A Hundred Horses (8 page)

Twenty-Seven

I
wanted to touch the foal.

“Can I see him?” I said.

Angel’s eyes startled me, how bright they were against the dark skin under her eyes. She didn’t tell me to go away.

The foal raised his head, rocked onto his side, swiveled his ears toward me.

“His name’s Lunar. Like the moon,” she barely whispered.

“Hello, Lunar,” I said.

I thought my hand might sink right through his rabbit-soft coat. Lunar was the color of the deepest storm, a white stripe down the middle of his face, white legs, a pale, fuzzy mane. He was wearing a blue cardigan with the arms chopped off, wrapped around him, and buttoned along his back like a back-to-front waistcoat. Rita’s missing cardigan!

“Is he Belle’s foal?” I said.

Angel nodded.

“Was he just born?”

“No, Saturday at Old Chambers’s farm. But I brought him here.”

Belle blew through her nose and nudged the foal. He staggered to his feet. I took a sharp breath. Something didn’t look right. His front legs stuck out at funny angles. He looked like a giraffe does when it bends down to drink water.

“Sometimes they get born a bit wonky,” Angel whispered, seeing me look shocked as Lunar staggered to his mom and suckled. “He’s got to stay in the stable to help his legs straighten up.”

Angel watched me, blinking slowly, but didn’t say anything more.

I watched Lunar sway as he came to me and nuzzled at my clothes. I saw the dark glass of his eyes, the curve of his jaw, the peachy skin of his nostrils, the wrinkles in his soft lip speckled with whiskers. Longer feathery hair grew from the back of his awkward knees and around his hooves. I felt down his strange legs.

“Will he be all right?”

Angel didn’t answer. She was asleep.

I ran into the farmhouse. I had to tell Rita. Angel’s eyes had told me that it was all too much for her.

“Rita, there’s a foal in your stables! He’s wearing your cardigan. And Angel found Belle too.”

Rita raised her eyebrows.

“A foal!” She seemed just as surprised as I was.

“Belle’s foal! He was born nearly a week ago, and he’s got a problem with his legs. Angel’s been looking after him in one of the stables.”

Rita leaned heavily against the kitchen worktop and muttered, “Mr. Hemsworth said he was going to breed Belle, but then he . . .” She closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. “He wasn’t a man of many words; he didn’t tell me Belle was in foal, and I didn’t notice any signs. I was so busy worrying about what to do with the horses over the winter and how I’d cope without him . . . I just turned them over to Old Chambers. I needed time to think what to do. But why didn’t Old Chambers tell me she’d had the foal?”

She sighed heavily, rubbed her forehead.

“Let me tell you something about Angel,” Rita said.

She rested her hand on my shoulder, and I knew we were now somehow together in this story.

“Belle was the first horse we had, long before we took on the herd. Mr. Hemsworth chose her; she’s from a fine heritage. Angel’s mother was helping out here then. Sometimes . . .” She shook her head but continued. “One night Angel’s mother was putting Belle in her stable. It was the night Angel was born. Right there in the stable, with Belle watching over them. You know, I think that from the first moment, Belle raised that child. Taught Angel everything she knows.

“I’ll let Old Chambers know Belle is here. We’ll keep quiet about how she got here, though.” She looked puzzled. “But he should have told me about the foal.”

“Gem told me Angel stole all your horses,” I said.

“Village gossip and tales,” she huffed. “Angel led them over to Old Chambers’s farm for me last autumn. I couldn’t face doing it myself. She was the only one who still seemed to care about them. Old Chambers runs the horse auction every spring. I thought if I didn’t see the horses, I would get used to being without them, just move on after the auction. I hadn’t seen Angel since she took the horses over there until she turned up the other day.”

She sighed again wearily.

“Angel was always a bit of a hooligan; perhaps someone saw her taking the horses over to Old Chambers’s farm. People believe what they want to believe, make up stories to explain what they don’t know.”

Now there seemed to be another Angel, one who I was still getting to know. Rita appeared lost in the past for a moment. Then she squeezed my hand.

“I didn’t know about the foal. Angel didn’t tell me either.”

So Lunar had been Angel’s secret in the stable all along.

“Angel did steal Mrs. Barker’s goat,” I said. “But she’s taken her back now.”

Rita shrugged and waved her hand in the air. She took the comforter off her bed for me to take out to the stable and put over Angel. Then she stopped gathering it into a bundle and laughed suddenly.

“The foal would have needed milk until Angel found Belle!” Rita tapped the side of her nose. “A nanny goat can stand in as a kind of foster mother. Up on a couple of bales of straw, she’d be about the right height. Goat’s milk is rich and almost good enough for a foal; Angel would know that.”

“Really?” I said. But I was laughing inside because now I knew why she had stolen Dorothy.

