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  ‘My Barry is definitely Emmental.’ The Bags were now comparing husbands to cheeses, Mo’s red-faced husband typecast in wax. ‘Mild and nutty.’

  ‘Charlie’s Stilton – blue-veined and at his best after dinner,’ Petra said loyally. ‘What about Paul, Gill?’

  ‘Dairylea slice,’ said Gill dismissively.

  They all looked at Bridge, expecting her to come up with an unpronounceable Polish mountain cheese with a complicated flavour, as deep and smoky as her giant of a husband.

  ‘Cheddar,’ she said firmly. ‘Delicious, popular and versatile.’

  The pragmatic, no-nonsense attitude that had propelled Bridge into management in her early twenties had also lent her a common-sense romantic outlook. By twenty-five, reluctant to follow her alter-ego twin into dating a series of heartbreaking deviants, Bridge had a strict wish list: he had to be tall, practical, funny and hard-working, like to get drunk, and shag well. Upgrading from Kilburn flat to Harlesden townhouse, she’d hired the sexiest Polish builder in town to convert her loft, soon ticking all the boxes before earning herself another top-floor promotion, this time from girlfriend to wife.

  Five years later she was a stay-at-home mother of two, riding around the Home Counties with three middle-aged women, wondering who had hijacked her life. She’d gone from high flying to autopilot. She had to figure out how to take back the controls.

  If her fellow Bags could all juggle career, families and horses, Bridge knew she had no excuse, no matter that the climb back up the career ladder was far harder with a child on both hips. It had been straightforward after Flavia was born three years ago, maternity leave guaranteeing her return to the personnel department of a blue-chip logistics company. But she’d taken voluntary redundancy when they’d moved to the Cotswolds so that Aleš could go into partnership with his brother, and then she’d fallen pregnant again.

  Aleš was very vocal in his belief that his wife had no need to work; his business was doing well enough for money not to be a worry, and he preferred Bridge at home with the kids, doing his bookkeeping for nothing, making more babies soon if he had his way. But Bridge craved a life beyond motherhood.

  Her greatest freedom already came at a cost that was holding her to ransom: Aleš resented the money that went on Craic. It didn’t help that she had never discussed horses with her husband before buying one on their credit card. Craic had been the ultimate impulse buy. They’d just moved into the village, the need for a new sofa great. Like Jack and the Beanstalk, she’d gone to market focussed on cowhide, and got distracted on the way. While her head was saying vintage leather button-back chesterfield, the sight of a poster for a Horse and Pony Sale at the local auction room made her heart take over. A day later, Bridge was the owner of an unbroken Connemara pony, fresh off the boat from Ireland. For a young mum who’d had a handful of riding lessons, it was undoubtedly a crazy thing to do, but Bridge didn’t regret it for a minute. Craic made her feel alive.

  She laughed as the little grey tearaway shot sideways, her rollercoaster ride of beating heart and flight instinct, her hand on his neck stilling him, the black-tipped ears flicking back. They were passing the Bernard Ugger Memorial Hall, known to locals as the ‘Bugger All’ after the antisocial local coach entrepreneur whose legacy to the village had been the slab-like, brightly lit eyesore, a pleasure palace of punch-ups and late-night police raids. While the others ambled past its ‘New Years’ Eve Disco Tonite’ banner, talking about their plans for later, Bridge reminded herself why she needed a job, and fast. Worried about her husband’s ever-louder objections to the smell of horse and the cost of keeping one in oats, she had vowed to pay for Craic herself. And the craic. It was time to shake off the guilt and the hormones and earn her spurs.

  Mo drew alongside, breathlessly enthusiastic, ‘I meant to say, they’re looking for someone to run the office at the village school. The Head’s a bit of a battleaxe, but soft as putty underneath. I can put a word in, if you like?’

  Bridge stared at the black-tipped ears in front of her, feeling her ego quietly fold into an origami warrior and commit hara-kiri. She mustn’t be proud. Sous Vide had made it clear she’d dropped a pay grade with each pregnancy. ‘That’s kind of you.’

  Mo puffed with laughter. ‘It was a joke! You’re a high flyer, you.’

  Bridge forced a smile, curling her fingers through Craic’s mane, grateful at least that he made her feel miles high. ‘Sure I am.’

