Spring Comes to World's End Read online

  ‘Have to, my dear. I’m in trouble with the feed man here. My son doesn’t know. He gave me the money for the bill, and I gave it to a girl whose husband ran out on her. Tumblers, they are. But he tumbled too far, and broke up the act. That’s worse than breaking up the marriage.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Well - eighteen quid would clear my debts. Twenty-two, if I’m to pay back a loan from my son’s wife, before he finds out the poor girl lent it me. So there you are. It’s back on the road for His poor old Lordship.’

  The trouble with Carrie was that whenever she took in any money, it usually went out again before it got to the red crock.

  She and Lester looked at each other, without speaking or moving their faces.

  The look said, The twenty pounds is for the World’s End fund.

  But here is a horse.

  Think of taking home all that money.

  Think of taking home this lovely old horse, and turning him into the hill field …

  ‘Been on the go since before Christmas,’ Ma Rosinella said, as if she had intercepted the look, and de-coded it. ‘He’s not been turned out to graze for months. If you could only raise twenty-two pounds. Make it twenty—’

  ‘Done.’ Carrie and Lester sat down and began to take off their shoes. ‘It’s a deal.’

  Eleven

  As soon as the percheron was officially theirs, they changed his name to Roy.

  ‘Why Roy?’ Ma Rosinella tucked the notes into the top of her spangled costume.

  ‘Because he is the kind of horse who used to carry kings.’ Carrie could imagine the big grey horse in all the trappings of monarchy, gold saddle cloth and gorgeous jingling bridle, stepping proudly under the royal banner.

  ‘Well, suit yourself. It takes all kinds. As long as you can get the old fellow away without trouble. No,’ she said, as Lester looked left and right with his conspirator’s face, and bent to her ear. ‘Don’t tell me how you’re going to do it. Then I won’t know.’

  ‘You don’t need to.’ Lester went over to the other ear, and whispered through the metal rollers. ‘But you must all go out after the evening show. Go out to supper. Tell your son it’s your birthday. He doesn’t sound as if he would remember the date.’

  He and Carrie went back to the boatyard. When John heard Carrie’s feet on the gravel of the yard, he let out a call that echoed through the big shed.

  She held him and Peter outside, while Lester helped his friend to put back the punt and the two skiffs. They took the horses down to the river to drink, and let them graze in the water meadow. Lester and Carrie sat in an old boat turned on its side, and watched the light go out of the river, and the opposite bank grow dim, and disappear.

  When they had laid their plans for the rescue of Roy, they talked about food, and what they would be eating if they had blown the whole of the rabbit radio money on a dinner at Mabel’s Table, the best hostelry in Wareham.

  It began to rain. But this was good, because the sideshows would be closed early after the circus. They moved the horses along the riverbank, nearer to the showground.

  They saw the lights of the big top go out. The music, which was only a beat of drums and brass from here, was gone. One by one, the roundabout, the flying chairs, the Jet Rocket stopped. The lights dimmed, and the glow of the circus left the sky. The throbbing dynamo was still.

  Lester waited with the horses under the bridge which took the road over the river, while Carrie stood near the gate to watch the cars drive out.

  In a red car was the oily son driving, his wife with her hair down and a child on her lap, and Ma Rosinella in the back seat, glancing back with sad eyes through the rear window, as if she were saying a secret farewell to the grey horse.

  Carrie ran back to Lester under the bridge.

  ‘They’ve gone.’

  ‘You start off for home.’ His low voice was hollow under the stone arch. ‘Don’t wait for me. If I’m caught, you mustn’t be involved.’

  ‘Thanks—’

  ‘For nothing. If they get me, you must be free to rescue Roy.’

  Carrie got on John, and Lester handed her up Peter’s halter rope. Crossing the bridge among the evening traffic, with two horses who were restless from waiting, was no picnic. Some cars slowed, others zipped past too close. Twice Peter pulled back, and Carrie almost let go of the rope. The rest of the time, he pushed too close to John, crushing Carrie’s leg, and making John put back his ears and nip at him. When John nipped, Peter nipped back. Once he nipped Carrie’s knee. In pain, she whacked him on the nose, and he shied away, close to the parapet. A car hooted, and Carrie almost lost Peter again.

