A Horse Called Hero (4 page)

‘I’m to collect mine next week,’ she said to Mrs Sprig, her gimlet eyes continuing their minute inspection of the children. ‘One, I’m taking.’ She
circumnavigated them as if to avoid contagion.

‘School. Hurry or you’ll be late,’ twittered Mrs Sprig. ‘Hurry. End of the drive, right, up the hill and down the hill.’

‘School, Wolfie, get your coat.’ Relieved to escape the prying Mary, Dodo took their bowls to the sink and collected their coats from the door.

At the end of the lane, Wolfie looked up the hill and sighed, ‘Why are the hills so big in the country?’

‘We must write to Spud and tell her where we are,’ said Dodo.

A group of children – four of them – emerged on to the lane from a turning higher up.

‘Let’s follow them,’ said Dodo.

They hung back shyly, a few steps behind. At the top of the hill, the tallest, a boy, stopped and turned, the others then stopping and turning too, one after the other. Dodo and Wolfie
hesitated, conscious of their soft London shoes, their soft London coats. They moved hesitantly on.

‘Them’retheHollowcombe onesascamelastnight,’ said one of the girls, all of them staring as though Dodo and Wolfie were Zulus suddenly landed amidst them. ‘Them’re
everywhere, Mum says. Nowhere to put ’em all.’

One by one they turned and walked on, caught up in their own affairs, as tribal and incurious as sheep hefted to a particular hill.

Wolfie reached for a small dark bauble in the hedgerow. ‘Blueberries,’ he said happily, a black stream down his chin, ‘There aren’t any blueberries in Kensington
Gardens.’

‘I’ll write to Spud today and tell her where we are,’ said Dodo thoughtfully.

‘Will she come and take us away?’

‘No, she won’t, but at least she’ll know where to write to us.’

‘It’s good we’re all in the same classroom,’ said Wolfie on the way home.

There’d been other London children there, the single schoolroom crammed to the walls.

‘No it’s not. It’s hopeless. Forty children in one class. How can I learn anything?’

‘I like Miss Lamb, Dodo. The teacher is nice but I don’t like sitting on the floor.’

Dodo smiled at him. He was right, Miss Lamb
was
nice. The Causey girls had been nice too. They’d been on the lane in the morning. Chrissie was Dodo’s age and she’d
been friendly once they’d got to school.

Three days passed. Dodo hadn’t yet received a reply to her letter to Spud.

‘Hurry or you’ll be late,’ said Mrs Sprig at breakfast. Dodo toyed with her sops, not wanting to leave before Mary came with the post. There was a whinny from the yard and
seconds later, Mary burst in, looking briefly at the children, then turning her head, her nose a fraction higher than before. Dodo leaped to her feet – Mary had a letter in her hand, and was
putting the newspaper down, as usual, on the dairy slab. Mrs Sprig was bobbing lightly on her toes, bird-like.

‘Is that from Henry?’ she asked. ‘Go on, Dorothy, put the kettle on for Mary, she’ll be wanting a cup of tea I should think.’

‘No, nothing for you, Cousin Marigold.’

Wolfie giggled.
Marigold!

‘Shh,’ hissed Dodo, then hesitated, stretching out a hand, hoping to be given the envelope. She saw Marigold Sprig’s arms fall deflated to her sides, her face suddenly
vulnerable and childlike. Mary was a little cruel to her cousin, thought Dodo, at the same time watching the envelope that Mary held proprietorially.

‘This’ll be for the London children,’ said Mary, turning the envelope over carefully, talking as though the children were not there. Mrs Sprig sank weakly on to the edge of the
settle. Dodo and Wolfie both stepped towards Mary, hands outstretched. She turned the envelope over once more, then held it out, midway between the two of them. ‘Wolfgang and Dorothy Revel,
here’s your letter.’

She relinquished it. Dodo grabbed at it and started for the door. Mary turned back to Mrs Sprig, talking still as though the children weren’t there. ‘How do you
know
,
Marigold, what you’ve got in your house, where they’re from? With a name like that!
Wolfgang.
Think about it, Cousin Marigold, is it
safe
?’

Marigold’s lips formed a thin ‘O’ of enquiry, then quivered as she whispered,

‘What do you mean, Mary?’

‘Can I have it, can I have it?’ Wolfie was jumping up and down. ‘Is someone coming to get us?’

‘German,’ hissed Mary. ‘It’s a German name.
Wolfgang
,’ Mary repeated meaningfully.

