A Hundred Horses (4 page)

Thirteen

I
phoned Mom and told her about the escaped chickens. She said, “You held a chicken!” and I said it was warm and soft and quite special. I told her what I said to it, and she said, “I expect it listened to you,” which made me feel nice. I said that I’d put it back, like I was asked, and she said, “I expect that chicken is looking out of the window right now, wondering about the girl who showed it the sky.”

I listened to her soft breathing for a minute. I knew she was wondering the same thing too.

Afterward me, Gem, and Alfie put away the dinner things. Gem made up a new word. She said because a shepherd is someone who rounds up sheep, we must be chickherds. You couldn’t tell her any different.

“We’re going to build our own farm,” she said.

“She means a toy one,” said Alfie.

“And it’s going to have pigs, chickens, some magic horses and angels, and everything. Come and do some too, Nell,” she said, holding my arms and bouncing up and down.

I knew how she felt. It was what my insides did when I thought about building the carousel. I didn’t want to see Angel again, but I knew if I wanted the carousel back, I was going to have to find her. I asked Gem and Alfie if they knew where she lived.

“She doesn’t live here anymore,” Alfie said. “Mom said her family moved away.”

Gem whispered in Alfie’s ear; then Alfie whispered in mine.

“Sometimes she used to sleep in a trailer, back behind the farm,” he said.

“Sometimes?” I asked.

“Sometimes she disappeared,” whispered Gem.

I rolled my eyes: when you’re five and seven, you believe anything.

“Why are you whispering?” I said.

Gem bit her lip. “’Cause she never liked people going to the trailer.”

I asked Aunt Liv if I could go out for a while, and she said yes. I waited for her to ask what I was going to be doing, but she didn’t. Gem said, “What about making our magic farm?” and I said, “Maybe later.” Then she pulled my arm to bend me down so she could talk into my ear. “Angel knows the fairy’s tail about the hundredth horse,” she whispered.

I found Angel’s trailer hidden among trees in the corner of the field behind Rita’s farmhouse. I heard leaves shuffling, twigs snapping. A startled rabbit zigzagged across the field. I took a deep breath.

The door of the mossy trailer was open. There was a comfy old chair, an empty packet of cheesy puffs on the floor. Nothing else but closed cupboards and an unmade bed.

I went back down the steps.

“What are you doing here?” said a mean voice from above me.

I jumped. Angel was standing on top of the trailer, half hidden in the tree branches and shadows.

“You scared me.”

She laughed. I thought she muttered, “Good,” but I couldn’t be sure. She moved back out of the light between the branches.

“My name’s Nell—”

“I know who you are.”

My skin prickled, and I almost forgot why I was there.

“I want my suitcase back,” I said.

I heard a shuffle, but she was invisible among the shapeless shadows.

“What’s so special about some old brown suitcase?” she hissed.

It wasn’t what I expected her to say.

“You can’t just take things that belong to other people,” I said, irritated now.

I heard a small thump, and then she was striding toward me from out of the shadows behind the trailer. She didn’t stop staring, even as she walked past, so close, like she wanted to burn her eyes into my face. She gritted her teeth and scowled.

“You don’t know anything.”

I was suddenly wondering how she got down from the roof of the trailer so quickly. I leaned away from her as she stood right in front of me.

“Just give it back,” I said. “It’s not yours.”

She pushed the hair away from her scalding eyes and stared and stared. Then she snatched a laugh, screwed her eyes up.

“It’s not yours either, is it?”

Well, it wasn’t exactly mine. Not exactly. But how could she know?

“I haven’t told anyone I saw you,” I said, stepping back from her, trying not to breathe like I’d been running. “So just let me have it back now. Please. It’s really important to me.”

And as I said it, I saw something in her sky blue eyes, something I recognized, something that told me how she knew the suitcase wasn’t mine. She was hiding something too, just like me.

“Go away,” she breathed, and disappeared into the trees.