Rita was more serious now.

“You know, Nell, I think Angel is just trying to hold on to Belle a little longer. I won’t deny her these last couple of weeks with her, with them both, before they go to auction. Come next Saturday, we’ll all have to move on.”

Angel was a thief, but only because she had been stealing some time with the things she loved.

Rita sat down then, as if something was too heavy for her to stand anymore. “What to do?” she muttered to herself.

I went back to the stables. I covered Angel as she slept on the straw with the beautiful foal, Belle watching over them. I left some cheesy puffs and a thermos of warm milk. Belle watched me close the stable door. I kind of liked what I saw. The three of them, like a family.

Back at Aunt Liv’s the grass looked green, much greener than before. There were no goose feathers anywhere.

Twenty-Eight

I
t was later in the afternoon before I could go back to the stables, after we’d all been shopping at the supermarket. Gem had made two string bracelets and tried to tie one around my wrist and one around hers with a longer piece between, like a pair of handcuffs. But her funny knots didn’t work and it all fell apart, and she gritted her teeth and sat down on the floor and yelled that she was going to make it again.

I raced back to the stable, to the carousel. I heard movement in the next stable, but I knew who was there now.

As I worked, Angel slipped in quietly, crouched, and watched. Before long she had her finger pressed on the tiny nuts so they wouldn’t spin while I twisted the bolts into the holes. I didn’t have to ask; she watched my hands and worked out what to do.

I showed Angel where to put the wires. The stable glowed with warm light.

“What’s it going to be?” she said.

“A carousel, you know, like a merry-go-round with horses.”

She gazed at it all, as if it were as precious as Belle and her foal.

“It doesn’t belong to you, though, does it?” she said, smirking. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be hiding it.”

And I was going to tell her all about it, like I’d promised. I was, but I didn’t like the way she said that. Poking and teasing. I wasn’t going to talk to her about it while she was being mean.

“Mrs. Barker asked about you again,” I said. “But I didn’t say anything.”

Angel leaned back against the bales of straw.

“Why are you hiding from her?” I said.

She sank her hands into the pockets of the coat that was way too big for her. She looked up from under her dark lashes.

“Why are you hiding that suitcase?”

She could sting like a wasp. And I was frightened now. We were like each other.

“Don’t you see?” I said, smacking my hands down. “It’s really important, and I do want to tell you, but it’s really hard for me to talk about it, and you’re just making it even more difficult.”

Angel went out of the stable, kicking the door open. She opened the next stable so Belle could wander the yard and eat the grass growing through the cracks. Lunar came out slowly behind her, lowering his head, bright eyes searching the new surroundings. He staggered and skittered and wobbled. Angel didn’t look back at him, but just like I had, the foal followed her.

I had put some pieces of the carousel in the wrong place and had to take it apart again. I wasn’t going to give up, but it suddenly seemed too complicated.

I stood up, took a big breath, and punched my hands on my hips. “Angel!” I shouted. “I want you to help me make this. I can’t do it by myself.”

Instead, Lunar came in. He lowered his head to get a closer look. I watched him shudder and skitter and come back to look again. His ears twitched and turned. I crouched, and he lowered his face close to mine. He was the most beautiful animal I’d ever seen, face-to-face like that.

“Lunar was going to be put down.”

Angel was half hidden behind the door, watching the shock on my face. Lunar staggered from my arms, back to Belle, to suckle his mother’s milk. Angel sat down cross-legged, facing me, her head down, her hair falling over her face. She talked, much more than she had before. She told me that she had been hiding out at Old Chambers’s farm and that she had seen Lunar being born. Just then Mrs. Barker and Old Chambers had looked in over the stable door, so Angel hid behind some hay bales. They saw Lunar couldn’t stand; they saw his wonky legs; they said he wasn’t right. She heard Mrs. Barker say that nobody would want Belle with a foal like Lunar at her heels.

“She told him she knew a breeder, somewhere abroad, who would pay a lot of money for Belle, but they wouldn’t want her if they knew she’d had a foal with bad legs. Old Chambers had to make sure that Mrs. Barker bought Belle at the auction; then she’d make it worth his while. She wasn’t interested in helping Lunar. She didn’t even go in and look at him properly. She told Old Chambers to have him put down.”

Her eyes looked hollow and scared as she stared over at Lunar. I hated hearing it, I felt sick, but something else was bothering me too.

“Why were you hiding there?”

She kicked at the straw but wouldn’t look me in the eye or answer. She just wanted to tell me the rest of what had happened. It was nice that she talked to me easily, like we had known each other for a long time. But that feeling wouldn’t go away. Was she still hiding something? Was she lying? I screwed up my eyes to try to see her differently.

“I took your aunt Liv’s cart. Lunar couldn’t walk far because of his legs, so I laid him in the cart and pushed him over here so nothing would happen to him. I went back and got Belle. That’s when I saw you with the suitcase.”

