Ballad of Favour

  Monica Dickens

  Ballad of Favour

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter One

  By late September, the Wood Briar Hotel was only half full.

  Rose, who lived and worked there, had loved the busy summer, with all the rooms in the hotel and its annexe house taken, but autumn was a good time too, with less work and more time for herself when she came home from school.

  Soft misty days were perfect for riding, and the sea was still just warm enough to swim when the sun was out. Weekenders came, and a few retired people pottered about the hotel, giving no trouble, taking walks, reading on the verandah in the low golden sunshine.

  One-nighters on car trips were more relaxed, and often stayed an extra night. Salesmen on the road were still cheery before the winter wore them out. Jake and Julie, two of Rose’s favourite guests, still came from the city for a night or two. Her friend Ben would come with his family when he had a weekend off from school. The elusive Mr Vingo, who lived in the round turret bedroom with his little yellow upright piano, would probably turn up again soon from one of his mysterious disappearances.

  Although he and Rose were close friends, and shared the colossal secret about the legendary Great Grey Horse, he would never tell her where he had been, or why. He would leave without warning and then just reappear, bulky and out of breath, and say something like, ‘Yes, thank you, I will have tea and two thin slices of that good pound cake,’ as if he had never been away.

  The small seaside hotel stood across the road from low sand dunes and a long curved beach; a gabled, turreted old house which had been built a century ago by someone with a taste for stained glass windows and odd bulges and balconies. Next to it stood a smaller, red brick house that was used as an annexe to the hotel, with extra bedrooms and a lounge.

  When Rose’s parents, Philip and Mollie Wood, bought the hotel four years ago, it was called with mournful grandeur, ‘The Cavendish’. It had been shabby and gloomy, with terrible food and bad service. Now it was all white paint and bright rugs and curtains, with real flowers on the dining-room tables instead of dusty plastic ones, and well-fed guests who were made to feel at home. The hotel had been rechristened ‘Wood Briar’, because the girl who lived there was called Rose Wood.

  Rose was thirteen. She was energetic and practical, and she helped the staff with all the jobs in the bedrooms and the kitchen and dining-room.

  ‘If you can call it help,’ Mrs Ardis said in one of her many different voices, a hoity toity one designed to show that she had known a much better life than being a chambermaid.

  Making beds with her, Rose had flung down a pillow and flown to the window at a shout from below. Abigail on her dun pony – Abigail was back! She pulled in her head and said, ‘Won’t be a sec.’

  ‘I know your “secs”.’ Mrs Ardis bent with a groan to pick up the pillow, and punched it as if she would like to do the same to Rose.

  But Rose was gone, scooting along the twisting corridor, sliding down the bannisters, jumping far out into the hall and skidding on a rug, to the outrage of old Mrs Plummer who was sitting behind a large fern waiting for her taxi to take her to the hairdresser, to have her stiff grey sausage curls dyed blue. Rose dashed through the kitchen where Hilda was stringing late beans and reading the paper with her one good eye, and outside to where Abigail sat gracefully on her pony on the back lawn.

  ‘Where you been?’ They always said that to each other, whether they had been apart for months, or only days or hours.

  ‘Well, you know. In Chicago.’ Abigail was American. ‘But Dad’s back here now at the engineering plant, so we’ve opened up the farmhouse. Where you bin?’

  ‘Here.’ Rose grinned, and rolled the sleeves of her overall higher. ‘Working.’

  ‘So what’s new?’ Abigial always said that. She said, ‘What’s noo?’

  ‘Nothing much.’ Rose wanted to say, ‘Lots,’ but she couldn’t tell Abigail about the enormous and splendid adventure that had come into her life when she was chosen as a messenger of Favour, the Great Grey Horse, in his fight against the sad and bad things of the world. So she laughed and said, ‘Mrs Ardis gave in her notice this morning.’ This was a weekly ritual, sometimes daily, if things were too hectic in the summer, or too boring in the winter. ‘Jake and Julie’s dog dug up the bulbs my mother planted. Dilys’s new boy friend broke her heart, and she broke five sherry glasses. A man called Robert McRobert did four crossword puzzles and two jigsaws before lunch on a rainy day. Hilda used coffee syrup instead of gravy browning …’

  ‘So what else is new?’ Abigail’s long chestnut hair was pulled tightly into a plait down her back, stretching the corners of her lively eyes. She had a pointed face, like an elf.

