Tab had come home.
* * *
It wasn’t long before I’d finished Black Beauty so I went in search of another book, and then another and then another.
Over the weeks I found I was spending more and more time at the village school. Mrs. Rhys, the teacher, needed a helper and I would go around the children showing them what to do. The fact that neither Mrs. Rhys nor the children hardly spoke a word of English made my job all the more challenging. Twice a week I took over the class for English reading lessons. I would write words on large sheets of paper—nothing too demanding. Words like “up” or “down” or “inside” or “outside” or “across” or “later”—easy sorts of words that everybody should know. I would hold them up and say the word and Mrs. Rhys would work out what I meant and tell the class the same sort of word in Welsh. I would do it several times, then mix up the sheets before testing them. I would test them again in the following lesson. Some would remember, but some wouldn’t. So I’d keep on at it until everybody understood.
At the weekends I would pack my rucksack and wander the hills and moors and coves and bays. Alone. Still looking for the creatures I’d come to see. My travels took me up mountains and right the way along the stretches of coast in both directions. I scanned the horizons with my binoculars. I dug about in muddy forests. I fought my way through walls of brambles.
But I found nothing.
And I realized my journey had really been about the journey, as much as the prize at the end of it. I had wandered through unknown lands, traveled in ways I’d never ever dreamt about. I had seen the sky turn itself slowly from dull violet to a blue you could row across in a boat, seen the grass change from fake to the real bean green thing. I had seen the trees come alive with each step farther west, and flowers just begging to be sniffed.
I had met many people. Most good—the Wessexes, Mr. Knottman, the Wizard, Mr. Nets, Rhodri and Llinos. A few bad—Miss Caritas, the Minister, Mordecai.
I had met them and coped. And here I was now, the wind blustering through my hair as I took peaceful, thoughtful walks over the lands of West Whales.
I mean Wales.
My life had gone on. It hadn’t just stopped still. I hadn’t just stood there and waited for things to wash across me like the pebbles on the beach. I had marched into the sea and dived in—turned over by some waves, yes, but I had surfaced; I had swum. My thoughts sometimes went back to Lahn Dan—I mean London—and there were moments, I’ll admit, when I missed the tall buildings and people like the Professor and Gry and Bracken. And my mama, of course. Always Mama. But my life had slipped on. For now, this was where I belonged.
And the horses?
I slowly came to believe that there were no horses. That they had truly died out when mankind had been so consumed by its own ideas and principles that they had released the Gases. Man had stamped its hefty foot across everything else and hadn’t cared what lived and what died. The Wizard and Shy had been mistaken. They had seen something else. Wind blowing leaves in the distance. A sudden burst of midsummer rain. Whatever. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been horses.
There were no horses.
* * *
Or at least that’s what I thought at the time.
YEARS LATER
I AWOKE ONE morning to the faint chug-chug-chug from a car. I stepped out to find one of the Minister’s modpods pulling into the center of the village. A sudden rush of panic whooshed in my chest. Had the Minister sent new police men to come and get his daughter after all this time? It couldn’t be true. Surely he had given up all hope of catching me now?
I held my ground as I watched the door swing open and a young woman jump out. She was tall and thin with sticky-up spiky hair and the way she stood reminded me of somebody.
“Gry?” I asked cautiously. “Gry? Is that you?”
She turned to look at me and her whole face sparkled.
“At last! Serendipity. We found you.”
I ran up to her and threw my arms around her. “We?” I questioned.
“Yes, my dear,” came a voice from the modpod. “We.” The opposite door opened then slammed shut and around the front of the vehicle came a bent-double old man with a stick, finding it hard to walk. “I hope you don’t mind us landing upon you like this, but you really are a difficult person to track down, Serendipity Goudge.”
The tears seemed to spin from my eyes and I lost my grip on Gry.
“Professor?”
He struggled and straightened, holding his arms open for me. “So very good to see you, my dear. So very good indeed.”
* * *
London had changed, he told us. Everything in London had changed. There was no such thing as an Au or a Cu or a Pb now. The crowds had spoken, led by the storytellers, of all people.
“Everybody’s calling it the ‘Storyteller’s Revolution,’” the Professor mumbled over his stew. “But to be honest, we humble tellers-of-tales and recounters-of-history merely helped to start the process. It was the people of Lahn Dan who took it all to their hearts so valiantly.” I could still spot his pride even though he tried to disguise it the best he could.
“So what about the Minister?” I asked. “Is he … dead?”
“No, no. Goodness, no. We are not barbarians.”
“What has happened to him then?”
The Professor stared me fixedly in the eye. “You know, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“The Minister. Your mother.” His eyebrows moved closer to each other. “You.”
“Yes. I do.”