We looked at each other for a moment. I felt so guilty then for what had happened to Belle. I’d dropped the suitcase and spooked her. It had been my fault that Lunar had been without his mother. No wonder Angel was so mad at me then. I squirmed; even my skin felt uncomfortable.

“The foal’s safe now,” I said.

Her eyes locked with mine. But she wasn’t going to say any more.

I went back to the carousel. I concentrated, overlapping the metal pieces so they fitted together correctly. I felt the carousel horses wanted to spin, wanted to move, wanted to live. The shape grew and held. My hands seemed to know what to do. Somebody would want Lunar if his legs were better. What could I do? And like magic, the answer was there in my hands.

“Look,” I whispered.

I held up the tall cylinder from the middle of the carousel.

“We could make Lunar something to go around his legs, to help them stay straight. Surely, if his legs get healed, then someone will want to keep him. Won’t they?”

Angel seemed to be sinking. Right into her coat. She was breathing heavily, shaking her head. I had a horrible feeling I had got something wrong again.

Twenty-Nine

M
e, Alfie, and Gem hunted for chocolate eggs. We looked for shiny foil under dense hedgerows, in the nooks and crannies of the trees, in the crumbly terra-cotta pots in the greenhouse. We gave one another Easter cards and rabbit-shaped chocolates. I raced around to Rita’s while Alfie and Gem hid all their painted eggs and played the game again.

Rita was at her sewing machine with Angel hanging over her shoulder, hurrying her, until Rita said to leave her be. Rita had cut up her green velvet curtains to make some padding for the foal’s legs.

I could tell by the way Angel turned her back and looked through Rita’s boxes that she was still hiding something from me.

The sewing machine buzzed. It made the air in the room feel uneasy.

Angel led Belle to the porch door, brought Lunar inside the farmhouse. He shied, stumbled, and snorted at everything until Angel put her hands on him and made him calm.

We strapped the padding around the tender skin on Lunar’s legs. We worked together fixing some splints to help straighten them. Rita used some leather straps from an old bridle to hold it all together. I wondered if Lunar minded that he was wearing an old blue cardigan and green trousers. I wondered if he felt different, like I did, wearing someone else’s clothes.

“Will it help, Rita?” I said.

She smiled. “I’ve seen this sort of thing with foals before. He’ll grow out of it soon enough.”

And the one thing I thought about just then, the one thing I didn’t want to think about, was how Rita, Angel, the horses, and I would all be gone from the farm by this time next week. I wasn’t waiting for the two weeks to be over anymore; I wished they’d stretch out forever. But I was scared of wanting something impossible.

I watched Lunar while his hooves stomped on the floorboards and echoed around us. Angel paced around the edge of the room, and I knew she was looking at me. And I could feel something uncertain prickling the hairs on my skin. Somehow it was too much, and I wanted to be there with them, but I didn’t. I don’t know why, but right then I needed to phone Mom.

“I have to go,” I said.

Angel ran after me, caught my arm as I was about to leave. She held my arm tightly, and I wondered then if she was just as scared as I was of our time together being over. She had a cardboard box, stuffed with straw. In the middle was Rita’s tea towel.

“What is it?” I said.

Angel lifted the edge of the towel. Underneath were six white eggs, but not for boiling. Their delicate shells were chipped and cracked; pink creatures wriggled inside them.

“The fox got their mother,” Angel said. “Keep them warm. They’ll be out of their shells soon.” She didn’t look at me. “I know you’ll look after them.”

Aunt Liv lit the stove and put the box in front of it. Me and my cousins spent the afternoon gathered around the eggs as they rocked and cracked. The damp, strange creatures struggled to get out of their shells. We watched them dry, their feathers puff and lighten. We listened to their quiet whistles. Gem made up a song and sang it to them. It was called the gosling song and it was funny, and because I laughed, Gem hugged me and said, “You’re like our big sister-cousin.” And I liked that a lot.

We held the chicks between us and made safe places for them on our laps; their soft feet padded on our palms.

In the evening the goslings followed us outside and mingled with the other geese in the yard. We collected them up and laid them in the nest of a different mother goose. But she wouldn’t settle with them. In the end, Aunt Liv said to put them with her special broody hen. The hen gurgled and clucked and fussed. She took the goslings under her wings. She spread her feathers and wiggled to cover them and keep them safe and warm. Then Gem told me a story about geese, and I phoned Mom and told her too.

I said, “When geese are emigrating—”

“Migrating.”

“
Migrating
, and one gets sick, two more geese fly down to the ground and look after it.”

And Mom said, “Is that true?”

And I said, “Yes. They look after it until it can fly again.”

And then she was quiet and told me she loved me more than anything.