In the meantime she had to pretend for her father’s sake that she enjoyed a day’s hunting as much as he did. On frosty mornings when her father, in his scarlet coat, came bellowing into breakfast and informed her that they were off to draw the hill covert or to ride over to another gentleman’s estate to raise a fox in his moss – which, she remembered with a sinking heart, was reputed to be bottomless – she acted out bloodthirsty enthusiasm. Madeleine had missed her true vocation. She should have been an actress.
Her father came into the dining room one day looking extraordinarily well pleased with himself.
‘I’ve just bought you a grand little horse, Madeleine,’ he informed her, rubbing his hands in glee. ‘A dealer from Kelso brought it over. You wait till you see it. Your eyes will pop out, gel.’
Madeleine toyed with her game pie and forced an expression of delight on to her face. She knew the Colonel could never resist a good-looking horse. Even though its temper was atrociously bad, he would buy it for its appearance and breeding alone and then expect someone else to ride it, for he never threw a leg over the wild ones himself, pleading old age as his excuse.
‘Hurry up, finish eating,’ he ordered, ‘and come out to the yard and see this horse. I’ve never seen a better. Its sire was Prince Leopold, the Duke of York’s Derby winner in 1816…’
Madeleine felt sick with fear. A good-looking blood horse bred from a Derby winner that arrived in the Colonel’s stables as a bargain from a Kelso dealer was very bad news indeed. The horse was a lissom, red-nostrilled chestnut mare who fidgeted and sweated as she was led around the cobbled yard. It did not matter to the Colonel that his new acquisition laid back her ears and bared her teeth every time anyone went near her or lashed out with her hooves at the slightest noise, she was going to make this season’s mount for Madeleine.
‘She’s a bit high-spirited but you like them like that, don’t you?’ he said to his daughter who, he often boasted, could ride anything. ‘You’ll look wonderful on this little mare.’ Madeleine looked round the yard for the dealer who had brought this horror into her life but he had pocketed the Colonel’s money and fled before the old man had time to change his mind.
The first time she was thrown up on to its back, Madeleine lasted five minutes before the mare dumped her unceremoniously on to the ground. The second time it reared up and tried to scrape her off against the stable wall as soon as her bottom touched the saddle. The third time it bolted and carried her ten times round the paddock before she could stop it by sawing frantically at its mouth.
In tears, with mud on her face and a rip in her riding skirt, she told her father, ‘I will not ride that mare. I hate her, she’s vicious and she has a mouth like iron.’
The Colonel could not believe his ears. ‘Don’t be silly, old gel, she’s a beautiful animal. I’ve never seen a better-looking mare and her father was—’ he tried to reassure her.
‘I don’t care if her father was Napoleon himself. I’m not going to ride her. I’m afraid of her, Father.’
He was really shocked. ‘Afraid? You can’t be! If you’re afraid of a horse, the animal knows it. You’ve got to ride her to prove to yourself that you’re not afraid. Come on, get up again and get over your fear. That’s the only way.’
‘But I am afraid. I’m terrified. I know that horse will kill me,’ Madeleine wept, and ran into the house.
The head groom at Maryfield was a gypsy called Gilbert Kennedy, a dapper, dark-skinned man who had a wonderful way with horses. He sympathized with Miss Madeleine because he had always known how she fought to conquer her fear of horses when the Colonel forced her on to greater and greater feats of daring. Without asking the Colonel’s permission, Kennedy led the mare into the stable and bedded her down. He was not going to join the Colonel in persuading the girl to do something she dreaded.
Later the same day when the Colonel ordered him to saddle up the horse again for Madeleine, Kennedy improvised. ‘I’m afraid the mare’s going a little short in her left fore, sir,’ he lied, ‘I’ll have to put a poultice on her leg and she can’t go out today.’
‘Short in her left fore!’ the Colonel was highly disturbed at the news. ‘Bring her out, Kennedy, and let me see.’
