THE Slaters’ farm was about a mile and a half up the road, a sprawling place of half-concrete, half-timber buildings, muddy cattle-pens, and tumbledown barns. The house was tall and narrow, built of the eternal red brick, with a thin wistaria trained over the little porch. Angela led the way through the muddy gateway, and across the main yard to a second, smaller yard. There was a big, brown-varnished Bedford horse-box parked under a Dutch barn, and a loose-box door hung open on sagging hinges. Angela dismounted outside this, and said, “Here comes Tamara.” She looked almost scared, and Ginny, still sitting on Flash, looked round curiously. Striding across the yard towards them came a tall, strongly built girl dressed in tapered blue denim jeans that clung closely to her powerful, muscular legs, and a dark blue woollen shirt open at the neck and tight across her broad, hard, boyish shoulders and firm bust. But as she came closer it was her face that caught Ginny’s attention. It was an unusual face, broad and weather-beaten under the short-cut, curly black hair, immensely vigorous, with high cheek-bones and startling, odd eyes, one brilliant blue, the other hazel, but it was disfigured by a once-broken nose that had only been partly repaired by plastic surgery, and by a shattered, misshapen left cheek-bone. Her eyes were at the moment riveted on Gambler’s mud-plastered form, and she was obviously about to be furious.
“What have you done with him this time?” she asked Angela sharply. “Can’t you ever be trusted to exercise a horse without turning the procedure into a circus?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Blake.” Angela looked cowed, and Ginny realized that ‘Tamara’ was only for use when Gambler’s owner was absent.
“What happened this time?” Tamara sounded more resigned, as she bent to examine her horse’s legs. So far she had not even glanced at Ginny and Flash.
“He shied when I was riding along a cart track on the edge of the floods, and I fell off,” explained Angela unhappily. “The next thing I knew he was in the water and swimming away from me. Ginny rescued him for me; he was on a sort of island. She was awfully brave.” There was genuine admiration in Angela’s pale, softly pretty face as she looked at Ginny.
“Was she?” Tamara swung her piercing, peculiar gaze on to Ginny for the first time. “What’s that you’re riding?” she demanded. “A disguised skeleton? You should be ashamed to keep a horse in that condition, unless he’s been ill. Is he yours?”
“No, he belongs to the man I work for,” Ginny told her.
“Better put him inside and give him a feed. He could do with it,” Tamara told her. “Then come and dry off in the house. Mrs. Slater won’t mind.”
“Thank you.”
Ginny dismounted, and Tamara opened the door of a second loose-box. Flash followed Ginny inside with low snorts of pleasure. There was an almost clean bed of straw on the concrete floor, and Tamara was clattering buckets and scoops on the other side of the partition in the dark, hay-scented fodder-room. There was already some sweet hay in the rack, and the bay pulled at it eagerly, without giving Ginny time to remove his bridle first. Then Tamara came in with a bucket almost filled with a mixture of bran, oats, and chopped carrots, which she tipped into the low, worm-eaten wooden manger. Flash plunged his nose into it with astonished delight, his dull eyes shining for the first time in months. Tamara smiled, and patted his thin neck, her face suddenly gentle.
“He hasn’t seen anything like that for a long time,” she said.
Then her face hardened again, and she went off to look at Gambler, whom Angela was attempting to clean in the next box.
Ginny dumped Flash’s tack beside the corn-bin and followed her, but she was not allowed to watch for long. Tamara saw her standing there, ordered Angela to keep working, and hurried Ginny across the yard to the house.
In the warm, spotlessly clean farm kitchen with its old-fashioned black-leaded range, a plump, grey-haired woman in a flowered overall was making pastry at the scrubbed deal table. She took one look at Ginny’s sodden condition, and abandoned her pastry-making hurriedly.
“Child! you’re soaking,” she exclaimed. “Whatever have you been doing? Come on now, out of those wet clothes. Miss Blake, will you fetch a warm blanket from the airing cupboard while I get her dry?”
“I will. Thanks, Mrs. Slater.”
Tamara went out of the room, and Mrs. Slater stood Ginny in front of the range and began to undress her as though she was a baby, clucking with distress at the layers of mud which had worked their way through Ginny’s clothes. When Tamara returned, the mud had been sponged off by Mrs. Slater and she was rubbing herself briskly with a large, rough towel.
