“Oh, but surely it could never drag on that long,” Kate exclaimed. “I don’t want to think about his going to war.”
At that moment, Patrick, on Gladiator, trotted past the terrace. His red hair glinted in the sunlight and Kate saw that he was wearing his new silks-white with red and blue stripes. He threw them a happy wave. “I have to rub him down before I come to lunch,” he called. “Don’t wait for me.”
“Of course we’ll wait,” Kate called back. “Take as long as you like.” To Charles, she said, with an almost inexpressible feeling of quiet joy, “I’m so glad you bought the horse for him, Charles. And I’m so very happy that he’s here.”
“After he dared to disappoint Pinkie and Lord Hunt by riding Gladiator to win that ten-furlong handicap at Newmarket, it was clear that the boy had no future at the Grange House Stables,” Charles said. “But George Lambton is delighted to take him on as an apprentice next year, and to have Gladiator in training as well.”
“I do wish we could come to some conclusion about school though,” Kate replied. “Patrick needs an education if he is to be happy in the world.”
“Well, no decision need be made just yet. In another week or two, I’ll suggest that Paddy start doing maths and science with me and reading and writing with you, and we shall see how he gets along.”
With a sigh of pleasure, Kate reached for Charles’s hand. “I’m in no hurry to send him off anywhere. I’m content just to have him here with us, for now.” She looked off into the distance, thinking how much her life had changed in the last few years. She was married to the man she loved, they had a child to love and care for together, and she had good work to do, work she loved as much as she loved Charles and Patrick. For a moment, she thought of Lillie Langtry, whose daughter had rejected her and who had married a man for his title. But it was not a thought on which she wanted to linger. Nor did she have to, since she had promised the Prince that Beryl would not write a story called “Death at Newmarket ” and had informed the editor of The Strand that she would not, after all, be submitting an article about Mrs. Langtry. She would need to think of a new writing project. But that would not be at all difficult-and in the meantime, Mrs. Grieve would be there that afternoon to meet the students and begin the course on herbs.
Kate put aside the newspaper stood up. “I’ll be in the garden,” she said. “You can call me there when you and Patrick are ready for lunch.”
AUTHORS’ NOTES
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of the man of arts.
Oscar Wilde
Bill Albert writes:
Racing is the oldest national sport in England, and the late Victorian and Edwardian periods were brilliant chapters in its history. Led by the Prince of Wales, himself one of the most respected racehorse owners of the time, the social elite embraced racing as its favorite entertainment and made the race meetings at Epsom, Ascot, Newmarket, and Goodwood important events in the social calendar. With plenty of leisure time on their hands and with what was left of their family fortunes in their pockets, aristocratic owners indulged extravagently in buying, breeding, and training horses-and, not least, in gambling. It was a time when, after the reforms of the 1870’s and 1880’s, racing had become respectable.
But there were some particularly ugly aspects of racing in this period, and we have used them as the background for this book. The Brits have always been sensitive about American invasions of one sort or another (remember the World War II joke about GIs that included the phrases “over-sexed” and “over here”?). We have been factual about the British attitude toward such well-heeled American gamblers as John Drake and Bet-a-Million Gates, hard-riding jockeys like Todhunter Sloan and the Reiff brothers, and trainers like Enoch Wishard; and about their fear of the horse doping that Wishard had brought from American tracks to the richer courses of England. For five racing seasons, the stewards of the Jockey Club wrung their hands helplessly, debating what to do. Finally, in 1903, they declared doping an illegal practice. Even then, the main impetus seems not to have been a concern for the health of the horses or for good sportsmanship, but for the cost to the gambling establishment (and hence to the economy): conservatively estimated, British bookmakers had lost over two million pounds to the enterprising Americans, something like seventy million pounds in today’s currency, close to one hundred twenty-five million dollars.
In the same year that the British Jockey Club outlawed doping, its French counterpart forbade the practice as well, but doping had already caught on among French trainers. Within a half-dozen years, it had spread across Europe, and a variety of substances were being used: caffeine, strychnine, and morphine, as well as cocaine. Finally, in 1910, the Austrian racing authorities hired a Russian chemist named Bukowski to develop a test for the presence of drugs in horse saliva. In 1912, a horse named Bourbon Rose was disqualified in France because it tested positive for dope. The owners sued and lost, and testing became an accepted practice.
If you’ve ever tried to learn the nuances of a complicated sport like football or tennis from a source who either had an imperfect knowledge of the game or was so perfectly versed in it that he assumed that everyone knew as much as he did, you can grasp the problems we faced when we began to do the research for this book. We had a great deal to learn, not only about horseracing and training, but about the underworld of doping and cheating-most of which is only obliquely addressed in the primary sources of the period. As a consequence, we’ve relied more heavily than usual on secondary sources, chief among them George Plumptre’s splendidly anecdotal book on Edwardian racing, Professor Thomas Tobin’s scholarly work on the doping of racehorses, and (for the characters of Henry Radwick and Alfred Day), on Henry Blyth’s study of the Henry Hastings scandal, The Pocket Venus. In fact, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to us to write about this obscure and difficult subject if it hadn’t been such a significant factor in the life and times of Lillie Langtry. It was an interest in her that snared us into the complex milieu of nineteenth-century racing.
Susan Albert writes:
I can think of only two women of our time who might be compared to Lillie Langtry: Madonna, the Material Girl; and Marilyn Monroe- Hollywood superstar, voluptuous sex queen, and lover of a president. In her time, Langtry commanded the same kind of public adulation and public censure that Madonna and Monroe have commanded, and for many of the same reasons. She was more widely known on both sides of the Atlantic than any other woman of her day (with the possible exceptions of Queen Victoria and Princess Alexandra), certainly more widely photographed, and probably more widely written about.