The Book of Horses and Unicorns

by Jackie French

  ‘I’ve brought you some clothes,’ said McWhirty. ‘Sure, it’s half frozen you must be in here.’ It was cold enough outside; in here the chill seeped into your bones.

  The child inched slowly around the barrel.

  ‘It’s no use trying to run,’ said McWhirty. He held out the clothes. The child glanced at them, then up at him.

  ‘Look,’ said McWhirty. ‘It’s one of my shirts.’ He held it up and pantomimed how to put it on. The child watched him, silent. ‘And I cut down a pair of my trousers for you too,’ said McWhirty. ‘You’ll swim in them, I know, but it’s the best I can do. I’ll see if the Colonel will get you some proper clothes next time someone goes in to town.’

  The boy still said nothing.

  ‘We can roll the sleeves up on the shirt,’ said McWhirty.

  Still the kid said nothing. McWhirty looked more closely.

  The kid was crying.

  ‘I’ll help you then,’ said McWhirty softly, with a gentleness he hadn’t used on another human in twenty years. He knelt beside the boy and draped the shirt around his shoulders, then lifted his arms into the sleeves.

  The boy let him, his eyes on McWhirty’s face.

  McWhirty rolled the sleeves up. ‘Now the trousers,’ he said. He lifted the boy and showed him how to put one leg into each hole, then belted it all with a piece of rope from the stables. ‘Not too bad,’ he judged.

  Suddenly the boy wriggled from his grasp. He ran to the door before McWhirty could catch him, struggled with the handle for a moment, then flung the door open. He was almost through the door when the too-long trousers tripped him, and he fell.

  McWhirty ran to him and picked him up. He carried him back inside, holding his arms firmly so he couldn’t struggle. He locked the door behind him before he put the boy down.

  The boy backed away from him. McWhirty sat down on a barrel of apples and crossed his arms and stared at him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what are we to do with you now?’

  ‘Gaja!’ yelled the boy, then a long stream of something McWhirty couldn’t catch.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said McWhirty slowly. ‘I can follow what you’re telling me clear enough. You’re saying why don’t I unlock that door and let you out? What call has any man to lock away a child like he was a goat in a stable? Why don’t I just be giving you your freedom and let you run away?’

  He stared at the boy some more. ‘They locked me up once,’ he told the boy. ‘Sure, I was a good few years older than you but not that old, all the same, for all I had a wife and a child. They threw me in a stone room, but not like this. There were fourteen of us in that room, and the straw stank and not of apples, and at night you could hear the cries of grieving from the women on the other side.’

  The boy backed over to the wall. ‘It was months I spent in there,’ said McWhirty slowly. ‘Then they put me in a cart with four others, and they chained us at the wrists and ankles and the carts dragged us down to Cork and then to Cobh, to the boats that would take us here. They tried to follow the carts a while, the women like my Mary, but she had to turn back in the end, and that was the last I saw of her, her and my Michael.

  ‘They dressed us in new clothes for the boats, just like I dressed you. We heard their boots beat against the decking like the clang of chains above. There was only one way out for us, into the sea, but for that we’d burn in the fires of hell as a suicide.’

  The boy was listening now, his eyes wide.

  ‘So now I’m wondering,’ said McWhirty. ‘Why I don’t free you, having longed for my freedom all those years. Well, I’ll tell you boyo; my Mary sent her petition over and over to the Governor, to let her join me here and I petitioned the magistrate here too. But she never came, because it’s only a convict ship that will take her for nothing, and none of those are sailing now, and nor can I go back, and the Colonel pays well if you’ve got a skill that he can use. So that’s why I stay here, and that’s why I’ll do what he says, because one sweet day I’ll have the money to bring my Mary over here and my Michael too, and enough for us to have a farm to live on.’

  McWhirty stood up. ‘I’ll bring you some food later on,’ he said, ‘and some straw and a blanket for sleeping. And my advice to you is to be as useless as you can, because once the Colonel takes a dislike to you he’ll send you away and that’s the only chance you’ve got, boy, to be of no use to the Colonel at all.’

  ‘Minyang?’ whispered the boy.

