Celebrating 50 years of Yours
Read the first chapter of Jilly Cooper’s latest novel, Tackle! Can her famous hero Rupert Campbell-Black turn his hand to managing a football team?
Rupert Campbell-Black, despite being one of the most successful owner/ trainers and one of the handsomest men in the world, was in the darkest of places. His adored wife, Taggie, had just endured a gruelling operation for breast cancer and would shortly undergo chemotherapy.
He had also recently discovered that Jan Van Daventer, his dotty father’s South African carer, who’d helped run Rupert’s very large Penscombe Court, had only ingratiated himself into the household because he was convinced one of Rupert’s ancestors in the eighteenth century had robbed him of his birthright, consisting of a vast estate and fortune.
As a result of Jan’s clandestine sabotage, the stud psychopath, a stallion called Titus Andronicus, had been let out of his pen and savaged to death Rupert’s beloved leading sire, Love Rat. Jan had also orchestrated the kidnapping of Rupert’s other favourite horse, the yard mascot, Safety Car, sending Safety on a nightmare journey across Europe before he was rescued in the nick of time from a slaughterhouse in Italy.
Finally, Rupert’s equally beloved black Labrador, Banquo, was suffering from a broken leg, having been chucked down a ravine in a nearby wood. This had happened when Jan had tried to murder Rupert because he was madly in love with – and determined to marry – Rupert’s wife, Taggie. Luckily, Jan had only succeeded in cracking Rupert’s ribs and puncturing his lungs, before a tipped-off local CID stormed in and arrested him.
Jan had orchestrated the kidnapping
Rupert, an accomplished gambler, had some years ago had a successful bet that, as a very mature student, he could pass a GCSE in English Literature. Having acquired a B grade as well as a fondness for Shakespeare, he now recalled Scene Five, Act IV of Hamlet: ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.’
It was a measure of Taggie’s extreme unselfishness that she had been so desperate not to distract Rupert when one of Love Rat’s last colts, Master Quickly, was competing in the World Cup in Dubai, that she had not revealed to him that she’d been diagnosed with cancer, not even that she was undergoing a lumpectomy operation. But, wised up to this in Dubai by one of his work riders, an utterly devastated Rupert had jetted straight home to Taggie in hospital. The only redeeming feature being that although Rupert had missed the World Cup, Master Quickly had won the race.
As so many of Rupert’s other horses had come first in earlier races in Dubai, he had been reluctantly persuaded to attend a parade of Master Quickly and other victorious horses and riders through the nearby Cotswold villages, endin
