The Love Letter (78 page)

Instead, Coolbaragh Farm was large and immaculate, with newly painted render, freshly creosoted fencing and tarmac so uniform and glossy black it looked like polished granite. It was alarmingly WAG-mansionesque. There were smart carriage lights dotted along the drive, beautifully edged flowerbeds bursting with red valerian, and a large stone horse rearing in the centre of a fountain on the flawless green grass in front of the house. Electric gates with a discreet CCTV camera were the only hint at the security required to protect its occupants, although that could equally have applied to the ones in the stables of its adjoining stud.

It wasn’t very Byrne-like. It felt wholly anti-climactic. It was also
punishingly hot, the storms in England having long since left its near neighbour which was basking in a late summer heatwave. She could smell the tarmac melting.

‘Who’s that?’ a cheerful female voice crackled through the intercom attached to the gatepost.

‘Legs,’ she said without thinking. Driving there from Portlaoise, she had been too busy veering between emotional extremes to formulate any sort of plan, one moment convinced that the jeweller’s hearsay had to be wrong and Byrne couldn’t be married; the next, wanting to kill him. Now that she had arrived, all she wanted to do was see him.

‘Did you say “Legs”?’ The accent wasn’t Irish. It sounded deeply European.

‘Yes. I’m here to see Byrne – Jago – Lapis – Gordon – Finch,’ she struggled. He was everything to her. He had no need for one name.

But the cheerful voice was clearly more than satisfied that she’d passed muster. ‘At
last
!
My husband’s been waiting on you all day. Come on in.’

To her amazement, the gate was opened with an electronic whirr.

A gorgeous blonde was already coming out of the front door, in possession of the sort of endless legs, pale blue eyes and cream complexion that only the purest gene-pool could contrive to reproduce. To prove the point, she carried a perfect Silbury Hill bump between her narrow hips and her pert bust, the advanced stages of pregnancy sported like a fashion accessory. Hopping along as she pulled on boots, she beamed across at Legs.

‘Come straight to ze yard. Ve are so glad you’re here.’ Her accent was very thick indeed, possibly Polish or Russian, with American vowel sounds and curiously Irish intonations. ‘My aul man’s on phone. He’ll be here shortly. He hasn’t slept in forty-eight hours. No doubt you have been told of ze situation.’ The blonde vision began striding ahead on those endless slim limbs, now
pursued by Fink the basset who cast Legs a mildly penitent look, like a serial adulterer caught out so often he no longer raised more than an eyebrow.

‘Not really …’ Having not slept for almost as many hours, Legs was struggling to keep up mentally and physically too. The blonde could cover ground like an ostrich, pregnant or not.

‘My husband has been frantic for you to get here.’ She was leading the way along the granite shiny tarmac to a stable yard of such gleaming perfection it looked like a little girl’s toy, complete with another pretty fountain and lots of hanging baskets bursting with colour like pick-n-mix scoops. The blonde headed to a far corner, where the half door had an ominous prison cell metal grille above it. ‘Ze vorst one’s over here. Nobody can get near him right now, so be careful.’ She slid open the bolt and ushered Legs in. ‘Can you see how poofy zey are?’

Before she could answer, Legs found herself sharing a very small space with very big, angry horse that was standing on three swollen legs. He hopped one way, Legs jumped the other.

‘I think there’s been a mistake …’ she bleated at the door.

‘I’ll make tea an get my aul man.’ The blonde walked away.

Legs flattened herself back against a wall as the horse bared its teeth at her. ‘Um … help!’

There was nobody outside to hear any more. Hay was munched, hooves stamped, and another horse whinnied. She crept to the door and reached through the bars of the grille to slide the lock, only to find the door was still stuck fast, a lower bolt on the outside holding it closed with steel force.

Legs’ disconsolate new companion, eager to see what was happening on the yard, limped towards its door too, still shooting her evils out of the corner of its eye which sent her scuttling against a side wall. A moment later its very large, glossy brown bum was facing her. She had very little working knowledge of horses, but she remembered a line saying that they were equally dangerous at both ends. She edged away into a corner and fought panic.

