How Nancy Drew Saved My Life (12 page)

“Excuse me?” I said.

“What did you think you were doing, riding a horse when you clearly have no idea how to ride a horse?”

“That sounds suspiciously like one of those no-win trick questions—‘Are you always this stupid?' or ‘Do I look fat?' It also sounds like a rhetorical question,” I said, “which leads me to ask, do you expect me to answer you seriously or are you in a mood now to just yell at me some more for what you perceive as my stupidity?”

Previously, he'd been crouched beside me, but now he rose, brushing his knees off.

“You're fine,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said. “That's the nicest thing you've said to me so far today.”

“You're definitely fine,” he said, unable to stop a smile. “No one who is not fine could be so comfortably sarcastic.”

“Speaking of being fine,” I asked, pointing to my foot, still caught in the stirrup. “Do you think you could help me with that?”

“Oh, no,” he said, swinging into his saddle and mounting his horse, the horse looking small in comparison. “You got yourself into this, Miss Bell, and now you can get yourself out.”

He clicked the heels of his riding books against the pony's flanks, twitched the reins—why couldn't I master that?—and shouted over his shoulder, “Come, Captain!”

The dog and the lead rider's three companions, who'd done absolutely nothing to help me, departed behind him.

“Fine, run away,” I shouted after them, knowing they couldn't hear me anyway. “I can handle this all by myself.”

Feeling like a fox who had gotten the worst end of the hunt, I had to do a jackknife sit-up, which my abs were in no way conditioned to do, in order to stretch up high enough to reach my own foot in order to free it from the stirrup.

And then the one fine day came to an abrupt ending and it started to rain on me.

Iceland and I were so not getting along together so far.

 

It felt as though I'd been gone forever, but it was only midafternoon when the van from the pony-excursion place deposited me back at the embassy.

I got the impression they thought I should count it a kindness that they hadn't charged me double for abusing their pony.

Pony?
The thing was the Cerberus gluepot from hell!

But when the driver pulled up in front of the embassy, saw where we were, his behavior toward me changed rapidly.

“You should have said that this is what was at this address,” he said.

“If you'd told me diplomatic asylum extended to alleged horse abuse,” I said, getting out, sorer in all ways by the minute, “I might have.”

“I didn't mean that,” he said. “I only meant you might have saved me the trip.”

What?

But I was of no mind to deal with mysteries or cryptic words just then.

So I tipped him handsomely—even the ugliest of horsewomen can be good tippers—and dragged my sorry ass inside.

Mrs. Fairly greeted me at the door.

Was that part of her job, I wondered, to lie in wait and pounce on me whenever I entered?

Apparently, I was of no mind for anything really, certainly not civility.

Mrs. Fairly was more excited than I'd ever seen her as, with a minimal greeting, I brushed by her and headed for the stairs.

“The master came home a day early!” she exulted.

Just what I need right now, I thought.

“That's great,” I said, not even bothering to turn around as I dragged myself upward.

“He didn't seem to be in a very good mood though,” she added, “said something about not having such a great afternoon.”

That's great, too,
I thought.

“Oh, Charlotte,” she said soothingly, as though seeing me for the first time, “you look as though you've had a rough afternoon yourself.”

“You could say that,” I said.

“And maybe also a wee tumble from a wee horse.”

“You could say that, too.”

“Well, no matter.” She brightened. “I did tell you that you could have the entire day off today, so why don't you do what you like for the remainder. The master would probably prefer to have dinner alone with Annette on his first day back, so I'll have a tray sent up to you.”

I reached the second floor, resting my hand on the newel post as I turned the corner.

“Sounds good,” I said.

“But afterward,” she shouted, “I do think you should come down and say hello. I know he's dying to meet you. And wear a dress if you've got one! The first night when the master comes home, dinner is always a formal affair. So even if you're not eating with us…”

Just great.

 

If someone had taken the time to ask me, before entering my room, what I planned to do upon gaining entry there, I would have replied with a one-word answer:
Sleep!

But, having reached the other side of that door, I found myself suddenly feeling shockingly awake.

Perhaps it was that ride in the brisk air, perhaps it was the fall on my cranium, perhaps it was getting rained upon that had done it, but I felt as though something had been knocked loose in me that had been previously blocking free thought and creativity. And for the first time in a very long time, I felt the impulse to write, write the truth.

I sat down at my desk, barely noticing the discomfort of my still-wet clothes.

While Annette had said she had prevailed upon her father to equip me with the trappings of the writerly life, and while he obviously had attempted to do so to the best of his ability, they had left one small item out. How did they expect me to write a novel, in the twenty-first century, without a computer?

And as plucky as I might have gotten since arriving, I wasn't yet brazen enough that I'd ask them to get me one.

I opened the top drawer of my desk, disheartened, and found a large supply of legal pads and a selection of pens. This must be what they had in mind for providing me with everything I needed to scratch my writing itch.

What was
wrong
with these people? Didn't they know I'd go positively crazy if I couldn't do things like cut and paste, moving large blocks of text around a manuscript? After all, wasn't that how writers wrote these days? Who did they think I was, Tolstoy? The next thing you know, they'd be exchanging my lamp for a candle.