“A hot bath would be better,” Mrs. Slater told Tamara. “But you know we haven’t got a bathroom, and that hip-bath does take such a long time to fill.”
She need not have worried. Ginny, dry and wrapped in the warm blanket, sipping hot milk by the fire, could not have taken cold had she tried. Tamara went out again to look at Gambler, and returned accompanied by Angela, who still looked unhappy.
“Now,” said Tamara, settling herself on the edge of the table, while Mrs. Slater returned to her pastry-making behind her. “Let’s get this sorted out. Angela’s told me most of the rescue story. Thank you, Ginny; it’s a good thing you were about. But I don’t like the way that horse of yours has been kept. Who did you say he belonged to?”
“My boss, Vic Tyler,” replied Ginny.
Realizing that it was the only thing to do, she went right back to the beginning, with her slow recovery from polio, and her first meeting with Vic, who kept the only ponies in the district. She told Tamara how she had gone to work for him, to her family’s suppressed disgust, as they had hoped that she would find some other way of carrying out the doctor’s advice of leading an outdoor life, and finally she came to Vic’s disappearance that morning with the police after him.
“I don’t know what I shall do now,” she went on. “I can’t run the stable alone, we don’t have enough riders to pay for the feed they should have at this time of year, and some of the ponies are past work, anyway. I wish I could get a proper job with good horses, like your Gambler. I’ve never seen anything like him on the stage; it was wonderful. It must be the most marvellous thing in the world to be able to ride horses like him, doing dressage and everything. I’d give anything to be able to learn to ride properly.” She stopped, suddenly afraid that Tamara would think she was cadging for a ride or something, but Tamara was merely staring at her with her odd, piercing look, and Ginny noticed that Angela was very pale, her blue eyes wide and wretched. Feeling uncomfortably that she ought to change the subject, Ginny said, “Do you always keep Gambler here? I didn’t know there were any horses except Vic’s in Branton.”
“No, we’re only here for the week,” Tamara told her. “I’ve got a riding and training-stable in Sussex. We go back on Sunday. How would you like to work for me, Ginny?”
Ginny stared at her in utter amazement, taken completely by surprise, and Tamara grinned with sudden malice.
“Well?” she demanded. “What’s the matter? You were keen enough two minutes ago. Got cold feet now you’ve been given your chance?”
Mentally Ginny shook herself. What on earth was the matter with her? This was the chance for which she had been longing ever since her first realization of how much riding and horses were going to mean to her. How could she hesitate, even for a moment?
“It’s awfully kind of you, Miss Blake,” she said, rather breathlessly. “I’d love to come. I’ll have to get my parents’ permission, but they’ll be glad for me to get away from Vic Tyler. But I don’t know what I can do with the ponies if I come. The fields we usually put them in are flooded, and there’s no one else to look after them. Vic’s sure to get about six months in prison.”
Tamara stared at her for a moment, and then said, “You can bring that miserable lump of horse-flesh you’ve got outside with you if you like, and put some decent food into him. As for the others, perhaps Mr. Slater could help?”
She looked inquiringly at Mrs. Slater, who nodded slowly.
“Yes, I daresay he could,” she agreed. “We’ve rough grazing in plenty up on the hill; we don’t use it much now we’re without the sheep. I’ll speak to Bert about it tonight, but I think I can promise you he’ll agree. Wouldn’t do the land any harm to be grazed and manured for a time.”
Ginny looked from one to the other in rather dazed delight, hoping that she was not dreaming, and again Tamara said, “Well?” but the malice was no longer in her voice.
“I should love to bring Flash,” Ginny told her. “And it’s awfully good of you to help, Mrs. Slater. Thank you very much.”
“Good.” Tamara slid off the table. “Talk to your parents about it tonight, and if they want to see me, perhaps we can arrange to meet tomorrow. That’ll be Friday. If you’re coming we’ll move Tyler’s ponies on Saturday, and you can travel down in the box with us on Sunday. All right?”
“I can hardly believe it’s happening,” Ginny told her. “It seems too wonderful to be true.”
