‘Welcome all.’ Richard Cammell-Curzon was holding an old-style grey megaphone that whistled as he spoke. Expertly he took both hands off the reins for a second to adjust the volume. The whistling quietened. He seemed to be controlling the horse just with his legs and heels, because the animal stood stock still as all the other horses shook their heads and fidgeted. He lifted the megaphone and now his voice crackled, but clearly, as if down an old phone line. ‘It’s hot, I know, but we have our trail.’
He was a tall, well-built man with an athlete’s shoulders and muscular legs. She saw parts of him through the throng of riders, as if windows were opening and closing. He was forty, perhaps, chiselled, high-cheekboned, with a neat blond beard. His nose was large, sharp, square like a Roman emperor’s.
‘I have brought Grandpa’s bugle, as before. So on the call, my lords, ladies and gentlemen – on the call of the bugle, we ride!’
He tossed the megaphone at a stable boy, who caught it. Then he blew on the bugle, the instrument tiny in his large hand, the note as high as a party whistle. His horse’s ears shot up. The place was suddenly awash with sound, almost deafening Stevie. She felt the massive muscles of her mount’s back twist and torque between her legs. She saw – with gratitude – that her own horse was not moving because Francis Martin, feet planted firmly on the ground, was discreetly holding the bridle. His other hand gripped the reins of his horse near the halter. Suddenly a gate opened, and what had been a low rumble of slavering and breathing became wild barking, a blur of coat, leg, teeth, tail. Hounds wild with excitement. In their enthusiasm, the dogs mounted each other to be at the front of the pack, which moved like a river of fur.
Stevie caught Martin’s eye. He said loudly, ‘I’ve got you, just wait,’ although amid the barking the words were barely audible. The hounds were looking for the trail. Francis Martin shouted, ‘Hold the reins tight!’ and let go to mount his horse, but whatever he wanted Stevie to do she had not done, because now the animal was moving, driven to follow the herd, and she wanted to carry this off even though the height and bounce combined to make her want to scream.
‘Chestnut, Chestnut, slow, slow, slow, Chestnut,’ Stevie kept saying. She felt her back get sorer with every bump, every divot. The stables adjoined a long, sloping field, and the horses began to canter across it, spreading out. Martin was nowhere to be seen. It was not enough just to hang on. She had to sit upright, like she had seen the YouTube riders doing, holding themselves, shoulders back. Her bottom left the saddle every time the horse landed a hoof on the thick grass. She dreaded a sudden stop, and then remembered the reins – they were her controllers, of course, and she should hold them firmly. She had seen that online too. She pulled them until the slack fed past her gloves, and now the horse’s head ticked up, as if she was annoying it. ‘Not too tight,’ said a man’s voice beside her. Francis Martin was looking at her with interest. His bulbous nose had begun gleaming with sweat as soon as they broke from the tree-shaded stables and into direct June sunshine. Despite his portly figure, or maybe because of it, he looked like a medieval king in his riding outfit. Gold cuffs on his tunic. She read his lips rather than hearing him – they were in a pack of at least twenty riders, all shouting to each other, laughing or whooping, spreading out and then converging, as if their mounts were choosing occasional moments to consult on the direction of travel. The exhilaration of the other hunters only stirred a feeling of raw terror in Stevie.
It was like being on a motorcycle with no idea what would happen if she turned the handles to rev the motor. She couldhandle herself while the horse was at a trot, hemmed in by the herd, but she knew she would soon be in open countryside. The thought raised hackles all across her body, a welt of physical fear she could feel lifting her skin, even making the scars on her face buzz, as if they were about to break open. She would be alone in this crowd of experienced riders, the lone beginner, trying and failing to hide her utter lack of history with any horse at all. She had joined the hunt to meet Richard Cammell-Curzon and, being honest with herself, to impress Kim and Edward too – this was incredible, thinking back; her ingenuity and ability to morph into the sort of person who could mix with Devon’s upper class without giving herself away with a volley of Tourette’s-powered expletives. So far she had avoided saying ‘fuck’ even once, but who was she kidding? Stevie had already given up on the crazy idea that she might draw level with the leader of the Ash Hunt for a casual conversation. She would be lucky to escape this adventure with her life.
Francis Martin, the portly little king, had evidently decided he no longer needed to look after her. Sink or swim, was it? His horse seemed to ghost sideways through the throng, the knight on a chessboard – forward and then diagonal. The horses were all snorting and coughing; up ahead, the hounds were scattered in all four directions, picking up and losing the scent, then converging when they found it again, some inbuilt radar telling each of them where the centre of the pack would be in the next thirty seconds.
The gate to the next field would be the test. She was, what, seven feet in the air? Five feet of horse and two feet of her upper body. Her helmet bounced left and right like Stan Laurel’s bowler hat, the visual gag in a silent movie. If she fell, she would hit her head. Would she hit it on a rock? She did not want any more injuries, any more pain. Her curved spine stabbed reminders:This was the kind of thing a doctor told you never to do.That warning had been forgotten in her zest to prove herself.
This field had kept the horses at a trot: the chase did not really start until the next one. Maybe she should dismount now, just jump off, take the hit, apologize for her lies or pretend, yes, she had ridden, but not on a horse as powerful as Chestnut?
