Ballad of Favour

by Monica Dickens

  Why did she jump? Because Joyce said she had to. Because one of her life’s beliefs, stronger since she knew Favour, was that you had to make yourself do things you didn’t want to do. Because Abigail said, ‘C’mon, old Rose, it’s much more fun if we do it together.’

  Abigail was going to take her dun pony into some junior classes before the show season ended. Crackers was a skilled and eager jumper who could manage a clear round at small shows if he felt like it. But he had his off days, and so did Abigail. Sometimes he would rush the jumps and take off too close. Sometimes he would run out at the last moment. Sometimes Abigail’s mind was on higher things and she forgot the course, even though she had watched fifteen people jump it before her.

  She was pleased with a win or a place, but what she really liked was the jumping and the excitement, and showing off spunky little Crackers. She actually did not care much if she won or not, which was just as well, since the prizes were usually won by the gimlet-eyed children who rode to win and never forgot the course.

  Joyce cared if Abigail won. It was a good advertisement for the stable, since she took lessons there. She had put up sizeable jumps in the middle of the field – ‘Here goes nothing,’ Abigail told Crackers as she circled him into a canter to start the first round – and smaller ones round the edge of the field for Rose and Moonlight and a tiny child called Lulu, who was learning to jump on a huge brown horse who was called Safety First, because he had been in the business a long time.

  ‘All right!’ Abigail and Crackers were having a good day. Joyce put the jumps up and the pony cleared them again neatly.

  ‘Your reins were too long, your bottom sticks out, you judged him all wrong at the wall.’ Joyce could always find something to criticize. She stood in the middle of the field with a long lungeing whip, not necessarily to use on the horses. She just liked to hold it.

  ‘All right, you two landlubbers over there by the hedge. Let’s see if you’ve learned anything from watching Abbie and Crack.’ She never bothered with anyone’s full name. Rose was Ro. Moonlight was Mule. Lulu and the clever, careful brown horse were Lu and Safe.

  Perched on his back like a midget jockey, Lulu, who was only eight, set her jaw, and the big horse carried her over the tree trunk and two rails and a double line of hay bales like a champion. He jumped them once more, and then started back to the gate, since Lulu was not strong enough to stop him.

  ‘All right, Lu!’ Joyce strode across to grab his rein before he got to the gate. ‘Naughty boy, stop playing games with little kids.’ She slapped him chummily on the neck. If it had been Moonlight, she would have yanked at his rein and said, ‘Knock that off, you ugly mule. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  Moonlight did not want to jump. Rose could sense that, even as she trotted to the end of the field and turned him towards the fallen tree trunk. She could not even make him canter.

  ‘Push! Push, girl, push!’ Joyce yelled and came towards them holding out the long whip, but Moonlight stopped at the fallen tree, then lurched over it from a standstill, leaving Rose off balance, so that she leaned backwards and jerked him in the mouth.

  ‘All wrong.’ Joyce shook her hair, which had been cut very short and permed into a thousand curls. ‘Get him going, Ro. Come on, you lazy mule.’ She flicked the whip round his tail and he put his ears back.

  ‘I don’t think he wants to jump,’ Rose said.

  ‘He hasn’t got the brains to think.’

  ‘He feels funny.’ Moonlight had landed stiffly. ‘Perhaps something’s wrong?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with him that a good kick in the ribs won’t cure. Come on, Ro, use your legs. Legs, I said!’

  Somehow, Rose got him over one rail and the hay bales, because she was too scared not to. At the last rail, she said, ‘I’m sorry, Moon,’ as she kicked him. He took off half-heartedly, broke the rail as he crashed through it, and stumbled on the other side. Rose fell off.

  ‘Get back on!’ Joyce ordered, but Rose walked away across the field with the reins over her arm and the horse’s head nodding low beside her. ‘Get on!’

  ‘You don’t have to.’ Abigail got off Crackers and led him beside Rose. ‘Are you O.K.?’ Rose nodded. ‘That was bad luck.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘Hey, you are hurt. What happened?’

  ‘Nothing I’m O.K.’ Rose was crying silently, but not from physical pain.