The mare, going perfectly sound, was trotted up and down the yard, but Kennedy persisted, pointing and saying, ‘Look, sir, you can see she’s going short, look at that, yes, there she goes, oh yes, she’s lame all right,’ until the Colonel allowed himself to be persuaded that his eyes were deceiving him. Not wanting to admit to failing to see when a horse was lame, he agreed with Kennedy and Madeleine was granted a reprieve.
She was not fooled by Kennedy’s ruse, however, and hung back after her father left the stables to say, ‘Thank you, Kennedy. I know the mare’s perfectly sound but I’ll be forced to ride her tomorrow and I’ll be just as scared then.’
‘Don’t you worry, I’ll take the steam out of her, I’ll tire her out before you’ve got to get up on her, Miss,’ promised Kennedy. ‘I’ll get someone to ride her into the ground.’
* * *
Jane had been slow to find her daughter a job because she could not bear the idea of sending her away from home, so during the next couple of months Aylie had hung around the stables, begging rides. Gilbert Kennedy recognized Aylie’s enthusiasm, and allowed her to help with the horses. That was how she came to witness the drama between the Colonel and Madeleine. When Gilbert made his promise to Madeleine, Aylie knew this was her opportunity.
Madeleine’s new mare was little over fourteen hands high and light-boned, but all the stable lads were heavily built, so that if the mare behaved well with them, she could well turn wild when a lighter rider went on her back. By rights it would be safest for her to grow used to a woman rider before letting Madeleine try her out again.
‘Let me ride that mare. Please let me try. If she throws me off, I won’t worry. I’m not scared of her,’ Aylie pleaded with Kennedy.
The groom looked reflectively at the girl. She was just a little thing, a child, but he’d seen her handling some of the most vicious horses in the stable with calmness and authority, and he’d promised poor Miss Madeleine that he’d quieten the horse down. It was worth a try.
‘All right, we’ll take her out into the back paddock. Mind, if anything happens to you, it’s your ain fault.’
As the mare was being saddled Kennedy’s conscience pained him, but when Aylie stepped up to the horse and gently began to fondle her ears, he began to relax. This child was without fear of any kind and though the mare drew back her lips and rolled her eyes, Aylie persisted, whispering in a soft murmur that brought the animal’s ears forward in an attempt to listen to what was being said to her. They stood together, the mare with her head down listening to the girl and the girl concentrating entirely on winning the animal’s confidence.
After a bit she turned and said to Kennedy, ‘It’s all right now. Can you give me a leg up?’
She rode with her thick skirt kirtled up, showing her thin legs in the woollen stockings and heavy boy’s boots that she’d worn on her walks to and from school. Her seat in the saddle was light but confident and her little hands looked capable as she gripped the reins with gently hooked fingers.
‘Take a tight hold of her when you get into the field,’ Kennedy warned, ‘she’s going to try to bolt with you.’
Then he opened the gate into the paddock and stood aside to let them pass.
The mare knew they expected her to bolt so she walked slowly out into the field and then began to buck. She tried everything to dislodge the girl on her twisting, writhing, plunging back but Aylie clung like a limpet, bottom firmly down and hands close to the horse’s neck. Her thin spine twisted and turned and her long hair burst from its ribbon and flowed out behind her as, giving up bucking, the mare took off. It reared, shuddered, galloped and jumped but the girl stayed on and eventually her will predominated over that of the horse until they were cantering in tight circles round and round, back and forward
with the assembled stable staff applauding enthusiastically.
* * *
Kennedy sent a message to old Archie to ask his bondager Jane if she would come to see him.
When Jane came into the yard she asked Kennedy suspiciously, ‘What do you want? My lassie tells me she’s been riding that wild horse of Miss Madeleine’s. Can’t Miss Madeleine ride it herself?’
Kennedy was, like all gypsies, an able liar. ‘She’s not very well and the mare needs exercising, but it’s a wee animal and it can’t carry a big man. Your lassie’s a good jockey and I heard she’s left the school and needs a job. I’ll take her on here in the stables for a few months. I’ll give her a half yin’s wage, sixpence a day, and she can live at home with you if she rides the mare for me.’