  ‘I don’t know what’s new.’ Rose’s father had come out of the shed that was his summer workshop behind the hotel, where he tested products for a magazine that told people what to buy. ‘But what’s old is that I’ve asked you before not to ride that damn horse on my lawn.’

  ‘It’s a pony, Dad,’ Rose said bluntly, and Abigail explained, ‘He doesn’t have any shoes. He’s been out to grass all summer.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’ Philip Wood was treading back a small piece of turf raised by the pony’s hoof, with as much fuss as if it had been made by a bulldozer.

  ‘Hi, Mr Wood,’ Abigail said charmingly. ‘It’s so good to see you again.’

  ‘Good to see you.’ Rose’s father nodded ungraciously and went on into the hotel.

  Rose wished he could be like Abigail’s father, who welcomed you as if you were the one person in the world he’d been wanting to see, but Abigail said cheerfully, ‘He’s neat, your Dad. Leaves you guessing.’

  Above them, Mrs Ardis pushed her head of wild brindle hair out of a bedroom window and called in one of her coarser voices, ‘It’s now or never, Rose!’

  If that was why the pony flung up his head from the grass and jumped sideways, why was he afterwards still tense and quivering, flicking his short Arab ears back and forth, staring away from the hotel towards the wood?

  ‘Cool it, you jerk.’

  Abigail could not hear anything. Only Rose heard it, beyond the wood on the turf of the moor, the drumbeat of galloping hoofs. Into her head came the first rising notes of the horse’s strange tune, dropping into the low, thrilling staccato of a snort blown into the wind.

  She had not seen him for so long, she was afraid she had lost him, but now she knew that he had never been far away from her, the challenging spirit of the Great Grey Horse that hovered always at the edge of her dreams.

  Rose’s mother was delighted to see Abigail again. Mollie Wood was a young, pretty woman with curly gold hair which she had not passed on to Rose, whose hair was straight and neither blonde nor brown. The hotel was Mollie’s joy and pride. She did everything she could to make the guests happy and comfortable – far too much, according to her husband, to whom guests were customers, who shouldn’t get more than they paid for. One of the reasons she liked Abigail was that Rose’s American friend loved the Wood Briar Hotel as much as Rose and Mollie did.

  ‘Just the woman I’ve been hoping to see!’

  Abigail grinned at Mollie’s greeting. ‘Me too, Mrs Wood. The hotel looks swell. Can I come and help Rose some time?’

  ‘This evening, if
you like. We’re going to be busy. You can help Rose to serve dinners.’

  Abigail thought it was the finest thing in the world, and was constantly nagging her parents to buy a hotel in Chicago. When she came back, she tied on one of Rose’s blue check aprons, which looked instantly elegant on her, while on Rose it just looked like a short blue check apron, and helped to lay the tables. After the usual argument about whether the pudding spoon went beside the knife or above it, she and Rose went out into the fine September rain to pick some chrysanthemums from the garden of the annexe house next door.

  ‘There used to be ghosts in this house, you know.’ Everyone had thought that was Rose’s imagination, but Abigail believed it.

  ‘Oh, gee.’

  ‘They’ve gone now.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Who knows? Wherever ghosts go when they’ve been released from haunting.’

  ‘Darn it,’ Abigail said. ‘You might have kept them for me.’

  ‘You like ghosts, madam?’ a man’s voice asked from the other side of the garden wall, as if he were selling ghosts in a department store.

  Rose stood up. Of course. Mr Vingo usually came back in this kind of weather. He liked the rain.

