by Tim Pears
‘On the far side of Maundown?’ she said. ‘With three daughters?’
‘That’s the one,’ Leo agreed. ‘I’ve dug me a little smallholding. I thought that might be what I wanted, but it ain’t.’
‘What do you want?’
Leo looked away. ‘I want to work with horses.’ He smiled, and turned back to face her. ‘Just as tractors is takin over.’
Lottie nodded. ‘I fear the days of the heavy horse are numbered.’
‘And not just them,’ Leo said. ‘I’ve been considerin the fate a sparrows.’
‘Sparrows?’ Lottie asked.
‘Have you noticed,’ Leo said, ‘how they peck oats from out of horses’ dung? Undigested oats. With fewer horses there’ll be fewer sparrows, for sure. All things is connected.’
Lottie said that he was surely right about that. Then she apologised, saying how rude she was, she must offer him something to drink. And food. It must be lunchtime.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I should get back. I should let you get on.’
‘Will you come again tomorrow?’ Lottie asked. ‘In the morning. Please. I want you to see something.’
‘I shall, then,’ Leo said. He got to his feet. ‘Once upon a time,’ he said, ‘I told you I would work for you. I made a promise.’
‘We were children,’ Lottie said.
Leo made a gesture with his right hand, tilting and holding it upraised and palm open towards her. ‘I came back, like I said, but when I saw you with the child, and assumed he was yours, and that you was married, I turned around. I had ideas, and I was too proud. It’s took me these years to swallow my pride. Now I don’t know what to think.’
Lottie smiled and reached out and took Leo’s hand in both of hers. ‘Don’t think,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you are here. So glad. Come back tomorrow morning.’
Leo nodded. He withdrew his hand from Lottie’s grip and turned and walked away from the cottage.
11
On the day following Leo rose early. After feeding his pig and his chickens he walked back to the estate. He strode fast, but it took an hour and a half. He thought that he had probably walked more miles than was good for a man. A man should have a horse. Or failing that a bicycle.
He walked past the stables and a little further on he heard a horse nicker. He stepped from the lane and walked through a coppice of beech trees and came out on a path. To his right were the stables. He knew where he was. On almost exactly this spot he had once held on to Herb Shattock’s rifle against its attempted seizure by his cousin, the maid Gladys, when Lottie refused to let the groom destroy her blue roan. He turned left and walked down through the spinney to the paddock where he’d first observed Lottie suppling the same animal. Now he saw a man leaning on the outside of the fence poles, watching.
Inside the paddock were three horses. A big grey, a bay mare, and a tubby little beast that resembled a moorland pony but was shorter and rounder. It had a long tail and a thick mane, whose forelock half-covered its eyes. Lottie was leading this diminutive animal by a short rope. A boy walked beside her. Lottie stopped and offered the rope to the boy. He did not look at her but at the ground. The pony stood still and made no fuss while the boy tried to make up his mind. The big grey remained on the far side of the paddock, grazing but watching between his legs what was going on. The bay mare had been following the little pony and the two humans at some dozen yards’ distance. The boy made up his mind. He took the rope from Lottie and resumed walking. The pony obediently accompanied him, Lottie walking beside them. The bay mare followed.
Leo stood beside the man watching and after a while he said, ‘Is you involved in this?’
The man glanced at him, then back at the proceedings in the paddock. ‘That’s my boy,’ he said. ‘Miss Charlotte reckoned the horse might help him.’
‘What ails the boy?’ Leo asked.
The man glanced at Leo again. His mouth and lips moved, as if he had just discovered some morsels of food, seeds or pips, between his teeth, and was chewing them. ‘He don’t say nothin, really.’
Leo nodded. ‘I was desperate shy at his age myself. Didn’t say boo to a goose.’
‘He bain’t shy,’ the man said. ‘He don’t say nothin. He grunts and growls. He’s angry. Don’t ask me why. If I could find out what angers him so I’d cast it out and be done.’
Leo asked how often the boy had come here and the man said this was their second visit. He nodded towards the people in the field. They had stopped walking. The boy stroked the pony.
