by Tim Pears
They passed the Francombe lad, bent forward over the neck of the grey mare, breathing hard. As they approached the crowd of gypsies Leo rolled and slid down off the colt and let his owner Levi Hicks take the reins off him and walked, still shaking his head, towards Gully.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said as he reached the old man, in his voice that was like honey rolled over sand. He knew only one or two could hear him and hoped that was enough. ‘I couldn’t turn him. Like you said, he don’t want to turn. He’s fast enough but he’s no good.’
*
The second race immediately followed the first and was won by the Burtons’ horse, a palomino mustang of great beauty. The deciding, final race was set for the following morning. During the day word spread through the gypsy encampments and beyond. The Burtons’ palomino was fast and dependable, a sure-fire winner. The lad who rode him had won the year before. The titch riding for the Orchards and the Hicks was not strong enough. That white horse had speed but was wilful and the boy could not turn him. He could neither speed him up nor slow him down. The horse did as it wished. Worst of all, the boy was said to be a gentile, and this was the Orchards’ most grievous error. The rules forbade them from changing rider at this late stage. Arabella’s prediction, that Leo would bring them bad luck, was made more widely known. Edwin and Henery moved gloomily about, accepting wagers reluctantly but trying to haggle the pot down. But they were poor at it this day, downhearted or lackadaisical, and often came away with the price of the wager not lowered but raised. They wrote nothing down, were bookmakers who remembered each figure for each person.
In the Orchards’ camp Samson spoke with great vehemence, yet in a whisper. ‘Did I not tell the boy?’ he said. ‘A stroke a genius if I say it myself. Make it look lucky, I said, did I not, boy?’ The old man took hold of Leo’s hair and pulled the boy to him and kissed him on the forehead. ‘You’re learnin our ways right beautiful, boy, is he not, Gully? But by God this boy can ride. And that horse! After this we’re leavin the West Country, I’m tellin you, Gully, the Orchards have been down here too long. We’re goin up country now. We’re takin this horse to the Kilsney races and the Appleby Fair and who knows where else. Wherever there’s races and tin. We’ve been waitin for this moment, have we not, Gully? A horse and a rider together. And the moment’s come to meet us.’
*
In the evening the boy went into the field. He found the colt and fed him some carrots and spoke to him. He apologised to the horse for holding him back this morning and promised that on the morrow he would not do so. He had a debt to repay and though he did not see how they would ever give him his freedom, for the more valuable he became so the longer they would wish to keep him, still he believed that he would gain his freedom and the horse would too.
‘What say you to that, old fellow?’ Leo asked the colt as he stroked him in the dying light of the spring evening. A smell of mint rose from the grass and mingled with the sharp sweet smell of the horse.
*
In the morning, none in the Orchards’ camp wished the boy well. All but Gully ignored him, skirted his presence, looked away when they glimpsed him. Gully told him he’d rubbed the colt down, he was in fine nick, but he reminded Leo that he had only galloped this course the once and on that occasion shot right past the halfway mark. Horses are slaves of habit. The colt might think himself obliged to repeat the manoeuvre today. Leo nodded. The Hicks lad Levi walked his horse up to the road. Gully and the boy walked behind. All the others came after. Then George was beside the boy. He put his meaty hand upon his shoulder and spoke softly.
‘I’ve seen me gettin hit, Leo,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen me goin down, and I’ve laid there on the ground, Leo, and I thought the clay is nice enough. The soil. The mud. I could lie on it or under it, I don’t mind, there’s no need to get up. But I got up. Yes, I did. Every time. I always got up, Leo, I seen it, I seen myself get up and raise my broken fists and finish it.’ He squeezed the boy’s bony shoulder. ‘Never give up, Leo. Never.’
They walked up through the crowd. Perhaps the Burton dancing girl was among them. It would be her turn to watch him. Not all were gypsies. Gentiles had come to place their bets, from the villages of South Tawton and Spreyton. From Okehampton town. Word had spread and many regarded the boy with pity. Leo bowed his head. George kept one of his great hands on the boy’s left shoulder, Gully on the right, like the seconds of some diminutive parody of a prizefighter approaching the ring.
