The Country Escape (36 page)

‘That must be a nightmare and a half.’

‘Don’t laugh. He captains a yacht in full
Officer and a Gentleman
kit. I still don’t really remember what he looks like – Hopflask should be prescription-only – but he’s lovely in my dreams.’

‘You’re in for a bit
of a disappointment,’ Kat said kindly.

‘Please tell me there’s at least one gorgeous eligible bachelor playing.’

‘Dougie Everett.’

‘He’s yours.’

‘He is not! He flirts with everyone in the village. I only put up with him to improve my riding. Today was awful. I told him a bit about Nick and he was a completely insensitive shit.’

‘You told him about Nick?’ Dawn
breathed in amazement, and Kat realized she had already given herself away. But she was unwilling to admit to the confusion that had been stirred up along with the mud as she scrambled from deep water.

‘I won’t let it beat me,’ she said again.

Later, Kat lay awake beneath her hot blanket of elderly snoring dogs, grateful that it was the shortest night as she tried not to
relive the one day that had changed her life’s direction totally. Flashbacks of today’s total submersion kept haunting her, and she longed for a reassuring body to cling to.

She got up to go outside and watch the dawn stealing across the lake, sitting cross-legged beneath the black willow, a magnificent broad-trunked relic from the Edwardian arboretum.

‘I won’t let it beat me,’ she
whispered.

A warm breath on her neck made her jump out of her skin, and she turned to see two blue eyes looking at her worriedly. ‘Sri.’ She scratched the mare’s forehead, running her hand along her neck still looking across the lake. ‘Tell me we can do it.’

The mare rubbed her face vigorously against Kat’s arm before looking up suddenly with a deep, wary snort.

Then Kat saw
the stag on the far bank of the lake, cast in the first silver cloak of dawn, his antlers like winter trees, head lifted high as he registered her presence with a gleam of a dark eye before loping off, tail flicking.

She stayed to watch the steely fingers of a new day’s light stretching across the water and tried to imagine herself on Sri, sending ripples in their wake as they raced towards
the house. She could do it easily if Dougie rode with her as he had today. Riding pillion to a stuntman was a confidence shot like no other.

She had an image of them swimming on horseback together now as she gazed across the water, seeing his blond head turning to look at her over his shoulder, the big smile full of encouragement, and those dark-lashed eyes full of pride. But then he ruined
it by shouting instructions at her through a megaphone like a boat cox. ‘Stroke! Stroke! Stroke! Don’t catch crabs! It’s sink or swim!’ She sat up with a start, realizing she’d drifted off to sleep. Heaving herself up, she headed back to the house to get dressed in her yard clothes. She envied Dawn her recurring dreams of yachts with a man dressed in officer uniform, even if he was Dair Armitage.
Her own dreams still revolved around water, drowning and – increasingly – Dougie Everett turning on her.

Posters for the masked movie night had been pinned all over the village hall notice-board. As Kat warmed up her ladies for their Bums and Tums class, she found her eyes drawn to Vivien Leigh swooning in the arms of Clark Gable, flames
leaping in the background.

Babs Hedges edged closer as they did shoulder shrugs, red-faced and eager in ancient cycling shorts and a faded Countryside Alliance T-shirt. ‘You must be missing Russ while he’s away touring with the band.’ She made her husband’s nephew sound like Eardisford’s answer to Jimmy Page.

Kat gave a vague hum and a noncommittal smile as she moved into side stretches.

‘He’s always been a bit of a wandering minstrel, but he comes back eventually,’ Babs reassured her kindly, arms criss-crossing now as though she was directing traffic around Hyde Park Corner. Rumours of a rift between the reigning wassail monarchs were clearly doing the rounds and she wanted the low-down. ‘I hear you’ve been riding out with the young hunt master every evening,’ she said
leadingly. ‘The ladies were worried you’d cancel Bums and Tums. Viv has her daughter’s wedding coming up and still can’t get into that Jaeger dress.’ She nodded towards a figure silhouetted by the tall windows, waving her bingo wings enthusiastically. ‘We need you, Kat love.’

‘I wouldn’t let you down,’ she said, flustered to be the subject of such intense gossip. ‘Dougie’s just been teaching
me race riding.’ She hadn’t told him she would be here this evening instead of riding, but he’d been horribly flippant yesterday and she didn’t want him joining her class again.

