My father ran the council until the day he died, heart attack, dropping on the cobbles of the clean-swept yard. I was riding Count Me In. I galloped Count in a wide circle around the ménage, brought him down to a trot, popped him over a broad oxer filled with brush, just to get his attention and put his muscles in gear, and when I passed the gate to the yard, I saw him there, sprawled out, unfastened raincoat tangled around his arms and his neck, and I didn’t know what to do, because there was no one else there, no one to take Count and hold his reins, or cool him out, or unsaddle him and put his rug on—there was just me and my father, as there had always been, and horses came first.
I remembered the mist on the hillside above the ménage, I remembered the goosebumps rising on my bare arms. It had been warm earlier, but the weather had changed while I was on Count.
Once I had fallen from my pony, from little gray Handsome Will, whose picture had adorned the first Manual, and I refused to get back up on him. I held my knees to my chest and sat in the grass and wept. My father had leaned down from his own hunter, swept up Will’s reins, and led him back to the stable to untack him and dry his legs. I eventually gave up looking for sympathy and came walking back to find my muddy tack awaiting a wipe-down with sponge and oil. This was my childhood. This was the upbringing that made me sit on Count in an agony of indecision, while my father lay sprawled on the cobbles.
Eventually I dismounted and led the horse across the yard, holding the reins while I leaned down and sought my father’s absent pulse, cold fingers on his cold neck. Then I walked on, taking Count back to his box to take off his tack and put his rug back on.
I tell it all to the English inspector, who is leaning back in his chair, his hands loose on the table, his jaw slack with surprise. “But—” he says when I get up to take the whistling kettle off of the stove. “But you—you ran the stables and wrote the Manual? I don’t understand.”
“Some call it slave labor,” I snap, dropping the tea cups onto the table from a height that is higher than necessary, listening to them slam onto the wood with satisfaction. “And I didn’t write the Manual, to be honest, so much as perform every single task in it to the highest order, so that my father could report and write about the perfect stable.
“I had no childhood. Everything I did was for the Council, to make the Manual, to redefine English horsemanship. I got away as quickly as I could and swore I’d never go back. That horse I slid off that day, Count, was the last horse I rode until last year.
“Tea?”
He looks nervously at me, like I’m not really the sort of person who ought to be handling kettles of boiling water right at the moment, but assents with a nod, and I splash water into his mug and toss him a box of teabags. “Help yourself.”
There is silence while he dunks his tea and makes a great deal of fuss about pouring in sugar and stirring it precisely, trying desperately not to clink his spoon against the edge of the mug. I find that noise grating on the best of days and decide to be nice to him in gratitude for his forbearance.
“I’m sure you can understand how I would have liked to gotten the inspection without letting on who I was. Because now, of course, what does it matter?”
“Well,” he says cautiously. “There’s still the little matter of whether or not you’re mentally fit to be running a livery. I mean, why are you doing it all? It’s been fifteen years. One would think you’d left horses behind for good.”
“Do we ever?” I ask him softly.
There is quiet.
“I couldn’t,” he admits at last, more to his teacup than to me.
“You tried?”
“My mother wanted me to be a doctor,” he admits. “My father wanted me to do anything at all that didn’t involve horses. Hates them. I could run the council and be a disappointment to them.”
“Bloody horses,” I say blandly. “They own us.” I look past him, out the window, to the sparkling twenty-stall barn I’ve been pouring my soul into, where the horses that I adore are comfortably eating from their haynets, snoozing in their shavings, talking in their nickers and whinnies to Brigid, who seems to speak their language and no other. “You can’t leave them behind. You’re always thinking of them. You’re always looking into fields when you’re driving down highways. You’re always peering down paths when you’re in parks. You’re always perking up when you see them on TV. You’re always analyzing their bridles when they’re in a movie. Horses get inside of you and there’s nothing you can do about it. I know. I tried.”
The inspector looks at me, a long searching look, and I meet his eyes unflinchingly, which is saying something for me. I shy from human contact. I grew up without it; I’m not used to it. I’ve been a hermit for fifteen years, run away from the only thing that ever made sense to me. The horses, the horses, the horses.
“You pass,” he says finally.
“Thank you,” I say.
He gathers up his clipboard and signs the certificate. “You’ll receive a password in your e-mail which allows you to order the signs for the property and the logos for your website.”
“Thank you,” I say again.
“It wasn’t a hollow victory, after all, was it, Inspector Healy’s daughter?” he says with a small smile.
“I’ve still got it,” I laugh. “After all these years, I’ve still got it.”
He steps through the front door, pulling on his coat. He looks back at my narrow hallway, the bridle hanging over top of a torn raincoat, the saddle slung upside-down under the hall table, the dirty saddle pads lying on top of a pair of my own jeans in the clothes hamper that jostles for space in the open utility closet. “They’ve got you, Ms Blakely,” he says with a wry smile. “They’ve got all of us.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A Note from the Author
The Head and Not The Heart was written to be a horse book for horse-people. I hope that horse-people see a little bit of their own lives and feelings in this book. I hope that people on the outside get a deeper understanding of why we do what we do.
I’ve spent my life with horses, whether they were hunters or jumpers or dressage horses or event horses or racing or breeding. My love for Thoroughbreds led me to begin Retired Racehorse Blog in 2010, which starts out as a training diary of one special Off-track Thoroughbred, and continues to this day as a news and information site dedication to Thoroughbreds on and off the track. I hope you’ll visit.
And while I’m working on more equine-filled novels, I hope you’ll leave The Head and Not The Heart a review at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or iTunes, visit me at nataliekreinert.com and contact me at [email protected] with any questions or suggestions you might have. Or, you know, just to talk horses.
—Natalie
Also by Natalie Keller Reinert
Other People’s Horses (Alex and Alexander, II)
Join Alex and Alexander for a second adventure. Alex should be thrilled — she’s taking a string of their own home-breds to Saratoga for the storied summer meet. But circumstances are less than ideal. Alexander is abroad, and her credentials are called into question by the other horsemen. And her naive assistant is a little too cozy with the trainer next door — a trainer with a bad reputation. And then there’s this filly… a filly with a problem Alex is sure she could fix. If she could only get her hands on that filly…
Amazon
Horse-Famous: Stories
Tales of horse life, from the racetrack to the show barn.
Amazon
share
The Head and Not The Heart (Alex and Alexander Book 1) Page 13