The riders removed their clothes save for the trousers and as before were examined to make sure that neither concealed whip or weapon about their person. The Burton lad had long black hair pinned up behind his head, and black eyes. He was leanly muscled, with no soft trace of fat beneath the taut skin of his torso. He offered his hand to Leo, who took it and yelped as he felt the bones of his fingers being crushed in a brief, fierce grip. The lad let go, smiling, and turned and walked to his horse. Leo shook the pain out of his knuckles and took the reins of the white colt from Levi, who cupped his hands. The boy stepped into them with his bare left foot and sprang up and astride the horse.
Perhaps the Burton rider had taken note of Leo yesterday, or been advised, or come up with the notion himself, but as they waited at the starting line he turned the mustang round in half-circles, one way then the other, as did Leo a few yards away. The same man as before stood beside a pole, removed the red calico scarf from around his neck and held it aloft. The riders turned their horses. They might have been winding them up like clockwork toys. Both men and animals were ready to go. The starter held his red scarf up, staring intently from his side of the road to the pole on the opposite side. He would not bring the scarf down. He waited for the horses to align themselves, each facing the right direction, dead abreast. The riders turned their horses with the reins held tight, the animals’ heads high up, their hooves pawing the gravel. They rotated in increasing agitation and the men in the crowd screamed, but what they said each individually in the roar of men and women shouting no one could say. Were they telling the starter to wait a second longer or to proceed now, this instant? All were yelling, each convinced of the impassioned truth of his own opinion.
But perhaps the starter held his flag precisely to prolong the excitement, and the boy was glad, for he could feel his blood warming within him, and the horse’s likewise. When the starter dropped his scarf and opened his mouth to yell something none heard, Leo let the colt go. The race might as well have been called off within yards, for though the palomino began well enough the white colt bolted ahead.
The boy clung to the galloping horse. The colt was beyond his control. Any number of catastrophes could occur now and each would mean his injury or death. He did not care. How could terror contain such joy? There was no place on this earth he would rather be, no person, than a bare-chested barefoot bareback rider on this white horse.
Some way to the marker in the centre of the road Leo glanced back and saw the palomino mustang four or five lengths behind. The colt sped on. As they approached the marker Leo slowed him, to a canter, to a halt, and they waltzed together around the post. As they came about the mustang approached. The rider was obliged to turn clockwise around the post. Yet for some reason Leo could not fathom, the gypsy on his mustang came careering towards him, on the wrong side of the road. The rider took his right hand off the reins and reached up behind him and pulled something from his hair. His black hair loosened and fell long and wild around his shoulders. He came veering towards Leo with his right arm extended behind him. Leo walked the white colt forward. The Burton lad leaned out as far as he could towards Leo and as he came past swung the blade in a wide arc across Leo’s torso. Leo leaned away. He walked the colt on and out across the road in a diagonal from the left- to the right-hand side. He turned his head and watched the Burton rider struggle to slow the mustang and bring it past the post on the correct, left-hand side. He saw the thin blade fall to the ground.
Leo felt like he had been scratched, as if he’d been foo
l enough to go blackberry picking bare-chested. He bent forward and looked down and saw a thin, darkly reddening line drawn aslant his chest. What was it? He took a hand off the reins and spat on a finger and wiped the cut with saliva. It was nothing. A slight incision in his skin. He looked back. The black-haired gypsy lad had finally coerced the palomino mustang around the pole and was turning to come back home.
Leo squeezed the colt’s ribs with his bare heels and in a moment the white horse was cantering. Leo did not wish him to go faster but he could not stay him for he had given the animal his word. He would not slow him now. Yet the colt did not gallop. Instead he cantered easily, as Leo wished he would. Somehow the colt knew. The boy sat high up on his back and the horse bore him like some imperial hero coming home. They cantered, waiting for the palomino mustang and its rider to catch up with them, and when that pair came abreast some yards away across the road Leo looked over at the Burton lad and waited for him to glance back. When he did so, the gypsy’s black eyes seemed blind with hatred. Leo smiled, and held out his hand as if to offer a sardonic handshake to the older youth. He saw the eyes fill and widen with darkness, before the palomino galloped on ahead.