  Across the bridge, she turned on to the path that wound through open fields, and the horses relaxed, and trotted quietly, snorting into the dark. The rain had stopped, and Carrie would have enjoyed the silent, mysterious ride through the wet grass, but her chest was tight with excitement, and anxiety for Lester.

  At the end of the soft track, she turned alongside a hedge, where unseen birds stirred with a whispered cheep. She dropped down through the gap on to the road, leaning back almost out of the saddle to lead Peter behind her.

  They clattered like smugglers through a small village, past dark cottages where people slept with all the windows shut. It was like the smuggling poem:

  Five and twenty ponies, trotting through the dark.

  Brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk.

  Laces for a lady, letters for a spy.

  So watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by.

  Some way beyond the village, Carrie stopped to listen. If Lester’s plan worked right, and he had got the big horse out of the tent, and squeezed him through the narrow gate in the dark corner of the field, he should be on the road by now.

  Carrie’s ears were good. She could hear things that people said about her three rooms away with all the doors shut. She could hear John tearing grass on a summer night, half way up the long hill field.

  Now she could hear nothing. But John and Peter raised their heads with their ears strained forward, and Peter, who had an undying curiosity about strange horses, whinnied.

  A deep answering whinny, back along the road. The grey shape of Roy loomed like a ghost out of the darkness, before Carrie heard his hoofs. Lester had tied bits of sacking round his feet. He looked like one of the elephants.

  ‘But John and Peter heard him quite far away,’ Carrie said.

  ‘It’s like when you put your ear to the railway line.’ Lester’s father had spanked him with a fly whisk for doing this. ‘They felt the vibrations on the ground.’

  Roy was so broad that Lester’s legs astride him stuck out at right angles. He had been tied with a leather collar in the tent, so Lester was riding him in John’s rope halter, let out on a loose knot, but still too tight for his large head.

  ‘What’s he like?’ Carrie’s eyes devoured the huge grey horse, with his soft blue eyes and his long silver mane flowing like water over his crested neck.

  ‘Dreamy. You have to walk or canter, because he’s been taught not to trot. Have a go.’

  Lester slipped off, and hoisted Carrie up on to the broad grey back. Roy was over seventeen hands high. It felt like a skyscraper. She looked over a hedge she had never seen over before, into the bland white face of a ruminating Hereford cow.

  There was no more hard road, so Lester took the sacks off Roy’s feet, and buried them among leaves, to leave no clues. He got on Peter and led John, trotting down a long cart track which followed the side of the wood.

  Not being able to use her legs, because they were stuck out sideways, Carrie said, ‘Canter,’ and Roy moved into the slowest, smoothest canter she had ever sat on.

  John cantered ‘as if he had five legs,’ Mr Mismo said, but Carrie had got used to his rolling stride. Peter cantered rather high, always competing to go faster. Oliver’s short legs cantered choppy and quick. Alec Harvey’s thoroughbred, which he let Carrie ride sometimes, never went slower than a g
allop with her. The donkey Leonora never went faster than a jog. Carrie had never known a canter like this, the broad back level, the legs moving supple and slow, like thick cream.

  But her own legs were soon in agony. She lifted the right one over and sat sideways, holding on to Roy’s mane, and blowing kisses to the applause of an imaginary crowd.

  ‘When we get home,’ she called to Lester’s dark head, bobbing in front of her, I’m going to ride him standing up.’

  ‘We’re not going to take him home. Yet. Ma Rosinella’s son has seen us, don’t forget. If he does come out this way looking, and sees one of us, he might get an idea in that greasy head.’

  They did not turn up the slope at the edge of the wood to come through the top gate of their own field. After a brief, fierce battle with John and Peter, who knew the way home, Lester managed to turn them across the tussocky field that dropped down to the brook on the other side of their hill. They crossed the hump-backed bridge on the Beddington road, and stopped by the gate of Mr Mosmo’s small calf pasture that was farthest from his farm.

  Carrie slid off Roy, jarring her knee joints from the height of the jump, and took him through the gate. He had scraped a large patch of skin off one hip squeezing through the narrow gate of the circus field, so he tucked it coyly away from the gatepost, like an overgrown hula-hula dancer. Carrie pulled off the tight halter with a struggle, and turned him loose.

