A Horse Called Hero

by Sam Angus

  Dodo says that you help with the horses after school. I know you find some comfort there. The presence of a horse is soothing and healing.

  I can’t be at your side, but I am always, always, in my heart, with you.

  Your loving

  Pa

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  ‘What’ll you do, Miss Revel, won’t you come to tea with Father too?’

  Dodo smiled and shook her head as she untied Cecily’s art smock, adjusted Meriel’s ribbons and kissed the top of their candyfloss heads. ‘It’s Wolfie’s birthday,’ she answered, replacing their palettes on the trolley, wheeling their easels to the side of the gallery. ‘Your father said I might take him to the stables tomorrow. Will it make him sadder or will it make him happier, do you think?’ She smiled. ‘Hurry. Your father doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’

  The girls skipped down the gallery, ribboning like butterflies in and out of the marble statuary. Dodo untied her own apron and regarded, with a critical eye, the work of her charges. She sighed a slow sigh and turned to their subject, a bird of prey carved from marble. Guarded and wary, it gazed, stonily, back at her, all claw and beak, talons clenching its veined perch as though to pierce blood from the marble of it.

  Dodo picked up a brush and corrected the claws, her hand moving confidently over Meriel’s more hesitant marks. Glimpsing the time, she put down her brush and ran to the door. She walked down the corridor, breaking into a tiptoe run where there was carpet, thinking, as she always did, that it took longer to get from one end of this house to the other than it did to cross the village.

  At the gate she hugged Wolfie, feeling in his rigid arms, the numbness in the centre of him.

  ‘We’ll soon be home, Wolfie, we’ll all be together.’

  ‘I know . . .’

  Dodo took the letter Wolfie handed her. She read it and looked up and saw the longing in his haunted eyes. Her heart twisted with pain. How large Hero was still in Wolfie’s heart, how very much he’d meant. Hettie said that he cried out in his sleep, that he screamed of trains, whiplashes, the press and crush of horseflesh in dark wagons. She said he’d asked once, when she’d woken him, if they’d been given water on their journey, if you gave water to a horse that would be butchered. Later she’d come to his room again to stop his screams and he’d asked how the thing had been done. With a gun? With a knife?

  Hettie had answered Wolfie that the police statement had read: ‘Stolen. Loaded at Dulverton. Transported by train.’ That was all they’d ever know.

  There was nothing Hettie or Dodo could give Wolfie, the darkness in him so heavy, so solid.

  Dodo was taking his hand. Wolfie shook himself with an effort to be cheerful for Dodo, who was being cheerful for him. Together, brother and sister walked the short distance to the modest terraced house that Wolfie and Hettie shared, the house that came with Hettie’s post as assistant head to the village school.

  Hettie was waiting in the kitchen. She hugged Wolfie. An iced cake stood on the table. Dodo put the kettle on the range. Captain, the small lead horse, stood in the window just behind the kettle. Dodo picked him up and held him, remembering Wolfie once, so small then, and so fierce. ‘He will be brave and he will have a silver tip to his tail,’ he’d said as he’d lined up his cavalry on the table at Addison Avenue.

  ‘And how is life at the Park? Does their drawing improve?’ Hettie asked Dodo, who laughed by way of answer. Hettie joined them at the table and said, ‘Your pa’s on a crusade – you know, for the miners – even now, even in prison, . . . he seems to be drawn to difficult causes.’

  ‘Sometimes I think he writes more to you than he does to us,’ said Dodo, smiling.

  ‘He’s a brave man. The coal masters are powerful and stubborn. Your father’s voice is a brave and lonely one. Moral courage is a rarer thing than physical courage.’

  ‘Hettie, if Pa – if Lord Seaton finds out what Pa is doing –’

  ‘Your position at Wynyard will become untenable if he discovers who your father is.’

  Later, when the cake was eaten, the cards opened, Dodo saw that Hettie was grave and preoccupied.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  Hettie took a letter from her pocket and put it on the table for them to read.

