Lu lay in bed, listening to the wind butt its head against the cottage like the big bad wolf trying to get in. She could hear the faint hiss of dust and grit against the windows.
The wind had arrived suddenly just before dawn, so hot already it seemed to drag all coolness from the world, first a strange high moan, a gust that shook the shingled roof, and then an endless screaming, leaves pattering against the cottage and the occasional thud of branches or the snap of twigs. Lu supposed most big bad wolves appeared suddenly, like cars that screamed out of a side street to take away everything you were . . .
But the wolf had failed. Because she was still who she was. She always had been. That was where most of the pain of the last year had come from: not just losing Mum and her sight, but fearing she had lost herself too.
She had not. She was the girl who could bond so closely with a horse — and not just any horse, but a king — that they worked better as a pair than alone. She was a girl whom horses trusted to match their strength with her judgement in a true and total partnership.
Losing her sight had not destroyed this. It had, if anything, enhanced it. Perhaps all humans relied so heavily on their sight that they forgot to use the other senses. But those senses were even more valuable than sight when you were partnered with a horse like Mountain Lion, earning his trust, respect and love.
She had despaired because everyone seemed so keen to push her instead into a nice suitable job for blind people. She was still a long way from properly defining a future. She’d need to work out ways around not being able to see: persuade clients to use a Dictaphone instead of sending her letters, maybe. Though a secretary could read letters out to her . . .
The biggest step of all would be convincing others. Working out how to show them too, because everyone, even Joe, was going to take one look at her and think, Poor blind girl, then subconsciously assume she couldn’t without wondering if, just possibly, she could.
Could a blind girl be a jockey? She was going to damn well find out. She was going to be a training jockey, at the very least. And from there on, well, she’d see.
But she had to take the first steps now. Most of them boring but necessary. Study braille, not just because it would be useful, even vital, but because it would show that she could, no, had adapted. Learn to look as if she were sighted, which she’d need help with. But expert help with hair, make-up and clothing should be relatively easy to find, with three step-aunts who looked like they ate Vogue for breakfast instead of muesli.
Plus keep riding, but with good horses, horses who saw their desire to challenge the horizon in her too. Learn to muck out a stable again — show everyone at the stables she was truly one of them, was not claiming special privileges. Because there were going to have to be special privileges. Rules like ‘don’t have a half-open door as my cane will miss it and I’ll get a black eye’ and ‘paths are left clear always and every tool hung on a wall, not left propped against a wall’. Others like ‘please read aloud any sign I need to know about and we need to have braille on every sign I need to read’, which would include each horse’s name next to their box.
And anyone watching her forking sawdust and manure would not think, That is a blind girl, but, That’s Lu Borgino mucking out a stall.
She’d ring Joe in the morning. Try, somehow, to explain she had not come home before not because she no longer felt it was home, or that he was no longer her father. Joe would always be her father, till the sun became dark and cold.
And she’d better call late tonight instead, because Joe would probably cry when she explained why she never answered his letters, often refused his calls, returned his hugs politely and passively when he visited — that it was not because she didn’t love him, but because she couldn’t bear to love him so much and lose him along with her horses.
If Joe cried, she’d start sobbing too, and she wasn’t prepared to do that if there was anyone else around the office.
From this moment on she was not going to be the blind girl who waited for others to organise things for her, tell her where to go and when. She was going to leave a note, neatly, politely written, and pinned with a thumbtack to her cottage door, telling Nicholas or anyone else looking for her that she had taken some apples over to Mountain Lion, because he might be spooked by the wind. But she would be back for breakfast, which hopefully would be the first time anyone would be likely to look for her. Four hours was plenty of time to get there and back without being missed . . .
Lu smiled. And with no need of a torch either. Suddenly the whole day and night were hers. She might have lost the daylight, but she had found the night.
She’d visit Mountain Lion every night, she decided. Let him learn her hand and voice. But not ride him. Nicholas was Flinty’s son-in-law, no, grandson-in-law. She needed Nicholas to tell Flinty that Lu Borgino was competent, responsible and reliable. And that she understood Mountain Lion like no one else ever could.
With her help and Joe’s and a good word from Nicholas to help make it happen, in a couple of years Flinty McAlpine would have her Cup winner.
Yes, this was the heart of her. Always had been. She was lucky, she realised, not just to know so strongly where her heart lay, but to have found it again. Was it what Nicholas had never quite found?
The wind rattled the windows again. She dressed as hurriedly as she could, which would have felt like an unbelievably slow business a year ago. But a year ago she’d have seen at a glance if her shirt was on inside out, or if her socks didn’t match. She couldn’t afford to have anyone look sideways at her now. For the rest of her life she had to be so perfectly put together that people could ignore her white cane.
She grinned. Maybe it was time to grow out of ‘Lu’ and give people a name they’d remember.
Lucrezia Borgino could manage anything.
Wind! The fire rolled in the wild west wind, kicked up its heels like a mountain horse, twisted, flared and then began to burn: fresh new country, bark, trees, tussocks, towards the east . . .