Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1) Read online

  Still, I couldn’t be rude. And, it must be said, his wide smile was the most welcoming expression I had seen on a human face in some time. To say nothing of his chiseled cheekbones and brown, suntanned skin. Peter Morrison was very easy on the eyes.

  “I do love my horse,” I admitted, a little embarrassed, a little disappointed in myself. I had to remind myself that it was Dynamo, a special case, not for sale. My number one rule in business was that horses come and horses go, always for sale and never for keeps. But I had been in love with Dynamo since day one, and therein lay the problem. I wanted, needed, had to have a top-level horse, had to make a splash on the international scene, had to be the best of the best or I would never be content. And Dynamo… Well, he just wasn’t good enough. Loving him wasn’t enough to satisfy my ambition, but I couldn’t bring myself to sell him and use the money to buy a young horse with more potential. It wasn’t like me to be sentimental, but there we were.

  Plus, and this was no small thing, competing Dynamo cost me money. Competing other people’s horses cost other people money. I could hardly run a business chasing twenty-five cent ribbons that I financed out of my own checking account.

  And so here we were. I needed the ACE horse and grant money more than anything. It was the only way that I could see to keep Dynamo in my barn and get hold of a horse with the potential to get to the four-star level. It was the only way that I could see to keep Dynamo in my barn and get hold of a horse who would raise my profile, get me a big sponsor, fill my barn with horses to train and sell, and pay the bills. It was the only way that I could see to keep competing, avoid teaching, and still stay in business.

  “It’s nice to see someone who really loves their horse,” Peter Morrison continued cheerfully. So cheerful! Didn’t he realize he had to ride for the committee in thirty minutes? No nerves at all? It made a person wonder. “Regina here, I’ve had her since she was three years old, and didn’t know anything but how to run very slowly around a racetrack.” He laughed and put down his magazine, freeing up his hands to pull off his ball-cap and run his hands through a mop of reddish brown hair. “He’s a Thoroughbred too, right?”

  “Yes, he raced too… didn’t win anything.”

  “Yeah, my Regina never saw anything but dirt in her face. It taught her to be a little ornery, I think. She’s a gorgeous mover, but she’d be happier just doing dressage… she jumps for me because I ask her nicely, but if she isn’t set up for a fence just-so, forget it!” He hopped off the tack trunk and gave the watching mare a big smacking kiss on her nose. Regina pinned her ears, outraged, and pulled back, ducking into the privacy of her stall. He watched her fondly. “Old bitch. Suppose I ought to throw her bridle on.”

  I watched him rummage in the tack trunk and pull out a hard hat, the thick shell personalized with a green and blue silk cover, and a pair of leather gloves, which he stuffed into the back pocket of his buff riding breeches: all the little rituals of bridling a horse, preparing to mount up immediately after the bit is in the mouth and the throat-latch and noseband are buckled. As English riders, we’d been trained in the same nuances and traditions that had been taught to horsemen and women for centuries. We were walking mirrors of one another, breathing facsimiles of history, reading all the latest scientific advancements in equine sports medicine and then strapping on our leather saddles and bridles as if it was still the eighteenth century.

  He walked the mare out at last, saddled and bridled and booted and wrapped, ready for action, and gave Dynamo and I a cheerful wave as he led her past. “Good luck to you!” he said, and sounded as though he meant it.

  I watched him walk outside of the barn and mount his mare, eyes narrowed. I didn’t understand how he could look so upbeat and excited about the audition. Certainly, no one else had. One by one, as the day dragged by, the other six applicants had gravely saddled their horses, tugging at their saddles’ girth straps with grim, doomed faces and panicked eyes, fumbling with the clips on their hard hats with trembling, numb fingers. They ran clean towels over their shining horses’ coats to remove every last imagined mote of dust, stuck a booted toe in the left stirrup and swung aboard, and then used that same towel to give one last desperate swipe to their polished boots. Every time someone mounted, one of the other applicants — once me, several times Peter Morrison — had stepped up and taken the towel from their gloved hands, to place neatly on their tack trunk in anticipation of their return, and given them a stiff nod, a wooden smile, to send them on their way.

