The Princess and the Foal

by Stacy Gregg

  It is the first time that Haya has admitted this to herself, let alone out loud, and somehow it feels like a tiny bit of pressure has lifted.

  “I remember my father,” Zayn says. “I don’t know if that’s better or worse.”

  He looks at Haya, and his grey eyes are filled with the sadness of loss. “I didn’t think you’d be like this,” he says.

  “Like what?”

  “Like a … real person.”

  Haya raises her hand and strokes Bree’s muzzle. “That is why I love it so much here. The horses do not care that I am a Princess. And Santi and Yusef, they pass me a broom and ask me to clean the yard and I am happy.”

  *

  Now that she is back at Al Hummar, Haya no longer has to endure lessons with Mrs Goddard. Santi comes down to the round pen with her each day to help school Bree.

  “Bree must accept the bit, and work as a true dressage horse,” Santi teaches Haya. “She must respond to the lightest touch.”

  This is not easy on a horse like Bree. She is willing and so clever, but she is also inexperienced and Haya must teach her everything right from the beginning. Santi shows her how to use her legs to move the filly not only forward, but sideways, and how to tune Bree in to her cues so that she requires only the slightest tap of the heel to change pace, or the softest tightening of the reins to come back to a halt. Bree can be a little hot-headed. When Haya’s signals confuse her, she will toss in an objectionable buck as if to say, “Really, I don’t understand what you are asking me to do!”

  “You see how she tells you her thoughts?” Santi says when Bree does this. “She is not being naughty, she is talking to you. You must always be clear so she understands what you are asking. It is about developing a language between you. In this way, we school the horse.”

  Haya’s own schooling is looming. The new term at Badminton is about to begin.

  “I don’t want to go,” she tells Zayn.

  They are grooming Bree together, and the words tumble out of Haya’s mouth before she can stop them.

  “Then don’t go,” Zayn says. “Stay here. Come to my school. You would like it.”

  Haya sighs. “It’s not that simple. My father went to school in England and my Mama too. It has been arranged and I must respect tradition – it is my duty.”

  She reaches out her hand to stroke Bree’s muzzle. The idea of leaving her horse is unbearable.

  “Do you wish sometimes that you weren’t bound by duty?” Zayn asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, do you wish that you were not a Princess?”

  Zayn’s question takes Haya by surprise. “No!” She shakes her head. “My family are my great strength. My father and mother both taught me what it means to have true love and devotion to my country and its people. Horses are not my escape – I do not need to run away. Horses are my expression. When I am on a horse, I am truly myself. It’s my soul in the clear light of day.”

  Zayn is staring at her now and Haya looks down at her toes, suddenly embarrassed. “I am talking too much. Hand me the pitchfork and I will help you to muck out the boxes.”

  Bree does not know that Haya is leaving. How could she possibly know? And yet the filly seems to sense that there is something wrong. Each day, when Haya arrives at her loose box, Bree whinnies for her and there is an edge of longing to the cries, as if she knows that each time she sees Haya may be the last.

  “I am going away to England tomorrow,” Haya tells Zayn, “and I need you to do something for me.”

  “Of course, Princess Haya. What is it?”

  “I need you to look after Bree. I want you to be the one to ride her while I am gone. I want you to be her groom and feed her and care for her and write to me and tell me how she is.”

  “I’ll take good care of her.”

  “I mean it! This is serious, Zayn, you have to promise me.” Haya bites her lip to fight back the tears. “Promise me that you will look after her as if she were your own horse. If anything happens to her …”

  “It won’t,” Zayn says. “I’ll keep her safe and care for her until you return, Princess Haya. You have my word.”

  *

  Haya adjusts the stiff collar on her blouse, and wrestles with the knot of her school tie. She is not used to wearing a uniform and the tie feels like it is about to choke her. She reaches down and yanks at her knee socks, which keep slipping and sagging at her ankles.

  On the lawn, the girls in their blazers and straw boaters gather in groups, stare and whisper and then act aloof and pretend that they haven’t noticed the arrival of the new girl. But how can you fail to see the two giant black limousines with black tinted windows, flying the Union Jack and the royal flag of Jordan?