‘But it’s not a job for a lassie,’ said Jane with doubt in her voice. ‘Women never work with horses, and how do I know she’ll be safe?’
Kennedy reassured her. ‘Take my word, Missus, she’ll be fine. I just want her to ride the mare round every day before Miss Madeleine goes hunting. She’s a great wee rider.’
Because the mother’s anxiety still showed, Kennedy leaned towards Jane and said with awe in his voice, ‘Your bairn’s a wizard on a horse. I’ve never seen anything like it in a lassie before.’
The following years were halcyon times for Aylie. Jane was glad that her daughter was so happy working in the Maryfield stables and though her dreams for Aylie might have been different, it pleased her that the girl was not being forced to work as a maid or take up the backbreaking toil of a bondager.
Because she was not a member of the bondager gang, Aylie did not have to be dressed in the same uniform as her mother but went to work in a dark grey drugget skirt, boots and a thick jacket. In cold weather she wrapped her head in a printed headscarf.
Aylie felt no fear and horses went smoothly for her, so smoothly that as he watched them cantering round the paddock, Gilbert felt it a great pity that the Colonel could not see how well Madeleine’s mare looked when it was being properly ridden.
At first Aylie rode astride like a boy, but when she grew taller and her figure began to round out, Gilbert felt this was indelicate and he taught her to ride side saddle, which made her look even more magnificent on a horse.
Maryfield was a happy place with the easygoing Colonel as its master. So long as his hounds were running well and his horses sound, he never complained and turned a blind eye when Gilbert occasionally brought in a horse from his dealing friends, put Aylie up on it in the paddock to show its paces over fences, and made a fast sale to one of the Colonel’s friends.
Apart from the time she spent with the horses, summer Saturday evenings at Maryfield were what Aylie loved best because then all the people from the cottages would gather at the nearby crossroads with the workers from nearby farms. A few of the men played fiddles and melodeons while couples danced in the dust. The lane was fringed with flowers, white meadowsweet with its heavenly scent; pink campions; tall daisies with pure white petals and yellow hearts; creeping purple vetch beneath the tangled bushes of pink-flowering dog rose. This was the backdrop to their balls, as fine a setting as any chandelier-hung ballroom as far as they were concerned. Romances flourished in the warm summer evenings while the jigs were played and old men and women, looking on with smiles on their worn faces, remembered the times when they too danced with lightness in their feet and hope in their hearts. The tunes they danced to were very old, ‘The Shepherd’s Rant’, a stately minuet that turned the dancers into elegant figures from a bygone age, and ‘The Scotch Bonnet’ which sent them stamping and shouting up and down in hectic glee.
Jane rarely danced, though when she did she moved with a stately elegance that impressed her daughter. Aylie, who loved dancing, was on her feet for every tune, a wildly stepping little tomboy with an intense face and flowing hair. One late evening when the dancing was all but finished, Gilbert turned up in a group of men.
One of them was younger than the others, a flashing-eyed youth with a red handkerchief knotted round his neck and his jacket slung over one shoulder. This bold-looking boy, a gypsy from the darkness of his hair and skin, danced with all the pretty girls – though not with little Aylie – and as she watched him she thought that he was the most dashing-looking man she had ever seen.
Though he was not a great deal older than she was herself, he had the air of a man with much experience, a dangerous air that thrilled her in much the same way as the feeling of a nervous horse prancing under her.
‘Who was that boy with Gilbert?’ she asked her mother as they walked home in the gathering darkness.
‘Which boy?’ asked Jane.
‘The one with the black hair and the red neckerchief.’
Jane sounded disapproving. ‘Oh, that gypsy boy. It was Hugh Kennedy, Gilbert’s son. The one who buys and sells horses, they tell me.’
Aylie was silent for a bit and then she asked, ‘Was my father’s hair that colour?’
Jane was genuinely shocked. ‘Of course not. It was brown, dark brown, very glossy, and it waved. It was long and he’d never get it cut.’
‘Was it the same colour as Hugh Kennedy’s?’ Aylie persisted.
‘Hugh Kennedy’s? No, of course it wasn’t. Hugh Kennedy’s hair is blue-black like a crow’s wing and it looks as if he puts goose grease on it.’