  ‘Favour is back,’ she muttered quickly, to let him know without Abigail hearing. He nodded and winked, one large smooth upper lid descending like the back of a spoon under the turned up brim of his rain hat.

  ‘And so is – so is Abigail.’ Rose had been longing to introduce her two best friends. Now she was nervous. Would they like each other? She had told Mr Vingo about Abigail, and written to Abigail about Mr Vingo. Would her enthusiastic descriptions fit at all? ‘Abigail Drew. Mr R. V. Vingo.’ That was his name in the hotel register. Sometimes Mollie wrote up his bill as Harvey Vingo. It didn’t seem to matter.

  Mr Vingo looked shy. If Rose had been Abigail, she would have been shy too, but Abigail never seemed to bother with things like shyness and doubt. She stood up, holding a bunch of red and gold flowers, with Mollie’s yellow oilskin jacket round her shoulders and her eyes shining, and said, ‘You must be the gentleman with the piano.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Mr Vingo’s thick eyebrows smoothed out and one of his great baggy smiles crumpled the flesh of his broad pale face. ‘And you must be the lady with the flute.’

  How did he know? Rose could not have told him, since Abigail had only told her today. But Mr Vingo knew a lot of things, or else he was a lucky guesser.

  ‘I’m only just learning to play the flute,’ Abigail said.

  ‘Well, I’m really only learning to play the piano,’ Mr Vingo said, although he was a composer, and could produce captivating music from his narrow marmalade piano that stood against the curving wall of his turret room. ‘The piano and the flute go well together. We must learn a duet.’

  ‘Hey, yeah.’ Abigail reached across the wall and gave him a wet bronze chrysanthemum.

  Chapter Two

  The hotel dining-room was full for dinner. Mollie’s reputation for good food had spread, and people from the nearby village of Newcome Hollow and the town of Newcome two miles away liked to come out at night, especially when it was raining. Bad weather outside seemed to turn their thoughts inward to their stomachs.

  Mr Vingo had to share his small corner table with a new guest, a youngish woman called Miss Elisabeth Engel, who had long, ash-coloured hair wound round her head, and a sad, tired face. She was recuperating from a nervous breakdown, according to the gossip of the staff, who always knew everything about every new guest before they had been in the hotel an hour.

  Mr Vingo managed to make her smile, and although she had told Rose at the beginning that she only wanted celery soup, she ate a little of the chicken and Mollie’s bread and butter pudding, and told Abigail at the end of the meal that she was glad she had come to Wood Briar.

  ‘Oh, gee,’ Abigail said.

  ‘Girl.’ Mrs Plummer could not distinguish between Abigail and Rose, although Abigail was tall for her age and slender, and Rose was short and rather stocky. ‘This table is not laid correctly.’

  ‘American style, ma’am,’ Abigail said.

  ‘It’s not what I’m used to.’ Mrs Plummer picked up the spoon and dipped it in her water glass and polished it on her napkin, holding it high, so everyone could see, and then dropped the napkin on the floor and asked for a new one, and another glass of water.

  The waitress Gloria, brisk and violent, went fuming into the pantry where Mollie was dishing up. Rose and Abigail had to hold in their giggles until they could carry them out with their trays to the kitchen and dump the giggles on each other.

  When they had cleared the tables and eaten their own supper of good things Mollie had held back for them, Abigail’s mother fetched her, and Rose went looking for Mr Vingo.

  He was not in his room. The windows were not making their semicircular pattern of lighted oblongs on the grass below the turret. He was not in the upstairs lounge or in the nook by the hall fireplace or on the verandah, where he sometimes sat in the dark, listening to the endless sound of the sea beyond the dunes, which you could not hear in the daytime, unless there was a storm.

  She found him in the annexe lounge, sitting with the French windows open on to the ripe damp autumn smells of the orchard.

  ‘What now?’ Rose kicked off her shoes and sat on the sill of the doorway with her bare feet getting gently wet on the step outside.

  ‘What now, messenger? Another job for you, it seems.’

  ‘I was afraid Favour was finished with me.’

