Dick Francis - Shattered

Beside Rose’s powerful identity her companions’ egos were pale. Even Adam Force’s good looks and persuasive smile faded to second rate in her presence, and I began to realize fully that her reputation in inspiring real abject terror, in men particularly, was in no way a myth. I felt the fringes myself, try though I might to counteract it. Her effect on her father sent him to the confessional at the best of times, and this being Sunday again I could barely imagine the turmoil churning in his good Catholic conscience.

To Norman Osprey no doubt one day was as good or bad as the next. His days were judged by the amount of muscle needed to achieve his own way, coupled with the fizzing ability to add, divide or multiply as if by instinct.

Adam Force’s finger seemed to itch on the plunger set to activate the syringe’s undisclosed contents. I wished to heaven that poor Pamela Jane would sniff back the tears and swallow the sobs, both of which seemed increasingly to irritate Doctor White-Beard; and as for Hickory, stuck with wide brown bands into silence and sightlessness, and deep in the soft armchair, I thought he would be staying exactly where Rose had put him until someone pulled him out.

Impressions flashed and passed. Rose stared at me with calculation, enjoying her certainty that she would defeat me pretty soon. I couldn’t swear she wouldn’t. This time there were no black masks or baseball bats. But to be faced bare-armed with molten glass was worse.

Suddenly and unexpectedly Rose said, “You came here this morning to make a trophy horse of glass and gold. I want the gold.”

Wow! I thought. No one had brought gold into the equation before. Gold for the trophy hadn’t been mentioned in Rose’s hearing as far as I knew. I had ordered enough for the trophy, and a little over for stock, but a quantity worth holding up the stagecoach for, it was not.

Someone had misled Rose, or she had misunderstood, and her acquisitive imagination had done the rest.

Rose was still sure that, one way or another, I could make her rich.

Adam Force was admiring her with a smile and applauding her with his eyes.

If I could use this, well... golden... opportunity... I could but try... I did need time now, and if I made the trophy horse I could slow things nicely.

I said, “The gold isn’t here yet. I’m fed up with the delay.” The carefree but complaining tone I used non plussed Rose into lowering the tip of the punty iron for the moment.

“If I don’t get the trophy glass horse ready on time,” I said, “the one that’s ordered, that is, well...” I stopped abruptly, as if I’d teetered on the brink of a monster mistake. “Never mind,” I said as if nervously, and Rose demanded I finish the sentence.

“Well...” I said.

“Get on with it.”

“Gold...” I said. “I have to use it on the horse.” Pamela Jane, to her eternal credit, dried her tears in mid-sniffle and in horrified disgust told me frankly across the workroom that I should be thinking of freeing Hickory, not making a trophy for Cheltenham races.

“How can you?” she exclaimed. “It’s despicable.”

“A car from the jewelers is bringing the gold for the hooves, mane and tail,” I said.

Rose wavered, and then demanded, “When?”

I said I wouldn’t tell her.

“Yes, you will,” she said, and advanced the hot iron in menace.

“Eleven o’clock,” I said hastily. A good lie. “Let me make the horse,” I suggested, and made it sound on the verge of pleading. “Then, when I’ve made the horse, I’ll tell you where to look where I think the tape might be, and then you must promise to set Hickory free as soon as you have the gold.”

Pamela Jane said helplessly, “I don’t believe this.”

She couldn’t understand how easily I had crumbled. She couldn’t see that her scorn was the measure of my success.

Rose looked at her watch, discovered she would have to wait an hour for the gold to arrive and did the unwise calculation that she could afford to wait for it.

“Get on and make the trophy,” she instructed. “When the gold comes, you’ll sign for it in the normal way, or your Hickory’s for the slow burn, understand?”

I nodded.

“Get on with it, then.” She looked around the workshop, assessing the state of things, and told Pamela Jane to sit deep in the other soft chair. There, while Adam Force held his threatening needle at her neck, Norman Osprey taped her ankles together.

Pamela Jane glared at me and said she wouldn’t be assisting me with the horse, or ever again.

Rose consolidated this decision by telling her I’d always been a coward. I looked expressionlessly at Pamela Jane and saw the shade of doubt creep in, even while she listened to Rose pour on the disdain.

I hadn’t meant to shape the trophy horse under the threat of Rose’s hand on the punty irons. I had in fact mobilized the bodyguards to prevent it, and they hadn’t. On the other hand a confrontation with Rose some day had been inevitable, and if it were to be now then I’d need to think a bit faster. I stood flat-footed, without drive.

Rose taunted, “I thought you were supposed to be good at glass.”

“Too many people,” I complained.

She peremptorily ordered Norman Osprey and Eddie Payne to go around the half-wall into the showroom, and with more politeness shifted Adam Force around after them. All three leaned on the half-wall, watching. Having pulled out one of the punty irons that I’d put to heat beside the active part of the furnace, Rose thrust it into the crucible — the tank — holding now white-hot glass, and drew it out, a reasonably sized gather, revolving it just speedily enough for it not to fall off onto the floor.

“Go on,” she said. She shoved her lump of burning devastation towards my right arm and I retreated far enough for it not to char my skin.

It was no way to make a trophy of any sort. I needed to start the horse’s body with several gathers of clear crystal and Rose, with irons loaded with plum-sized tips that would destroy whatever they touched, hovered over Hickory’s and Pamela Jane’s heads and threatened to melt off their ears, to make their roasting flesh smell like meat cooking if I gave her the slightest cause. I was to tell her all the time what I proposed to do next. There were to be no sudden unforeseen moves on my part. Hickory and Pamela Jane would suffer. Did I understand? Rose demanded.

I did.

I understood. So did Pamela Jane, and so did Hickory, who could hear.

I told Rose I would need to take four or five gathers

from the tank, and while she had her own lump of destruction close to Pamela Jane’s ear I harvested enough glass to make a horse standing on his hind legs a third of a meter high.

Pamela Jane closed her eyes.

I told Rose in advance that it was almost, if not totally, impossible to make a horse of that size without an assistant, which was partly because the body of the horse had to be kept at working heat, after one had sculpted the muscles of the neck and the upper legs while one added two pieces of glass for each lower leg and foot, and others for the tail.

“Get on with it and don’t whinge,” she said. She was smiling to herself.

People in circuses could keep a dozen plates spinning in the air by twiddling sticks under them. Making that rearing horse in Broadway felt much the same: keep the body and legs hot while you sculpted the head. The resulting head wouldn’t have won in a preschool contest.

Rose was enjoying herself. The less I blocked and opposed her the more certain she grew that I was on the way to capitulation. She liked it. She smiled again, a secretive dirty-little-girl underhand twist of the lips.

I looked at that smile and abruptly I personally understood what Worthington had described. Victory for Rose was never complete without the physical humiliation of a male adversary.