  We’d all been barely able to manage even the simplest version of the fake courtesy that horsemen afford their competitors, pretending to be kindred spirits and admitting to having all the same likes and dislikes and histories and needs, all the while knowing that we competed against one another. (Eventing is a “team sport” at the Olympics, but everyone is competing for an individual medal as well. Horse sports are about one person and one horse, not about teams of riders, and this constant life of rivalry shows in our limited social skills. Or maybe I was only speaking for myself here? Maybe this was a personal problem.)

  But Peter had seemed genuinely interested in every pair, wishing them well, patting riders on the thigh with friendly abandon, patting horses on the neck with companionable goodwill, and it just wasn’t what I was used to. Or that total lack of nerves, in the face of one of the most important steps on all of our roads to stardom — it was pretty disconcerting.

  Then again, I thought, as I got up to take Peter’s towel and give him his mechanical wave good-bye, Peter Morrison was the only male applicant this year. And considering that there was only one male applicant last year, too, and that prominent eventing patriarch Damon Knox had publicly stated, in The Chronicle of the Horse, that there weren’t enough young American men riding, compared to the hordes of girls that flocked to riding lessons as soon as they were big enough to wear a riding helmet safely, and that Damon Knox was the head of the ACE committee, and that two years ago, the only male applicant riding in front of Damon-“there aren’t enough guys in eventing”-Knox won the ACE grant…

  No wonder he was so happy. Statistics were on his side. Sex was on his side. The publicly-biased judge holding the purse strings was on his side. The eventing gods were on his side. And he knew it.

  I shrugged my shoulders, adjusting the knot in my neck, the tag in the collar of my fitted blue polo shirt, the chip on my shoulder, and went back to Dynamo’s stall to get the big red horse saddled up. We would be next.

  Twenty minutes later, Dynamo was standing with his chest against the stall guard, brushed, bandaged, and tacked. Every hair lay perfectly in accordance with the next, the swirls and whorls of cowlicks red and gold like the grain of polished wood. The fox-colored mane brushed flat against the muscles of his arched neck, a meticulous four inches long from ear to withers; his thick tail flowed like a waterfall before coming to a precise blunt ending halfway between his hocks and his ankles. “Banged,” it’s called, the way the English do it. We English riders are traditionalists, in every way.

  Just as traditional, I stood before him in the barn aisle, fastening the button closure on my deerskin gloves. My blue-covered helmet sat snugly over my forehead, my polo shirt in matching navy just brushed the top of my buff riding breeches with their deerskin leather seat and my bridle-leather belt. My polished black boots were understated dress boots, without the fancy Spanish cuff that so many riders were opting for. I couldn’t afford the high-cut Spanish cuff, for one thing. I thought it was a little over-the-top and circus-performer, for another. But I have always managed to disdain the things that I cannot afford, and the people who can.

  There was a shadow in the barn entrance, and then Peter Morrison was walking in, a low-headed horse dragging behind him. Her hooves scraped along the concrete floor. He gave the mare a pat on the neck and smiled at me as he approached.

  “Your horse looks knackered,” I observed.

  “Hot out there,” he acknowledged ruefully. “If it gets any hotter this summe
r we’re all going to have to move up north.”

  “I wish.” The lucky ones did, of course. The riders with fat wallets and big strings of top horses went far north of the Mason-Dixon line to wait out Florida’s hellacious summer months in temperate comfort. The rest of us struggled not to melt in our sub-tropical hell. But hey, it was home.

  “Yeah, that’s the jackpot, right?” He had the tiniest accent, just present in the flow of his words, a statement in his questions and an inquiry in his statements. An English or Irish trainer growing up, probably. That sort of thing rubbed off, and having the old country accent was good for business in the horse world, anyway. New money loved old accents, they wanted to feel continental or they wouldn’t have bought a horse as an investment (or tax shelter) in the first place. “We all want the yard somewhere in Vermont so we won’t have to break a sweat!”

