IT was raining—a steady, grey, relentless rain that fell from a uniformly leaden sky. The river Trent was in flood, and the sheets of water lay like dull metal over the flat water-meadows behind the railway and the power-station. Even here, on the poor, straggling outskirts of the town, the air was heavy with the smell of brewing, though for Ginny Harris it was drowned in the stronger smell of rain-wet, sweating, unclipped horses as she shepherded the ride under one of the low railway bridges towards the tumbledown stables just above the limit of the flood-water. There was a train coming, a long, slow goods-train rattling over the many points where branch lines led off to the brewery yards, the black, greasy engine puffing out clouds of thick steam, and Ginny shouted to Beryl Sanders, riding in the lead on Flash, the ex-race-horse, to trot on. Actually none of the ponies really minded trains, they were too used to them, for Branton was a town full of railways. In its narrow, sooty streets the traffic crawled from one level crossing to another, and the long streets of terrace houses behind the tall breweries re-echoed to the whistle and rattle of shunting. Six sets of hooves shod with worn iron clattered under the bridge with a sudden deceptive air of briskness, spoiled by Bonny, the New Forest pony whose feet were contracted with navicular disease, stumbling dangerously on a rough patch of tarmac.
“Walk,” ordered Ginny, glancing back at the bridge as the steam swept down and enveloped them, filling their nostrils with the wet-ash train smell, and blotting out the tired string of underfed ponies from her sight. Ginny, at sixteen and a half, was very thin, with short-cut, curly red hair which she wore brushed firmly back from her white, sharp-boned face with its slanting green eyes and too-wide mouth. She was dressed in blue denim jeans and a short green windbreaker jacket, both dark with rain, like her bright, copper-wire hair.
As the steam melted and faded away under the rain Flash turned into a road on the right, a quieter street of fairly good residential houses, and a few yards farther on he turned again, this time into a stony, rutted track. He was followed with suddenly increased eagerness by the rest of the ride. Ginny’s mount, a long-backed, ribby brown pony with an ugly head, broke into a rough jog, pricking his heavy ears for the first time that ride, and Bonny stumbled again on the rough ground. His small, blue-gaberdined rider pitched up his neck, and Ginny grabbed her just in time to prevent a fall. It was no use, she decided, Vic would just have to agree to retire Bonny or have him put down. His feet were in dreadful condition, and it was beginning to make Ginny, who was hardened to such things in her job, feel sick to see him hobbling along.
“I don’t like Bonny,” announced the child. “He falls down all the time.”
“That’s because you don’t ride him properly,” Ginny told her untruthfully.
“I do.” The child went pink. “He’s a horrid pony.”
“He isn’t a horrid pony at all,” snapped Ginny, fondling the little bay’s wet, ragged neck as he hobbled along beside her mount. “But you can ride something else next time if you don’t like him.”
“I don’t,” Bonny’s rider assured her.
They were approaching the stables by now, a collection of ramshackle wood and corrugated-iron sheds on the slope between the ends of the long back gardens of the tall, red-brick houses that faced on to the street, and the grey, muddy, flood-water covering the marshy meadows below. The water was on three sides of the stables by now, only on the fourth, where the track climbed towards the road, was there still dry land. But the water had seldom been known to come any higher, and if it did the stables would still stand above it on their slight rise, and would be approachable in wellingtons along the track. The chief trouble from Ginny’s point of view was that, with the fields flooded, the ponies all had to stay in, and Vic’s hay was hardly of sufficient quality or quantity to keep them going for long. Oats were an unheard-of luxury, though the ponies did receive a little bran mixed with a lot of dusty chaff each midday.
