A Hundred Horses

by Sarah Lean

  Back at Aunt Liv’s the grass looked green, much greener than before. There were no goose feathers anywhere.

  Twenty-Eight

  It was later in the afternoon before I could go back to the stables, after we’d all been shopping at the supermarket. Gem had made two string bracelets and tried to tie one around my wrist and one around hers with a longer piece between, like a pair of handcuffs. But her funny knots didn’t work and it all fell apart, and she gritted her teeth and sat down on the floor and yelled that she was going to make it again.

  I raced back to the stable, to the carousel. I heard movement in the next stable, but I knew who was there now.

  As I worked, Angel slipped in quietly, crouched, and watched. Before long she had her finger pressed on the tiny nuts so they wouldn’t spin while I twisted the bolts into the holes. I didn’t have to ask; she watched my hands and worked out what to do.

  I showed Angel where to put the wires. The stable glowed with warm light.

  “What’s it going to be?” she said.

  “A carousel, you know, like a merry-go-round with horses.”

  She gazed at it all, as if it were as precious as Belle and her foal.

  “It doesn’t belong to you, though, does it?” she said, smirking. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be hiding it.”

  And I was going to tell her all about it, like I’d promised. I was, but I didn’t like the way she said that. Poking and teasing. I wasn’t going to talk to her about it while she was being mean.

  “Mrs. Barker asked about you again,” I said. “But I didn’t say anything.”

  Angel leaned back against the bales of straw.

  “Why are you hiding from her?” I said.

  She sank her hands into the pockets of the coat that was way too big for her. She looked up from under her dark lashes.

  “Why are you hiding that suitcase?”

  She could sting like a wasp. And I was frightened now. We were like each other.

  “Don’t you see?” I said, smacking my hands down. “It’s really important, and I do want to tell you, but it’s really hard for me to talk about it, and you’re just making it even more difficult.”

  Angel went out of the stable, kicking the door open. She opened the next stable so Belle could wander the yard and eat the grass growing through the cracks. Lunar came out slowly behind her, lowering his head, bright eyes searching the new surroundings. He staggered and skittered and wobbled. Angel didn’t look back at him, but just like I had, the foal followed her.

  I had put some pieces of the carousel in the wrong place and had to take it apart again. I wasn’t going to give up, but it suddenly seemed too complicated.

  I stood up, took a big breath, and punched my hands on my hips. “Angel!” I shouted. “I want you to help me make this. I can’t do it by myself.”

  Instead, Lunar came in. He lowered his head to get a closer look. I watched him shudder and skitter and come back to look again. His ears twitched and turned. I crouched, and he lowered his face close to mine. He was the most beautiful animal I’d ever seen, face-to-face like that.

  “Lunar was going to be put down.”

  Angel was half hidden behind the door, watching the shock on my face. Lunar staggered from my arms, back to Belle, to suckle his mother’s milk. Angel sat down cross-legged, facing me, her head down, her hair falling over her face. She talked, much more than she had before. She told me that she had been hiding out at Old Chambers’s farm and that she had seen Lunar being born. Just then Mrs. Barker and Old Chambers had looked in over the stable door, so Angel hid behind some hay bales. They saw Lunar couldn’t stand; they saw his wonky legs; they said he wasn’t right. She heard Mrs. Barker say that nobody would want Belle with a foal like Lunar at her heels.

  “She told him she knew a breeder, somewhere abroad, who would pay a lot of money for Belle, but they wouldn’t want her if they knew she’d had a foal with bad legs. Old Chambers had to make sure that Mrs. Barker bought Belle at the auction; then she’d make it worth his while. She wasn’t interested in helping Lunar. She didn’t even go in and look at him properly. She told Old Chambers to have him put down.”

  Her eyes looked hollow and scared as she stared over at Lunar. I hated hearing it, I felt sick, but something else was bothering me too.

  “Why were you hiding there?”