‘If you’d wagered me’, the man said, ‘that our boy would be gentle with that horse, I’d a bet every penny I had against you. ’Twill mean nothin to you, fellow, but to me it’s …’ The man frowned and shook his head. ‘’Tis odd. ’Tis incredible, is what it is, really.’
After the man had taken his boy off, Lottie joined Leo at the fence. She drank from a flask of water and together they watched the three horses. Leo said that the big grey was a beauty. Lottie said his name was Pegasus and he was the most confident horse she had known, with a rare authority, and such was his confidence in himself that he was obedient to her. ‘If that makes sense,’ she added.
Leo said he thought that it did. He asked what she had been doing with the boy. She said she had an idea that horses, or at least certain horses, gentle beasts, might be more patient with people who were crippled or troubled than other people were. The idea came to her after a blind man she knew had ridden Pegasus. She wasn’t sure. It was early days.
‘It is an interestin notion,’ Leo said. ‘Appealin.’
‘I wanted you to see,’ Lottie said. ‘And I wondered too if you might help me with the mare.’
‘That bay there?’ Leo asked. ‘Her looks sound to me.’
‘She has a vice,’ Lottie said. ‘An affliction. I don’t understand it.’
Lottie put a halter on the bay pony and led her out of the paddock. Walking up towards the stables, she explained to Leo that the mare was a smooth and comfortable ride. Her mouth was delightfully soft. She broke promptly into a gallop. ‘She has a fire inside her, but she’s gentle too.’
Leo asked what was wrong with her.
‘She attacked me,’ Lottie said. ‘And I’m not sure why. Perhaps you might work it out.’
Lottie went back to the paddock for her gelding. They saddled up the horses and rode across the estate, Leo on the big grey, Lottie on the smaller mare. On the old gallops they let their mounts have their heads until the mare was wearied. They walked them back to the stables.
In the yard Lottie took her Pegasus. Leo unsaddled the mare and rubbed her down. As he slipped a rope halter on her she nuzzled his arm. He led her into the largest loose box, and held her with his right hand as he began to pull shut the bottom half of the door, which he did by feel, not taking his eyes off her for a moment. Then he felt the door being closed by someone else.
Lottie bolted the lower door. ‘How does she seem?’
‘Content,’ Leo told her. The mare stood quiet. He patted and stroked her, and spoke to her, and rubbed her withers.
‘Be careful,’ Lottie said.
‘I shall,’ Leo told her. ‘But I can’t feel no violence in her.’
‘Neither could I,’ Lottie said. ‘My hope is it was because I’m a woman.’ She told him that she would climb to the hayloft and watch from up there. She hung a short, stout riding crop on the door, and told Leo he should keep it handy.
He frowned. ‘I seem to recall you do not believe in such chastisement.’
Lottie smiled. ‘For self-preservation I’ll allow it,’ she said.
Leo spoke to the mare, as he spoke to all horses, in his calm, gritty voice. He heard Lottie on the boards above his head. After a while he said, ‘I reckon ’tis about time to turn her loose.’ He left the halter on the mare, and simply loosened the rope and pulled it through its own loop and free. He stepped back and grasped the riding crop, and held it behind him, and waited. The bay mare watched him.
‘I’ve seen plenty a horses,’ Leo said, ‘with everything from mischief to madness, and you can see it in their eyes. Their eyes change. Hers ain’t changed.’
‘Not yet,’ Lottie said. ‘Keep on your guard.’
‘Maybe you’re right, a woman was cruel to her.’
‘She does seem content with you.’
Leo looked around the loose box. ‘If she do go berserk, she might try to leap over the top half a the door.’
He stepped back and closed it. The morning sun was shut out, light dwindling in the windowless box. Leo could no longer see the mare’s eyes, only the dark shape of her form as she walked to the far wall. She whinnied once, quietly. Leo moved towards her. And then it happened.
The bay mare spun away from the wall to face the man. It took Leo a moment of disbelief and hesitation before he began to react, but the horse’s turn towards him gave him that moment. He lunged away to the right as the mare, her ears flattened, threw herself at him. He smelled the hot, herby smell of her breath as he twisted away. Her teeth missed his face and sank into his left shoulder.
