by Fiona Walker
‘Only if you ride round Badminton.’
‘Of course I will,’ she’d said matter-of-factly, amazed it was ever in doubt. ‘I’ll get that Whitbread Trophy. And the Evening Standard Best Actress Award goes to... Hermia Austen!’
‘Hermia’s short and fierce.’
‘So are we.’
They’d neither of them liked the names they were christened with, one taking the boyish abbreviation for Veronica, the other trying out many different variations of her own, none suiting her until then, the character in Shakespeare’s great fantasy romantic comedy hers to play on through her professional life.
‘Hermione Austen sounds like a member of the WI about to deliver a talk on clematis pruning. Hermia is an actress who reduces her audience to tears as Joan of Arc cries vengeance at the gates of Heaven.’
‘And Ronnie Percy will—’
‘—cry out horses’ names at the gates of paddocks.’
The two had revelled in those rite-of-passage holidays, dressing up and sneaking out to nightclubs and smoking indecent numbers of cigarettes behind the war memorial on the Green. Highly flirtatious and endlessly inquisitive, Ronnie was the touch-paper who all too often got them into trouble, Hermia the fast-talking, quick-thinking diplomat who got them out. They’d shared the same taste in clothes and boys, sometimes swapping both when they grew bored. In their last summer before leaving school, they pursued a rock-star who had bought a neighbouring manor, escaping through his bathroom window when things had got out of hand.
From the hotel room, she heard ‘Wild Horses’ playing as Blair’s phone rang and was answered.
While Hermia had gone on to win a place at a London drama school, Ronnie remained in the Cotswolds where her competitive horse-trials career had quickly taken off from Pony Club to professional, a career path as meticulously planned by her parents as the breeding of the horses she rode. By contrast, her impulsive love life had lacked forethought. If she’d walked the course beforehand, she might have taken a different route.
‘Your mother could never see her way to forgiving you,’ her father had explained irritably, at that first lunch together after Ann’s funeral. ‘Not for what you did, but for what you didn’t do. You had so much potential.’
A splash made her turn to look across the lake, eyes creasing against the sun’s bright reflection on the water. The heron had a silver fish wriggling in its beak.
Patience on a monument smiling at grief, she remembered, looking up at the unbroken hot blue canopy. ‘So tell me, Hermia, who sang “Spirit in the Sky”?’
‘Norman Greenbaum.’ Blair wandered outside, yawning and raking up his silver-streaked pelt of hair. He stooped in front of her, brown gaze finding hers. ‘You okay?’
She nodded, already knowing what he was going to say: it had stolen all the joy from his eyes. ‘You have to go home.’
The smile flashed, an auto-response she was accustomed to, its stoic apology a given.
Ronnie didn’t need to ask why, but today had been so upside down it spilled out without thinking. ‘Is Vee okay?’
He flinched almost imperceptibly. They never spoke about his wife. It was an absolute. Of course Vee wasn’t okay. How could she be?
He kissed her again, dropping onto his haunches. ‘I’ll call you later. The room’s paid for. Order what you like from room service.’
‘Company?’
‘You know I hate to do this to you.’
‘Hey.’ She cupped his face, aware how hard it was for him. ‘I’m grateful you came, in every sense.’ She pressed her forehead to his, smiling. ‘I have my girls.’ Her two dogs were spread out on the baking deck in the afternoon sun, like two seal pups. ‘We’ll go for a walk where the willow grows aslant the brook.’
‘Wear a hat.’ He fetched his battered baseball cap out of a back pocket and slotted it on her head. ‘The heatwave’s arrived.’
*
‘Will you really, really be all right?’ Pip asked Lester, after she’d helped him with afternoon stables, noticing his increasing pallor and shaking hands, despite the sudden rise in temperature. The yard thermometer was already pushing thirty, the storm’s puddles all but burned from the cobbles. ‘Why not come back with me to the Bulrushes? I’ve got the new Game of Thrones box set and seafood lasagne. I can drop you back here later.’
‘Go,’ was all he said. She took the cue gratefully.
