Bolt - By Dick Francis Page 0,42

had of the lighter side within, he asked ‘Has Beatrice got you out of the bamboo room yet?’

‘No, Monsieur,’ I said cheerfully.

‘She was up here this morning demanding I move you,’ he said, the smile lingering. ‘She insists also that I allow Nanterre to run the business as he thinks best, but truly I don’t know which of her purposes obsesses her most. She switched from one to the other within the same sentence.’ He paused. ‘If you can defeat my sister,’ he said, ‘Nanterre should be easy.’

By the following mid-morning, I’d been out to buy a recording telephone, and the guard had been installed, in the unconventional form of a springy twenty-year-old who had learned karate in the cradle.

Beatrice predictably disapproved, both of his looks and his presence, particularly as he nearly knocked her over on one of the landings, by proving he could run from the basement to the attic faster than the lift could travel the same distance.

He told me his name was Sammy (this week), and he was deeply impressed by the princess, whom he called ‘Your Regal Highness’, to her discreet and friendly amusement.

‘Are you sure…?’ she said to me tentatively, when he wasn’t listening.

‘He comes with the very highest references,’ I assured her. ‘His employer promised he could kick a pistol out of anyone’s hand before it was fired.’

Sammy’s slightly poltergeist spirits seemed to cheer her greatly, and with firmness she announced that all of us, of course including Beatrice, should go to Ascot races. Lunch was already ordered there, and Sammy would guard her husband: she behaved with the gaiety sometimes induced by risk-taking, which to Litsi and Danielle at least proved infectious.

Beatrice, glowering, complained she didn’t like horse racing. Her opinion of me had dropped as low as the Marianas Trench since she’d discovered I was a professional jockey. ‘He’s the help,’ I overheard her saying in outrage to the princess. ‘Surely there are some rooms in the attic’

The ‘attic’, as it happened, was an unused nursery suite, cold and draped in dust-sheets, as I’d discovered on my night prowls. The room I could realistically have expected to have been given lay beside the rose room, sharing the rose room’s bathroom, but it, too, was palely shrouded.

‘I didn’t know you were coming, Beatrice, dear,’ the princess reminded her. ‘And he’s Danielle’s fiancé.’

‘But really …’

She did go to the races, though, albeit with ill grace, presumably on the premise that even if she gained access again to her brother, and even if she wore him to exhaustion, she couldn’t make him sign the contract, because first, he didn’t have it (it was now in Litsi’s room in case she took the bamboo room by force) and second, his three co-signers couldn’t be similarly coerced. Litsi had carefully told her, after Nanterre’s telephone call and before my return from Devon, that the contract form was missing.

‘Where is it?’ she had demanded.

‘My dear Beatrice,’ Litsi had said blandly, ‘I have no idea. The notary’s briefcase is still in the hall awaiting collection, but there is no paper of any sort in it.’

And it was after he’d told me of this exchange, before we’d gone to bed on the previous evening, that I’d taken the paper downstairs for his safe-keeping.

Beatrice went to Ascot with the princess in the Rolls; Danielle and Litsi came with me.

Danielle, subdued, sat in the back. She had been quiet when I’d fetched her during the night, shivering now and again from her thoughts, even though the car had been warm. I told her about Nanterre’s telephone call and also about her uncle’s agreement with Litsi and me, and although her eyes looked huge with worry, all she’d said was, ‘Please be careful. Both of you … be careful.’

At Ascot, it was with unmixed feelings of jealousy that I watched Litsi take her away in the direction of the princess’s lunch while I peeled off, as one might say, to the office.

I had four races to ride; one for the princess, two others for Wykeham, one for a Lambourn trainer. Dusty was in a bad mood, Maynard Allardeck had again turned up as a Steward, and the tree of my favourite lightweight saddle, my valet told me, had disintegrated. Apart from that it was bitterly cold, and apart from that I had somehow gained another pound, probably via the railway sandwich.

Wykeham’s first runner was a four-year-old ex-Flat racer out for his first experience over hurdles, and although I’d schooled him a few