Lisa (20 page)

“She’s always loved flowers,” Carole observed. “They must taste good.”

I nodded. “She reminds me of Ferdinand, the bull who likes to smell the flowers.”

“That gives me an idea,” Carole said. “I think I
know how we can make our point to Stevie.” She dismounted, secured Starlight to a fence a few yards away, and then returned to the flower patch. “Let’s be Ferdinand ourselves.”

I understood right away. After tying Delilah up beside Starlight, I joined Carole in the middle of the flower patch. We plucked a few blossoms and smelled them. Then I started twining mine together to make a daisy chain. Carole wanted to know how to do it, so I showed her. When my chain was about a foot long, I wove the ends together to make a circle and then put it on top of my riding hat.

A moment later, I heard approaching hooves. I didn’t look up. I was sure Stevie was going to be mad. I wasn’t looking forward to facing her famous temper.

But when Stevie spoke, her voice sounded perfectly friendly. In fact, it sounded downright excited. “Nice!” she exclaimed. “I like it! I thought you two were giving up on me, but look at you! You’ve figured out how to get flowers into our wedding. Great!”

Carole and I looked at each other. We couldn’t help laughing. Stevie really is one of a kind, even when she’s being a tiny bit annoying. It just seemed a lot easier to go along with her than to try to rebel any further. We remounted and let ourselves be bossed around for the next hour or so before returning to Pine Hollow and getting to work on more of the chores on the list. Or rather, Carole and I got to work on the chores. Stevie insisted on racing back to her house to
stow the flowers we’d picked in her refrigerator, and it took her a while to return. When she did, she suddenly remembered that she had to make some phone calls to make sure that everybody knew what to bring on Saturday.

That was pretty much how Thursday went, too. Carole and I worked our fingers to the bone while Stevie strained her brain with plans for the wedding. By the time Friday arrived, we weren’t sure we’d ever finish everything Max had asked us to do. Still, most of it was done—enough to hope that Max would let us go to the horse show that evening.

The only other problem was Stevie. She was so gung ho about her wedding plans that she actually made us meet her at Pine Hollow
before
school for another wedding rehearsal. Then, right after school, we all returned for a couple of hours of hard work.

It was all worth it, though. Max came through with the tickets, and we headed for the show right after dinner. The minute we entered the arena, we could feel the excitement of the horse show. We were even more excited ourselves when we saw how great our seats were. We were practically
in
the ring!

Dorothy DeSoto found us shortly after we’d taken our seats. She had big hugs for Max and Mrs. Reg and for all of us.

“I’m so glad you could all come tonight!” she exclaimed. “This is one of my favorite nights of the show. It’s going to be great.”

We had to agree with that—especially when Dorothy invited us backstage to see what was going on behind the scenes. She also promised to introduce us to Nigel.

When we met him, he was not only incredibly handsome, but as nice as can be, too. “Nigel, here they are,” Dorothy told him. “This is Carole, Stevie, and Lisa—better known as The Saddle Club.”

“Ah, the American girls who ride at Max’s stable,” Nigel said with a smile.

I was a little awed by Nigel at first, actually. He’s one of the most impressive people I’ve ever met. He was very tall and slender, with strong features, wide-set dark brown eyes, and impeccably combed hair. I might have been downright scared of him if it weren’t for his wonderful, warm smile.

“I suppose it wasn’t really me you wanted to meet, though, was it?” Nigel joked. “It was my horse, right?”

“Well, we do love horses,” Stevie admitted with a grin.

“Then come right this way.”

Dorothy excused herself, saying she’d meet us all back at our seats. We followed Nigel to the area where the British Equestrian Team was set up. There were four members of the team at the horse show, and they were competing in a variety of events, including the Gambler’s Choice later that evening. Nigel introduced us to two of his teammates, Camilla Wentworth and Alastair Brown. Then we met the horses, who
were positively wonderful, although Camilla was a bit worried about her horse, Elementary.

“He’s been acting up, very frisky,” she told Nigel with a little frown.

“Isn’t that good?” Carole asked.

I was wondering the same thing. I’d always thought it was good to have a lively, fresh horse just before a performance.