Pip drove home at speed, not noticing that the remainder of the egg salad was still festering in its Tupperware container on her car roof. It flew off as she turned out of the drive, splattering crimson across one of the sandstone Compton Magna Stud signs set in the drystone wall.
As she parked on the neat tarmac rectangle in front of the Bulrushes’ yellow garage door, a predictably illiterate text came through from Janine Turner: Jst conferming tomz. Myself and my best girl C @10. Cash plz. xx
Pip smiled with relief.
There was a PS. Is it true the old man there’s snuffed it?
Out of respect for the family, Pip didn’t reply.
It had been a day of high drama, but not without its plus points. She and Lester had won several hundred pounds on the Sussex Stakes. And meeting Ronnie Percy had been the sunrise that eclipsed tragedy. Pip had a mission in cyberspace to examine the corona more closely.
Convinced that Ronnie and gravel-voiced Blair were more than just owner and rider, she hurried straight into the bungalow to research the Australian horseman in more detail, grateful for something to focus her mind on other than the Captain’s slipper soles, marking the end of the best client on her books.
Her other clients would just have to wait. She was supposed to be taking a cake to one and picking up fresh groceries for another, but she was too engrossed in her task, calling them both with a hurried apology. ‘There’s been a terrible tragedy at the yard. I can’t go into details, but the family have been informed. Weather’s perking up for Open Gardens Week at last, isn’t it?’
Cat curled up like a purring ammonite on her lap and digital mouse in hand, she called up her search engine and whizzed past all the results she was familiar with from playing detective on Ronnie in the past – the Australian rider’s Wikipedia entry, his long competition track-record and Olympic team golds – and this time went deeper. Although Blair rarely gave interviews, there was plenty of information about eventing’s senior tough-man on equestrian news sites and forums, his legendary three-decade career guaranteeing acres of Google Image photographs as he held up trophies. Most recently he’d taken a break from the sport’s top level to concentrate on course designing, stepping away from a spotlight that had focused on him over-brightly at times. Stories of rivalries and ride-offs abounded, along with loyal friendships he’d held close for three decades, and the devoted aristocratic owners he’d ridden for. One in particular had caused a scandal back in the nineties.
Still in his early thirties then, three-times world champion and notorious serial-shagger Blair had outraged both the Establishment and the equestrian world when he’d set up home with one of the most prolific owners in eventing, Lady Verney, a blue-blooded former show-jumper fifteen years his senior. At the time, she’d been the wife of outspoken Tory peer and Prince Charles’s hunting crony Earl Verney, their pack of chisel-chinned children freshly fledged and cavorting across Tatler’s Bystander pages.
‘That’s basically twenty-first-century Downton!’ Pip told the cat excitedly. ‘Blair stole Cora!’
She scrolled the very few photographs of them together, Blair and Verity, craggy sexpot alongside a high-cheekboned ageing Audrey Hepburn in a quilted waistcoat. The chemistry sizzled like rock-star and cougar.
‘She must be coming up for seventy now,’ Pip calculated, digging around for up-to-date photographs. There were none. After the late-noughties, Verity had vanished from view, like the first Mrs Rochester.
9
Like the rainfall from that week’s storms still running off the hills into the Fosse valley, news and rumours of Joce
lyn Percy’s death spread through the Comptons from multiple sources, drip-feeding and trickling into the collective consciousness. Alice’s phone calls to friends and family from her farmhouse kitchen couldn’t hope to keep pace with the quickening tide of news.
At Manor Farm, the Austen family kept it within their inner circle, quietly celebratory beneath decorously unsmiling faces. At the equine clinic, soul of discretion Gill Walcote was furious when husband Paul carelessly mentioned it to the most gossipy equine dentist in Gloucestershire. Twenty minutes later it was on all social feeds. ‘Talk about straight from the horse’s mouth.’
