Bolt - By Dick Francis Page 0,12

whenever possible, not least because any slanderous thing I might say might drift back to his litigious ears.

‘Anyway,’ Greening said, rocking on the edge of my vision, and with irony plain in his voice, ‘Princess Casilia would now like you to gallop to the rescue and try to rid Monsieur de Brescou of the obnoxious Nanterre.’

‘No, no,’ the princess protested, sitting straighter. ‘Gerald, I said no such thing.’

I stood slowly up and turned to face Greening directly, and I don’t know exactly what he saw, but he stopped rocking and took his hands out of his pockets and said with an abrupt change of tone, ‘That’s not what she said, but that’s undoubtedly what she wants. And I’ll admit that until this very moment I thought it all a bit of a joke.’ He looked at me uneasily. ‘Look, my dear chap, perhaps I got things wrong.’

‘Kit,’ the princess said behind me, ‘please sit down. I most certainly didn’t ask that. I wondered only … Oh, do sit down.’

I sat, leaning forward towards her and looking at her troubled eyes. ‘It is,’ I said with acceptance, ‘what you want. It has to be. I’ll do anything I can to help. But I’m still… a jockey.’

‘You’re a Fielding,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘That’s what Gerald has just seen. That something … Bobby told me you didn’t realise …’ She broke off in some confusion. She never in normal circumstances spoke to me in that way. ‘I wanted to ask you,’ she said, with a visible return to composure, ‘to do what you could to prevent any “accidents”. To think of what might happen, to warn us, advise us. We need someone like you, who can imagine …’

She stopped. I knew exactly what she meant, but I said, ‘Have you thought of enlisting the police?’

She nodded silently, and from behind me Gerald Greening said, ‘I telephoned them immediately Princess Casilia described to me what had happened. They said they had noted what I’d told them.’

‘No actual action?’ I suggested.

‘They say they are stretched with crimes that have actually happened, but they would put this house on their surveillance list.’

‘And you went pretty high up, of course?’

‘As high as I could get this evening.’

There was no possible way, I reflected, to guard anyone perpetually against assassination, but I doubted if Henry Nanterre meant to go that far, if only because he wouldn’t necessarily gain from it. Much more likely that he thought he could put the frighteners quite easily on a paralysed old man and an unworldly woman, and was currently underestimating both the princess’s courage and her husband’s inflexible honour. To a man with few scruples, the moral opposition he expected might have seemed a temporary dislodgeable obstinacy, not an immovably embedded barrier.

I doubted if he were actually at that moment planning accidents: he would be expecting the threats to be enough. How soon, I wondered, would he find out that they weren’t?

I said to the princess, ‘Did Nanterre give you any time scale? Did he say when and where he expected Monsieur to sign the form?’

‘I shall not sign it,’ Roland de Brescou murmured.

‘No, Monsieur, but Henri Nanterre doesn’t know that yet.’

‘He said,’ the princess answered weakly, ‘that a notary would have to witness my husband signing. He said he would arrange it, and he would tell us when.’

‘A notary? A French lawyer?’

‘I don’t know. He was speaking in English to my friends, but when they’d gone he started in French, and I told him to speak English. I do speak French, of course, but I prefer English, which is second nature to me, as you know.’

I nodded. Danielle had told me that as neither the princess nor her husband preferred to chat in the other’s native tongue, they both looked upon English as their chief language, and chose to live in England for that reason.

‘What do you suppose Nanterre will do,’ I asked Greening, ‘when he discovers four people have to sign the application form now, not just Monsieur?’

He stared at me with shiny eyes. Contact lenses, I thought inconsequentially. ‘Consequences,’ he said, ‘are your particular field, as I understand it.’

‘It depends then,’ I said, ‘on how rich he is, how greedy, how power-hungry, how determined and how criminal.’

‘Oh dear,’ the princess said faintly, ‘how very horrid this all is.’

I agreed with her. At least as much as she, I would have preferred to be out on a windy racetrack where the rogues had four legs and merely bit.

‘There’s a simple