“Not necessarily,” Nigel said. “And not in this horse. Elementary is a very staid and steady performer. What’s significant here is that his behavior is
different.
”

That made sense. We watched while Nigel and Camilla checked over the horse carefully. They couldn’t find any problems, so they decided it was probably nothing—though Camilla still looked kind of worried as she took the horse out of his stall for a warm-up walk.

After saying hello to Nigel’s horse, Majesty, we left the riders to their preparations and returned to our seats. Before long, the show began. The whole evening was fun, but the later it got, the more I was looking forward to the final event of the evening, the Gambler’s Choice.

Finally it came. After all the jumps were set up, the riders came out to walk the course.

As we watched, Max told us about the rules. “Unlike most jump courses, this one doesn’t have a specified order that the riders have to follow,” he explained.

“Instead, each jump has a point value, and the riders can choose whatever jumps they like. They can go over any jump up to two times during the first fifty seconds. Then, when the buzzer rings, they have fifteen seconds in which to decide whether they want to try The Joker.”

Mrs. Reg nodded. “If they try and miss, they lose. If they make it, they get seventy points.”

“If they don’t attempt The Joker, they aren’t penalized,” Max continued. “But they aren’t likely to have enough points to win, either.”

“Look, there’s Nigel!” I said a moment later, pointing. Nigel had spotted us, too. He came over to say hello and tell us that he would ride seventeenth.

A couple of minutes later, just as the riders were leaving the ring, Dorothy came to join us at our seats and tell us the same thing. “He’ll be the first member of his team to go,” she added. “They all drew high numbers.”

Soon the event began. It took a few of the riders going through the course for me and my friends to get used to how it worked. We’d all seen plenty of jumping before, but never that daring and never that fast. And never that good, either.

They had to be good. Each rider was pressed for time, trying to make as many high-valued jumps as possible in the first fifty seconds. In most jumping events, if a horse knocks down a rail on a fence, there
are penalty deductions. In the Gambler’s Choice event, it just means that the rider and horse don’t receive any points for the fence, and that’s bad enough. Most of the riders concentrated on the twenty-five- and thirty-point jumps, since a lot of them seemed to have trouble with the one forty-pointer. There was also one ten-point jump that was right on the way to a thirty-pointer, so most of the riders went over that one, too.

Each time the buzzer announced the end of the first fifty seconds, there was a breathless silence in the arena as we all waited to see whether the rider would try The Joker. It loomed far higher than any of the other jumps—over six feet tall. Because the riders didn’t stand a chance if they didn’t try it, most did. But not more than half who tried made it over.

Finally it was Nigel’s turn. I don’t think Dorothy took a breath the entire time he was in the ring. Nigel chose a daring course, taking all the hardest jumps. His horse, Majesty, seemed to fly over every obstacle. He was wonderful. He was even more wonderful as he soared over The Joker without so much as nicking the top rail!

We all stood and applauded when he had finished. Nigel had scored very well and was certainly in the running for a ribbon.

After another couple of riders had gone, it was Camilla Wentworth’s turn. She entered the ring on Elementary,
still looking a bit worried as he pranced and tossed his head friskily. Most of the audience probably had no idea that there was anything wrong with the horse. He looked perfectly fine—no more lively than many of the other horses. But there was something wrong, and it soon became obvious. Elementary fought Camilla at one jump and stopped dead in his tracks, refusing the next. Camilla turned the horse around and retreated about fifteen feet before trying again. This time, instead of just stopping, Elementary bucked and then reared. He yanked his head to one side.

Camilla did everything she could to stay in the saddle, and in the end she managed to do that. But the violent yanking of the horse’s head had pulled very hard at her left arm. Her right hand kept a firm grip on the reins, but the left one dropped limply to her side and hung there.

I guess Camilla was lucky she wasn’t hurt more seriously. But I was sure she was disappointed as she left the arena, unable to complete her round.

“Is she going to be okay?” Stevie asked worriedly.

“I’m sure she is,” Dorothy replied reassuringly. “Looks like she dislocated her arm. It hurts like crazy when that happens, but she’ll be as good as new and back in the saddle in a couple of weeks or a …”

Her voice trailed off and a look of alarm crossed her face.