“Then that’s all right,” Tamara told her, hiding her rather grim amusement. “You’d better borrow some of Angela’s clothes to go home in.”
While Angela went upstairs to fetch them, Tamara asked Ginny casual questions about her job with Vic, and decided that she might have got herself a good bargain. Ginny Harris seemed a little different from the usual run of starry-eyed, horse-struck girls like Angela Miles who drifted through her stables, with their sentimental ideas and their visions of turning into riders like Pat Smythe or Sheila Waddington overnight. So far none of them had lasted more than a few weeks; when they discovered that working for Tamara Blake was a little different from working for the golden-hearted riding mistresses of their favourite pony books they promptly took themselves off to the local horsey fairy godmother, with her field full of sweet little ponies as fat as butter balls and as little schooled as sheep. Angela, Tamara knew, would be off there as soon as they got back, and perhaps a sadly disillusioned Ginny the week after. But, looking again at Ginny’s sharp-boned, white face and brilliant green eyes, somehow Tamara did not think so.
Angela returned with the clothes, which had to be pinned to fit Ginny’s thin body, and twenty minutes later, after thanking Mrs. Slater again and promising Tamara that she would let her know as soon as possible about the job, Ginny was mounting a well-fed Flash in the yard. She rode back down the long main road into Branton lost in a rosy cloud of dreams, with Flash unusually brisk and cheerful beneath her.
Though surprised and at first doubtful, it did not take Ginny too long to persuade her parents to see Tamara the next day to discuss the job with her. Tamara arranged to come round during the lunch hour for the meeting, as she had to be at the theatre with Angela and Gambler all evening, and her arrival in the big horse-box caused quite a stir in Railway Rise. But her briskly practical manner swiftly swept away most of the Harris’s doubts.
“But what about that bad leg of hers?” asked Mrs. Harris, towards the end of their conversation. “Won’t that slow her up too much for your work?”
“No, I’m sure it won’t,” Tamara told her. “There won’t be a great deal of walking about, and riding is the best treatment she could have. A lot of riding-schools run special classes for polio patients now, you know. And Ginny has been doing the work at Tyler’s single-handed.”
“Maybe she has, but that’ll be a bit different from what you’ll want from her, I daresay,” replied Mrs. Harris. “With your thoroughbred horses and such.”
“Yes, it will be different. But not necessarily harder,” Tamara assured her. “You see, she’ll have less horses to do, there’ll be three of us, and I don’t run a really large stable, I specialize in dressage and Haute École, and take a few liveries. Anyway, she can come for a trial period first, if you like. I’ll pay her pocket money, and she’ll have her keep and the keep of the horse, and if she doesn’t like it, or I find she isn’t suitable after all, she can come home.”
“That seems fair enough, Annie,” Mr. Harris told his wife. “It’d break young Ginny’s heart not to go with Miss Blake.”
“As long as she don’t break more than her heart by going,” retorted Mrs. Harris; but she gave in, and a few minutes later Ginny was called into the room from where she had been anxiously waiting in the kitchen and was told that she could take the job.
She was delighted, and Tamara realized that she was rather glad, and wondered why. Usually she could not care less about the girls she employed; they were useful while they lasted, and that was that; but something about Ginny appealed to her, and as she drove away down the drab street Tamara hoped that she was not going to get too fond of the child. For it had been her policy for a long time never to form any attachment for a human being again, after the way that she had been hurt by them.
Doreen was distinctly jealous when she heard about Ginny’s job, and realized that her younger sister was going to be the first to leave home to see the world outside Branton, and Deirdre disapproved. Ginny would soon be in trouble, she said; she was far too young to leave home, and Mum should know better, even if Dad did not. But Ginny ignored both her sisters. Her life was opening out in front of her, and she was determined to make the most of it.
As she had promised, Tamara fetched some of Vic’s ponies in the box next day, and Ginny and Angela took the others up between them. Angela was very quiet, and Ginny wondered uncomfortably if she was pushing the other girl out of her job by going to work for Tamara. On a quietish stretch of road she managed to get close enough to Angela to ask her.
