Showjumpers Read online

  “I always knew he was toxic,” Alice said. “He’s so vain and arrogant.”

  “He’s not,” Georgie insisted. “Not once you know him.”

  She didn’t know why she was standing up for James or why, despite what he’d done, she still felt a desperate need to see him again. All she knew was that she wasn’t ready to hate James Kirkwood. Not just yet.

  The Dupree house was two-storeyed and painted white with a massive kidney-shaped swimming pool set into the lawn. Kendal swung the wheel of the lorry and eased the vehicle down the tree-lined driveway towards the front of the house. Georgie expected Kendal to pull up and stop, but she kept on driving.

  “Mom and Dad are down at the stables,” Alice explained.

  As they arrived outside the stable block, two enormous American Staffordshire terriers bounded out, followed by a small but yappy Jack Russell.

  “Hey, Spike!” Alice said, swinging open the lorry door and leaping down to pat the brindle-coloured Staffordshire terrier, while the black and white spotted one leapt up to get her attention. “That one is Lulu,” Alice said, “and the Jack Russell is Ralph.”

  Even though Ralph was the smallest, he did all the barking. He’d obviously made enough noise to announce their arrival because the Duprees came out of the stables a moment later to greet them.

  “You must be Georgie,” Mr Dupree said, reaching out his huge bear paw to clasp her hand, a broad smile on his face. “I’m Charlie. Lovely to have you here. Alice has told us so much about you. I hear both of you girls made the House Showjumping team this term!”

  “Hi, hon!” Mrs Dupree had a Maryland accent that was much stronger than Alice and Kendal’s. She was tanned and lean like her husband and wore her black hair back in a ponytail. She had the same bubbly personality as Alice and she didn’t hesitate to give Georgie a vigorous hug.

  “Where’s Cherry?” Alice asked.

  “She’s working the horses out back,” Mrs Dupree said and smiled at Georgie. “Do you need anything to eat, hon? Maybe some lemonade?”

  “No, thanks,” Georgie said, “I’m fine.”

  “Well come out to the arena then,” Mrs Dupree said, “and see what you think of this five-year-old that Cherry convinced us to buy.”

  The Duprees were the sort of family that Georgie’s old instructor Lucinda would have classified as “true-blood horsey". It was so clear that all of them adored horses, and more than that, they understood them too.

  Cherry, the oldest of the Dupree sisters, was a Blainford graduate who was now riding the professional showjumping circuit. Like Alice and Kendal, she was lean and delicately built like a ballerina. The five-year-old in question was a Hanoverian called Doodlebug. He was sixteen-two and had the temperament of a volcano. When Georgie arrived, Cherry was having trouble settling him down and he kept doing little bucks as he went over the jumps. Cherry didn’t look at all perturbed by this, even though she was jumping him bareback!

  “Oh, Cherry doesn’t like to use a saddle on the young ones,” Mrs Dupree told Georgie. “Doodlebug doesn’t have the strength in his back yet – he’s too young, too green.”

  Georgie was stunned. The jumps in the arena were over a metre high and Cherry was taking the horse over all of them. How on earth did she manage to stay on?

  “Cherry jumps Grand Prix without a saddle,” Mrs Dupree said matter-of-factly. “She used to get into no end of trouble at Blainford, always being told off for riding bareback!”

  While Mr Dupree rearranged the jumps with the dogs gambolling along at his heels, the rest of the family watched Cherry from the sidelines.

  “Doodlebug’s on the forehand.” Alice frowned as she watched Cherry collect him up.

  “She needs to sit back,” Kendal pointed out. “That’ll make him put in that extra stride before the jump.”

  Mrs Dupree relayed their observations to Cherry, who acknowledged them with a cheery smile. “Charles,” Mrs Dupree called out to her husband. “Can you put a canter pole in front of the oxer to help Doodlebug take off?”

  “Cherry has six horses that need work at the moment,” Mrs Dupree told the girls. “I’m sure she’ll be glad of an extra hand now that you’re here too, Georgie.”

  Georgie didn’t need to be asked twice. Genuinely happy, she and Alice headed off to the stables to find themselves a horse.

