Showjumpers (8 page)

A
storm had been threatening all weekend, but it wasn’t until Monday that the rain finally began to fall. Georgie sat in Ms Schmidt’s class that morning and watched the raindrops forming tiny rivers down the windowpane.

They were supposed to be conjugating verbs, but Georgie found it hard to focus. She kept thinking back to the weekend, about Clemency Farm and Riley Conway.

Riley was like no one she’d ever met before. “He knew straight away what was wrong with Belle,” Georgie told Alice as they left German class and walked around the quad.

“So he’s horse psychic?” Alice pulled a face.

“No,” Georgie said, “I mean he’s really instinctively talented. You know, here we are studying how to be riders and it just comes naturally to him.”

“What does he look like?” asked Alice.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Georgie replied.

“I don’t know,” Alice grinned. “You just seem pretty into him, that’s all.”

“Alice!” Georgie laughed. “It’s not like that! He’s just helping me with Belle.”

The weather continued to worsen and got so bad that by the afternoon even Tara Kelly had admitted defeat and their cross-country lesson was cancelled. The fields were too wet and the rain was too heavy, so the students were handed over to Mrs Winton, the grooming mistress, for a practical horsemanship lesson in the stables instead.

Mrs Winton was a stickler for detail. Her grooming lessons were often tedious, as she demanded the students get things absolutely perfect. Georgie once spent an entire week plaiting and unplaiting a Spanish running plait on a piece of rope tied to a post before Mrs Winton was satisfied enough to allow Georgie to progress on to a real mane. She was a robust woman and always wore a tweed hacking jacket and a bowler hat that drew attention to her round face and ruddy, weather-beaten cheeks.

The students arrived to find her oiling a large pair of electric shears and looking like she meant business. “Nicholas,” Mrs Winton said, “can you bring Lagerfeld out of his box? I’m going to demonstrate how to do a trace clip.”

Nicholas led Lagerfeld to the teacher and held him as she took a piece of white chalk and began to draw a pattern on the horse’s body.

“Some people clip without a chalk line, but the end result looks messy,” Mrs Winton told them as she sketched a straight line horizontally along Lagerfeld’s belly. “You must make the chalk line even on both sides, down the gullet of the neck, along the belly and then a second line at the top of the legs…”

Then Mrs Winton began. She held the clippers against Lagerfeld’s neck first, to get him accustomed to the sound. Then, when the horse didn’t flinch, she turned the clippers and pressed the blade against his skin. The horses all had thick winter coats and Lagerfeld’s fuzz peeled off in long strips as Mrs Winton shaved him. She worked swiftly and confidently, talking constantly as she went, giving tips on how to attack certain bits like the tricky area behind the elbow. Within minutes there was a huge pile of russet-coloured horse fluff all over the concrete floor of the stables and Lagerfeld’s neck and belly had been shaved as smooth as a seal.

Mrs Winton moved around the horse to work on the other side. As soon as she was out of sight, Kennedy and Arden began giggling and grabbing handfuls of fluff off the stable floor, throwing it at each other like snowballs.

“Girls!” Mrs Winton stuck her head over Lagerfeld’s back and caught Kennedy in mid-throw. “I hope you’ve been paying attention and not just fooling around, because now it’s your turn.”

The teacher walked over to a stack of clipper boxes and began to hand them out. “You’re going be clipping your own horse.”

Kennedy looked horrified. “But Mrs Winton, we get a man in to do our horses!”

“As a professional eventing rider, you will have as many as twelve horses in work,” Mrs Winton replied. “You’ll save a fortune if you can do this yourself.”

“I don’t care about the money,” Kennedy sniffed.

Mrs Winton thrust a clipper box into her hands. “Think of it as a beauty parlour for ponies,” she suggested. “You can give them a manicure afterwards if you want.”

Mrs Winton made her way around the rest of the class. “You’ll have to share the clippers,” she said, “so split yourselves into groups of three.”

Georgie was sharing with Alice and Cameron, and while Alice went to get Will from his stall, Georgie began to examine the illustrations that Mrs Winton had stuck to the wall, showing them the various types of clip to choose from.

“I’m going to do an Irish Clip on Belle,” Georgie said when Alice returned.

Alice looked around. “Where’s Cameron?”

