all the patting and praising. I know I’ve got to give her the chance to go into training, but it’ll be like sending Martin off to prep school.’
‘No bad thing if he went back,’ said Painswick with a sniff. ‘Might knock off a few rough corners.’
37
In the following week, Etta received offers for Mrs Wilkinson from the finest trainers in the land. She refused them all but yielding to pressure from Martin, Carrie and her Willowwood friends, who felt she shouldn’t deny Mrs Wilkinson a brilliant career, she allowed her mare to have a DNA test.
Sensational findings came back that Mrs Wilkinson was a five-year-old named Usurper. Her sire was Rupert’s Derby-winning stallion Peppy Koala, her dam a National Hunt mare called Little Star, who’d won several races. More disastrously it transpired that Usurper had once belonged to Shade Murchieson and Harvey-Holden. She’d been born on 6 March.
‘She’s a Pisces and she’s got the same birthday as Ouija Board,’ said Dora ecstatically. ‘No wonder she pissed all over that point-to-point. She’s going to need lots of counselling, like my sister Emerald, before she meets her real parents.’
Joey, to protect a distraught Etta, tipped off the police, who immediately rolled up at Ravenscroft to interview Harvey-Holden, waving photographs of a bloodstained, lacerated Mrs Wilkinson from when Etta first rescued her. Harvey-Holden immediately protested he had no idea how his filly had got into that condition. He would never have dreamt of hurting her.
Shade, he said, had bought her for his daughter Chantelle’s eighteenth birthday, but Shade’s ex-wife, from whom he had parted with colossal acrimony, had refused to let Chantelle accept the filly. Usurper had been returned to Harvey-Holden to await further developments. Harvey-Holden had been very fond of the filly and wanted her back.
Etta’s fears intensified because Harvey-Holden’s fortunes had changed dramatically. He had not witnessed Mrs Wilkinson’s point-to-point victory because that weekend he’d married a very rich, very large widow called Judy Tobias.
Tipped off in the Fox by Joey, Alan arrived to commiserate and brief Etta.
‘Judy Tobias, now Judy Harvey-Holden, talk about Tobias and the Devil,’ said Alan, helping himself to a large glass of red, ‘is a big, blowsy philanthropist, horribly politically correct and heavily, she couldn’t be anything else at that size, into animal welfare. So H-H better start treating his horses better. Jude evidently fell in love when she saw H-H crying on television after the fire.
‘Taking her to bed must be like a ferret mounting a hippo. With any luck H-H will get squashed flat before the next National Hunt season. If she walked past that window she’d darken the room more than Valent’s mature hedge. Oh cheer up, Etta darling. They’ll never be allowed to take her back to that dump.’
In the days that followed, the on dit was that Judy’s money would enable H-H to rebuild his yard to the lushest specifications, adding new gallops, a solarium, an indoor school the size of a football pitch and an equine swimming pool for Jude to romp in.
‘Which means lorries rumbling through Willowwood wrecking the roads, holding up the traffic,’ observed Alan. ‘Joey will no doubt get the contract to build it.’
Deadliest of all, Jude was determined to help H-H fight the case for the repossession of Mrs Wilkinson with a crack QC called Cecil Stroud.
Martin Bancroft was appalled by the news. On returning a week later from fundraising in America, he set out for Little Hollow, determined to persuade his mother to give back Mrs Wilkinson at once. Judy Tobias, particularly if she were going to be living round the corner, was someone to get in with. Martin was outraged to find his egregious brother-in-law and that slyboots Dora Belvedon in situ drinking a bottle of Moët.
‘Cecil Stroud has never lost a case, Mother,’ were his opening words. ‘You’ll end up in prison for horse-rustling.’
‘No, she won’t,’ crowed Dora. ‘Marti Gluckstein’s going to act for her.’
‘Don’t be fatuous,’ thundered Martin. ‘How can Mother possibly afford him?’
‘Rupert Campbell-Black’s helping with the bill,’ drawled Alan, then, at Martin’s look of disbelief: ‘Never look a gift horseowner in the mouth.’
Rupert had been secretly gratified that all the press had picked up on the fact that he had recognized Mrs Wilkinson’s star quality and tipped her in the point-to-point. He loathed Shade, ‘Mr Chip and Grievance’, and Harvey-Holden, the little twerp. Mrs Wilkinson had turned out to be the daughter of one of his favourite stallions, which was good for business, and if he helped Etta out she