by Fiona Walker
The smell really was very bad. Putting the brake on the buggy, she looked around uselessly. She’d just have to change the nappy here – it was sunny now, at least, and the grass was dry enough to lay out the mat. As she did so, pulling back the nappy’s tabs and leaning away from the sight inside, she heard the thud of hoofs and Sienna let out a shriek of excitement. ‘Horsie!’ she cried excitedly from the front of the buggy.
Looking up, Carly saw a small grey horse thundering towards them, its rider’s eyes wide as she tugged frantically at the reins. ‘I can’t stop! Get out of the way!’
Carly’s reactions were lightning fast. Gathering up Jackson, she kicked off the buggy brake and reversed it into the crop, screaming at Ellis to stay back.
Still bearing down on them, the pony spotted the changing mat with the full nappy on it and applied the brakes, almost shooting his rider over his neck, her stick flying through the air and landing in the buggy. She and the pony swerved away from Carly and the kids, came up against the hedge, reared back until they were almost sitting down, then set off at full speed back the way they had come.
‘Horsie gone!’ Sienna started to cry, as the grey disappeared from sight.
‘Shit, that was close!’ Carly breathed, kissing her daughter’s head while jiggling a bawling, smelly Jackson at her chest, some of the contents of his nappy now plastered over her hands and T-shirt.
‘Mum said “shit”!’
She felt a light smack on her bottom and irritably retrieved the crop from Ellis’s grip, surprised at its weight and rigidity, its sparkly purple end shaped like a star. Poor horse.
‘Horsie!’ Sienna shrieked happily, as more thundering hoof beats approached, this time out of sight behind the hedge, accompanied by the bleating of sheep. A moment later another rider flew over four feet of birch, almost landing on top of the changing mat. As her chestnut touched down, the rider looked at Carly in shock. ‘Sorry! Christ.’
‘They went that way.’ Carly pointed the magic-wand crop at the retreating white shape.
‘Goodness, you’ve a baby there. Are you all right?’
‘We’re fine.’
With great effort, the woman turned the horse in a tight circle and called over her shoulder. ‘Are you lost?’
Carly recognised them from the big farmhouse by the barn conversions – she stopped at its paddock gate to talk to the chestnut mare and her pony friends most days if they were out, and sometimes saw the woman clattering about with buckets in the stable-yard at the far end. She had often wondered what it would be like to be married to a rich husband and live in a beautiful big house.
Now she backed further into the corn as they plunged around on the track, feeling uncomfortably like a serf looking up at a royal. ‘You’re not far behind.’ She held out the crop like a race steward, indicating the departing grey. ‘You’ll catch them if you’re quick.’
‘Damn! I thought I’d cut them off. Thanks!’ They set off in pursuit.
*
‘...and there’s a John le Carré film on BBC One we can all watch one night next week – or is it Jim Carrey? The one you both like,’ Pip was saying loudly to an out-of-sight Lester as she filled nets, planning a few evenings of company for him and the Captain. Both men claimed to prefer to be alone, the stallion man drinking caramel-dark tea in his stable cottage while his boss downed claret in the main house, but she didn’t believe it, and they loved their television. It must be terribly lonely here nowadays. The Captain was deeply antisocial, rarely stepping across his threshold, too proud to use the walking frame Pip had acquired for him on loan from the NHS, along with a shower seat and grab-rails. He had once been a regular at the Jugged Hare, she’d been told, always talking horse, part of a ribald farming and hunting set who had been yesteryear’s wild men of the Comptons. It was hard to imagine that now: her curmudgeonly charge had his beady eyes fixed on the television screen all the time.
The Captain’s fierce raptor of a wife, Ann, had employed Pip, reluctantly taking on her only applicant for the role of part-time housekeeper, a thirty-something former job-centre manager. Pip had recently started up her Home Comforts carer service after taking voluntary redundancy to look after her ageing parents: ‘You obviously didn’t do a very good job as they’re both now dead, but at least English is your first language and you live in the village, so you’ll have to do.’ There had been impatience in Ann Percy’s manner, which Pip took to be typical of her breed, but it turned out her need to find someone to look after her gout-ridden husband was urgent: she’d underplayed her on-off battle with cancer to family and friends for almost a decade and the disease was spreading into her lungs and liver. Just three months later Ann Percy’s funeral had brought so many mourners to the village they’d opened the church meadows for extra parking.