I pretended I was a Zen practitioner, closed my eyes and took ten deep breaths, even though I wasn't completely sure that's what a Zen practitioner would do in such a moment.

When I opened them, I saw that while they'd still been closed, Steinway had jumped up on my desk.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

“Meow!”

“And stop looking at me like that!”

But then I realized that the cat had a point: back in the days before indoor plumbing and all the other good stuff, writers hadn't had the advantage of computers that could do nifty little tricks to work on. If they were lucky, they had some kind of writing implement, paper and, yes, a crummy candle. If the electricity still held through the storm we were gearing up to get, a storm I could see brewing right outside my window, threatening to replace the steady rain with something more thunderous, I'd at least have something a damn sight better than a candle to write by.

I took out one of the legal pads, clicked open a pen.

Now, for the big part, what had formerly been the hard part: What was I going to write about?

I was going to write a novel based on my experiences. I was going to tell the story of me and Buster, without naming names, tell of my love and pain and desperation. Based on emotional truth rather than emotional fantasy, it would be a good book, even if neither the critics nor the readers—assuming I ever had any of either—ever agreed with me on that. I realized, finally, that it only mattered what I thought of what I wrote.

If the book ever fell into Buster's hands and he actually read it, would he sue me?

Somehow, I doubted it. After all, to take legal action, he'd have to out himself as being the real guilty party. Somehow, I didn't think he would ever do that. And even if he did sue me, so what? The telling of the tale would be my reformation, my regeneration. In telling the tale, I would take back my own life.

I would heal myself.

Writer, heal thyself.

I put pen to paper, started to write.

People think it must be easy for you, when they see you out here on the wire…

It was dinnertime, the knock coming at the door with Mrs. Fairly carrying a tray, before I stopped.

 

I heard the dog before I saw anything else.

Having slopped spaghetti sauce all over my damp sweater, I realized that it was a good thing I had delayed putting on my dress. Sliding into my heels, running a comb through my tangle of black curls, I glanced in the full-length mirror only long enough to verify that I was indeed as presentable as I ever was. Whatever the image that looked back at me, it would have to do.

I came down the staircase, holding tight to the railing so as not to trip in my unaccustomed heels. It wouldn't do, I thought, to fall at the master's feet as prelude to our first meeting.

As I said, I heard the dog before I saw anything else.

And then an impatient voice, an oddly familiar bass voice:

“Captain! Stop that infernal barking! One would think you smelled the blood of someone you knew.”

Oh no!
I thought. It couldn't be.
It couldn't be. How could it possibly be?

It was.

I had just been about to enter the library, where I was to meet my master for what I thought would be the first time, what I now knew would be the second, when I'd heard that bass voice call out its message to the dog. Realizing that there was only one person in the world who could own that voice, and that I had already met him and had no desire to repeat the awful experience, I turned abruptly on my heel.

And tripped, of course, over the edge of the runner in the long hall.

“Who put that there?” I muttered to myself.

“Is that the new governess I finally hear?” the voice called out, an annoying laugh contained within it.

He did not wait for my answer.

“Well, do not dawdle,” he went on. “Delay no further. Annette has been spending this last hour telling me all manner of wonderful things about you.”

Meekly—what choice did I have?—I brushed off my dress, entered the room.

And there he was: sitting in a leather armchair beside the great fire.

Captain, upon seeing me, commenced to barking again.

“You!” said the man in the chair, clearly shocked.

“I,” I said, rising up to my full lack of height and steeling my courage.

I moved to stand before him, hands clasped behind my back as though to prove I had nothing to hide. What could he do, I had realized, fire me? There was nothing too awful he could do to me that life hadn't already done. I was almost sure of it.

“
You
is right,” he said. “You're the woman who scared my dog.”

“I?”

“Yes,
you.
If you hadn't been such an abominable horsewoman, if you'd had more control—”

“If you and your, your…
compadres
hadn't trampled at my heels, if you hadn't let that horse you call a dog bark at me so—”

“If you hadn't been in the wrong place at the wrong time—”

“Nor you,” I countered.

I was reminded yet again of how somewhat unattractive he was.

By now he had risen from his seat and was staring me down, hands on hips, as though with no more than his stern gaze he could destroy me.

But I stood my ground. “Nor you,” I said again, just in case he hadn't heard my insult the first time.

Just when I was beginning to think he looked angry enough that he might indeed hit me, an extraordinary thing happened: he laughed.

It was that same laugh I'd heard earlier in the day, a lifetime ago it seemed, when he had laughed on the horse trail.

In that moment, I forgot how somewhat unattractive he was.

Surprising myself even more than I surprised him perhaps, I started laughing, too.

“It is a good thing,” he said, getting his own laughter under control, a smile still dancing around his lips, “that we both have good senses of humor. I do not think Annette would like it, were we to go on fighting so in front of her.”

“No,” a little voice piped up.

I had not seen her there before. He so sucked up all the oxygen in the room, there was no space for anyone else.