All the King's Horses (27 page)

We both ran forward to wave one more time, but Colin tripped, and I fell over him. When we got up, we were in the Ring, and the trucks were roaring past on Highway 495.

I stood there, staring at them, until a big tanker took the exit and crawled down the ramp onto the 125 Connector, sending a black cloud out of its smokestack as it shifted down. At the bottom of the ramp, it turned towards town, and the gears started the other way: first, second, third … It disappeared around the curve, and I turned to Colin. ‘Let’s go.’

He wiped his eyes with the tail of his shirt. ‘OK.’

We turned and picked our way slowly through the junk, blinking in the late afternoon sun. When we got to the yard, Colin stopped and frowned. ‘It shouldn’t be where it is.’

‘The house?’ I said blankly.

‘The sun. Usually, when we go to Faerie, it’s the same time when we come back, right?’

I saw what he meant; it had been a little after noon when we had started home from the Gordons’, and now … ‘Maybe it’s different now that our mission’s over.’ Then I wished I’d held my tongue; putting it in words made it so … certain.

We were both standing there, looking towards the sun, when Mom’s old car bumped across the tracks. As it got closer, we could see that Mom wasn’t driving; Mr Crewes was. I suppose we should have waved or something, but we just watched it pass the warehouses … slow down … pull into the driveway … stop. After what seemed a long time, Mom got out of her door and walked slowly towards us. Her face was completely frozen.

‘Children,’ she began, ‘your grandfather …’ She stopped, and so did everything else. Well, not really. The birds kept singing, Mr Crewes walked
slowly
towards the porch, the whistle of the 4:45 sounded far off down the tracks … but it was like there was nothing in the world but Mom, all alone, not talking, not crying.

Be good to her
, he’d said. I understood now, and I wanted more than anything to tell her all the things he’d explained, but the words just wouldn’t come. All I could do was run and put my arms around her. ‘Don’t feel bad, Mom,’ I said. ‘He’s all right, now … and he loved you.’

Mom’s frozen expression melted, and she hugged us both – and I guess we all cried, but I don’t remember.

THERE WERE OVER
two hundred people at the funeral; every horse person I’d ever met in Pennsylvania was there, and a lot of other people I’d only seen in pictures. It was great to see them, except they all said the same sorts of things.
It was a blessing. He could have lingered for years. It must be a tremendous relief to have it all over
.

‘If I hear one more person say it’s a good thing that Grandpa died, I don’t know how I’ll stay polite,’ said Colin, as we climbed into a black limousine to follow the hearse from the church to the cemetery. ‘Can’t they understand that even a Grey Land Grandpa is better than no Grandpa at all?’

‘I guess not,’ I said. ‘But then, they’re not the
ones
who have to go into his study and see all his stuff there.’

‘Don’t,’ he said. So I looked out the window.

Mom got into the limousine and sat next to Colin; Mr Crewes got in and sat next to me. He saw I was crying a little, and he put his arm around my shoulder. Which was OK; he’d been really, really great. The thing was, though, it didn’t help. Nothing did. Everywhere Grandpa had been, there were empty spaces, and nothing anybody said or did could make them go away. There were even spaces where I knew he couldn’t possibly be. Like, when we got to the cemetery, I kept worrying that he might fall into the grave as we watched the funeral people lower the coffin into the ground. And at the wake, as I passed the food and said ‘thank you’, when people told me how grown up I looked, I kept worrying that the noise and confusion would upset him. It all seemed like a bad dream, and I was very glad when we finally went back home with Mr Crewes, the Gordons, and the Smithes, who had come up from Pennsylvania.

After I’d helped put the leftovers away, I changed and lay down on my bed, hoping I’d go to sleep or something; but I stayed awake and hurting. Outside, the 5:15 express shot past, and in the silence it left behind, I heard Colin’s
sneakers
padding down the hall to the front stairs. When I looked out my door, he was sitting on the top step with his chin on his hand, and he didn’t turn around. I tiptoed to the stairs and sat down next to him, feeling sort of guilty. All through the wake, he’d been looking just fine, and I’d thought he’d let everyone cheer him up. After a while, he looked sideways at me. ‘That was awful,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but like Mr Crewes says, you have to do
something
.’