  ‘I’ll give you a lesson on Crackers at home,’ Abigail said. ‘You could do real well. Don’t let that female commando get you down.’

  Rose shook her head. She was not crying for herself.

  In the stable, she bent to run her hand over Moonlight’s legs, not sure what she was looking for, but knowing that something was wrong. There did seem to be a slight swelling at the back of one bony knee.

  ‘His left leg is swollen,’ Rose told Joyce when she stuck her tight curls over the loosebox door to see why Rose had not brought the saddle and bridle to the tack room.

  Joyce squinted down at the leg. ‘Nothing to speak of. He’s stiffening up a bit, that’s all. Happens to all old horses.’

  ‘Poor Moon.’ Rose came back from the tack room and leaned over the door to watch the cream-coloured horse pulling at his hay greedily to fill the great hollows within him, and dropping some of it into the water bucket. Holding a mouthful of water, he stuck out his head to Rose and slobbered it over her hands, before he went back to his hay rack.

  As she stood and watched him, he changed. His coat whitened and dappled and began to shine like a pearl. His head was smaller and finer and his neck more arched, his body filled out and muscular, his pale eye deep and gleaming. There was a misty glow about him, like a lamp shining through fog. He was Favour.

  Then Rose’s eyes re-focussed, and he was only poor old Moonlight, with a manure stain on his rump she had not been able to brush out, and a loose sheaf of hay trailing from his slack pink lips.

  The message was clear. Even if the tune had not started to curl through her mind in a spiralling flight of melody, she would have known that the grey horse was calling her.

  ‘Got to go,’ she told Moonlight, the only one besides Mr Vingo for whom she did not have to invent an excuse.

  Abigail had ridden home. Rose took her bicycle as far as she could on the bridle path that went up to the moor, then left it under a tree and ran towards the foot of the hill where the castle ruins stood above the lake. Noah’s Bowl was gone, as she knew it would be.

  The white mist hung thickly in the valley. Rose thought about the soldiers whose ghosts might be waiting there, the men she had seen in the flesh of a bygone time when she was carried away from the concert to watch the origin of the legend. In this mist, which was dense and still, not swirling and thinning and gathering again, it was impossible to watch for them.

  Feeling her way cautiously down, she shrank with the dread that she would brush against a cloak, feel a reeking breath on her cheek without seeing a face, hear the same brutal laughter that had defeated the farmer and now waited to defeat her, as she struggled through evil to reach the source of good across the river.

  The memory of the boy Alan, defying the Lord himself, gave her courage.

  Just when she thought she was clear through, and would step out any moment into the bright sunlight, she heard it. That thin, cold voice with the trace of a lisp.

  ‘Save the people,’ it whispered against her ear. As she put out a hand to protect herself, she touched the fur of the weasel, felt its tiny backbone, heard the murderous click of its needle teeth as it struck at her and missed.

  ‘Save the people,’ the Lord of the Moor jeered, and now she could see his eyes, very close to hers, hypnotic eyes that drained her will power.

  ‘Save yourself,’ he whispered. ‘Save Rothe. Go back. Go ba-a-ack.’ His voice was a thin echoing moan.

  ‘Go back to hell!’ she screamed. ‘Favour!’

  The mist cleared and there was nothing there but the bridge and the r
iver, leaping and sparkling with points of light. As she went towards the bridge, she saw the grass above the river bank move in a ribbon of slithering movement as something very small and quick, like a weasel, slipped away unseen.

  The horse appeared to her like a fireball, and she climbed past the hollow in the rocks where Alan had sheltered his sheep, and joyfully on to his back, with no idea of where he would take her. She knew it would be something to do with Davey. Each time she flew with the horse, she hoped this would lead to the final solution, but she knew that there might be many journeys to make and many clues to unravel before her work was done.

  A blast of deafening rock music hit her in the ears, and she was in a room where the music seemed to come out of the walls and the ceiling and the floor, so completely did it fill the space and fill the head of the person she had now become.

  The person was dancing, twisting and turning and sticking bits of herself out in all directions. Her fat cheeks jounced. Her fat pink arms were like uncooked sausages. She moved her frenzied feet to the relentless beat, beat, beat.