‘Dair mentioned you two have been thundering about Lush Bottom like a pair of hares every evening,’ Babs was saying, a frown bearing down on her button eyes. ‘You’re not still seriously thinking of riding the Bolt,
are you, Kat love?’

‘Why not?’

‘You do know Constance wasn’t the last Mytton to ride it? One of the daughters tried it in the seventies. Back then, the hunt kennels were still on the estate and a few Brom thrusters egged her on to do it. The horse drowned. Terrible business.’

Kat stood still, shocked. ‘Constance didn’t mention it.’

‘She never knew. She and Ronnie were
away – Italy, I think, pearl wedding anniversary. It was all hushed up, and the huntsman behind it left soon afterwards.’

‘I wouldn’t do anything to put Sri at risk.’

‘Of course not. That young Dougie Everett will see you right.’ Babs gave her engine-tick laugh. ‘My girls are totally smitten and – what is it they say? – “well jell” of all the rumours about him setting his cap at
you.’ Seeing Kat’s horrified face, she chuckled. ‘Oh, you know what pub talk’s like. Don’t worry, Russ told them there’s nothing going on and never would be.’

‘Russ told them?’

‘The night of the quiz, it was. A few of the earthmen got a-chuntering when you weren’t there and young Dougie left early, but Russ said you knew what you were doing.’

Kat realized the entire Bums and
Tums class was listening in fascination to the conversation now. ‘Oh, yes, I do,’ she said brightly, glancing up at the
Gone With the Wind
poster as she reached for the stereo to flip to a high-energy track. ‘Time for the thirty-minute burn, ladies.
Are you ready?
’

Dougie dealt with the news that a VIP might be arriving at short notice in the same way he dealt with anything he
didn’t want to dwell upon: by ignoring it. It was out of season, and no fool would want to follow hounds in midsummer. In any case Dair was set to rustle up some shooting.

By contrast, he found it impossible to ignore the nagging doubt that he’d pushed Kat too far and misjudged the situation. Whenever he tested her riding nerve, he found the hardest steel, yet her emotional temperature
shot up and down, like the mercury in a thermometer. She seemed so fearless, but her past clearly chased her, no matter how fast he rode. Her failure to turn up at the meadow that evening bothered him deeply, and his impatience was no longer about deadlines or dares. He wanted to see her to apologize for coming on too strong and to try to make the smile reach her eyes again.

He rode to
Lake Farm, but found nobody at home, a dachshund barking at him furiously through the cat flap.

Several miserable-looking pheasants were lined up in makeshift runs and coops in the open-fronted barn. He remembered Kat saying they drove her mad and were always dying for no good reason – it was one of the only negative things she’d said about Russ and his obsession with rescuing wildlife.
Double-checking that nobody was around, he liberated a few of the healthier ones. Dougie found Kat’s loyalty to Russ Hedges baffling and infuriating. He could only imagine that she saw the big, hairy militant as one of the many animals she cared for in the sanctuary, plus occasional guard dog, and he thought it was high time for a badger cull.

Sri was turned out in the field along with
her small herd, he noticed, and Harvey charged up to say hello as Dougie approached, pushing at his pockets for mints, barely recognizable because he’d been rolling in the red Herefordshire soil so that his grey coat was patched with chestnut, like a poor impersonation of the Marwari mare.

Dipping his hand into the water trough, Dougie wrote his phone number and DOUGIE on Harvey’s red side,
followed by a handprint on his still-white quarters like a Hindu sacred cow. He was about to add a smiley face when he stopped himself, appalled at his sentimentality. Harvey shambled off to roll again, then shook himself and trotted away to his rejoin his new best friend, at which point Dougie saw he had smudged off the number.

Having popped in to see Miriam after her class and
stayed on for supper and too much Pinot Grigio – only to find herself grilled about Dougie’s hunting plans and her own Bolt-riding ones – it was dusk by the time Kat came home. When she checked the horses in the fading light, she briefly mistook Dougie’s old stunt horse for Sri and thought she was seeing things at first, a message from Constance beyond the grave appearing on one dark patch. Then,
realizing it was Harvey, she felt the wine kick in and addressed the horse as though he was his master whose name was written on his side.