He sighed and sat farther back in his chair. “She tried to keep it from you, Serendipity. Tried to hide it. Did a good job too, if I’m being honest. But I think she always knew that, one day, you might find out.”
“Is he safe?”
“Oh, yes. He’s safe. Safe and free. Which is more than could have been said for the people of Lahn Dan during his ministry. He lives in an apartment at Bucknam Place—”
“In prison!”
“Not anymore, it’s not. He lives in an apartment in Bucknam Place and is free to come and go when he chooses. Within reason.”
We sat there silently for a minute, dipping rye bread into our stew.
“You know, Serendipity,” he said, a moment or two later. “None of us can choose our parents. Neither our mothers, nor our fathers. We simply are who we are.”
* * *
The sun was low in the sky as the Professor hobbled along the wooden jetty in front of us, his stick tip-tapping away. The sea rolled beneath and the boats jounced up and down.
“Strange, isn’t it?” he said, turning back to look at Gry and me. “The way you picture things in your head.” He waved his stick across the horizon. “This, for example … I hadn’t realized just how … just how big the sea would be. Look at it. It goes on forever. Remarkable. Quite remarkable.” He lowered his stick to his side and stood there, staring at the water lit suddenly red by the sun.
“He’s dying, you know?” Gry said quietly.
“What?”
“Three months. Six months. That’s what they said.”
I couldn’t reply.
“He was determined to find you, though. Kept saying how finding you was to be his last, great adventure. His last, great dream.”
I smiled to myself, the Professor’s words at the Emm Twenty-five flushing back to me—This is your dream, Serendipity. Dreams are things that you have to reach and stretch for.
“He’s definitely dying? There’s nothing anyone can do?”
Gry shook her head.
We both watched as the Professor saluted the sun as it faded gently into the sea.
* * *
Gry returned to London a few days later. There was urgent work to be done wading through the Ministry’s records of political prisoners—families to be informed, children and parents reunited. Bracken had joined a team of archivists, scouring documents and cross-referencing names, and Gry—having just acquired her mo
dpod license—was needed to transport and store all this material at the British Library.
Soon Professor Nimbus’s strength started to fail—even Llinos’s amazing caraway seed cakes couldn’t sustain him—and Tab and I resorted to pushing him around the village in a wheeling chair. As his eyesight worsened, I read him books.
“You can read!” he said the first time I took down a book. “Goodness me, Serendipity. You can read.” The smile on his face spoke to the moon and back and I knew he was so proud of me.
I told him stories of our journey and of all the people we met. All of it. Every last single bit of it. Even of Mordecai and his lonely new life on the island. But at the very end, when the Professor was bedbound and silent—everything on the verge of stopping—I would simply hold his hand and wipe the sweat from his forehead just before wiping the tears from my own face.
When he did pass, we found a sweet spot on the hill above the village to bury him. Tab made up a headstone of a wooden cross and I told him what to carve into it. It read:
Here lies
HORATIO NAPOLEON NIMBUS
Scholar
Storyteller
Liberator of London
* * *
It was a Sunday, and sometimes on Sundays I ventured into the fields to the north where the wildflowers bloomed particularly well. Taking a basket with me I collected as many of the purple cornflowers, yellow flags, Solomon’s seals, red valerians, lilacs, brooms, sweet woodruffs and forget-me-nots as I could possibly manage, to bring back for the older ladies in the village, who filled their vases and cooed at them all week.
I set off before the rest of the village had surfaced and made my way along the sweeping roads before climbing the rotting stile into the boggy moorlands, through the patches of oak forests and over the acres of old farmland.
The flowers were especially full this morning, so I cut them carefully and lined them up gently along the length of the basket.
It was just as I was about to set off home that I heard the sound. It was distant and unlike anything I’d ever heard before. A strange, high-pitched stuttering.
I swiveled around to see where it was coming from.
And there they were. Two of them. Trotting up from the wood, coming to see me. They moved slowly, but not uncertainly. Large, beautiful creatures plodding their way up the hill towards me.
Horses.
The one in front was a chestnut color, his eyes open and wide as his tail swished. The one to the rear was a grayish white, with a long mane that fell gracefully over her neck. They whinnied and snorted as they got nearer.
I watched them calmly, my heart filling with a glow that melted away the years like ice. Suddenly I was that little girl in the Gallery Market again, staring at Whistlejacket. Thinking and wondering and hoping.
And now here they were.
I thought of Tab and wished that he could have been here with me to see them. But Tab’s journey hadn’t ever really been about the horses. He had come looking for somewhere he could call home. Something he could reach out and touch and know it was his. And in the Haven, on the sea, he had found it.
I put the basket down and pulled out the apple I was saving for my lunch. I cut it into pieces, and waited for them.