  DEAR MISS LAMB,

  OLD MAN JERVIS DIED LAST WEEK. HE DIED IN JAIL, MISS LAMB. I THOUGHT YOU’D WANT TO KNOW. HAVING DEFAULTED ON THE RENT OF THE LAND AT WINDWISTLE AND ON THORNE, HE’S LEFT HIS WIFE AND CHILDREN HOMELESS. YOUNG NED’S HAD A HARD TIME. AS THE ONLY PROVIDER FOR THE FAMILY FOR A LONG TIME NOW, HE WAS BULLIED BY HIS FATHER INTO SOME NASTY GOINGS-ON. CAUGHT AT IT BY THE POLICE, HE WAS FORCED, BY THE QUESTIONS OF A CLEVER JUDGE, TO TESTIFY AGAINST HIS OWN FATHER. I AM SURE I DON’T NEED TO TELL YOU, MISS, WHAT SOME OF THOSE GOINGS-ON WERE, BUT IT WAS CLEAR THAT YOUNG NED WAS BULLIED INTO THEM. THE CONSEQUENCES FOR YOU HAVE BEEN TERRIBLE. WHEN THE GOOD IN HIM MADE HIM REBEL AGAINST HIS FATHER THERE WAS NO MORE MONEY COMING IN FOR THE WEE ONES AND THE CONSEQUENCES FOR NED AND HIS YOUNG BROTHERS HAVE ALSO BEEN TERRIBLE.

  IT’S NOT THE SAME AT LILYCOMBE WITH YOU GONE AND THE NEW RECTOR HAS NOT SO GOOD A VOICE AS YOUR FATHER.

  YOURS EVER,

  SAMUEL ROCK

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The scent of oil and leather transported him, as if in a dream. Wolfie had a greasy cloth in his hand, a saddle on his lap. He could lose himself in the rubbing and polishing of a bridle, could lose himself in the brushing of a horse, but sometimes beneath his fingers there’d be the coat of another horse, the velvet of a young muzzle, the thistledown breath on his cheek. A wave of nausea would roll, gulping and choking from the pit of him.

  ‘Learn him by heart, Wolfie, learn your horse by heart,’ Pa had said. And he had: he had the whole of Hero by heart, the touch of him, from nose to tail, the coat of him, the muscle and vein of him, all by heart, and if he closed his eyes, there in the tack room at Wynyard, he could run his fingers from the dappled neck to the silver tail of him.

  Only Ryland and his yard could breathe some warmth and life into the boy. The old groom’s father had worked in the mines, his son Jo worked there now. Wolfie would ask Ryland to talk about the miners’ lives, to tell him what he knew so Wolfie felt close to Pa, close to the things that Pa cared for and fought for.

  Ryland had been reluctant to have Wolfie’s help when Dodo had brought him to the yard, but they’d grown accustomed to each other. Ryland found that Wolfie had a good hand for a horse, a soft hand. The boy had told him about his own horse and Ryland had softened, softened more when he’d seen the work was doing the boy good. To Dodo it seemed that Wolfie talked more to Ryland than to anyone else.

  ‘Have you ever been down?’

  Ryland was clipping Shannon in the yard. Holding her foreleg, he looked under her belly towards the boy and answered, ‘I never went down. Father was ostler in William Pit. Before I were old enough to go down, there was an explosion . . .’ Ryland glanced across the park to the steam that rose from the distant winding shaft. ‘I never wanted Jo to go down, but there weren’t no other work, nothing else but the pit.’

  ‘Does Jo like working there?’

  ‘Well enough. But he never heard what we heard . . . After the explosion, then there were the flood . . . twenty-six men drowned . . . children, young as five . . . six hundred feet underground in a flood in the pitch dark.’

  ‘Children?’ Wolfie asked.

  ‘Aye, them’re cheaper, women and children came cheaper than the men.’

  Wolfie hung up his bridle and collected another. Leaning against the door, watching Ryland at his work, he said, ‘My father writes speeches and papers for the miners. He’s fighting to impose maximum working hours, maximum loads, and mechanical haulage.’

  Ryland straightened up and lifted his cap and looked at the boy. ‘Oh, aye? . . . And does the master know?’ He gestured with his head to the house.

  ‘I don’t know. Dodo hopes he doesn’t but even when he’s in prison he’s in the pa
pers. He is contrary-minded. He doesn’t think what other people think.’

  Ryland laughed. ‘Contrary-minded,’ he said, ‘is a fine thing to be.’

  ‘I don’t want to be contrary-minded. I want to think what everyone else does, otherwise life is difficult.’

