Ballad of Favour

by Monica Dickens

  ‘You’ve come to hear the music,’ she started. ‘Not to hear me talk.’

  Philip Wood grunted something that might have been, ‘Hear, hear,’ and Mollie poked him with her elbow.

  ‘But so that you can understand the music better, we want you to know something of the legend that lies behind The Ballad of the Great Grey Horse.’ Elisabeth put up a finger to hook her hair back behind her ear. ‘It’s a true story.’ Philip Wood snorted gently. ‘You may have heard different versions of it if you’ve lived round here for some time, but the truth of it is like this.’ She hooked her hair back again.

  ‘Once there was rich and evil man who called himself the Lord of the Moor, although he was nobody’s Lord by right of birth or royal decree. He lived in a grim castle on the moor where the ruins on the hill are now, and grabbed for himself the grazing and forests that used to be common land for the farmers and peasants who lived in the valley below the castle. He grabbed their best cattle and horses too, and their prettiest daughters to be servants, and wives for the brutal band of soldiers in his private army.’

  Elisabeth had stopped trembling. Telling the story in her clear and gentle voice, she had caught the attention of the audience. Abigail was leaning forward, absorbed, her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands.

  ‘One of the horses at the castle was a magnificent grey horse of great speed and courage.’ Rose smiled to herself. ‘He was called Favour, because he was the favourite charger of the wicked Lord of the Moor. One of the children at the castle was the son of a soldier and a girl from the valley. He was called Alan, and he was just about thirteen. Because the Lord had cut down the trees on the river bank for gain, the river burst its banks after heavy storms and flooded the whole valley. The people who lived there were saved by Alan and Favour, galloping ahead of the rushing water to warn them.’ Elisabeth stopped, and hooked her hair behind her ear again, although it had not escaped.

  ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ Rose’s father muttered.

  ‘It’s true!’ Rose turned and whispered to him fiercely.

  ‘The Ballad of the Great Grey Horse is a song of praise for this noble deed.’

  Elisabeth turned to Mr Vingo, who had been sitting at the side of the hall, listening to her intently, as if he had never heard the legend before. Now he stood up, wearing a black velvet jacket which Mollie had steamed and pressed, and a black bow tie hiding the fact that his shirt collar was too tight and wouldn’t button, and lumbered shyly to the piano, wringing his hands to loosen them.

  The first part of the music was beautiful. You could tell that the audience loved it, and Mr Vingo played better than Rose had ever heard him.

  Then he paused, and announced, ‘For the “Dancing Song of the Valley People”, I will be joined by my colleague, Miss Abigail Drew.’

  ‘Here goes nothing,’ Abigail whispered to Rose. She stood up and stepped on to the platform. When she turned round, Rose saw that she was blushing, right up to the edges of her hair. She had never seen Abigail blush before.

  Mr and Mrs Drew clapped, so everybody clapped, and Rose’s father looked enthusiastic for the first time. Mr Vingo raised his hands above the keyboard. Abigail raised the flute to her lips with her fingers poised, and they were off.

  Rose was so proud of them. These are my friends, she wanted people to know. Even though she was no dancer, the joyful music made her want to get up and dance, and she noticed that many people were tapping their feet and smiling, and wagging their heads a bit.

  Applause. Mr Vingo and Abigail took a bow, holding hands. Then Abigail hurried back to her seat and said, ‘Phew!’ and leaned back and stuck her legs out and flapped a hand to fan herself.

  With that anxiety over, Rose could give herself up to the music. Some of it she knew. Some was new to her. Some of it was overwhelming, a tumbling waterfall of sound, and great melodic chords that reached into her soul. She closed her eyes and let the music capture her and carry her away into a kind of waking dream.

  When she opened her eyes, she was not in the concert hall. The music was still running through her head, but she was out of doors. It was not like a scene from any of the journeys she had made with Favour. She did not seem to be anyone, or to have a body or a personality. No one was aware of her, but she could see and hear, as an observer, as if she were watching a film.

