The Horseman

by Tim Pears

  Children dispersed homeward, the rabble thinned. They left the village. Around him children yelled and yelped. He did not hear them. He listened to the quietness. The birds that had left for more clement territory, the horses at rest, animals in hibernation, dogs asleep, men pottering. He listened to the emptiness.

  His sister caught them up. A monitor, she stayed behind to help the teacher tidy, received in return a piece of cake or biscuit. A number turned off the road for the farms and cottages of the estate. One of the Sparke girls asked Kizzie whether she had any cake left. ‘Was you given summat taffety?’

  ‘That’s for me to know and you to wonder,’ Kizzie said. ‘And if one day you be monitor then you may know yourself.’

  In Higher Redlands where he believed they intended to sow turnips the boy saw smoking piles dotted across the bare ploughed earth. Red stood between the poles of one of the two-wheeled carts. Cousin Herbert forked manure off the cart into a heap. Beyond, the boy’s brother Fred did likewise. Pleasant the old mare stood patiently waiting for him to finish. The muck-carts were the smallest the horses ever had to pull. They made the Shires look huge, giants towing toys. An easy job for the horses, less so for these lads. They had been doing it when the boy left for school and would doubtless do so until the day grew dark, spreading at the rate of twenty tons an acre. One or two of the girls waved, and the carting lads waved back, briefly.

  Kizzie headed for their cottage but the boy walked on to Manor Farm. In the frozen world smell, like sound, was muted, but from where they’d shovelled muck came rich aromas. From Isaac Wooland’s cowhouse the smell was sweet, like hay and meadow grass. By the stables the air was harsh with ammonia. Noble was in her stall and the boy went to her. Her foal was due within a month. Her belly hung swollen beneath her and the boy imagined her foal within, its spindly limbs folded, eyes closed, slung between the Shire mare’s great haunches, her sturdy legs. The boy spoke to her. He told her she was the finest horse on his carter father’s farm. The name she had been given at her own birth befitted her.

  He took the stool that hung from a hook on the wall and stood on it beside her. He scratched a point low on her neck he had discovered by chance she liked as no other horse he knew of seemed to. The mare was still and listened to him speaking to her. He said he looked forward to seeing her give birth and he told her of his secret wish, that his father would involve him in the handling of her foal, for it was something he wished for above all things now. He believed he was ready, whatever others might say of his age or stature or other immaturity.

  The boy heard voices. He did not know whether they had only just entered the range of his hearing or whether they had been there for some while and he had only just become aware of them. He listened now. The voices of men. They came from the tack room, on the far side of the stall next door.

  His father and one other.

  Two others.

  The boy climbed up into the manger and around the partition to Red’s empty stall. He picked his way over Red’s manger and crouched there beside the wall to the tack room. There was a foot of space between the wood partition walls and the back brick wall, left so that the carter could hear his horses.

  ‘They over Home Farm builds middens in the yard and they takes them as serious as their corn or hay stacks, and so they should.’

  It was his uncle Enoch speaking. The boy pressed one hand against the partition wall, the other on the wooden screen upon which he crouched. He leaned forward and peered into the tack room. None of the three men were seated, all stood. The stove had been lit but only Amos Tucker stood beside it. The others were in separate corners.

  ‘This is how they build em, gaffer,’ Enoch said. ‘They lays a square about the size a this room.’ He described the shape with his hands. ‘Build as high as a man can reach, then they starts another square aside of it. Bin doin so for two year now. No takin it out a bit at a time, half rotted.’ Enoch opened wide his arms. ‘One great midden.’

  ‘Is he done?’ Albert said.

  ‘Tis all mixed up so tis all the same. Not patchy like ours.’

  ‘Is he finished?’ Albert asked Amos Tucker.

  ‘No, I isn’t,’ Enoch said. ‘It gets so hot in there all the damn seeds perish, every last one.’

  Albert laughed. Amos Tucker said, ‘Combustion.’

