National Velvet (22 page)

    
“That's not gristle, that's fat,” said Mr. Brown. “You just carry that back and eat it up. If snacks in the mid-morning's going to spoil a leg for you you better have no more of 'em. Ten sheep coming at four, Mi.”

    
“Right,” said Mi.

    
“To be killed?” said Donald.

    
“Yes,” said Mi.

    
“Why killed?” said Donald.

    
“To make meat for you.”

    
“For me?”

    
“I said so.”

    
“I want to see 'em be killed,” said Donald.

    
“Well, you can't,” said his father.

    
“Do they break an' fall down and die?”

    
No answer.

    
“Who dies them?”

    
“I do,” said Mr. Brown. “And Mi.”

    
Donald looked at his father without the slightest disfavour but with added respect.

    
“If there's a sheep's head for to-night give it me while it's warm, Mi,” said Mrs. Brown. “You can't cook it so tender once it's chilled down.”

W
HEN
the answer from Weatherby's came it contained terrible difficulties. Velvet took it to Mi.

    
“Oh, God,” said Mi when he looked at the blue entry form. “I oughta known. It brings it all back” Mi's wicked knowledge of the North came over him in floods. “There's this to be done . . . an' that . . . and this and that. . . . See if we can't get round it. You'll be disqualified in the end in any case, my girl. Might as well be disqualified all round. All you want is the chance to do it. I wonder if we're dotty.”

    
“Who could you ask?”

    
“Ask!” said Mi. “Ask the churchwardens. You leave it to me. It's Lewes races to-morrow. I'll be over there and have a talk. You get on with the animal. Leave a lot to me. An' don't talk!”

    
“I never!”

    
Mi glanced at her a moment. He had been absorbed in his thought.

    
“No, you don't,” he said. “But 'Dwina'd hand it on to Teddy, and Merry'd forget she wasn't to speak . . .
An' it may never happen. You'd best just get on with the animal if you think such a crack of it.”

    
“Don't you?”

    
Mi heaved a big breath, first in, then out of his lungs. “I think more of you,” he said in the end.

    
“I'm nothing without him,” said Velvet.

    
“Get on now,” said Mi. “An' don't keep asking me how I'm getting on. What's more, there's another thing. You might have a shot at the Tindles jumps in the mushroom valley.”

    
“They're all wired up.”

    
“Yes; well, I'd unwire 'em. Take some pliers. They're a lazy lot over there now the horses are gone. There's no one in the valley before seven.”

    
September passed and October came. Velvet by now had grown bolder. She no longer rose in the dawn to fetch the piebald to the mushroom valley but took him in the red-haired Autumn under cold afternoon moons of October on dew-drenched grass. The mushroom pickers cleaned the valley before dawn. No one came down from Tindles, the hill village of the Derby winner. The old man was old, old. His horses gone, his men lazy. He warmed his toes and looked at his Derby cup but kept indoors between the sideboard and the fire.

    
Velvet grew so bold she ceased to replace the barbed wire over the jumps. The great brushwork barriers stood up free and clean and twice a week the piebald leapt them from end to end of the field. Sometimes Mi came with a bamboo rod and caught him a flick on his belly or his hock as he flew over.

    
One day when his work was over he came in the evening with a spade and dug a pit before one of the jumps and dragged logs to lie at the lip of the pit to make The Pie take off earlier. He came back with Velvet in the morning early and she and the horse leapt the contraption. After which Mi filled it in again and threw sods on it.

    
“They'll think we've buried someone,” said Velvet. “You do take a lot of trouble, Mi.”

    
“Know what he's just jumped?” said Mi, straightening his back.

    
“What?”

    
“Jumped the third on the National. Third jump's a ditch an' fence. Same as this one. I wrote to a chap on the railway up there for the measurements.”

    
“Railway?”

    
“Truckline. Runs on the raised embankment alongside the Course. You on'y got to run down and measure.”

    
Now the piebald jumped as he had jumped the five-foot wall when they had first seen him, hitching his quarters up behind him and leaving inches to spare. Not a twig on the jumps moved except from the wind of his passage. Velvet lay on his neck like the shadow of an ape and breathed her faith into him.

    
One evening before supper, Mi and Velvet alone under the Albert lamp, Velvet read the accounts of races. The Cesarewitch. Prophecies about it beforehand.

    
“. . . the conditions will be ideal for all except the mudlarkers,” she read aloud. “What's that, Mi?”

    
“Dud talk o' mutts” said Mi.

    
“ ‘Munition started so slowly he was always tailed'?”