Leo cried out as he felt the point of his shoulder, the flesh and the bone, crushed in the animal’s jaws. The riding crop was held in the hand of that arm and it dropped from his fingers. He felt the mare’s teeth slide off his shoulder and down his arm, the sleeve of his jacket tearing apart. Then her teeth got a grip. Before they could rip his flesh Leo regained his balance and, with the fingers of his free, right hand bunched into a fist, brought it down as hard as he could on the side of her nose.
The mare let go her teeth on Leo’s arm and swung her head up towards his face again. He side-stepped and punched her a second time. She spun around, and Leo found himself facing her flexing hind legs. A kick would be a bone-breaker for sure, and there was no escape. He darted in towards her flank, and punched her as hard as he could in the belly. The mare recoiled. The man leaped back and away. Just as he reached the door it opened and Lottie pulled him out, then pushed the door shut and bolted both halves.
Leo leaned back against the stone wall, his eyes closed against the brightness of the sun, sweating, gasping, his chest heaving for breath. Lottie pulled his jacket off and led him to the stable bothy, Herb Shattock’s old office, and sat him down. The left sleeve and whole side of his shirt was soaked with blood. She unbuttoned the shirt and took this off too, then she washed the blood from his arm and shoulder. Leo gritted his teeth and stared at a particular brick in the wall opposite and kept his gaze upon it. Lottie said she did not think anything was broken. Maybe the shoulder was torn somewhat, but the pain he must be feeling was mostly from the muscles.
‘The bruising’s already coming through,’ she said.
Leo closed his eyes. ‘I can feel it comin.’
‘She’s cut you, but it’s not deep,’ Lottie said. ‘I don’t think you need stitches.’ She bathed Leo’s arm in antiseptic, and bandaged the wounds.
Leo rolled himself a cigarette with his right hand. Though the fingers of his left hand were not numb, exactly, they felt oddly unwieldy. He rolled the cigarette as tight as he could. It was somewhat misshapen. He licked the paper, and lit it, and smoked with his eyes once more closed. When he opened them he saw that Lottie was watching him. Studying his face, or waiting for his verdict, he was not sure which. He shook his head, and said, ‘She did that to you?’
‘No. She was still tied up when she went for me, thank God, or I’m not sure I’d be here.’
Leo took a long drag on his cigarette and blew out the smoke and said, ‘Well, I think we can rule out her fury bein towards women only.’
Lottie smiled. ‘A savage equine demon. I suppose I’ll have to sell her. For horse meat.’
Leo frowned. ‘Please do not do that. Give me a little time, at least.’
‘You’d go back in there with her?’ Lottie asked.
Leo considered this proposition. Perhaps it was indeed insane. ‘If I might wish to call myself a horseman,’ he said, ‘time’s one thing I should give her. Let me think on it some, and her and me can have another go together.’
They sat in the bothy. Leo finished his cigarette. Lottie waited patiently for him to say more. Did he mean that he was thinking now? Or that he would go away and think about the problem another time, elsewhere, and now was simply recovering?
Leo opened his eyes and stood, wincing, and then he walked back across the stable yard. He opened the upper half of the door and looked in. The mare stood agitated in the far corner of the loose box. Lottie joined him and they stood together, watching the bay mare.
‘If either of us went in there now, do you not think she’d go for us?’ Lottie asked.
Leo watched the mare. Her breathing was becoming less febrile. ‘I do not,’ he said. He spoke further and Lottie realised he was speaking not to her but to the horse, telling her there was no need for her to be afeared, no one here planned to hurt her. The mare turned and walked across to the door. Lottie took a step back. The horse put her head over the top of the door, and nuzzled Leo’s right arm. He raised his hand and rubbed her neck. Then he unbolted the lower half of the door and opened it.
‘Leo,’ Lottie said.
The man stepped through the doorway, and resumed stroking the bay mare, and speaking to her. She continued to nuzzle him, and rubbed away an itch on her ear against his undamaged shoulder.
‘How can you be sure it’s safe?’ Lottie said. ‘Please be careful.’