Fourteen

B
edtime. I couldn’t stop thinking about Angel. She whirled around my head. I tried to shake away the feeling: we weren’t the same, even if I was right about her hiding something.

“Your mom phoned again,” Aunt Liv said.

I asked her for every tiny detail of exactly what she had said until it sounded just like Mom, and I didn’t completely miss her when Aunt Liv gave me the kiss she’d asked her to give me. I saw Gem watching from the bottom bunk, her eyes flicking between Aunt Liv and me, her tired mouth slightly open. Then she asked Aunt Liv to pretend she was my mom and to kiss Gem to see what it was like.

And that was quite funny because Gem kept asking her to do it again and again until Aunt Liv pinched her nose and said enough now.

As she went to switch off the light, Aunt Liv said, “Did Rita say anything about that horse?”

I’d forgotten all about the horse that Angel had been riding the day she stole my suitcase. But I didn’t know what to say. I was worried if I started talking about it, I would say I’d seen Angel, and then she would never give the suitcase back.

“She hadn’t seen it,” I said.

“Still a mystery then, hey?” She smiled.

I nodded.

The light disappeared as she flicked the switch.

“Nell?” a small voice whispered. “Did you see our farm?”

I felt bad. When your head is full of other things, when you’re worried because someone has scared you and you didn’t even get your suitcase back, then the mini magic farm on the kitchen table only looks like a mess.

“I’ll look at it in the morning,” I said.

A soft sigh.

“Did you see her?” Gem whispered. “Did she scare you?”

I pretended I was asleep.

“It’s all right. She scares everyone, Nell.”

The darkness fuzzed in my eyes. I couldn’t forget the way Angel had looked at me earlier. I didn’t think she was mad at me because of the horse or because I knew she was the one who had stolen my suitcase.

I thought she was mad just because I knew she was here. Maybe that was why she wouldn’t give the suitcase back. Because if she did, then she wouldn’t be able to stop me from telling. Who, though? Rita knew she was here, and Old Chambers knew too because she’d asked him if she could look after the horse. Who wasn’t supposed to know? I thought about what Mrs. Barker had said about her. The mystery of Angel spun in my head like the tin girl.

I didn’t know what woke me. Maybe it was the moonlight on my skin. It was silent, except for Gem’s and Alfie’s sleepy breaths. I got up and went to the window to close the curtains. The trees and greenhouse and sheds were etched in gray and silver. So was Angel. She was sitting on the grass cross-legged, collecting goose feathers from the ground. She put them together in a fan, stretched her arm out, and skimmed the air. Then she stuffed them in her pockets and skipped away.

Fifteen

I
decided I was going to need some help with Angel.

I asked Aunt Liv if I could go to Keldacombe Farm to see Rita again. Aunt Liv seemed happy I wanted to go, and besides, she had a whole row of planting to do.

“Come back when you’re hungry,” she said, smiling.

Alfie watched me go. Gem was sitting on the floor, playing with her plastic animals. She had her back to me, her arms folded.

“I’ll help you later,” I said, but she didn’t turn around.

I went to the farm and called out, and after a few moments Rita told me to come in. She was lifting things up and putting them back and opening drawers.

“Have you seen my blue cardigan?” she said. “I had it on the other day.”

I helped look for a minute, but in the end Rita sat down on the bed, patted for me to sit next to her, and asked what I’d been up to.

“Nothing much,” I said, sitting on the end of the bed. “Except helping Mrs. Barker get some of her chickens back in the barns. We couldn’t find her goat, though.”

Rita frowned but didn’t say anything about it. Then she smiled and said, “Tell me about where you live.”

So I told her I lived with Mom and then did a list of the clubs and all my after-school stuff.

“Oh,” she said, as if I’d just described the most boring things in the world. Which I had.

Then she told me about when she was a girl and how she used to get up in the middle of the night to start her day by bringing the cows in for milking. She helped her parents on the farm, feeding the animals, protecting them from the wind, the rain, and the snow. She used to drink warm milk with a ladle from a bucket before school. She said it like it was a good thing. It was a bit like hearing about history at school, but better, because her stories were alive with moving, breathing things.