Beryl helped Ginny to stable Flash and the ponies, leading them into dark, damp, draughty stalls, and hauling off the heavy, mildewed tack, replacing bridles with old leather head-stalls mended with string, or dirty rope halters. The riders paid their six shillings and drifted away, squelching through the mud, and arguing about their riding prowess, and Beryl, who considered herself very superior to the others, as she had once shared a pony with a friend for six months, said “Goodbye” in slightly condescending tones, and followed them. Ginny was left alone with the sad, wet ponies and the sinisterly lapping flood-water. She threw empty sacks over the loins of the wettest ponies, and stuffed the cleanest straw she could find beneath Flash’s torn jute rug, which had been made for a pony half his size. The bay thoroughbred always felt the cold and damp more than any of them, so that his joints creaked audibly every time he moved, and in the mornings he was usually so stiff that he could scarcely move. He was the only one privileged to have a rug. Ginny gave him a stale crust of bread, and re-filled his water-bucket from the old metal drum that served as a rain-butt. The hay she gave them smelt musty, and there were white patches of mould in it, but there was nothing else. The seven horses at once set hungrily to work, creating a false impression of comfort and content with their steady munching. A fresh spatter of rain blew across the roofs, and Ginny sighed and decided to go home. She had hoped that Vic Tyler, the owner of the place, would be there when the ride got in, so that she could tackle him again about Bonny’s feet and the bad hay, but he had not been near the place for two days. Sometimes there was a week or more between his visits, for he was also a general dealer, mainly in scrap, and the stables were one of his smallest concerns, interesting him only when he collected the money.
Ginny had a last look round, depressed as usual by the misery of the ponies, for the chief thing in the world that she loved was horses, and she hated the wretchedness of these; then she bolted the lower halves of the stable doors, locked the padlock on the door of the draughty lean-to which served as a tack-room, and turned for home. The grey twilight was thick and wet, and Ginny limped more than usual as she made her way up the rough track, her red, rain-soaked hair clinging to her white cheeks and forehead. If only she could escape from Branton, she thought, find a good job in a proper stable, where the horses were properly fed and cared for. But she did not know how. Her only experience with horses and in riding was with Vic Tyler’s animals, which she had discovered only two years ago while she was still weak and very lame after polio, and apart from lack of experience the main drawback was her leg. Who, Ginny asked herself, would want to employ her when there were dozens of girls with perfectly sound, strong limbs looking for the same kind of jobs? And besides that, she had no confidence in her own ability to deal with fit, keen horses, never having ridden or handled any. But her one burning ambition was to try. One day, vowed Ginny, one day I’ll get away from this town and learn to ride properly, somehow.
She was nearing home by now, the rain-blurred lights of the High Street were behind her, and she was making her way through the maze of narrow streets below one of the breweries. Railway Rise, where the Harrises lived, was dark and deserted. Even at busy times of day Railway Rise always seemed deserted, but now, with the black sheen of water on roads and pavements, on the soot-caked red brick of the houses, and the dark bulk of the brewery behind, it looked utterly desolate. There were no lights in the windows; here people lived in their back rooms, and behind the broken brewery windows the stored grain lay dark and silent except for the gnawing rats and the thin, prowling cats. Ginny turned down a dark entry which led through to the cobbled passage-way which ran between the back yards of the houses and the minute patches of cat-haunted grass which were called gardens, and from the ends of which rose the sheer walls of the brewery with its thousand sightless windows.
The wooden gate into the yard of number ten, the Harris’s house, glistened with rain in the flickering light of the gas lamp halfway along the passage-way, and a scrawny ginger cat leaped for the wooden fence which divided the yard from that of number nine as Ginny let the gate slam behind her. Already she could hear the blare of noise from the crowded back room. Her sister Doreen was playing the gramophone as usual, turned up very loud, and below the beat and throb of the jazz ran the low mutter of the radio, which her father would have on for the racing results and the news. The noise hit Ginny like a solid wall as she opened the back door and stepped into the clean, scrubbed kitchen. Mrs. Harris, a tall, thin woman with grey-streaked red hair as wiry as Ginny’s, scraped back from a long, sallow, bony face, turned dark, bright eyes on to her youngest daughter, and set down the tea-pot she held with a slam.
“You’ll catch pneumonia next, you will,” she shouted. Mrs. Harris invariably shouted; she had lived for too many years amid ceaseless noise to attempt to do anything but shout it down. “You go and change out of those wet clothes at once. Why you can’t get a proper job like your sisters, I don’t know. The doctor may have said fresh air was good for you, but he didn’t tell you to drown yourself, or work yourself to death. D’reen’s waiting for you; she’s got something for you.”