The boy turned back and kicked the colt and leaned back down into his rider’s clinch. The white colt accelerated out of his canter and within yards had overtaken the mustang. Leo hung on. Ahead of him the crowd on either side of the road was a heaving throng of bodies, as those behind jumped up for a better view and fell, and many waved their arms and shook as if riding some invisible horse themselves in their wish to encourage their rider. He could make out one among them, a giant at the front, George, who had lifted the boy and carried him and brought him back to life.
Leo glanced back. The palomino mustang was falling behind. The gentile boy and the white colt rode clear, coming to victory. But then they turned inexplicably away, off the road. Towards a stand of oaks. The crowd went quiet. As the pale, half-naked boy, with nothing but the trousers he wore, the reins in his hands and the white horse beneath him, struck out for the distant moor.
Part Three
THE DERBY
1
Lottie, June 1913
‘The point of the handicap,’ Lord Grenvil told his daughter, ‘is that the weight a horse carries determines the speed at which he can gallop.’
‘No, no, Duncan,’ said Lord Prideaux. ‘That is merely a description. The point, Alice,’ he said, leaning forward a little from his seat in the carriage, ‘is that without a handicapping system, everyone would know which horse is likely to win. Obliging the faster horses to carry weights makes for more even, unpredictable races.’
Alice Grenvil nodded. ‘And how is the handicap judged?’ she asked.
‘That’s simple,’ her father said. ‘The handicapper has the results of every race run during the season so far.’ He held up his left hand and with his right counted off the fingers. ‘He knows what weight each horse carried. The distance of the race. The condition of the course. The form of each of the runners. He’ll have a report on the pace of the race and the distance between each horse at the finish.’ Having no more fingers, Lord Grenvil sat back.
‘For every race?’ Alice said. ‘Sounds like a doddle, dear father.’
Arthur Prideaux smiled. ‘In addition to all that information,’ he said, ‘the handicapper will want to know of any incidents that might have occurred to impede this horse or make that one’s position better than it deserved.’
The girl, Charlotte Prideaux, gazed out of the window. Fields of ripening corn and grazing beasts racketed through her field of vision; dense pockets of woodland.
‘It sounds to me,’ Alice said, ‘like an impossible job. The handicapper must have to be some kind of mathematical genius. I can’t begin to imagine his desk, covered with sheets of scribbled calculations.’
‘It’s even worse than that,’ Duncan Grenvil said. ‘Yes, he needs to assess the factual information, but he has also to interpret it. A horse came third in a race but the handicapper learns that the ground was soft, and he believes this horse likes hard ground.’
‘I suppose he’ll have help from the owners and trainers in that regard,’ Alice suggested.
Both men found this speculation amusing. ‘A good handicapper is inherently suspicious. He doesn’t trust a soul,’ Arthur Prideaux said. ‘Not owners, not trainers. Jockeys least of all.’
‘Why not?’ Alice asked.
‘Because, Alice, they’re all hoping to pull the wool over the handicapper’s eyes. Not to mention those of the bookmakers and the ordinary punters. In order, quite simply, to get long odds for a good horse, which they can then gamble upon and make a fortune.’
‘Or more likely lose it,’ Duncan Grenvil said. ‘Talking of reckless gentlemen, did I tell you that Hugh Lowther invited us to pop into his box tomorrow for the customary plovers’ eggs and champagne?’
The girl knew the man of whom they spoke, her father’s friend Hugh, Lord Lonsdale. When he travelled by train to visit them he reserved two sleeping compartments, one for himself and the other for his dogs. Her father and Duncan Grenvil spoke for a while about extraordinary sums of money won and lost on horses, agreeing with each other that the great plungers were extinct. There were no true gamblers left.
The train braked sharply as they pulled into a station. Westbury. They idly watched the commotion on the platform. Some travellers left the train, others joined it. Porters wheeled their trolleys to the luggage van. Doors closed with reassuringly conclusive percussion. In due course, their carriage creaked as the locomotive pulled on it.