“It doesn’t matter, really,” Angela assured her quickly. “I’m going to leave anyway, as soon as we get back. Tamara doesn’t want me any more; she’d want me to go even if you weren’t coming, and I don’t like working for her; she’s awfully impatient and difficult. There’s another place in Hampton I can go to, a smaller riding school than Tamara’s, but the owner’s awfully nice. I hope you’ll get on all right, Ginny. You may do; you’re tougher than I am.”
Then a fresh string of lorries cut off further conversation, and they had to drop back to riding behind each other. Ginny was left to wonder about Angela’s words, and hope that she was not making a mistake in going to work at Hampton.
It was wonderful to turn the ponies loose on the rough grazing above the Slaters’ farm, and watch them wander happily away to roll and begin almost disbelievingly to graze on the good grass which grew between the patches of scrub.
“They’ll be all right there until Tyler wants them,” Mr. Slater told Ginny. “Not heard any more about him, have you?’
“Not yet,” Ginny told him. “I hope he won’t mind me taking Flash to Sussex, but I can’t turn him out at this time of year, and Dad spoke to the police yesterday. They said to take him, leaving word with them where he’s gone. If I turned him out the R.S.P.C.A. would sue Vic and me anyway for cruelty.”
“Yes. You can’t go turning a thin-skinned animal like him out in February,” agreed Mr. Slater. “Especially when he’s got no fat on him to keep him warm.”
Ginny agreed, and thanked him again for having the ponies. The farmer brushed her thanks away.
“It’s a pleasure,” he assured her. “Won’t do the land any harm, and I’ve plenty of hay. They can have a bale or so each day until the grass comes through. Besides, I hate to see an animal hungry. Don’t you worry, Miss; you go on and enjoy your new job. Be a sight better than working for Vic Tyler, I’ll be bound.”
And Ginny’s few doubts faded away as she realized that he was right. Whatever Tamara Blake was like, she could not be a worse employer.
That afternoon was fully occupied for Ginny, by packing and rushing out with her mother to buy a few essential things like underwear, a new pair of jeans (jodhpurs must wait until she could save up for them herself), and a new toothbrush. Tamara was coming round to pick her up at seven o’clock on Sunday morning.
It was a cold, rather grey dawn on the day that Ginny left Branton. She had said goodbye to Doreen and Deirdre the night before, but Doreen came to see her off, her jealousy almost gone in the emotion of saying goodbye, and even Deirdre climbed out bed to say a ‘Good luck’, that was far less grudging than it had been the night before. In the bleak, over-tidy front room which they seldom used Ginny kissed her mother goodbye, feeling suddenly inclined to wish that she was staying at home.
“Now you take care of yourself,” Mrs. Harris told her youngest daughter, hiding her emotion beneath a sharp manner. “Don’t let Miss Blake overwork you, and mind you write home every week. Send us a card when you get there.”
“Yes, Mum,” agreed Ginny, picking up her shabby suit-case. “l promise I’ll write.”
“If you don’t like it, come straight home,” instructed Mrs. Harris. “If you haven’t enough money for the fare write, and your Dad’ll send it to you.”
“Yes, Mum, I will,” promised Ginny, hearing the roar of Tamara’s box coming up Railway Rise.
Her parents stood in the doorway to watch her go, and as the box turned out of sight at the end of the street all Mrs. Harris’s doubts returned with a rush, and her husband was startled by the tremor in her usually strident voice as she spoke.
“I suppose we have done right, letting her go off like that, when she’s been so ill and all?” she asked him; she, who was usually the one to make family decisions and who was never in doubt.
Jim Harris swelled slightly with the pride of having his opinion asked, and slipped his arm around his wife’s thin waist.
“Course we have, Annie,” he told her. “She’ll have the time of her life. That Miss Blake seems a nice enough young woman. Shame about her face, though. She’s been pretty once.”
Slightly comforted, Mrs. Harris let her husband lead her back into the warm kitchen.
At the farm Angela had Gambler and Flash ready to be loaded, the latter looking very unlike himself in one of Tamara’s polished leather head-collars and a jute night rug. The palomino walked straight into his compartment with complete absence of fuss, and Ginny was pleased when Flash, perhaps remembering his racing days, did the same. Then, waving a last ‘Goodbye’ to Mrs. Slater, they were on their way south at last.