‘If you’re sure about that.’ Lester followed, clearing his throat awkwardly, the same noise he’d make when she was tiny and he was worried for her, his most fearless little jockey.

Pax was touched by his concern, although long numbed to the anxiety she used to feel about the flat that had been home to her parents during their short, unhappy marriage, later becoming her father’s refuge to drink and rage. After his death she’d refused to go near it, weeping on Lester’s shoulder that it was haunted. Looking back, that seemed silly and self-absorbed.

She jumped as a hind hoof struck out hard against the stable wall beside her. The grey was glaring at them both through his stable bars, ears flat. ‘Why does Mummy like hotheads so much, Lester? Men, horses—’

‘Daughters?’

She cuffed him playfully with her elbow, startled to find him stiff as a statuette, apologising when he almost fell over. ‘I just hope this Luca character keeps his cool and pulls his weight; you can’t be expected to do all the heavy work any more.’

‘I told Mrs Ledwell that we need a yard helper, not some highfalutin showjumper,’ Lester sniffed, always at his most confiding with Pax, who he saw as a kindred spirit. ‘Eager youngster, willing to push a barrow in exchange for a few lessons. It’s how your grandfather did it.’

‘This place needs a professional too,’ Pax pointed out, watching the grey weave his head from side to side. ‘A cheap local work rider, not James Bond parachuting in with a lunge whip in each hand.’

‘You were the best rider this stud ever saw.’

‘I was a Pony Clubber,’ she dismissed quickly.

‘Only one of the children ever tried the Wolf Moon Lap. Even your mother never did that.’

‘She had more sense,’ Pax scoffed, although a small puff of pride lifted her to hear it.

It was the stuff of family legend – and Pax now thought a ridiculous one – that every year when January’s first full moon, the Wolf Moon, was highest in the sky her great-grandfather Major Frank would carry the wind-up gramophone out onto the yard with his beloved Holst’s Planets on the turntable. Dropping the needle at ‘Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity’, he’d mount his favourite hunter and they’d charge around the stud’s boundary, a far bigger land holding in his day. If he rode back under the arch before the ‘Saturn’ brought old age, it would augur a year’s good fortune to the stud. This was practically impossible in Pax’s experience, although according to Lester, her father had managed it the year she was born. She’d not even come close. Given that Major Frank had also been known for taking pot-shots at his staff and keeping the petty cash in the mouth of the stuffed Barbary lion in his study, she didn’t set much store by his business tactics, however profitable the stud’s fortunes in those days.

Lester looked at her beadily. ‘Moon’s full on St Agnes day. We could use a prosperous year.’