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covering, and offered to buy the stallion for twenty guineas. At eighteen, Marske was getting on a bit and might not have many fertile years left; his owner accepted Wildman’s offer. Wildman returned to Mickleham with his purchase, and advertised him in the 1768 Racing Calendar at five guineas – a fee that would soon rise.
    The window of opportunity for taking advantage of such inside information was not open for long. Others saw the chestnut with the white blaze speeding over the Downs. It is likely that these observers included Dennis O’Kelly.
    Dennis by this time had graduated from blackleg to racehorse owner. In 1768, he entered his horse Whitenose in a £50 plate at Abingdon, and there he met Wildman, who had a chestnutfilly in the same race. In spring 1769, Dennis owned four horses in training at Epsom, and made regular visits to the town to check on their progress. As he watched them go through their paces, he spotted another horse, head held low, galloping with awesome power.
    It was as momentous an occasion in Dennis’s life as his first meeting with Charlotte Hayes, and probably more romantic. For an owner or trainer, the first sight of a young and exceptionally talented horse is very like falling in love. You know that this is the real thing; you know, too, that what you recognize is potential, and that much can go wrong. Adrenalin courses through your system; you are exhilarated, insanely hopeful, and scared. ‘He really filled my eye, ’ trainer Vincent O’Brien said of the yearling Nijinsky, who two years later, in 1970, would win the 2, 000 Guineas, Derby and St Leger. 51 ‘When he was working, you would just see that he would devour the ground, ’ Simon Crisford of Godolphin said of the two-year-old Dubai Millennium, who went on to win the 2000 Dubai World Cup. This is what Dennis saw on the Epsom Downs. A recently established owner, ambitious to acquire champion racers, he had found the embodiment of his hopes.
    He learned that the chestnut belonged to William Wildman. Dennis, the boisterous adventurer, and Wildman, the solid member of the middle classes, became friendly. Wildman outlined Eclipse’s history: how the horse had been bred by the late Duke of Cumberland, had got his name because a solar eclipse had taken place at the time of his birth, had come up for sale following Cumberland’s death. Dennis congratulated his neighbour on such a splendid acquisition, and offered to help prepare Eclipse for his first race: he would lend a competitor for a trial.
    William Wildman and Dennis O’Kelly were interlopers in the upper levels of horseracing. The men who bred the Thoroughbredin the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and whose names were to be immortalized in racing bloodlines, were the likes of the Lords Darley and Godolphin; the distinguished soldier and MP Byerley; the royal stud master Darcy (the Darcy Yellow Turk, the Darcy White Turk); and the landowner Leedes (the Leedes Arabian). All these stallions appear in the pedigree of Eclipse; and Eclipse was bred, as was fitting, by a royal duke. He was not, in the normal scheme of things, the kind of possession suited to a commoner. But society was changing. As the eighteenth century wore on, humbly born, entrepreneurial tradesmen were acquiring the means to take part in pursuits that had belonged exclusively to the gentry. When Eclipse came up for sale, Wildman had the contacts and the money to take advantage. His ownership of a horse who was to win five King’s Plates in his first racing season was curious enough; what really astonished the Turf establishment was the champion horse’s connection with an Irish adventurer whose companion was a brothel madam.
    Dennis’s progress to Epsom Downs would have seemed even more improbable eight years earlier, when he and Charlotte Hayes emerged from the Fleet prison. Yet by spring 1769 they had reportedly amassed £40, 000 – a