  She saw the castle on the hill above the valley as it had been centuries ago at the time of the legend, a grim stone fortress with narrow windows, dominating the landscape. The square tower stood beside the arched stone gateway. The gate was of thick studded timber. Outside it on the grass, trodden and muddied by many hoofs, a poorly clad man was standing under the grey and lowering sky, with his cap in his hand, small and scared and overwhelmed by the menace of the castle.

  Then, as if she could pass through those thick walls, Rose was in the great courtyard inside the castle walls. She saw the men, the same hateful soldiers she had glimpsed among the mists of the valley. She heard their laughter and their rough voices, heard the stamp of their boots on the stones, smelled the smoke of their fires, heard and smelled the horses, and saw them tethered in a long open shed at one side of the courtyard.

  One of them was Favour. She would know him anywhere. He was not glowing and unearthly and larger than life, as he was when he appeared to her on the rock above the bridge. He had somehow taken earthly life and substance as a real horse like the others, but much finer and more restive and proud. He pulled back from his tether, and when one of the men cursed him and lifted an arm at him, he danced sideways and arched his neck with his ears back. The man hit him with a stick, and Favour squealed and stamped his hoof as if the man were under it.

  ‘Don’t hit him, Father.’ A young boy, coming to the shed with a forkful of hay as big as himself, dropped his load, and went to the horse to put his hand on his neck and calm him. ‘That’s not the way to handle Favour.’

  ‘Damn you, Alan.’ The man hit out at his son, and the horse grabbed for him with his teeth.

  ‘Bite me, would you?’ He raised the stick again, but another soldier called out, ‘Leave him be. The Lord is coming.’

  A door in the castle opened. The sentries beside it straightened up and rang their pikes down on the stones. Out of the door stepped a small crooked man with a limp. The pale mouth in his white face was set in a sneer. His thin hair was like oiled wire. He wore a black tunic with a fur collar and a heavy gold chain. On his shoulder crouched a tiny brown weasel, its teeth murderous, its lips drawn back in an expression as loathsome as its master’s.

  This was the Lord of the Moor, the same horrible figure that Rose had seen in the valley mists and had hoped never to have to see again.

  ‘So. Bring the fellow to me,’ the Lord commanded in his thin cold voice with the nasty hissing lisp. ‘If he’s had the courage to come here, he may as well get his moneysworth.’

  A small door within the great studded door was opened, and the man from outside stepped through, touching his forelock to the Lord and stopping several yards away from him.

  ‘What is it now, Farmer Jarvis?’ the Lord asked impatiently. ‘Why do you people always bother me?’

  The farmer straightened up and put back his shoulders and stuck out his chin and put a foot forward with the knee bent, to show he was not intimidated.

  ‘I’ve come to speak for us all,’ he said. ‘I come in protest. Things are going badly for us in the valley, and we can’t afford the taxes you impose on us.’

  ‘If thingth are going badly,’ the Lord lisped, ‘it’s your own fault, becauth you are lathy workers and hopeleth farmerth.’

  ‘That is not true. You know it.’ The man looked as if he was going to step forward, and the sentries shook their pikes and growled at him. ‘But we haven’t a chance with you taking away our common grazing and demanding your share of all we grow.’

  ‘What a shame.’ The Lord half closed his eyes and yawned, and the weasel yawned too, showing its killer fangs and a thin dar
ting tongue like a snake. ‘Thank you for coming to tell me.’ He looked at the sky. ‘Devils in hell,’ he muttered. ‘It’s raining again. Is there no peath?’

  ‘And that’s another thing.’ Two of the soldiers had moved towards the man to take him out, but he held his ground. ‘The river is rising. Since you’ve cut down so much of our oak forest to sell for ships’ timbers, the banks of the river are weakened.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Lord, mocking the farmer’s angry face through his slitted eyes. ‘Thatth very alarming.’

  ‘You can laugh.’ The farmer clenched his fists. ‘But one day there’ll be a disaster.’

  The Lord did laugh, a whining rattle high in his nose. He shook the rain from his oily curls and limped inside. The soldiers laughed and jeered coarsely at the farmer, and he allowed himself to be jostled through the small door in the big door.

  Outside in the rain, which was now deluging down like steel rods, the man shook his fist at the castle door. Then he untied a thin old horse that was trying to shelter under a dead tree, and rode away, slumped and defeated, down the hill.