Dodo, reaching for her coat, froze, but Wolfie retorted, ‘Wolfgang was Mother’s father’s name. From many-times-Great-Grampa.’

Dodo grabbed two coats and hissed, ‘Shut up, Wolfie. Come on.’

She dragged him to the door, throwing his coat over his shoulders. From the doorway, manhandled by his sister, but undaunted, Wolfie continued, ‘Many-times-great-Grampa was the General of
Quebec.’

Mary sniffed. ‘No manners, them London children.’ She established herself comfortably on the settle by the fire and took a sip of her tea. ‘I’ve asked for a girl –
I’m not being given anything like what you’ve been given. I need to know what sort they are.’

Wolfie and Dodo ran out on to the lane and, at a comfortable distance from Mary and Marigold, threw themselves on to the bank. She held the envelope in trembling hands, turning
it over and over.

‘Hurry – hurry – open it,’ Wolfie was saying, but she’d paused at a distant tapping sound. Watching the lane warily, she could see nothing except the hedges shining
in the silvery light. Beyond them, the primal hills, all ochre and russet. As they waited and listened, it grew to a drumming, a thunder, then a percussion of steel ringing on tarmac. The noise
echoed and reverberated up the high-sided lane. They scrambled on to the bank, waited, trying to decipher it.

‘Horses,’ said Wolfie, breath held. ‘It’s horses.’

The clattering grew and filled the air. They picked out the rasp of leather and jingling bridles. They squirmed higher, into a gap in the hedge, feeling as foolish in the still, silver morning,
as sheep stuck in a fence.

A torrent of huge, muscular hounds, all white-and-tan coats and pink tongues, surged down the lane. Then, behind them, horses appeared, heaving, coats glistening, breath steaming, clattering
down at an easy canter. Wolfie caught his breath, transfixed by the splendour of it, by the weight of straining animal power, the flashes of scarlet, the bulk of bone and muscle.

‘Morning . . . Morning . . . Morning,’ said each and every rider, touching a hand to his hat as he passed.

There was a shout from above: ‘Master on the left, Master on the left!’

The message passed downhill from rider to rider, and the streaming, mud-splattered beasts were pulled over to the bank against which Dodo and Wolfie lay pressed.

Wolfie pointed to a rider in scarlet galloping down. ‘Quite good,’ he said grudgingly. ‘A dark muzzle, a silver tail . . . That grey is
quite
good . . .’

The rider caught sight of them there in the hedge, opposite the turning to Hollowcombe, and pulled up the handsome grey. Horses, live and tense, snorting and stamping, scrambled to avoid piling
into one another behind the master.

‘Morning.’ The Master touched his hat. ‘Are you the London ones at Hollowcombe?’

Dodo nodded.

‘Knacker’s cart. Tell Mrs Sprig it’ll be there this afternoon.’ Touching his hat to them again, he spurred the grey on.

‘That eye is not right. A good horse must have a big dark eye,’ said Wolfie. ‘Pa says so. Even a light horse must have a dark eye.’

‘
Knacker’s
cart?’ whispered Dodo.

Hot animal breath lingered in the air after the riders left and the lane cleared.

‘What does he mean, “knacker’s cart”?’ Dodo asked again, but she was bending over the envelope now. ‘From Spud,’ she said, biting her lip. Her hands
shook a little as she opened it and read, scanning it quickly. She looked up and shrieked, ‘He’s home! Wolfie – he’s back – he’s back – Pa’s . .
.’

She grabbed Wolfie, hugging him, the whole of her shaking with relief and release, tears in her eyes and on her cheeks.

‘What does he say, Dodo?’

Wolfie snatched at the letter. Dodo snatched it back.

‘Wait, Wolfie, I’ll read it.’

‘Is he coming, Dodo, is he coming to get us?’ Dodo read:

‘Shall we not go to school?’ asked Wolfie hopefully. ‘Perhaps we don’t need to go to school here any more . . . we can go back to London.’

‘Why does he have to go to his regiment?’ wondered Dodo. She read the letter again. Spud’s letter was full of holes, full of things unsaid, reserved and chilly. Dodo remembered
her conversation with Dora. Something was wrong; Pa was alive, as Wolfie had always known he’d be, but something was wrong.

‘I’ll write to Pa and tell him to take us home,’ said Wolfie, fishing in his bag for a pencil. He found a piece of paper, and, eventually, a pencil stub.