  She kicked at the straw but wouldn’t look me in the eye or answer. She just wanted to tell me the rest of what had happened. It was nice that she talked to me easily, like we had known each other for a long time. But that feeling wouldn’t go away. Was she still hiding something? Was she lying? I screwed up my eyes to try to see her differently.

  “I took your aunt Liv’s cart. Lunar couldn’t walk far because of his legs, so I laid him in the cart and pushed him over here so nothing would happen to him. I went back and got Belle. That’s when I saw you with the suitcase.”

  We looked at each other for a moment. I felt so guilty then for what had happened to Belle. I’d dropped the suitcase and spooked her. It had been my fault that Lunar had been without his mother. No wonder Angel was so mad at me then. I squirmed; even my skin felt uncomfortable.

  “The foal’s safe now,” I said.

  Her eyes locked with mine. But she wasn’t going to say any more.

  I went back to the carousel. I concentrated, overlapping the metal pieces so they fitted together correctly. I felt the carousel horses wanted to spin, wanted to move, wanted to live. The shape grew and held. My hands seemed to know what to do. Somebody would want Lunar if his legs were better. What could I do? And like magic, the answer was there in my hands.

  “Look,” I whispered.

  I held up the tall cylinder from the middle of the carousel.

  “We could make Lunar something to go around his legs, to help them stay straight. Surely, if his legs get healed, then someone will want to keep him. Won’t they?”

  Angel seemed to be sinking. Right into her coat. She was breathing heavily, shaking her head. I had a horrible feeling I had got something wrong again.

  Twenty-Nine

  Me, Alfie, and Gem hunted for chocolate eggs. We looked for shiny foil under dense hedgerows, in the nooks and crannies of the trees, in the crumbly terra-cotta pots in the greenhouse. We gave one another Easter cards and rabbit-shaped chocolates. I raced around to Rita’s while Alfie and Gem hid all their painted eggs and played the game again.

  Rita was at her sewing machine with Angel hanging over her shoulder, hurrying her, until Rita said to leave her be. Rita had cut up her green velvet curtains to make some padding for the foal’s legs.

  I could tell by the way Angel turned her back and looked through Rita’s boxes that she was still hiding something from me.

  The sewing machine buzzed. It made the air in the room feel uneasy.

  Angel led Belle to the porch door, brought Lunar inside the farmhouse. He shied, stumbled, and snorted at everything until Angel put her hands on him and made him calm.

  We strapped the padding around the tender skin on Lunar’s legs. We worked together fixing some splints to help straighten them. Rita used some leather straps from an old bridle to hold it all together. I wondered if Lunar minded that he was wearing an old blue cardigan and green trousers. I wondered if he felt different, like I did, wearing someone else’s clothes.

  “Will it help, Rita?” I said.

  She smiled. “I’ve seen this sort of thing with foals before. He’ll grow out of it soon enough.”

  And the one thing I thought about just then, the one thing I didn’t want to think about, was how Rita, Angel, the horses, and I would all be gone from the farm by this time next week. I wasn’t waiting for the two weeks to be over anymore; I wished they’d stretch out forever. But I was scared of wanting something impossible.

  I watched Lunar while his hooves stomped on the floorboards and echoed around us. Angel paced around the edge of the room, and I knew she was looking at me. And I could feel something uncertain prickling the
hairs on my skin. Somehow it was too much, and I wanted to be there with them, but I didn’t. I don’t know why, but right then I needed to phone Mom.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  Angel ran after me, caught my arm as I was about to leave. She held my arm tightly, and I wondered then if she was just as scared as I was of our time together being over. She had a cardboard box, stuffed with straw. In the middle was Rita’s tea towel.

  “What is it?” I said.

  Angel lifted the edge of the towel. Underneath were six white eggs, but not for boiling. Their delicate shells were chipped and cracked; pink creatures wriggled inside them.

  “The fox got their mother,” Angel said. “Keep them warm. They’ll be out of their shells soon.” She didn’t look at me. “I know you’ll look after them.”