  The yard… definitely a UK trainer.

  That was fine. My trainer was from Alabama and had the accent to match, but she was a USDF gold medalist as well, so not sounding posh didn’t make me less of a rider than this guy.

  “Did they work you hard out there?” I asked. There was already sweat running down my cheeks and the back of my neck from beneath my hard hat. I shoved at the hairnet keeping my shoulder-length hair tucked discreetly above my ears and under the helmet. A boyish crop was definitely in my future. It didn’t matter what I looked like without a hard hat on, anyway.

  “Pretty hard,” he admitted, stripping the sweat-soaked tack from his mare. “Dressage, show-jumping, the water complex on the cross-country course.” He grinned and tossed a mud-soaked girth on the ground. “Water was quite refreshing, of course.”

  “Like doing an entire event in a half-hour!”

  “All three phases. You ready?”

  I wasn’t ready. I was hot. I was so hot. I’d grown up in Florida, I’d been riding in this heat since I was seven years old, close enough to a lifetime to be the truth, but it had to be hotter today than ever before. This had to be a record-breaker. It might get this still and close and steamy on an August afternoon at about two o’clock, but no one would have scheduled us to ride then, either. We knew what we were in for in August. I wasn’t ready for this in early June.

  “I’m ready,” I said stiffly.

  “Good luck,” he said earnestly, as if he really meant it, but maybe it was part of his all-around good guy schtick, how he got clients and students and girls. These guys on horseback were all the same, they had a groom at every farm. There weren’t enough girls who had spent time on breeding farms with snorting-whinnying-prancing stallions chasing around mares in heat, or pregnant mares, or goats even, to recognize peacocking and showboating, and be disgusted by it when it was being displayed for their benefit.

  I had, however, spent a little time around breeding stallions and long-suffering mares (and goats) and I wasn’t interested in being courted, however casually, by another stud colt. There was too much li’l ladying going on in the horse business. Too much swagger and men walking into the barn crotch-first in riding breeches that were entirely too tight. Something about being with horses made women more understanding and empathetic, at least that’s what all the self-help books masquerading as horse books seemed to suggest, but they just seemed to make men more macho and chauvinistic. I suppose it was tough on their egos that both sexes competed on equal footing in equestrian competition.

  No lady’s tee for us, and we look better in riding breeches, too.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The dressage arena sat on top of a hill, and I loosened Dynamo’s muscles by putting him through his paces: circles and serpentines, voltes and half-voltes, halts and changes-of-gait, while the judges sat, rather less-than-regally, perched atop a picnic table along the rail.

  Beyond them, catching Dynamo’s eye every time we passed, was a big oval jumping field, dotted with the kind of expensive, whimsical jumps — butterflies holding up orange and black striped rails, two wishing wells spanning a false brick wall — that only the top events can afford to put out for their show jumping phase. It was a reminder that the money behind Longacres was very significant. This was a rich man’s game I was trying to play. Well, that’s why I was here, I reminded myself. For the money. Every other rider here was in the same position I was — they possessed all of the skill and none of the cash.

  I wasn’t overwhelmed by the height of the show jumping course — the poles fall down if your horse hits them, and they weren’t higher than four feet, anyway. But down the slope, opposite the stable where we’d spent the day in waiting, I could see the railroad ties and telephone poles, sculpted by chainsaw into their own forms of rustic art, that comprised the cross-country course. The stone wall out there wasn’t painted rocks on a sheet of plywood — those were real stones, held together with real mortar. And the water complex had a particularly formidable drop. Once your horse was leaping over the fence in front of it, you were soaring seven feet above the pool of water below.

  I had to look away from the water hazard, actually. I felt a wave of nausea wash over me, and settle in the pit of my stomach. I wasn’t scared, exactly — I’d done it all before, and cross-country riding is the heart and soul of eventing, the reason why we work so hard. But I was a little dizzy in the heat, perhaps just a little weak. I swallowed hard. Heat stroke was not an option. Balancing a horse around cross-country fences requires a clear head and a strong body.