Her mind was in overdrive. Byrne was married to the leggy blonde, she realised. They had a child on the way.

She reached automatically for the back of her neck, feeling the heat burning there, horrified by her misjudgement.

Her touch-paper ignited again, this time blazing out of control. She felt so livid and humiliated that her skin seemed to blister, and she was amazed the stable didn’t combust around her. She’d been a total fool for coming here with her heart on her sleeve, for assuming such a deep connection based on their brief acquaintance. He’d told her from the start that he had nothing to give her, but she’d blindly assumed that it was because he didn’t trust love, never assuming that he was already taken. She wanted to mule-kick him, which fitted nicely with her current circumstances. If her puffy-legged stable-mate would oblige, she’d very much like him to kick Byrne too, then bite him, after which they could both roll on him. She’d show him just what a Heavenly Pony was capable of if betrayed.

No wonder he hadn’t wanted a relationship with her in the face of public exposure, she thought furiously. Away from the media gaze, Gordon Lapis could get away with whatever he liked, but as soon as his life became public, keeping a mistress would be impossibly messy.

She let out an angry sob.

The horse snorted back, far from sympathetically.

Legs snivelled and hiccupped.

A big brown head swung around and glared at her.

She gulped, looked at him apologetically, and started to wail.

A moment later and there was a loud rustling of wood shavings and a big hairy shoulder thudded against hers as the horse rubbed his cheek against her head with a deep sigh, slamming her against a wall as it sympathised with her woes.

Legs put her arm around his neck and wailed into his warm skin. She wailed for a long time. Nobody came back to check on her or bring her tea. Eventually, she and the horse started to clear
their throats and feel embarrassed. He shuffled off to pull at a haynet. She slid down the wall and buried her face in her hands, knowing that she had to get away somehow. She’d judged it all wrong. She didn’t know Byrne at all. He was a married man.

There was a voice shouting out in the yard now, deep baroque Irish, husky and whip-crack hoarse. It was a mesmerising voice, but not Byrne’s.

‘Where is she? Paddy Flynn definitely said his new man is a man. Why d’you not ask for ID? She could be one of O’Grady’s lasses sent here to dope the few sound ones we have left. Where is she now?’

The door was thrown open and Legs found herself staring at the most mesmerising older version of Byrne, with all the same chisel-boned beauty and those huge, fierce eyes, but these were deep grey to match the grey streaks in his faded red hair.

The man was sitting in a wheelchair, so white hot with anger that the heatwave-baked tarmac around him seemed destined to melt into bubbling lava.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded furiously.

The horse sharing its quarters with Legs whickered cheerfully, knowing no fear of him. She quailed by comparison.

‘Legs!’ she bleated.

‘I told you, Brooke.’ The blonde raised her palms in self-justification. ‘Ze leg person.’

‘Now there’s a thing,’ Brooke had the same gruff laugh as his son, eyeing Legs with supreme scepticism, taking in the pedalpushers, off-the-shoulder top and the reddened eyes. ‘Where’s your bag?’

‘In the car. The thing is, I—’ she started to explain, but he interrupted.

‘Think this one will race again?’

‘I couldn’t say.’

‘Half my yard is hopping around with fetlocks like footballs, so they are. My son thinks it’s a virus.’

‘Could be right, yes, only I’m not really—’

‘Sure you have a way with big Lappy, d’you not?’ he laughed as he watched the horse nuzzle her hair, now quite fond of the impostor in his stable. ‘Lapis here is a brute and he’d usually eat you as soon as look at you. Zina puts all the pretty girls in with him first.’

The blonde smiled innocently, making Legs wonder if Zina had already guessed that she was an imposter with murderous intentions towards her husband. The best course of action seemed to be keeping quiet and making a swift exit.

But Brooke was clearly enjoying the show.

‘Come and see the others,’ he’d already started wheeling away. ‘Now this little grey mare is Purple; she’s not so bad as the others – Finch here has been off colour all week; this chap Necrodorn is born idle, but he’s got filled legs on him too as has his neighbour Rushlore.’ Legs recognised the names of two of Ptolemy’s arch rivals, at least one of them based on Hector.

‘They’re all named after Ptolemy Finch characters,’ she said, stating the obvious.

