‘We can do it,’ Rose said. ‘I know we can.’
‘So do I.’ Mollie and Rose fuelled each other’s enthusiasm.
‘I’ll get Abigail and Hazel to come in,’ Rose said.
‘And you can wear those frilly aprons you wore for Jean King’s wedding party.’
‘Shall I wear the black skirt? I think I’ll put on lipstick and do up my eyes.’
Rose had been looking for a chance to try mascara ever since she had felt what it was like to have sexy weighted lashes when she was Lynette at the marina. ‘And I’ll borrow your nail varnish, and—’
‘You’ll have to do something about that hair.’ Philip had an incredible talent for damping you down when you were excited.
Rose went to the mirror. Was her hair as bad as all that? She put both hands through it and held it away from her head.
The mirror clouded over and she could not see herself. A dark image began to form, like a Polaroid picture slowly developing. With her hands in her hair, she stood and stared at the mirror in horrified fascination, sick with guilt because she had been thinking of stupid things like mascara when all the time, the donkey … poor abused little Gully … Oh God, was she going to see him lying dead in the water, as she had seen Favour lying on the river bank?
But the brown donkey was no longer lying at the edge of the sea. He had somehow got to his feet and managed to drag himself farther up on a narrow pebbly beach, hemmed in by craggy rocks on either side. His knees were bent and his back legs leaned in under his sagging stomach. Rose could see that he was nosing feebly at an old bucket that was wedged among stones and rubbish, staggering as if he would collapse again.
‘Your hair’s not as bad as all that,’ Philip said from behind her. ‘You look as if you’d seen a ghost.’
The beach and the donkey were gone as if they were wiped off a blackboard by a wet sponge, and Rose saw her face again, staring, amazed. She took her hands out of her hair and shook it into its usual square shape, and went quickly out of the room.
Not dead. Not dead. Rose hung on to that thought with hope, although the mirror vision had shown her that the donkey might not have much longer to live. Poor little bedraggled castaway, sagging at the knees, head hanging down on the weak neck, bumping his nose feebly at the toy bucket some child must have—
Some child! Rose stopped on the back stairs, eyes and mouth open. The abandoned bucket she had seen in the mirror was a faded red. A red bucket. What did that mean to her?
‘Derek’s left his bucket behind. Cost me three pound …’ The toad-like grandmother’s complaining voice came back into Rose’s head. Derek, Joanne – of course! Gully must be on the beach where Joanne and her family had picnicked last year. That was why Favour had taken Rose there, so that she would know about the bucket, and know about the beach where Gully was.
But she didn’t know. It could be any beach. She hadn’t a clue. Or had she? As she stepped down slowly to the bottom of the stairs into a heated aroma of bacon and sausages, Rose remembered Joanne saying, ‘Gives me claustrophobia, shut in with you lot.’
Shut in where? A guest house with rain streaming down the windows? A holiday chalet? There were some of those at Newcome Hollow, but – no. They had climbed some steps up to … up to … ‘A leaky caravan’. Joanne’s voice came back to her again. The discontented family had been staying in a caravan somewhere near the top of a cliff.
The only caravan site Rose had ever heard of was farther along the coast. She had never been there. She had no idea whether it had a beach below.
When she had helped to clear breakfasts, working at speed and skipping her own meal, Rose grabbed a piece of toast and went off on her bike to where she thought the caravan and camping site must be. It was farther than she expected. She wanted to turn back. It was hopeless. She would never find it. She could even be going in the wrong direction.
But she knew it wasn’t on the other side of the hotel towards Newcome, and each time she decided she had ridden far enough, she saw again the tears of the poor old man and the image of the exhausted donkey who had struggled so gallantly through the hostile sea. Was he to die alone on that deserted beach because Favour’s messenger gave up trying?
At last she found it. There was a ‘Camping’ sign out in the road, but the campground was closed, a high fence all round it, and the gate barred and padlocked.