‘The faeries do it a lot better.’

‘I’ll say.’

We sat there, listening to the grown-ups’ voices float up the stairs from the living room … not words, just questions, answers, mutterings … and watching the colours in the stained-glass window flicker in the shadows of the leaves outside. They were the same colours they’d always been, but the pattern around the border was just vines, trees, and flowers. No faeries.

‘Do you suppose They knew when we were there?’ said Colin after a while. ‘About the house, I mean?’

‘Maybe. Epona said something about it … I can’t remember exactly what.’

He looked up at the dingy bronze chandelier and the cracked ceiling. ‘You’d think they’d fix
it
up instead of tearing it down,’ he said. ‘It could be a great house.’

‘Not with four lanes of Route 125 running through it.’

‘Well, yeah, but it’s a shame. And then there’s the warehouse people. I suppose they’ll find other warehouses, but …’

I nodded. ‘Lots of them have gone already – have you noticed? – even though they’ve got until September.’

‘Sure I’ve noticed. And it’s not
fair
, pushing us all out just to build a stupid road! Grandpa never would have let it happen!’

I wasn’t sure Grandpa could have stopped a four-lane road from being built, any more than the faeries could. But I might have been wrong, and anyway, this wasn’t the time to say so.

Colin looked sideways at me. ‘You thought about where
we’re
going to go?’

‘Sort of. They haven’t said anything, though.’

‘Yeah, but they’re going to. Right? Some big, sappy announcement—’

‘– I thought you
liked
him!’

‘I
do
like him! I just wish they’d stop treating us like babies and get it over with.’

‘Think that’s what it is? I kind of thought … well, he’s patient. Like when everything was so
crazy,
and you asked him to watch you flip that penny a hundred times—’

‘– I just wanted to see if the faeries were really gone, and nobody else would—’

‘– OK, OK. Anyway, you can see how tired Mom is, with the house thing happening in the middle of the funeral and all. And I thought maybe he was being patient about her, too.’

The big sliding doors to the living room slipped back, and the grown-ups walked out, talking, the way they do when everybody’s leaving. We smiled politely and started down the stairs, bracing ourselves for being kissed.

‘There they are!’ said Mrs Smithe. She turned from Mom to us. ‘We’ve got a present for you – just the thing, from what the Gordons have been telling us about the horse you’re working with them.’

‘She means Dandy,’ said Mrs Gordon quickly, as we stared at each other. ‘It seems that there’s almost no chance of Tiffany’s coming back. Her parents have skipped town, and the police are pretty sure they sent her on ahead somewhere and then went to collect her. And since we have no legal claim …’ She sighed, and Mr Gordon put his arm around her.

‘In any case,’ he said, ‘Dandy is standing in our barn, and your mother and Jim agree with us
that
you’re the perfect people to work him, if you want to.’

‘
Want
to!’ said Colin, his eyes shining. ‘Criminy!’

I nodded, trying to look enthusiastic. And I was – really. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I saw Tiffany, patting foals, brushing mares, riding young horses in a huge green field. Her face was completely happy, but … I glanced at Colin, and I prayed that his face would never look like that.

‘So,’ said Mr Smithe. ‘Let’s go get your present.’

We all trooped out to the cars, and he pulled a carefully-covered saddle out of the plush back seat of his Cadillac. ‘There you go,’ he said, handing it to me.

Colin slipped off the cover – and we stared at each other. It wasn’t just a saddle; it was the very, very best jumping saddle you could buy – so good, you wouldn’t even
think
of buying one if you weren’t a rider like the famous ones who’d been at the funeral. And though it wasn’t new, it was beautifully oiled, all supple … I ran my hand over it gently, and in the empty space next to me, Grandpa … not the Grey Land Grandpa, but the real one … nodded in approval.

‘It’s really gorgeous,’ I said, looking up at Mr Smithe. ‘I … thank you.’