‘It’s awfully good of you to join us, Alice,’ Arthur Prideaux said. ‘Lottie’s wanted to come for years, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, Papa.’ The girl gazed out of the window. On the estate, human beings and animals cohabited the landscape. You were never far from another person, working, for all the fields, fences, ditches, hedges, lanes, culverts, drains, copses, had to be kept up. Yet this land they rolled through, this England, was huge and barely populated.
‘You could hardly have come without Alice, could you?’
‘No, Papa.’
‘So when I decide which horse to back,’ Alice said, ‘I should look at what weight the handicapper’s saddled them with, but I should also study their form and so on, and come to my own conclusions?’
‘Very good,’ her father said. He paused to light his cigarette.
‘I shall be glad to advise you, Alice,’ Arthur said, ‘should you need it.’
‘She won’t,’ her father said. ‘As I’ve told you, Arthur, in a healthy bloodline each generation’s brighter than its predecessor.’
‘Indeed. Das Ei will kluger sein als die Henne. Though possibly not as difficult in your case, Duncan, as in some.’
The girl turned from the window. ‘It’s not a handicap race.’
Alice returned her gaze. Lottie shook her head. ‘Most flat races are, but none of the Classics.’ The two men and the young woman looked at the girl, who turned back to the window.
‘It’s gratifying to know that one’s offspring does listen to what one says,’ Lord Prideaux said. ‘Occasionally.’
‘Yes, Papa,’ Lottie murmured, the glass misting from her spoken breath.
There was a knock at the door of their compartment. The train attendant informed them that lunch was being served in the restaurant car.
*
In the third-class carriage Lord Prideaux’s valet Adam Score offered the maid, Gladys, a cigarette. She took it and put it between her lips. He lit a match and held it up to her cigarette but the yellow bulb of flame at its tip would not stay still.
Gladys pursed her lips around the cigarette so that she could speak. ‘Your hands is tremblin, Mister Score.’
‘It’s this bloody train, it’s bouncin all over the place.’ The match burned down.
‘As long as it ain’t me makin you nervous.’
Adam Score flinched as the fire reached his flesh. He shook the match out
. He put it in the ashtray beneath the window and lit another.
‘You’d make any man nervous, Gladys,’ he said, holding one hand with the other to steady it.
Lord Grenvil’s valet stood to fetch his pipe and tobacco from his bag in the luggage net. ‘Will you be havin a flutter, Gladys?’ he asked.
The maid sucked on the cigarette and blew the smoke instantly out of her mouth. ‘I’m hopin Mister Shattock might give us a tip or two.’ She turned and spoke across the central aisle, to the man seated on his own. ‘Won’t you, Mister Shattock? Give us a tip for the gee-gees?’
The master’s groom smiled. ‘I shall,’ he said. ‘And I’ll give it now. Put your tin on the favourite. A little each way.’
Alice Grenvil’s maid passed round the luncheon baskets they’d bought at Taunton station. They opened the baskets and inspected the bread and butter and cheese. There were various meats. Adam Score said he could not eat tongue, it did not agree with him. Gladys said there was an answer to that but she would not give it in polite company. She agreed to swap her slices of ham for the valet’s tongue. Herb Shattock had ordered beef sandwiches. Others had chicken. The men had purchased in addition a bottle each of stout. The women drank ginger beer.
Gladys asked Mister Shattock more about the bookmakers. Were they bent? Could you trust them? It was true, he said, that in the old days there were those who would take punters’ money then try to slip away during the excitement of the race. Welchers. He’d seen the odd one caught and badly beaten. But all was in better order now.
Adam Score said the problem with betting was the dope. ‘The Yanks brung it over,’ he claimed. ‘Got some old nag and give her a shot a cocaine. She run as if possessed a the devil, eyes startin out of her head, sweat pourin off of her. She raced past a field a the finest thoroughbreds and won her crooked owners a pile a loot.’ He told them of one who crossed the finishing line in first place. The jockey dismounted and the horse took off again and galloped straight into a brick wall. ‘Killed outright,’ he said. ‘That’s true, that is. I heard it from the master his self.’