Pip was honoured that the immensely practical, no-nonsense Ann Percy had entrusted her house and husband to her care, the former’s beauty more than capable of making up for the latter’s beastliness. She gazed lovingly out from the hay store now at the golden-stone tiles, tiny top dormers and tall chimneys visible over the stable-yard roofs, the fast-climbing sun creeping across them.
In the village, the stud was a star attraction architecturally, its clock-tower and pretty house a landmark that visitors saw first as they approached Compton Magna along the die-straight narrow lane up from the Fosse Way, causing many a hire car to veer onto the verge towards its paddocks. The oh-so-handsome face, with its symmetrical sash windows, flirty dormers and limestone quoins was like a perfect doll’s house.
The main house at Compton Magna Stud had never been given a name. Unlike its Stables Cottage and Groom’s Flat, it wasn’t separately listed in the records of the Eyngate Estate to which it had once belonged. For years, it was commonly known as Percy Place, and so many letters were addressed thus that it was assumed to be historically correct, but family accommodation was officially indistinguishable from horse. Pip rather liked its anonymity, like the mares in its oldest stud books with only stable names written in. Lester had explained that their bloodline was more important than their individual merits. That was how she felt as its part-time châtelaine. Just Pip. A tiny part of its history, and a seed that might find a place to root there.
Whenever she introduced herself to somebody new, Pip would tell them, ‘My dad nicknamed me Pipsqueak. Everyone calls me Pip.’ It wasn’t strictly true. Both parents had always addressed her as Pauline. Even after their deaths, she could still hear their voices in her head when someone called her by her given name. She had chosen to bury Pauline Edwards with them and Pip, the village’s happiest helper and bounciest baker, had been born.
There weren’t many hay nets to make up at this time of year – just those of the stallion, the box-resting point-to-pointer, and a few of the visiting mares, given private quarters well away from the broad-span barn where their foals had just been weaned. The rest of the broodmares were all out at grass, far from earshot of their offspring’s plaintive cries. The stud always separated mother and foal in high summer so that the mare, pregnant again, wouldn’t have more taken out of her by her big, milk-guzzling foal at foot.
‘There’s no room for sentimentality in horse breeding,’ Lester had told Pip, the first day she’d come in early to help on the yard.
Pip wasn’t sentimental, so that suited her. When she’d started as housekeeper, there had been two stallions standing at Compton Magna: ‘Old but serviceable,’ the Captain would bark, on each occasion they were led ceremonially past him. Not long after his wife’s death, they’d lost the legendary old thoroughbred, father of the first Magna Badminton winner. Lester had disappeared for hours after the hunt kennelman had come for the body, limping up to the top fields on a spurious pretext, returning at dusk with his old eyes buried in swollen bags. Pip had held the fort and carried on, unflappable and, she liked to think, indispensable.
Only roman-nosed Cruisoe was left, by far the tougher horse for his ‘quarter of Irish bog-trotter’, accor
ding to Lester, who wouldn’t let Pip handle him. His dedicated care guaranteed that the horse’s gold coat and black points gleamed like a concours d’élégance Ferrari badge.
She popped her head around the feed-room door. Lester was listening to his classical music, feed buckets lined up in military order in wheelbarrows ready to throw over stable doors and decant into long foal troughs. ‘I’ll take these round.’ She’d seen how perilously the old boy moved over wet cobbles with a full barrow.
‘Don’t forget to check the—’
‘Water buckets. I’m on it.’ She barrowed away, wheel squeaking, proud of how expert she was these days. Lester never praised her, but she knew he trusted her. There had been a time when he wouldn’t let her pick up a yard brush. She turned off the floodlights as she passed the switch, left on all night after Lester’s midnight walk to check the foal pens, his memory and eyesight less sharp than they had been. Only two of the eight big tungstens were still working, which meant less electricity wasted, not that the Captain ever opened his bills.
The sun was already illuminating gingerbread stone walls and gleaming cobbles, like toffees.
