lifetime’s supply of trout and venison as a sweetener.’
‘Don’t tell me the old boy told him to bugger off and come back with Pegasus and ambrosia?’
‘Typical farmers. They should have joined forces by marriage generations ago to redraw their field maps, but the Percys have always put horses first.’
‘The horse before the cartography?’ Petra suggested breathlessly, her mare trying to steam ahead, the other two Bags dropping far behind as the cob idled and the pony spooked.
‘I wish I’d thought of that one! It can make for very unstable relationships. Just look at what happened to Ronnie.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘She! You must know the story. The Bardswold Bolter! Veronica Ledwell was her married name, but everybody round here still thinks of her as Ronnie Percy.’
‘I’ve never heard of her.’
‘Good God, this village is fractured.’ Gill gathered the bay into a more leisurely hunting canter. She had a short fuse when it came to the Comptons’ disintegrating collective memory. ‘I always forget you haven’t been here long.’
‘Seven years!’ Petra was breathless from galloping. ‘I’m on the fête committee and the parish council.’
‘By local standards you’ve hardly unpacked.’ Gill dropped back to a trot. ‘And you never go to meetings. Where were you when that awful eco developer was threatening to annex the old cricket field for hobbit houses with a solar panel and a reed-bed loo each?’
‘Working hundred-hour weeks to pay for fossil fuel and oats.’ She’d only got a seat on the parish council because Charlie had resigned from his at about the same time he’d decided to take advantage of their Pimlico tenants giving notice and stay in the London flat on week nights. Having been co-opted into her husband’s seat, Petra had intended to step down as soon as the elections came round. Three years later, she was still searching for a replacement, her truancy rate increasing. ‘Why did Ronnie Percy bolt?’
‘Adultery,’ Gill breathed, with a shudder of revulsion. ‘The village was jolly shaken. The stud’s Percys usually make very dull marriages, unlike their cousins at Eyngate Hall, who all murdered each other in crimes of passion – it was like a game of Cluedo over there.’
Petra had trawled the children around the local stately pile many times in search of writing inspiration in its grand ballroom, interlinked bedchambers and Gothic follies. Notoriously well connected and oversexed, the Percys had once boasted enough highly strung women, love-rat cads, infidelity and scandal to fill a shelf of romantic historical fiction. The big Regency wedding cake of architectural excess was now a favourite landing spot for coachloads of pensioners in search of tea and a wee. When media tycoon tax exile Peter Sanson had bought the Eyngate Estate in the eighties, he’d wasted
no time in separating the house from its valuable agricultural and sporting assets and placing it in a charitable trust to turn it into a tourist attraction. Sanson Holdings’ tenanted properties and arable agricultural land – farmed by contractors like Mo’s husband, Barry – dominated the Comptons, like a new era of feudal landlords.
They pulled to a halt, waiting for the others to catch up, so far behind they couldn’t even hear their hoofs now, just their own horses blowing. They were high on the ridge, almost able to see across to the huge hall cupped in its own valley of Capability Brown parkland with tree-lined rides, a five-acre lake and a scimitar-shaped ha-ha. ‘The Eyngate Hall lot were the Bingham-Percys,’ Gill told Petra, ‘totally obsessed with pretty architecture. They built the stud for the Captain’s great-great-grandfather. His mob are just plain Percys and distinctly poor rellies.’
Petra turned to look down to the stud again, far less grand in proportion than Eyngate Hall, but no less fuel for creative imagination, gleaming in its fold of the ridge, like a golden hare. She was ashamed that she rode past its fields of mares and foals almost every day, and even coveted the beautiful house, yet knew so little of its occupants. A bubble of excitement caught in her chest, but it wasn’t the cynical story-hunter’s hunger to revive her jaded writing career. It was more child-like and joyful, a chance to rekindle a daydream. ‘I always think of it as Birtwick Park,’ she said fondly.
‘Is that National Trust?’
‘Beauty, Ginger and Merrylegs live there. It’s Squire Gordon’s house.’
‘Now why is that familiar? Do the Gordons hunt with the Fosse and Wolds?’
Petra didn’t answer, transported back to a field in Yorkshire in the seventies, legs flapping at her pony’s sides. The much-loved middle daughter of two jovial teachers, who preferred animals to humans – they’d named her after the Blue Peter dog – nobody had ever taken Petra Shaw’s childhood dreams of literary fame very seriously, least of all Petra. Her childhood obsession with Black Beauty, both the book and the seventies television series, meant that her prolific output of early work exclusively featured small girls with ringlets galloping around vicarage orchards. It was young Petra Shaw’s single-minded ambition to live in Squire Gordon’s beautiful country house, with a black gelding, a small white pony and a chestnut mare. When not writing, Petra had spent a lot of time researching her work by belting around the Dales on the loan pony she shared with her younger sister, fantasising that she was galloping side-saddle to Squire Gordon’s aid. Even her eleven-plus essay had been crammed with ostlers and nosebags.
