In sympathy with The Engineer, Sharon raised her hackles and yapped, and when shouted at by Tab, rammed her tail between her legs, and howled.

Even when Tab uncharacteristically laid into The Engineer with her whip because she was so humiliated he was napping in front of Isa, the horse wouldn’t go forward. Finally he backed, terrified, into a rusty barbed-wire fence, entangling his hind legs.

Only Isa’s lightning reactions, leaping from his mare, chucking his reins to Rannaldini, gently talking to The Engineer as he calmly set him free, avoided a hideous accident.

‘Could have severed a fetlock, you stupid bitch,’ he swore at Tab as he bound up the horse’s leg with a red-spotted handkerchief.

Tab, who’d also jumped down, couldn’t stop shaking and had to lean against an equally shaking Engineer for support. After he’d given her a leg back up, Isa handed her Sharon to hold.

‘The little one’s gone far enough. Better carry her home.’

‘Let’s go back through the main gates,’ said Rannaldini, swinging his horse round.

The setting sun had emerged from beneath a curtain of dark grey cloud, firing the puddles, warming the swirling silver spectres of old man’s beard. As they swished home through the wet leaves, Isa lit a cigarette and drew deeply on it. Then, as Tab’s hands were full of reins and Sharon, he held it to her lips for a couple of puffs, letting his fingers rest for a second against her cold face.

‘Few horses like that lane,’ observed Rannaldini idly. ‘Sir Charles Beddoes, a previous owner, got so bored with the local blacksmith visiting his young wife Caroline, he rearranged the old man’s beard cables between the two oaks. Then he surprised the lovers in bed. Escaping on his horse down the back lane, the blacksmith rode straight into the cables and — snap — they broke his neck.

‘Over the years many villagers have heard the clattering of his horse’s hoofs or seen him hanging above the road at twilight.’ Rannaldini’s smile was satanic in the half light. ‘Sometimes on winter evenings at Valhalla you can hear poor Caroline sobbing for her lost love, or see her wandering the passages in a bloodstained grey dress.’

‘A fashionable colour for ghosts,’ said Isa sardonically, but he crossed himself quickly and spat on the tarmac, as they turned into the Paradise — Cheltenham road.

‘Maybe,’ said Rannaldini, ‘but the trail of her little footprints comes through locked doors leaving marks on the flagstones.’

‘Why the hell did you take us that way, then?’ yelled Tab. Then, slipping all over the wet leaves, endangering both her horse’s and her puppy’s lives, she galloped back to the stables.

Once the vet had given The Engineer the OK, Tab retreated along endlessly twisting dark passages to her bedroom, refusing any supper, tempted to drown herself as she soaked in a hot bath, sobbing helplessly like Caroline Beddoes as she waited in dread for the sound of Isa’s departing car.


7


Valhalla was full of priest-holes and secret passages, known only to Rannaldini and Clive, his leather-clad bodyguard. Rooms on all levels enabled people to peer out of the small mullioned windows through the creepers into other people’s bedrooms. Not trusting Rannaldini, Tab drew her tattered crimson damask bedroom curtains that covered the window overlooking the courtyard but left open the others so that she could gaze south over the quiet starlit valley.

Valhalla had been a royalist stronghold during the Civil War. On one of the mullions was carved the head of a cavalier — probably Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Running her fingers over his long hair and proud, patrician face, Tabitha wished he’d gallop down the centuries on his charger and whisk her away from all this confusion.

From the Summer Drawing Room directly below her bedroom she could hear the distant rumble of Rannaldini’s voice, and longed to gaze at Isa through a crack in the floorboards.

Used to owners banging on, Isa was only pretending to listen to Rannaldini’s post-mortem about why The Prince of Darkness had only won by four lengths at Chepstow. To take his mind off Tabitha, he was deliberately pondering on a small, lazy chestnut two-year-old called Peppy Koala, which he’d seen last week in Australia — or, rather, not seen because, frightened by a snake on the gallops, the colt had flashed past him faster than light.

Peppy Koala’s owner, a tycoon called Mr Brown, had no idea of the colt’s potential. Isa didn’t ride horses for the flat, but he reckoned he’d found a Guineas, possibly a Triple Crown winner. If tipped off, Rannaldini would certainly pay for the colt, and its fare to England, but would then want total glory and control. He was a difficult, demanding owner.

Unfortunately Baby Spinosissimo, the Australian tenor, who let Isa do what he liked, had run out of money. It couldn’t be long before someone else sussed the colt’s potential. Rupert was also serenading Baby. The racing world was a bloody jungle.

