Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [107]
Sarah Driffield: now there was a girl. There was Sarah Drif-field, undeniably in his bed. Undeniably, also, he hadn’t spent the few horizontal hours of his night in total inactivity. What a waste, he thought regretfully, that he could remember so little of it clearly.
When he’d pulled on his riding clothes and made a pot of strong coffee, Sarah Driffield was on her feet, dressed and saying, ‘Tell me I didn’t do this. My father will kill me. How the hell do I get home unseen?’
The inquisitive eyes of Lambourn awoke with the dawn. The tongues wagged universally by evening. Sarah Driffield, daughter of the reigning champion trainer, did not seek publicity concerning her unplanned escapade with the wickedly persuasive jockey who rode for John Chester, her father’s most threatening rival.
Grinning but awake to the problem, Moggie Reilly handed her the keys to his car with instructions not to move out until the horse population had trotted off to the training grounds. He told her where to leave the car and where to hide its key, and he himself jogged on foot through the town to John Chester’s stable, which did his hovering hangover minor good.
Sarah Driffield! His whole mind laughed.
It had all been due to a birthday party they had both attended the evening before in The Stag, one of the Lambourn area’s best pubs. It had been due basically to the happy-go-lucky atmosphere throughout and specifically to the last round of drinks ordered by the host, that had mixed disastrously with earlier lager and whisky.
Tequila Slammers.
Never again, Moggie Reilly vowed. He seldom got drunk and hated hangovers. He remembered offering Sarah Driffield a lift home, but wasn’t clear how they had ended at his home, three and a half miles from The Stag, and not hers, barely one. In view of his alcoholic intake, Sarah Driffield had been driving.
Moggie Reilly, though within the top ten of jump jockeys, wouldn’t normally have looked on Sarah Driffield as possible kiss-and-cuddle material, admittedly on account of her father’s power, status and legendary fists. Percy Driffield’s well-known views on suitable company for his carefully educated nineteen-year-old only child excluded anybody who might hope to inherit his stable by marrying her. He was reported to have already frightened off shoals of minnows, and his daughter, no fool, used his universal disapproval as her umbrella against unwelcome advances. Which being so, jogged Moggie incredulously, which being so, how come the gorgeous Miss Driffield, the unofficial tiara-chosen Miss Lambourn, had climbed the Reilly stairs without protest?
John Chester observed the wince behind each step of his jockey’s arrival but did no more than shrug. The fast gallops got done to his satisfaction (all that mattered) and he offered a tactics-planning breakfast on his Winchester runners.
At shortly after eight-thirty, while Wendy Billington Innes, twenty miles away, still sat in frozen and helpless disbelief on her dressing stool, John Chester, bulky and aggressive, told his jockey that Storm Cone was to win the fourth race, the Cloister Hurdle, at all costs. Moggie must somehow achieve it.
John Chester had been doing his sums, and the prize money of the Cloister Hurdle would put him into leading position on the stakes-won trainers’ list. The big prizes were sparse at that time of year, as the main part of the jumping season was over: the very last was on the following day, Saturday, but Percy Driffield had no suitable runners. With luck John Chester could win the Cloister and stay ahead of Percy Driffield for the few weeks that were left.
John Chester ached to be leading trainer, and to humble Percy Driffield.
‘Find a way,’ he told his jockey,