It was on the Compton Magna stable-yards that its historic architects had lavished their most extravagant flourishes – two grand courtyards of twenty stables apiece, interlinked with three Gothic stone arches, the first topped with a dovecote and weathervane, the central arch crowned by the clock-tower and the one at the rear boasting a copper-domed lookout of such structural ingenuity it still drew engineering students. It had originally been intended for visiting owners to watch their horses in training on the gallops, but the Percy family had never taken to training, and the gallops had only ever existed in their benefactors’ imagination. The views from the little tower across to Eyngate Park were spectacular and entirely wasted on the colony of pipistrelles it had housed for more than seventy years. Having rescued many babies from grilles and gutters, and thinking of them as her little namesakes, Pip was determined that their home wouldn’t be disturbed on her watch. Developers prowled regularly, and she knew from filing the Captain’s post that there had been several unsolicited approaches since Ann’s death, but he hadn’t dignified them with a reply.
She wheeled beneath the tower now and out towards the modern barns, where the little foal group in the first enclosure started to shift, snort and whinny in anticipation, shuffling, barging, nipping and cow-kicking their way into rank order. There were six this year. A quartet of strapping juveniles vied for supremacy; the two younger ones, still in individual weaning pens, craned over to watch, squealing and whickering plaintively.
In the past decade, the breeding programme had been scaled down, visiting mares a priority. The majority of Compton Magna’s homebred stock had traditionally been sold on as yearlings or even younger to keep costs down, staff numbers kept lean as the Percys aged and money thinned, only the cream of the crop retained to produce. When Pip had first become housekeeper, a work rider had come in from a neighbouring village and helped to break them in, a stoat-faced woman who seemed to go from lying across a horse to hunting it in a week, but she hadn’t been around for more than a year, and there seemed to be a lot of horses. Bossy Gill Walcote, the vet who came to check foals and scan mares, said there were far too many. None had been sold or broken in since Ann Percy’s death, so the four-year-olds that should have started their careers had all enjoyed an extra gap year, now great lanky adolescents with nothing to do but battle over their herd position like gang members.
Pip couldn’t tell most of them apart. She wished they came in more colours, like cats – tortoiseshell and tabby, maybe. She liked the foals when they were tiny, and rideable horses like Horace, the point-to-pointer, and Lester’s hunting cob, which were so well mannered they stood aside and waited for you to go through doors first, like old gents. But she found the broodmares a bit boring and the youngsters intimidating – even at five months old they could nip and kick so hard it bruised bone. She chucked the food into the barns now, missing most of the troughs, already thinking about her tea and shortbread.
Dripped on by wet trees, she did a quick check over the gates at the herds out in the fields – not that she could see where any of them were in the far distance. A bobbing line of brightly coloured helmet silks beyond the furthest boundary hedge meant riders on the bridleway, which always drew the stud horses across to watch. Forgetting the water troughs and the buckets in the foal barn, Pip hurried back to Lester to help him skip out stables and sweep up, eager to talk to him again about her summer pensioner outings until it was time to wake the Captain.
‘I can’t stay long,’ she said, leading the way into his little cottage and putting the kettle on. ‘He’ll give me hell if he misses the racing news again. Now, Lester, what’s your opinion of a day at an outlet village vis-à-vis a National Trust property, and do you think the Captain could be persuaded to come along? I have lots of mature single ladies on my books.’
*
‘She was definitely right here.’ Petra pulled up, looking at a patch of flattened straw. ‘A blonde woman with three children.’
‘Well, they’re not here now,’ said Gill. ‘Let’s not hang about.’
‘I can’t see my stick,’ complained Bridge.
‘What if she was terribly lost, poor mite?’ Mo let the cob graze and scanned the headland.
‘Not to mention traumatised?’ Petra fretted. ‘We almost galloped over her new-born, Bridge.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ Bridge said breezily, having already chalked up her speedy detour to high spirits. ‘But what about my bloody stick? Aleš gave me it.’
‘There’s an earring here.’ Gill jumped off to retrieve it, holding it up.
‘It’s a phone charm.’ Petra examined the glittery little crescent. ‘A letter C.’
