Free Moonlight: Star of the Show by Belinda Rapley Page B

have a spare second!” Rosie whined, at the idea of all the work she needed to do the next day as much as anything else.
    “But we can’t just leave it to chance on Sunday morning once we get to the show,” Charlie said.
    “No way,” Alice added, trying hard not tothink about how ill she’d be feeling on the day. “I’ll be such a bag of nerves by then I won’t be able to think straight so we’ll have to get it sorted out before then.”
    “There’s only one thing for it,” Mia announced. “Rosie, if you agree, we’ll have to have a sleepover tomorrow night.”

Chapter Eight
    M IA , Charlie and Alice arrived at Blackberry Farm the next morning with their overnight bags and show kits, bubbling over with excitement about spending the night there. Rosie’s bedroom looked out across the paddocks, so they would be able to check on the ponies by the luminous light of the moon and the stars as they made their plans.
    After they’d bundled their bags in the cottage and hung up their clothes, they raced back to the stables and concentrated on getting ready for the following day. The yard was soon awash with suds as the girls tied their ponies outside their stables and shampooed them, getting drenched as the ponies whirled their tails round after they’d been rinsed. They used a sweat scraper to squeakilysqueeze off all the excess water from their ponies’ coats.
    After washing Pirate’s tail, Charlie put a tail bandage on to try to make the hairs at the top lie flat, rather than spiking out like a huge hedgehog. Then the girls led their ponies to a patch of grass to crop while they dried off in the sun, with Dancer getting behind Rosie and nudging her along each step so that they could get there faster. Every now and again Scout stopped eating, and while Alice stroked his velveteen muzzle, prickly with whiskers, he rested his chin lightly on her shoulder, blinking his eyes.
    Once Scout was turned out wearing his light summer sheet to keep him as clean as possible, Alice headed into the depths of the gloomy tack room, filled with its familiar strong smell of leather and saddle soap. Finding a sponge, she started cleaning her tack, scrubbing Scout’s bit and all the metal buckles. She polished the leather on her saddle until it shone.
    “Alice, you do realise that if you carry on like that you’ll make the seat so slippery”, Charlie pointed out, “that you’ll slide off it after just one jump!”
    This sent Alice into another spasm of nerves, but although they all offered various opinions, no one actually knew how to scuff up the leather once it had been polished so Alice just added it to the list of things to worry about the next day.
    After they’d finished tack-cleaning and had given the ponies their small evening feed Alice gave Scout strict instructions not to get any grass stains on his beautifully clean and sparkling grey coat.
    They yanked off their jodhpur boots, leaving piles of straw that fell out of them by the mat before running through the open back door of the farmhouse, into the large, cluttered kitchen. The smell of warm, fresh bread filled their noses. They scraped out the chairs and flopped at the big, scarred wooden kitchen table moaning about their aching arms after all that tack-cleaning asthey cut huge chunks of the bread and buttered it haphazardly.
    Rosie’s mum, dressed in paint-spattered overalls, her messy blonde hair tied back with a long, dangling rainbow-coloured scarf, wandered in and poured them some lemonade.
    “Home made,” she announced proudly as she poured it, not noticing the girls grimacing as they took great gulps.
    “Mum!” Rosie groaned. “I think you forgot to put any sugar in!”
    Mrs Honeycott scratched her head with the small paintbrush she’d had tucked behind her ear.
    “Did I?” she asked vaguely. “I must have been distracted.”
    “I think you’re permanently distracted,” Rosie muttered as the other girls giggled between mouthfuls of