  She and Lester watched over the gate. Roy walked round and round with his nose down, until he found the choice, the perfect spot to roll. He pawed at the ground, turned round like a dog making a bed, sagged, thought better of it, turned round again, sagged, and finally flopped down with the thump of a bomb dropping.

  He rolled ecstatically, waving his silly big feet in the air, rubbing his head and neck so violently on the ground, to get rid of the smell and feel of the circus. He was too broad to roll over, so after he had squirmed on one side, he got up and went down on the other - thump! They must have heard him two miles away.

  He got up, shook, and then the ghostly grey shape wandered off into the darkness.

  They heard him tearing at the grass like a starving castaway.

  ‘What shall we tell Mr Mismo?’

  ‘I’ll think of something tomorrow.’ Lester yawned, and neck-reined Peter towards the bridge. ‘I’ve done enough brilliant thinking for one night.’

  Twelve

  After stopping at Mr Mismo’s farm to check Pygmalia, they put John and Peter in the stable with an enormous feed. Oliver stood on his back legs and hung his front hoofs over his half door, so they gave him a handful of bran and cracked maize. He shared it with Lucy, the Nubian goat who slept with him.

  Carrie and Lester ran for the house, their stomachs turning over as they got near food. Rodge was giving Irma a bottle, and everyone was home from their various jobs.

  Nobody said, ‘Where have you been?’ It wasn’t that kind of family. Tom said, ‘Have you had supper?’ Em said, ‘We ate all the stew.’ Liza began to fry bacon to make the World’s Biggest Sandwich, her speciality of bacon and tomato and pickles and mustard and mayonnaise and chopped onion, with an egg fried just hard enough to keep it from spurting when you bit into the bread.

  ‘How was the ride?’ Rodge asked.

  ‘Marvellous.’

  ‘You must have been half way to London.’ Rodge put down Irma’s empty bottle, and felt the raised figures on his Braille watch. The leopard cub rolled on to her back, sleepily dribbling milk, her soft round stomach distended.

  ‘We rode over to the other side of Wareham,’ Carrie said. True.

  ‘Is it that far?’

  ‘We followed the river for miles, to try to find its source.’ Carrie invariably spoiled either truth or lies by embroidering them a bit too far to be believed.

  ‘There’s a circus at Wareham.’ Em sat opposite her and stared.

  ‘Is there?’ Slumped at the round table, waiting for food, Carrie closed her eyes against the stare, and fell into a half doze behind her hair, her fingers playing with the silver heart round her neck.

  Em, who always noticed what people wore, leaned across the table. ‘Where did you get that?’

  Carrie pulled out the locket and showed it to her. ‘It was in the attic.’

  ‘C.F.,’ Em read. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘It doesn’t open. But it’s the same initials as me. It proves I was here before. Ages ago, in the days when they went everywhere on horses. I dressed up as a boy, I expect, and went to war on a charger.’

  ‘You would,’ Em said. ‘Though it would serve you right if you were one of those soppy girls in long frilly bloomers, fainting at mice. Here, give me the locket. I’ll polish it for you.’

  ‘No.’ Carrie put it back inside her shirt. She wasn’t ever going to take it off. They could bury her in it. ‘I like it like this. It brought us luck today.’

  ‘We could do with a bit of that.’ Tom’s eyes went up to the hanging red crock. ‘I got a letter from Uncle Rudolf. He’s coming down soon, to find a surveyor to look at the land.’

  ‘What luck?’ Em asked. ‘Did you win something at the circus?’

  ‘I didn’t say we went there.’

  ‘But did you?’

  ‘No.’ Carrie looked at Lester. ‘I mean - we can’t tell you. Yet.’

  ‘Come on,’ Tom said. ‘You know we said when there were no grown-ups here, we wouldn’t have secrets from each other.’

  ‘Rodge is a grown-up.’

  ‘He doesn’t count.’

  ‘Ta,’ said Rodge. ‘Even if that was meant as an insult, I take it as a compliment.’

  ‘It’s better for you all not to know,’ Lester said.