Isa was brought back to earth at the sound of Tabitha’s name. Rannaldini was saying idly that he was thinking of settling a very large sum of money on her.

It wouldn’t be worth it, Isa told himself. Too much blood had flowed under the bridge and, being superstitious, he couldn’t defy that feeling of foreboding when Tabitha had entered the room that morning. As Rannaldini fetched the brandy decanter, Isa glanced at a letter on a nearby desk:


Dear Dame Hermione

I am sorry to suspend your son, Cosmo, but we cannot allow bullying, particularly of a much younger boy. Xavier Campbell-Black is only six and a half, a plucky little lad, who has settled in as a day-boy extremely well. The fact that he is black makes the whole business even more reprehensible. I hope ten days at home will give Cosmo the chance to reflect upon his actions.

That was poetic justice, thought Isa sourly. Rupert had bullied Isa’s father at school. Now Rupert’s adopted son was getting a taste of his father’s medicine.

‘Tell me all about Baby Spinosissimo,’ said Rannaldini, filling up Isa’s glass.

Later they went out on to the terrace to admire the winter stars, which Isa knew well, as he had to rise most mornings several hours before it was light. A small silver moon was sailing up from the east. As Isa breathed in the smell of moulding leaves and woodsmoke, Orion and his dog stars blazed down as beautiful, solitary and icily imperious as Tabitha. And, like the little silver moon, how much light she cast around her!

The chapel clock tolled midnight. Tab turned her sodden pillow. Oh, why had she left the latest Dick Francis downstairs? The front door banged. Isa was gone. She gave a wail of despair. But hearing distant steps on the flagstones, she hastily turned off her light, in case Rannaldini was on the prowl.

The footsteps, slow and deliberate, were coming up the stairs, getting closer and closer. In a moment of panic she felt sure she heard the door of the empty spare room next door stealthily opening and closing. As the boards creaked outside her heart stopped.

It must be Rannaldini. She wanted to scream, but who would hear, with her mother locked in Mogadon-induced stupor at the other end of the wing? Sharon, asleep on the bed, was no protection.

The floorboards creaked again, as if someone were deliberating. Then there was a knock.

‘Who is it?’ gasped Tab.

Shutting the door behind him, Isa leant against it. In the moonlight his eyes were a skull’s black hollows. ‘I’ve been brought up to hate the name of Campbell-Black,’ he said wearily, ‘but I can’t help myself. You are the most desirable…’

But he didn’t have time to finish. Tab had belted across the room, tripping over a still unpacked suitcase into his arms.

‘You’re as verboten as a cream bun in a health farm,’ she gabbled, ‘but I can’t help myself either.’

For a second, he put his hands round her white throat, so slender that he could have snapped it in an instant, telling himself he could still escape. But her breath, which came in little gasps, smelt so sweet and her mouth, shyly testing his, was so soft, that he found himself gently sliding his tongue between her perfect white teeth.

But it was the last gentle thing he did. Sharon must have thought one of the blacksmith’s oaks had landed on her as they collapsed onto the bed. Ripping off Tab’s striped pyjamas, scattering the buttons of his shirt, jamming the zip of his jeans, leaving on just his gypsy earrings to ward off evil, Isa appreciated her true beauty only when he held her naked and quivering in his arms. Kissing, often biting his way downwards, he found a little seahorse tattooed just below her left breast.

‘You’re in for a bumpy ride, fellow,’ he whispered mockingly, as his exploring fingers crept between Tab’s legs.

‘Oh, bliss, you mustn’t, oh, please go on,’ gasped Tab, then, worried that he might be bored by such a wonderful but extended foreplay, ‘Oh, please come inside me.’

As Isa brought her to extremes of pleasure with the same pelvic thrusts that drove winners past the post, she knew exactly why he had been nicknamed the Black Cobra. It was as though constant lightning were being unleashed from his body, and she never seemed to dry up, as if a Cotswold spring was constantly bubbling between her legs. As their breathing grew quicker and the four-poster creaked like an old tree in a high wind, she thought she had never known lovemaking like it.

As he watched them through the two-way mirror, which kept misting up, Rannaldini realized he had never seen anything like it either. Silvered by moonlight, they were so transported by their passion, it was as though Canova’s Cupid and Psyche had sprung to white-hot life: constantly changing positions, they coupled with snakelike frenzy.