  For the next two days the girls spent nearly all their time down at the arena riding Cherry’s young jumpers. Cherry insisted that they ride bareback, which took some getting used to at first, but eventually Georgie found that she could hold her normal position over the fences, almost as if the saddle was invisible beneath her.

  Afterwards they would come back up to the house and mess about, teaching the dogs to leap over the living-room furniture. Incredibly, Mrs Dupree didn’t seem to mind. “Having you girls home for the holidays is like having a hurricane come to stay,” she would laugh as Ralph, Spike and Lulu crashed into the couch and sent sofa cushions flying.

  At mealtimes the conversation invariably revolved around horses and Georgie felt like she’d learnt more about showjumping at the Duprees’ dinner table than she had in her whole life before. She loved hearing Cherry’s stories about the professional showjumping circuit.

  “Is Miss Loden still teaching Natural Horsemanship classes?” Cherry wanted to know.

  “She’s on sabbatical,” Georgie told her. “She’s gone to some island in the Bahamas to do research on the wild Abaco horses.”

  “I learnt to jump bareback in her class,” Cherry said. “Some of the other teachers were uptight about it, school rules and that, but Miss Loden was cool.”

  With a name like Cherry, Georgie had been expecting the oldest Dupree sister to be a redhead and had been shocked the first time she took off her helmet to reveal dark blonde hair. She had the same tanned skin as Kendal and was naturally beautiful, just like her sisters.

  “Oh, my! Cherry broke hearts when she was at Blainford,” Mrs Dupree told Georgie when she was in the kitchen on Saturday afternoon helping to peel potatoes for dinner. Mrs Dupree saw the look on Georgie’s face and quickly added, “Not that there’s anything clever about being a heartbreaker, Georgie. Alice told me a little about what happened with that Kirkwood boy. You did nothing wrong, hon. You trusted him and he let you down. You can go back to that school tomorrow with your head held high.”

  It was such a kind thing to say, Georgie found herself on the verge of tears. It had been so long since she’d had her own mum around, and even though Mrs Dupree already had three daughters who were quite demanding, she’d made Georgie feel like there was more than enough room for her in the family too.

  The last days of the mid-term break passed all too quickly and on Sunday morning, Georgie helped Alice and Kendal load their horses up the ramp of the lorry. Then the girls said their goodbyes and prepared to make the long drive back to Blainford. It was the first time that Mr and Mrs Dupree were letting Kendal drive there by herself.

  “Here,” Alice said, as they waved goodbye out the window and cruised up the driveway, “put this on.” She thrust a CD at her sister.

  “Over my dead body,” Kendal replied. And so the squabbling began that would take them all the way to Route 64, and the long straight highways that led back to Lexington and Blainford Academy.

  When they finally arrived just before dinnertime on Sunday, students were pouring back into the school. Horse lorries, as vast and glamorous as super-yachts, lined the Blainford driveway as they deposited horses and pupils, their sleek state-of-the-art designs looking strangely out of place beside the Georgian brick front of the school.

  As Kendal parked the lorry at the far end of the driveway Georgie spotted Daisy King and Emily Tait waving to them.

  Daisy had been Georgie’s toughest competition on the eventing circuit in Gloucestershire. It was obviously too far for Daisy to go home for the mid-term break so she had stayed at the school and her New Zealand room mate, Emily Tait, had done the same. Both the girls w
ere in Badminton – the same boarding house as Alice and Georgie. The houses at Blainford were named after famous international horse trials – there were six of them: Badminton, Burghley, Lexington, Stars of Pau, Adelaide and Luhmuhlen. Friendships and allegiances at the school were frequently defined by which house you were in.

  Burghley House was located on the driveway and was the nearest building to the main college. It was a boys’ boarding house and considered by the arrogant polo set to be the only house to be in. James Kirkwood was in Burghley, of course, and so were Damien Danforth and Andrew Hurley. The head prefect of Burghley was Conrad Miller, who made a special point of picking on Georgie – giving her fatigues (Blainford’s version of detention) on her very first day.

  Of all the boys’ houses, Georgie liked Luhmuhlen the most. Two of her best friends from eventing class – Cameron Fraser and Alex Chang – were in Luhmuhlen. Lexington House had most of the Western boys and Matt Garrett, an Australian eventer who could be annoyingly full of himself.