  ‘Because he lets you catch up with your life between jobs? He won’t finish with you as long as you do the work right, and in secret. You haven’t told your – ah – your, ah– ’ he was short of breath, because he had eaten a large meal and a handful of Mr Barrett’s marzipans. ‘Your transatlantic –’

  ‘Abigail? No. I wish I could. She’d die. It’s funny,’ Rose said. ‘She keeps telling me about all the exciting things going on in Chicago, and she thinks I’m just the same old Rose who never goes anywhere or does anything except go to school and help run Wood Briar. Ha!’ She let a shout of laughter out into the night. ‘If she only knew.’

  When Rose became thirteen, the mystical grey horse Favour had called her to come to him, because she was now travelling through the special age between childhood and growing up, when fantasy can become reality, and you are sensitive enough to see things unseen by other people, and strong and brave enough for adventure.

  The horse had been coming and going on the earth for centuries, long after he was supposed to have died. His crusading mission was to protect the innocent from evil and disaster and misery. He needed human beings to help him, and he chose them from among these special people. He had chosen Rose.

  ‘Perhaps I shall play Abigail some of my music for The Ballad of the Great Grey Horse,’ Mr Vingo said, tapping his knee as he thought about the music. ‘And I shall tell her, “Miss Abigail,” I shall say, “this is the legend of how Favour, the favourite horse of the dreaded Lord, galloped against the flood to save the valley people.” Even though she can’t know where you fit in.’

  Messengers must never tell anybody about the horse, or where he had taken them to do his work. Mr Vingo knew, because he had once been a messenger too, countless years ago when he was Rose’s age.

  ‘She’ll like the part about the wicked Lord of the Moor and his beastly soldiers,’ Rose said. ‘She loves horror stories. Oh …’ She hugged her knees and frowned out at the wet apples glistening in the grass in the light from the house. ‘I hope I don’t have to fight my way through them again. They terrify me.’

  ‘But to reach the horse, there must be struggle,’ Mr Vingo said behind her. ‘And terror too, Rose, if need be. If it was easy to be a messenger, Rose of all Roses, where would be the glory?’

  ‘Where will he take me?’ Excitement had fired up in Rose. She pulled in her feet and got up to pace the carpet of the lounge. ‘Will he take me back into the past, or into the future?
How will I know what I have to do?’

  ‘You’ll know.’ Mr Vingo followed her pacing with his eyes, without turning his head.

  ‘Will you help me?’

  His answer was lost in a flash of white light and a deafening crack of thunder that exploded together over the house. In the glare of the lightning’s after-image, Rose saw the horse standing in front of the apple trees, his beautiful head flung up and his ears straining forward, his luminous grey eyes fixed on her. Then it was all black outside and he was gone, and she held herself tightly with her arms crossed, hugging the electric excitement.

  ‘Rose of all Roses.’ Mr Vingo quoted softly behind her from the old poem that he liked to weave around her name. ‘Rose of all the World.’

  Chapter Three

  Another thing that qualified Rose to be one of Favour’s messengers was that she truly loved and understood horses.

  She was a terrible rider, who would never be good enough to perform at horse shows or events, but she did not love horses because of how fast they could race or how high they could jump, or how many rosettes they could win. She loved them for being horses, just as they were, not only the proud, expensive ones, but the clumsy, ugly ones too. Perhaps these even more so, because most horsy people didn’t appreciate them.

  At the stables on the edge of the moor where she took riding lessons with some of the money she earned at the hotel, she almost always rode the same pale, pink-eyed horse, Moonlight; partly because she wasn’t good enough for the better ones, partly because she and Moonlight needed each other.

  Joyce, who ran the stable with her mother, complained that he cantered as if he had five legs. When he stumbled or crashed through a small jump instead of over it, she would call him Mule, and threaten to send him to the sausage factory.

  He was tall and bony, with a stained, cream-coloured coat, big sloppy feet and a spine too long for his front and back ends to communicate to each other what they were doing.