  ‘I see no evidence of you thinking what everyone else does,’ said Ryland. ‘Aye, an’ your father’s right, I’m thinking.’ Ryland moved to Shannon’s off side and picked up a hind leg. ‘The men are paid piece work – paid, that is, for each tub o’ coal. An’ if you don’t bring up enough o’ them tubs, you can’t feed the family. The country needs coal and wants it cheap, and the master wants profits, but the miner just wants a living wage. He’s right, your father, the loads must be fixed at what a horse can carry. Fifty tons a day, them horses down there . . . fifty tons . . . or else a man can’t feed his family. Fifty tons a day till their backs an’ legs are broken an’ they’re shot where they fall. Or worse . . . Aye, hunger makes monsters of men an’ a hungry man’ll loose a tub of coal on a pony just to be given a faster one.’ He stroked Shannon’s gleaming coat. ‘The master don’t want change, he wants profit.’

  Shaking his head sadly, he went to the feed room to prepare the sugar beet for the horses.

  Wolfie rose and wandered over to the window. He held the bridle in his hand, running his fingers across the metal bit of it, remembering the first time he’d put Hero to the bit, the young horse’s indignation at the cold metal across his tongue.

  When Dodo came down to the yard to find her brother, she saw him through the window of the tack room. He was tall now, she thought, older-looking than his years, tall and strong. She saw his finger move across the dusty pane. She saw the letters emerge, in mirror image.

  Dodo watched Wolfie sadly.

  ‘Wolfie,’ she called to him, ‘I’ve got a picnic tea – we’ve ham and melon . . .’

  ‘Melon?’ Wolfie asked in wonder as he came to the door.

  ‘. . . And egg sandwiches, specially for you. I said every picnic had to have an egg in it.’

  ‘Every picnic has to have horses, and streams,’ said Wolfie.

  Dodo tried again, holding out a pamphlet to him. ‘Look, Wolfie, there’s going to be races – the pit ponies racing,’ she said. ‘It’s their only week above ground – the only chance to see them.’

  Ryland joined them, raising his cap to Dodo. He picked up the hamper at her feet, weighed it in his hand, disapproving.

  ‘There’s more in this than most here put on their table in a year.’

  Wolfie read the Pitman’s Derby pamphlet, then turned to Dodo. ‘Do you remember the race, do you remember Comer’s Gate?’

  ‘I do, and I remember you flying about like a small bobbin!’ She laughed.

  ‘Nothing will ever be the same, Dodo.’

  Ryland took the paper from Wolfie’s hand.

  ‘Will you come, Ryland?’ asked Dodo.

  ‘No. I don’t like to think on t’others, on them you won’t see, as have the broken knees, the ones who can’t breathe for the dust in their lungs, the stones in their guts.’

  Ryland put the paper back in Wolfie’s hands and made for the tack room. At the door he paused and said, his back to them, ‘Them ponies pull tubs o’ coal, seven tubs, seven tons, between rails half a yard wide, through pitch dark, their knees doubled a’most to the ground . . . No, you won’ find me at them races.’

  ‘Hettie’s asked me to go with her,’ said Dodo quietly.

  ‘We’ll stay here, you and I,’ said Ryland.

  Wolfie nodded.

  Ryland went about his work in the tack room.

  ‘Come on, Wolfie, take the handle, help me,’ said Dodo, trying to recover the afternoon. She called goodbye to Ryland and they made their way out of the park.

  ‘It would be quicker on a horse,’ said Wolfie, always resistant to walking.

  At the park gates he looked doubtfully at the drear chimneys and brooding slag heaps, the Lilliputian houses that cowered in silent and bitter file.

  ‘I miss Lilycombe,’ he said simply.

  ‘I know, Wolfie, I know,’ said Dodo gently. ‘Nowhere will ever be as lovely.’

  ‘Do you think about it too?’

  ‘All the time,’ she answered. ‘All the time.’

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  1st June

  Dear Wolfie,

  The police have been in touch about the ponies of Hettie’s that were taken from Windwistle. As your parent, they contacted me rather than you. I was of course able to give them no information and they have, I believe, now spoken to a man named Samuel. But I discovered from them that the lease on the farmland at Windwistle expired with the death of a Mr Jervis.

  That house, Windwistle, so close as I now know, to Lilycombe, was your ma’s childhood home.

  I have bought the lease and made it over to you both. Spud has made all the arrangements. It will always be your home. This would have made your ma so happy. One day, with Hettie’s help, we’ll rebuild the herd and we’ll find you a horse. In the meantime, no Jervis will ever set foot there again. We could all go there until Addison Avenue is restored and that may take some time since there is such a shortage of building materials in the country.