She felt that justified her calling Petra to relay the news. ‘I wonder if Ronnie will come back and run the stud now. That’ll liven things up. There was such a scandal when she ran off with the jump jockey in the eighties. Eventers were frightful bed-hoppers back then. My father was the stud vet at the time. He said half the mares foaled early with the shock.’
‘How horribly Mitford.’ Standing in her kitchen, whisk in hand, envisaging tight breeches, shoulder pads and big hair, Petra thought it sounded excitingly like something from Dynasty. ‘Did she ever return?’
‘Only for funerals. Her husband Johnny died in a smash-up on the Fosse Way a few years later – nobody else was involved and he was pickled with Scotch, so it was pretty clear he drove straight at the tree. They’d never divorced so Ronnie probably thought she’d cash in, but Johnny died beanless. She pushed off PDQ when she realised there was no fatted calf on offer. The same when her mother died. I was there – huge turnout, standing room only – and she kept the engine revving, lover at the wheel. He’s probably putting his driving gloves on as we speak.’
‘The woman sounds like a monster.’ Petra imagined a Cruella de Vil character sliding into town in a Rolls, swathed in furs, cigarette holder at a jaunty angle, pound signs in her eyes.
‘The Captain was the last true Percy in Compton Magna.’ Gill sighed.
Meanwhile Pip’s pensioner network had hit the telephones as soon as they heard the word ‘tragedy’, cause of death still a mystery, with only grains of truth available. Kick from a horse? Lightning strike? Suspicious circumstances, they’d heard. One had a grandson who was a local police officer and discovered that cutting equipment had been involved. Had the Captain died in his car, like his son-in-law? Surely it couldn’t have been intentional. It was said he’d become very anti-social since his wife’s death. As talk of a fatal kick spread one way along the landline and suicide the other, Janine and her cleaning Mafia picked it up from their on-the-job radar. Briefly putting their cloths down from polishing brass and glassware, they spread the jungle drums, tapping it through their texting thumbs with an altogether cooler-headed rap. Old boy from the stud snuffed it. Must have been worth a packet.
News reached the Jugged Hare where the small crowd of hard-drinking locals were crammed in their tiny designated bar area away from its latest upmarket gastropub incarnation, and they found it a fitting excuse to demand a round of drinks on the house. ‘To the Captain!’ they raised their glasses.
The dog-walkers crossing paths on Plum Run abandoned exclamations about the sudden change in weather and were soon whispering in grave undertones, fearful for the future of the village. What if the stud was sold? Developers would be straight in there. What if the hobbit house man came back and built eco-shacks all over the paddocks?
The farm shop was abuzz by closing time, a cloud of midges outside, gossip within. Petra, who had walked across the fields with her daughters and Wilf to buy ice-cream, found a small gaggle discussing the Captain’s death at the till. ‘Did you hear? The old boy from the stud got trapped under his quad-bike. Lay there all night and died of his injuries. His horses formed a circle around him and literally wept.’
‘We rode right past the stud just this morning.’ She handed a tenner across, ice-cream blissfully cool in its bag against her side. ‘Poor old chap.’
‘He was a paardenlul.’ Petra’s other side felt even colder as Monique Austen slid in beside her, super-thin in grey Pikeur breeches, white-blonde hair scraped back in a rider’s bun so tight she almost looked shaven-headed. ‘That’s Dutch for horse dick. Hello, Petra.’
‘Monique!’ With a fixed smile, Petra charitably assumed Bay’s wife was referring to the Captain’s field of expertise, the phrase somewhat lost in translation.
Having pushed to the front of the queue, Monique was waving a bottle of designer water and a packet of kale crisps at the manageress. ‘I’m taking these, okay?’
‘Can I just scan them for stock-keeping, Mrs A?’ She held up her barcode reader.
Monique had the sing-song voice of a Eurovision act, with Stasi manners, ending each sentence with a determined exclamation: ‘I’ve no time for that, okay. You can sort it out.’ She turned on her heel and gave Petra a frosty look. ‘I know you.’
‘Monique, hi! Petra Gunn. Tilly and Bella are friends,’ Petra greeted her, overenthusiasm masking dislike. ‘She’s just outside with her sister.’ She gestured through the glass doors where the girls were squabbling over who had been left in charge of holding Wilf.