  ‘You don’t understand me, do you?’ asked McWhirty. ‘Well, that makes two of us, because I’m not understanding myself sometimes.’

  He left the boy in the darkness.

  They came looking for the black kid, of course.

  A bloke came up from the camp by the river that evening. He may have been the kid’s father, though he was getting on in years, and his beard was grey — the boy’s grandfather, perhaps, or uncle.

  He didn’t knock at the back door of the Colonel’s house, or the front. He called from the trees behind the horse yards and the black kid called back to him, urgently from his prison in the storeroom.

  The Colonel ran down the stairs, his shotgun in his hand.

  ‘Off with you!’ he yelled, and fired once into the air. The Colonel had been at his dinner. The scent of steak and kidney pudding and madeira was still thick around him, and he was angry at being disturbed. ‘Off with you! The boy stays here!’

  McWhirty reckoned the old man didn’t speak English, but he understood the shotgun. The boy cried out once more from the storeroom, but the old man had gone away.

  The Colonel nodded at McWhirty. ‘Keep watch,’ he ordered. ‘I want two men on guard there all night.’

  McWhirty and Young Mike took the first watch, then Young Mike changed places with Flash Jack. McWhirty stayed on. He could have let Chookie Neilson relieve him but for some reason he felt he should stay with the black kid, even if it was as his guard by the door.

  Three men came just before dawn. McWhirty saw them first, darker shadows among the trees. For a moment he hesitated, but some noise must have woken Flash Jack, who had been dozing with his back against the wall. Flash Jack raised his shotgun and fired into the night.

  One of the shadows fell. The child cried out in the storeroom. The two men still standing knelt by their companion and half lifted him off the ground. He staggered between them, then the three were lost among the shadows.

  At least he isn’t dead, thought McWhirty. Maybe it was just a scratch — Flash Jack’s aim was never very good. McWhirty hoped it was only that.

  The Colonel came to let the black kid out next morning. The frost clung to the grass and the smoke from the house chimneys hung in a haze over the roof in the still air. Even the gum leaves were motionless.

  The Colonel nodded at McWhirty. ‘Unlock the door.’

  McWhirty shoved the key into the lock, and turned it. The door swung open. McWhirty half expected the boy to try to run again, but either he’d understood the shots in the night or he judged there were too many hands to grab him if he tried to escape.

  The black kid walked forward slowly. He looked even smaller this morning in McWhirty’s too-big clothes. McWhirty glanced at the plate on the floor. He was relieved to see the boy had eaten the meat and the bread too. At least there was always food in plenty at the Colonel’s.

  ‘Get some rope,’ ordered the Colonel suddenly.

  McWhirty blinked.

  ‘Tie it round the piccaninny,’ explained the Colonel. ‘That way he can’t try to run. Ah, that’s the ticket,’ he said, as Young Mike brought over a length of rope from the stable and tied it round the boy’s waist. ‘From now on I want that rope on whenever the child is outdoors. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said McWhirty.

  The Colonel took the rope in his leather-gloved hand and led the boy over to the horse yards. The stallion tossed his head. His hooves thumped on the ground.

  ‘Better stand back, sir,’ said McWhirty quietly. ‘We’re upsetting him.’ He nodded at t
he rope around the child. ‘I’d take that off of him too. Don’t think the horse likes rope much.’

  The Colonel hesitated. Then he nodded at McWhirty. ‘Take it off then. But put it on as soon as he’s out again. I don’t want him running off.’

  McWhirty untied the rope, then pushed the boy lightly towards the horse. The Colonel smiled.

  ‘Let’s see what happens, then,’ he said.

  McWhirty nodded. He gazed at the horse, hoping that if he thought hard enough the horse might hear him: don’t be going near the boy, lash out at him maybe, just a little, not to hurt him mind, just to let the Colonel think the boy is useless to him, so he’ll let him go …

  The black kid looked back at the Colonel, at McWhirty and Flash Jack. Then he looked at the stallion.

  It was as though they recognised each other, the boy and the horse. The terror of the journey from Calcutta, the horrors of the night in the storeroom all vanished in the sunlight. The boy slipped through the rails and pulled an apple from his pocket.