  Aunt Liv lit the stove and put the box in front of it. Me and my cousins spent the afternoon gathered around the eggs as they rocked and cracked. The damp, strange creatures struggled to get out of their shells. We watched them dry, their feathers puff and lighten. We listened to their quiet whistles. Gem made up a song and sang it to them. It was called the gosling song and it was funny, and because I laughed, Gem hugged me and said, “You’re like our big sister-cousin.” And I liked that a lot.

  We held the chicks between us and made safe places for them on our laps; their soft feet padded on our palms.

  In the evening the goslings followed us outside and mingled with the other geese in the yard. We collected them up and laid them in the nest of a different mother goose. But she wouldn’t settle with them. In the end, Aunt Liv said to put them with her special broody hen. The hen gurgled and clucked and fussed. She took the goslings under her wings. She spread her feathers and wiggled to cover them and keep them safe and warm. Then Gem told me a story about geese, and I phoned Mom and told her too.

  I said, “When geese are emigrating—”

  “Migrating.”

  “Migrating, and one gets sick, two more geese fly down to the ground and look after it.”

  And Mom said, “Is that true?”

  And I said, “Yes. They look after it until it can fly again.”

  And then she was quiet and told me she loved me more than anything.

  Thirty

  Rita had a message for me. Angel said to meet her at the oaks. As if we’d done it a hundred times before.

  She was there with Belle. She held my arm and helped me up behind her.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To see my family.”

  Belle carried us down the other side of the valley, along narrow lanes where the hedges burst with bright new leaves and bobbles of buds. Our legs swayed against Belle’s sides.

  I’d really thought we were going to see her family and the people she was staying with. But she hadn’t meant that at all. She took me to where a herd of black-and-white horses grazed by a river in wide, open fields. They were just like Belle. Some more black, some more white, with long manes and long hair around their legs like feathery cuffs. We were near Old Chambers’s farm.

  Angel slid off Belle’s back, opened the gate, and went in.

  “Yeeyeye,” she called.

  I saw their heads rise, their curious eyes and ears turning to her. I saw the horses come, slowly at first. They gathered and moved. I felt fear trembling in me as their hooves quickened. They came to Belle as she whinnied. My skin shivered with the sound and the rumble of their hooves. They came and surrounded us. I held tight to Belle’s mane.

  “What are you scared of?” Angel said.

  I looked into the sky, then into Angel’s eyes. I saw the vastness there, the same wide-open space, electric blue. I didn’t know what I was scared of.

  The horses came to Belle; they blew on me. Belle walked through the herd, taking me with her.

  “Belle’s their leader; they follow her,” Angel said as the horses came to her too.

  “When I speak to them, I don’t talk and they don’t talk. You can just trust them because they understand that.”

  She walked among them as if she was one of them; she touched them all. She passed the young horses, and they didn’t run or shy.

  “People are mostly scared of themselves,” Angel said. “They get scared of their own brilliance.”

  People didn’t know Angel at all. But the horses did. They trusted her, even if she was a liar and a thief. They knew her in a different way.

  “We have to get Belle back now,” she said, climbing up. “We can’t leave Lunar for long.”

  We moved out of the field. The horses followed us to the gate, watched us leave. Angel’s huge family. Maybe because of what she showed me, I wanted to tell Angel everything.

  “I live with my mom. Just us two,” I said.

  Angel kept looking ahead, at where we were going.

  “I don’t see my dad. He used to travel a lot because he worked on shows doing the lighting.” I continued, knowing she wouldn’t be mean this time. “I think he was clever and imaginative, but then he went away and didn’t come back.

  “He made the carousel, but I don’t want Mom to know I’ve got it. I don’t know why he left it behind, why it was still there. It’s the only thing I’ve got of his—well, most of it. There’s a piece missing.”

  “How do you know it’s missing?”

  She turned around. She seemed to really want to know.

  “Because I know it was there before,” I said. “And I think he took it.”

  “Like the moon?”

  “The moon?”

  “You thought a bit of the moon was missing. But it’s not.”

  Angel turned away, and Belle gently clipped along the lane.

