After two hours doing exactly as Lester told her, keeping the pace up all the while, not pausing to talk or tea-break as dawn broke, she sensed he was grudgingly impressed. A compliment was hard won. As she wobbled up the plank onto the muck heap, upending the barrow, she heard him bellow behind her, cutting through the electric beat.

‘Not there!’ he snapped. ‘You emptied that far too soon. Look at this heap and tell me what you see.’

She took out an earbud. ‘It’s a big pile of horse shit.’

‘Look again.’ He stomped up the plank, proud architect in the grey morning light. ‘It’s stepped so that it heats up evenly and decomposes more efficiently, you see? Twelve feet high at the back there. It takes months of work to create a muck heap like this, young lady. It is a work of art.’

‘An Egyptian pyramid of poo, hey?’

She started wheeling back down but he lifted a hand like a traffic cop and stopped her, raising a thin smile. ‘The last girl we had was next to useless to start with too, but Pip did one thing very important. She listened. Now take those things out of your ears.’

She did as she was told, birdsong and crackly opera from a distant radio replacing pop. ‘I always play my downloads when I work.’

‘Not here.’

He wasn’t exactly chatty company, his own choice of dreary classical music droning constantly through the rattly loudspeaker in the feed room which she thought was hypocritical. And he was really slow and stiff. Wheeling beside him was like tailgating a Sunday driver. She wanted to accelerate off but guessed it was bad manners.

‘So does Pip still work here?’ she asked, needing to know where she stood with Ronnie’s staffing plans if she was going to make it a regular thing.

‘Not for me to say. I imagine Mr O’Brien will rota casual staff.’ It clearly pained him to say it. ‘Sweep that bit again, will you? It must be immaculate.’

Although told by Ronnie in a burst of enthusiasm that the Horsemaker could teach her a lot, Carly was shrewd enough to work out that it was Lester who held the key to regular work at the stud – nobody would get on the rollcall who didn’t meet his exacting standards. She needed to find his right side, and get on it fast. Because this morning, surrounded by doe-eyed mares and bright-eyed young-stock, she’d realised that this was the work she wanted to do, no matter how cold and frosty the weather and her mentor. Spending time with the horses made every moment worth it.

Her favourite, Spirit, was out in a covered barn with his best friend. Now officially a yearling according to her reference book – although Lester insisted sports horses were ‘rising’ until their real birthdays, unlike racehorses who all shared midnight on December the thirty-first, regardless of the month they were born – Spirit had lost some of his cuteness, but none of his beauty. Herding them along a grass track to their turn-out field with Lester and his small, bearded dog, feeling like a proper wrangler, she whooped with joy to see him streak ahead of the others, pure liquid gold, kicking up his heels and skipping fleet-footed over the mud and ruts while the others waded and tripped.