  And there was no turning back now. I brushed the back of one hand against my forehead, trying to sop up some of the damp, but my deerskin gloves were already soaked through with the sweat of Dynamo’s withers and neck. All I accomplished was introducing a salty prickling into my eyes. Now I couldn’t see, in addition to the nerves and nausea. This wasn’t ideal.

  Get it together.

  I heaved a deep sigh, hoping the breath would stretch my diaphragm and back, and tilted my pelvis so that my seat bones would sink into the saddle, feeling his very spine. There’s a moment that I’m sure must be the entire point of riding dressage, (the Olympic sport takes decades to master and puts the masses to sleep), a moment when your muscles flow into your horse’s muscles, and you cease to sit as a passenger on his back and find yourself floating, buoyed by his impulsion and glorious strength. Whoever first felt it — a Roman cavalryman, a French knight, a Bedouin nomad — they must have been forever addicted. It is the sort of sensation that a person feels once and spends the rest of their lives seeking out. It is perfect balance with a four-legged creature of speed and power, and I had never felt it so strongly with any horse beside Dynamo.

  What was remarkable, though, and what I thought would impress the judges, was that while I could find perfect balance and enlightenment with Dynamo, he was naturally very bad at dressage.

  His natural gaits were unbeautiful: he lifted his knees too high at the trot instead of swinging forward from the shoulder; he had a long back and a natural tendency to let his hind legs trail after him at the canter, instead of bringing them up underneath of his body to create a springing, cat-like bounce with every step. All his mismatched parts required a particularly long warm-up to start flowing together in the tightly-sprung watchworks precision needed for a competitive dressage test, and for the first ten minutes or so of any warm-up, few onlookers would have believed me if I told them he was capable of upper-level movements. But he could do them, because I could put him together and coax them out of him. I was counting on the judges to watch our warm-up, and see the transformation I created.

  But the transformation took time, more time than a naturally gifted horse would have needed, and it was hot — have I mentioned that it was hot? — and so by the time Dynamo had finally managed to pull his hind legs underneath himself and started pushing off with his hindquarters, instead of pulling himself along with his forelegs in an undignified scrabble, his veins were bulging from his neck and sweat had been rubbed into white foam along the leather of the reins, the bridle, even behind my legs where my calves were constantly pus
hing, lifting, coaxing his abdominal muscles to lift up his back and meet my seat. When we halted at last, I let the reins fall loose and he turned his head; I could see the red rims of his flared nostrils, and I knew then that we didn’t have long. I couldn’t ask for much more in this airless swamp.

  Along the rail, the trio of judges had begun beckoning, flagging me down with various gestures, flourishing a hat, brandishing a notepad, waving their arms. For all the motion, it took me a surprisingly long time to notice them. I was too absorbed in working Dynamo, I supposed then, but perhaps it was that I was already so overheated that my reaction times had begun to crawl more slowly, neurons firing sluggishly, brain literally fried.

  I nudged the horse into a trot and we jogged over to the rail. A few strides before we reached the group, I squeezed my fingers closed on the reins and sat deep in the saddle, pushing Dynamo with my calves so that his forward momentum ran straight into the firm hold I had on his mouth, causing him to rock back and halt beautifully and square, a leg at each corner, like a general before his troops. It was time to show off what we had.

  I gave him a quick pat on the neck, and felt the heat of his wet neck through my deerskin glove. He was broiling.

  “We’re going to make this brief,” the lone man on the committee said. Tall and traditional, in breeches and damp polo shirt and a faded ACE ball cap perched on his bald head, Damon Knox had been making and breaking the dreams of penniless riders for ten years. I’d been gearing up for this moment for just as long. “It’s just too hot,” he continued. “We’re risking your health and your horse’s with this weather.” He glanced up at the opaque sky, the thunderstorm that had stubbornly refused to budge and let loose rain and wind upon us, to make his point. “Just a couple of warm-up fences, then do the show jumping course that we posted in the barn this morning and we’ll call it a day.”