‘Tilly’s at a sleepover, okay.’
Oh, no! Had she sounded as if she was angling for an invitation? ‘Mine hardly seem to be home this summer. Such bliss on days like this when I have them all to myself.’
Outside, Bella and Prudie were now giving each other Chinese burns.
‘No kidding.’ The cool Botoxed face regarded Petra’s red one, still sweaty from walking at hard-pulling-spaniel speed.
Mindful of Gill’s stern warning not to cross the woman, Petra said: ‘Isn’t it awful news about the Captain? We were only talking about him today.’
‘Don’t be a hypocrite.’ Monique’s beautiful profile remained fixed, nose in the air, disparaging slit eyes on Petra. ‘Nobody round here liked him, okay. They only care about his house.’ She strode off, her bottom small and pert.
She turned back to take her change, grateful for the look of amused empathy from the manageress. Counting out coins into Petra’s hand, she lowered her voice: ‘The stud’s going to be auctioned, I heard. An Arab sheikh offered the family a blank cheque for it once.’
‘What about the daughter?’ asked Petra. ‘The Bolter?’
‘Who?’
‘Oh, she won’t want to come back,’ said a husky little voice behind her, a local she didn’t recognise queuing with a packet of chicken fillets. She moved forwards to the counter now, tiny and tough in a baseball cap and vest-top, her slim tanned arms landscaped with freckled muscles. ‘Are these priced right?’
‘Yes, madam. The meat is from a one hundred per cent organic pasture-fed Ixworth bird, raised here on the farm.’
‘Did it have a name? For this price I’d expect a full obit. How did it die? Is its coop on the open market yet?’ Her voice had a deep, teasing quality, but there was steel too. The manageress smiled nervously, then offered ten per cent off.
Petra walked out alongside her, and the woman gathered up the leads of two little dogs tied there. ‘I bought your supper, girls!’ She strode away in the direction of the footpath along Lord’s Brook.
The dogs bounded eagerly in their mistress’s wake, one darting the wrong side of Petra so that the lead caught her ankles. High-stepping over it, Petra dropped her canvas bag, tubs tumbling out. One cracked, spilling a gory splat of raspberry sorbet onto the tarmac.
‘Oh, hell, I’m sorry.’ The woman turned. ‘I’ll buy you another.’
‘Really, don’t worry.’ Petra stooped to clear it up as best she could. ‘It was my fault.’
‘Stay there.’ She marched inside while Petra reclaimed Wilf, tugging him away from the sorbet splash, which was gathering wasps.
The late-afternoon sun was blisteringly hot. Prudie and Bella were grumbling that they wanted cold drinks. One of the woman’s small dogs whined.
The shop door opened, but it was a pair of elderly ladies in checked shirtdresses, baskets of new-season rhubarb
hooked on one arm, talking in excited undertones. ‘I tell you, Cynthia, she is Ronnie Percy.’
‘She’d be far older.’
Petra gazed into the shop again, seeing a flash of blonde hair. It was perfectly possible she’d be in the village if her father had just died.
A minute later the little dogs were wagging all over and a cold replacement tub was pressed into Petra’s hand. It was gazpacho soup, but she appreciated the gesture, her thanks waved away with a freckled hand as the woman strode again towards the path along the bank of Lord’s Brook.
Finding herself on the same track, Petra hung back awkwardly, not wanting to impinge on her grief. The blonde was far faster, with the jaunty, swinging gait bred to cross moors, walk hunter-trials courses and nail a gay Gordon in an ancestral ballroom. Before she could stop them, though, the girls raced shrieking ahead, soon leading them all, tossing twigs into the stream and chasing them along like white-water rafting Pooh sticks. Wilf was pulling her arm out to catch them up, doubly so when the blonde’s small dogs were let off their leads to trot obediently beside her. A well-practised mutineer, the spaniel threw himself down and wriggled until he was free of his collar.