Damn – she hadn’t thought of that. The fence was too high to climb. There was no way to get inside to look for the steps that led down to the rock-bound beach. She went round outside the fence, but at the end of it, there was a tangled grove of stunted pine trees and a forbidding metal and barbed wire barrier at the edge of the cliff. She could not get close enough to look down.
Rose was in despair. Suppose this really was the place, and Gully was down there and she couldn’t get to him?
‘Gully! Gully!’ She called his name into the wind, and tried to whistle, with a dry mouth. The old man had said he always answered, but he would be too weak to bray now, even if this was the right beach.
Rose stood behind the barbed wire barrier like a prisoner, and gazed through the trees wretchedly out to sea. A failure, that’s what she was. She felt again Joanne’s frustration and misery as she stared glumly at the empty ocean, hating everyone. Hating herself. Envying the seagull who landed briefly on a buoy out at sea and soared again into flight.
A grey seagull, it was. A buoy, rolling in the waves. A buoy! Hang on a minute, Rose, you’re on to something. The buoy had been offshore from that pebbly beach, far enough out to be seen from here, at the top of the cliff.
Steadying herself on the wind-scoured trunk of a leaning pine tree, Rose stood on tiptoe to stare over the barrier at the water where the buoy should be if this was the right place.
It wasn’t there. Desperately, Rose scanned the empty sea. It must be there. Otherwise, this could not be the place where Derek had left his bucket, and then what was Rose to do? She did not know any other caravan sites. It must be somewhere farther away – too far to reach on her bike.
Take me there, Favour! But he wouldn’t. He had done what he could – transporting her into the person of Joanne, showing her the harrowing visions of poor courageous little Gully.
The rescue had to be made by Rose alone.
She looked at her watch. Help! She’d have to ride fast to get back in time to help with lunches. Whatever incredible adventures were going on, Wood Briar was always there, claiming her back to her ordinary life. And always there was the painful tug between her responsibilities at the hotel and the urgency of her tasks as a messenger.
And other things too. One of the girls who worked for Joyce at the stable rang up to complain that Rose had missed her lesson, and that if she did not turn up this afternoon, Joyce said she wouldn’t be able to go to the Pony Club rally with Abigail.
‘Hullo, stranger.’ At the stable, Joyce greeted Rose sourly. ‘Gone off riding, have you?’
‘No, of course not. We’ve been very busy.’
‘You look ghastly.’
‘I’m tired.’
‘Should have come this morning then.’
‘Couldn’t.’
Joyce swaggered off in her skin-tight riding breeches, and Rose made a face at her lean behind.
When she went into Moonlight’s loose box, he blew out his wide pink nostrils in a little bubbly mutter of welcome. She put an arm over his neck and laid her face against his cream-coloured coat.
‘My poor old Moon, did I desert you? But it’s Gully. A donkey. Small and old. He could walk under your stomach, Moon. I wish he—’
‘Get tacked up!’ Joyce shouted.
Moonlight liked to see Rose, but he did not care whether she rode him or not. Especially jumping. Joyce had not forgotten her threat to make Rose try the in-and-out, and there was no avoiding it, although Rose was already worn out from bicycling, and from everything that was going on.
After she had gone twice round the outside jumps with no problems, Joy
ce shouted, ‘All right! Turn in to the centre, take the brush and then the in-and-out.’
‘Impulsion!’ she yelled, as Moonlight took the low brush fence at a trot and slowed down at the sight of all the bars in front of him. ‘Legs, girl – legs! Get that mule going!’ Joyce ran towards the jump.
Rose used her legs, but not her heart. Moonlight jumped the first parallel bars, saw Joyce standing at the side with the whip, stopped and backed away from the next jump, crashing into the bars behind him and breaking one of them.
He disentangled himself from the wreckage and kept on backing.
‘Come hup, you donkey!’ Joyce got behind him with the whip.
Fed up, shaken by the catastrophe of the in-and-out, exhausted and sick with worry about Gully, Rose turned and shouted back at Joyce, ‘There’s nothing wrong with donkeys! They’ve got more brains than some people!’
Joyce laughed coarsely. ‘Only trouble is,’ she jeered, ‘they go backwards faster than forwards.’