  All along, Rose had been aware of the sound of Mr Vingo’s piano behind what she saw and heard, like film music. It flowed through her head like a torrent, and she found herself down in the valley, where the rain was falling out of the sky in solid sheets of water.

  The boy Alan was driving a few sheep into a hollow space behind a jutting flat rock. Drenched, he stood out on the rock to watch the river, and Rose saw that it was the same rock where the horse appeared to her, and the bridge below, with the river surging over the foot planks, was the same bridge she had to cross between her old familiar world and the new dream world with Favour.

  Alan looked down the valley towards the sea, where the houses and farms and fishing village were hidden by the rain, and then back to the swollen river, shouldering its way against the embankments. Just above the bridge, he saw to his horror that the bank of earth and rocks was crumbling. Water was beginning to leak through over the valley floor.

  Leaving his sheep, he clambered back up to the castle. Rose was with him, the music hurrying, hurrying. She saw him try to rouse the soldiers in the guardroom.

  ‘The embankment is breached! Come out and help! Drag stones and timber – do something – the people are in danger!’

  But the soldiers were drinking, and only laughed at him.

  With a sob of rage, Alan ran through the courtyard where the horses stood in the shed, their tails tucked in against the driving rain. The main door was barred, but Alan knew all the secret ways of the castle. He squeezed through a narrow opening between two huge stones with grinning faces carved into them, their beaked noses dripping rain. He ran up a steep spiral stair inside a turret, then out into the lashing storm along an open battlement, fighting the wind to get to the far turret. Its door was locked, but he was small enough to crawl through an observation slit, grazing his elbows and knees. He hurtled down another spiral stair, falling the last few steps, then picked himself up and ran down a dark damp corridor and through the chill of a storage chamber that smelled of rotten meat. Dead animals and birds on hooks swung against him as he pushed through. In the doorway, he ducked past a group of servants carrying sacks. They shouted at him, and he shouted back and followed the twisting stone passages, dimly lit with barred windows, to the very centre of this evil place. The chamber of the Lord of the Moor himself.

  The music pounded urgently in Rose’s head as she saw Alan, panting and desperate, burst into the vaulted room. The light was dim. Flaring candles showed the rich hangings and weapons and horns and helmets that hung on the walls. An oil lamp hung from a beam on an iron chain fashioned like a snake, with its head upturned above the lamp and its fangs out to strike. In the pool of yellow light, the Lord sat in an enormous carved chair on a raised platform. The back was higher than his head and the seat could have accommodated three of him between the dragons which were its arms.

  He sat like a child, with his feet dangling in their small pointed boots, stroking the slithery weasel on his lap as if it were a pet kitten.

  In spite of his desperation, Alan remembered to drop on one knee in front of him.

  ‘The embankment has been breached!’ he gasped. ‘Save the people!’

  ‘Oh, well.’ The Lord put his greasy head on one side, and his bony white claw continued to stroke the back of the mean little animal, which bared its teeth at Alan with a hiss. ‘Perhaps we should just let them go. At least there will be no more trouble.’

  ‘You can’t, my Lord. A flood is coming. You’ve got to make the men fortify the embankments. You’ve got to do something.’

  ‘Oh, but we can’t thtop the fortheth of nature,’ the Lord lisped smugly. ‘If a flood is their fate, they mutht accthept it.’

  ‘Send warning to them. They’d have time to escape.’

  ‘Too late.’ The Lord lifted his lip in a sneering, crooked smile. ‘No one could get there in time.’

  ‘Favour could.’ Alan stood boldly upright. He knew what he had to do.

  The Lord scowled. ‘No one rides Favour but me.’

  ‘Today I do!’

  As the Lord struggled down from the high throne, Alan escaped from the chamber, through the labyrinth of corridors and twisting steps and out to the courtyard. He dragged open one side of the heavy gate, then darted back to untie the rope of the grey horse’s halter.

  Favour backed out at once into the teeming rain, and Alan leaped on to his back, just as the Lord came running out of the castle with a sword in his hand to stop him. Scuttling on the wet flagstones, he was before Alan at the gate, his arm raised to slash down with the sword, but the horse sprang forward and trampled him on to the stones like a bundle of black rags, the red blood washing away into the gurgling gutters.