  “Are you ready, Your Royal Highness?” The man sitting beside her in a dark navy suit prepares to open the door while Haya self-consciously fiddles with her tie.

  Haya nods nervously and he speaks into his walkie-talkie, communicating to the car in front. “We’re going in.”

  The car door opens and Haya emerges, flanked by two bodyguards; already a third bodyguard is halfway up the footpath waiting for them. Haya walks up the path and tries to smile and to ignore the way the girls stare at her. It was bad enough having her old bodyguard constantly shadowing her at the palace, but now that she is in England the British Government has assigned not one but three agents on rotating security detail to watch over her. So much for fitting in and being a regular girl.

  The main building of the school is a stately manor with wisteria vines climbing the stone walls and gigantic pear-shaped topiary standing sentry down the path to the front entrance. It is all very English, as is the man in the tweed suit who stands on the steps waiting for her.

  “Good morning, Haya.” She notices how the headmaster greets her, making a point of not using her royal title, yet she must use his title and address him always as Mr Gould.

  “Your governess has spoken with us at great length,” Mr Gould says. “She insisted that you are a normal girl and must be treated as such.”

  Was that what Frances actually said? Or was it more along the lines of Princess Haya is a royal spoilt brat so see that you take her down a peg or two, or you’ll have a troublemaker on your hands? Certainly the headmaster seems to go to great pains, as they stroll round the grounds, to point out the rules and regulations, followed up with a vigorous lecture on curfews and the consequences for those who step outside the grounds without permission. Haya begins to wonder if this is a private school or a prison.

  The bodyguards do not help matters and behave as if there might be assassins lurking behind the giant hedges or in the gym lockers. “You will sleep in a dormitory room with twelve other girls,” Mr Gould says. “We’ve provided an additional room in another wing to accommodate your security team.”

  From the outside Badminton School looks rather grand and austere, but inside Haya is surprised to see that the corridors and classrooms are painted a cheery yellow with blue trim. With all the rules laid out and Haya not showing any signs of dissent, Mr Gould softens a little and makes a few jokes, in Latin, as he shows Haya where she will study sciences, maths and languages. It is not until the tour has almost come to an end and they still haven’t laid eyes on any horses that Haya asks, “Can we see the stables, please?”

  “Ah,” Mr Gould says. “We’d been told that you are a keen equestrienne. I’m sure you will enjoy our weekly lessons here at Badminton.”

  The stables are right beside the school. Haya is introduced to a rosy-cheeked instructor in a tweed hacking jacket and gets a sinking feeling that this will be Mrs Goddard all over again. As for the ponies themselves, they are such strange creatures! They are solidly built and so round in the belly they make the Tanks look skinny! Some of these ponies are so fat that Haya wonders how she will ever get her legs round them to ride. The ponies are doe-eyed and dozy, the complete opposite to Bree and the leggy, highly strung Arabians back home. They look as foreign as Haya feels i
n her dormitory, which seems to be filled with long-limbed, blue-eyed blondes.

  Haya has never really spent that much time with girls her own age before. Now, in the open-plan dorm room, she is suddenly surrounded by twelve of them. And yet she has never felt more alone in her life. All the other girls seem to know each other already. They sit on their beds and giggle and whisper and braid each other’s hair. No one even talks to the Princess.

  Haya makes herself busy putting away her things and hanging up her uniform in the closet. She takes dusty old Doll out of her suitcase and props her up on the pillow of her bed, then she unpacks her books and stares out of the window at the green manicured lawns. She thinks of Baba and Ali back home at Al Nadwa palace and wonders what they are doing right now. And, with a pang, she thinks about Bree. She said goodbye to the filly before she left, but Haya knows that Bree will not understand why she doesn’t come to see her tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. Bree will think Haya has abandoned her. And that was the last thing Haya ever wanted to do.

  Everything is strange at Badminton. In the dining room that evening, Haya asks the cook serving up the food what the dish is called and the woman looks at her as if she were mad. “It’s sausages: sausages and mash. What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen a sausage before?”