  The girls’ houses tended to mirror the boys so, just as Burghley was the house to be in for the polo boys, Adelaide had the same reputation for showjumping girls. The showjumperettes – Kennedy, Arden and Tori – were all in Adelaide. The uncoolest house was Stars of Pau, which tended to accommodate dressage riders and students who chose the stranger Blainford subjects like carriage racing or horse vaulting. Georgie had a few friends in Stars of Pau including Isabel Weiss, a dressage rider who had been in her cross-country class before she got eliminated after the mid-term exam.

  “Badminton House is the best one,” Alice had told Georgie on the first day they’d met. Badminton’s residents were very international. There were students from the USA, but also riders like Emily Tait and Georgie who came all the way from opposite ends of the world. Already in the few short weeks that they had been together, the Badminton girls had begun to feel like family. Even Daisy was like a sister – in an annoying, competitive sibling-rivalry way.

  “Why were you in Alice’s horse lorry?” Daisy asked as Georgie jumped down from the cab. “I thought you were spending the mid-term break at the Kirkwoods with James?”

  “I was. It’s a long story…” Georgie began.

  “James dumped her,” Alice said. “She called me and I came and got her.”

  “All right, maybe not such a long story.” Georgie sighed.

  “You’re kidding!” Emily couldn’t believe it. “What does Alice mean, he dumped you?”

  “Well, I don’t know for sure. Maybe it was a misunderstanding,” Georgie said. “He went with his dad to New York and he just sort of, well, he left me behind.”

  “Tell us about it over dinner,” Emily said. “We’re just on our way up to the dining hall.”

  “We need to unload the horses first,” Alice said. “Give us a hand?”

  While the two sisters led their horses towards the stables, Emily, Georgie and Daisy followed behind, carrying their tack. As they walked, Georgie told the unabridged version of the story, beginning with her arrival at the Kirkwood mansion and ending with Alice and Kendal coming to her rescue.

  “I wish I’d seen the look on Kennedy’s face when the truck turned up,” Daisy said. She wasn’t a Kennedy Kirkwood fan either.

  At the stables, Alice put Will in his loose box. Georgie was dying to say hello to Belladonna, but the mare wasn’t in the stalls – she was out grazing in one of the school’s paddocks.

  “Come back and see her later,” Emily said. “If we don’t go now we’ll miss out on dinner.”

  They walked briskly from the stables, back up the driveway. Ahead of them they could see the main building of the school, its red brick front with white columns and three turret rooms on the top floor that jutted up into the sky out of the red-shingled roofline. A vast stone archway in the front of the building led into a courtyard where a large square lawn, known as the quad, was bordered by broad footpaths and red-brick buildings on every side. The building on the furthest side of the quad contained the dining hall. Even though they were in a rush, the girls didn’t risk cutting directly across the quad. Georgie knew from bitter experience that only prefects and school masters were allowed to set foot on this hallowed piece of lawn.

  “We’re going to be just in time,” Emily was saying as they entered the dining room through the heavy wooden double doors. “Dinner finishes at seven-thirty and…”

  Suddenly she stopped speaking and silence fell over the group. Ahead of them in the queue were the boys from Burghley House waiting to be served by the cafeteria ladies. And there he was, laughing and talking to his friends as if nothing was wrong. He was the one person that Georgie had been dying to see. But now she was actually in the room with him she found herself wishing the ground would swallow her instead. It was James.

  Chapter Five

  Ever since James had left her at the Kirkwood mansion, Georgie had been imagining the moment when they would meet again. She’d mentally rehearsed their reunion a hundred times. James would beg her forgiveness, and Georgie would respond with a light, witty comment to prove that he hadn’t broken her heart and she was still the one in charge.

  In her dreams, maybe, but this was reality. They stood there in the dining hall surrounded by the Burghley House boys – Damien, Andrew and, worst of all, vile Conrad Miller – and James wasn’t apologising. He wasn’t even looking at her.

  Georgie stepped back into the queue between Emily and Alice and said nothing. Maybe she could pretend that she hadn’t seen him? She didn’t have the nerve to approach him with the other boys there.

