Read Online To the Hilt by Dick Francis - Free Book Online

I felt for her could at worst be described as lust, and at best as unrealistic Round Table chivalry. Worse than hate or love, we had come near to apathy.
    I had walked, feet metaphorically dragging, from the bus stop to the stable on Upper Lambourn Road. I had arrived as she was completing her evening rounds of the stable, checking on the welfare of each of the fifty or so horses entrusted to her care.
    It was true, as jealous detractors pointed out, that she had inherited the yard as a going concern from a famous father, but it was her own skill that continued to turn out winners trained by Cox.
    She loved the life. She loved the horses. She was respected and successful. She might once also have loved Alexander Kinloch, but she was not going to dump a busy and fulfilled career for solitude on a bare cold mountain.
    “If you love me,” she’d said, “live in Lambourn.”
    I’d lived with her in Lambourn for nearly six months, once, and I’d painted nothing worth looking at.
    “It doesn’t matter,” she’d consoled me early on. “Marry me and be content.”
    I had married her and eventually left her. She’d never used my name, but had become simply Mrs. Cox.
    “What are you doing here?” she repeated.
    “Er... my stepfather had a heart attack.”
    She frowned. “Yes, I read it in the papers. But he’s all right, isn’t he? I telephoned. Your mother said not to worry.”
    “He’s not well.... He asked me to look after his horses.”
    “You? Look after them? You don’t know all that much about horses.”
    “He just said...”
    She shrugged. “Oh, all right then. You may as well set his mind at rest.”
    She turned away from me and walked back across her stable yard to an open door where a groom was positioning a bucket of water.
    She had dark hair cut like a cap and the sort of figure that looked good in trousers. We were the same age almost to the day, and at twenty-three had married without doubts.
    She’d always had a brisk authoritative way of talking that now had intensified with the years of responsibility and success. I had admired—loved—her positive energy, but it had drained my own. Even if I’d still loved her physically, I couldn’t have forever bowed to her natural habit of command. We would have quarreled if I’d stayed. We would have fought if I’d ever tried to return. We existed in a perpetual uncontested truce. We had met four times since I’d left, but never alone and never in Lambourn.
    Ivan had three horses in training in Emily’s yard. She showed me two unremarkable bays and one bright chestnut, Golden Malt. Somewhat to my dismay he had noticeably good looks, two white socks and a bright white blaze down his nose: great presence as an advertisement for a brewery, not such a good idea for disappearing without trace.
    “He’s entered for the King Alfred Gold Cup,” Emily said with pride, patting the horse’s glossy neck. “Ivan wants to win his own race.”
    “And will he?”
    “Win?” She pursed her lips. “Let’s say Golden Malt’s running for the news value. He won’t disgrace himself, can’t put it higher than that.”
    I said absently, “I’m sure he’ll do fine.”
    “What’s the matter with your eye?”
    “I got mugged.”
    She nearly laughed, but not quite. “Do you want a drink?”
    “Good idea.”
    I followed her into her house, where she led the way through the much-lived-in-kitchen, past her efficient office and into the larger sitting room where she entertained visiting owners and, it seemed, revenant husbands.
    “Still Campari?” she inquired, hands hovering over a tray of bottles and glasses.
    “Anything.”
    “I’ll get some ice.”
    “Don’t bother,” I said, but she went all the same to the kitchen.
    I walked across the unchanged room with its checked wool sofas and dark oak side tables and stood before a painting she’d hung on the wall. It showed a view of windswept links with a silver slit of sea in the background; with gray