  *

  Peeling off his yard gloves in his small cottage kitchen, Lester fetched Stubbs’s feed bowl, shaking in the kibble and breaking an egg on top, before dousing it all with a splash of water from the kettle that he now refilled and switched on.

  ‘You’ll have to wait,’ he reminded the little fox terrier as it danced from paw to paw below, Lloyd George eyebrows shifting.

  Lester folded the metal mesh rack around his slice of bread and wedged it between Rayburn range plate and lid. Leaving it to toast, he headed outside to fill the bowl in the hutch by the back door. Two vulpine eyes gleamed back at him.

  Laurence the fox. The stud’s housekeeper Pip had named it – she was a big fan of the television series Lewis, starring an actor by that name.

  Compton Magna Stud had been manned by an increasingly paltry staff in recent years, the breeding enterprise downscaled in the shadow of family tragedy, ill health and economic recession. Lester, recruited by the late Captain Jocelyn Percy during his national service days with the Household Cavalry, had worked there for over fifty years, and been stallion man for twenty, outstaying all others. Now, even the eager local housekeeper appeared to have deserted the sinking ship, claiming to be far too busy over Christmas to help out.

  Despite finding chatty little Pip very wearying, Lester missed her baking. He hoped she would be back in the New Year, although Ronnie seemed to have the impression Pip was taking up a new career in private detection, no doubt inspired by her taste in small-screen whodunnits. Lester had never heard anything so ludicrous.

  Then again, if such a far-fetched thing were true, he might be grateful for her services. Some strange things were going on around here. Initially relieved that Ronnie had decided to stay on in Compton Magna to take up the reins of her late father’s enterprise – pleased would be pushing it – Lester was extremely annoyed that she’d hired a stud manager who was coming over from Canada to run it with her for six months, no doubt bringing newfangled ideas and gadgetry. Moreover, while the man had yet to arrive, his possessions had been turning up throughout the Christmas period. First had been the mysterious boxes that had been delivered by international movers, sent by shipping container weeks ago, then a horsebox had rolled up to drop off more bags and boxes, an eventer friend laughingly sharing the joke with Ronnie that a rolling stone like Luca O’Brien gathered no moss because he left it all in other people’s barns. There had been several phone calls to the stud’s landline at very antisocial hours: a seductive female voice asking whether Luca had arrived yet; another, male and menacing, possibly South African, enquiring whether a Mr O’Brien worked there. And out hunting with the Fosse yesterday, Lester had found himself the focus of yet more unwanted attention.

  ‘Is it true Smiley O’Reilly is coming to the Wolds?’ the MFH, Bay Austen, had demanded at check.

  ‘I think his name is O’Brien, sir.’

  ‘Ha!’ Bay’s frosty Dutch-born wife had ridden between them. ‘When I trained in Limburg, Luca was based at Gestüt Fuchs, just over the German border, okay. That place is so huge, nobody remembers names, but he was not so easy to forget. He could ride any horse, however crazy, played the violin like a gypsy and everybody there was in love with him. They all called him Smiley.’

  ‘Could be because he was a spy, I suppose?’ Bay had looked amused.

  ‘He left under a very dark cloud.’ Monique could slay a reputation in a breath. ‘I heard it was something to do with a stallion he handled that was injured. That wiped the smile off all their faces. It was no accident, perhaps.�
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  Lester had felt his blood quicken. If anybody mistreated his beloved stallion Cruisoe, he’d slay them. Or indeed the grey beast of Ronnie’s, who for all his delinquency, was the best-looking horse Compton Magna Stud had seen in a century.

  The hunting field exchange unsettled Lester, although he normally took no heed of tittle-tattle. He wouldn’t dream of saying anything to Ronnie – in fact, he derived a certain amount of pride in the fact that he had managed to get within days of the man’s arrival having not once referred to him by name, nickname or reputation – but he felt a deep-seated need for allies.

  ‘Nobody’s fiddling while Rome burns around here,’ he muttered to Lawrence before following the smell of burned toast back inside. The infernal phone was ringing again. Lester shared the stud’s landline with the office in the main house, from which his late employer, the Captain, had shouted at bookmakers, friends and relatives. Having none of these himself, Lester rarely had use of it and was damned if he was going to answer it when he knew there was someone at home to do so.