‘You are a gorgeous, arrogant bastard, you know that? I don’t trust you at all. And I wish it was as simple as tumbling into bed with you for a week until I can’t walk, but for me that’s more terrifying than riding through any lake you could show me.
And, God help me, I fancy the arse off you.’

As Harvey pricked up his ears and turned his heard sharply towards the woods, Kat heard crashing through the undergrowth and groaned, imagining her Catherine the Great speech doing the rounds in the pub. But then, to her relief, she saw the unmistakable shape of the big stag’s antlers moving away through the trees.

When Kat took
Sri to the hidden meadow the following evening, Dougie was already riding there, cantering Rose along the row of willows. A storm was gathering overhead as they caught up alongside.

‘I’m so glad you came.’ He laughed, the blue eyes earnest, pupils huge.

‘I can’t stop,’ she confessed breathlessly.

‘Me neither,’ he said, riding closer. ‘I’ve never felt like this.’

‘I
mean I have no brakes,’ she shouted, demonstrating her problem by pulling on the reins, which Sri cheerfully deflected with a flurry of fly-bucks, then speeded up more. ‘I literally can’t stop!’

Dougie’s smile widened and he accelerated to match. ‘The secret is not to try too hard. Race me to the first horse chestnut.’ He nodded at it.

Flying along in his slip-stream, Kat knew she
was really galloping now, that flat-line, breakneck speed that was a feeling like no other. It was why she was here, she reminded herself. The adrenalin kick was astonishing, and the thought of racing from one end of the estate to the other at such speed, with a stretch of water to cross, was beyond daunting.

‘You’ll need to cover ground at this pace through the main stretches of old parkland
and the best headlands to buy yourself time through the woods and the lake,’ Dougie told her, as he pounded alongside on the grey mare. ‘But you’ll need much better brakes, you’re right. That’s what went wrong the other day. Take more contact, apply pressure with your legs and start to sit up – great. Now kick on again, fast as you can to the big oak over there, where we’ll slow up enough to
turn and gallop back.’

Turning wasn’t something Sri was eager to co-operate with. Nose in the air, ear tips practically criss-crossing, she managed to keep up a rapid sideways pelt without knowing where she was going until they both went their separate ways under a low branch.

‘What did you say about trusting her?’ Kat grumbled, picking herself up from a mercifully soft landing in
a mossy dell.

‘She has to trust you too. You were totally unbalanced and tugging at the bit like a gym-freak on a rowing machine. Now do it again.’

After half an hour, sweat pouring from her face, she was flying around the oak like a rodeo barrel-racing champion. ‘Better?’

He nodded, his eyes darker than ever. ‘I think we’re almost ready to name the day.’

She looked
at him curiously.

‘The day you ride the Bolt.’

‘Thing is, Harv mate,’ Dougie glanced across the paddocks to the sagging roof of Lake Farm, his knobbly bicycle tyres bouncing slowly through the ruts as he let his hounds jog ahead, ‘much as I admire your taste in accommodation –
and, indeed, hostess – this is not a long-term option. We can’t get attached. She has to relocate, and it’s our duty to help her. It’s either that or come clean.’

Shambling along on the opposite side of the fenced rail that divided the millstream track from sanctuary land, Harvey regarded him wisely and very muddily, his grey coat its customary dusty chestnut from rolling.

‘In your
case, coming clean will take some time.’ Dougie conceded and pedalled on as Harvey stopped to touch noses with an eager, smiling hound.

Dougie had been out since six thirty that morning, covering almost ten miles of roads and tracks, and was ravenous. He briefly contemplated calling in on Kat, imagining scrambled goose eggs on thick doorsteps of toast, steaming mugs of tea and her dressing-gown
falling open as she passed the salt. But he knew she wouldn’t play the game. Neither would she thank him for bringing eight couple of hound into her farmyard. Theirs was an evening acquaintance that existed separately from their normal working and social lives, despite his best efforts to lure her off a horse, flirt her towards his bed and guard her like a sentry. The trouble was, he was
also flirting with a million pounds, and that had started to feel like a curse rather than a bonus.

He saw the summer as his own time, a long stretch of hazy days and naked nights before the hunting season began, a time in which he’d get his horses fit, his hounds disciplined, his local knowledge up to speed, and in which he’d do whatever it took to help Kat Mason ride for her life across
water.