Dodo folded both letters thoughtfully and put them in her pocket.

‘Can we go to London?’ Wolfie asked again that afternoon as they turned off the lane on to the Hollowcombe track.

‘We can’t go if Pa’s still in his barracks.’

‘He’ll get leave,’ said Wolfie. ‘You always get leave when you come home. And I don’t really like Mrs Prig.’

‘
Sprig
,’ said Dodo, setting off, trailing a hand along on a wire that was attached intermittently to wooden posts, all of them keeling like masts in a high sea. She stopped
at a field gate, laying her forearms on it, resting her head, lost in thought about Pa.

‘I want to see Pa,’ said Wolfie, joining her. He waited, his eyes close to the sodden wood, examining the surface of it, all a filigree of emerald moss and silver lichen.
‘Look, Dodo, it’s all green and gold and silver, like a . . . like a . . . like something in church.’ He bent to study a damp and rotten stump, his eye caught by a strange
sprouting of yellow and orange growths, weird as an elfin garden. After a while he looked up. ‘I just want to go home,’ he said.

‘WOLFIE!’ said Dodo. ‘We
can’t
go to London. Spud isn’t there. She’s making balloons,’ she added, a little resentfully. ‘And she
doesn’t want us. Anyway, it’s hopeless talking to you. Number one because you’re a boy, and number two because you’re only eight and for both of those reasons, there’s
no point—’

‘I will be nine—’

‘Your age will improve, slowly year on year, but for your being a boy there’s no remedy . . .’ She broke off and looked up at a rushing, whispering sound overhead. A dark,
packed mass swooped low over the field gate with a mighty gusting, as if marking Wolfie and Dodo out for a premonition. It rose and widened and spread. A little spooked, Dodo caught Wolfie’s
hand, feeling again, as her thoughts turned to Pa, the shadow at the centre of her joy that he was home.

‘Starlings,’ said Wolfie as the torrent soared over the brow of the hill.

Dodo turned away from the gate to go, but stopped as she heard a new sound, the skitter and patter of unshod hoofs on the mud and stone track. A lanky figure, bareback on a stout pony, legs
almost to the ground, was approaching, a sheep slung across the pony’s neck.

‘A sheep,’ said Wolfie, his voice wide with astonishment. ‘There’s a sheep on it . . .’

The pony drew close and they both started, arch as cats, as they saw the white hair, the red birthmark on the left cheek.

‘That’s him – it was him!’ Wolfie said, putting a hand to his own left cheek.

Dodo scowled at him and he lowered it, embarrassed, as the pony came to a disorderly, snorting halt right beside them. Wolfie looked out sideways under truculent half-lowered lids at the violent
red mark on the pale skin.

‘You from Hollowcombe?’

They nodded, wary, in both their minds the flickering, phantom lamp on the moor.

‘I’m Ned . . . Ned Jervis. From Thorne. You all right at Hollowcombe? Mrs Sprig lookin’ after you then?’ His tone was friendly, his smile wide, bright-eyed with
amusement. ‘We’ll be up this way with the knacker’s cart later. Too wet, last week, couldn’t get up there. Leave the top gate open.’

‘What’s a knacker’s cart?’ Wolfie asked. And he knew Dodo was glad he’d asked because she didn’t know either.

‘For the old horse.’

‘Where’s a horse?’ asked Wolfie. ‘Where’s a horse?’

‘In top field. They left her behind, Bassetts did, just left her behind when they left Windwistle. Irish mare. Won’t hunt again an’ll ’ave to shoot her for the
hounds.’

‘Savages,’ said Dodo, raising her head slowly, now looking him square in the eyes in disgust.

‘Where’s the top field?’ asked Wolfie.

‘Savages,’ repeated Dodo.

Hurt, and taken aback, Ned turned to Wolfie and said, ‘Follow the lane. Through the yard at Windwistle. Out along beech hedge line. First gate!’ he called. ‘Leave it open
for’s!’

He banged his legs and the sturdy animal spurted wildly forward. Ned cantered off, one arm out, pointing left.

‘I’m going to find the horse,’ Wolfie said.

He set offrunninginthedirectionofNed’spointing arm. Dodo walked slowly after him, following the track as it curved and dropped, the hedges either side rising from banks of stone cushioned
with emerald moss. The dropping sun shone fire-gold through the vaulting luminous russet leaves. The lane turned a corner and Dodo saw a cottage, so ancient and golden that it seemed to smile at
her as if out of a storybook.