  ‘I want no fires in my yard, gaffer,’ Albert said.

  ‘Will you look at the midden on Home Farm?’ Enoch said.

  ‘I will not,’ said the boy’s father. The men stood in silence, as if taking in what had been said and thinking deeply on it.

  ‘Yon brother a mine knows about horses, gaffer,’ Enoch said. ‘Don’t mean he knows bugger all else about farmin.’

  The coal stove made no noise. The carters waited for the farmer to say something. To resolve the dispute one way or the other. He said nothing. Perhaps he was waiting for the words but they would not come to him. Instead he stepped slowly to the door and opened it and walked away.

  The carters watched him leave. Enoch Sercombe shook his head. ‘You’s lucky the gaffer’s a coward,’ he said quietly. ‘He’s scared to give you a single fuckin order or get you to change one single thing in case you walks away.’

  Albert pondered what his brother meant. ‘He’s right,’ he said. ‘I would.’

  March

  The boy stood in the field. He did not move. A statue of himself. What would someone think should they see him? A boy who, like the wife of Lot, had been walking across the field but looked back and been petrified to salt? Or had he been carried there for a scarecrow? Boys were paid to keep crows off seeds but they generally made a noise. Waved their arms about, or ran at the crows as if believing, like puppies, they could catch them. If they had catapults so much the better.

  The boy stood still. He watched hares at play. The buck hares chasing the does. Hither and thither. An endless game of tag. He never saw the bucks catch up and receive their prize. They must couple later somewhere hidden.

  He watched a fox chase a hare. Only for the sport, for hare meat did not agree with the vulpine palate. The fox would gain on its prey, then the hare turned sharply. The fox could not do this but rather jumped up, turning in the air. It landed and chased the hare again, who had opened up the gap between them once more. The effect was comical. Eventually the fox tired of its sport, headed for a hedge and vanished.

  The boy did not move. A hare came across the field. It headed straight for him. It did not veer to left or right. It had happened once before a hare had run almost into him. He did not know whether it had been blind, or sick. He stood in the field. The hare came on towards him. He held his breath. A few yards away it got his scent and turned its head a little, and saw him, and ran off. So, each species of animal had its own peculiarities of vision. This world we surveyed was not as it was but as it was seen, in many different guises.

  Back at the cottage he found all their mattresses taken downstairs and stood up outside, leaning against walls or hedges, like tablets brought down from the mountain. Perhaps there were Commandments writ in the stains. A voice sounded from above.

  ‘Come and give us a hand then, Leo,’ his mother said, leaning out of a window.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kizzie, from another. ‘Don’t stand there gawpin.’

  Leo climbed the stairs. There were three bedrooms. Kizzie was sweeping the bare boards of their parents’ room. Chairs, bedside tables, washstand were piled upon the slats of the bed. Ruth was in the room he shared with his brother Fred. She called him in. This room had been swept already. Ruth shifted one of the beds, wedging it against a wall at right angles to the other.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Like this?’

  The boy frowned. ‘T’was all right how it was.’

  ‘Don’t be zart, Leo,’ his mother said. ‘How’s about next to each other but facin opposite ways? Then you and Fred can sit up and have a gab together.’

  Ruth called it spring-cleaning but all knew this to be an excuse
for rearranging furniture, creating a new configuration of their wooden beds and tables in the small rooms. Their mother did this every year. Perhaps such activity placated some restless spirit within her.

  When the men came home from the farm, Kizzie whispered to her father what he might not otherwise have noticed. Albert looked around the cottage and returned to the kitchen and told their mother what an improvement she had made, and the children all agreed.

  March

  Albert Sercombe slept on a cot in the stable. So too the boy, on a bed of straw beneath a blanket in the tack room. He would not leave.

