Chocolate Box Girls: Coco Caramel (15 page)

‘Got a better idea?’

He sighs. ‘OK. Supposing – just
supposing – things work out with Caramel. What about the dapple-grey?’

‘That’s where it gets clever. We
use the money from
the “sale” of Caramel to hire a
horsebox and driver and get her taken out of Somerset – to a real pony sanctuary.
I’ve googled one in Wiltshire that takes in unwanted ponies and then rehomes them
– they homecheck the new owners to be certain they’re OK. Our grey could have her
foal safely and then both she and the baby would have a fresh start, a new life.
We’ll have to invent a convincing backstory for her – perhaps say her owner died
suddenly …’

‘Do you think they’ll take
her?’ Lawrie asks.

‘No idea, but we have time to work on
that, don’t we?’

‘Might work,’ he concedes.
‘As long as the sanctuary hasn’t heard about the theft. At least you
didn’t suggest painting her brown and setting her loose on the moors.’

‘That was my Plan B,’ I grin.
‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. We’d have to use poster
paint, and it rains a lot in Somerset …’

Images of a paint-streaked pony,
rainbow-bright and round as a barrel, flash across my mind. I think Lawrie may be
thinking something similar because he starts to grin, and by the time we reach the
ruined cottage, the two of us are laughing.

We work together in the twilight, feeding the
ponies and grooming them as best we can. While I focus on Caramel, I notice that Lawrie
is stroking the dapple-grey pony and feeding her grain from his palm … her
trust is growing day by day, as if she knows that we mean her no harm.

‘She’s definitely not so
frightened,’ Lawrie says. ‘Now that she’s putting on a little weight,
though, I’m sure she’s nearer to foaling than we think.’

Disquiet settles inside me, and I shake it
off, briskly.

‘We need a name for her,’ I say,
changing the subject. ‘We can’t just keep calling her “the
grey”. Something positive, hopeful. Any ideas?’

‘We’ll never agree,’
Lawrie says. ‘Not a chance. You’ll want to call her something sickly, like
Sugar or … I dunno, Shortcake.’

‘We’ll pull names out of a
hat,’ I tell him. ‘Compromise.’

‘You? Compromise?’ he teases.
‘That’ll be the day.’

An hour later, we are huddled in the kitchen
drinking hot chocolate from the flask, a fire made of fallen branches roaring in the
grate, candle lanterns that give out yellow pools of light hanging from the ceiling. A
worn Indian
rug covers the cold flagstones, cushions and blankets
scattered across it. It’s still cold because half the door is missing, and Caramel
is leaning over what is left of it, her brown eyes glinting in the darkness.

‘Any more suggestions?’ I ask,
scribbling names on scraps of paper and folding them before dropping them into the
fluffy panda hat positioned between us.

‘Shadow?’ he offers.
‘Misty? Swift? Whisper?’

‘Good ones,’ I say, scribbling
them down and adding them to the lucky dip. ‘OK. New name, new
start … I’ll mix them up and you pick.’

I stick my hand into the fun-fur hat to stir
up the folded papers at exactly the same time as Lawrie goes to fish out a name, and
both of us jump and mutter ‘sorry’ and pull our hands away as if we’ve
been burnt.

Awkward.

‘Did you pick?’ I ask, watching
him unfold his piece of paper.

‘Spirit,’ he reads.
‘OK … that kind of suits her. Sorted then.’

Lawrie grins in the half-light, chinking his
tin mug of hot chocolate against mine. ‘So … do you want to come
up on Saturday for a while?’ he asks. ‘If you’re
not busy, that is?’

‘Don’t you have to do something
with your little sister?’ I recall.

He shrugs. ‘She has a ballet class at
ten, but Mum can take her just this once. We could meet at ten or eleven, spend the
whole day if you want to. It’d be nice to work with the ponies in daylight for a
change. Or I could just come by myself …’

‘No,’ I tell him.
‘I’ll come. I have to go out later because it’s Sarah’s birthday
and we’re all going to the firework display in Minehead and on to the fair, but
that won’t be until evening, obviously, so I can still be here. Hey, I meant to
ask, what’s your sister’s name? My big sister Summer goes to the dance
school – she might know her. She often works with the little ones.’

‘She hasn’t been there
long,’ Lawrie says vaguely. ‘She’s not a great dancer, it’s more
a way of getting her out of the house, having her involved in something,
y’know?’

I don’t know, but Lawrie isn’t
giving any more away. His family, even his little sister, seems to be strictly
off-limits. I fish the foil-wrapped cupcakes from earlier out
of my
rucksack. ‘You didn’t buy any cakes today, but I thought your little sister
might like some anyway,’ I tell him. ‘I saved her some – you said she liked
them.’

Lawrie smiles. ‘She’ll love
them,’ he says. ‘Thanks, Coco. What is it with girls and cake?’

‘True love,’ I tell him.
‘Cake never lets you down.’

I’ve been dreading Friday’s
riding lesson. I’m worried that everyone will be talking about the pony rustlers
and that I’ll somehow give myself away – and I haven’t managed to apologize
yet about riding Caramel without permission.

Besides, I’d much rather be up on the
moors with Caramel and Spirit.

As predicted, my lesson is not the same
without Caramel. An hour of hacking through the woods on Bailey with Kelly telling me
about ‘poor Mr Seddon’ just about kills me. ‘He won’t let a
bunch of horse thieves stop him,’ Kelly insists. ‘He wants to open a
trekking centre – Jean and Roy reckon he’s been asking around, trying to get new
ponies. I think they’re sorry they sold him Caramel now, what with the horse
thieves and everything. And it’s
a bit cheeky to start up a
trekking business so close to the stables. It would take custom from Jean and Roy,
wouldn’t it? Still, I do feel sorry for Seddon, losing two lovely horses to
lowlife thieves …’

I open my mouth to tell Kelly exactly what I
think of Seddon, then close it again. I would only incriminate myself. I realize then
that no matter what Lawrie and I have done to get Caramel and Spirit to safety, we
can’t stop Seddon – he has money, status, power. It is all very depressing.

