The Horses of Follyfoot Read online

  ‘Did he say that?’

  Dora shook her head. Her agitation was subsiding. You could not stay agitated long in the cool, peaceful atmosphere of the Colonel’s study, with two donkeys dozing.

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Well, then,’ the Colonel said. ‘Shut up about it, whatever it is.’ He got up without disturbing the donkeys, sleeping with their long eyelashes fanned out, and went to his desk to rummage in a drawer. ‘Here.’ He held out a ten-pound note. ‘Here’s a bonus to get Robin that martingale he needs. I want him to go his best here. Gives us a good name.’

  Although the Colonel had sort of made things all right by not understanding what she was talking about, he still had not solved the problem, just because he didn’t understand what she was talking about.

  Dora would have to solve it herself.

  On Sunday, when Mr Crowley would be at home, she took Robin out by himself.

  ‘It’s too hot to ride,’ Steve said when he saw her mounting. A rather wet summer had steamed up into some stifling days. Nothing moved in the hot air except biting insects. Crickets in the long grass rang in your ears all afternoon.

  ‘I’m going down to the brook to cool his legs off.’

  ‘Hang on, then. I’ll bring Hero. Do him good.’

  ‘I’d rather go alone. I have to think.’

  ‘See you when you come back,’ Steve said cheerfully. Dora was not really speaking to him properly yet, but he had not noticed.

  Callie was coming down the road on the Cobbler, bareback in shorts.

  ‘I’ve been down to the stream,’ she said. ‘It’s great. Come on, I’ll go back there with you.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  Callie stuck out her tongue. ‘You’ve got dreadfully snotty since you went to America,’ she said. ‘I suppose it was bound to happen.’

  Dora squeezed Robin and he moved into his long, supple, pigeon-toed trot, lightly flexed, head held just right in the martingale.

  Mr Crowley had changed a bit since the day of the show when he and Steve had rolled on the ground in the middle of the in-and-out. He had struck it luckier in his business and made a bit of money. When Dora offered to take Rebel for a while for the price of his grazing and a bit extra for her schooling, he agreed, encouraged by the lamentations of his women.

  ‘You said yourself, Dad, we’d have to get rid of the horse if something wasn’t done.’

  ‘Don’t sell him, Daddy, don’t sell Rebel. He’ll be a good boy, he says he will.’

  ‘He wants to learn.’ The horse lifted a back leg sourly. ‘You want to go to school, don’t you, Rebel dear?’

  ‘I’d be glad to see what I can do with him,’ Dora added.

  Mr Crowley, not used to offers of help in a neighbourhood where he had made no friends, agreed to let her take the horse, but no messing about and not letting them have it back when it was improved, because the girls would pine their hearts out until their friend came back to them.

  The Colonel agreed, because Dora needed the money, and because he didn’t want another scene with her like the one in his study. Slugger said she would get herself killed, and Steve said he wouldn’t touch the black horse with a bargepole.

  But the horse seemed to be all right. Perhaps Amanda had invented the rearing and spinning story to cover up for having fallen off. Rebel performed quite steadily in the small field, trotting and cantering and hopping over low jumps. She ventured out with him and he didn’t shy, although once he charged off with her when she bent forward as they pushed under a large tree. He was nervous after that. He jogged all the way home, driving Dora’s brains up through the top of her perspiring head, laying his ears back at nothing.

  Dora was pleased with what she had done with him, but he was still unpredictable. He was tricky in the stable. He had that funny way of laying back his ears, lowering his ugly head and lifting a back foot thoughtfully.

  ‘She’d better not ask me to feed him on her day off,’ Slugger said, watching as Dora groomed Rebel one sultry evening, avoiding his feet which stamped impatiently at flies.

  ‘He’s on grass, you know that.’ Dora ducked her head as the horse’s long black tail swished round and swatted her in the face.

  ‘Good thing,’ Slugger said. ‘He’d be a maniac else.’

  ‘Something’s not quite right.’ The Colonel stood with him in the stable doorway, studying the black horse, as he and Slugger must have stood many times in their Army days, considering some military malefactor. ‘Can’t quite put my finger on it, though, can you, Slugger?’