  ‘Ye’ll be like Dunstone, can’t see the point a home.’ But the boy was at home. He gazed upon the sets of waggon harness with their back-bands and belly bands, the breechings and the riding saddle. The halters and blinkers. Many pairs of reins. There was a smell of leather and saddle soap. Plough strings, cart saddles, cobble trees and swingletrees, each hung on wooden pegs in its allotted place. These were icons of beauty to the boy like the painted crockery his mother had brought in her dowry and kept in their parlour.

  He would not leave until Noble’s foal was born. He attempted the habit of his father of rising at hourly intervals, more or less, during the night to check upon the mare. Was able to regain slumber upon his return to the straw. Then he was woken suddenly by voices, and understood even as he looked around him in the bright light pouring into the tack room that he had missed it. His father had not woken him.

  Leopold walked to the loose box. The master stood beside his father, looking in over the open upper door.

  ‘A fine mare, carter. How many’s she given us?’

  ‘This’ll be her sixth foal, master,’ his father replied. ‘The last one was yon filly in the next box.’

  The boy quietly approached, and stood beside his father. A girl stood beside the master. His daughter. ‘I can’t believe he’ll grow to be a carthorse,’ she said. ‘He looks so delicate.’

  ‘All babies do,’ her father said.

  Miss Charlotte was at church every Sunday, sat in the front pew beside her father. The dowager countess, the master’s grandmother, no longer accompanied them. Otherwise Leo rarely saw the girl, though she lived on the estate as they all did. The shoot was a rare occurrence. Miss Charlotte did not go to the village school but had her own governess, a teacher all to herself who lived in the big house with her. He did not believe she had ever been on the farm before.

  ‘I’ve water warmin for the mare,’ Albert said.

  The boy, hearing this, went to the stable room. He felt the water in the urn with his finger. It was luke-warm. He poured a quantity into a bucket and heaved it along the yard. He could not help it swinging. Water sloshed out at either side. The master turned and said, ‘One of your sons, carter?’

  His father took the bucket from him in one strong hand. ‘Not so big’s he thinks he is, master.’

  ‘No, no, carter, he’s willing. We like that, we applaud it.’

  The boy did not look up yet he knew the girl watched him. His father opened the door and entered the loose box. Noble bared her teeth. She made a sound that was a kind of low growling.

  ‘Easy, girl, easy now.’ He put the bucket on the ground and backed out of the box, and the mare drank.

  ‘The most gentle mare I’ve ever had, master, but when she’s with a young foal …’

  ‘Will she have to work again?’ the girl asked.

  ‘We’ll let her rest for ten days, miss,’ Albert said. ‘I’ll give her plenty a warm bran mash, and one or two other things besides.’

  They watched the foal become accustomed by degrees to standing on his spindly legs. He probed beneath his mother’s belly and sucked her milk. The mare bent down on occasion and briefly nuzzled or licked him. He leaned his head against her side and stroked it against her skin. As the foal explored the circumscribed territory of the loose box he sometimes staggered and looked as if he might fall but he never did.

  The master chuckled. ‘I can tell my daughter would like to pet your foal. But I believe the carter here,’ he said to her, ‘will no more let you touch the creature than its mother will. Isn’t that true, carter?’

  Albert Sercombe nodded. ‘Aye, master. We don’t handle them afore they’re broken.’

  The boy glanced across at the girl. She was looking at her father and then away, her eyes narrow slits of anger, suggesting that what he had presumed of her was false, or else that his assumption was correct but she did not wish him to share it with their servants, the boy did not know which.

  April

  Though the windows were high and he could see but sky through them the boy gazed upward rather than before him.

  ‘Are you listening?’ Miss Pugsley said. She called his name and he turned and she asked him to name the capital of a certain country in such a tone as to suggest she had asked him already once or more. She wore her black-and-white hair in a tight bun upon her head. For his distraction or his ignorance, which he was not sure, she told him to hold out his hand and stung his palm with the switch she kept for that purpose.