  Then she heard Conrad Miller’s voice booming across the hall. “Hey, Kirkwood! Your girlfriend is behind you!”

  There were snickers from the Burghley boys and then Conrad called out to her, “Want to come hunting with me sometime, Georgie?”

  Andrew Hurley followed his lead in a silly high voice. “Oh, James, I’ve never felt like this about anyone before…”

  Georgie’s blood ran cold, her eyes fixed in horror on James. He’d told them! He’d told them everything. How could he?

  James caught her eye then looked away, that stupid lopsided grin on his face, as if this were all a joke.

  “Georgie.” Alice was standing right next to Georgie. “Just ignore him and get your food. He’s so not worth it.”

  The School Formal was a Blainford tradition at the end of the first term. “Tickets are going to be available at the front office next week,” Mrs Dickins-Thomson told the school at assembly on Monday.

  “Make that a ticket for one, please,” Georgie groaned under her breath.

  “Make that two tickets for one!” Alice muttered back. “And at least you had a boyfriend – even if he did turn out to be evil.”

  Mrs Dickins-Thomson, the Blainford headmistress, was a thin, horse-faced woman, with very erect posture and a no-nonsense manner. She ended the assembly with an update on the House Showjumping competition.

  “The competition is next month,” Mrs Dickins-Thomson said. “The house teams were chosen before term break and your coaches will be advising you shortly on training schedules. Please check your house noticeboards for details, if you are in the squad.”

  Georgie was the first out of her seat when assembly was over, dashing through the doors. By the time Alice caught up with her, she was halfway around the quad.

  “Geez, Georgie,” she complained. “I’ve never seen you this keen to get to German!”

  “I’m not!” Georgie hissed. “Hurry up!” She wanted to get to the safety of the classroom where there was no chance of accidentally bumping into James Kirkwood. He was a second year at Blainford so fortunately they didn’t share any classes.

  Kennedy, however, was unavoidable. She strode into Ms Schmidt’s German class with Arden and took her usual seat, not even bothering to look at Georgie. It seemed like Kennedy had called a kind of truce, but as Ms Schmidt began the lesson she raised her hand. “Ms Schmidt?” “Yes, Kennedy?”

  “What is the Germa
n word for ‘being dumped'?”

  Ms Schmidt was confused. “You mean the word for rubbish? Like a landfill?”

  “No.” Kennedy cast Georgie a sly glance. “I mean like, if a boy dumps you.”

  Arden burst into giggles.

  “I don’t see the use for this phrase,” Ms Schmidt said humourlessly. “And I don’t see what is so funny.” “Get Georgie to explain it to you,” Kennedy said, at which point the showjumperettes all collapsed into fits of giggles.

  Georgie struggled on through Maths and English, finding it increasingly hard to focus with Kennedy constantly making snide comments.

  “I hate the fact that Kennedy’s loving this so much,” Alice said as they walked towards the dining hall for lunch. She looked at Georgie, who had turned white at the prospect of entering the dining hall again. “Don’t worry,” Alice said reassuringly, “it’ll be OK.”

  As they walked in, Georgie’s eyes did a quick scan of the dining room, relieved to see that the polo boys must have been and gone already.

  The dining hall was in one of the oldest buildings on the Academy grounds, a vast space with high vaulted ceilings and dark wood-panelled walls decorated with ancient black and white photos of previous Blainford pupils. The hall was filled with long trestle tables, each of which sat eight pupils at a time. Like any high school cafeteria, the students divided themselves into cliques.

  But the cliques at Blainford were different to those of a normal school – the students were split into strictly horsey social groups.

  Georgie looked at the table right beside the lunch queue and saw Tyler McGuane and the rest of the Westerns hanging out together. Tyler was a good-looking boy with shoulder-length blond hair and a fringe that was so long you could barely make out his eyes. He owned a palomino Quarterhorse called Maybelline and was in the youth team for the Calgary Rodeo circuit. Next to him sat his best friend, Jenner Philips, his long black hair tied back as usual. Jenner could rope a calf in under eight seconds, and he’d been the under-sixteen bareback bronc champion two years in a row at Calgary.