My father’s voice is suddenly in my ear and it’s all I can do not to leap to my feet and squeak.
He is strange, of late. My father. He looks at things that aren’t there. He answers questions I have not asked. He speaks to people who I know are long, long dead. His lined face pierces my heart. His great brown eyes are soft, too soft, where they should be sharp. He sounds all right now.
Of course he’s not actually in my ear, but close enough, in Soldier’s stall next door. Must have been dreaming deeper than I thought, or they’ve crept up on the lightest of feet. His question, Shakes’s voice replies.
Papa’s saying, ‘The poultice should set it right by next week.’
Someone clicks their tongue and Tom’s voice says, ‘Come up, now.’
They’re quiet. I picture them all three bent and earnest over Soldier’s hoof.
‘He’s doing well,’ says Papa.
‘Yup,’ says Tom.
Papa says, ‘The horses will miss you.’
Tom says, ‘Someone else’ll come along soon enough.’
‘And the horses will learn to like it,’ says Shakes, comfortable.
‘Not everyone wishes to work at Rawblood,’ says my father. He sounds tired. The hollow sound of Soldier knocking his bucket with a hoof. He hopes it’s feed time. My father whispers to him. The good hard clap of a palm on shining hide. ‘I will look in on him again tomorrow,’ Papa says. I feel him, his dark presence behind the stall door as he goes.
From Soldier’s stall there comes the whisper of caps being put back on heads. Someone lights a pipe. The blue smoke is idle on the air. Soldier knocks his bucket.
‘Well,’ says Shakes, ‘maybe it’s no bad thing, you going.’
‘Suppose,’ says Tom. ‘You keep quiet, just for a bit? Just while we muck out the boxes. After that, why, you go on and get it all off your chest. I’ll be miles away but you’ll feel better.’
‘Used to be such a nice little bugger, you did.’
‘Ah, well.’
‘Grown too fast, your common sense hasn’t kept pace. Bad lot. Not fit to be around gentle people.’ Shakes’s scorn rings high into the stable rafters. ‘Young ladies and so on.’
‘Round here?’
‘That’s cheek, right there,’ says Shakes. ‘Yes. Drinking and chasing girls and whatnot.’
‘Whatnot.’
‘Army’ll teach you what’s what,’ says Shakes. ‘Mark my words. War will.’
‘Well,’ says Tom, and there’s a little crack of uncertainty in his voice, ‘not sure I’m right for it.’
‘Best notion you’ve had in years.’
‘Not mine,’ says Tom, ‘as it happens. He gave me the boot.’ There’s silence. Soldier knocks his bucket.
‘How’s that?’ Shakes says.
‘Himself. Told me I was no longer needed.’
‘Well. See? Drinking. Chasing girls. That’s what you get.’ But Shakes’s voice has lost its confidence.
‘Gave me a hundred quid, told me to enlist. Well shy of eighteen, I am. He said they’d take me anyway. And they did.’
‘A hundred quid? I’ll go and all.’ They go away down the stable, voices raised, bickering and fond.
Long after they’re gone I am pinned in place. My eye at the crack in the stall door, straw rustling, Nell breathing warm into my back.
I have abided by his rules, in recent years, so closely. I have kept my word. I have obeyed him to the letter. But Papa is sending Tom away and that is not in our agreement.
When I think of Tom going to war my heart stops, actually stops.
Before the glass I smooth the dark fabric one last time. The stays are unfamiliar, another skeleton between cloth and skin. I am tight but brittle somehow as if I might break. The perfume of lilies hangs in the air, which I regret. I have tried to wash it off my wrists. It is pale, lingering, persistent. I don’t think it’s a scent for skin. For wigs or cloth or something.
It took an hour, maybe more, to get the riding habit on. Sixty tiny jet buttons fasten me, throat-high, to the mandarin collar which brushes my chin. The jacket small, severe. Whalebone pinching me in at the waist. Swags and swathes of serge skirt; a heavy train, with a loop for the wrist. The deep, deep blue faded in patches to stormy grey. Attic dust still clinging in the folds.
I present a strange, antiquated silhouette. Tall, wasp-waisted. Armoured. Anyhow I don’t look like myself, which can only help. My flesh is restless. Behind me in the glass the window shows blue sky. That’s good. I must look different, be different, now; I will no longer be told what to do and what to fear.
There’s no denying things haven’t come out quite right. I smell like a syrup or a sweet, sickening. The corsetry is snappy, cracking. I can’t feel my lungs. The glass shows me pale and cross. I pinch my cheeks but it makes no difference. Part the hair over the left eye or catch it back in a low pompadour and pull out softening locks over temples and ears with your comb … Soft bandings across the hair are universally becoming. My hair won’t even stay under my hat. I lick my wrists, rub them on the skirt. Bitter, oily taste on my tongue.
