‘Oh Dancer!’ she moaned. She started to turn him around and ride back to the parking area. Then she heard a whistle and looked up to see the starter beckoning to her. ‘Number 25!’ the man shouted, pointing at the large number fastened to her jumper. ‘You’re next!’
Suzanne looked around frantically for Ger. Then she saw him coming across the field towards her. ‘Ger! My magic stone!’ she yelled at him.
He looked puzzled, but he began to trot towards her, aware that something must be wrong. ‘What’s wrong, Suzanne?’ he called.
‘I left the stone in my jeans! In the back of the car! Can you run back and get it?’
At that moment the starter called again, ‘Number 25, you’re next. Ride to the starting point, please.’
There was no time to get the stone. Ger saw the fear leap in Suzanne’s eyes. He covered the distance between them at a fast run and fell into step beside Dancer as girl and horse began walking towards the starting point.
‘It’s okay, Suzanne O, you don’t need the stone.’
‘I do need it. Without it I’ll fall off and be hurt like in my nightmare. The stone keeps me safe.’
‘The stone doesn’t do anything,’ Ger replied. ‘There’s no magic in it, that’s just a bit of guff I made up. It’s not the stone that keeps you safe.’
Suzanne reined Dancer to a halt and stared down at the boy. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s a story I made up, Suzanne. A lie,’ he said, to make his meaning more clear. ‘I told you all that stuff to make you feel brave, but it’s not true. My old fella never carried that stone in the war, he wasn’t in any war. He’s been in and out of detention centres and prisons since he was fifteen. I took that red stone out of Dancer’s hoof at the RDS, that’s where it came from.’
‘And it’s not magic?’ Suzanne’s lips were trembling.
‘It’s just a stone! A plain old bit of rock,’ Ger replied. ‘You don’t need it. You can ride great without it. You aren’t going to fall off and you aren’t going to get hurt because you can ride, not because of any old stone. Now go on and ride!’ He gave her booted leg a hearty slap.
The starter’s whistle sounded a final warning. With one more bewildered look at Ger, Suzanne gave Dancer a kick and they set off at a trot for the starting line.
Ger watched them go. ‘Now I’ve really done it,’ he muttered to himself. ‘I should’ve kept my big gob shut.’
The starter waited at the line with a flag. When Suzanne rode up, he waited until she had Dancer’s head turned towards the first obstacle, then he dropped the flag.
14 – Trouble at the Stables
THERE WERE SOME SPECTATORS at each obstacle around the course. Having studied the course map, Ger knew the route Suzanne would take and where the finish was. He hurried to the finishing line to be there for her and found Anne and Mr O’Gorman there ahead of him, waiting to greet her when she came back.
If she got around. But Ger didn’t like to think about that. What if she was scared again? What if she got all tense and fell off?
‘How did my girl look when she started?’ Mr O’Gorman asked Ger as the boy joined them.
‘Great form,’ Ger said casually.
Too casually, thought Anne Fitzpatrick. She studied the boy’s face. Was he hiding something? ‘Is everything all right with them, Ger?’ she asked.
Telling the truth to Suzanne was one thing, Ger decided, but there was no point in making Anne and Suzanne’s father worry when there was nothing they could do about it anyway. ‘They’re going to be brilliant,’ he said aloud.
The cross-country course was laid out across rolling fields and through a wood. Occasionally they caught glimpses of various riders on the course, brief flashes of colour in the distance. Ger stood on tiptoe, straining for a glimpse of Suzanne’s blue jumper.
‘There she is,’ Mr O’Gorman said once. ‘Coming up to the ditch and bank.’ But then trees obscured his view.
The three of them waited impatiently. First one rider and then another came galloping towards them to cross the finishing line and be greeted by friends and supporters.
Kevin Keogh appeared, spattered with mud and on foot, leading his piebald mare.
‘What happened to you?’ Anne wanted to know.
He gave her a look of disgust. ‘She refused three times at the stream, then threw me off. I’m out of it. I’ll ask my dad to buy me a different horse.’