Wondering what her sister could possibly have, Ginny went through into the racket of the back room. Mr. Harris, a once slim, muscular contestant for the ‘Mr. Universe’ title, but now balding and running to fat, was sitting close beside the radio set in his shirt sleeves and braces, the evening paper on his knee, while Doreen, eighteen, and the beauty of the family, lay on the rug beside the record player, and Deirdre, twenty, dark, and something of a prig, was running dark material under the needle of the old hand sewing-machine. As Ginny entered the room Doreen rolled over to look at her.
“You’re soaked,” she remarked.
“I happen to have been out in the rain,” snapped Ginny. Doreen’s obvious remarks always irritated her. “Mum says you’ve got something for me?”
“Two complimentary tickets for the Empire,” Doreen told her smugly. “That’s the sort of bonus you get, working in a proper job like mine. Want to come?”
“I’d rather have my job any day,” retorted Ginny. “What’s on?”
“Variety,” replied Doreen. “The Jive Five, and dozens of others. Oh, there’s a horse in it; that’ll interest you, I suppose.”
“A horse? On the stage?” Ginny certainly was interested. “Whose is it?”
“Oh, I can’t remember the names,” Doreen told her. “Well, coming? It starts at eight-thirty; it’s the second show.”
“Yes, all right. I’m going to get dry now.” Ginny opened the door in the corner which led on to the stairs, and as she closed it behind her the noise became slightly muffled.
Upstairs in the tiny, overcrowded bedroom Ginny struggled out of her wet, clinging jeans and the damp jersey which she wore beneath her windbreaker, and gave her damp legs a brief rub with the rough towel which hung over the side of the dressing-table mirror. There were no bathrooms in Railway Rise. One of Ginny’s legs was long and hard, with no spare ounce of fat—merely bone and muscle—the other was skeleton thin, the muscles shrunken and wasted, the tendons standing out like taut strings in the ankle and under the knee. Ginny rarely wore skirts, and now she pulled on a pair of dark tartan trews and a green sweater, before sitting down on her bed and beginning to rub her wiry hair with the towel. She sat amid a steady uprush of sound from the room below, the varnished floor-boards trembled slightly with the beat of Doreen’s record, and in the kitchen the whistling kettle boiled with a shrill scream of warning. Tea was ready. Ginny tossed her towel back over the mirror, dragged a comb through her hair, and returned to her assembled family.
There was quite a good audience in the Empire Theatre that evening. The management had sent complimentary tickets to most of the breweries and big offices in Branton, and the normally unsold seats were well filled. Doreen quickly discovered many friends in the audience, particularly boy friends, of whom she was never short. She was dressed tonight in a very full, knee-length black-and-white checked skirt with a long-sleeved white sweater with a scooped neck, filled in by a three string bead necklace in tones of green, and she knew that she looked nice. Ginny realized that she was an almost comical contrast to her pretty sister, with her over-curly, wiry hair, sharp, white face, and angular thinness. It was yet another reason for her longing to escape from Branton and find herself a new life.
The show opened with a very weak comedian, and the noisy audience was not polite. Branton had a flourishing teddy-boy population, and most of it seemed to be in the theatre that night. The comedian’s feeble jokes were soon drowned by the whistles and cat-calls of his bored audience, and he escaped thankfully from the dusty stage as the heavy, dark-red curtains swung down. The next act was a pair of passably good jugglers, but in spite of their skill their act brought much the same reaction from the audience. This pair, however, were older hands than the comedian, and refused to be hurried. There was even a grudging round of applause as they left the stage. And then came the moment for which Ginny had been waiting, as the worn-looking compère announced, “Esmerelda and her famous mount, The Golden Gambler,” and the heavy curtains swung up to reveal a pretty, fair-haired girl dressed in black, riding a showy palomino with a pure white mane and tail, and a white blaze.