  As he set down Stubbs’ feed bowl, however, a flash of blonde, bright as the sun, appeared in the small rectangular window above his front door followed by a familiar, percussive rap.

  Ronnie was on his doorstep, dressed up in her best fur-trimmed tweed coat and pearls, wearing make-up for once. She still knocked the rest dead, Lester thought, wondering if she was going to see her fancy man.

  ‘I have to set out now or I’ll miss this bloody lunch in Wilts,’ she said, glancing instinctively up at the clock over the stable-yard arch, although it had been saying half past ten for six years. ‘I’d bow out, but Bunny’s invited a bunch of owners and breeders especially, and lord knows we need the business. Pax should be here by now to help you. Did you take that call? Was it her?’ She plucked out her mobile phone, no more than a glorified clock on days like today when their patchy rural signal thinned to nothing, sighing at its blank face.

  He cleared his throat. ‘I can cope.’

  ‘Can you?’ The bluest eyes in the Cotswolds, ever amused, regarded him shrewdly as he shuffled aside to let the younger of her little black-and-tan dogs bustle in to lick Stubbs’ now empty bowl.

  Not for the first time, he sensed she knew precisely how much his hips hurt, how bad his eyesight was, how hard he found it to push a full barrow up the muck plank these days. ‘Done it long enough.’

  ‘That’s the point. You’re supposed to start easing off a bit now I’m here; you’re too valuable.’ Laying down her phone and handbag, she stooped to help her elderly dog over the front step.

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do, Lester, I do. Pax should be here.’ She glanced over her shoulder at the stud’s drive as if willing her daughter to appear. ‘Damn. I wanted to talk to her before I set off, too. I don’t buy this story about not going to Scotland for Hogmanay because of the puppy, do you? I mean it’s jolly lovely that she’s offered to help here while I’m gallivanting, but it’s not like her to let Kes out of her sight. Alice could have the puppy. We could have him here, come to that.’

  Listening to the snarling and snapping coming from his kitchen, Lester was grateful, at least, that Ronnie’s heelers were going with her, their manners as tenacious as their mistress’s. Pax’s Scottish deerhound puppy – a Christmas present to her husband that Lester suspected was really to herself – was already bigger than Stubbs, to which the little bearded terrier took great umbrage, as well as its sharp teeth and general clumsy larkiness. Lester was rather hoping Pax would leave it in the car. Like Ronnie, he didn’t believe the Hogmanay story either. Those big hare eyes had too many unspilled tears in them.

  ‘I’ve suggested she stays here in the house tonight,’ Ronnie told him. ‘No point shivering in that tin box alone, and the ghastly M and Ms won’t let the puppy in their bungalow because of their cat.’

  Ronnie was talking about Muir and Mairi Forsyth, Pax’s hollow cheeked in-laws. Lester thought the nickname very disrespectful. Straight-backed and snowy-haired, the Forsyths struck him as show-bred examples of parsimonious, doughty Scots, unlike their fast-talking and profligate son, Mack. He was the reason his wife and child were enduring a second winter in a static caravan in the shadow of the gutted shell of an old Cotswold rectory they were renovating to live in. Pax was loyally tight-lipped, but her sister Alice didn’t mind who knew that Mack Forsyth – who Alice claimed fleeced local farmers by underpaying for development projects – had blown the budget on half a dozen million-pound barn conversions they now couldn’t sell. Mack’s parents, who had moved down from Scotland to rent nearby, were helping keep the ship afloat as far as Lester could tell. Pax should be grateful, not listen to Ronnie pouring scorn with her usual disrespect for seniority.

  ‘You’ll see in the New Year with her, won’t you?’ Ronnie demanded now.

  ‘She won’t stay.’

  ‘Oh, I know she’s not ready to spend a night under the same roof as this Scarlet Harlot of the Wolds, Lester.’ Ronnie laughed throatily. ‘I’m staying in Wiltshire. Bunny’s been banging on about the Bretts’ party again, and it’s another good place to plug the stud. Lots of old chums. But I don’t want to desert you; I’ll be back by eight thirty tomorrow morning latest. You’re hunting, I take it?’

  Lester nodded. ‘You should be too.’