Body bouncing on the saddle, even at this slow trot, Stevie had worked out how to steer Chestnut. If she pulled the reins tight in her hands, the gigantic animal seemed to become more responsive. Was that all there was to riding? A middle-aged man with a ginger beard was alongside her.
‘You’ll probably know this, but hold the reins tight as you can. When they hear the gate open, they’re like bloody paratroopers, all jumping through the hatch.’
The gate clicked and Stevie felt Chestnut shiver with excitement. One rider shouted ‘No!’ as his horse got impatient and jumped the fence, the gorse almost tearing his tunic off. Stevie felt her stomach turn and her heart sink. She leant towards the horse’s ear, holding its mane. ‘Don’t go too fast, Chestnut, please. I’m small and I haven’t done this before.’ She had the crazy thought – would her Glasgow accent stop the horse understanding? She kept it simple. ‘Slow, lover, slow. For me. Please Chestnut, please. Slow—’
Then she was through the gate. The horse jumped, straining the reins. She worried they might break and loosened her grip. But as soon as she did, he was away.
Who had given her Chestnut? He was a racehorse. The field had a camber, the shoulders sloping away. The horse bounced her so high in the air she was not even sure she would return to the saddle. Whatever happened, she must not scream. They tore past the other horses. Chestnut had sensed the inexperience of his rider and bolted through the other horses to shouts of ‘Hey!’ and ‘Watch out, girl!’ He was catching the hounds. She begged and begged, ‘Chestnut, lovely, please, Chestnut,’ but the faster he went, the more she bounced, and the more shebounced in the saddle, the less control she could exert on the reins. Faster and faster and faster …
He roared towards a second gate. It was shut. Stevie squeezed her eyes closed and grabbed the horse’s mane, expecting a sudden stop and a moment in the air. But when she was airborne, she realized she was still attached to the horse and almost weightless. The other riders must be half a mile behind. The horse landed, hooves kicking into farm mud, soil and stones thrown sideways. The shouts behind her were some way back now – were they calling her? Warning her? Whatever happened, she would not scream. She would not scream.
‘Chestnut!’ she shouted, ‘I will not scream for you!’
Still the horse barrelled on. And gradually she realized she could control it, at least slow the animal a little with a strong tug on the reins. He was jerking the reins out of her grasp, so she wrapped them around her wrist. Wasn’t it always ‘sit up straight’ when you got taught to ride a horse? Move through the hips and all that? She was close to a road and dreaded Chestnut opting for a smoother surface, deciding to make for the nearest motorway. So when she got to the corner of the field, she tugged the reins to the right to head uphill across a wheatfield.
For the first time her panic was ebbing, and she picked out extraneous sounds. The stalks crunching beneath the horse’s hooves. The distant sound of the hounds, following the trail across a nearby field. And now, to her right, a gallop – not her horse but Richard Cammell-Curzon’s, crashing towards her from fifty yards away.
Chestnut was panting. Now at a canter, he was at last tired enough to be controlled. Cammell-Curzon pulled his horse up, but it must have confused his tug on the reins for a different command: it jammed into a sudden halt and threw its rider into a hedge.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
‘Oh my God! Oh my flying God!’ shouted an upper-crust voice from behind a curtain of white flowers and red berries. ‘Bloody hawthorn! Shit! I’m okay! I’m okay!’
Stevie did not know what to do. She could not dismount Chestnut. She had finally got control of her horse and brought it to a halt. RCC’s horse was skipping around the field as if it had perpetrated the best practical joke. She peered past the flowers and berries and saw only flashes of white shirt.
‘That wasnotsupposed to happen! For crying out loud, Miss Mason!’
‘What can I do?’
‘Can you ride over to my horse and call her? Her name is Gibby. I don’t want her following the hounds without me. She’ll take to heel in a trice, that one, and I’ll be a laughing stock.’
‘Yep.’
Stevie amazed herself by kicking Chestnut – just the lightest heel-tap with her stirruped shoes – and getting the horse to move at a trot, but this time, unlike the last, keeping the reins as tight as she could. The horse could not hit its lethal acceleration. ‘Gibby! Gibby!’ she shouted. ‘Here, girl!’ She even had the confidence to turn back to where RCC had entered the bush at adiagonal, a flash-frame in her mind’s eye of him half in, half out of the bush as he shot off the horse like a tumbling bullet, neither up nor down. The hole he had made in the hawthorn had closed behind him, as if the bush had devoured its invader. But now she saw two arms emerging. ‘Gibby!’ She turned. ‘That’s it, Chestnut. Boy meets girl, lovely. Kiss away.’ The two horses nuzzled each other. Her heart lifted. She felt joy for the first time since she had arrived at this hunt feeling like a foreigner. A stab of joy. Here, where the camber of the field lifted, she felt the blood and muscle of the horse below the saddle like a medieval queen taking power from nature.
The leader of the hunt was a hundred yards behind and below her. Could she – dare she – reach for the reins of his horse, lead it back to him? She leant a little, released Chestnut from one hand. But her horse felt the grip loosen instantly and kicked, bucking like a steed in a Wild West rodeo, raising his front legs, kicking at the back, as if intent on a sudden escape. She quickly grabbed the mane and pulled the horse’s head back. ‘Not hurting you, am I, you little menace?’ she growled. The other horse turned, and suddenly she saw Richard Cammell-Curzon alongside his animal. His face was streaked with blood.
‘Climb down, can you, for a minute?’