  It felt strange to Rose to be fat, as if your flesh was in charge of you, and you had to allow more space for yourself between the furniture.

  ‘Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah,’ the girl howled.

  The door opened, and an irate woman in an apron thundered in shouting, although you could only see her mouth opening widely, without hearing the words. She pushed Rose and the dancing girl aside and marched to the radio set and punched it into a stunned silence.

  ‘Here, Gran.’ The fat girl put her hands on her cushioned hips. ‘Don’t to that.’

  ‘Shut up, Gwendolyn. I’ve been calling and calling, but you’re too deaf or too stupid to hear. Go and see who’s at the door.’

  ‘You go.’

  ‘It’s no one for me,’ the grandmother said, with the air of one who has been forgotten by life. ‘One of your boy friends, if you can call that dopey creature a boy – or a friend.’

  ‘Vernon?’ Gwendolyn was a bit dopey herself. Rose, having access to the contents of her mind, could tell that there wasn’t much in stock, and that her thinking mechanism ran as slowly as cold treacle.

  Vernon was outside the door, with a droopy lip and a handful of dying wild flowers. He was weedy, like the flowers, shorter than Gwen, with a large head that ran up to a point from which his hair parted in the middle and fell on either side of his vacant face.

  Gwen quite liked him, or at least she tolerated him, because he was dafter than she was, and she could control him. Gwen was sick of being controlled by her grandparents since her mother had walked out on her, and by teachers who tried to put her in special classes to learn home economics, when she knew she was going to be a rock star, and by her so-called friends at school who called her Whale, and had to be put up with because otherwise she would have no friends.

  ‘Look what the cat brought in,’ she said. She hooked Vernon by the back of the collar and hauled him into her grandmother’s front hall, which bristled with coat racks and hat pegs and was hung with fearsome religious pictures of martyrs in great pain.

  ‘For me?’ She took the flowers and laid them on top of the frame of St Somebody being attacked by smiling lions in the Roman Coliseum. ‘What’s up then?’ For somebody who needed friends, she had not got a very gracious manner.

  ‘Hey,’ said Vernon, ‘you look all right today.’

  ‘Like my eye shadow? “Riot,” they call it.’

  Vernon blinked, as if it dazzled him. When Gwendolyn moved to the mirror on the coatstand to check on ‘Riot’, Rose saw that it was lizard green with silver flecks. She saw that Gwen had a fat, lost sort of face, with a turned down mouth and pale blue, confused eyes that looked as if they had seen trouble.

  ‘Want to come in?’

  Vernon shot a scared glance towards the closed door of the front room. ‘Your gran home?’

  ‘Don’t mind her. We’ll go in the back room and play some music, eh?’

  ‘All right.’

  Gwen was wondering if she could risk taking him to the kitchen to look for biscuits, when the door of the front room opened and her grandmother came out.

  ‘Hullo, Vernon,’ she said without enthusiasm. ‘Did you come over by yourself?’

  ‘Of course he did, Gran, what do you think? He’s not daft.’

  ‘Oh? Well I’m glad to hear that,’ the grandmother said in the special, slow, patient voice she used on Gwendolyn when she was having one of her vague days.

  ‘Well, I have to go now.’ Vernon shifted the heavy boots at the end of his thin legs uncomfortably.

  ‘Stay for tea,’ Gwen said impulsively.

  His lip dropped. His eyes rolled at the grandmother, who said, ‘I’m sorry you can’t stay, Vernon,’ and went back into the front room.

  ‘Why did you come then?’ Gwen followed him to the front door.

  ‘Dunno.’ He turned and looked at her. ‘Oh yes, I remember. Your birthday that we talked about, when my uncle said he’d take us to the pictures. You coming?’

  ‘No,’ Gwen said. ‘I’ve got something to do on my birthday.’

  ‘Why?’

  “Cos.’

  ‘With your gran?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something.’ Gwen could not remember.

  ‘Oh.’

  They stood in the open doorway and talked to each other in monosyllables for a bit. Then Vernon tried again. ‘My uncle said he’d take us to the pictures on your birthday,’ and Gwen said, ‘I’ll be busy,’ and shut the door.