Brooke was delighted. ‘Clever girl! Zina’s mad crazy on those silly books about the little grey-haired fellow, so she is. I’m not a one for reading about wizards, although I liked the movies, sure enough.’ He eyed her cheerfully, and Legs knew full well he was relishing the craic of talking about his son’s career in front of a stranger, unaware that she knew exactly who Gordon was in real life. Except the Jago Byrne she had fallen in love with was was no more real than his alter ego. He was as illusory as Ptolemy Finch himself, a fictional creation she’d coloured in with her imagination, joining the dots to make sense of the contradictions. Not once had she thought to draw a wedding ring on his finger.

A buzzer indicated another visitor at the gates. Zina trailed away towards the driveway muttering as she went. ‘I hope it’s not zat creepy Conrad fellow again, always turning up out of the blue wanting Jago to run this errand or that one, and calling me ‘Kelly’.
Jago’s a computer programmer, not a dogsbody. Fink is ze dogsbody round here.’

Panting in the heat, Fink trailed after her.

Legs was in even greater shock. Could it be possible that Byrne’s young wife had no idea he was Ptolemy Finch’s creator? She felt dangerously close to tears again. Her skin had started prickle afresh with hot needles of indignation, her breath shortening and her mule-kicking legs tensing, torn between running away and planting hard until she found him and gave him hell.

Meanwhile, Brooke was looking at her askance, both suspicious and amused, well aware of his son’s cachet as a romantic catch. And it was obvious that Brooke had a shrewd suspicion who
she
was, or at least what she wanted.

‘You mustn’t mind Zina – she’s overprotective.’ He narrowed his eyes speculatively as he took in Legs’ dishevelled blonde appearance and obvious agitation. ‘And she calls all vets “the leg man” because that’s what we call Paddy, who usually cares for the beasts here. What he doesn’t know about a nag’s pins isn’t worth knowing. But you’re obviously no vet, nor any sort of horsewoman. I take it you’re another one come to see my son?’

Legs’ eyes met his clever grey ones. He had all of Byrne’s directness with less brooding darkness. Do not cry, she told herself firmly, too choked to speak

‘You are,’ Brooke nodded with certainty. ‘I have no idea what you girls see in a waste of space like him, dreaming his life away on computers when he has such a talent to ride a horse. I suppose you two met on the internet?’

She nodded vaguely, realising it was technically correct, alarm bells ringing ever-louder in her head. How many others had there been? No wonder his pregnant young wife was such a crosspatch, left to look after her father-in-law while Byrne was gallivanting around leading his secret double life. And no wonder, again, that he had resisted losing the anonymity that allowed such deception.

His father, clearly complicit in all this, seemed remarkably unbothered.

‘You’re not the first pretty caller of the day. The other girl waited all morning. I told her he’d not be back from the quarry before dark, but she insisted on waiting here in the tower.’

It must be Kizzy, Legs realised in horror. She’d been too overwrought by the disovery that Byrne was married to give it another thought until now, but Conrad had charged the redhead with the task of bringing Gordon back to Farcombe at any cost, even if it took all-out seduction. Legs doubted a brush with incest would put Jago off given the hypocrisy she’d just uncovered, but she knew she couldn’t run away and leave them to it. They had to be told the truth.

‘Is she still here?’ Legs looked across at the crumbling stone wreck by the entrance gates, wondering what sort of family would let anyone wait in there, although the idea of locking Kizzy away in a medieval dungeon for a bit quite appealed to her.

‘Not that one,’ he cackled, following her gaze. ‘Jago’s tower, up there,’ he pointed through the archway at the rear of the stable yard to a corner of hilly woodland hidden from the road, through which a steeply raked path led up to another sun-baked limestone tower, this one intact and gloriously, totally Ptolemy Finch. ‘She’s gone now. Left about an hour ago, she did. I told her if she was going to the old quarry she’d need to change her shoes, but she took no notice. I’d lay you any odds she’ll be limping back here any minute. His last girlfriend used to set off up there dressed up to the nines with champagne picnics – always spraining her ankle and needing first aid, she was; it drove Zina mad.’