‘I don’t think I can face any
more riding lessons right now,’ I tell Lawrie afterwards, leading Bailey back to
his stable. ‘It’s all spoilt. I don’t want to be here now that
Caramel’s gone, and if Kelly tells me one more time what a shame it is for that
rat Seddon I might lose the plot and tell her what a loser he really is.’

‘Don’t do that,’ he says,
lifting Bailey’s saddle off and brushing him down. ‘She’ll start to
wonder why you think so, and there’s no way you can tell her without setting off
alarm bells. Seddon’s respected around here – nobody’d believe you, and
it’d put the ponies in danger.’

I sigh. ‘Well, if I stick around here
I will put my foot in it for sure. I love riding, obviously, but … I think
I’ll
take a break from lessons for now. Caramel and Spirit need
me.’

‘What will you tell your
parents?’ Lawrie asks. ‘If you just stop, it might look
suspicious!’

I shrug. ‘I won’t tell them.
I’ll find something else to do on Fridays – the school orchestra practise that day
and Miss Noble is running auditions for new members. Paddy’s taught me a few tunes
and I practise every day, so they’d probably snap me up.’

‘Modest, aren’t you?’
Lawrie asks.

‘Just confident,’ I shrug.
‘And hopeful.’

Lawrie rolls his eyes. ‘It’s
like you just naturally expect things to work out for you. As if you can pass every
exam, get to uni, be a vet or whatever it is you want to do and then play in some
orchestra in your spare time …’

‘Don’t forget about saving the
whale, the tiger and the giant panda,’ I grin. ‘And setting up my own animal
sanctuary. You’ve got to dream, haven’t you? And it’s no fun at all
unless you believe that you can make it happen. It’s hardly going to happen if you
don’t
believe it, is it?’

‘You make it sound so easy!’

‘Not easy, exactly,
but … well, I don’t see why it can’t happen. Some of it, anyway.
What about you? What would you like to be doing in ten years’ time?’

‘I’ll still be shovelling wet
straw, cleaning out stables,’ Lawrie says gloomily. ‘Not that I mind,
exactly – I love working with horses. But I’m not like you, Coco. School stuff
isn’t easy for me.’

‘It isn’t easy for anyone, you
just have to be organized and put in the work –’

‘Not that simple,’ he
interrupts. ‘Trust me.’

‘But –’

‘But nothing, OK? Just leave
it!’

Lawrie ruffles Bailey’s mane and walks
out of the stable, leaving me pink-cheeked and open-mouthed. I hate the way that boy can
switch from friendly to furious in the blink of an eye.

Some people are just plain impossible.

With ponies, you have to be patient,
gentle, kind. You need to build up a trust. It’s the same with any animal, really
– Grandma Kate once had an old rescue dog called Gigi who would growl like crazy if you
ever tried to take
anything away from her. I found that out the hard
way on one visit – Gigi had run off with one of my new red sandals and was trying to
shred it, and I yelled and made a grab for it and ended up with grazed knuckles where
she’d snapped at me.

Grandma Kate explained that rescue dogs have
had a tough past, coping with things we can barely imagine – Gigi had been abandoned and
lived on the streets for months, foraging and fighting for food. That was why she was so
possessive about things now. Grandma Kate showed me how to talk softly to Gigi, calming
her, stroking her, and when I finally took the chewed-up sandal away she barely even
noticed. Minutes later, the grumpy old mongrel was rolling on her back, sighing with
contentment while I tickled her tummy and scratched her ears. It was like being given a
secret – instead of reacting with anger or exasperation, show animals kindness and most
of the time they will do pretty much anything you want.

Lawrie’s approach to the ponies is the
same; he is calm, firm, gentle. It’s like watching a completely different boy from
the mean, moody middle-school version. Animals bring out the best in him, I can see
that.

I wonder if the calm, gentle approach works
with people too?

I have already decided to tame Lawrie
Marshall with smiles and kind words, but progress is painfully slow. He is worse than
Spirit – he edges towards friendliness, then backs away, bucking and rearing. Well, not
actually bucking and rearing, but you know what I mean. He is wild and angry and totally
closed off.

If he were a pony I would offer him food,
stroke his ears and scratch his neck; but he curls his lip at the idea of cake and I am
seriously not going to stroke him. That would be just gross.

In spite of it all, the two of us have found
a way to work together. By Saturday afternoon, Jasmine Cottage is starting to feel less
like a ruin in the middle of nowhere and more like a den, a hideout. We’ve hauled
more firewood into the murky kitchen, hung up extra lanterns and covered the wrecked
armchair with an old quilt so it looks almost inviting, even if it is still wobbly to
sit on. Outside, we have draped solar lights around the bushes to help when we’re
up there after dark and cleared the path that winds through the overgrown garden to the
broken-down front door.

‘It’s a bit of a giveaway if the
police come looking,’ Lawrie frowns. ‘You may not be able to see anything
from the moors, but once they’re inside the gate they’d suss something was
up.’

‘If they came through the gate the
ponies would definitely give the game away,’ I point out. ‘They’re
much less jumpy now. Caramel’s really relaxed and even Spirit is much less shy
than she was – the minute they hear the gate creak they trot over, looking for a treat
or a cuddle. Face it, if the police find Jasmine Cottage, we’ve had it – we just
have to hope they won’t look here.’