  I heard something else too, this week. Otto Senf, on his deathbed, broke his vow of silence. He admitted the massacre and the place of it. The bodies of my men have been found. It will be too late to make up the years I’ve missed with you, but it’s now certain I’ll be released early.

  In all hope,

  Pa

  Wolfie put the letter on the table for Hettie to read.

  ‘I couldn’t ever go back,’ he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  A school holiday was given for the Derby. Wolfie went early to the stables at Wynyard, passing Dodo on her way to meet Hettie at the school house.

  ‘Always put your money on a grey,’ Wolfie said to her.

  He found Ryland washing down the immense dark horse the master had named Black Diamond. As Wolfie approached, Ryland leaned forward over the horse, his arms folded, head resting there, watching Wolfie, seeing the deadness in the boy’s step and wondering. The boy had lost his mother, his father was jailed, the horse he’d had once had gone. Ryland saw the sadness in the boy’s step.

  ‘Nothing can’t ever replace a horse you’ve really loved,’ he said as Wolfie came close.

  Wolfie smiled and shook his head. He took the hose from Ryland, and the sponge.

  ‘What happened to ’im?’ Ryland asked.

  ‘Stolen.’

  ‘Aye,’ Ryland said to himself, coiling the hose. ‘Aye, an’ they were takin’ from all over in the war . . . an’ after it.’

  Wolfie went to the tack room to fetch a towel. From outside he heard the determined tread of a boot on the cobbles, then a voice rising. When he came out someone had Ryland by the collar, their two heads only a few inches apart, the hose water from the pipe spreading in a lake around Black Diamond’s polished hoofs. Wolfie turned the tap off and coiled the hose.

  ‘You tell ’im. You tell your boy. If he makes any more trouble he’s out. If it weren’t for you, an’ my fondness for your father, your boy’d ’a lost his job a while back . . .’

  Ryland submitted to the rant in silence. The man saw Wolfie. Reluctantly he relinquished his hold of Ryland’s collar, turned and made as if to leave.

  ‘Who was that?’ whispered Wolfie.

  ‘Ostler from William Pit,’ answered Ryland.

  ‘An’ I’ll tell you one more thing.’ The man had turned, was yanking Ryland round by the shoulder. ‘Once more and there’ll be no work for ’im, if I find ’im at it again . . . It’s a good pit, an’ the men’re happy an’ I don’t want no problems from your boy, makin’ trouble where there ain’t none an’ stirring men up.’

  Ryland heard the man out, then said, ‘You won’t lay a finger on Jo an’ you know that well as I. You can’t threaten me with what I know as you’ll never do. You’re
too scared, Jervis, that I’ll tell all as I know.’

  Wolfie sprang forward. ‘Jervis?’

  The man kept his hold on Ryland and turned to Wolfie, considered him briefly then turned back as Ryland spoke.

  ‘Them’re expensive horses, if you ’as to buy ’em. But you don’t buy ’em market price, do you? I seen you, Dick Jervis, aye, I know where you used to go, in the dead o’ night . . .’

  Eye to eye, Ryland watched Jervis. Discomforted, Jervis relaxed his hold on Ryland.

  ‘To the siding, where the wagons stop. I seen you . . . I seen you unload ’em . . .’

  Wolfie pushed between the two men, pulled Jervis to one side and stood before him, eyes blazing. ‘Jervis?’ he asked.

  Jervis was silent.

  ‘Aye,’ said Ryland, turning to Black Diamond. ‘Aye, ’e’s named Jervis, Dick Jervis.’

  ‘What’s Ned Jervis to you?’ asked Wolfie.

  Jervis looked slowly at Wolfie, narrowing his eyes. He turned to Ryland, then back to the boy, but made no answer. Wolfie leaped forward and grabbed him by the collar. Jervis, surprised to be manhandled by so young a boy, said after some consideration, ‘Old lame Jervis . . . Ned’s father, that was . . . he was me brother.’

  ‘So Ned’s . . . he’s your nephew.’ Wolfie gripped Jervis tighter, shaking him.

  Ryland, rubbing Black Diamond down, looked over the horse’s back, the twinkle of a smile in his stern eyes as he saw Wolfie thrust Jervis against the wall and pin him there.