The Auditions Page 10

  As she said this, she caught sight of the whip in Mitty Janssen’s hand. “Is that a dressage whip?” Tara was wide-eyed in disbelief. “Go back to the stables and swap to a proper cross-country crop! And be quick!” Tara yelled after them as they rode off. “We’ll be waiting for you so we can start!”

  She looked at Alice, Cameron and Georgie at theedge of the arena, too scared to come in. “Ah, Miss Parker, Miss Dupree and Mr Fraser!” Tara slapped her riding crop against the palm of her hand. “Nice of you to join us at last! What are you three waiting for? An invitation from the Queen? Get in here and line up!”

  Cross-country class was about to begin and Tara was already living up to her old nickname.

  Chapter Eleven

  The eventing students stood nervously as their instructor paced in front of them with her riding crop clasped in her hands. “Welcome to cross-country class, novice level one,” Tara Kelly said. “You have all gone through the most rigorous auditions to be accepted into this school. You have proven yourselves the best young talents from around the world.” She paused and took a long hard look at the young riders lined up in front of her. “All of which counts for nothing in my class. You’ve been told you’re the best? Think again. This is where the hard work really begins. You’re about to find out if you’re a true eventing rider. We will stretch your talents beyond the limits of anything you have experienced before and take your riding to a whole newlevel. Some of you will find the pressure too much. This class has the highest drop-out rate in the school. Fifty per cent of my students will not make it to the end of the year.”

  The young riders looked terrified.

  “As you already know,” Tara continued, “class rankings happen at mid-term and then once again before the end of term. There are twelve of you in this cross-country class. All scores are accumulated towards your final end-of-year mark.” Tara frowned. “If your rank falls to the bottom of the class then you will need to consider your future–or I will do it for you. I do not encourage students to stay in my class if I do not think they can perform. Cross-country is a dangerous business and I cannot afford to have riders out there attacking fences when they are off their game.” Tara’s eyes scanned the row of riders.

  “If any of you here are half-hearted about this class then I suggest you leave now,” she said.

  Nobody moved. Tara had known that they wouldn’t. She gave this lecture every year to her first year students. From this row of twelve young hopefulsshe would try to create future stars of the international eventing world and the students in this new intake were some of the most talented that she had ever seen.

  At the far right, on her hand-me-down horse, William the Conqueror, was thirteen-year-old Alice Dupree. Tara had taught both her older sisters, but they had failed to cut it as eventing riders. However, the youngest Dupree seemed to be made of sterner stuff than her siblings and there was something steely about her that Tara liked.

  Next to Alice were two riders that Tara had chosen at the British auditions. Daisy King had a neat professional style but there was something about her dark determination that Tara found unnerving. Beside Daisy sat Cameron Fraser, a wildcard that Tara had convinced the other selectors to back. He lacked training and finesse but she liked his daredevil attitude and his natural bond with the big coloured cob he rode.

  Tara had chosen dressage rider Isabel Weiss at the auditions in Germany. She was puzzled to see her taking part in the cross-country class, but impressed by Isabel’s determination to push herself beyond herlimits. She was uncertain about Isabel’s choice of horse too, a heavy-boned brown Oldenburg. Although solid enough jumpers, Oldenburgs could be slow across-country.

  Tara suspected that Mitty Janssen had only joined the class because she was Isabel’s best friend. Mitty rode a dark brown Dutch Warmblood that Tara definitely liked much better as a cross-country prospect.

  Emily Tait was next in line. The New Zealander rode one of the school horses, a jet-black Thoroughbred called Barclay. The boy next to her, Alex Chang, was Chinese, but spoke with an English accent. His mother was a diplomat and Alex had learnt to ride in Oxfordshire. His mount, Tatou, was an Anglo-Arab grey, which was unusual since the breed were commonly chestnut or bay.

  To the right of Alex on a very glossy Selle Francais gelding was Nicholas Laurent. Nicholas had been in the French junior equestrian team before Tara had chosen him at the European auditions. There was already an arrogance to Nicholas, Tara thought, but rightly so. Hewas undoubtedly one of the best riders of the group. Beside him was another self-assured young rider, Australian, Matt Garrett, who rode a school horse, a handsome sixteen-two hand dun called Tigerland.

  Isabel and Mitty weren’t the only additions to the group that had surprised Tara. Kennedy Kirkwood had been a stand-out rider in the US auditions. She had star quality, no doubt about that. But she was a Kirkwood–a family with a showjumping heritage. Tara had not expected to see her in this class. Neither had she expected to see Kennedy’s best friend and fellow socialite Arden Mortimer. It was a relief to see that Tori Forsythe had decided to stick with Miss Clairmont’s turn-out classes instead of joining them.

  Kennedy rode a powerful chestnut Selle Francais gelding called Versace while Arden rode a dark-brown Holsteiner mare called Prada. Tara couldn’t help smiling at how perfectly the two horses suited these girls. Typical showjumperettes, she thought, choosing horses to match their hair colour.

  The other English rider in the cross-country class was Georgie Parker. Tara had some misgivings aboutassigning Belladonna to the girl. The mare, like her rider, was green, but talented. If it worked then they would be unstoppable, but there was the risk that Belladonna could be too much horse for Georgie to handle.

  “Right!” Tara said briskly. “Check your girths and take your stirrups up to jumping length. We’ll warm up and take a look at your positions in the arena and then I’m going to take you out on the novice course. It features the smallest fences we have here at Blainford and should be within your capabilities. Your lesson in week four will be the first rankings test. You will be expected to get a clear round.”

  Tara saw the worried expressions on their faces. “I’m not making you ride the whole course today. We’re going to tackle the difficult jumps on this course one by one.” She paused. “Today we’re going to be jumping the water complex.”

  The novice course was the smallest of the three cross-country courses, and its water jump was not much more than a large pond. It was less than half a metre deep all the way across–not enough, Georgienoted with relief, to get trapped underneath her horse this time.

  The pond could be entered and exited in any number of combinations from all directions. If you trotted in from the north side you could ride straight into the water without jumping. Then in five strides, at a trot, you were through the pond and jumping up a metre-high wooden retaining wall on to the raised bank on the other side. Or you could take the same route in reverse, leaping off the bank into the water and then cantering out the other side. The easiest routes were to come at the water from the west or east side, jumping in off the low raised banks on either edge of the pond.

  “I’m not going to give you any advice on how to approach this jump, or which route or angle you should take,” Tara told the twelve riders. “I want to see the decisions that you make and gauge the kind of riders you are.”

  It turned out that the twelve riders were all very different indeed. Some, like Cameron Fraser, only knew one speed on a cross-country course–a mad gallop. Cam rode Paddy through the water and flew the largebank to get out again at top speed.

  “You were lucky,” Tara told him. “There was no control. If your horse had got into trouble you were powerless to adjust his stride. Try it at a trot next time!”

  “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 rou
te 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.”

  Chapter Twelve

  After 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 bolti
ng 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.