as well as a gym, spas and a salt-water pool, plus equipment and flat and uphill gallops to replicate every fence, hurdle, surface or course in the world.
None of this, however, impressed Mrs Wilkinson, who was above all a home bird who never slept in strange stables. She was desperately homesick and frightened at Rupert’s. No one played Beethoven to her. No one laughed when she stuck out her tongue, no one gave her a Polo if she tried to shake hooves. Refusing to eat, walking her box, driving everyone crackers yelling for Chisolm, she desperately missed Tommy, Etta, Rafiq and all her horse friends at Throstledown.
Nor, to their rage, was Rupert going to give that ‘ghastly syndicate’ access or allow any journalists or fans into his yard, so Mrs Wilkinson missed their adulation as well.
The acquisition of Mrs Wilkinson was a two-edged sword. Red postal vans were soon buckling under her fan mail, as tons of Polos, carrots, barley sugars and get-well cards arrived at Rupert’s gate. Chisolm sent her a bleatings card. These had been redirected by Painswick, who remembered Rupert as one of the most subversive and difficult parents at Bagley Hall.
‘It’s your problem now,’ she sourly told Rupert’s very diplomatic PA.
132
Dora, however, was a great friend of the Campbell-Blacks.
‘It’s absolutely dreadful for Marius, Tommy and Rafiq,’ she told Etta apologetically, ‘but I can’t diss Rupert because I’m writing his column for him.’
Always on the hunt for a story, Dora rolled up at Penscombe to see her friend Bianca, Rupert and Taggie’s daughter.
Mrs Wilkinson, temporarily roused out of her black depression, was touchingly pleased to see Dora, practically clambering out over the half-door of her box.
‘How is she?’ Dora asked Lysander, Rupert’s assistant, who was a genius at bringing on horses. Infinitely patient, refusing to push them, believing that it didn’t matter if they came fifth or sixth as long as they looked forward to their next race, Lysander praised and encouraged them to the skies. So far he wasn’t having much success with Mrs Wilkinson.
‘She’s absolutely miserable,’ he sighed. ‘Rupert’s put her in a ring bit and a cross noseband to teach her to jump straight. He’s taking her drag hunting tomorrow so she gets used to jumping big fences at speed.’
‘She’s refusing Polos, she must be dying,’ said a worried Dora.
‘She’s also come into season.’
‘Ah, will Rupert still run her?’
‘Only one in ten mares runs better in season or when they’re cycling,’ said Lysander, ‘so the odds aren’t great.’
‘We better enter her for the Tour de France then,’ giggled Bianca.
Mrs Wilkinson sank back into gloom, whinnying piteously then retreating to the back of the box, head drooping, tail down, so Dora asked if she and Bianca could take her for a walk. Lysander, who was quite used to dealing with temperamental stallions but who had turned deathly pale at the prospect of sorting out an impossibly fractious Furious, said that was OK.
The yard for once was very quiet. All the lads were on their breaks. Rupert was at the World Cup in Dubai. Lysander had clattered off to the indoor school. Bianca, who was madly in love with Feral Jackson, Ryan Edwards’s brilliant new striker, wanted to know if Dora thought seventeen was too young to get married.
‘You’re a WAG anyway,’ said Dora, who wasn’t listening.
They were passing Billionaire’s Row, a yard of boxes housing Rupert’s top stallions, who weren’t let out into the fields but lunged or walked in hand for a couple of hours a day.
‘They’ve got to be kept fit if they’re covering four mares a day,’ explained Bianca.
Beside each stallion’s door was a brass plaque listing the races they’d won.
‘That’s Peppy Koala.’ Bianca pointed to a wild-eyed chestnut, who was chewing at his half-door. ‘He’s worth forty million. He never gets ridden, poor thing, he’d take off. Eddie jumped on Love Rat the other day, nearly ended up in Scotland. That’s the practice mare,’ went on Bianca, pointing to a dozing dapple grey. ‘She stands still and the stallions practise on her.’
‘Cheap date,’ said Dora, ‘no champagne or flowers.’
‘Mares travel from all over the country for our stallions,’ said Bianca proudly, ‘like women used to run after Daddy before he married Mummy.’
‘Still do,’ said Dora, thinking of Corinna and Phoebe.
‘Love Rat had three hundred and twenty applications this year, but he only accepted a hundred.’
‘Sounds like the waiting list at Bagley.’
‘Here’s the covering yard.’ Bianca showed Mrs Wilkinson and Dora a huge barn with shredded black tyres over the floor and