The Auditions (13 page)

“I don’t think Paddy knows how to trot!” Cam muttered to Alice and Georgie as he rejoined the other riders.

Kennedy Kirkwood had ridden the water next and Tara had been complimentary as Kennedy took the easy route from west to east. “Nicely done, good canter stride and strong body position.”

Of all the riders who followed, only Nicholas Laurent and Daisy King took the water the hard way, jumping down off the big bank and cantering through and out the other side.

As Georgie rode forward to take her turn, she was determined to take this chance to prove herself. Even though she was on an untested novice mare, she decided she would go one better than Nicholas and Daisy, by taking the riskiest of all routes into the water, the big leap into the pond off the high bank, topped by a sudden turn to canter out again, jumping over one ofthe low banks. It was an option that demanded precise control and courage and no one had attempted it so far.

“Go ahead when you’re ready, Georgie,” Tara called out.

Georgie was surprised when the mare set off like a bullet. There was no way she could hold Belladonna back as she fought for her head and came in at the water complex at a mad gallop, far too fast to take the big drop into the water. Georgie was still trying to slow her down when Belladonna approached the jump. She stood up in her stirrups and then, just as Georgie was preparing for the mare to leap, Belladonna didn’t. Instead, she shied violently to the left and Georgie flew over her head and into the pond. As she emerged from the water muddy and soaking, the only thing Georgie felt was embarrassment.

“A bit ambitious perhaps,” was Tara’s assessment as Georgie climbed up the bank looking like a drowned rat.

“Miss Kelly?” Kennedy piped up gleefully from the sidelines. “Perhaps she should wear a snorkel instead of a hard hat next time?”

“That’s not funny,” Tara said firmly as Kennedy and Arden sat there giggling.

“Try that again please,” Tara told Georgie. “But bring her in the easy way this time, we don’t want her to get phobic about water jumps, OK?”

Sodden and humiliated, Georgie clambered back into the saddle. As she approached the low bank, Belladonna still raced it but Georgie was ready for her this time. She hung back and sat heavy with a gruff growl and managed to ride Belladonna successfully into the water and up the other side.

“That’s it everyone!” Tara said. “Back to the stables.”

There is nothing worse than the clammy feeling of riding in wet jodhpurs. As she rode back humiliated and shaking, all Georgie wanted to do was get her horse unsaddled and go back to the dorms.

“That was quite the performance.” It was Kennedy Kirkwood. She slid down off Versace and stood next to Georgie. “Is that how you won the UK auditions? Did you do a little synchronised swimming or did the judges let you in for performing backstroke?” she said snidely.

“Shut up, Kennedy!” snapped Alice. She had afurious look on her face as she defended her friend. “It’s her first day on a new horse and she’s got jetlag.”

Kennedy shrugged. “I thought you’d be my rival, Parker. I guess I was wrong about you.”

“Why don’t you join Miss Clairmont’s lessons now and stop wasting everyone’s time,” Arden joined in. “If you learn to do nice plaits I might hire you. I could do with a new groom.”

As the showjumperettes walked away giggling, Alice and Cameron closed ranks around Georgie.

“I’ll take care of Belladonna for you,” Cam offered, “if you want to go and get changed.”

“Thanks,” Georgie said, “but you heard what Arden said. Untacking and grooming horses may be my new career once I fail this class.”

“Who ever listens to anything Arden says?” Alice said dismissively. “She’s Kennedy’s lapdog. She only barks when she’s given permission. And as for Kennedy, she’s like a hyena. She looks for the weakest one in the herd and tries to drag them down. But if you ignore her she’ll pull her claws in and move on to someone else.”

Georgie felt terrible. Back home in Little Brampton she hadn’t exactly won any popularity contests, but no one had ever bullied her. And when it came to riding, she had always been the most fearless one on the crosscountry course. It had, without a doubt, been one of the worst days of her life. “At least today’s over,” she said to Alice as they slid their saddles back on to the racks.

Alice screwed up her face. “Ummm… have you forgotten?”

“Forgotten what?” Georgie asked.

“Georgie, it’s four o’clock. You’ve got to go to the Great Hall and meet Conrad. You’re on fatigues.”

A
fter her disastrous cross-country lesson, Georgie had dutifully reported for fatigues and found herself in a field for the next two hours with a pitchfork in her hands, picking up horse dung and wheelbarrowing it to the compost heap as Conrad told her to “put some effort into it”.