    
“The same,” said Mi.

    
“And ‘he galloped the opposition down in grand style,' ”

    
“And the same,” said Mi.

    
“Oh, no!” said Velvet. “I like that! It's what I'll do. I'll gallop the opposition down. It's grand.”

    
“If you like,” said Mi.

    
“I do,” said Velvet.

    
Silence.

    
“We gotta call him something,” said Mi.

    
“What? The piebald? Can't we call him The Pie?”

    
“If you like. It's a mutt name.”

    
“I'll always call him The Pie. But if he's got to have something grand . . .”

    
“We gotta choose the name and choose racing colours and send up and ask Weatherby's if they'll pass 'em. Sooner the better. They'll print 'em in the Calendar.”

    
“I'll have black and pink,” said Velvet.

    
“You'll look awful.”

    
“Could we call him Unicorn?” said Velvet slowly.

    
“That's the sort,” said Mi. “Longish. Historical.”

    
“Is Unicorn historical?”

    
“Seems to me.”

    
“He could just be Unicorn for the race?”

    
“Yes, he could. But he'll be put down Unicorn for ever in the history books.”

    
“On'y if he wins, Mi . . .”

    
“Win or no, he goes down. Some of those books put every runner that ever ran. Starting with the ‘Lottery' year, with Jem Mason up. That was eighteen thirty-nine. Seventeen starters.”

    
“You know a heap.”

    
“Any chap knows anything knows the first Grand National.”

    
“Lamp's smoking, Mi.”

    
Mi turned it down.

    
“An' Mi.”

    
“M'm.”

    
“I don't like Unicorn.”

    
“Well, think of something else.”

    
“I'll never like anything but The Piebald. It's his name. He's got to go in the books like that.”

    
Mi looked up. The thin face opposite him had grief in it.

    
“They weren't all so grand,” he said at last. “There was Jerry M. and Shady Girl. An' Old Joe won it in eighteen eighty-six. An' there was Hunter an' Seaman and Miss Lizzie, an' the Doctor, an' The Colonel . . . Why, there was The Colonel! He won it twice. You call him The Piebald an' it won't hurt. It'll do fine.”

    
Velvet gave him a look of love. “Thank you, Mi,” she murmured.

    
“Here, take the papers,” said Mi, “an' look at 'em.”

    
“Gotta enter his sire and his dam,” said Velvet, poring over the Rules.

    
“Well, that's that,” said Mi, yawning.

    
“Whad'you mean, that's that?” said Velvet. “He's got a sire and a dam somewhere, hasn't he?”

    
“Orphan. Horse is an orphan. Here, hand me the Rules!”

    
Mi drew the lamp nearer and leant his face deeply upon the little page. “ In entering' . . . m'm . . . m'm . . . ‘he shall be described by stating a name.' . . . We gotta name. Settled. ‘The age he will be at the time of the race.' . . . Blacksmith says he's six. Might be more. We'll put ‘aged.' “

    
“That's a horrid word.”

    
“It's fine. It means grown up. No more o' them silly years. We'll put ‘aged.' “

    
“What's next?”

    
“ ‘The colour' . . . (they'll cough a bit when they read he's a piebald) ‘and whether a horse, mare or gelding, and the Calendar or Stud-Book names of his sire and dam.' That's where they get us!”

    
“Oh, Mi . . .”

    
“Wait a bit! ‘If the sire or dam has no name in the Calendar' . . . wait a minute, wait a minute . . . ‘or if the pedigree of the sire or dam be unknown, such further particulars as to where, when, and from whom the horse was purchased or obtained must be given as will identify him.' That's us all right.”

    
“What'll you put? You can't put about the shilling an' the raffle.”

    
“Make 'em sit up.”

    
“Too much. They'll sit up and see me!”

    
“You're right, yes. Pity though. Been a bit a fun.
We'll put ‘Bought from Thomas Ede, Farmer,' an' the date. Previous bought in Lewes Market. . . .”

    
“That reads odd.”

    
“You aren't asked to state all the buys. We'll leave it at Ede.”

    
“Anything else?”

    
“Not that I can see.”

    
“S'sh! Here's the others!”

    
Donald had out his jigsaws. He was doing a map of the world in big simple pieces. He could not get it started because two bits of the margin were missing. He begged and pleaded and nagged, “Will you help me? WILL you help me?”

    
Merry helped him most. Mally stuck in a piece or two. Edwina bent over him and played the mother till she got bored.

    
“There's India!” said Edwina, skipping from mother to teacher.

    
“All the pink bits, Donald, belong to England.”