Then Rita sighed, saying that since she’d decided to sell the farm and all the animals had been moved elsewhere, it wasn’t the same. She missed hooves clumping across the yard, geese gathering under the kitchen window, the tumbling bales of baked straw in the barns. And how everything had changed since Mr. Hemsworth had passed away.

“He was very tall,” she said, looking up as if his head was right there, just below the beam in the ceiling. “A real giant, with a deep, deep gentle voice that the animals could feel rumble in the ground. Sometimes I think I still hear him, but it’s just the wind on its way.”

You could tell she missed him most of all, that he wasn’t a make-believe giant.

She took a long breath through her nose, as if she had just come up into the air from deep below the water.

“What have you got to tell me today?”

It’s funny how she asked that again.

I moved across to the other side of the bed, suddenly realizing Angel might be lurking in the alcove. But there was just a sewing machine on a little table pushed in there.

“Is Angel your granddaughter?” I asked.

Rita’s eyebrows popped up over the cup of tea she was drinking.

“No, but I’ve known her a long time. She was always around here, with the horses mostly, or stealing something from the kitchen.” She rolled her eyes. “She stopped coming, a while ago now. I heard her family moved. I expect they’re back visiting.”

I tried something else.

“Is she coming here today?” I said.

Rita leaned back. She looked surprised I’d asked.

“Why do you want to know?” she asked, her head to one side, really looking at me.

“I—I just want to talk to her,” I said. “I think she might need a friend.”

It just sort of came out like that. But Rita’s eyebrows popped up again, and then she chuckled.

“Maybe you do too,” she said.

I felt my cheeks burning. It’s funny, but when you see someone is like you, just a bit like you, it makes you want to know more. I supposed that was it right from the start, what intrigued me. I was hiding the carousel, and I wanted to know what Angel was hiding too.

Rita looked at me for a while, one arm folded, a finger tapping her mouth, her eyebrows furrowed. She seemed to make up her mind about something and beckoned me closer.

“It’s not an easy task finding Angel, not if she doesn’t want to be found,” she said. “Go up toward the village, across the fields at the back. There’s a circle of oaks at the top of the hill; you can’t miss them. You know what an oak tree is?”

Her eyes twinkled as she chuckled to herself.

“You might have seen a picture in a book.”

I frowned. We had oak trees in the city.

“Of course I know,” I said, remembering a picture showing the leaves had wavy edges.

“The leaves are barely out, so just look for the circle, ten of them. There’s a chance you’ll find her there,” she said. “And take a couple of apples and some chips from the kitchen.”

“What for?”

“For you and Angel,” she said. “You might need to do a bit of bargaining.”

She lay back against her cushions and smiled to the room.

“Oh, and watch out,” she called as I left. “That girl can tell a tall tale.”

Sixteen

I
took the path Rita had told me to take.

On the highest hill overlooking the valley I found the ring of oak trees, their complicated branches still mostly bare. You couldn’t see the farm or Aunt Liv’s house from up there because of the woods and the way the ground seemed to disappear into a green sinkhole. But away from the valley you could see miles and miles of fields divided into random shapes by the hedges, dotted with grazing animals. And a whole sky full of blue.

Something inside me was shaky and skipping.

A twig hit my head, and I looked up.

Angel was crouched high in the tree, pretending she hadn’t seen me. I saw her eyes flick down to me and away.

I had chips, apples, and maybe some useful information. Mrs. Barker had wondered if Angel was here and had been the one to let her chickens out and steal her goat. And I wondered if there was more to know about Belle, the horse, than she’d said.

“Mrs. Barker still hasn’t found her goat. Maybe it was stolen . . . ,” I said.

I was only guessing, but Angel looked startled long enough for me to think I had guessed right.

“What are you doing up there, anyway?” I said.