I give it up. I spit into the ewer, take my whip in hand and go.
‘There you are, old chap,’ says my father, melting out of his darkened study into the bright hall. His spectacles are askew. His nose wrinkles at the cloud of roses. He says, ‘Riding? Iris, there was a vase, in the dining room—’
‘To Grimspound,’ I say quickly.
He sees me. He stills. Even at a distance I feel all his muscles go quiet. He says, ‘Where’s your twill?’
‘It’s muddy,’ I say. As if this were a sufficient reason to go to the attics, find and put on my dead mother’s riding dress.
‘It fits well,’ he says at last. A quick furrow between his brows. ‘I’ll put you up,’ he says, and we go.
The sun is blinding after the dim hall. On the blazing white drive Nell stands, her pale legs in constant movement, shifting, twisting her into the glistening surface. A brown hoof lifts, strikes the marble chips, tosses them into a spray. Matilda throws herself sideways. At the horses’ heads the groom tuts, soothes each in turn.
When I come near, Nell stills, lifts her ears. I stroke her neck. Her withers curve against the sky.
My father’s hand is cupped for my foot. I swing the habit up over my arm in an unfamiliar, heavy swathe, reach for the high pommel, step in. Something happens as he lifts me, beneath my foot his hand is gone, I’m caught, suspended in air. Then I fall. My skirt billows.
I land neatly on my feet with a crunch of gravel. Nell turns a dark, surprised eye.
When I look there is a thin old grey man where my father should be. His arms shake by his sides as he stands. I begin to say, ‘Papa, are you …’ But the old man flaps his hand like the muscular wing of a bird. His lips are trembling, loose. He shuffles towards me, hand outstretched once more for my foot. His eyes are somewhere else.
‘Meg,’ the old man says, reaches for me.
The groom brushes past him, comes silently to my side, throws me aloft in one quick movement, settles my foot in the stirrup.
My father stops, blinks. He turns, goes up the steps, goes inside. I look after him for a moment, a bent figure vanishing into the shadowed hall. I put Nell’s nose into the breeze. She huffs, plays with the bit, wanting to go. The drive scatters around us with the sound of breaking glass. It’s not till we’re on earth, grass that I hear Matilda behind. I don’t look back. We pound up the hill into the copse.
We slow out of sight of the house, Matilda comes up beside us, settles into place at my side. The breeze wanders through the trees. My heart is heavy and burning.
‘Horse coming on nicely,’ he says, nodding at Nell.
‘You’d no call to do that,’ I say, ‘to shame him like that.’
His face is unreadable in the shadow of his cap. He says nothing.
‘He was all right. How could you show him up?’ A feeling like taut wire in my chest. And I think again of what I hea
rd yesterday in the stable. ‘How dare you,’ I say to him, and nudge Nell. She moves on, ears pricked at the rustles of the woodland. Matilda hurries to keep pace beside her.
I say, ‘We’re going through Dartmeet, Gilmore.’ I don’t look at him.
He starts to speak, to tell me it’s the long way round. He shuts his mouth with a click. He touches his cap, pulls Matilda up, falls a proper distance behind.
This was supposed to go so differently.
In Dartmeet there’s a Friday market. We’re a very respectable sight. I stop in a lane to speak to a child who is poking in the ditch with a stick. I can’t remember its name. I’m not sure if it’s a boy or a girl, it’s at that indeterminate age, but it’s enough to say, ‘I’ll get down,’ so he has to, and help me off. I toss Nell’s reins at him, say, ‘Hold her.’
I talk to the child, which turns out to be a girl. She tells me about a pet rabbit. I can only bear it for a few minutes; she seems quite stupid. As I turn to go she tells me, ‘You smell funny.’
He puts me up silently. We ride. The pulse of his anger is warm on my back. It follows the rhythms of our hooves on the cobbles, beats along the path as we leave the village.
We move into untenanted country. We’re alone but for the larks and the rabbits. He stays behind, a precise five feet. I feel him like a weight. Bees hum. Grasshoppers sing. My head aches. The stink of lilies hangs in my throat.
He comes up beside me when we reach the ford. He fixes me with the side of his eye, blue and white. He pulls his cap off, rubs his head, puts it back on. The Dart runs wide and bronze before us. I’ve never seen it so high. Shining surface, deep water. Summer rain running to the sea.
‘Iris,’ Tom says.
I lift my chin up and away.
He says, ‘You ride with Shakes. Not with me.’