As she dragged herself back to the boarding house that night, aching, smelly and utterly miserable, Georgie decided that this was rock bottom. Life at Blainford could not get any worse. But then that was before she had natural horsemanship classes with Miss Loden.

Natural horsemanship was one of the compulsory subjects at Blainford. “Call me River,” the teacher toldthem at the start of their lesson. River Loden didn’t wear jodhpurs and a hard hat. She wore sage-green cotton harem pants and rope sandals and her wrists were strung with silver horse charms. She smelt of pennyroyal flowers and her long curly dark hair was tied back with a lavender twist.

“Today,” River told them, “we’ll be exploring our relationship with our horse by sharing our ch’i.”

Ch’i, River explained to the class, was life energy. “The essence of our bodies, expressed by our breathing, just like transcendental yoga,” she said, twirling her hands as she spoke. The class spent the next hour breathing up their horses’ nostrils trying to share their ch’i.

“It’s an ancient natural horsemanship practice,” River insisted. “If you breathe gently up the horses’ noses, it will calm them.”

Alice wasn’t so sure. “I think Will could do with a breath mint!” she hissed to Georgie.

Georgie decided to give the breathing her best shot, but after half an hour of inhaling and exhaling andgetting nothing but baffled snorts in return, she was ready to mount up.

River Loden, however, had other ideas. “Groundwork is very overlooked,” she told the riders. “There’s no need to ride the horses. We’re going to spend the rest of the afternoon on the ground doing rope work to improve our personal space and help our relationships.”

They spent the rest of the lesson with the horses in halters and lead ropes, teaching the horses to take a step back if they gave the rope a vigorous wiggle. Georgie couldn’t believe it. “I fail to see how this is going to help me get a clear round on the cross-country course,” she muttered.

River Loden, who had ears like a bat, overheard and floated over to her like a sage-green cloud. “I should have known I had some eventing students in this class,” she said softly. “You’re the ones with the prickly energy. It’s always the same. You’re the hardest to convert to natural methods. You have very rigid ideas about what being a horseman means. You need to expand your minds.”

Kennedy Kirkwood was not convinced. “I’ll expand my mind when she shrinks those pants,” she muttered to Arden. “Harems are so over.”

At the other extreme, dressage class the next day with Bettina Schmidt was like being put through army bootcamp. From the moment the riders were mounted up and in the arena Bettina was barking orders at them. She wore a headset with an amplifier strapped to the small of her back so that the riders could hear without her shouting–but she managed to shout anyway and her instructions never stopped. She made them ride non-stop for two whole hours, spending half of that time with the stirrups crossed over at the front of the saddle so that the riders had to cope without them.

“You will never master sitting trot if you do not let go of your dependence on stirrups and relax your thighs!” Bettina asserted as the riders bounced around the arena.

Georgie wanted to point out to Bettina that it was hard to relax your thighs when you were on a brand new horse that was prone to bolting off at full gallop. Belladonna had the most enormous trot stride that wasalmost impossible to sit to. But it was clear that no one talked back to Bettina and so she clung on and survived the two-hour ordeal.

“I think that sitting trot has loosened my fillings,” she groaned to Alice as they dismounted and took the horses back.

Alice was walking with her legs apart like a cowboy. “The first hour was painful enough,” she said, “but the second hour gave pain a whole new meaning.”

Thursday’s class was Western Compulsory with Hank Shepard who had a leathery tan and wore a Stetson atop a lustrous wave of grey hair. His handlebar moustache flicked up at the corners, making it look like he was always smiling. He sat on the fence post by the arena and twirled his lasso at his feet in slow languid loops as he talked.

“Y’all can call me Shep,” he told the students.

“This guy is going to be another rope wiggler like Loden,” Alice whispered to Georgie. But Shep didn’t believe in rope wiggling or groundwork.

“For your half-term exam you’ll need to know how to rope a steer from a gallop,” he told them. “So let’s getstarted. I’ve got two dozen cattle in the chute ready to go.”

Isabel Weiss was horrified. “My Oldenburg has never even seen a cattle!” she told Georgie with wide eyes. “He is a purpose-bred dressage horse with outstanding bloodlines, worth a fortune, and this cowboy expects me to chase these beasts with a bit of rope?”