As the curtains went back the girl pulled her horse up into a beautifully balanced rear, Gambler striking out over the footlights with flashing pale gold forelegs, and returning calmly to all fours. There was a slightly mocking cheer from the audience, and Esmerelda patted her horse’s arching neck. She was dressed in Spanish or Mexican style: black serge tapered trousers, a black shirt, and a short black jacket with white braidings. Her smooth, bright gold hair fell to below her shoulders, and she wore a black, broad-brimmed Stetson hat. There was a black gun-belt around her waist, and she wore black-and-white cowboy boots. The horse wore Western tack: a heavy, ornate cowboy saddle and a studded bridle with a long cheeked curb bit and plaited leather reins.
“Thank you, and hello,” Esmerelda was saying, and Ginny noticed with surprise that her voice shook slightly, as though she were nervous. “Gambler and I would now like to show you a few of our tricks. We hope you’ll enjoy them.”
She swung the horse abruptly across the stage, and he broke into a jog trot, and then into a showy, elevated movement like a trot, but with a slight hesitation in it at the top of every stride. From descriptions that she had read Ginny guessed it to be the movement called a passage. Esmerelda circled the stage, then rode into the middle, slowing her horse until he was almost at a standstill, but still lifting his feet high in that hesitating trot, the footlights striking sparks of colour from his golden coat and lighting his white tail with a rosy glow. Then the girl rode him forward once more, into a very slow canter, Gambler’s rubber-shod hooves thudding hollowly on the dusty boards as he began to change leading legs at every stride. Ginny’s eyes were shining with admiration. She was utterly lost in Esmerelda’s act, completely unconscious of the growing noise around her, as the rest of the audience, refusing to be impressed, flung remarks and cat-calls at the stage. Esmerelda was obviously more nervous when she stopped Gambler, facing the audience for her next announcement, and her voice shook badly as she said, “Now Gambler wants to show off his dancing. We’ll start with a polka, then a waltz, and some rock-n-roll.”
“Gee, dig that. It’s gonna dance,” yelled someone.
“Square stuff too,” shouted someone else.
Esmerelda was hurrying her horse too much; his ears were laid back crossly, and he was kicking out more than doing a version of a polka rhythm. In the untidy pirouettes that formed his waltz the girl was swinging him round by the reins instead of using her legs properly, and in spite of his rubber shoes Gambler slipped several times on the dusty boards. Then the band struck up the latest rock tune, and the audience roared. On stage Gambler was bucking and kicking, swinging his hind quarters from side to side, and Esmerelda seemed to be in danger of falling off. All around Ginny there was uproar, but she was far too immersed in the act to notice it. The music ceased abruptly, and Gambler took a hurried bow on both knees before leaping gladly through the wings as the curtain fell. Ginny turned to Doreen, her eyes shining, and was surprised to find her sister deep in conversation with someone in the row behind. Obviously she had not even been watching. But to Ginny the act had been pure magic and drama, the golden horse in the coloured lights had seemed the spirit of enchantment, and his schooled movements performed to the music were the fringe of something that she felt instinctively was an answer to some inborn, unsatisfied part of her being. She had read of dressage and Haute École, but she had seen very little of the former and nothing at all of the latter, advanced form of those arts. The performance of the golden horse, ragged as it was, had been a revelation to her, and somehow, she vowed, she must know more about this wonder.
She sat through the rest of the show in a state of glowing suspension from the increasingly noisy and excitable atmosphere in the theatre. Doreen turned to speak to her, and realized that she was miles away, and would not hear. Ginny was certainly an odd one, she thought, with her daft interests and her dreams. She supposed it was what came from being ill for so long, and being left with a bad leg.
Ginny lay awake for a long time that night, dreaming, and trying to plan her way into the wonderful world of horses and the people who really knew about them. She did not get very far, for at every turn she came up against her own lack of experience and her crippled leg, and the conviction that no one would offer her the kind of job she dreamed about when she had those drawbacks. And she knew so very little of the world outside Branton, especially the world she longed to join. Deirdre said all people who rode properly were snobs, and Vic said most of them were wealthy mugs who just did it to shake up their livers or keep up with their friends. It was a dreadfully discouraging prospect, and Ginny fell asleep with her problem still unsolved.