  ‘The boy has some sense in him,’ thought McWhirty sadly. ‘He must have taken that apple from the barrels in the storeroom. He learns fast.’

  The boy held the apple out to the horse. The stallion took a step closer, then another. He bent his head down and, once again, took the apple delicately from the outstretched hand.

  ‘There now,’ said the Colonel with satisfaction. ‘Was I not right? Look at that now.’

  McWhirty looked.

  The horse whinnied softly into the boy’s face. This time the boy didn’t laugh. But he pulled the long, bony head down towards him and whispered in the horse’s ear.

  It was enough to break the heart in you, thought Alf McWhirty.

  ‘Keep the boy out here till tonight,’ ordered the Colonel. ‘So the horse gets used to him, but keep an eye on him at all times. You,’ he said to McWhirty, ‘I hold you responsible if anything happens to him. I want the boy to bring his feed, his water, muck out the yard — everything. Let’s see if that will calm him down.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said McWhirty.

  ‘And put the rope back on him whenever he’s not with the horse. Understand?’

  In the horse yards the boy ran his hand along the horse’s side.

  They kept the black kid prisoner.

  Each night McWhirty took him back to the storeroom, with its straw and its blanket and its small barred window, and locked him in. Every morning the Colonel supervised his release, and led him on the rope over to the stallion. And every day the mighty horse grew quieter.

  No-one came again from the camp down by the river.

  Sometimes McWhirty thought he saw a woman, eyes wide and shiny with tears, watching the black kid from the trees, but when he looked again it was shadows, just the shadows and the wind.

  He said nothing about the woman to the others. Perhaps, anyway, she was never really there. And if sometimes at night someone whispered up through the tiny window of the storeroom — perhaps that never happened either.

  Perhaps it WAS only the wind.

  Every day the Colonel watched as the black kid fed the stallion, stroked him and patted him. No-one else was even able to touch the stallion, or even come near him, except the boy.

  The black kid never spoke after that first day, except to the horse. He was always whispering to him, and sometimes it almost seemed that the horse was whispering back. Of course no-one knew his language — unless the horse understood — but McWhirty thought it was something more than that.

  Alf McWhirty was good at not talking too, except to horses, though he still talked to the black kid sometimes. It seemed easier, somehow, when the person you talked to didn’t know your language.

  After a week the black kid was able to place a rope around the horse’s neck and lead him slowly round the yard. A week after that he put a bridle on him too, though the horse tossed his head at the bridle and never seemed happy when it was on.

  The boy looked almost happy when he was with the horse, decided McWhirty, as he tried to shove away the guilt that rose when he saw the rope hanging on the fence that he would have to replace around the child’s waist when his session in the yard had finished.

  You got good money when you worked with horses, so the kid was learning a trade, McWhirty told himself just a bit too firmly. And it wouldn’t be forever, surely. One day either the Colonel would let the boy go, or maybe one day the child would decide he wanted to stay …

  And the Colonel watched and dreamt of riding tall and straight on the great horse, and of the whole town watching him controlling the stallion’s power.

  Three weeks after the black kid came the Colonel ordered McWhirty to get the child onto the horse’s back.

  ‘And how am I supposed to do that, you great bosthoon,’ thought McWhirty, ‘when neither of us speaks the other’s language.’

  But he gestured to the boy nonetheless, with the Colonel and the men looking on, safely behind the rails.

  The boy’s eyes gleamed. He patted the great neck until the horse drew close to the rails — the side furthest way from the Colonel and the men. McWhirty slid into the yards then, and slipped the reins and bridle on. The stallion tossed his head, but quietened again when the boy touched him.

  Then the boy climbed the rails and let himself gently down onto the horse’s back.

  The black horse froze. His eyes rolled and he tossed his head again, then seemed to settle.

  ‘He’s had a rider before,’ thought McWhirty, as he gazed at the boy and the horse. ‘The bloke who sold him to the Colonel was right then. That horse has been broken, he was just too scared to remember.’

  The black kid sat there half surprised, with a look of joy dawning on his face. It was the look he had had that first day when he peered at the stallion from the trees.

