Bolt - By Dick Francis Page 0,89

signature, which I did.

‘I don’t know how much of all this is strictly necessary,’ he said happily,‘but Mr Fielding wanted these documents unbreakable by any possible quibble of law, as he put it, so we have two witnesses, seals, declarations, everything. I do hope you all understand exactly what you’ve been signing as unless you should burn them or otherwise destroy them, these documents are irrevocable.’

Everyone nodded, Roland de Brescou with sadness.

‘That’s splendid,’ Greening said expansively, and began looking around him and at his watch expectantly.

‘And now Gerald, some sherry?’ the princess suggested with quiet amusement.

‘Princess Casilia, what a splendid idea!’ he said with imitation surprise.‘A glass would be lovely.’

I excused myself from the party on the grounds that I was riding in the two-thirty at Windsor and should have left fifteen minutes ago.

Litsi picked up the signed documents, returned them to the large envelope Gerald Greening had brought them in, and handed me the completed package.

‘Don’t forget to telephone,’ he said.

‘No.’

He hesitated.‘Good luck,’ he said.

They all thought he meant with the races, which was perfectly proper.

The princess had no runners as she almost never went to Windsor races, having no box there. Beatrice was spending the day in the beauty parlour, renovating her self-esteem. Litsi was covering for Sammy who was supposed to be resting. I hadn’t expected Danielle to come with me on her own, but she followed me onto the landing from Roland’s room and said,‘If I come with you, can you get me to work by six-thirty ?’

‘With an hour to spare.’

‘Shall I come?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

She nodded and went off past the princess’s rooms to her own to fetch a coat, and we walked round to the mews in a reasonable replica of the old companionship. She watched me check the car and without comment waited some distance away while I started the engine and stamped on the brakes, and we talked about Gerald Greening on the way to Windsor, and about Beatrice at Palm Beach, and about her news bureau: safe subjects, but I was glad just to have her there at all.

She was wearing the fur-lined swinging green-grey showerproof jacket I’d given her for Christmas, also black trousers, a white high-necked sweater and a wide floral chintz headband holding back her cloud of dark hair. The consensus among other jockeys that she was a ‘knock-out’ had never found me disagreeing.

I drove fast to Windsor and we hurried from car park to weighing room, finding Dusty hovering about there looking pointedly at the clock.

‘What about your ankle?’ he said suspiciously. ‘You’re still limping.’

‘Not when I’m riding,’ I said.

Dusty gave me a look as good as his name and scurried away, and Danielle said she would go buy a sandwich and coffee.

‘Will you be all right by yourself?’

‘Of course … or I wouldn’t have come.’

She’d made friends over the past months with the wife of a Lambourn trainer I often rode for, and with the wives of one or two of the other jockeys, but I knew the afternoons were lonely when she went racing without her aunt.

‘I’m not riding in the fourth; we can watch that together,’ I said.

‘Yes. Go in and change. You’re late.’

I’d taken the packet of documents into the racecourse rather than leave them in the car, and in the changing room gave them into the safekeeping of my valet. My valet’s safekeeping would have shamed the vaults of the Bank of England and consisted of stowing things (like one’s wallet) in the capacious front pocket of a black vinyl apron. The apron, I guessed, had evolved for that purpose: there were no lockers in the changing rooms, and one hung one’s clothes on a peg.

It wasn’t a demanding day from the riding point of view. I won the first of my races (the second on the card) by twenty lengths, which Dusty said was too far, and lost the next by the same distance, again to his disapproval. The next was the fourth race, which I spent on the stands with Danielle, having seen her also briefly on walks from the weighing room to parade ring. I told her the news of Joe, the jockey injured at Sandown, who was conscious and on the mend, and she said she’d had coffee with Betsy, the Lambourn trainer’s wife. Everything was fine, she said, just fine.

It was the third day of March, blustery and cold, and the Cheltenham National Hunt Festival was all of a sudden as near as next week.

‘Betsy says it’s