As usual, Ginny was at the stables before eight o’clock the next morning, mucking out the dark, damp stalls and feeding her seven charges on musty hay. The floods had risen a little higher, but they were still well below the level of the buildings, though they did not improve the dampness of them. Flash was so stiff that he could scarcely move, and the bad hay had made Star’s permanent broken-winded cough even worse. Their misery was in such contrast to Golden Gambler’s fit beauty the previous evening that it struck Ginny as never before. She and they could not go on like this, with things getting worse from week to week as Vic’s appearances grew even less frequent and the feed he provided less eatable. She decided to go round to see him as soon as the work was done.
She chose Flash to ride on her mission. Apart from being her favourite, for he still had the smooth stride of his breed once his stiffness wore off, as well as a touch of spirit, exercise did him good, and got him out of the dampness for a time. He was a dark bay in colour, and she did her best to keep him shining, though the bad feed and the discomfort of his stall were against her, and his skin was taut on his bony frame. He limped and stumbled slowly and unhappily up the rough track, his joints creaking and giving, and his head low; but it was a fine day, the first for ages, the sun shone brightly in the blue February sky, tinting even the muddy flood-waters with colour, and gradually the horse began to move more freely, and his head came up a little on his thin, sunken neck. Ginny patted him, and felt happier, unconscious of the pathetic sight they made : the painfully thin, stiff thoroughbred with his once-gay, bold head, and his toes worn down from much dragging and tripping on hard roads, and the equally thin girl in his broken saddle, with her rough red hair and white, sharp-boned face, and her unnaturally thin, awkward leg under the worn, dirty material of her jeans.
The way to Vic Tyler’s lay through a tangle of shabby back streets following the railway embankment, and this morning the sun threw their dirt and poverty into sharp, naked relief, the soot-caked, crumbling bricks of the terrace houses, the few blackened evergreens on the earth plots that served as gardens, the torn lace curtains behind the small windows with their inset coloured glass, and the peeling paint of the doors and window-frames. And as well the streets were full of the Branton smell, so familiar that Ginny had almost ceased to notice it: brewing and trains, overworked drains, and filthy flood-water.
Eventually she was riding along the street in which Vic lived, the dark, dank railway arches beneath which he made his home on her right, and more of the everlasting terrace houses on her left. At the end of the street the allotments vanished beneath the fringe of the floods washing around the brick pillars of the viaduct. Flash stopped of his own accord outside Vic’s place. The arch had been walled up with creosoted wood, in which was set two small windows and a narrow door. There was no sign of life. Ginny dismounted and hammered on the warped wooden door panels, while Flash investigated a cabbage leaf in the gutter. There was no reply. Ginny was surprised: it was unusual for Vic to be out so early. Usually he came to the door still in his pyjamas and swore at her for waking him. But he might just not be bothering to answer, thought Ginny, standing back to look up at the blank, raggedly curtained windows above her head. Vic was something of a miser: he could easily have afforded a better place by now, with the amount he made from selling scrap, but he preferred to stay on here, using the next-door arch to store his junk. She was still gazing up at the dark boards and the sooty bricks of the embankment above them when a woman’s voice shouted, “Hey, you. You looking for Vic Tyler?”
Ginny turned. Across the road, a typical Branton housewife in a faded print overall and a dirty flowered head-scarf, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of her loose-lipped mouth, was leaning in a doorway watching her.
“Yes, I’m looking for him.” Ginny began to lead Flash across the street towards her. “Is he out?”
“He is. And likely to stop out,” the woman told her grimly. “Police were round here last night, looking for him. Something to do with borrowing a car without the owner’s permission. Don’t reckon we’ll be seeing much of Mr. Vic Tyler for a bit.”
“Oh, help!” exclaimed Ginny crossly.