He called back Honour, the bitch with the unbroken chestnut coat: she was snuffling down a rabbit hole, detached from the pack as usual.

One summer school holiday, aged about fourteen, Dougie had developed such a fierce crush on one of his father’s girl grooms that he’d got up obscenely early to walk his terrier past her shared cottage in the hope of seeing her open her curtains.
He had gone out again at dusk to watch her shut them. This was quite separate from the obscene amount of showing off he’d done, in and out of the saddle, while hanging around the stables all day trying – and failing – to impress her. Nor was it an attempt to glimpse a thrilling flash of underwear or nipple. He had simply been so besotted that he wanted to see her from the very start of the
day to its finish. To his increasing disquiet, he was now starting to feel the same way about Kat.

This was, he was certain, largely down to the summer-holiday boredom of being in rural confinement. His bonus felt like the homework he was putting off – the Bolt was far more fun. That surely had to be why he counted the hours down until seven o’clock each evening, like an avid
Archers
fan.

That evening when he met Kat to hack side by side through the estate, he started to plan the route for the historic Mytton challenge, searching out the best galloping stretches and short cuts through the trappy wooded sections.

‘So you’ve been getting to know all these coverts and gullies ready to hunt them with hounds?’ she asked, swatting midges away as they ambled alongside the
river.

He knew she was digging. She’d done it several times before – a flurry of intensive questions followed by a quick change of subject. She was so gloriously transparent and he found her pink-cheeked shiftiness adorable to watch. In turn, his tactic was to flirt with increasingly outrageous suggestions, which usually backed her off.

‘That’s right, to entertain estate guests,
although I’d far rather entertain you covertly, naked and with champagne bubbles popping on every freckle as I drink it from your gullies.’

She shot him a withering look, although her eyes couldn’t quite meet his and the mare started to jog, picking up on her rider’s tension. ‘Won’t all those international magnates and tycoons find trail-hunting a bit tame?’

‘I’ll show them some
very good sport.’ He rode closer, his eyes not leaving her face, watching the bloom of a blush stealing across it to match the pink sunset.

But she refused to back down. ‘Hard to explain the Hunting Act to a bloodthirsty banking baron, or can you bend the rules for a private foxhound pack?’

‘Totally different laws apply,’ he teased in an earnest voice.

‘What are they?’

‘Man-hunting laws,’ he said coolly. ‘Seth’s got a regular supply from the Mumbai slums.’

‘That’s so unfunny.’

‘It’s all perfectly legal under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme.’

His flirtation was gaining less purchase, he realized impatiently, sliding off her as she built her defences higher. Yet the dares they shared had lost no edge as they raced through the
deepest dry streambeds and along high ridges, pounding down the estate’s steep parkland slopes with G-force pushing their hearts into their throats, then crossing the vast, weed-choked water meadows, like settlers chasing the best land flags in the Wild West. Dougie was amazed by her nerve. She could be pretty hairy in the saddle, but she never stopped driving and whooping. She and the mare were starting
to trust one another and really have fun at last.

He led her back through the woods along the gravel-bottomed stream, wading through its shallows. She barely batted an eyelid, he noticed. But when he suggested cutting across an edge of the lake where he knew it to be boggy but no deeper than a garden pond, Kat froze, her whole body ramrod tense. Picking up on her fear, the mare started
to nap, shaking her head and backing away from the water.

They rode the long way round. Increasingly curious to know more about the scars her ex-fiancé had left, Dougie decided to draw her out by switching the game to truth.

‘I’ve been engaged three times,’ he started conversationally, hoping to get a thread going. ‘They all ended in a bit of a bloodbath.’

‘You attacked them?’

‘I was talking emotionally.’ He was aware that he was wielding a broadsword conversationally when he needed a scalpel. ‘Got as far as the altar once.’

‘Did she jilt you?’

‘More an act of God, who pretty much struck us down with a trident. Good move on His part really. We weren’t ready to settle down. Besides, Iris was far too good for me.’

She snorted disparagingly.
‘All men say that.’

‘Kiki was bad for me.’ Dougie – for whom this sort of conversation was akin to haemorrhaging blood from a main artery – cleared his throat uncomfortably. ‘I rushed into it. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a great girl, but we made a lousy couple. Hence I ran away here.’ He felt a physical pull of relief, like a thorn from his side, as he got to the point of the conversation
at last. ‘So we’re both runaways, you and I. We have so much in common.’ He brought out the big smile, riding closer, theirs leg brushing and stirrup irons clanging.