  The old man shook his head in the woollen hat which he still wore, even in this heat. ‘It’s not in me hands, it’s in me head. In the eyes. In the nose.’ He sniffed, scenting for trouble.

  ‘You’re always against any new horse,’ Dora said. ‘Rebel is all right, aren’t you, sweetie?’

  Sweetie swung round his head and gave her quite a hard nip. She did not allow herself to yell. As soon as Slugger and the Colonel had moved on, she pulled down her shorts and saw the bruising teeth marks on her hip.

  Chapter 19

  ONE COOLER EVENING, when the air was stirring at last, and free of the high whine of crickets, and the slap of hand on skin as the female mosquitos stopped humming and settled to feast, Dora and Steve and Callie went out for a late ride.

  Now that Steve had stopped throwing out hints about Robin, Dora was letting him ride the fine bay horse. Not because she thought it was good for Robin to be ridden by somebody else – he could happily be a one-girl horse for ever – but because she wanted Steve to understand the way she felt about him. No, it wasn’t that, either. It was simple. She wanted Steve to enjoy what she enjoyed.

  She also wanted Rebel to go well this evening, as proof of what she had accomplished. Being the perverse animal he was, he did just about everything wrong.

  He kicked at Cobby while Dora was mounting, then turned and tried to brain her, going back into the stable. He struck out at one of the dogs. He pushed past Robin going through the gate. Going ahead, he humped his back and tucked in his tail and fussed about the horse behind. Following the other two, he pulled and nudged and tried to run up on their tails.

  He shied. He stumbled. He yawed his head about. He jogged when the others were walking. He did all the things that make a ride no fun. Steve and Callie carefully didn’t criticise, and Dora set her jaw and didn’t admit that she was having no fun.

  She became very frustrated. When Rebel stumbled, she jerked his head up, which didn’t help him to regain his footing. When he jogged, she pulled him back and tried to force him to walk. Robin and Cobby could both ‘walk a hole in the wind’ with their long easy stride. The farther ahead they got, the more impossible it was to make Rebel walk, since he had to jog to catch up.

  When they came to a place where two tracks crossed, Dora said, ‘I’m sick of this. You two go on ahead. I’m going off on my own.’

  ‘Are you sure he—’ Callie had her worried face on.

  ‘He’s all right.’ Dora hauled Rebel’s head round to go off at a right angle.

  ‘Go easy with him,’ Steve said. ‘He’s in a funny mood.’

  ‘He’s all right.’

  He was better on his own, but he was still clumsy, dragging his toe and stumbling over stones. When his front end went down in a really devastating stumble over nothing, adrenaline rushed into Dora’s system. She hauled up his head in the anger of fear, reached her hand forward and gave him a whack behind the ear.

  He took off. Dora tried everything. She pulled and let go and pulled in. She crossed the reins, setting them against his neck. She leaned back and hauled. She leaned forward with her hand low on one rein and tried to turn him. She sawed, she swore. She contemplated hurling herself on to the first patch of soft ground.

  They were headed for the road. Dora shut her eyes, opened them as they missed a car by metres and tore through a broken hurdle into a tussocky field dotted with trees. The horse stumbled, pecked w
ith his nose on the ground, recovered with Dora’s arms round his neck, and headed straight for a huge old tree.

  It was unbelievable. It was hypnotising. It was like those films where Japanese pilots flew down the smoke stacks of battleships. The tree was upon her, enveloped her. For the fraction of a moment, she saw every ridge of its bark, every curl of lichen, then whiteness exploded.

  ***

  In her room at the farmhouse, the curtains were drawn, and Dora had finally stopped being sick. Her head was banded tight by iron, but the pills that Anna had given her were detaching her from that. The pain was there, but more observed than felt.

  ‘How’s Rebel?’

  ‘He’s all right.’ Anna came to the bed. ‘He cut his leg, that’s all. He went after Steve and Callie. They followed his tracks back and found you. Steve wants to have him put down.’

  ‘He’s not ours.’

  ‘He’s dangerous.’