  Colonel Gloucester rubbed his hands. He gestured to McWhirty. ‘Lead him around the yard,’ he ordered. ‘Let’s see his paces.’

  McWhirty nodded.

  The parrots peeped in the trees above them, waiting for the humans to leave so they could feed on the corn in the stallion’s droppings. The horse came quietly, one step, two, three. Then suddenly he reared, forelegs high, then crashed down, so McWhirty had to roll under the railings to avoid being struck.

  When he looked up there was no sign of the black kid.

  The horse was careering round and round the horse yards. The black kid lay by the gate. He looked … crumpled … somehow. McWhirty leapt to his feet and ran over.

  The boy was conscious. But one leg was twisted awkwardly and one arm looked out of shape as well.

  The Colonel swore and stamped inside, as McWhirty knelt by the black child. The boy looked up at him. McWhirty hadn’t known a dark face could look so pale.

  ‘Someone ride to town! Fetch a doctor!’ yelled McWhirty.

  Young Mike blinked. ‘Not sure the Colonel would like …’ he began.

  ‘I’ll pay the man if the Colonel won’t!’ roared McWhirty. ‘But you fetch him. Now!’

  McWhirty and Flash Jack rolled the boy onto a blanket. Then the men lifted the blanket carefully, each hand holding one corner, so the blanket stayed taut and gave the child some support.

  ‘We’ll take him to my hut,’ stated McWhirty.

  ‘But …’ began Flash Jack.

  ‘The boy isn’t going to escape like this,’ said McWhirty shortly. The way he felt at the moment, McWhirty didn’t care if he did.

  The kid made no noise, though he must have been in pain.

  McWhirty kicked the door open. It was just a dirt floor and no glass at the windows and bark for a roof, but it kept the rain out and there was a fireplace and there was a proper bed, with a straw mattress and blankets and a pillow too.

  They rolled the boy carefully off the blanket and onto the bed. The child winced with pain, but didn’t say anything. It was only then that McWhirty realised the boy had probably never seen a bed before.

  ‘It’s alright,’ said McWhirty, then realised how silly
that sounded. But maybe the boy didn’t understand anyway, though his eyes were wide and steady every time McWhirty spoke to him.

  Doctor Miller arrived late that afternoon. McWhirty heard the hoof beats outside his hut and went to meet him. He glanced at the sun behind the trees, sending their shadows stretching across the dust. The doctor would never get back to town in daylight now; he’d have to spend the night at the Colonel’s. He’d probably planned that all along, thought McWhirty. The two would drink the Colonel’s port late into the night. Well, at least it would keep the Colonel away from the black kid, and the doctor would be on hand if he was needed in the night.

  ‘Got a patient for me, I hear?’ said Doctor Miller, as he dismounted and tied the reins to the verandah post.

  ‘A boy,’ said McWhirty.

  ‘What’s his name?’ asked the doctor, pulling his case out of his saddle bag.

  McWhirty blinked. Somehow he’d never even thought the kid had a name. ‘Don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Some native name, I expect.’

  ‘Well, what do you call him, then?’ asked the doctor impatiently.

  McWhirty shrugged. ‘We don’t,’ he said.

  Doctor Miller looked him up and down. ‘I see,’ he said shortly. He stepped into the hut. ‘I’m Doc Miller,’ he said to the black kid. ‘Now, let’s be having a look at you.’

  The black child lay quiet while the doctor examined him, pressed his stomach and smelt his breath, held his wrist to feel his pulse and looked into his eyes. He cried out only once when the doctor touched his leg.

  ‘Bad break there,’ said Doctor Miller finally. ‘The arm is broken too, but that’ll set alright. Don’t know about the leg. Don’t seem to be any other injuries.’

  ‘Can you set them?’ asked McWhirty.

  ‘I can try. I’ll need some branches — straight ones, about this long. Trim them smooth as you can.’ The doctor took a tall brown bottle filled with a thick white liquid and a long silver spoon out of his bag.

  ‘Now I’m going to give you a spoonful of this, young fellow me lad,’ he said to the black kid. ‘It’ll make you feel sleepy but it’ll keep the worst of the pain away. Understand?’