Showjumpers Page 8

  Mrs Winton moved around the horse to work on the other side. As soon as she was out of sight, Kennedy and Arden began giggling and grabbing handfuls of fluff off the stable floor, throwing it at each other like snowballs.

  “Girls!” Mrs Winton stuck her head over Lagerfeld’s back and caught Kennedy in mid-throw. “I hope you’ve been paying attention and not just fooling around, because now it’s your turn.”

  The teacher walked over to a stack of clipper boxes and began to hand them out. “You’re going be clipping your own horse.”

  Kennedy looked horrified. “But Mrs Winton, we get a man in to do our horses!”

  “As a professional eventing rider, you will have as many as twelve horses in work,” Mrs Winton replied. “You’ll save a fortune if you can do this yourself.”

  “I don’t care about the money,” Kennedy sniffed.

  Mrs Winton thrust a clipper box into her hands. “Think of it as a beauty parlour for ponies,” she suggested. “You can give them a manicure afterwards if you want.”

  Mrs Winton made her way around the rest of the class. “You’ll have to share the clippers,” she said, “so split yourselves into groups of three.”

  Georgie was sharing with Alice and Cameron, and while Alice went to get Will from his stall, Georgie began to examine the illustrations that Mrs Winton had stuck to the wall, showing them the various types of clip to choose from.

  “I’m going to do an Irish Clip on Belle,” Georgie said when Alice returned.

  Alice looked around. “Where’s Cameron?”

  “I thought he was with you,” replied Georgie.

  They finally found him with the showjumperettes. Kennedy had managed to get her clippers jammed before they’d even started.

  “I nearly broke a nail,” she was telling Cameron as she held up her perfectly painted violet nails for his inspection.

  She smiled sweetly, looking up through her long eyelashes as she handed him the clippers. “I think these need a man’s touch. Can you get them working for me?”

  “Sure,” Cameron said. He tried the clasp on the handset, but it wouldn’t budge. He began grunting and straining, trying to work it loose.

  “Ughhh!” His face turned pink with exertion. “They’re stuck!”

  Alice couldn’t stand watching this for a moment longer. She stomped over and grabbed the clippers off Cameron and in one deft move flipped the clasp open. “You had the safety catch on,” she told him.

  “I knew that,” Cameron muttered.

  “Well, if you’re quite finished flirting with the showjumperettes,” Alice said snidely, “we could actually use you back on your own team.”

  Cameron turned even pinker. “Sorry, Kennedy,” he said. “Gotta go.”

  “Later,” Kennedy purred.

  “Oh, good grief.” Alice rolled her eyes as she walked back to William, waiting patiently for his chalk line to be drawn on.

  Georgie held William steady so Alice could draw an outline and then clip him. Cameron, however, was no help at all and kept gazing over at Kennedy.

  When Alice had finished, the girls stood back to admire his hunter clip. Will was shaved all over except for his legs and a saddle shape on his back. There were a few stray tufts and it was a little uneven, but not a bad effort.

  “Come on,” Georgie looked at her watch. “We’ve got two more horses to do and it’s already three o’clock.”

  With time running short, the girls chalked Paddy and then left Cameron to do the clipping on his own while they brought Belladonna in from the field.

  “Did you see?” Alice asked as they led Belle to the stables. “The way Cam keeps drooling over Kennedy?”

  Georgie couldn’t help noticing it. And she could see how much it upset Alice too. Ever since the very first day at Blainford, Cameron had been embarrassingly fixated on Kennedy Kirkwood. Georgie didn’t blame him. With her glossy blow-dried hair and lean, tanned limbs, Kennedy was kind of gorgeous. Like all the showjumperettes, she ignored the uniform rules and wore jewellery and make-up every day. While the other girls wore regulation knee-length skirts, Kennedy and Arden and Tori had theirs altered so they finished halfway up their thighs. Even Kennedy’s navy jodhpurs weren’t the usual school regulation version – they were tight-fitting, expensive Pikeur jods that her stepmother brought back for her from Paris. Face it, Georgie thought, what boy wouldn’t fancy Kennedy Kirkwood?