Tyler McGuane and Jenner Philips were the first volunteers to try out. Both of them made it look easy, galloping down hard after the steers when the chute opened, roping their calf around the horns and flinging themselves off their horse to plant the beast on the ground and hogtie its feet. Despite being half the size of the boys, Bunny Redpath and Blair Danner also managed to rope and pin a steer each. Their horses were brilliant at cattle cutting and the girls did fearless leaps from their backs to wrestle the calves to the ground, hogtying them briskly and stepping back with hands raised so that Shep could clock their time.

Arden Mortimer was the first non-Western to give it a go. When the chute opened her Holsteiner took onelook at the calf and reared back. Arden shrieked and dropped her lasso on the spot.

“I broke a nail on that stupid rope!” she scowled, as she held up her lilac fingertips. After that, she refused to try again.

None of the other non-Westerns fared much better. Cam, who fancied himself as a bit of a cowboy, rode hard after the calf and even managed to get the rope around its neck, but instead of tying the end to his pommel horn he had mistakenly tied it to his own belt. As the steer took up the slack he was yanked out of his saddle and got dragged along the ground for the length of the round pen before Shep could cut him loose.

Georgie felt sick with nerves when she was in the chute waiting for her turn. When the gates opened she managed to keep Belladonna alongside the steer long enough to throw the rope but missed the horns entirely.

At least she was trying. Kennedy seemed entirely preoccupied with Westernising her Blainford uniform by knotting the shirt at the waist to show off her tanned midriff and Nicholas Laurent made a half-hearted attempt, tossing the rope in the air as if he didn’t care.

“We have cattle on my farm at home,” he told Shep sniffily, “but in France we do not chase our cows with silly ropes.”

Matt Garrett, the Australian rider, seemed to cope the best. His lasso was wonky but he managed to get it over the steer’s head and wrestle him to the ground. “We’ve got a cattle farm too, in Coober Peedy,” he told Nicholas.

“How big is your farm?” Nicholas asked. “We have over two thousand acres in the Dordogne.”

“Mate! We have two hundred thousand acres,” Matt replied. Nicholas looked impressed until he added, “Mind you, most of it is desert. There’s more snakes than cows on our place.”

Friday afternoon’s showjumping class seemed to be the only thing the showjumperettes had talked about all week. Georgie realised something strange was up when Arden refused to put her helmet on before class. When one of the other riders mentioned that being on her horse bare-headed was against the rules she snapped at them. “I don’t want to squash my blow-dry before Trent gets here!”

Alice rolled her eyes. “Arden, put a helmet on before your brain falls out.” She turned to Georgie. “The showjumperettes are all in love with Trent.”

It was easy to see why. In his taupe polo breeches, white shirt and tobacco-coloured Dubarry boots, Trent Chase looked like a movie star–all tanned skin, wavy brown hair and perfect white teeth. He was the youngest teacher at Blainford and he’d already competed in the USA World Equestrian Games.

“He’s also a ten-goal polo player,” Alice told Georgie. “Honestly, if those showjumperettes could use a lasso properly I swear one of them would throw a rope around Trent Chase!”

Despite his too-handsome-for-his-own-good charm, Georgie liked Trent Chase immediately. The instructor had a direct, no-nonsense approach to showjumping that reminded her of Lucinda. They spent the day doing gridwork. Trent had set up a long alley of small fences down the middle of the arena. The grid began with trotting poles and progressed to cavaletti, finishing off with three higher jumps constructed with coloured rails. The horses all followed each otherthrough the grid in single file with Trent calling out to the riders to work on their rhythm and maintain a steady unchanging position.

After their mad galloping display at the water complex, Georgie had been nervous that she would have problems jumping Belladonna. But working with other horses in front of her meant that Belladonna couldn’t just gallop off. Forced to slow down she actually relaxed and took the showjumping grid in her stride, performing brilliantly.

“Fantastic riding, Georgie!” said Trent, singling her out. “You can tell that you’re Ginny Parker’s daughter–you ride just like your mother. She was always a hero of mine.”

Kennedy was far from impressed by the attention that Georgie was getting. “Just because Trent has some sort of Ashton Kutcher complex about your mother, doesn’t mean you can out-jump me,” she said in front of the others as they were hacking back towards the stables. “I won my place at this school as a showjumper and when the mid-term exam comes I expect to be in the number one spot.”