Last Ditch by Ngaio Marsh Page B

terror-stricken. And now you’re going to laugh at me,’ he added, hearing the preliminary splutter.
    ‘If you fall off, I’ll try not to. But you’re sitting him like a rock.’
    ‘Not true, alas.’
    ‘Nearly true. Good God! He’s at it again!’
    Mr Harkness had broken out into the familiar roar but this time his target was Bruno. The horse-paddock sloped down-hill towards a field from which it was separated by a dense and pretty high blackthorn hedge. Bruno had turned the sorrel to face a gap in the hedge and the creature, Ricky saw, was going through the mettlesome antics that manifest an equine desire to jump over something.
    ‘No, stop! You can’t! Here! Come back!’ Mr Harkness roared. And to Jasper: ‘Call that kid back. He’ll break his neck. He’ll ruin the mare. Stop him!’
    The Pharamonds shouted but Bruno dug in his heels and put the sorrel at the gap. It rose, its quarters flashed up, it was gone and there was no time, or a lifetime, before they heard an earthy thump and a diminishing thud of hooves.
    Mr Harkness was running down the horse-paddock. Jasper had ridden past him when, on the slope beyond the hedge, Bruno appeared, checking his dancing mount. Farther away, on the hillside, a solitary horse reared, plunged and galloped idiotically up and down a distant hedge. Ricky thought he recognized the wall-eyed Mungo.
    Bruno waved vaingloriously.
    Julia had ridden alongside Ricky. ‘Horrid, showing-off little brute,’ said Julia. ‘Wait till I get at him.’ And she began shakily to laugh.
    Mr Harkness bawled infuriated directions to Bruno about how to rejoin them by way of gates and a lane. The Pharamonds collected round Julia and Ricky.
    ‘I am ashamed of Bruno,’ said Jasper.
    ‘What’s it like,’ Carlotta asked, ‘on the other side?’
    ‘A sheer drop to an extremely deep and impossibly wide ditch. The mare’s all Harkness said she was to clear it.’
    ‘Bruno’s good, though,’ said Julia.
    ‘He’s given you a fright and he’s shown like a mountebank.’
    Julia said: ‘Never mind!’ and leant along her horse’s neck to touch her husband’s hand. Ricky suddenly felt quite desolate.
    The Pharamonds waited ominously for the return of the errant Bruno while Mr Harkness enlarged upon the prowess of Sorrel Lass which was the stable name of the talented mare. He also issued a number of dark hints as to what steps he would have taken if she had broken a leg and had to be destroyed.
    In the middle of all this and just as Bruno, smiling uneasily, rode his mount into the stable-yard, Miss Harkness, forgotten by all, burst into eloquence.
    She was ‘discovered’ leering over the lower half-door of an empty loose-box. With the riding crop, from which she appeared never to be parted, she beat on the half-door and screamed in triumph.
    ‘Yar! Yar! Yar!’ Miss Harkness screamed, ‘Old bloody Unk! She’s bloody done it, so sucks boo to rotten old you.’
    Her uncle glared upon her but made no reply. Jasper, Carlotta and Louis were administering a severe if inaudible wigging to Bruno, who had unwillingly dismounted. Syd Jones had disappeared.
    Julia said to Ricky: ‘We ought to bring Bruno and Dulcie together; they seem to have something in common, don’t you feel? What have you lot been saying to him?’ she asked her husband who had come across to her.
    ‘I’ve asked for another mount for him.’
    ‘Darling!’
    ‘He’s got to learn, sweetie. And in any case Harkness doesn’t like the idea of him riding her. After that performance.’
    ‘But he rode her beautifully, we must admit.’
    ‘He was told not to put her at the hedge.’
    Syd Jones came out and led away the sorrel. Presently he re-appeared with something that looked like an elderly polo pony, upon which Bruno gazed with evident disgust.
    The scene petered out. Miss Harkness emerged from the loose-box, strode past her uncle, shook hands violently with sulking Bruno and continued into the house, banging the door