“Everything feels just fine.” said the vet as he climbed off the milk crate, “It confirms the story the x-rays are telling us.”
It had become standing joke that every time he visited someone dashed off to find the milk crate for him to stand on to examine the chestnut mare's back. Mark Lister was a specialist in equine spinal injuries and had been called in by Keith and Rachel Pendleton's regular vet eighteen months ago after Always A Lady had slipped on the dewy grass in the paddock and fallen awkwardly. It wasn't that Mark was particularly short, but standing at 17.2 hh, Lady took after her dam. She was Toujours Ma Reine's last foal and the only filly to have inherited her height and colouring - in fact, it was often impossible to tell them apart in the field unless you could see the unusual 'star' shaped like a crescent moon on Lady's forehead. But unlike her dam, who had begun racing as a two year old and had been over raced by the owner until she had broken down, she had been brought on carefully and hadn't gone into training until she was three years old and had developed the strength to match her height.
Rachel and Keith let out a sigh of relief. “So it will be alright for us to let her go out on loan to Joanna?” asked Rachel, nodding towards the sixteen year old girl who was standing just outside the box with her parents, John and Fiona Hadstock.
“That'll be O.K. It was a freak accident and its put paid to any racing career, but she'll be fine for hacking out and maybe even some elementary dressage” Mark smiled at the anxious looking trio gathered around the stable door. “Just so long as you bear in mind that she will always have a bit of a weakness at the site of the injury.”
After Mark had left and Lady had been turned back out into her paddock they all made their way back to the house to finalise the details of the loan agreement. Keith's younger brother Peter had a pot of tea waiting for them in the kitchen.
“Did he give her the all clear?” he asked as he started pouring. Rachel told him the good news and Fiona said that they would be coming to pick her up towards the end of the month.
“I'm sorry I can't bring her down for you, but we are still working all hours with the mares and foals, we've been fully booked again all this season”
Peter ran his hands through his hair and shot a quick glance at the television monitor which was mounted in the corner of the room. Everyone's eyes followed his to the split screen showing four foaling boxes. They were all occupied. In two of the boxes the mares were contentedly pulling at their hay nets. The mare in the third was moving around the box, but didn't seem to be in any discomfort. In the fourth, a new born foal was lying next to its mother.
“ Don't be silly” exclaimed Fiona “of course you can't bring her down! We would come up sooner ourselves but it lambing time, so we are all working flat out too. It should be finished in a few weeks time and we'll fetch her then. You'll just have to be patient” she said to Joanna who groaned but put a brave face on to cover her disappointment. “ I suspect I'll survive – but I'm counting the days!”
The Hadstocks and the Pendletons had been good friends for many years. Keith and John had met up at college, been each other's best man and despite the distance between John's home in Devon and Keith's Newmarket stud, both families had kept in contact over the years. When Fiona had heard that Lady would recover but that she would never be able to race or jump she had offered give her a home with them. Joanna was keen for Lady to be ‘her' horse. She loved horses and enjoyed riding out but had no competitive ambitions at all, so it seemed like an ideal solution. It had all depended on Mark Lister's verdict. He had done new x-rays which confirmed that the spinal injury had healed well, but had left her with a slight misalignment of the vertebrae in her lumber spine and he needed to be sure that she was pain free and able to cope with the light hacking that was proposed for her.
“ Come on !,” pleaded Joanna, “ lets get this loan agreement signed.” As the forms were being filled in she asked why they had named the mare Always A Lady. “It's a good job it wasn't me who was naming her” she said, “I would never have thought of anything like that. I would probably called her ‘Moony' – you know, because of her star. Although it isn't a star really is it? Its just like a crescent moon.”
“ It's customary to try to keep pedigree names linked in some way if you can,” Peter said, “by taking something from a name on the sire's side and something from a name on the dam's pedigree or to keep some kind of theme going. Like Stage Fright and Curtain Call or Thatch and Final Straw. As you know Lady's dam is Toujours Ma Reine - Forever My Queen in English, and we had pretty much played out the royalty theme with her other foals. So we looked at the grand dams. Reiney's mother was called Always Special and the sire's dam was Three Times A Lady, so that's how we got to ‘Always A Lady'”
Joanna couldn't help noticing that all the while he had been talking Peter kept checking the monitor.
“Are you worried about that mare, the one who looks a bit agitated?
“Sorry, I didn't mean to be rude. It's the foal – he hasn't got up yet and I won't be happy until I see him up on his feet and taking his dams first milk. Look, would you like to come with me? I'm going back over there to keep an eye on things.”
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