‘All gypsies have that sort of hair, at least all the ones I know,’ said Aylie.
Jane drew herself up proudly. ‘Your father wasn’t a gypsy. He was an aristocrat and he looked it. He was a gentleman! And the less you know about gypsies the better, my girl, because none of them are to be trusted.’
‘Gilbert’s all right,’ said her daughter and Jane had to agree.
‘Well, yes, but he’s not like the rest of them. At least he’s got a job and sticks to it. Most of the others just wander around, doing this and that. That son of his, Hugh, works in the summer with labouring gangs at the harvest or the potato picking but the rest of the time he deals in horses and what he does in the winter is anyone’s guess. They say he’s involved with the smugglers.’
She couldn’t have said anything that interested her daughter more and she regretted it as soon as the words were out of her mouth because Aylie stared back at her round-eyed. ‘Involved with the smugglers? How romantic!’
* * *
On Sundays Aylie and her mother still went to the Charterhall cellar and pored over Alice’s notebooks, for Jane was becoming more and more interested in her mother’s old cures. When some of her neighbours in the farm cottages became sick, she started to treat them and her fame as a healer spread as her mother’s had done before her. There were still people who were in awe of her as a witch but this reputation seemed to make her cures even more effective. In fact many of her treatments did smack of witchcraft for when a patient suffered from toothache she wrote a special charm on a piece of paper and hung it round the sufferer’s neck. Her favourite cure for madness or derangement of the mind was to rub the affected person’s forehead with a smooth slab of ivory and to ease the pains of childbirth she rubbed the labouring woman’s belly with an old stone, called a toadstone, which was really a piece of fossil fish eaten through with holes like a scrap of ancient cheese.
* * *
Aylie loved the sound of the Colonel’s hounds, especially when they were out on the hill. Then their baying was like music in her ears and she felt her blood rise when she heard it. She often watched from the top of a gate as the hounds made their music among the gorse and the scarlet-coated riders streamed after them in glorious pursuit. Her eyes shone at the thought of joining in, but then she would remember: I’m only a servant.
But the Colonel had noticed Aylie, for he knew an equestrian genius when he saw one. ‘That girl’s a natural,’ he said to Kennedy one day as they stood watching Aylie schooling Madeleine’s recalcitrant mare. By now the Colonel regretted his impetuous purchase and wanted to be rid of her, but before she could be sold she had to be seen perform
ing well on the hunting field.
‘If Madeleine could ride the mare as well as that girl, we’d have an offer for her in no time,’ he told Kennedy.
‘You’d get a buyer quick enough if the wee lassie rode it to hounds,’ suggested the groom.
The Colonel laughed at this but a couple of days later he brought up the subject again. ‘Could that girl take the mare out hunting, do you think?’
Kennedy shrugged. ‘You’re the master, you can let people ride after your hounds or turn them away. She’s a nice-looking girl and if we got her dressed up she wouldn’t look like a bondager’s bairn.’
They gave her an old habit of Madeleine’s which was far too large, but she and Jane stitched and tucked away at it till it fitted.
Early in the morning of the meet, a maid came out of the big house with a shiny top hat in a box and handed it to Gilbert, who carefully fitted it on Aylie’s head. Then he tied a pristine white stock round her neck and stood back to survey his handiwork. She looked every inch the lady.
When she saw herself – or at least bits of herself – in the broken shard of mirror on the saddle room wall, she could not help staring in astonished admiration. The shiny black boots on her legs delighted her, the feel of the soft white gloves over her fingers made her soul cry out in joy, and when she mounted the mare and spread the generous skirt over her lap she felt magnificent.
‘You look real fine,’ said Gilbert.
As the stable boys chorused their agreement, she saw Gilbert’s son, the dark-haired dancer, standing at the saddle room door and watching her with a peculiarly arresting stare. As she turned the horse and rode out of the yard after the Colonel and his whippers in, the gypsy boy suddenly smiled at her and she noticed how white and regular his teeth were, and how bold his eyes.
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