‘It’s nothing,’ he said, looking a little embarrassed. ‘It’s been sitting in the tack room for years, and just before we came here, one of the senior stable boys asked me who it belonged to, because he’d been cleaning it as long as he could remember, but nobody ever used it. Well, that seemed a waste, and I remembered that you kids had used our kids’ saddles when you rode, and so … enjoy it.’

‘Thank you,’ we said – and boy, did we mean it.

Mr Smithe clapped Colin on the shoulder, and Mrs Smithe kissed me on the forehead. Then they said goodbye to everyone and took off for Pennsylvania.

Mr Gordon stepped over to look at the saddle. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘If I were you kids, I’d get down to the barn right after school tomorrow and try it out.’

‘All
right
!’ said Colin, looking up at Mom. ‘Can we?’

‘
May
we,’ she said. ‘You may indeed.’

‘Great!’ said Mrs Gordon. ‘We’ll take the saddle, and when you come—’

‘– Um …’ I said, looking down. ‘I’d really like to clean it … not that it needs it …’

‘That’ll be fine,’ said Mom, smiling at Mrs Gordon. ‘I’ll bring it over in the morning, and
we
can talk over boarding arrangements.’

Mrs Gordon said not to even
think
of arrangements. Mr Crewes and Mom said not to be silly … Mr Gordon looked at his watch and said it was past feeding time, and we’d settle things tomorrow. Then everybody laughed, and the Gordons jumped in the truck and left.

Mr Crewes looked around the yard, the way you do after everybody has gone; then he offered to go and get a pizza from a place that had started making them so people could take them home – because Mom had been cooking for days. Colin wanted to go along, to make sure it was the right kind of pizza, and they took off, thick as thieves. Which left just Mom and me.

‘Your arms getting tired?’ she said, holding hers out towards the saddle.

‘They’re fine,’ I said. ‘You’ll get your dress dirty. Is there any saddle soap?’

‘Blocks of it. Dad insisted on bringing it all up here with him, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him he wouldn’t need it. It’s in the cellar.’

I zipped in the door and down to the cellar, leaving the saddle on the back of a kitchen chair. When I came back up with a new glycerine bar and a sponge, Mom was standing there, looking at it.

‘Saddles in the kitchen,’ she said, with a funny sort of smile. ‘Just like home.’

I nodded, but what I was really thinking about was taking the stirrups off. When I turned around, there was a bowl of water on the table, all set to go; I dampened the sponge, scrunched it around on the bar of glycerine, and tipped the saddle up, to start on the bottom, the way Grandpa had always made us … and stopped. On the inside of the tree was scratched neatly, ‘D O’ B.’ Deirdre O’Brien.

I stared and stared, feeling the kitchen dissolve into another kitchen, cluttered with boots and bridles and newspapers. In one corner was a big chair and a table, with a copy of Yeats or whatever with a riding glove shoved in it to keep the place. And at the sink, peeling potatoes with an expression that said he was really thinking of what stories to tell us after dinner …

I blinked and looked up. Mom was standing at our sink; her hands were completely still.

‘Mom …’ I said. ‘Um … someday, would you like to go riding? Just you and me?’

For a long time, she just stood there; then she turned around and smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I would.’

THE END

Laura Stevenson grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the University town in which she was born, but ‘home’ to her was the Vermont farm that became her parents’ summer place when she was five years old. During her Vermont summers, Laura began the day by practising the violin for three hours in the loft of the barn; in the afternoons, she, her horse and her dog explored all the trails and back roads within thirty miles of that farm.

As a child, Laura dreamed of being a novelist, but as she grew older, her family’s ties to England developed her interest in English history. After studying at the University of Michigan and at Yale, she became a historian and published articles and a book on Elizabethan literature and culture. Gradually escalating deafness, however, forced her to retreat to Vermont, where she began to write fiction for her two daughters (collectively, she and her husband now have seven children and fourteen grandchildren). Laura’s books
Happily After All
and
The Island and the Ring
have been shortlisted for nine children’s books awards and have been translated into Danish and German.
All the King’s Horses
is her first book to be published by Corgi Books.