Last Ditch

Syd Jones slid out of the tack-room door, and with a sidelong scowl at Ricky, approached the loose-boxes.

Julia advanced upon him with extended hand. She explained to Mr Harkness that she and Syd were old friends. It would be difficult to say which of the two men was the more embarrassed.

Syd led out the first horse, a sixteen-hand bay, and Mr Harkness said he would give Jasper a handsome ride. Jasper mounted, collecting the bay and walking it round the yard. The others followed, Julia on a nice-looking grey mare. It was clear to Ricky that the Pharamonds were accomplished horse people. He himself was given an aged chestnut gelding who, Mr Harkness said, still had plenty of go in him if handled sympathetically. Ricky walked and then jogged him round the yard in what he trusted was a sympathetic manner.

Bruno was mounted on a lively, fidgeting sorrel mare and was told she would carry twelve stone very prettily over the sticks. ‘You asked for a lively ride,’ Mr Harkness said to Bruno, ‘and you’ll get it. Think you’ll be up to her?’

Bruno said with dignity that he did think so. Clearly not averse to showing-off a little, he rode out into the horse-paddock where three hurdles had been set up. He put the sorrel at them and flew over very elegantly. Ricky, with misgivings, felt his mount tittuping under him. ‘You shut up,’ he muttered to it. Julia, who had come alongside, leant towards him, her face alive with entertainment.

‘Ricky!’ she said. ‘Are you feeling precarious?’

‘Precarious!’ he shouted. ‘I’m terror-stricken. And now you’re going to laugh at me,’ he added, hearing the preliminary splutter.

‘If you fall off, I’ll try not to. But you’re sitting him like a rock.’

‘Not true, alas.’

‘Nearly true. Good God! He’s at it again!’

Mr Harkness had broken out into the familiar roar but this time his target was Bruno. The horse-paddock sloped down-hill towards a field from which it was separated by a dense and pretty high blackthorn hedge. Bruno had turned the sorrel to face a gap in the hedge and the creature, Ricky saw, was going through the mettlesome antics that manifest an equine desire to jump over something.

‘No, stop! You can’t! Here! Come back!’ Mr Harkness roared. And to Jasper: ‘Call that kid back. He’ll break his neck. He’ll ruin the mare. Stop him!’

The Pharamonds shouted but Bruno dug in his heels and put the sorrel at the gap. It rose, its quarters flashed up, it was gone and there was no time, or a lifetime, before they heard an earthy thump and a diminishing thud of hooves.

Mr Harkness was running down the horse-paddock. Jasper had ridden past him when, on the slope beyond the hedge, Bruno appeared, checking his dancing mount. Farther away, on the hillside, a solitary horse reared, plunged and galloped idiotically up and down a distant hedge. Ricky thought he recognized the wall-eyed Mungo.

Bruno waved vaingloriously.

Julia had ridden alongside Ricky. ‘Horrid, showing-off little brute,’ said Julia. ‘Wait till I get at him.’ And she began shakily to laugh.

Mr Harkness bawled infuriated directions to Bruno about how to rejoin them by way of gates and a lane. The Pharamonds collected round Julia and Ricky.

‘I am ashamed of Bruno,’ said Jasper.

‘What’s it like,’ Carlotta asked, ‘on the other side?’

‘A sheer drop to an extremely deep and impossibly wide ditch. The mare’s all Harkness said she was to clear it.’

‘Bruno’s good, though,’ said Julia.

‘He’s given you a fright and he’s shown like a mountebank.’

Julia said: ‘Never mind!’ and leant along her horse’s neck to touch her husband’s hand. Ricky suddenly felt quite desolate.

The Pharamonds waited ominously for the return of the errant Bruno while Mr Harkness enlarged upon the prowess of Sorrel Lass which was the stable name of the talented mare. He also issued a number of dark hints as to what steps he would have taken if she had broken a leg and had to be destroyed.

In the middle of all this and just as Bruno, smiling uneasily, rode his mount into the stable-yard, Miss Harkness, forgotten by all, burst into eloquence.

She was ‘discovered’ leering over the lower half-door of an empty loose-box. With the riding crop, from which she appeared never to be parted, she beat on the half-door and screamed in triumph.

‘Yar! Yar! Yar!’ Miss Harkness screamed, ‘Old bloody Unk! She’s bloody done it, so sucks boo to rotten old you.’

Her uncle glared upon her but made no reply. Jasper, Carlotta and Louis were administering a severe if inaudible wigging to Bruno, who had unwillingly dismounted. Syd Jones had disappeared.

Julia said to Ricky: ‘We ought to bring Bruno and Dulcie together; they seem to have something in common, don’t you feel? What have you lot been saying to him?’ she asked her husband who had come across to her.

‘I’ve asked for another mount for him.’

‘Darling!’

‘He’s got to learn, sweetie. And in any case Harkness doesn’t like the idea of him riding her. After that performance.’

‘But he rode her beautifully, we must admit.’

‘He was told not to put her at the hedge.’

Syd Jones came out and led away the sorrel. Presently he re-appeared with something that looked like an elderly polo pony, upon which Bruno gazed with evident disgust.

The scene petered out. Miss Harkness emerged from the loose-box, strode past her uncle, shook hands violently with sulking Bruno and continued into the house, banging the door behind her.

Mr Harkness said: ‘Dulcie gets a bit excitable.’

Julia said: ‘She’s a high-spirited girl, isn’t she? Carlotta, darling, don’t you think we ought to hit the trail? Come along, boys. We’re off.’

There was, however, one more surprise to come. Mr Harkness approached Julia with a curious, almost a sheepish smile, and handed up an envelope.

‘Just a little thing of my own,’ he said. ‘See you this evening. Have a good day.’

When they reached the end of the drive Julia said, ‘What can it be?’

‘Not the bill,’ Carlotta said. ‘Not when he introduced it like that.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. The bill, after all, would be a little thing of his own.’

Julia had drawn what appeared to be a pamphlet from the envelope. She began to read. ‘Not true!’ she said, and looked up, wide-eyed, at her audience. ‘Not true,’ she repeated.

‘What isn’t?’ Carlotta asked crossly. ‘Don’t go on like that, Julia.’

Julia handed the pamphlet to Ricky. ‘You read it,’ she said. ‘Aloud.’

‘DO YOU KNOW,’ Ricky read, ‘that you are in danger of HELL-FIRE?’

‘DO YOU KNOW, that the DAY of JUDGEMENT is AT HAND?

‘WOE! WOE! WOE!!! cries the Prophet –’

‘Obviously,’ Julia interrupted, ‘Mr Harkness is the author.’