‘I want to take him in now,’ Rose said sullenly.
Jeering at Moonlight was bad enough. Jeering at donkeys was unbearable.
‘You’ll ruin him if you let him get away with refusing, but you’ll ruin me if you break any more jumps. Take him in, then.’
In the tack room, Rose hung up Moonlight’s saddle and bridle. She gave the bit a sketchy wipe and passed a sponge over the muddy girth, and stuck out her tongue at the photograph of Joyce in her better days, all togged out on a show horse with a championship rosette.
The dusty picture changed to another vision of the brown donkey, still on the same stony beach. He was resting one front foot, and as he dropped his head forlornly to nose about among the litter of plastic and rusty tins, Rose saw that he was not putting any weight on that leg. It looked as if he could have fallen over one of the rocks and broken it.
Chapter Eleven
When Mollie had left the following week, Rose went to Newcome with Jim to get some of the supplies for the Golden Wedding lunch party. Jim wanted to see a friend, so Rose left him at the car park and hurried across the bridge to the marina.
A young woman opened the door of Arthur’s cottage.
‘You want my granddad?’
‘I just came to see how he was. He told me about the donkey.’
‘It’s awful, isn’t it? I don’t know what to do for him. He’s going downhill from all the worry of it, and the grieving. I’m staying with him for a bit to look after him, but I can’t make him eat. “I don’t fancy anything, Judy,” he says. Just sits and stares, and sometimes he goes to the door and gives a bit of a whistle. For the donkey, you see.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘In the shed. He goes out to sit there some of the time.’
The little donkey cart was in the shed, with its shafts resting on a saw horse. The old man was sitting on the leather seat that was made like an armchair, with his hands on his knees, the fingers curled as if he were holding reins.
He looked much worse than a few days ago. His watery blue eyes were sunken, his lips trembled, and there was a stubble of grey beard on the loose skin of his bony chin. He did not want to talk to Rose. She tried to cheer him up, but he just shook his head. As she left the shed, she heard him make a clucking sound, and then he whispered, ‘Come on boy, good little Gully.’
‘If that donkey doesn’t turn up, I don’t know what we’ll do,’ Judy told Rose. ‘The doctor talked about putting Granddad in the hospital, but he didn’t want to go. He said he had to be here in case Gully comes back. There’s not much hope of that, though, and I don’t see how long he can go on like this.’
‘You mean, he’ll make himself ill?’
Judy bit her lip. ‘I mean, he might die.’
And so might Gully, before Rose could find him. Where was Favour? He had never stayed away for so long. The visions had told her a certain amount, but she must go on a journey if she was to find the donkey.
In every sound she heard, the blaring radio of a boy walking over the bridge, the noise of the van’s motor as she drove home with Jim, she tried to hear the lilting tune with which the horse would summon her.
If he did not call her or come to her, she must go to look for him.
Driving through the village of Newcome Hollow, she asked Jim, ‘Do you mind if I get out here? Gloria or Hilda will help you put the food away. I want to go and ask Hazel if she can come next Sunday.’
She went up the hill away from the harbour, but she did not go to Hazel’s ugly concrete house at the top of the street. She went round behind it and on to the narrow road that cut across the corner of the moor, then turned off it up the track that led to the castle ruins.
In the summer, there were always hikers and picnickers up here by the broken tower and the few remaining walls of the castle built by the Lord of the Moor. The arrow-slit windows and the remnants of the arched gateway looked down towards Noah’s Bowl. Rose stood on the side of the hill, and by narrowing her eyes and making a great effort of thought and will she tried to make the lake disappear, so that the valley would be there below, and with it, the great grey horse.
The valley had been a lake for hundreds of years, since the devastating flood. Whenever the valley appeared for her and Rose walked down into it through the mist, she was going back centuries to the time before the lake was formed by the flood, when the tyrannical Lord and his soldiers terrorized the countryside.
Since Favour was not here to take her back in time, she must go by herself. She must force the valley to appear, so that she could cross the river and climb the other side to find the horse waiting for her on the jutting rock.