  Haya sits alone and tries not to meet the eyes of the other girls as she eats. She stares at her plate and chokes the strange food down, but she cannot bring herself to eat the sausages and pushes them to one side. She still hates to eat meat. That is the one thing about home that she will definitely not miss – miserable mealtimes with Frances.

  Haya’s governess knew why she didn’t want to eat red meat, but would deliberately serve up great slabs of lamb or chunks of steak on Haya’s plate and force her to sit at the table until she ate it. If Haya refused, she would stick it in the fridge and then bring it back out, the same plate every dinnertime, until the meat was so old it was like shoe leather curling up at the edges. Sometimes, after Haya had refused her shrivelled meat one too many times, Frances would send Haya to her room as punishment, not realising that Zuhair or one of the kitchen staff would smuggle food up to Haya in spite of her orders.

  Well, Haya thinks, Frances must be loving it now. This is what she always wanted – Haya out of sight and out of her way.

  After dinner, Baba phones her, just as he said he would, but she is not allowed to speak for long on the dormitory line as it is almost time for lights out. Haya wants to cry down the phone that she hates it here and please, please, can’t she be allowed to come back home? But she doesn’t of course. She knows that Baba would only be upset and she doesn’t want him to worry. Everything is good, she tells him, everything is just fine. Her father hears the note of anxiety in her voice and he tells her that once classes begin she will settle in and make friends. And then Ali is on the other end of the phone and Haya cannot help welling up with tears as he tells her that he misses her.

  She is so homesick, for the palace and for Baba and Ali and for Bree. Oh, how much she misses Bree!

  She hangs up the phone and goes back to her dorm room. She has never slept in a room with twelve strangers before. And how could anyone sleep when the room is abuzz with conversation? The matron keeps coming in and telling them to be quiet, but as soon as she is gone, they begin to gossip again. It takes ages until the room is quiet at last and all the other girls are asleep. It is well after midnight when the matron does her final check and only then does Haya dare to get out of bed again.

  Sitting on the floor beside her bed, Haya tries to be quiet as she works the fastenings on her suitcase and takes her treasure box from inside. Everything is exactly as she left it, and she goes through her familiar routine, working by touch in the darkness of the dorm room, methodically picking up each item and putting it aside as if cataloguing the contents of the box like a museum archivist. There are her mother’s sunglasses, the cassette tapes and the stiff dried flowers. When she picks up the braid of coarse black hair that she cut from Bree’s tail, she feels her heart aching as if it were going to break in two.

  Finally she takes out a grainy black and white photo of her and Mama. It is too dark to see it properly and besides, the tears blur her vision. Haya kisses the photo and then she puts it away again in the box with the rest of the treasures. Then she climbs back into bed and, cuddling Doll in her arms, she cries a little, very softly so that no one can hear her, the tears soaking into her pillow, dampening it beneath her cheek as she goes to sleep.

  s she enters the dining room for breakfast, Haya tries not to meet the eyes of the other boarders. She loads up her tray with scrambled eggs and toast and finds an unoccupied table. She feels self-conscious sitting alone, but she is too shy to try and join the others so she is trying to act oblivious to her surroundings and focus hard on her food. This is why it takes her a few seconds to notice that there is a girl standing beside her.

  “You shouldn’t eat that.”

  Haya looks up. It is one of the blondes from her dormitory.

  “I’m sorry?” Haya says.

  The blonde casts a knowing glance back over at her friends at the other table. There are four of them, cloistered together giggling, and they all have their eyes fixed on Haya’s table.

  “The eggs, I mean,” the blonde says. “It’s a new girl thing. You’ll learn once you’ve been here for a while. Never get the scrambled eggs – they taste like old socks. The trick is to sidestep the eggs and get two servings of sausages. The cooks tell you off, but just ignore them and smile and take an extra piece of toast too.”

  The blonde girl plonks herself down at the table beside Haya. “My name is Claire Booth,” she says. “Do I have to call you Your Majesty?”

