Bolt - By Dick Francis Page 0,1

in England.

He lived now in France, but I’d met him a few times over the years when he’d visited his aunt and escorted her to the races, and I’d liked him in a vague way, never knowing him well. When I’d heard he was coming again for a visit, I hadn’t given a thought to the impact he might make on a bright American female who worked for a television news agency and thirsted for Leonardo da Vinci.

‘Kit,’ the princess said.

I retrieved my attention from the Lake District and focused on the calmness in her face.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘some races are easier than others.’

‘Do your best.’

‘Yes.’

Our pre-race meetings over the years had developed into short comfortable interludes in which little was said but much understood. Most owners went into parade rings accompanied by their trainers, but Wykeham Harlow, trainer of the princess’s horses, had altogether stopped going to the races. Wykeham, growing old, couldn’t stand the incessant winter journeys. Wykeham, shaky in the memory and jerky in the knees, nevertheless still generated the empathy with horses that had put him straight into the top rank from the beginning. He continued to send out streams of winners from his eighty-strong stable, and I, most thankfully, rode them.

The princess went indomitably to the races in all weathers, delighting in the prowess of her surrogate children, planning their futures, recalling their pasts, filling her days with an unflagging interest. Over many years, she and I had arrived at a relationship that was both formal and deep, sharing intensities of success and moments of grief, understanding each other in easy accord at race meetings, parting to unconnected lives at the gate.

Unconnected, that is to say, until the previous November when Danielle had arrived from America to take up her London posting and ended in my bed. Since then, although the princess had undoubtedly accepted me as a future member of her family and had invited me often to her house, her manner to me, as mine to her, had remained virtually unchanged, especially on racecourses. The pattern had been too long set, and felt right, it seemed, to us both.

‘Good luck,’ she said lightly, when the time came for mounting, and Cascade and I went down to the start with him presumably warming up from the canter but as usual sending no telepathic messages about his feelings. With some horses, a two-way mental traffic could be almost as explicit as speech, but dark, thin, nippy Cascade was habitually and unhelpfully silent.

The race turned out to be much harder than expected, as one of the other runners seemed to have found an extra gear since I’d beaten him last. He jumped stride for stride with Cascade down the far side and clung like glue round the bend into the straight. Shaping up to the last four fences and the run-in he was still close by Cascade’s side, his jockey keeping him there aggressively although there was the whole wide track to accommodate him. It was a demoralising tactic which that jockey often used against horses he thought frightenable, but I was in no mood to be overcrowded by him or by anybody, and I was conscious, as too often recently, of ruthlessness and rage inside and of repressed desperation bursting out.

I kicked Cascade hard into the final jumps and drove him unmercifully along the run-in, and if he hated it, at least he wasn’t telling me. He stretched out his neck and his dark head towards the winning post and under relentless pressure persevered to the end.

We won by a matter of inches and Cascade slowed to a walk in a few uneven strides, absolutely exhausted. I felt faintly ashamed of myself and took little joy in the victory, and on the long path back to the unsaddling enclosure felt not a cathartic release from tension but an increasing fear that my mount would drop dead from an over-strained heart.

He walked with trembling legs into the winner’s place to applause he certainly deserved, and the princess came to greet him with slightly anxious eyes. The result of the photo-finish had already been announced, confirming Cascade’s win, and it appeared that the princess wasn’t worried about whether she had won, but how.

‘Weren’t you hard on him?’ she asked doubtfully, as I slid to the ground. ‘Too hard, perhaps, Kit?’

I patted Cascade’s steaming neck, feeling the sweat under my fingers. A lot of horses would have crumbled under so much pressure, but he hadn’t.

‘He’s brave,’ I said.