  ‘Oh, I am.’ She winked, picking up her bag. ‘Hunting for clients. Wiltshire horsemen have very deep pockets.’ As she turned away with a wave, calling her dogs, he caught a breath of her scent, sweet and light as winter jasmine.

  Lester narrowed his eyes. She was definitely seeing the fancy man.

  *

  Bridge made light of Craic’s hysterical attempts to reverse through a hedge at the sight of fly-tipped litter in a gateway – like a Womble having a panic attack – despite the Bags well-meaning advice.

  ‘Kick him on!’

  ‘Give him a slap!’

  ‘You need the Horsemaker, darling!’

  When not telling her to keep her heels down and leg on, they had moved on to discuss the object of Petra’s new Safe Married Crush, an international man of mystery not even in the country yet.

  ‘Ronnie has promised me Luca O’Brien is totally TDF DDG,’ she said in her breathy posh Yorkshire voice.

  ‘Tiny dull fogey dealing dodgy gee-gees?’ Bridge suggested with a cynical snort as Craic burst from the hedge.

  ‘To Die For, Drop Dead Gorgeous,’ Mo told her helpfully, she and Petra both mothers of nine-year-old Dork Diaries addicts.

  ‘No man’s so gorgeous that you’d die for him,’ Bridge argued.

  ‘The French call an orgasm la petite mort,’ said Petra, ‘the little death.’

  Bridge laughed. ‘In that case I die for Aleš all the fecking time! I should be demanding a marble plaque and flowers.’

  Petra and Gill’s smiles developed a frozen, jealous look.

  ‘La petite mort,’ she repeated, liking the dangerously sacrificial, all-absorbing sound of it, and the way it made the others uncomfortable.

  ‘Oh, Barry gave me some of those at Christmas.’ Mo panted alongside. ‘From Aldi, they were. We gave Gill one when she came round. She wouldn’t stop going on about how good it was.’

  ‘Petit four, Mo. You gave me a petit four.’

  ‘Did Ronnie Percy really use the phrase “drop dead gorgeous”?’ Bridge asked Petra, having imagined something far cooler from the Bardswold Bolter, Ronnie’s nickname earned after a dramatic departure in a sports car from the village and her marriage in her twenties.

  ‘She actually said the Horsemaker is the Angel Gabriel in breeches, Lucifer out of them.’

  ‘Better than Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford,’ Bridge muttered. Petra turned everything into romantic melodrama, a side-effect of penning so many Georgian virgins about to have their bodices ripped off.

  The imminent arrival of Luca ‘the Horsemaker’ O’Brien was the most anticipated thing in this village if Petra was to be believed. Hired by Ronnie Percy to tr
y to turn around the fortunes of her family’s failing stud, the Irish-Italian stallion man with the battered passport was purportedly a globetrotting stud in his own right.

  ‘One can’t deny Ronnie has a good eye for men as well as horses,’ Gill conceded, adding beadily, ‘Is it currently on or off between her and Mr Sit Tight do we know?’

  ‘No idea.’ Petra flashed her big, easy smile.

  The cause of much fascination, stud owner Ronnie was a Percy family prodigal, her scurrilous past, forthright presence and uncertain future keeping tongues wagging.

  These days the Bags rarely rode past the stud without standing up in their stirrups to take a better look, especially since Petra, who regularly dog walked with Ronnie, had hinted at a clandestine affair with three-day eventing’s sexiest silver fox and six-time Olympian, craggy sexpot Blair Robertson.

  ‘The Bolter won’t stay single for long,’ Gill predicted.

  ‘I heard she got very pally with your Shakespeare director from the Old Almshouse over Christmas.’ Mo gave Gill one of her Carry On winks.

  ‘They’re hardly a good match,’ Gill dismissed, guarding her secret crush fiercely. ‘Kit’s an academic, so not nearly he-man enough for the Bardswold Bolter. She’s bringing this lusty young horse-whisperer over for herself, mark my words.’

  ‘When does Horse Boy arrive?’ asked Bridge, who had a vision of Poldark in Pikeur, all dark, thrusting good looks.

  ‘The Horsemaker,’ Petra corrected. ‘Later this week, I think Ronnie said. One touch of his hand makes horses follow him like disciples, apparently,’ she sighed, clearly in the Poldark zone too. ‘Goodness knows, they need him. The stud’s really short-staffed now Pip’s stopped going in to help.’