  They were walking back into the stables and Alice was still moaning about Cameron when Georgie looked at Paddy and let out a shriek of horror. “Ohmygod! Cam, stop!”

  Cameron couldn’t hear her shouts. The noise of the clippers drowned them out. Georgie raced forward and grabbed them from his hands.

  “Hey! What did you do that for?” Cam was shocked.

  “Look at what you’ve done to him!” Georgie pointed at the piebald gelding.

  Poor, poor Paddy. Cameron had been so busy gawping at Kennedy that he’d barely been paying attention when the girls drew the chalk line on the black and white horse. When Cameron had started to clip Paddy he was so distracted that he had lost track of the chalk line and instead he’d begun to follow the white markings on the piebald by mistake. Instead of doing a neat straight line across Paddy’s tummy he’d veered off and begun to shave the outline of the white patches instead. He’d shaved off all the white bits on Paddy’s belly! Cameron’s horse looked like a half-finished jigsaw puzzle.

  “Mr Fraser.” Mrs Winton was stunned. “This is the worst clip I have ever seen! What were you thinking?”

  She took the clippers roughly out of Cameron’s hands. “Give me those. You’re a menace.”

  Everyone thought the jigsaw clip was hilarious, except for Cam. His mistake had lowered his position in the class ranking – plus it would take two months at least for Paddy’s patchwork coat to grow back.

  The weather had cleared enough for showjumping training to go ahead that evening after class so Georgie, Alice and Daisy took their freshly clipped horses down to the showjumping arena along with Amy, Kendal and Karen.

  Tara was in the arena setting up jumps when they arrived. “We’re going to begin with some gridwork,” she told them. “I want you to come through over the canter poles and then push your horses on so that they do two big strides between the cross rails.”

  The girls had only just begun warming up when Conrad Miller appeared with Damien Danforth, Andrew Hurley, Nicholas Laurent and James Kirkwood.

  Georgie stiffened at the sight of James. “What are they doing here?” Alice muttered. Tara was wondering the same thing. “Sorry, boys,” she told them. “You’ll have to ride somewhere else. We’re in the middle of a training session.”

  “So are we,” Conrad replied. “Burghley House has booked this arena for showjumping.”

  Following the boys into the arena was Heath Brompton, the polo master at Blainford. He was also Burghley’s house master and coach for the showjumping competition.

  “Sorry, Tara,” he said. “There appears to be a double booking. Would you mind sharing the arena?”

  “I guess we don’t really have a choice,” Tara sighed. She began to dismantle her grid of jumps. “We’ll use one end of the arena and you use the other.”

  Georgie held on to Kendal and Amy’s reins while the girls went to help Tara construct a new jumping course at one end of the arena.

  Meanwhile, James, Andrew and Nicholas helped their coach do likewise at the other end, leaving Damien and Conrad holding on to their horses.

  Damien led the horses over so that he could talk to Georgie. “So,” he said, “you made the team?”

  Georgie nodded. “You too.”

  There was an awkward silence and then Damien said, “Listen, James will never admit it, but I know he still cares about you. He wants to talk to you, but that idiot Conrad keeps giving him a hard time.”

  “I wish he would talk to me,” Georgie said. “That’s all I want.”

  “I know,” Damien nodded, “but he’s still hur
t, you know – after what you did.”

  He saw the look of astonishment on Georgie’s face. “Hey,” Damien added hastily, “I’m not blaming you, I’m just saying—”

  He looked over his shoulder. “I’d better go. Can’t spend this long talking to the enemy, can I?”

  He turned the horses around and walked back towards Conrad, who called out in a booming voice. “Oi, seagull!”

  Conrad glared over at them and as Damien rejoined the group Georgie watched as Andrew Hurley began taunting him, flapping his arms and cawing like a gull.

  “What are they doing?” Georgie was baffled.