“I thought he was with you,” replied Georgie.

They finally found him with the showjumperettes. Kennedy had managed to get her clippers jammed before they’d even started.

“I nearly broke a nail,” she was telling Cameron as she held up her perfectly painted violet nails for his inspection.

She smiled sweetly, looking up through her long eyelashes as she handed him the clippers. “I think these need a man’s touch. Can you get them working for me?”

“Sure,” Cameron said. He tried the clasp on the handset, but it wouldn’t budge. He began grunting and straining, trying to work it loose.

“Ughhh!” His face turned pink with exertion. “They’re stuck!”

Alice couldn’t stand watching this for a moment longer. She stomped over and grabbed the clippers off Cameron and in one deft move flipped the clasp open. “You had the safety catch on,” she told him.

“I knew that,” Cameron muttered.

“Well, if you’re quite finished flirting with the showjumperettes,” Alice said snidely, “we could actually use you back on your own team.”

Cameron turned even pinker. “Sorry, Kennedy,” he said. “Gotta go.”

“Later,” Kennedy purred.

“Oh, good grief.” Alice rolled her eyes as she walked back to William, waiting patiently for his chalk line to be drawn on.

Georgie held William steady so Alice could draw an outline and then clip him. Cameron, however, was no help at all and kept gazing over at Kennedy.

When Alice had finished, the girls stood back to admire his hunter clip. Will was shaved all over except for his legs and a saddle shape on his back. There were a few stray tufts and it was a little uneven, but not a bad effort.

“Come on,” Georgie looked at her watch. “We’ve got two more horses to do and it’s already three o’clock.”

With time running short, the girls chalked Paddy and then left Cameron to do the clipping on his own while they brought Belladonna in from the field.

“Did you see?” Alice asked as they led Belle to the stables. “The way Cam keeps drooling over Kennedy?”

Georgie couldn’t help noticing it. And she could see how much it upset Alice too. Ever since the very first day at Blainford, Cameron had been embarrassingly fixated on Kennedy Kirkwood. Georgie didn’t blame him. With her glossy blow-dried hair and lean, tanned limbs, Kennedy was kind of gorgeous. Like all the showjumperettes, she ignored the uniform rules and wore jewellery and make-up every day. While the other girls wore regulation knee-length skirts, Kennedy and Arden and Tori had theirs altered so they finished halfway up their thighs. Even Kennedy’s navy jodhpurs weren’t the usual school regulation version – they were tight-fitting, expensive Pikeur jods that her stepmother brought back for her from Paris.
Face it,
Georgie thought,
what boy wouldn’t fancy Kennedy Kirkwood?

They were walking back into the stables and Alice was still moaning about Cameron when Georgie looked at Paddy and let out a shriek of horror. “Ohmygod! Cam, stop!”

Cameron couldn’t hear her shouts. The noise of the clippers drowned them out. Georgie raced forward and grabbed them from his hands.

“Hey! What did you do that for?” Cam was shocked.

“Look at what you’ve done to him!” Georgie pointed at the piebald gelding.

Poor, poor Paddy. Cameron had been so busy gawping at Kennedy that he’d barely been paying attention when the girls drew the chalk line on the black and white horse. When Cameron had started to clip Paddy he was so distracted that he had lost track of the chalk line and instead he’d begun to follow the white markings on the piebald by mistake. Instead of doing a neat straight line across Paddy’s tummy he’d veered off and begun to shave the outline of the white patches instead. He’d shaved off all the white bits on Paddy’s belly! Cameron’s horse looked like a half-finished jigsaw puzzle.

“Mr Fraser.” Mrs Winton was stunned. “This is the worst clip I have ever seen! What were you thinking?”

She took the clippers roughly out of Cameron’s hands. “Give me those. You’re a menace.”

Everyone thought the jigsaw clip was hilarious, except for Cam. His mistake had lowered his position in the class ranking – plus it would take two months at least for Paddy’s patchwork coat to grow back.

The weather had cleared enough for showjumping training to go ahead that evening after class so Georgie, Alice and Daisy took their freshly clipped horses down to the showjumping arena along with Amy, Kendal and Karen.

Tara was in the arena setting up jumps when they arrived. “We’re going to begin with some gridwork,” she told them. “I want you to come through over the canter poles and then push your horses on so that they do two big strides between the cross rails.”