  If Ma Rosinella’s son did come round asking awkward questions, Tom and Em and Liza could get rid of him more efficiently, if they genuinely didn’t know about Roy.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ Tom groaned. ‘You two have stolen a horse again.’

  ‘No,’ Carrie and Lester said together. That was the genuine truth, since they had paid for Roy.

  Liza gave them each a giant sandwich, which would need the jaws of a whale to get round it, and they took the plates to bed, with cocoa in the thick pottery beakers Michael had made. They had started life as mugs, but the handles had dropped off the first time they were used.

  Tomorrow was Sunday, so Lester was staying the night. He slept in the little room downstairs that had once been the Snug at the back of the Public Bar. The walls were patchy and peeling, so Lester had papered them with pages torn from an obsolete timetable given him by his father, who worked for the railway. When Lester could not sleep, because ideas buzzed in his head and he could not wait for the promise of tomorrow, he lit a candle, and figured out how he could have got from Polperro to Stirling in the shortest time in 1902.

  As Carrie was finishing her sandwich, Rodge and Wendy came in to say goodnight.

  Rodge knew his way about so well that Wendy never had to lead him inside the house. She pushed open the door with her thick, pinky-brown nose, and jumped on to Carrie’s legs to clean up crumbs from the blanket.

  Rodge came in behind her. He put out a hand to feel the foot of the bed, then moved cautiously along the rug, feeling with his foot for sleeping cats or puppies.

  ‘Ouch.’ He stubbed his toe on Carrie’s horse book on the floor. ‘Goodnight.’ He bent to kiss her. His beard was soft, like kissing a cat, and smelled of soap.

  ‘Do you always kiss goodnight, because your mother used to do it to you?’ Carrie asked.

  ‘No,’ Rodge said. ‘It’s because she didn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I couldn’t see, she wanted to make me super tough, and not dependent.’

  ‘Well, she failed miserably,’ Carrie said.

  ‘I’m not dependent,’ Rodge said quickly.

  ‘Except on Wendy.’

  ‘Oh, well.’

  Although she was tired, Carrie still felt like a balloon, blown up too tight with excitement not told.r />
  She had to say, ‘I’ll tell you a secret.’

  She told him about Roy. Rodge sat on the bed with his hands dug into Wendy’s golden coat, and kept his eyes on Carrie’s face, as if he was hearing through them.

  ‘I can’t wait to see the horse,’ he said.

  ‘But if Ma Rosinella’s son comes here, can you swear you have never set eyes on Roy?’

  ‘Of course.’ Rodge got up, felt for Wendy, and pulled her off the bed. ‘Because I won’t have.’

  After Rodge had gone, Carrie rode John up to the Star, where there were all the horses from all the years since men and horses began to keep company together.

  Favourites waited for friends on earth to die, and come to fetch them. Famous horses of history strolled about on the endless pastures that were always sweet with spring grass, and told tall tales of their past to anyone who would listen.

  That night, when John came to Carrie’s bedroom window, snorting gently and pawing the air, he had Roy with him. They bounded up through the night sky, Roy moving alongside with his effortless big-footed canter. Clouds curled damp about Carrie’s face, and streamed her hair down her back. Then they broke through into the clean cold sky, and threaded their way between lesser stars to the one where the horses were.

  Carrie and John were well known, but several horses looked up curiously as Roy ambled on to the springy turf and stood out well, hocks back, head and tail high, for admiration. He was used to the crowds, so he did not mind being stared at.

  ‘Ho, ho, what’s this?’ Alexander’s big black charger Bucephalus came up, stepping arrogantly.

  Roy explained that he was from the circus, just retired.

  ‘Another barnstormer.’ No one but a war horse was any good in the opinion of Bucephalus. ‘This place is crawling with ‘em. Liberty horses. Not an idea in their fool heads, because they’ve been trained like machines. Dancing horses. La-di-da - my dear, my arabesque!’ He minced a few steps. ‘Trick horses like that old fake Clever Hans - whoops - Hallo, Hans.’ He took a kick from the rear from the angry trick horse. ‘I didn’t know you were there.’

  ‘Say fake again, and I’ll kick your lying teeth in.’