  Alice rolled her eyes. “It’s this stupid tradition at Burghley House. They do it if they catch one of their members hanging out with anyone that Conrad deems uncool.”

  Georgie knew she definitely qualified. “But why ‘seagull'?”

  Alice groaned. “Because only a seagull hangs out with the garbage. Lame, huh?”

  For the rest of the training session, Georgie tried to ignore the Burghley boys, but she couldn’t help thinking about what Damien had said. What was that stuff about blaming her? It was James who’d taken off without any explanation!

  Even though she hated herself for it, she still thought about him all too often. She had daydreams that he would suddenly have a change of heart and confess that it had all been a terrible mistake.

  Being here with James in the arena, Georgie had worried that she was going to wig out and get so self-conscious that she wouldn’t be able to ride. But Conrad’s taunting actually helped her to find some steel inside herself and harden up. Conrad and the polo boys thought she wasn’t good enough, huh? They weren’t good enough!

  As she rode Belle through the gridwork she’d never felt so focused, so competitive. And it showed. If Tara asked them to jump a combination with a single stride they could do it. If she asked Georgie to hold the mare back and put in three little strides instead, well, Georgie could manage that too. As they kept working on their stridings, Tara kept on raising the rails and by the time they had finished their training session, Georgie and Belle were easily clearing a metre thirty – the height that would be required for the first knockout round of the showjumping competition in just over a week’s time.

  The rest of the riders all performed well too, and Tara seemed genuinely happy with her team.

  “That was nice, solid work today,” she told them as they left the arena. “If we can build on this level of performance then we’ve got an excellent chance of making it through to the finals.”

  “Do we know who we’re competing against in the first round yet?” Alice asked.

  “No,” Tara said. “But I should have the team draw soon.”

  As Tara was talking, Georgie was watching Arden Mortimer, who was standing by the edge of the arena. Arden was in the whitest, tightest breeches Georgie had ever seen, and her hair was loose and flowing over her shoulders. She waved at James and he trotted his horse over to her, and then, in full view of everyone, he vaulted down off his horse and kissed her.

  “Georgie?” Alice said. “Georgie, are you OK?”

  “Not really,” Georgie admitted.

  “Honestly, you just need to forget him,” Daisy said bluntly.

  Georgie knew it was true. She just hoped that the day would come soon when James Kirkwood could no longer break her heart.

  Chapter Ten

  Georgie’s alarm went off at five-thirty a.m. on Saturday. She could hear the groans from Alice in the bed opposite her as she struggled to get up.

  “How does Tara expect us to train at six-thirty in the morning?” Alice whined as the two girls dragged themselves to the bathroom.

  The bathrooms in Badminton House were massive – there were eight showers to accommodate the forty girls who lived there. But there was no queue for the showers at this hour.

  On the outside, Badminton House was a gracious old building, two-storeys high, painted pale blue with scarlet trim around the door and window frames like the ribbons on a Southern Belle’s gown. The showjumping squad members gathered on the front veranda and Georgie, Alice and Daisy waited while Kendal, Amy and Karen pulled on their boots – and then the six girls headed for the stables to saddle up for more training.

  It was still dark and as they walked up the driveway, the girls pulled the sleeves of their school jerseys down over their fingers to keep warm, their breath making little puffs of steam in the chilly air.

  Even on a Saturday at Blainford, students were meant to wear uniforms if they were on the school grounds. For training, the Badminton House girls wore their usual navy school jodhpurs, navy Blainford school jerseys and polo shirts in their house colours, the same brilliant scarlet as the trim on the windows of Badminton House.

  Georgie was the only team member riding a school horse, and so, while the others headed into the stables to get their horses out of the loose boxes, Georgie grabbed her halter out of the tack room and walked to the paddock to catch Belle. The mare had been rolling as usual and even with her rug on she had managed to get herself completely covered in mud. Georgie only had enough time to give her a brisk brush to remove the worst of it and get Belle’s saddle on as Tara was already waiting in the arena.