Leo turned to Lottie and said, ‘It’s safe. But if I close the top half a the door and cut out the light again, she’ll rip me to pieces, I reckon.’ He patted the mare’s shoulder. ‘I do suspect that someone mistreated her in the dark. In secret, I shouldn’t doubt. Knowin in their heart a hearts it was wrong.’ He scratched the mare’s ear. ‘This old girl here is afraid a the dark,’ he said.
12
Most days were wet, with warm summer rain. Leo walked to the estate each day and rode the bay mare and turned her out in the paddock. After one week he rode the mare to the stable yard as usual where he unsaddled her and rubbed her down, but this day he took her back to the loose box. Inside he hitched her to the wall and gave her a good armful of hay. Then he left her, shutting both sections of the door behind him. He stood outside listening. The mare stopped eating. Leo made no noise. After a minute or two he could hear that the horse accepted that she was alone in the box, and resumed chewing her food.
‘Tomorrow I shall do the same,’ Leo told Lottie, when she returned from her veterinary visits. ‘And the next day. And the next.’
‘You don’t need to,’ she assured him. ‘It’s too much trouble. It doesn’t make sense. I can buy another.’
Leo did not say anything.
‘At least take Pegasus with you,’ Lottie said. ‘If you’re going to go to and fro. It’ll be good for him. Can he graze in your field?’
For a week Leo rode the big grey to the estate and exercised the bay mare and let her feed in the dark, then rode the grey back to his smallholding. One evening Myrtle Luscombe came to gaze upon the handsome horse. Leo let him loose then came and stood beside Myrtle.
‘You’re going to leave soon, aren’t you?’ she said.
Leo said that he probably was.
Myrtle said, ‘Will you take me with you?’
Leo looked at her and his expression must have betrayed his surprise, for she continued. ‘I can’t stay any longer. All three of us clogged up here.’
‘You want to skedaddle?’
‘Do not tease me.’
‘You’re the youngest,’ Leo said.
‘I come eighteen in a month or two.’
‘Or ten.’ Leo sat on one of the sawn logs overlooking his field. ‘Wouldn’t one of the others wish to push on first?’
‘Agnes won’t.’
Leo nodded. He rolled himself a cigarette. ‘I suppose your father relies upon her most of all.’
Myrtle laughed. ‘You could say.’
‘I don’t mean he don’t rely on you, Myrt
le, nor on Ethel.’ Leo lit his cigarette. ‘Just that Agnes does everythin in the house.’
‘She’s like a wife to him,’ Myrtle said. ‘You do know that, don’t you?’
‘That’s what I’m tryin to say. She cooks, cleans. Grows vegetables. Tends poultry.’
‘No,’ Myrtle said. ‘She is like a wife.’
‘Do you mean …?’ Leo asked.
Myrtle nodded.
Leo smoked and thought about this. ‘I can’t rightly believe that,’ he said at length. ‘Agnes don’t seem abused.’
‘No. Pa don’t beat her. They bicker like some long-married couple, more like. Look, they’re welcome to each other. The thing is, I don’t want to drive no tractor.’
Leo turned and looked the girl in the eyes. ‘You could get work anywhere,’ he said.
The rain stopped. The weather grew warm. After a week of leaving the bay mare alone in the dark box, tied by a rope, munching hay, Leo did exactly the same except this time he closed the door from the inside and stood motionless, silent, in the gloom. The mare resumed eating. After a minute or two Leo began to speak, softly. The mare abruptly lost interest in the hay and turned towards the man. Leo stepped slowly towards her. The mare gave a whinny that became a drawn-out grunt of a sound, from deep in her belly. Then she jerked towards him.
The rope brought her head back with a jolt.
Leo continued to talk to the horse, telling her she was safe, he was no threat to her, there was no danger, but it did not mollify her. She exploded with a wild frenzy at the end of the rope. She lunged forward with a force that Leo feared would rip the tendons of her neck or break the thick rope, one or the other. He doubted the knots he’d tied. Then she changed her mind and swivelled around. Leo stepped back all the way to the door, just out of reach of the stabbing hind hooves that slashed towards him. He opened the door, and let himself out, leaving the upper half of the door open.
For three days Leo shut the horse in and stood in the box with her, and spoke to her, but he did not take a single step towards her before letting himself out.