‘Did she try to drown you too?’

‘Fire was my demon.’ He found the smile impossible to sustain as he dropped out of role. Flirting was tough when you suddenly wanted to bare your soul to somebody, and when touching them
– even the clunk of two leather-booted ankles – made a tidal rapid of energy roll up your whole body.

‘Are you frightened of it now?’ she asked.

‘I don’t light a lot of bonfires.’

Kat looked across the lake as they approached it. ‘That must be such a hard thing to get over.’

‘No more awful than almost drowning.’

They watched as a pair of Canada geese drifted
past on the glittering black surface of the water, honking tetchily at the riders. ‘Constance always insisted that if I swam the lake my fear would go,’ she said. ‘She dived in and out of it every summer as a girl. She said it was like a hug to her. Her parents were living in India. They left her here from the age of two – it’s unimaginable now. She had a nursemaid, a nanny and later a governess too.
Apparently the entire household swam in the lake one drought-stricken summer in the forties, including the kennel hounds and horses.’

‘Sounds bliss.’ He looked across at the evening sun, eyes creasing. ‘Shall we try it?’

‘Right now, I’d rather walk over burning coals.’

This time, Dougie wasn’t fooled by Kat’s big smile, the apparently open invitation to make light of life
that covered scars she’d kept hidden from everybody except Constance.

‘I might hold you to that,’ he said carefully. ‘Then we can ride through a lake to cool off. Take the plunge together.’

‘Ha-ha.’

‘Constance was right. You need to jump right in. Like getting back on a horse or falling in love.’

‘I don’t rush into things like you, Dougie, especially not that.’

They were riding along two parallel tractor ruts, the overhead branches so low that they continually had to duck to avoid them. Dipping their heads and turning their faces as an arch of brambles loomed, they found their eyes inches apart.

‘Did what happened with your fiancé make you frightened of marriage proposals too?’ he asked, irritated that all his soul-baring had backfired, and
now she saw him as even shallower.

She looked at him curiously. ‘Not particularly. Why? Are you thinking of asking?’

‘I might.’ He put on his suavest Rhett Butler voice: ‘Did you ever think of marrying, just for fun?’

‘If that’s a dare, it’s not funny.’

‘Actually the line is something like “Fiddle-de-dee, marriage is only fun for men.”’ Dougie’s Vivien Leigh impersonation
was, to his chagrin, far better than his Clark Gable. Seeing her blank face he explained, ‘It’s a scene from
Gone With the Wind
.’

‘I’ve never actually seen it,’ she confessed, a smile playing on her lips again. ‘I didn’t have you down as a fan of epic romances.’

‘I have eclectic taste.’ He adopted a deep, thoughtful look. In fact, the only reason he knew it so well was because he’d
been in the running for the key role in that network television series now tipped to be the biggest hit of the decade. Nagged by Abe and Kiki, he’d dutifully read the book and watched the film four times before the first casting session so that he could practically smell the rifle fire amid the cedars and swamps. He had no desire to see it again in his life, but he wasn’t about to admit that.

‘Are you dressing up tomorrow evening?’ he said.

She rolled her eyes. ‘I have no choice. It’s a sanctuary fund-raiser. Cyn is lending me a dress. The skirt’s so wide I’ll take up most of a row.’

‘In that case, I insist on giving you a lift. You’ll never fit it into your little car.’

‘I’d rather walk,’ she said, too quickly for his liking. She was avoiding his gaze again,
he noticed.

‘Then we’ll walk together. No burning coals. Never a good idea with a long skirt.’

‘You must have her entirely in your hold by now?’ Dollar checked later.

‘She’s certainly hot for more,’ he assured her.

‘And marriage?’

‘We’ve talked about it.’

‘Already? I am impressed. Keep the heat on. A million pounds is a very good dowry.’ Her deep
voice was as modulated and emotion-free as usual.

As soon as they rang off, Dougie called an old friend from the
Ptolemy Finch
crew who now worked in the BBC’s wardrobe department. ‘Micha darling, how soon can you get hold of a Confederate uniform and courier it to me?’