Now what was she going to do? she wondered. It would probably mean six months at least for Vic, if they caught up with him, and meantime she had no idea how she was going to keep the ponies. At this time of year it was highly unlikely that the ride money would be enough to do more than buy them rubbish to eat: in spring and summer it picked up quite well, but Vic always kept the profit, and never used any to improve the conditions for his ponies. Ginny thanked the woman and mounted Flash slowly, turning him towards home. But when she reached the end of the street she changed her mind, and turned instead the other way, towards the dreary district which in Branton signified the country.
She was riding along a rough cart track with the floods below her on one side and the scrubby hill rising steeply on the other, when Flash suddenly pricked his long, narrow ears and snorted. Coming down the track towards them, half running and half walking, was a tall, slender girl wearing, astonishingly for that area, jodhpurs, hard hat, and a well-cut hacking jacket. As she came closer Ginny recognized her with mingling astonishment and excitement as Esmerelda. Today she wore her golden hair in one plait down her back, and without the thick stage make-up she looked very young, almost as young as Ginny.
“Please,” she gasped, panting up to Flash. “Could you help me? Something awful has happened! My horse fell in the water, and now he’s stranded. I can’t get to him, and Tamara will be furious.”
“Where is he?” asked Ginny.
“Just round the next bend,” Esmerelda told her. “He shied at something, and I fell off. The next thing I knew he was in the water, and he couldn’t get back up the bank. He’s got on to a sort of island now, but I can’t swim, and he won’t come. Oh, please help.”
“Of course I’m going to help,” Ginny told her. “Come on.”
She kicked Flash into a trot, and Esmerelda held her leather, and ran beside her. As they rounded the bend Ginny saw Gambler. He was standing miserably on a wet hill which rose a few feet above the brown flood-water, his reins trailing around his feet, his white mane and tail dark with mud and water, his golden coat dripping. He was a very different animal from the flashing, graceful, gold-and-white creature she had watched on the stage the night before. Flash raised his head and whinnied shrilly at the sight of another horse, and Gambler answered with a long shout of welcome. Just here the ground fell away sharply into the brown water, and Ginny saw the marks on the edge where the palomino had slipped, and the old sack on the hill on the other side of the track at which he had shied.
“What can we do?” asked Esmerelda.
“Someone’ll have to fetch him,” Ginny told her. “The water looks calm enough here.”
It lay between the track and Gambler’s island as still as a farm pond, but farther out it was broken by swirls and eddies where strong currents flowed beneath the surface. Esmerelda looked scared.
“I can’t swim,” she told Ginny again. “I’d better fetch Tamara. She’ll know what to do.”
“We can’t leave him there,” Ginny told her, with visions of the horse somehow slipping off the other side into the main flow of the flood. She wondered briefly who Tamara was; that was the second time that Esmerelda had mentioned her. “I’ll go,” she went on, dismounting. “I can swim, and I don’t think it’s very deep just here.”
She began to unbuckle the stiff fastenings of Flash’s reins, and pulled off the stirrups. Buckled and knotted together with the girth on the end they made quite a lengthy rope.
“Hold this,” she told Esmerelda. “And grab Flash if he goes off.”
“But …” began Esmerelda.
Ginny did not stop to listen. She unfastened her windbreaker, left it lying on the path, and slid down the slippery bank into the cold, thick water, holding the end of the improvised line in one hand. Water held no fears for her. She had learned to swim a long time ago, and while she was recovering from polio it had been one of the chief exercises that the hospital recommended—that, and riding, which had been how she first found Vic Tyler. The mud was soft and deep under her feet, and the water icy around her middle. Swimming proved easier than walking with her weak leg, and, seeing her, Esmerelda imagined that it must be much deeper than it was, and clutched her end of the line desperately. Ginny found one nasty current a few feet from Gambler’s island, but she was a more than strong enough swimmer to cross it, and a moment later she was pulling herself up beside the horse with the aid of some clumps of coarse, muddy grass. Gambler greeted her with deep whickers of relief, pushing his pink nose against her, and ‘asking’ with one forefoot. Ginny patted him, and admired him, and the hard muscle on his powerful body. If only Vic’s horses were half as fit. On the bank Esmerelda wondered anxiously what could be wrong.
“Are you all right?” she shouted across the water.
“Yes, thanks.”