  ‘It wasn’t his fault.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Anna said. ‘Won’t you ever grow up?’

  Dora slept most of the next day in the darkened room. When she woke, it was night time, a sky brilliant with stars, a three-quarter moon making black and white patterns on the corner of the stable yard she could see from her window.

  She got up and opened the door of her bedroom. All the lights were out. The clock in the hall creaked the seconds. You could only hear its feeble tick when everyone was in bed.

  Dora did not want to sleep any more. She put a sweater over her pyjamas and went down to see the horses.

  Robin was in the long field with most of the others. At first when she went through the gate in the moonlight, it seemed like an empty field. Then here and there shapes moved, something that had been lying down got up, grunting. Dolly appeared round a gorse bush, looked at Dora sideways, then ambled off with her hips swaying, in case Dora had come to catch her for work.

  Robin materialised from somewhere, blowing down his nose. His mysterious night self that slept on grass and watched the dawn come up was remote from her. He let her put her hand on his gingery nose but his eye stared at her instead of softening, and he suddenly swerved away and cantered off, and two or three of the other horses thudded with him out of sight below the dip of the hill.

  The night was theirs. Dora felt like an intruder.

  Dottie and her chocolate foal were inside the shed in their enclosure. Specs and Folly were camouflaged somewhere by shadows. In the stable, only Rebel was in a loose box, resting a puffy foreleg on the toe.

  He was resting his head too. The stable had a low wooden manger at one end. Rebel’s clumsy head was drooped over the bar, jaw resting on the wood.

  There was something strange about his head. Dora went in to him. The moon was bright enough to see that his eye was flat and dull. His lip looked slack, a dribble of saliva damp on the wood of the manger. His neck was stretched out. He looked all ribs and belly.

  When she had been in the vet’s office with Blank, the vet had shown Dora a picture in Equine Medicine and Surgery of what a horse with eastern equine encephalitis looked like.

  It looked like Rebel.

  But the virus of the disease had never been active in England. Only in America. Only in America, unless …

  Dora slid to sit in the straw with her back to the wall and her throbbing head in her hands. The pain had come back. She couldn’t think straight. But she must think. Robin … Chuckie … King Kong … The throbbing became the roar of Ron’s motorbike as he skidded in from the road at his usual Wall of Death speed and shut off the engine. It coughed, hiccuped, and returned the night to silence.

  Dora had left the door of Rebel’s loosebox open. Ron appeared in the moonlight, silhouetted like a space traveller in his leather clothes and helmet.

  ‘Left me radio in the shed,’ he said. ‘Can’t go to sleep without it, can I?’

  Dora raised her head and stared at him, not understanding.

  ‘Sitting up again then, are you?’ Dora had sat up so many nights with sick horses. With Cobby, with Lancelot, and with poor old ruined Rusty, the night he died. ‘Your pet lamb looks a bit rough.’ He came nearer into the stable. ‘I never seen a horse look like that,’ he said.

  ‘Nor have I. Except – except once in a book. Oh, Ron, I—’ She dropped her head back into her hands and burst into tears. Rebel moved restlessly, shifting from foot to foot, grating his teeth on the edge of the manger.

  ‘Here, what’s this?’ Ron was softer than he pretended to be. He knelt beside Dora and put his leather arm round her. ‘Come on, girl, you’re just weak, that’s all, after the concussion. You shouldn’t be up. Come on, old Ronnie will take you into the house.’

  ‘No, Ron.’ She pushed him away and scrambled up, standing with her palms pressed against the wall, breathing heavily, staring in terror at the stricken horse. ‘Something terrible has happened. Something has started. I can’t tell anyone.’

  But she had to tell someone, and so she told it to Ron. She told him about the terrible disease that could kill a horse in two or three days, and kill people too, if they were bitten by a mosquito whose saliva glands were infected by the virus. Robin’s cold and ‘jet lag’ when he arrived, could have been encephalitis, mild to him because of being immunised in other years. But mosquitoes biting him could have transmitted it to Rebel, to other horses, birds, rats, dogs, who in turn would infect other mosquitoes. The virus could be spreading in this neighbourhood, this county, the whole of England in the hot end of summer.

