‘You’ll see in the New Year with her, won’t you?’ Ronnie demanded now.

‘She won’t stay.’

‘Oh, I know she’s not ready to spend a night under the same roof as this Scarlet Harlot of the Wolds, Lester.’ Ronnie laughed throatily. ‘I’m staying in Wiltshire. Bunny’s been banging on about the Bretts’ party again, and it’s another good place to plug the stud. Lots of old chums. But I don’t want to desert you; I’ll be back by eight thirty tomorrow morning latest. You’re hunting, I take it?’

Lester nodded. ‘You should be too.’

‘Oh, I am.’ She winked, picking up her bag. ‘Hunting for clients. Wiltshire horsemen have very deep pockets.’ As she turned away with a wave, calling her dogs, he caught a breath of her scent, sweet and light as winter jasmine.

Lester narrowed his eyes. She was definitely seeing the fancy man.

*

Bridge made light of Craic’s hysterical attempts to reverse through a hedge at the sight of fly-tipped litter in a gateway – like a Womble having a panic attack – despite the Bags well-meaning advice.

‘Kick him on!’

‘Give him a slap!’

‘You need the Horsemaker, darling!’

When not telling her to keep her heels down and leg on, they had moved on to discuss the object of Petra’s new Safe Married Crush, an international man of mystery not even in the country yet.

‘Ronnie has promised me Luca O’Brien is totally TDF DDG,’ she said in her breathy posh Yorkshire voice.

‘Tiny dull fogey dealing dodgy gee-gees?’ Bridge suggested with a cynical snort as Craic burst from the hedge.

‘To Die For, Drop Dead Gorgeous,’ Mo told her helpfully, she and Petra both mothers of nine-year-old Dork Diaries addicts.

‘No man’s so gorgeous that you’d die for him,’ Bridge argued.

‘The French call an orgasm la petite mort,’ said Petra, ‘the little death.’

Bridge laughed. ‘In that case I die for Aleš all the fecking time! I should be demanding a marble plaque and flowers.’

Petra and Gill’s smiles developed a frozen, jealous look.

‘La petite mort,’ she repeated, liking the dangerously sacrificial, all-absorbing sound of it, and the way it made the others uncomfortable.

‘Oh, Barry gave me some of those at Christmas.’ Mo panted alongside. ‘From Aldi, they were. We gave Gill one when she came round. She wouldn’t stop going on about how good it was.’

‘Petit four, Mo. You gave me a petit four.’

‘Did Ronnie Percy really use the phrase “drop dead gorgeous”?’ Bridge asked Petra, having imagined something far cooler from the Bardswold Bolter, Ronnie’s nickname earned after a dramatic departure in a sports car from the village and her marriage in her twenties.

‘She actually said the Horsemaker is the Angel Gabriel in breeches, Lucifer out of them.’

‘Better than Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford,’ Bridge muttered. Petra turned everything into romantic melodrama, a side-effect of penning so many Georgian virgins about to have their bodices ripped off.

The imminent arrival of Luca ‘the Horsemaker’ O’Brien was the most anticipated thing in this village if Petra was to be believed. Hired by Ronnie Percy to try to turn around the fortunes of her family’s failing stud, the Irish-Italian stallion man with the battered passport was purportedly a globetrotting stud in his own right.