Then, at seventeen, she’d visited her brother in London one school holiday and never come back to pick up the reins again. Lester still didn’t know precisely why, although he sensed it was no coincidence she’d been walking out with young Bay Austen all that summer. At the time, the Captain had brushed it off with talk of academic ambitions, but it struck Lester as most unlikely. She had been ethereal on a horse.

When Pax had taken herself off, Lester had been bereft. It had been like losing Ronnie all over again. Barely eighteen months old when her mother had left, Pax had always been his compensation, the little redhaired Percy cub he’d taken under his wing. Johnny was already too reliant on the bottle to make much of a fist of fatherhood, his emotions buried alive. After his death, Lester and Pax had become even more inseparable, united by their faith in the power of horses to heal grief. Her nature was so different from her siblings, both forthright Percy terriers who snarled to get to the bowl while she hung back through kindness. The most intuitive of all Johnny’s children, she’d had a way with nervous mares, and her husky, jazz-singer’s voice was beautiful, a choirgirl at school who sang like Nina Simone at home.

Lester had seen very little of her after she decamped to London, fleeting visits when she’d shown no great interest in the horses, always in a hurry, distractedly polite. He’d stored each snippet of news he was told – which was little, Jocelyn and Ann Percy being taciturn, pragmatic sorts – patiently piecing together a picture of a woman quite unlike the girl he’d known, a drifter in a cosmopolitan herd when once she’d galloped a straight line. He’d been even more dumbfounded when she’d married Malcolm ‘Mack’ Forsyth, a divorced Scot twenty years her senior whom Lester thought very brash. They’d moved to Argyll to start a family, and the Percys had seen even less of Pax until Ann’s illness years later, a cancer so aggressive there was barely time to adjust, her youngest granddaughter travelling from one end of the country to the other to visit, toddler on her hip, tears in her big, golden hare’s eyes when it turned out the stud’s lifeforce was frail and mortal after all.

Lester listened to the owl screeching again. He refused to bow to superstitious nonsense. Death came to them all, and for Ann it had been ignoble but merciful. Full of gin and morphine to kill the pain of the cancer eating at her bones, she’d nodded off in the bath with a cigarette on the go and started a fire, smoke inhalation suffocating her in her sleep. They’d caught the blaze before it spread, and she’d been spared the slow and agonising bedridden death rattle she’d feared most of all.

Soon afterwards Pax surprised them all by uprooting and moving her family and the business she and Mack ran to the Cotswolds, saying she wanted to spend more time with her grandfather. But Jocelyn withdrew himself, deeply antisocial and hard to like by the end. The grandchildren clashed over his care, Alice and Tim ganging up, undermining Pax. Yet the Captain had adored his youngest granddaughter, convinced right up to his death that he’d one day breed the horse to persuade her back in the saddle.