  The school day had begun with the children rung into the room by the bell in the roof. Jane Sparke played a harmonium and they sang the morning hymn. Awake, my soul, and with the sun, Thy daily stage of duty run. Miss Pugsley said a prayer then mounted her platform desk and filled in the register while a monitor read a lesson from the first book of the Old Testament about some of the many clans of the sons of Noah. She read them out. The Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites, Arkites. The Sinites, Arvadites, Zemarites and Hamathites. Would all be slaughtered to make room for the Israelites, the chosen people of God? At intervals the monitor stopped and asked questions of those she deemed inattentive, and those who answered wrongly were called from their seats to stand in line at the front. Following the reading Miss Pugsley caned these miscreants.

  They practised their writing every day. Studied arithmetic, reading and grammar.

  Miss Pine tended to the younger children, herded to the back of the room. Today Miss Pugsley had taken the older ones through history then mathematics. During the first lesson she rebuked Leo for confusing Christopher Columbus with Ferdinand Magellan, and in the second she chastised him for making no attempt to calculate the simple equations chalked upon the board. The boy was right-handed. He held out his left palm; with each blow the pain intensified. In the lunch break some went home, some ate their bread and cheese or pie in the playground. Leo walked out of the village and watched farmhands at their labours, with their animals, as was his habit.

  When Leo returned, Alfred Haswell approached him flanked by others and said, ‘Here he comes, the yay-nay what talks more to beasts than he do to us.’ The others laughed and Alfred said, ‘Why’s that then, Sercombe, is you a fuckin beast? With the brain of a beast and the mind a one too?’

  Then his sister was beside Leo, saying, ‘He’ll get more sense from any a them creatures than he will from ye.’

  More had gathered, and some chuckled at Kizzie’s wit, but one of those flanking Alfred, Gilbert Prowse, son of the baker, said, ‘And is big sister as to speak for e.’ He turned to seek the approval of his coterie. Kizzie struck him on his jaw presented side-on to her, and he staggered sideways into the crowd pushed up close around them. The bell rang. They looked over and saw Miss Pine by the door, shaking the bell so vigorously it belied her consumptive frame. They trundled across the playground and shuffled back into the classroom.

  In the afternoon the swallows continued to build their nests in the eaves of the school. They flew away from the building and returned with plant fibre between their beaks or with nothing visible and Leo presumed their mouths were full of mud, though he did not know for sure. The subjects studied were geometry and Latin. He was not the only one to be chastised but he received the switch more than anyone and he was the last, shortly before the end of the final lesson. He walked back to his place and studied his hand, the way the blood seemed to seep to the surface, drawn upwards by t
he impact of the switch upon his skin. Perhaps by the heat of it.

  As the class made their way out Miss Pugsley requested that he remain behind. He sat in his place. The desks and tables were scoured with initials. Kizzie told him she had found the letters ES and was convinced they were those of their uncle Enoch, carved there when he was a child like them. Miss Pugsley dismissed Miss Pine, and when she had gone the schoolmistress called Leo once more to the front. Her voice echoed in the high roof in a way it had not when the room was full.

  ‘Leopold Sercombe,’ she said, more quietly than she habitually spoke. ‘What am I to do with you? You do understand, I hope, that punishing you gives me no pleasure? You will soon be one of the eldest and so you must set an example, or I must set one of you. I would much rather not.’

  The boy stood with his head lowered.

  ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Please speak clearly.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘I can’t hear you. Do not mumble, boy.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘And look at me when I’m talking to you. Oh, Leopold, you are not simple, I’m convinced of it. Can you not see that the world reveals itself to children who study? We walk in the footsteps of those who’ve studied before us and thus civilisation is created. The Empire thrives. Its peoples prosper.’ Miss Pugsley sighed.

  The boy watched her feet as she turned and walked some paces to the side, then came back to where she’d stood before. Her shoes were of brown leather and they had a pattern punched and stitched in their sides. They had been polished in recent days if not this very one.

  ‘Your truancy is foolish and you must know how it saddens your mother. But at the very least, when you do come here, can you not concentrate? I wonder if you even try, Leopold. Instead you gaze at the sky and daydream.’