Free The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes Page A

to be a very fond, warm smile, and leant across and touched her hand.
    "I do," she said softly. "And you are. Nobody but you."
    Miranda blushed again, and nodded; in removing her hand from Jackie’s, she managed to upset a full glass of white wine over both of us; by the time we had that cleared up, the main courses had arrived. I ate steak frîtes with béarnaise sauce, washed down with two slow glasses of red. I could drink a lot, and generally did, but I had no head for wine; in any case, I wanted to study these people at the periphery of the Tyrrell family closely: there was history between them, and I’d need my wits about me to pick up on it.
    As we ate, Seán Proby launched into a boilerplate account of the invention of Steeplechase: how in 1752 Edmund Blake and Cornelius O’Callaghan had raced from Buttevant Church to St. Mary’s Church, over jumps, steeple to steeple; how National Hunt, as it was now called, was the true Irish horse racing, involving as it did not just skill and discipline and courage but passion and spirit and a sense of adventure. The flat wasn’t racing at all, he sniffed.
    Except as a means for bookies to separate punters from their cash, Jackie pointed out. Proby seemed keen to continue with a survey of National Hunt’s premier meeting, the Cheltenham Festival, but Jackie reminded him that I was not in fact writing a book and if I had been I would at least have known about bloody Blake and O’Callaghan and bloody Cheltenham and could he stop boring the arse off everyone and eat his dinner like a good little boy.
    She then began to talk about her riding school, her tone derogatory of her clients and dismissive of the school’s worth.
    "No reflection on Miranda, her teaching is second to none; if you want to know your way around a horse that lady is the one to teach you. But honest to God, these spoilt little South Dublin brats, as they zip into the Dundrum Shopping Centre in their ’06 reg Mini Coopers Daddy bought them for their seventeenth birthdays, all they care about is shopping and fashion and grooming; riding’s an unwelcome distraction from the beauty salon and the shoe shop; the whole thing’s wasted on them."
    Miranda beamed at her satirically.
    "There speaks Jackie Tyrrell, who went to finishing school in Geneva. Dressmaking and deportment and Italian and place setting and flower arrangement."
    "Quite right too. Made a real woman of her," Seán Proby said.
    "Miranda doesn’t agree. About the girls," Jackie said, seemingly reveling in any exchange that approached the condition of a row.
    Miranda shrugged wearily: this was evidently something they rehearsed on a regular basis.
    "Girls were always interested in hair and makeup and clothes. They just didn’t have the money to do anything about it back in our day. Now they do."
    "Too much money," Jackie said severely. "Too much money in the wrong hands. What do you think, Ed?"
    "I’d always be in favor of wealth redistribution," I said. "The problem is, how to dole it out, and who decides?"
    "I decide," Jackie said, and then, straight-faced: "Ed, do you think teenage girls should be taught to ride?"
    Miranda and Proby burst out laughing at this, and Jackie Tyrrell shook her head sadly, like a prophet without honor at her own table. Champagne arrived, and we drank a toast to the riding school (in which Seán Proby had some kind of interest) against her protests, and to Christmas. Then Jackie, unprovoked and with no challenger, launched into a long and involved defense of the Irish Revenue Inspectors’ tax exemption for the bloodstock industry, inviting my support on the grounds that, as a creative writer, I benefited from a similar dispensation. I tried to remind her that I wasn’t, in fact, a writer, but she and Proby were drinking Calvados by now, impervious to any music but their own. Occasionally she would scribble something on a napkin, briefing herself for her rhetorical assault against illusory foes. It was after ten;