  As Alan and Favour galloped out under the arch, and headlong down the hill to the river bank, Rose saw a tiny travelling ribbon of movement as the weasel slithered away through the wet grass.

  The music swelled and drowned out everything else with the roar of a torrent of water. A hand fell on Rose’s shoulder, and her father’s voice said in her ear, ‘You can wake up now, Rose. It’s over.’

  The music had stopped. The roar of water had dwindled into the sound of clapping hands. Mr Vingo was standing up and bowing, breathing heavily and sweating, leaning on the piano as if he would fall down without it. Rose looked round at her parents. Mollie nodded, beaming and applauding hard, nudging Philip to make him clap harder.

  ‘Did you like it?’ Rose asked.

  ‘I’d like to go through it all again.’ Her mother’s eyes were dreamy, as if she too, like Rose, had been in another world.

  ‘It wasn’t as bad as I expected,’ her father said. ‘Bit noisy.’

  ‘We thought it was fantastic,’ Abigail said, ‘didn’t we, Rose?’

  ‘She slept through most of it,’ Rose’s father said.

  ‘Well, so would you if you worked as hard as she did – oops, sorry, Mr Wood, nothing against you – but people like Rose who are short on sleep do drop off when they sit down.’

  Had she been asleep? Was it all a dream? It was much too vivid for that. Rose’s heart was still racing with the urgency and drama of what she had witnessed. She could still see, as clearly as if it were there on the varnished wood floor in front of her, the wet black trampled body of the Lord of the Moor, with the blood flowing swiftly away with the rain.

  During the refreshments, several people came up to Mr Vingo to congratulate him and tell him to be sure and come back to play the rest of the Ballad, when it was finished. He smiled modestly, but he was too short of breath to talk much to them.

  As people left, and Mollie and Sam were clearing up, Mr Vingo went to sit in a chair in the back row, to wait for the car.

  Rose sat down beside him.

  ‘I saw it all,’ she said quickly.

  He nodded. ‘I thought you did.’

  ‘What happens after Alan and Favour gallop out down the valley?
’

  ‘They race the flood waters, and in a tremendous leap – no. You’ll have to wait till I’ve written it.’

  ‘It is true, isn’t it? You didn’t make it up?’

  ‘Rose!’ He looked shocked.

  ‘Save the people!’ Rose said softly.

  ‘He did. Still does. You know.’

  ‘Yes, and I know what it is this time. A child in danger,’ Rose whispered. ‘I know who he is, but not where, or why. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘You will, brave messenger, as Alan knew.’

  ‘Was he one of us?’

  Mr Vingo nodded. ‘He answered the call. You too. Be ready.’

  Chapter Eight

  After the concert, Mr Vingo was not exactly famous, but he had made a dent. There were two paragraphs in the local newspaper calling him Mr Virgo. Someone rang up for piano lessons, which were not in his line. A friend of Philip Wood who had invented a new kind of tin opener wanted him to write a jingle for it that could be played at a forthcoming Kitchen Fair. A university professor’s wife and her daughter, who had talked to Sam and Mollie at the concert, came to the hotel to make a last-minute request to have the daughter’s wedding reception there, since there had been a fire in the restaurant where she was going to have it.

  Their first wedding at Wood Briar. Mollie went into a fever of plans and arrangements. Mrs Ardis said the hotel was getting ideas beyond its station. Dilys said, ‘A bride – some people get all the luck.’ Gloria said, ‘I’m going to clean this old place from top to bottom, you see if I’m not.’ Abigail booked herself up to help Rose on the great day.

  Meanwhile, the rest of life went back to normal. Mr Vingo disappeared again for a bit. Rose and Abigail went to the stables for a jumping lesson with Joyce.

  Rose was afraid of jumping. Approaching every jump, she could not help imagining all the things that could go wrong.

  It was lovely when it went right, and Moonlight lurched over without breaking the rhythm of his lumbering canter. That did not often happen, largely because Rose expected him to stop, or run out, or stumble when he landed and push his pink nose through the mud until he got his feet back, and so he usually did.