Chapter 2

DORA, THE GIRL who worked with Steve in the stables, had been home for the weekend, but she came back on an early bus, to help with the feeds. She would rather be here than at home anyway. The Colonel had to force her to take an occasional weekend at her parents’ flat in the industrial town which sprawled along the valley, to keep her mother from storming up the hill to complain.

Steve’s mother did not come, and he had no father. This was his home, and his family. Cobbler’s Dream, the pony he had rescued from a spoiled and vicious child, was the horse he loved best.

It was going to be a wet night, so Dora brought the rest of the old horses in from the fields. She was coming round the corner of the barn with the two Shetlands, a handful of shaggy mane in each hand, when a car stopped in the road and a man walked into the yard. A worn-looking horsey type of man, with bow legs and a lean brown face.

‘I’m sorry, we’re closed to visitors.’ Dora shoved one Shetland into its stable with a slap on its bustling bottom and made a grab for the long tangled tail of the other, as it ducked under her arm and headed for the feed shed. ‘Shut that door!’

The man moved quickly and shut the door in Jock’s square face. Dora got her arms round his neck and practically carried him back to the loose box he shared with Jamie and the tiny donkey. They had tubs on the floor because the manger was too high, and they nipped each other round and round the box, going from tub to tub like a buffet lunch.

‘I’ve come to see the manager,’ the bow-legged man said.

‘The Colonel?’ You were supposed to say he was not at home on Sunday afternoons, but Dora always stated facts, even when they were ruder. ‘He’s in the house, but he can’t see you.’

‘Why not?’

‘He’s probably asleep.’

The man bit his lip, which was cracked and dry, like badly kept leather. ‘Could you possibly … It’s an emergency. About a horse.’

‘Another customer?’ Callie came up. The stables at the farm were full, but she always wanted more.

‘It’s a hard case.’ The man looked sad. He looked defeated, as if he had known a lot of disappointments and could not stand any more. ‘The mare is in bad trouble.’

‘I’ll get the Colonel,’ Dora said, but Callie said, ‘Let me. He hates being woken up, but at least I do it gently.’

The last time a horse was down at night and thrashing in its box, and Dora had shouted in the Colonel’s ear, he had sat up and yelled, ‘Messerschmitts – take cover!’

The Colonel came out of the back door with his yellow mongrel dog, pulling his worn tweed cap over sleepy eyes. He was a tall thin man with a slight limp from the war, and a scar by his eye where a kick from one of his horses had left him able to move the right side of his face more than the left, so that you could not always tell if he was serious or joking. He limped down the cinder path in his socks because he couldn’t find a pair of shoes, walking on his heels with his toes turned up, because the ground was damp.

He and the bow-legged man leaned against posts with their hands in their pockets and talked quietly. Callie put a wheelbarrow in a doorway and pretended to be cleaning out Lancelot’s clean stable, so that she could hear.

‘… but I can’t do any more,’ the man was saying, ‘because I lost my job.’

‘I’m sorry.’ The Colonel waited. He was a good listener.

‘Down at the Pinecrest.’

The Pinecrest was an unattractive shabby hotel outside the town, with no pine trees in sight and not on the crest of a hill, but in a swampy valley where a polluted stream ran sluggishly through, gathering more pollution from the garbage that the Pinecrest cook threw out of the back door.

‘I was in the stable there. They hire out riding hacks, you know.’

‘Yes, I know.’ The Colonel made a face as if he would rather not know.

‘It’s been on my mind,’ the groom said. ‘I done my best for my horses, but they want to get the last scrap of work out of them, and they’re not fit for it.’ The Colonel waited. ‘Well, you can’t feed more than the owner will buy, can you? The pasture is all grazed out and the hay he bought – you wouldn’t use it for bedding.’

‘They got a licence to run a riding stable?’

‘Must do, or they couldn’t be in business. I don’t know how they got it though, unless they bribed the authorities, which I wouldn’t put it past them, the kind of people they are.’

‘Why did you stay with them?’

‘Work’s not easy to find.’ The groom shrugged. ‘I kept my mouth shut, because I needed the job, and my horses needed me. But then I couldn’t hold myself in any longer. When I hit that boy of theirs – he was lucky I didn’t kill him – they said, “Pack your bags and keep walking.”’

‘What happened?’

‘They’ve got this old mare, see? A good one once. They got her off the track because she wouldn’t race, and they’ve always kept her down and very poor, so she’d be quiet enough to ride. Quiet! The poor thing can hardly raise a canter. She gets a saddle sore, of course, with that thin thoroughbred skin and no flesh on her. Well, then it’s my day off, and this fat lady comes to the hotel. “I want to ride Beauty Queen,” she says. Beauty Queen, that’s what they call her, though she’d win no prizes anywhere. I come back early with a bag of cracked corn I’d managed to scrounge from a friend of mine who has some poultry, and someone yells, “Hey you! Saddle up Beauty for this lady.” “Her back’s not healed,” I says, shutting the door of my car quick, so they wouldn’t see the bag of corn and grab it to make porridge for the guests. “Saddle her up, I told you!” That was their eldest son, name of Todd, very ugly customer. When I refused, he gets the saddle himself and thumps it on that poor old mare’s back’ – the groom winced, as if he could feel the pain of it himself – ‘and leads her out. I grab the rein and start to lead her back inside, and when the boy gets in the doorway to stop me, I knock him sideways.’

‘Into the manure heap, I do hope.’ Callie was frankly listening now, standing in Lancelot’s doorway with a foot on the barrow handle and her chin on the fork.

‘Right.’ The groom smiled for the first time, then turned back to the Colonel with a long face. ‘So I lost my job, and the horses lost me, and Beauty – well, God knows what will happen to her.’

‘What about the RSPCA?’

‘The Inspector is away. I can’t wait, because I’m leaving for Scotland first thing tomorrow. I’ve a pal up there might have a job for me. So I came to you, because I’d heard what you do here for horses. Will you help?’

‘Oh Lord,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’ll try.’ He hated trouble and this looked like trouble, but for a horse, he would get into trouble with both feet. Last year, he had got himself knocked out at Westerham Fair, taking on a giant of a man who was dragging off a mare in foal tied to the tail gate of a lorry.