Anne said sternly, ‘It’s not her fault, she’s a good horse. You lost your temper with her, didn’t you? We’ve talked about that before, Kevin. You don’t get anywhere losing your temper with a horse, they’re bigger and stronger than you are. You don’t need a different horse, you need to learn to ride this one.’
Kevin led the mare away. Ger shaded his eyes with his hand, watching for Star Dancer. ‘Where are they?’ he muttered.
Mr O’Gorman said, ‘I hope Phyllis’s dream was wrong.’
Ger glanced sharply at him. ‘What dream?’
‘One my wife had just after we bought Star Dancer for Suzanne. Phyllis used to ride, and she’s always encouraged the girl. But about the time we bought Dancer, we learned we couldn’t have any more children. Suzanne will be our only one. My wife began worrying about her all the time, worrying something would happen to her. Then she had this nightmare. She dreamed Suzanne fell while riding Dancer and was terribly hurt.’
Ger’s jaw dropped in astonishment. ‘Mrs O’Gorman dreamed that? Are you sure?’
‘She did. It frightened her so much she can’t bear to watch Suzanne ride any more.’
‘It’s after scaring Suzanne pretty badly too,’ Ger commented.
It was Mr O’Gorman’s turn to look surprised. ‘But we’ve been careful not to talk about Phyllis’s fears in front of Suzanne. We didn’t want to risk making her timid about her riding, not when she loves it so much.’
‘You have done, though. And Suzanne’s having the exact same nightmare herself.’
‘How can that be?’
Ger scratched his freckled nose. When there was a mystery to solve, it always helped to scratch his nose. ‘Did you ever talk about the nightmare when Suzanne was with you in the car, asleep?’
‘I think we might have,’ Mr O’Gorman replied slowly, thinking back. ‘Just a few weeks after we bought Dancer, we drove down to the Heritage Centre in Wexford one weekend. On the drive back, Phyllis told me about her dream for the first time, and I tried to reassure her, tell her it was just her imagination. It didn’t do much good,’ he added ruefully, ‘but I’m sure Suzanne didn’t hear us. She was fast asleep in the back seat.’
‘Yeah, I thought so,’ Ger said, nodding. ‘Suzanne falls asleep in the car all the time, but she doesn’t sleep very deeply. She hears nearly everything that happens, only she can’t tell if it’s real or a dream. She must have heard the two of you talking about the nightmare, and somehow it became her nightmare. She’s been having it ever since.’
Mr O’Gorman was dismayed. ‘But that’s the last thing we wanted. A person who’s scared riding is more likely to get hurt.’
‘They are,’ Ger agreed. ‘So I sort of told Suzanne that …’
Just then Anne Fitzpatrick exclaimed, ‘Here they come!’
Ger and Mr O’Gorman turned to see Star Dancer emerge from a line of trees and come galloping up the last hill towards the finishing line. In the saddle was a triumphant Suzanne, her face aglow beneath her safety helmet. Stretching out his neck, Dancer put in a final sprint that would have done credit to a racehorse.
They thundered past the finish. Ger tossed his cap into the air and yelled ‘Olé olé olé!’ It was the only thing he could think of with Mr O’Gorman standing right next to him.
Suzanne reined Dancer to a walk and went over to the official check point before dismounting. A woman in a straw hat checked her number against the score sheet on her clipboard and nodded. Suzanne kicked her feet out of the stirrups and slid off Dancer. Ger was already there, waiting with a coolin
g sheet to put over the hot horse and keep him from chilling down too fast.
‘We did it Ger!’ Suzanne said joyously. ‘You were right. I was safe as houses. I threw my heart over every fence and Dancer jumped after it. Isn’t he brilliant?’
‘He is that,’ Ger agreed, stroking the sweating neck.
‘Brilliant maybe, but not sound,’ came a muffled voice from the far side of Dancer. Putting one hand on the horse’s broad rump as he passed behind him, the vet engaged for the event came around to Suzanne. ‘One of his forelegs has heat in it, I’m afraid,’ he said soberly. ‘I can’t pass this horse for the showjumping.’
With a gasp, Suzanne crouched down beside Dancer and ran her hands lightly up and down his front legs. One did feel hot.