The girls had only just begun warming up when Conrad Miller appeared with Damien Danforth, Andrew Hurley, Nicholas Laurent and James Kirkwood.

Georgie stiffened at the sight of James. “What are they doing here?” Alice muttered. Tara was wondering the same thing. “Sorry, boys,” she told them. “You’ll have to ride somewhere else. We’re in the middle of a training session.”

“So are we,” Conrad replied. “Burghley House has booked this arena for showjumping.”

Following the boys into the arena was Heath Brompton, the polo master at Blainford. He was also Burghley’s house master and coach for the showjumping competition.

“Sorry, Tara,” he said. “There appears to be a double booking. Would you mind sharing the arena?”

“I guess we don’t really have a choice,” Tara sighed. She began to dismantle her grid of jumps. “We’ll use one end of the arena and you use the other.”

Georgie held on to Kendal and Amy’s reins while the girls went to help Tara construct a new jumping course at one end of the arena.

Meanwhile, James, Andrew and Nicholas helped their coach do likewise at the other end, leaving Damien and Conrad holding on to their horses.

Damien led the horses over so that he could talk to Georgie. “So,” he said, “you made the team?”

Georgie nodded. “You too.”

There was an awkward silence and then Damien said, “Listen, James will never admit it, but I know he still cares about you. He wants to talk to you, but that idiot Conrad keeps giving him a hard time.”

“I wish he would talk to me,” Georgie said. “That’s all I want.”

“I know,” Damien nodded, “but he’s still hurt, you know – after what you did.”

He saw the look of astonishment on Georgie’s face. “Hey,” Damien added hastily, “I’m not blaming you, I’m just saying—”

He looked over his shoulder. “I’d better go. Can’t spend this long talking to the enemy, can I?”

He turned the horses around and walked back towards Conrad, who called out in a booming voice. “Oi, seagull!”

Conrad glared over at them and as Damien rejoined the group Georgie watched as Andrew Hurley began taunting him, flapping his arms and cawing like a gull.

“What are they doing?” Georgie was baffled.

Alice rolled her eyes. “It’s this stupid tradition at Burghley House. They do it if they catch one of their members hanging out with anyone that Conrad deems uncool.”

Georgie knew she definitely qualified. “But why ‘seagull'?”

Alice groaned. “Because only a seagull hangs out with the garbage. Lame, huh?”

For the rest of the training session, Georgie tried to ignore the Burghley boys, but she couldn’t help thinking about what Damien had said. What was that stuff about blaming her? It was James who’d taken off without any explanation!

Even though she hated herself for it, she still thought about him all too often. She had daydreams that he would suddenly have a change of heart and confess that it had all been a terrible mistake.

Being here with James in the arena, Georgie had worried that she was going to wig out and get so self-conscious that she wouldn’t be able to ride. But Conrad’s taunting actually helped her to find some steel inside herself and harden up. Conrad and the polo boys thought she wasn’t good enough, huh? They weren’t good enough!

As she rode Belle through the gridwork she’d never felt so focused, so competitive. And it showed. If Tara asked them to jump a combination with a single stride they could do it. If she asked Georgie to hold the mare back and put in three little strides instead, well, Georgie could manage that too. As they kept working on their stridings, Tara kept on raising the rails and by the time they had finished their training session, Georgie and Belle were easily clearing a metre thirty – the height that would be required for the first knockout round of the showjumping competition in just over a week’s time.

The rest of the riders all performed well too, and Tara seemed genuinely happy with her team.

“That was nice, solid work today,” she told them as they left the arena. “If we can build on this level of performance then we’ve got an excellent chance of making it through to the finals.”

“Do we know who we’re competing against in the first round yet?” Alice asked.

“No,” Tara said. “But I should have the team draw soon.”

As Tara was talking, Georgie was watching Arden Mortimer, who was standing by the edge of the arena. Arden was in the whitest, tightest breeches Georgie had ever seen, and her hair was loose and flowing over her shoulders. She waved at James and he trotted his horse over to her, and then, in full view of everyone, he vaulted down off his horse and kissed her.

“Georgie?” Alice said. “Georgie, are you OK?”

“Not really,” Georgie admitted.

“Honestly, you just need to forget him,” Daisy said bluntly.