Dick Francis - Shattered

Victory over Gerard Logan, which Rose now saw as gloriously her own, wouldn’t be sufficient for her in that place unless it included her inflicting some depth of burn.

I might shudder at such a prospect but Rose wouldn’t. I might use plain muscle power in an all-out attempt to defeat her, but I wouldn’t try to wreak havoc of molten glass on Rose. Nor on anybody. I lacked the brutality.

Neither, though, could I desert my team and run.

With tweezers I pulled the horse’s front legs up and its rear legs down and held the whole body on an iron within the furnace to keep it hot enough to mold.

There were still things I could do, I thought.

Honorable exits.

Exits that were more or less honorable, anyway.

I managed to juggle body and leg pieces into a headless racer.

Exits, hell, I thought. Exit wasn’t enough. Defeatism never got anyone anywhere.

I held two punty irons with difficulty and transferred enough glass from one to the other to attach and shape a mane, but it hadn’t the elegance necessary for Cheltenham.

Worthington opened the gallery door and began to come in from the street. His eyes widened as fast as his comprehension as he spun a fast 180-degree turn and was on his way down the road before Rose could decide which had priority, chasing Worthington or keeping me penned.

When Worthington was out of anything but whistling distance she told Force and her father to lock the gallery door immediately and was furious because neither of them could find a key. I hoped to hell and back that Pamela Jane wouldn’t report obligingly that she herself had a key to everywhere.

She gave me another uncertain stare and shut her mouth.

Rose stopped smiling, loaded her punty iron with a white-hot golf-ball-sized end of glass and held it close to Hickory.

I did my best to make and fix a tail to my increasingly non-thoroughbred creation. The tail and two hind feet formed a triangle to support the rearing horse. When I wanted a great result, this stage often went wrong. That day it all balanced like perfection.

Hickory wriggled desperately to get away from Rose’s white-hot threat.

Pamela Jane saw me doing nothing to help Hickory while constructing only a toy, and went back to despising me.

I stuck the head on the neck and tweaked the ears forward. Finished, the object had four legs, head, mane and tail, and no grace whatever. I stood it upright on the marver table, where rearing, it was ready to start leaping into the future from a crystal ball.

In spite of the faults, Rose seemed impressed. Not impressed enough, however, to lower her guard, or her punty iron beside Hickory’s head.

I glanced at the workshop clock.

A minute — tick tock, tick tock — was a very long time.

I said, “The gold will cover the hooves and the mane and the tail.”

Tick tock, tick tock.

Rose thrust her cooling punty iron back into the furnace and brought out a new white-hot gather, which she again held near Hickory’s head.

“How long,” she demanded, “until that gold gets here?”

Hickory wriggled violently, trying desperately to free himself from the sticky strips on his mouth and his eyes.

Pamela Jane, eyes closed, seemed to be praying.

Two minutes. Tick tock.

“The gold,” I said, “will come in small bars. It has to be melted, then it has to cover the hooves and the mane and the tail...”

Hickory threw himself forward, trying to get out of his embracing chair. Rose didn’t move her punty iron far enough away fast enough to avoid him, and one of his ears did touch her waving white-hot blob of glass.

Under the parcel tape, he couldn’t scream. His body arched. Rose jumped back, but Hickory’s ear sizzled and now smelled of fried meat, and would never be perfect again.

Three minutes. Eternity. Tick tock.

Hickory’s horror, plain and agonizing, had everyone staring. Rose should have jettisoned her iron and gone to his help, but she didn’t.

Three minutes, ten seconds since I stood the rearing horse on the marver table.

Dangerous to wait any longer.

I picked up the big tweezers I’d used to form the horse’s mane, and with them tore the parcel tape securing Pamela Jane’s ankles. I pulled her up by her still-tied wrists, and Rose turned towards me from Hickory and yelled at me to leave her alone.

Pamela Jane had no idea what she should do, and dither could be fatal. I said to her urgently, “Run,” and she didn’t, but hesitated, looking back to Hickory.

No time left. I lifted her up bodily and carried her.

Pamela Jane objected. Rose ordered me to put her down. I didn’t, but aimed a bit unsteadily for the way into the showroom and shouted at the trio there leaning on the wall to get down behind it.

Rose came fast across the workshop after me, and drove at me, holding her hot glass — laden punty iron like a sword.

Half seeing her, half sensing the searing future, I twisted both myself and Pamela Jane roughly to let the iron miss us, like a bullfighter, but Rose in fury dragged and stabbed and burned a long black slit through my white singlet.

No more time.

I lugged Pamela Jane around the half-wall to the showroom and threw her, screaming protests, to the ground, and I fell on top of her to pin her down.

The rearing horse had stood unannealed at maximum heat on the marver table for three minutes forty seconds when it exploded.

The horse exploded into scorching fragments that flew like angry transparent wasps throughout the workshop and over the half-wall into the showroom beyond.

Adam Force, refusing to get down because it had been I who suggested it, had been hit twice, once in the upper arm, and once, more seriously, across the top of the cheekbone below the eye, taking away a chunk of surface flesh. Half fainting from shock, the doctor had dropped his syringe. Blood reddened his sleeve, but there was no spurting arterial flood.

It was the wreck of his good looks though, I thought, that would in the end grieve him most, and if he had peered into a looking glass at that moment, he would probably have collapsed altogether. The speed and sharpness of the flying glass fragment had opened a furrow that was bound to leave an untreatable scar, and like many facial cuts this one was bleeding copiously. Adam Force bled into his white beard, which was fast turning red.

Doctor Bright-Scarlet-Beard Force. Serve him right, I thought. A pity it would wash clean. Wash clean... other things would wash out too... an idea.

Glass cooled rapidly if it expanded and thinned. One could gently blow down an iron into semi-liquid glass so that it would expand until it looked like a soap bubble: a dollop of red-hot glass would cool to the cold shell of a brittle bubble in the few seconds it took to blow it from one state to the other.

The trophy horse, though, hadn’t been blown on purpose from the inside, it had split violently apart along the internal stress lines caused by the pulling and stretching as the glass cooled, the outer regions cooling faster than the inner core. The splinters had still been fiercely hot when they’d dug into the first thing they met. Adam Force had been lucky not to lose an eye.

Norman Osprey, kneeling in spite of his antipathy towards the source of good advice, had survived the shattering of the horse with his skin intact, if not his temper.

Although pale and slightly shaking, the Elvis lookalike still clung to the doctrine of “Get Logan.” In consequence he’d risen from his knees and planted his gorilla shoulders close inside the gallery-to-street door, making an exit that way a matter of hand-to-hand fighting and a toss-up whether I won or lost. A hand-to-hand fight against that visibly dramatic strength would have been daunting always but in my tottery state of that moment, even if I’d wanted to quit the scene, which I didn’t, a win would have been impossible. As long as Norman Osprey thought he was usefully stationed where he was doing me no good, however, I could count him one less trouble to deal with, and be grateful.