‘Is his tendon sprained?’ Anne asked the vet.
‘Probably. We’ve had no rain for ages and that ground out there is too hard. It’s telling on horses with any weakness at all.
They led Dancer slowly back to the horse box. Ger filled buckets with cold water and began sponging the horse’s leg over and over again, while Anne went to the refreshment booth and got ice to make packs for it. The ice was crushed and put into bags, to be held against Dancer’s leg with his travelling bandages until he got home.
‘It’s all my fault,’ Suzanne kept saying. ‘The other day I thought he was limping, but then when I checked he seemed all right and I thought I was imagining things.’
‘You might’ve been,’ Anne tried to reassure her. ‘This could be a brand new injury caused by the hard ground today. That’s not your fault at all. But I think we got it in time. He’ll be laid up for a while, of course, but I doubt if he’s bowed a tendon.’
Suzanne buried her face in Dancer’s neck. ‘Not now!’ she whispered to him. ‘How could this happen now, just when we were jumping so well together.’
To Ger’s relief, Dancer didn’t seem to be in any pain. He paid no attention to his foreleg. Instead, he stood with his head up and his eyes bright, watching with interest everything going on around him.
‘This one enjoys showing,’ Brendan commented.
‘But if he’s lame …’
‘Listen to me, Ger, he’s not lame. Not permanently, that is. That leg will come right again with a little care. But Suzanne may have to face the fact that she has a fine-boned horse here who’s had leg trouble before. He just may not be up to eventing, even carrying a lightweight like her, no matter how good his dressage scores are.’
Suzanne tried to watch the rest of the competition that day, but she kept returning to ask how Dancer was.
Ger, who was staying at the truck with him, told her, ‘He’s the same as he was when you asked me fifteen minutes ago, Suzanne.
He’s grand. Look at him there, nibbling at his hay net, not a bother on him. Stop worrying, will you?’
But Suzanne couldn’t stop worrying. She kept thinking about how wonderful Dancer had been in the cross-country phase, flying over obstacles as if they were nothing, carrying her as lightly as a feather. Ger was right, she had needed no magic stone. All she had needed was faith in herself and her horse.
Would they ever have that experience again? Now that she had known what it was like, she couldn’t bear the thought of giving it up.
But what if Dancer’s legs were simply not strong enough?
Leaving her father with the other parents at the arena where the showjumping was taking place, she went back to Dancer yet again, just to see how he was.
At last the awards were given and the horses were loaded into the horse box for the trip home. Two of the horses from Suzanne’s stables had placed very well in the competition. But Star Dancer had scored the highest of all in dressage.
‘He might have won the event,’ she said sorrowfully. ‘He might have won!’
She was quiet as her father drove them home. Ger thought she was asleep, but she wasn’t. She was just staring out the window with her forehead leaning against the glass.
A flashing light reflected on the glass caught her attention. ‘There’s a police car coming up behind us,’ Suzanne warned her father.
Mr O’Gorman slowed down and prepared to pull over, but the distinctive blue Garda car sped past.
When they turned into the road leading up to the stables they could see the flashing blue light already there ahead of them.
There was a small crowd of people in front of the stables. ‘You two stay in the car,’ Mr O’Gorman told Suzanne and Ger. They obeyed, but they rolled the windows down as far as they would go in spite of the evening chill and leaned out, trying to hear what was being said.
A tall Garda was talking to Mr Flannery, who owned the farm and the stables and lived in a house over the hill. Another Garda was standing with two boys, holding them by the arms on either side of him.
To Ger’s dismay, one of the boys was Rags and the other was Anto.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour, sir,’ the tall Garda was saying to Mr Flannery, ‘but when these lads set off the silent alarm in your tackroom we had to ring you.’
‘You did the right thing,’ Mr Flannery assured them. ‘My stable manager was away at a horse show, or he would have … ah, here comes the horse box now.’
The truck with Anne and Brendan and the horses was just turning in the gate.
Ger ducked down in the car.
‘What’s the matter?’ Suzanne wanted to know.
‘I know those two.’