“Hello, boy.” I held a chunk of apple out to the chestnut as he came alongside me. He sniffed at my hand before snaffling it up with his rubbery lips, so I placed another chunk on my flattened palm. The white soon joined us and was just as greedy as her friend. In seconds my apple had gone.
“All gone, I’m afraid. All gone. No more apple.”
But they didn’t seem to mind. It was as though they knew and they understood that I had been waiting for them; that I had traveled to this very point to be here at this very moment to see them. Their heads nuzzled closer and I could smell that warm musty smell that I had vaguely caught in the old stables at Ashdown. Rich and reassuring.
I reached up and wrapped my arms around their muscular necks, and pulled them nearer to me. They were real. They were alive. I wasn’t imagining them. I wasn’t dreaming.
They existed.
I cried and they watched me, allowing me to wipe my cheeks in their magnificent manes. They didn’t move. Didn’t pull away. They stood there as proud and as beautiful as I’d always imagined them to be, creatures with souls as deep as the deepest seas and as wide as the skies. These most majestic of beasts. These Whistlejackets.
My thoughts filled with Mama and that bashed-up wooden toy she’d bought with her last few pennies once upon a long ago.
* * *
It was nighttime. Mama had spent all day carving an ear for the horse from an old wooden clothes peg. It was larger than the other ear and rougher-looking and it had fallen off three times already, but I told her it was wonderful.
“So,” she started with a laughing wheeze in her voice, “have you decided on a name yet?”
I looked out. The other pods were shut up now. Mrs. Ludovic’s lamp had just come on. In the old days the Lahn Dan High had turned, the people flown like birds, soaring over city streets and the boats on the river Tems.
“We’ve had Magic and Fairy, Firefly and Velvet. I think we’ve had all the names under the moon and the God Man.”
The sky was prickled with stars. One star in particular was trying its ever-so-hardest to shine before a big purple cloud faded it out. I drew the curtains, my fingers trembling and my heart nearly slipping its ribs at how hard that star was trying.
“Hope.”
I turned and smiled at Mama propped up with pillows, her skin so thin, her eyes all red and tiredy. She smiled her warm wide smile right back.
“I’ve decided on Hope.”
* * *
I don’t know how long I stood there. It may have been minutes, it may have been hours. I wished it could roll into days or weeks. But I do know that at some point I nestled my head into their necks one last time, gave them both a final sturdy pat before stepping back and letting them go.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Heartfelt thanks go to Liz Szabla for her support and trust, Miriam Altshuler, Reiko Davis, Eileen Savage, Matilda Johnson and, of course, Julia Churchill.
Also thanks to Mark, Benji and Loveday for their great ideas.
FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK OR VISIT US ONLINE AT MACKIDS.COM.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Zillah Bethell was born in a leprosy hospital in Papua New Guinea, spent her childhood barefoot playing in the jungle, and didn’t own a pair of shoes until she came to the United Kingdom when she was eight years old. She was educated at Oxford University and lives in Wales with her family. This is her first children’s book. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: Inside
Chapter 1: Serendipity
Chapter 2: Professor Nimbus
Chapter 3: Storytelling
Chapter 4: The Gallery Market
Chapter 5: The Telebracelet
Chapter 6: Caritas and the Crystal Tower
Chapter 7: The Beekeeper
Chapter 8: The Dream
Chapter 9: Nimbus’s Promise
Chapter 10: Thornton Heef
Chapter 11: The Emm Twenty-five Wall
Chapter 12: The Minister
Chapter 13: To Bucknam Place
Chapter 14: Escaping
Part Two: Outside
Chapter 15: The King
Chapter 16: A Good Heart
Chapter 17: Flight
Chapter 18: Tab’s Path
<
br /> Chapter 19: Bikes
Chapter 20: The Valley of the Wolves
Chapter 21: The Dragon
Chapter 22: Ashdown
Chapter 23: Saddles and Books
Chapter 24: A Police Man’s Tale
Chapter 25: Black Beauty
Chapter 26: Too Much Comfort
Chapter 27: The Fear
Chapter 28: The H H Bridge
Part Three: Across
Chapter 29: The Wizard on the Hill
Chapter 30: A Debt Repaid
Chapter 31: The End of the World
Chapter 32: Bishops and Clerks
Chapter 33: The Invisible Island
Chapter 34: The Haven
Years Later
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Zillah Bethell
A Feiwel and Friends Book
An imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
mackids.com
All rights reserved.
Feiwel and Friends logo designed by Filomena Tuosto
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945 ext. 5442 or by e-mail at [email protected].
First U.S. hardcover edition April 2017
eBook edition April 2017
eISBN 9781250093950
A Whisper of Horses Page 23