  “My father is Your Majesty,” Haya says. “I am Princess Haya.”

  “That is so cool!” Claire Booth says. “Princess Haya.” She says it to see how the words feel coming out of her mouth and then she looks back over her shoulder and pulls a face at her friends who are watching her, wide-eyed in disbelief.

  “They were all too scared to come and talk to you,” she says. “They think you’re going to be stuck-up because you are a princess, but you’re not, are you?”

  Haya frowns. She doesn’t know what the word means, but she assumes it isn’t good.

  “Do you live in a palace?” Claire asks.

  “Yes,” Haya says, “but it’s just like a house really.”

  “I bet it’s huge!” Claire says. “Do you have lots of servants? We have a housekeeper twice a week at home and I had a nanny when I was little, of course, and there’s a gardener who comes sometimes, but we don’t have butlers or anything really posh like that. My dad’s a surgeon. We’re not filthy rich or anything. Not like some of the girls here. Does your dad have loads of oil wells?”

  Haya shakes her head. “There is no oil in Jordan.”

  “Well, diamond mines then!” Claire Booth says briskly, clearly not wanting factual details to get in the way of a good story. She looks up at the bodyguard who is standing at the door of the dining hall and watching her warily. She gives him a cheery wave. “Do you have bodyguards with you all the time? What do they do when you go to the bathroom? I suppose they wait outside. Are they going to come to school with you each day? Can you get them to do your homework for you?”

  “My father makes me have them,” Haya says. She has never met someone who can talk so fast! “Back home in Jordan my brother and I are always running away from them.”

  “I wish I was a princess,” Claire sighs. “I bet your whole life is super-glamorous and you jet-set about and hang out with gorgeous princes who buy you gifts and go on luxury yachts, and you’ve probably already met loads of celebrities at those fabulous parties in the south of France!”

  Haya shakes her head in disbelief. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, do you wear a tiara when you’re at home?”

  “No!” Haya giggles at the idea of wandering around the stables at Al Humm
ar dressed in a tiara.

  “Ohhh! If I had a crown, I’d wear it all the time!” Claire says excitedly. “Only I don’t think my hair would be right with a crown. I’m thinking of getting it cut because it’s too curly and it never looks any good. I wish I had hair like you! Where do you get yours cut? My mum takes me into London and we have this hairdresser in Knightsbridge who does absolutely everyone’s hair …”

  Claire sits with Haya for lunch that day too, and at dinnertime she asks Haya to sit at her table with her friends. The friends don’t talk as much as Claire does, but they seem mostly nice. All of them want to hear stories about life in Arabia, except for the tall blonde with a short bob and ski-slope nose called Stephanie, who looks extremely bored. Stephanie hardly ever smiles and she looks Haya up and down in the way that Frances used to do.

  When they are leaving the dinner table that night to go back to their dorm rooms, Haya is walking across the quad alone when she sees Stephanie directly ahead of her.

  “Oh, yah,” Stephanie is saying to the girl walking with her. “We had dinner with her. She’s a real princess. Totally arrogant, like she just goes on about herself all the time, talking about how she wants to ride horses, but the ones here are all too fat – not good enough for her.” And then, in a low whisper, she adds, “My father says they’re all like that. Middle Eastern royalty. They’re so used to being given everything that they think they can just snap their fingers and everyone will fall over themselves because they have so much money. Her daddy, the King, donated a new library to the school apparently. That’s how she got in …”

  Haya feels her face flushing hot. It isn’t true! And she only meant that the horses here weren’t like the ones back home! She wants to run up and tell Stephanie then and there, but it would do no good. She hurries back across the lawn, trying to hide the tears that are welling in her eyes.

  Homesickness, Haya is beginning to realise, is a lot like grief. It is always with you, but if you want to have any happiness, then you must call a truce of sorts with your heart and get on with life. She had thought that the stables would be her sanctuary here at boarding school, but the smell and the sound of the horses make her long for Al Hummar. And the way they ride, doing nothing but boring quadrilles in the arena, is no fun at all. She needs to take her mind off horses and try something new.