  Chapter Nine

  Gwen’s birthday. That was the only possible clue. Otherwise, what was the point of Gwendolyn and poor simple Vernon? Favour would not have taken her to the house with the pictures of tormented martyrs for nothing.

  Rose went over the conversation again and again, trying to puzzle out a clue, but the only definite fact that emerged was the birthday. ‘Your birthday that we talked about,’ Vernon had said. But when was it? Tomorrow? Next week? The week after? Was something going to happen to Davey Morgan to make him cry, and if so, what had Gwen the Whale got to do with it?

  Rose brooded next day at school, and was useless. At the hotel, she broke a few more things than usual, was in trouble with Hilda for burning toast, and with Mrs Ardis for not listening to her knotted string of complaints against Mr and Mrs Crabbe – ‘The Almighty knew what he was doing when he gave them that name’ – the aunt and uncle of the bride, who had already moved into the hotel and were finding fault with everything.

  They had wanted the wedding at the Empire Rooms, or nowhere, for that matter, because they had never thought that George King was good enough for Jean.

  As the wedding drew near and Mollie became more frantic, Samson Flite the caterer became calmer. Sam was a gentle, slow-moving young man, with lazy, smiling eyes and a relaxed view of life. He had chosen to leave the rat race of business, and indulge in his hobby of cooking in a timbered cottage in Newcome Hollow by the sea. Things that ought to be done today could perfectly well wait until tomorrow, if he wanted to read or sit on the beach or take his boat out.

  When it was time to decorate the bridal cake, Rose and Mollie went early to his cottage to put on the first symbolic touches, for good luck.

  The huge edifice of fruitcake had its marzipan layer on all three tiers, and was already covered with pure white icing, the top like a field of newly fallen snow waiting for someone to make tracks in.

  ‘It breaks my heart to spoil it,’ Mollie said, ‘but here goes.’

  There were to be little white and yellow crowns all round the edge, because the bride and groom would be Mr and Mrs King by the time they cut the cake. Sam, wearing a striped chef’s apron over his pyjamas, gave Mollie the icing bag and she piped out a perfect crown.

  ‘Now you, Rose,’ Sam said, as Mollie handed her the bag. ‘Squeeze and lift.’

  As he said it, Rose heard quite clearly the sound of the child crying. With the pitiful, ago
nized sound came a vision of his small, puckish face screwed up in fear, the round eyes staring.

  Her hand trembled.

  ‘Oh look, you’ve mucked it up,’ Sam said serenely. He scooped off the squashed sugar crown and put it in Rose’s mouth. ‘Have another go.’

  ‘No, I can’t. I’ll mess it up again.’

  ‘You won’t. Try another,’ Mollie said. ‘It’s your good luck to them.’

  ‘I don’t feel lucky.’

  She felt left out and in the dark. Mr Vingo had gone, and Favour’s journeys were too mysterious.

  ‘Oh pooh,’ said Sam. ‘Don’t be tempermental.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Mollie asked, as they walked home under the clear blue unused sky of a new day. She sometimes had to ask that nowadays, when Rose was distracted, half in this world, half in the other.

  ‘I’m all right.’ That was what Rose usually answered.

  ‘Well, I just thought …’

  One day, I will tell you. Her mother deserved to be told, and she might even understand. She deserved to be told everything. But not yet. Not for ages and ages yet.

  Mr Vingo came back before the wedding. The mother of Jean, the bride, had pleased him by asking him to play, and he was teaching Abigail the melody of ‘I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair’, so that they could serenade the bride in a duet.

  Abigail rode her bicycle home from school with Rose, to practise.

  New guests had just arrived and Jim, the handyman, was mowing the lawn, so Mollie asked Rose to help carry their bags into the annexe, where they were putting people this week so as to leave space for wedding guests. Abigail went on up to Mr Vingo and the piano.

  In the annexe lounge, Mr and Mrs Crabbe were talking to the bride’s mother. When Rose came down from the bedroom, they asked her to make them a pot of tea. She wanted to say, ‘Make it yourself,’ because the annexe kitchen was really to let the guests be independent, not to be served by the staff.