The colour must have rinsed from my face as she talked. I was losing the battle with normalcy and found it hard to balance my cup or quieten my hands. “He always seems so happy to be on the farm.”
“Why wouldn’t he be? He only comes when he wants to come. It never costs him anything. My struggles matter, yes, but they’re not his.”
She was speaking of commitment—she wanted all of him, and for life—but she seemed not to understand how this would be a stranglehold for Denys. She couldn’t force a promise. He would have to enter her life freely or not at all. After what I’d been through with Jock, Denys and I very much agreed on this. “Why do you keep trying?”
“Because when he’s here, I’m happier than at any other time. It makes everything else endurable. I’ll walk across the lawn and hear music from his gramophone, or come through my door and see his hat on the peg, and my heart lurches to life. All the other times, I’m sleeping.”
“You feel very much alive to me.”
“Only because you don’t know me. Not the way Denys does.”
I sat and listened to Karen’s sad, beautiful words, wanting to hate her—her good chairs and carpets. Her rare white lilies and face powder and overdramatic kohl. She was wrong for trying to keep Denys on a chain, but didn’t I want him, too? We were kindred in this respect, closer than sisters, and irrevocably estranged at the same time.
Before I left the hotel, I found Blix at the bar to say goodbye.
“How are you really?” he asked. Something in his tone was more delicate than I’d ever heard him be.
“Still standing.” I straightened my shoulders for him so he would worry less about me. “You know, Cockie was a lifesaver to me in London.”
“She’s a wonderful girl.”
“She’s marvellous. If you don’t marry her, I will.”
“Right.” He laughed and his eyes crinkled. “The plan is to do the deed when she returns. If she hasn’t come to her senses by then.” He laughed again, looking past the rim of his glass. “I’ll be the one wearing white.”
“And Dr. Turvy? He’ll be there, I suppose.”
“Yes. He’s promised to give away the bride.”
I trained Wrack in a fever. The St. Leger was in early August—there were only a few precious months left to get him on top form—and then the worst happened. Wrack’s recent successes should have made Ogilvie feel confident in his horse, but his friends had begun to whisper to him. How could he trust a girl to bring Wrack into his sharpest glory? For any old race at Nakuru, certainly, but for the St. Leger? Did he really want to risk it?
And so it was that less than three months before the race of my life, I had no horse. I could barely think or see straight. In the year I’d had Wrack, I’d put everything into him. His skill and prowess and moments of glory were me—mine—with my stamp on every reach and thundering turn. Now his loss had left me nothing. I was hollowed out.
“What will we do?” I asked Ruta. We were sitting on hay bales up in the stands, the sun and the day’s labours gone. Velvet night pushed in, soft and deadly.
“We still have half-a-dozen horses to run at the meeting.”
“In the smaller races, yes. I know we can take some of those, but for the classic, the one race that matters?”
“We must think on this,” he said, looking out at the night. “There is much we don’t yet know.”
“All the other owners will see that Ogilvie has pulled Wrack. And if he wins anyway, without us, they’ll clap him on the back saying how clever he was, how forward-looking.” I sighed and stewed, tugging at my hair, until Ruta left for home and his wife.
When I was alone again, I listened to the pulsing thrum of insects and the more distant noises of the stable, knowing that if Denys were anywhere on the continent, anywhere at all, I would have run to him, just to feel his arms around me, to feel centred there and know I could go on somehow, finding strength and courage along the way. But he wasn’t. He was nowhere I could find him.
—
A few days later, Ruta was out on breezes with Melton Pie when Eric Gooch came into the stable. He was an owner I didn’t know very well—tall and nervous-looking, with a tic of straightening his tie every few minutes. I was familiar with one of his fillies, though. Wise Child was out of one of my father’s best brood mares, Ask Papa. Like Pegasus, she’d been delivered into my hands, a bundle of slick warmth and promise. She had the right blood in her to be a serious contender for prize money, but early on another trainer had run her too hard. Her fragile tendons had been jarred severely on the wrong sort of track, concussing them. Now, no matter how perfect her pedigree was, she could barely carry a rider.
“Her legs could be built back up again,” Eric said. “With the right care.”
“Maybe they could,” I agreed. “But in twelve weeks?”