  “Let’s talk team tactics again,” Tara said. “I’m glad I decided not to discuss anything in the arena in front of Heath and his boys on Monday, because I’ve just seen the draw for the knockout round. We’re going to be competing against Burghley House.”

  There was a collective groan from the squad. Burghley were possibly the toughest opponents in the entire competition.

  “This means our tactics have to change,” Tara told the girls. “If we had drawn a team like Stars of Pau then I’d have said we could win by concentrating on getting good, solid clear rounds. But against Burghley, such a conservative approach won’t work. They’ll go clear and beat us on time faults, unless we can outwit them at their own game.”

  She eyed up the six riders in front of her. “Those of you who do not have your back protectors on, I need you to return to the stables and get changed. We’re about to practise speed circuits and I want you all in full body armour.”

  While Amy and Kendal went to get their back protectors, the other riders warmed up, doing serpentines along the length of the arena while Tara set up the jumps. She was erecting a line of seven fences down the middle of the arena, just as she’d done at their Wednesday session. There was a double stride in between each jump.

  As Kendal and Amy came back to join them, Tara called the girls to her. “I want you to ride the grid – but I only want you to go over every second jump. So jump a fence, then steer your horse around the next one, jump the one after that, and so on.”

  She looked at the riders. “One at time, please – Kendal, you first.”

  As Kendal dodged and weaved her way through the jumps, Tara yelled out instructions. “Swerve around the fence smoothly. Don’t yank your horse around,” she told Kendal. “Make the lines smooth and accurate. Aim for the centre of the jump. Now swerve again! Excellent!”

  At first, the riders found it hard. Amy had trouble when Sandy refused at the second jump. “You didn’t have enough impulsion! Make it clear when you are intending to jump,” Tara told her. “Legs on! That’s better.”

  Tara let the riders go through at their own speed twice each and then she put the pressure on.

  “I’m timing you,” she told them. “Keep jumping every second fence and maintain your rhythm, watch your canter leads, but go as fast as you can. This is against the clock.”

  In her first speed dash through the jumps, Daisy came to grief. Her Irish Hunter Village Voice was a long-backed horse, which meant he had a big jump in him, but was hard to steer around the turns at top speed. When Daisy turned in too tight on jump number three, Village Voice decided he didn’t want to go and veered out dramatically to the side instead. Daisy went flying. Her body landed hard against the coloured rails, knocking the top two to the ground as she fell.r />
  “I’m fine,” she insisted, getting up quickly and dusting herself off. Fortunately, the back protector had shielded her from the worst of the fall – without it she would probably have ended up with a couple of broken ribs. Instead, she was straight back on Village Voice and this time she was prepared in plenty of time before the jump, making sure that she didn’t repeat her mistake.

  Tara drilled her squad vigorously over the jumps, not cutting the girls any slack for their mistakes, making sure that they kept their horses on form the whole time. When Belle got a little lax with her hind legs and took a rail out three times in a row, Tara responded by raising all the fences by almost half a metre each.

  “She’s not respecting the jumps because they’re too low for her to bother with,” Tara reasoned. “Come through again, Georgie.”

  Once the fences were big enough, Belle flew them without putting a hoof out of place.

  It was 8 a.m. – they had been training solidly for an hour and a half – when Tara finally looked down at her watch and declared that it was time to call it a day.

  “Nice work, girls; go and give your horses a wash-down,” Tara told them.

  “A wash-down?” Alice flopped over William’s neck and slid to the ground to lead him out of the arena. “I think I need a lie-down first! That just about killed me!”

  “There’s no time for lie-downs,” Georgie groaned. “We need to hurry to the dining hall before breakfast finishes.”

  They were walking to the gates of the arena, when they saw a group of riders heading towards them.

  “It looks like Adelaide House is also having an early training session,” Daisy said.

  “Is that Hans Schockelmann with them?” Georgie asked.

  The legendary showjumping superstar, whose employment as team coach had caused so much controversy, was tall, leggy and lean as a cat. He was dressed in khaki breeches and brown leather boots and he had way too much gel in his strawberry blonde hair.