Ginny remembered the task in hand, and began to consider the best way to get Gambler back. Ride him, she decided. It would probably take some persuasion to get him to enter the water again, and then she had to keep him straight and get him up the other bank. She was glad to see that he was wearing an ordinary saddle and bridle, and not his heavy Western tack, and that the reins were broken only at the buckle. Gambler’s head went up and his ears pricked as she mounted, still holding the line that was her connection with Esmerelda on the bank, but when she asked him to slide down the slope into the water he was not so keen. Ginny used her legs hard, wishing that she had more strength in her right leg, and the palomino ran back, slipping dangerously on the wet ground, and swinging round almost on the edge of the farther slope, above the fast-moving current. Ginny swung him back to face Esmerelda and Flash on the mainland, and slapped him hard on the rump with her hand. Flash whinnied, and Gambler hesitated for a moment to shriek a reply. Then, at more urging from Ginny, he slid down into the water.
For a moment the ground was still beneath his feet, slippery with mud, but giving him some feeling of security. Then he was out of his depth and swimming. Ginny felt the pressure of the current against her thigh, and Gambler tried to turn with it, but Ginny held his head straight and drove her heels into him under the water. Then they were through the worst and there was land under the palomino’s hooves again. But climbing the bank on to the track was not so easy. Gambler could get no real grip on the wet earth and thin grass, and twice he plunged back into the water, churning it to thick, muddy foam all around them. On the bank above, Esmerelda dithered anxiously, trying ineffectively to get hold of Gambler’s bridle, but too nervous to get close enough to the edge for her attempts to be any use. Gambler tried for the third time, digging his toes in, and scrambling frantically, while Ginny leaned right forward, clinging to his mane and urging him on with her legs, and somehow, at last, straining and slipping, Gambler got his forelegs on the track and pulled himself up, water streaming off him, and plastering Ginny’s jeans to her legs. His muddy flanks heaved from the effort, and his beautiful tail was plastered into a thin, dark rope. Ginny slid off him and patted him, breathless herself from their struggles, her white face splashed with mud, and her slanting green eyes alight with success.
“Is he all right? It was wonderful of you to do it. I don’t know what I’d have done if I hadn’t met you.” Esmerelda clasped her long, slender hands together and gazed embarrassingly into Ginny’s sharp face.
“It wasn’t that wonderful,” Ginny told her. “The water wasn’t very deep. Where do you keep him?”
“At a farm on the main road,” replied Esmerelda, “the Slaters. Do come back with me; you can get dry, and you must help me to tell Tamara what happened.”
“Who is Tamara?” asked Ginny, beginning to unbuckle her life-line and replace the various bits of Flash’s tack.
“She’s Gambler’s owner,” explained Esmerelda surprisingly. “Tamara Blake.”
“But I thought he was yours,” exclaimed Ginny.
“Oh no. I only ride him on the stage,” Esmerelda told her. “My name’s Angela Miles, by the way. What’s yours?”
“Angela?” exclaimed Ginny, without answering the girl’s question. “Then why do you call yourself Esmerelda?”
“Tamara likes it. She used to ride as Esmerelda,” replied Angela. “What is your name?”
“Virginia Harris,” Ginny told her. “I’m always called Ginny, though. Why doesn’t Tamara ride Gambler herself?”
“She can’t,” replied Angela. “She had an accident once, and it scarred her face. Look: do hurry up and get on. You’ll catch an awful cold if you don’t get warm soon.”
Ginny finished piecing Flash’s stiff tack together and obeyed. They made an odd pair as they rode back towards the Branton road, one horse so fit and showy under his thick coating of wet mud, the other skin and bones under a dull, stretched hide, and their riders were as great a contrast: Angela in her neat, correct riding clothes with her neat, correct seat; and Ginny painfully thin under her shabby, mud-plastered clothes, with her self-taught position and awkward leg. But oddly it was she who was the most in harmony with her mount, and of them both it was Ginny who caught the eye, as the two horses turned up the main road away from Branton, dropping into single file as they joined the roaring stream of lorries, a peaceful reminder of the past in the thunder of the present.