‘I thought I recognised her.’ Bridge studied it too. ‘She came to my mummy-yoga class in the village hall when the baby was still a bump – she was with that lot from the estate who just lie down and giggle. She has Cs tattooed bloody everywhere. Third trimester and still lean as a marathon runner, lucky thing.’
‘That’ll be young Ash Turner’s wife,’ said Mo, whose bungalow was in the cul-de-sac that led directly off the Orchard Estate, stronghold of the Turners and their fleet of battered white vans. ‘Carla. Carrie? Pretty blonde, am I right?’
‘Blondie didn’t fetch a mat or take out her earphones, just watched us warm up and walked out, saying she preferred fresh air.’
‘Your classes are punishing, Bridge.’ Petra had bulk-bought Deep Heat after an hour’s Ab Planking for Muffin Tops.
‘Ash Turner used to be a right tearaway,’ Mo remembered, with a smile. ‘War hero now. Probably sent wifey on a recce, Bridge. He’s retraining to be a fitness instructor, I heard.’
‘He’s welcome to run my class. The sooner I get back into HR the better.’
‘We really should push off,’ Gill urged, standing in her stirrups on lookout. ‘Sanson’s estate managers are very quick to come down on riders threatening their stewardship scheme by trampling the field margins – not to mention his valuable crops.’ His henchmen were notoriously heavy-handed.
Petra conceded defeat. She was still worried about the young mum with the haunted eyes, but her own children would soon be up and wanting breakfast. She didn’t entirely trust Fitz to oversee them, despite his babysitting-for-cash promises. Last time she’d left him in charge, his younger brother, Ed, had consumed an entire loaf of bread, toasted with Nutella, ten-year-old wannabe Junior MasterChef Prudie had tried flambéing pineapple on the Aga, smoke alarms shrieking, and baby-of-the-family Bella had brought their Shetland pony into the kitchen to sample her apple and marshmallow smoothie. ‘Let’s cut back through the sheep fields. It’s quicker.’
‘That’s Austen land.’ Mo shook her head.
‘Bay’s even tougher on trespassers than Sanson,’ warned Gill, ‘especially when he’s just released all the poults.’ Compton Manor Farm’s drives were far f
rom prying eyes, its fat, high-flying pheasant and partridge closely guarded.
‘Hates anyone going near his birds, does Bay.’ Mo glanced up at the woodland on the far brow where a Land Rover was parked. ‘That might be his car.’
‘Maybe that’s what Petra’s hoping,’ scoffed Bridge.
‘It takes a game bird to cross his land uninvited.’ Gill’s puns never got better.
‘You might get a thorough plucking, Petra.’ Mo gave it her Pam Ayres best.
‘Maureen Dawkins!’ Gill chided.
‘A good stuffing?’ Mo suggested.
‘Ha-bloody-ha.’ Fed up with the ribbing, Petra headed for a hunt jump. ‘Is everyone up to this? Shall I give you a lead?’
‘You go ahead, Lucy Glitters!’ Mo called.
Realising too late that an extra rail had been added behind the tiger trap to allow for the summer sheep wire, Petra got left behind as the Redhead put in a huge leap, losing both stirrups quickly followed by her dignity as the mare landed and bucked, propelling her up her neck where she dangled as long as she could before sliding gently into a patch of boggy, sedge-tufted ground. Standing over her, the chestnut mare prodded her for signs of life with her nose, long accustomed to her mistress falling off. Petra made a lot of unscheduled dismounts, which Gill insisted was because she had an insecure seat, like a marginal MP.
‘I’m fine!’ she said, springing up to take a bow, then grab the Redhead before she started terrorising sheep. ‘My fault!’
Leading a round of applause from the track, Mo rode to the nearby gate and put the combination in the padlock so that she could let the others through to the field without the need to jump. ‘Barry does a lot of tractor work for the Austens,’ she explained. ‘He knows all the codes. Took him ages to remember. Nineteen... eighty-two... There we go! The year Bay was born.’
‘Falklands War,’ Gill remembered solemnly.
‘Blade Runner, Ridley Scott.’ Bridge smiled. ‘Fecking iconic.’
