Dick Francis - Shattered

Marigold, regaining her breath, asked if Martin had seen it.

“Yes.” I nodded. “He thought it would suit Bon-Bon, but she wanted the boots more.” I’d lent the necklace to him without conditions, and he’d shown it around in the jockeys’ changing room. Dozens of people had seen it.

Marigold, incredibly brought again to speechlessness, said nothing at all while I reenclosed the necklace into darkness and put the velvet folder back in the metal strongbox. There were the other papers there that I checked yet again — will, insurance policy, deeds of the hill house, all the conventional paper trail of living, but of an instructional videotape, still not a sign.

I searched carefully once more through the pile of envelopes.

There was no tape. Nothing. I reflected with irony that even if one followed the instruction tape, it wouldn’t be enormously easy to fabricate. I kept it partly because of the difficult hours it had cost me.

The bank minions relocked everything and gave me back my key, and Marigold grandly commanded Worthington to drive us all back to Logan Glass. Apart from her instruction to her chauffeur she remained exceptionally quiet on the very short journey, and also, as I’d noticed in the Wychwood dining room, her gin intake had dropped to scraping zero.

Back at Logan Glass she paraded up and down the brightly lit gallery as if she’d never been in there before, and halted finally in front of Catherine’s wings before addressing all of us, Worthington, Irish, Hickory, Pamela Jane and myself, as if we’d been a junior class in prep school. She said we were lucky to be in a studio that stood so high already in the world’s estimation. She was going to give us all a huge jump forward in reputation because, “Gerard” — she blew me a kiss — “with the help of all of you, of course, is going to make a marvelous necklace for me, which I’m going to call the Marigold Knight Trophy, and I’m going to present it each year to the winner of a steeplechase run at Cheltenham on every New Year’s Eve in memory of my son-in-law, Martin Stukely... and there” — she spread her arms wide — “what do you think of that?”

Whatever we thought, we gazed silently in awe.

“Well, Gerard?” she demanded. “What do you say?”

I didn’t say, “Over the top. In fact, out of sight,” but I thought it.

“You see,” Marigold went on triumphantly, “everyone benefits. People will flock to your door, here.”

Apart from terrible trouble with insurance, the one dire probability ahead in her scheme was that someone somewhere would try to exchange the modern for the antique, with Marigold embroiled in legal pincers.

“I think it’s a beautiful idea,” Pamela Jane told Marigold, and the others, smiling, agreed. Even Worthington raised no security alarms.

Marigold, delighted with the scheme she had thought up within ten minutes, filled in the details rapidly. She would consult the Cheltenham Race Trophy Committee immediately... Gerard could start work at once... the press should be alerted...

I hardly listened to those plans. Almost anything would be a better trophy than a copy of a jewel worth a million. The obituary for Martin that I hadn’t yet fashioned would be more suitable. Glass trophies were common in racing and I would be elated in general to be commissioned to make one.

Irish with enthusiasm clasped Marigold’s hand and shook it vigorously, to the lady’s surprise. Hickory beamed. The trophy necklace idea swept the polls at Logan Glass, but the Cheltenham committee might not like it.

The Cheltenham committee were given little time more to remain unconsulted. Marigold used my telephone to get through to an influential high-up whom she galvanized into visiting Logan Glass at once.

An hour later, Marigold, irresistible to many a powerful man, greeted the man from Cheltenham, Kenneth Trubshaw, with a familiar kiss and explained her intention even before introducing Irish, Hickory and Pamela Jane.

I got a nod from the smoothly urbane member of the racecourse’s upper echelon. He knew me by sight, but we hadn’t until then talked. Marigold with arms raised put that right.

“Darling, you know Gerard Logan, of course?”

“Er... Yes, of course.”

“And it’s Gerard who’s made the fabulous necklace which you must see, which is down in the bank here...”

Everyone looked at a watch, or the clock on the showroom wall. The bank had closed its doors five minutes earlier and Marigold looked frustrated. Time had ticked away too quickly.

I suggested diffidently that Mr. Trubshaw, not to have wasted entirely his short journey, might care to see a few other things I’d made and although Marigold protested, “Darling, there’s more gold in the necklace and it’s going to be a Gold Trophy race...”

Kenneth Trubshaw, though perhaps more courteous than interested, took the first few brisk uncommitted steps into the gallery. Then, to my great relief, he paused, and stopped, and went back a pace, and finished thoughtfully in front of Catherine’s wings.

“How much is this one?” he asked. “There’s no price on it.”

“It’s sold,” I said.

My assistants all showed astonishment.

“Pity,” commented Trubshaw.

“There isn’t enough gold,” Marigold complained.

“Um,” I said. “I did a horse jumping a fence, once. The fence was solid gold; so were the horse’s hooves. The rest of the horse was crystal, and the ground, the base of the piece, was black glass, with tiny gold flecks.”

“Where is it now?” Kenneth asked.

“Dubai.”

He smiled.

“What about the necklace?” Marigold demanded, cross.

Her Kenneth appeased her gently. “I’ll come over and see it tomorrow, but this young man has more than a necklace to show us. These wings, for instance...” He stood in front of them, his head on one side. He asked me, “Couldn’t you make that again? If this one’s sold?”

“Part of what I sell is a guarantee of one-of-a-kind,” I apologized. I wasn’t sure I could, even if I wanted to, repeat the wings. The climbing powerful splendor of their construction had come from the subconscious. I hadn’t even written up my notes.

Could I instead, then, he asked, make a tribute to Martin Stukely?

I said, “I could make a leaping horse with golden streaks. I could make it worthy of Cheltenham.”

“I’ll come tomorrow,” the trophy chairman said and embraced Marigold in farewell with smiling enthusiasm.

Marigold having agreed earlier with her daughter to take me back to Bon-Bon’s house, she, Worthington and I made tracks to the Stukely gravel, arriving at the same moment as Priam Jones, who was carefully nursing the expensive tires he’d bought to replace those wrecked on New Year’s Eve. Priam, Bon-Bon had reported, had after all decided not to sue the town for erecting sharp-toothed barriers overnight, but had already transferred his disgust to Lloyd Baxter, who’d ordered his horses, including Tallahassee, to be sent north to a training stable nearer his home.

Bon-Bon came out of the house in a welcoming mood, and I had no trouble, thanks to her maneuvering it privately on my behalf, in talking to Priam Jones as if our meeting were accidental. Priam looked like the last of the cul-de-sacs.

“Bon-Bon invited me to an early supper,” Priam announced with a touch of pomposity.

“How splendid!” I said warmly. “Me too.”

Priam’s face said he didn’t care to have me there too, and things weren’t improved from his point of view when Bon-Bon swept her mother into the house on a wardrobe expedition and said over her departing shoulder, “Gerard, pour Priam a drink, will you? I think there’s everything in the cupboard.”