10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [57]
“Er ...,” I said. “Thank you ... very much.”
He nodded and bent his head to his paperwork, and Jim, grinning widely, drove half a mile to the stable yard that was old, needed paint and had sent out winners by the dozen over the years to small races on west-country courses. Stallworthy didn’t aim for Cheltenham, Sandown or Aintree. He trained for local farmers and businessmen and ran their horses near home.
Jim stood in the yard and laconically pointed. “Tack room there.” He half turned. “Horse in number twenty-seven. OK?”
“OK.”
I took a look at the occupant of box 27 and found a heavily muscled chestnut gelding standing there, anxious it seemed to be out on the gallops. He had nice short legs, with hocks not too angular and a broad chest capable of pushing his way over or through any obstacle that came his way. More the type of a tough hardy steeplechaser than an ex-flat racer graduating to jumps.
I guessed at stamina and an unexcitability that might take a tiring amateur steadfastly towards the finish line, and if there were anything against him at first sight it was, perhaps, that he was a bit short in the neck.
Jim whistled up a groom to saddle and bridle the chestnut, though I had the impression that he had at first intended that I should do it myself.
Jim had considered me a sort of a joke. Perhaps my actual presence in the yard had converted me from joke to customer. In any case, neither Jim nor the groom saw anything but ordinary sense when I asked if I could see the chestnut being led around the yard at a walk. Somewhere along the way in my scrappy racing education I’d been told and shown by an avuncular old pro jockey that a horse that walked well galloped well. A long, slow stride bode well for long-distance ’chases. A tittupping scratchy little walker meant a nervous, scratchy little galloper.
The stride of the chestnut’s walk was long enough and slow enough to suggest a temperament that would plod forever. When he and his groom had completed two circuits of the yard I stopped him and felt his legs (no bumps from past tendon trouble) and looked in his mouth (which perhaps one shouldn’t do to a gift horse) and estimated him to be about seven years old, a good solid age for a steeplechaser.
“Where do I ride him?” I asked Jim, and he pointed to a way out of the yard that led to a gate into a vast field that proved to be the chief training ground for the whole stable. There were no wide-open downland gallops, it seemed, in that cozy part of Devon.
“You can trot or canter down to the far end,” Jim said, “and come back at a half-speed gallop. He ... the chestnut ... knows the way.”
I swung onto the chestnut’s back and put the toes of my unsuitable running shoes into the stirrups, lengthening the leathers while getting to know the “feel” of the big creature who would give me half speed and at least an illusion of being where I belonged.
I might never be a great jockey, and I might at times be clumsy and uncoordinated owing to growing in spurts and changing shape myself, but I’d ridden a great many different horses in my school holidays by working for people who wanted a few horses cared for while they went away on trips. I’d begged racehorse experience from trainers, and for the past two years had ridden in any race offered: twenty-six outings to date, with three wins, two thirds and three falls.
The Stallworthy chestnut was in a good mood and let me know it by standing still patiently through the stirrup-leather lengthening and the pause while Jim sorted out a helmet in the tack room, insisting that I wear it even though it was a size too small.
The chestnut’s back was broad with muscles and I hadn’t sat on a horse for three and a half weeks; and if he’d been mean-spirited that morning he could have run away with me and made a fool of my deficient strength, but in fact he went out onto the exercise ground as quietly as an old hack.
I didn’t enjoy his