  ‘You mean, it could be spreading to people?’ Ron was still kneeling in the straw, gaping up at her, the hang of his jaw supported by the chinstrap of the helmet. ‘Kids might die, like you said they did in America?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ron. I don’t know. I have to think. Perhaps I’m wrong. It’s too impossible. Rebel will get better, and it’s all just a crazy idea. I don’t know. I can’t think straight any more.’ She shook her head to try to clear it, and a whole Guy Fawkes’ night of fireworks exploded among the nerves of her brain.

  ‘Forget what I told you, Ron – please?’ She put one hand over her eyes and held the other out to him. He took it and pulled himself up. ‘Don’t say a word to anyone.’

  ‘Like the grave. You know me.’

  But Dora did know Ron. That was the trouble. He was the last person she should have shared her fears with. Thank God she had not told him the worst thing of all, that Robin had entered this country as King Kong, six-year-old bay with star and two white feet, the only official difference between them being that King Kong had a certificate of immunisation against encephalitis and Robin did not.

  The only clear thought that cut through the pain in her head was: It’s got to be kept secret.

  ‘Promise you won’t tell.’

  ‘One of us ought, if it’s true about the ensuffer – ensiffer – encephlawhatsit.’

  ‘It’s not. It couldn’t be. Forget it.’

  ‘Total blank.’

  Ron saluted her and shuffled his boots across the yard in dancing steps to get his radio.

  Dora put a rug on the sick horse, and ministered to him as best she could.

  Chapter 20

  THREE O’CLOCK IN the morning was the deadest of all the dead hours on the night desk of the Chronicle. It was called the night desk because whoever was on duty at night sat there; but whoever was on duty during the day sat there too and answered the telephone and made notes to be written up into news stories.

  Bruce Ingersoll was on the Chronicle’s night desk. He had only been with the local paper six months, and it was his first night duty ever, so three o’clock in the morning did not seem dead to him, but just as exciting as every hour of this first night of challenge and responsibility. The night reporter was on his own in the building. It was up to him whether the Chronicle missed the boat on scoops, or lived up to its local catchphrase of ‘Always Alert’.

  Bruce was like his name, a square young man with short hair, solid and eager and trustworthy. At college
, he had known where he was headed. When he landed the job with the Chronicle, he had known that it was the first rung to Fleet Street and future glory.

  The glory of a scoop could come any time. It could come tonight, although by three a.m. it had not yet shown itself.

  The night had started promisingly with a stammering small boy calling to report a fire.

  ‘Where is it?’ Bruce pulled the notepad towards him, his voice tense.

  ‘In the grate, stupid.’ Shrieks and giggles in the background.

  Mr Shanker of the waterworks commission had called to render to the Chronicle some hot news that could not possibly wait till morning.

  ‘Oh yes?’ In spite of Mr Shanker’s slow creaking voice, perhaps this was it.

  It wasn’t. The waterworks commission had held its ladies-night banquet at the Dog and Fox and settled the date of its annual general meeting.

  ‘Thanks a lot, Mr Shanker. We’re very glad to know.’

  No harm in sending the poor old guy to bed feeling chuffed.

  An old lady rang to say she had let out her cat at eight o’clock and he hadn’t come back yet, so unlike him, naughty Tibbs. Would the Chronicle be sure and put an appeal in the morning edition?

  The small boy again. ‘There’s been a murder done.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the TV, creep.’

  At two o’clock, Bruce checked the police station and received some interesting news about a five-car crash in a patch of fog on the London road. A concert pianist had broken his leg.

  That’s better. Bruce made himself a cup of tea, and before writing his story, he telephoned his favourite Fleet Street newspaper, where he dreamed of working some day.

  ‘Night editor here. Five cars? Not really. We’ve had ten and twenty smash-ups coming in. The fog’s nothing round your way. Concert pianist? Who? Who, laddie? Sorry, never heard of him.’ Two other lines were ringing. ‘Bye.’

  Just before three, the small boy again and the giggling. Must be a pyjama party.

  ‘Can you talk for a second?’

  ‘Yes, but—’