She went up the grass slope to put her hands on the buttress at the side of the castle gateway. Perhaps these ancient stones could energize her. She closed her eyes, pressed her palms against the stones, and with a tremendous effort of mind and spirit, she willed herself back through the multitude of years.
Her body was as tense as a bow string, and the blood pounded in her head, as if all the bygone years were roaring through it. Their speed increased, until she was shaken by an explosion of light and noise. She opened her eyes and turned dazedly to look down the hill.
She had done it. By force of will, she had broken through the time barrier. The lake was gone. The valley was there, and the swift river tumbling to the sea.
That was not all. Behind her, the ruins of the Lord’s castle were once again the whole fortress that he had built. Before she could run down to the valley, she was grabbed roughly and pulled inside the gateway into the castle courtyard.
Another soldier grabbed her other arm. Some of them jostled behind her, and others closed in ahead. She was surrounded by huge, bestial men, pulling her this way and that, spinning her round, slapping her, kicking her to her knees and then dragging her upright. Among them, she thought she saw the cruel face and flat, dead eyes of the one who looked like the motorcycle gang leader, Evil. She was in a nightmare vortex of jeering, brutish voices, eyes that held no mercy, hands that would tear her to pieces if she could not get free.
‘What’s here?’ The high, domineering lisp of the Lord cut through the uproar.
The men in front of Rose fell back, and the two who gripped her arms held her upright to face the Lord in his black cloak, his thin lips twisted in a terrible smile of triumph.
‘Tho. The methenger thought she’d take matterth into her own handth.’
Rose hung her aching head. She could not look at him.
‘Look at your Lord!’
‘You’re not my …’ she mumbled, and he shot out a hand like a claw and jerked her chin up. ‘Look at me!’
Now that the soldiers had moved back, she could see the open shed where the horses were tied at the other end of the yard. Powerful, muscular horses to carry big men and heavy equipment. Brown rumps, a black, two bays, a chestnut. Rose looked desperately for dapple grey hindquarters that could be Favour.
The Lord chuckled and let go of her chin with a vicious twist
.
‘Looking for him, are you? Well, you’re too late. He’th not there. He can’t help you. Favour ith dead!’
‘Then so are you.’ Rose looked into his murderous, gloating eyes. In an earlier image, when the opening music of Ballad of the Great Grey Horse had shown her the beginnings of the legend, she had seen the Lord’s puny, crooked body pounded into a bloody rag on the castle cobblestones under Favour’s galloping hoofs. ‘You’re dead! Favour killed you!’
‘The forces of darkness can never die.’ He spat the words at her scornfully.
‘Nor can Favour.’ Her arms pinned by the soldiers, she threw back her head and strained towards him. ‘The forces of light are stronger than the forces of darkness!’
‘Light can be extinguished.’ He looked at her as though she was less than nothing. ‘Darkness can’t.’
The courtyard was growing rapidly dimmer, as if night were pouring into the enclosed and fortified space. Rose could hardly see the black garments of the Lord, although his pale face glimmered eerily and she could hear his mocking laugh. She could not see the soldiers. Their heavy boots and brutish voices sounded farther away. She staggered as the grip on her arms slackened.
Was it really darker, or had something happened to her eyes? The night was in her head. Blackness swirled through all the corridors of her brain. She struggled to hold on to her consciousness, but the light had gone, and she was falling into the abyss.
She plummeted down with a sickening lurch, like a headlong fall in a dream, and crashed awake – in daylight again. She was lying on a grassy slope, with the open sky above and space round her, not the harsh high walls of the castle yard. She had reached the valley after all. Favour would be there.
She scrambled to her feet and almost fell down again, because her head was swimming. She steadied herself to run down to the bridge over the river, but the river and the valley were not there. Below her, the placid waters of Noah’s Bowl reflected the clouds. Behind her, the Lord’s castle was in ruins again, ornamented with a litter bin around which people had carelessly chucked their rubbish, and the familiar broken sign that said, ‘NO CAMPI G’.
Cry of a Seagull Page 10