‘You do?’
Suzanne craned her neck for a better look. ‘Ger, I think I recognise them too! Weren’t those the ones who were trying to take our car?’
‘Yeah,’ Ger mumbled.
‘What are they doing here?’
‘I dunno.’ But I can make a very good guess, Ger thought to himself.
Anto was tugging at the Garda who was holding him. ‘Lemme go, I done nothing.’
‘You broke into the stable,’ the policeman replied.
‘We just wanted to look around,’ Rags said defensively. ‘Our mate works here and we wanted to see what it was like. Maybe we could get jobs here too.’
‘There’s no chance of that now,’ Brendan Walsh assured them as he strode up. ‘You look like a pair of gurriers to me. Come to rob us, have you?’
A few neighbours whose attention had been attracted by the flashing lights were quick to volunteer information. ‘I saw these boys cutting across the paddock behind my garden,’ one said. ‘They were keeping low, trying not to be seen, and I knew they were up to no good then.’
‘That’s right,’ Mr Flannery agreed. ‘You rang me just a few minutes before the police’
Anto made another effort to free himself. ‘Lemme go, I said. You can’t prove anything. We took nothing. We just came to see our pal. Ger Casey.’
‘Ger?’ Brendan turned around and looked towards the car. ‘Would you ever come over here a minute?’
Reluctantly, Ger got out of the car. Everyone was looking at him.
‘Are these friends of yours?’ Brendan wanted to know.
Ger looked from Rags to Anto. ‘I know ‘em,’ he admitted. But somehow he didn’t want to identify them as friends. If they had broken into the locked tackroom and set off the burglar alarm, they had come for something other than a friendly visit.
Ger scratched his nose. ‘Did you see the picture in the paper?’ he asked Anto.
Anto nodded sullenly.
‘And you thought we’d all be away at the event, is that it?’
Anto didn’t say anything. His face was closed like a boarded-up house.
Ger said to Brendan Walsh, ‘They live near me, but I didn’t ask ‘em out here. I didn’t know they were coming at all, and I’m … I’m sorry about this.’
‘You going to arrest us?’ Rags asked the Guards.
The tall officer shook his head. ‘You’re too young for that, but I am going to give you a warning and I want you to listen to it very carefully. If either of you try anything like this again, you’ll be in a lot of
trouble. Now we’re going to drive you home to your parents, and I want your full names and addresses.’ He turned to Ger. ‘What about you, lad? If you live in their neighbourhood, do you want a lift home too?’
Once, not so very long ago, Ger would have thought it great fun to be driven home by the police. He would have been a hero among his pals and could have told all sorts of great stories about the adventure. But now, the last thing he wanted was to go off in a police car.
He shook his head. ‘I have work to do here still,’ he told the Garda.
‘That’s all right, Ger,’ said Brendan. ‘It’d save you a long bus journey.’
‘I’ve work to do!’ Ger cried, hurrying into the stables. He kept out of sight until he was certain the Guards had left with Rags and Anto. Then he helped Brendan put the horses away for the night. Together, they checked Dancer’s leg.
‘Still heat in it,’ Brendan said, frowning. Suzanne was hovering over them, also unwilling to go home.
‘Will he be all right tomorrow?’ she wanted to know.
Brendan said, ‘He’s going to need a longer rest this time, I’m afraid. But he’ll come right, girl. Just give him a chance.’ The stable manager glanced at Ger. ‘Give him a chance,’ he repeated, as if he meant something else.
Ger understood.
It was very late when he finally got home that night, and he had never felt as tired in his life. His mother greeted him with, ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Working,’ Ger groaned.
‘Did you know the Guards brought those friends of yours home earlier? There I was looking out the window when I saw them going into the flats down the way. It put the heart across me, seeing young ones like that with the police. I thought it was you.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ Ger said. ‘I just told you, I was at work.’
He reached into his pocket and took out the folded bank notes Brendan had given him for the week’s work. ‘Here,’ he said, offering them to his mother. At least she was sober. ‘I earned this,’ he added. ‘I didn’t rob it.’
Star Dancer Page 11