She scowled again, shifted her back against the trunk, and pulled her knees up.

“You might fall,” I said.

She rolled her eyes and looked away.

“I’ve got an apple for you,” I said, holding it up high so she could see it. I pulled the bag of cheesy puffs out of my pocket. “And these.”

Her face changed so quickly, I could have been offering her a thousand dollars. But I’d already guessed she wanted me to know she was there, that she’d dropped the twig on me.

“You come up,” she ordered.

I went around and around the tree, looking for a ladder or some way to climb up. I reached up to the lowest branch, but I couldn’t hold on or pull myself up.

“How?” I said.

Angel smirked, and then she laughed out loud.

“Easy,” she said. “You’re just not very imaginative.”

There was a gentle thump, and she was crouched on the ground, looking up at me. Her dark, untidy hair was tangled around her face and dark eyelashes. She was still wearing the long coat, which obviously wasn’t hers, over black leggings and a faded black top and the black flats.

She snatched the bag out of my hand. Her fingernails were chewed and dirty. She sat on a fallen tree branch, so I knelt on the grass nearby and listened to her crunch through the chips.

“I’m staying with my aunt Liv, just over Easter,” I said, trying to be friendly, trying to lead up to asking her where my suitcase was. After all, I was sure now she would give it back because I hadn’t told anyone about seeing her.

“So?” she muttered.

She peeled open the side of the packet and licked the crumbs from the bottom. She crumpled up the empty packet and put it in her pocket and held her hand out toward me. I started to feel that it wasn’t actually bothering her that I knew she’d had something to do with Mrs. Barker’s chickens and the missing goat.

“Apple,” she said, only flicking a screwed-up glance at me.

I thought,
The nerve of it, like I’m her servant or something.
I had tried to be nice, but I smacked the apple into her hand. She laughed, like she was glad I was getting annoyed.

And I couldn’t help saying, because she looked so smug, “You like winding people up, don’t you?”

She lay back on the branch. She found that even funnier.

“You’re really rude, you know,” I said, getting more irritated. “I can see why Mrs. Barker and my cousins told me to stay away from you now.”

She was almost crying, laughing so much she nearly fell off the branch.

“You didn’t listen, though,” she said, her jewel eyes sparkling.

I huffed as hard as I could and stood up.

“I wish I’d never bothered,” I said, and walked away.

I could hear her, almost hysterical with laughter.

“Nell!” she suddenly called.

I turned to see her trying to hide a smirk.

“What?”

“There’s a
huuuge
spider on you!”

I screamed and flapped, brushing at my clothes.

“Where?”

“On your arm.” She giggled. “No, the other one.”

She rolled off the branch, clutching at her middle.

“It’s on your back now,” she gasped, hardly able to breathe.

I suddenly realized she was making me look like an idiot. My fists were clenched, my shoulders up, as I stared at Angel rolling around in the grass, tears streaming through her high-pitched laughter.

She looked at me at last. I was barely able to control my own breathing.

“There’s no spider,” I snapped.

She took a last bite out of the apple, not laughing anymore, but still smirking. She threw the core away and walked toward me, stared right into my eyes.

“I expect people told you not to believe anything I said, either.”

I groaned through my teeth and marched off.

I heard her footsteps behind me. I turned, punched my hands on my hips, only to find her mirroring me, standing just like me, barely able to stop herself from laughing again. I was
not
like her. And I was
not
going to give her the satisfaction!

I stomped off down the hill.

“You don’t even want me around, so why are you following me?” I said over my shoulder.

“I’m not,” she said, giggling.

“Yes, you are. Stop following me!”

“I’m going this way anyway,” she said, then muttered, “So easy to wind up.”

That did it. I wheeled around.

“What’s down here then?” I snapped. “Something else to steal?”

Her eyes quivered. I thought she was going to deny it.

But she smiled, like something really pleased her, like I’d played into her hands. Then she froze, her eyes still piercing mine, as a horse’s neigh echoed through the valley.