“Oh no!” she exclaimed. “I’ve got to go see Nigel!” Without another word, she stood and raced away.

The rest of us looked at each other in confusion.

“I guess that’s what it’s like when you’re engaged,” Stevie said philosophically. “When you’ve got to see the man you love, there’s just no stopping you.”

We returned our attention to the ring as the next rider entered. In the end, Nigel took third place. That meant he’d won a nice cash prize that we figured would help to pay for his upcoming honeymoon.

We were a little disappointed that we didn’t get to see Nigel and Dorothy again before we left. “You’ll see them tomorrow,” Max reminded us. “When they bring Geronimo to his new home.”

We didn’t get much sleep that night. Stevie kept us up late—or maybe I should say early, since it was the wee hours of the morning before she let us go to bed. When she woke me up at six the next morning, I wasn’t sure I’d actually been to sleep at all.

Stevie put us to work as soon as we arrived at Pine Hollow at six-thirty. We worked on the flowers first, turning the grape arbor near the stallion’s paddock into a beautiful floral bower. I had to admit, it looked fantastic when we got it done.

Meanwhile, we were still sneaking around to keep anyone from guessing what we were really up to. We kept a close watch for Mrs. Reg, who arrived at seven-thirty—with Dorothy.

“She’s probably here to sign the papers to sell
Geronimo,” Carole whispered, peeking into the office from the tack room, where we were still working on our flower chains.

That seemed logical, until we heard the distinct sound of crying coming from the office. We doubted that Dorothy was crying because she was going to miss Geronimo, but we couldn’t think of any other possible reason. So we cocked our ears and strained to hear what was going on.

That wasn’t good enough for Stevie, though. After a few minutes she ran out of patience and marched into the office. “What happened?” she asked. Carole and I followed her into the office a bit more tentatively. I was afraid that Dorothy might not want us barging in, but she hardly seemed to notice.

“It’s Camilla,” she began before bursting into fresh tears.

“I thought she was going to be all right,” I said. “It’s just a dislocated shoulder, isn’t it?”

“Did something happen to Elementary?” Carole added.

It took a while, but Dorothy finally collected herself enough to explain the situation. “They’re both okay. Elementary is just fine, and Camilla will be fine in six weeks. The problem is that Camilla won’t be able to ride and the team is competing in some very important shows during those weeks. They just can’t be a person short. That means they have to use the alternates, but there are only two qualified alternates at the
moment, and one of them is eight months pregnant and can’t ride at all.”

“So, what about the other one?” I asked.

Dorothy’s eyes started to tear up again. “The other one was to replace Nigel while we got married and went on our h-h-honeymoon.”

Finally we understood. Because Camilla could no longer ride, Nigel had to. That also meant he would have to fly off to Italy in a few days—and the wedding wasn’t scheduled until the following weekend.

Carole spoke up tentatively. “Why can’t you get married before next weekend?”

Dorothy blew her nose. “We can, of course, but it was going to be such a beautiful wedding. It wasn’t going to be big, but it was going to be at my stable, and it was going to be so nice. I think that’s what bothers me the most. We can reschedule our honeymoon.”

“It’s the wedding part,” Stevie said sympathetically. “I know how it is. A girl dreams about her wedding for years. She plans it from earliest girlhood—the most important day of her life—and you can’t stand the idea that all your dreams of a perfect wedding have been dashed against the rocks of misfortune.”

Carole and I turned to stare at Stevie. When she started talking that way, it usually meant she was up to something. I saw Carole glance at the flowers she still held in her hand, and all of a sudden I had the funniest feeling that she and I had both just guessed what was in Stevie’s mind.

Meanwhile, Stevie was still talking. “Some girls want to have big church weddings with thousands of guests,” she said. “Others like the idea of a small chapel, maybe outdoors, with a few close friends. Others, like you, want to be surrounded by the people and the creatures they love best …”

Dorothy was nodding. “Yes, I really wanted to get married at my stable.”

“How about Max’s instead?” Stevie asked.

“Here?”