Free To the Hilt by Dick Francis Page A

Lambourn church. I don’t want tongues wagging that you’ve come back to me. You can sleep here, on a sofa, out of sight.”
    “How about,” I said impulsively, “in your bed?”
    “No.”
    I didn’t try to persuade her. Instead, I borrowed her telephone for two calls, one to my mother to tell her I would be away for the night but hoped to have good news for Ivan the next day, and one to Jed Parlane in Scotland.
    “How are you?” he said anxiously.
    “Living at a flat-out gallop.”
    “I meant ... Anyway, I took the police to the bothy. What a mess. ”
    “Mm.”
    “I gave them your drawings. The police haven’t had any other complaints about hikers robbing people around here.”
    “Not surprising.”
    “Himself wants to see you as soon as you return. He says I’m to meet you off the train and take you straight to the castle. When are you coming back?”
    “With luck on tomorrow night’s Highlander. I’ll let you know.”
    “How is Sir Ivan?”
    “Not good.”
    “Take care, then,” he said. “So long.”
    Emily, deep in thought, said, as I put down the receiver, “I’ll send my head groom out with the first lot, as usual, but I’ll tell him not to take Golden Malt. I’ll tell the head groom that the horse is going away for a bit of remedial treatment to his legs. There’s nothing wrong with his legs, actually, but my grooms know better than to argue.”
    They always had, I reflected. Also, they faithfully stayed. She trained winners; the grooms prospered, and did as she said.
    She wrote, as she always did, a list of which groom would ride which horse when the first lot of about twenty horses pulled out for exercise at seven o’clock the next morning, and which groom would ride which horse in the second lot, after breakfast, and which groom would go out again later in the morning with every horse not yet exercised. She employed about twenty grooms—men and women—for the horses, besides two secretaries, a housekeeper and a yardman. Jockeys came for breakfast and to school the horses over jumps. Veterinarians called. People delivered hay and feed and removed manure. Owners visited. I’d learned to ride, but not well. The telephone trilled incessantly. Messages whizzed in and out by computer. No one ever for long sat still.
    I had been absorbed into the busy scenery as general cook/dogsbody, and runner of errands: and although I’d fitted in as best I could, and for a while happily, my own internal life had shriveled to zero. There had been weeks and weeks of self-doubt, of wondering if my compulsion to paint was mere selfishness, if the belief in talent was a delusion, if I should deny the promptings of my nature and be forever the lieutenant that Emily wanted.
    Now, more than five years later, she put her newly written list for the head groom in the message box outside the back door. She let out her two Labradors for a bathroom run and walked round the stable yard to make sure that all was well. Then she came in, whistled for the dogs to return to their baskets in the kitchen and locked the doors against the night.
    All so familiar. All so long ago.
    She gave me two traveling rugs to keep warm on the sofa and said calmly, “Goodnight.”
    I put my arms round her tentatively. “Em?”
    “No,” she said.
    I kissed her forehead, holding her close. “Em?”
    “Oh,” she said in exasperation, “all right.”

chapter 4
    She no longer slept in the big bedroom we’d shared, but in the old guestroom, in a new queen-sized romping ground suitable for passing fancies.
    She had slotted a new, luxurious bathroom into what had once been her father’s dressing room. Downstairs the house might be as I remembered it, but upstairs it was not.
    “This is not a precedent,” Emily said, taking off layers down to a white lace bra. “And I don’t think it’s wise.”
    “Bugger wise.”
    “You obviously haven’t been getting enough.”
    “No, I haven’t.” I switched off the lights and drew back