  And I wondered then if I’d looked properly. Had I looked in all the corners, under all the lining? Was it there and I just couldn’t see it?

  “Do you think I might be like him? Like my dad, I mean.”

  “Do you want to be?”

  “He was . . .”

  What was I supposed to say? He didn’t care about us; he betrayed us and left us. That’s why none of his things, none of him, or the bits of me that were like him, were allowed in our house anymore.

  “No,” I said.

  Belle stopped walking. Angel turned around and smiled.

  “Mostly you’re like you. Sometimes you’re not, though. Sometimes you pretend you’re nobody, just in case you are like him.”

  Then I heard her breath catch at the rattle and rumble of a car coming toward us. I could see the top of a Land Rover with a horse box attached driving down the lane. In a moment Angel slipped to the ground, vaulted a gate, and ran.

  Thirty-One

  Mrs. Barker stopped her Land Rover in the middle of the lane. She stared through the windshield for a long while before she got out and came over.

  Belle lifted her head away from Mrs. Barker’s hand as she tried to stroke her nose. Angel had told me not to do that, that horses like to come to you first and then you’ll know whether they want you to touch them or not.

  “Liv’s niece, isn’t it?” Mrs. Barker said. “What are you doing with this horse?”

  Before I could even think what I was saying, I said, “I found her.”

  I was turning into a liar like Angel! Mrs. Barker hadn’t seen Angel, though, and somehow that was the most important thing.

  She was smiling now, her voice gentle.

  “I’ll take her back to Old Chambers’s farm. That’s where she’s meant to be, ready for the auction on Saturday.”

  I couldn’t think what to do. Mrs. Barker held my arm as I slid off Belle’s back. She slipped a halter over Belle’s head, led her into the horse box. She told me to get in the Land Rover, that she’d take me home afterward.

  Mrs. Barker drove to Old Chambers’s farm. She left me in the car and talked to a man in a mucky overall, and he nodded toward the stable where she had put Belle. They argued, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Mrs. Barker glanced at me, then came over.

 
“Do you know where this horse’s foal is? Is it at Rita’s farm?”

  Mrs. Barker tapped her lip when I didn’t answer.

  “The horses are going to auction on Saturday.” She hesitated. “Belle’s foal didn’t look too good when he was born, but I persuaded Old Chambers here to keep him and I’d take them both on when they come up in the auction. So you see, if you could tell me where the foal is, then I’ll make sure he gets looked after and stays with his mother.”

  That’s not what Angel had told me. But people said Angel was a liar, and I knew she was too. Was it true what she had told me, that Mrs. Barker wanted the foal put down? I was so confused. Something was bothering my stomach and my head and all my insides. And I couldn’t think which secrets I was supposed to be keeping, and then I remembered how Angel looked when I said if Lunar was healed, then somebody would want him. I didn’t know what it all meant. But then I remembered those eggshells in my hands.

  I looked everywhere but at Mrs. Barker. As if I could find an answer somewhere, anywhere, in the sky, in the trees.

  “Can I say good-bye to Belle?” I said, stalling.

  I got out of the Land Rover and went into the stables. Belle hung her head and pushed her nose into my shoulder. I ran my hand along her neck. Lunar needed his mother. What should I say? What should I do? I looked into the dark glass of Belle’s eye, and I saw me. Scruffy, my hair unbrushed, but I was still shining there in Belle’s eye. I knew the most important thing was to protect Angel.

  “Mrs. Barker . . . I’m not saying anything.”

  Thirty-Two

  The next morning Mrs. Barker telephoned Aunt Liv.

  She told Aunt Liv that her goat had gone missing again, and she seemed to think it might have something to do with me. I hated being blamed for something I hadn’t done. I hugged my elbows in, feeling like I was shriveling to nothing.

  I guessed Angel must have stolen the goat again because Lunar needed the milk now that Belle was back at Old Chambers’s farm. It was too complicated inside me. I didn’t want to tell on Angel. I had promised I wouldn’t tell anyone else she was here. Because she asked me. And because I wanted to. But it was so hard not to tell.