The Princess and the Foal. Stacy Gregg

      I am underneath my blankets with a torch as I write this. I don’t dare turn the lights on because Frances might see and know that I am awake, and the last person I want to deal with right now is Frances.

      I should be asleep, but I am too full of nerves about tomorrow. Santi has a calendar in his office at the stables and I have marked off the squares in red pen one by one, the knot in my belly tightening as the day grows closer. For a long time it seemed forever away. And now suddenly there is no more waiting. In a few hours it will be dawn and I will go down to the stables and prepare Bree. I’ll braid her tail and bandage her legs and then we will load the horses on to the truck and travel across the desert, bound on a journey that must end in either defeat or honour and glory for the Royal Stables.

      I am trembling as I write these words to you and I tell myself that it is not fear, it is excitement. In all the history of the King’s Cup there has never been a girl rider. But I am not just a girl. I am a Bedouin of the Hashemite clan and I was born to ride. Thousands of years ago the women of my tribe sat astride their horses in battle and fought side by side with men. Well, I do not want to fight – all I want to do is win.

      A thousand faces will stare down from the grandstand tomorrow. Baba will watch me from the Royal Box with Ali by his side, and no doubt Frances will have elbowed her way in too. She’ll be waiting for me to fail, to make a fool of myself in front of all those people. All the time undermining me to Baba, saying it is not right for the daughter of the King of Jordan to spend her time hanging around the stables, mucking out the dung. She is always trying to make me into something I am not.

      Frances wants me to be like some princess in the storybooks – confined to my tower, dressed in ball gowns and a golden crown and glass slippers. I mean, who in their right mind would wear glass slippers? If I had my way, I would wear jodhpurs all day long.

      “Your mother always deported herself as a gracious lady.” That is exactly what Frances says. She talks so posh sometimes it is as if she is the royal one not just my governess.

      Frances is always telling me I should be more like you. It is so annoying because if you were actually here then I wouldn’t have to listen to her. I would be allowed to do as I like and I would never have to wear stupid dresses to dinner or put up with any of the rules that Frances makes up.

      I tell her that you were a Queen, but you wore a T-shirt and jeans. I remember your favourite pair of red jeans. The ones you bought in Rome when you were very young, before you married Baba.

      You wore those red jeans and your long hair was always loose over your shoulders and swept back off your face. I have grown my hair long now too, but it is plain brown. Baba insists that I look just like you, but you always looked like