I’m silent, eyes on the burnished river.
‘Why today?’ Tom says.
I think of what Shakes said to my father in the stable. Tom watches me and waits. He’s taller than I remember. Quieter. His face used to show everything. He has shut himself away and I’m facing a stranger. Matilda, who likes to dance and bite and fret, stands like stone under him. His hands on the reins are not boy’s hands.
It’s no good. We haven’t spoken to one another in so long. I can’t remember how to do it.
Tom gives me a long measuring look, then shrugs, sharp and furious. ‘All right,’ he says and surges past. He plunges Matilda into the ford. She moves surely through the water, climbs the far side, her wet tail a mean thin streak of bay. Tom wheels her round on the bank to face us.
Nell steps out with cautious hooves; she fusses as the river stones shift under her. She bends, breathes her disapproval at the quick brown surface. I let her make her own way. She won’t fall. When the water’s at her flanks the folds of my skirt come loose from my hand, the hem skims the water. The cloth blackens, hauled in by the running stream.
I say, ‘Damn,’ pull at it, gather it up.
‘I’ve time to finish that book,’ says Tom from across the river. ‘Or. Pop over to London for the day to see the King, shall I. Take a cruise on the Nile. Still be back by the time you get here.’ Matilda shifts, patient, under him. She bows a long mahogany neck, salutes us from bank. In the river Nell stops, plants her legs, shivers.
‘Particular, aren’t you,’ Tom calls. Nell pays him no mind, breathes crossly at the water. Tom drops his reins, folds his arms as if for sleep, tips his cap over his nose, snores.
I push Nell on. She doesn’t want to go. ‘You’ve done it a hundred times,’ I say and give her a hard cut across the quarters with the whip. She leaps forward. The riverbed vanishes.
We’re buffeted from the stony floor, off the shelf, into deep water. Nell is lifted, taken, caught in cold brown current. She’s swept, we’re swept like paper in the wind. My skirts are a heavy balloon in the insistent, downward suck. All around, little waves ripple, cold water grasps my waist, arms, chest. The horse’s neck rears like a sea monster in front of me. Nell swims. Her muscles move like pistons. I float, cling to her straining neck. My foot drifts loose from the stirrup. The heavy skirt pulls, the river wants it. Water rises, skims my chin. Knotted, cold fingers loosen, I feel them go. Cold mouthfuls. I think, so this is what it’s like. A glimpse of Tom sliding off Matilda, face very pale, caught in an expression I don’t know.
Nell strikes the sandy bottom, finds her legs. She ploughs busily through the water, up, out, onto the bank, casting walls and waves of spray in all directions. I lie forward on her, hug her as she moves, solid, suddenly earthbound.
Tom says hell and wipes his face with his neckcloth. His fingers have a twitch in them. The cloth won’t go where he wants.
I come up beside them. Nell is iron-grey, wet. She leans in, nostrils wide, to adore Matilda. Matilda blinks; her hide shivers with pleasure under the scatter of cool drops. I throw my habit back over her quarters where it hangs, sopping.
‘The bottom drops away. On the right,’ Tom says.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘it does.’
He reaches his unsteady hand to Nell’s neck. ‘Good girl,’ he says. She pays him no mind, her nose touches Matilda’s. ‘Check her legs,’ he says, makes to get down.
‘She’s all right,’ I say.
We look at one another. It’s like the skin’s been stripped from both of us. I don’t know what to do so I say, ‘Race’ll dry us off. If you remember the rules.’
He’s gone before I say rules; all that’s left is the pounding of hooves and trembling air between the trees. Nell shivers with longing and I let her go.
She runs like a greyhound, flattens her Arab ears, flattens herself over the land. The woods blur. As we come out of the copse we pass Matilda. She’s straining at the bit, held back to a canter. Tom is twisted in the saddle, looking behind him. He doesn’t hear our approach on the soft woodland floor; he starts. We fly past him into open ground.
The moor, wide in the sunshine. Wind hits us like a breaker. Ahead, the tor spills out of the hill. The old wall curves towards it, cuts across the green. It’s been some time, but of course I remember: the first boulder, shaped like an egg, is the winning post. No jumping the wall. No cutting across. Tom always wins. I am vague and blind, eyes streaming. Follow the long, hectic curve. Nell elongates beneath me, opens up her stride, clods of earth scatter and fly. My habit is blown out stiff behind us, solid in the wind. Emptied. Nothing left but my heart and the drum of hooves. When Nell sees Matilda’s long brown nose inching up beside her, she hoots. I’ve never heard a horse make this sound before. It’s impossible that we could go faster, but Nell’s grey neck snakes out, she becomes a flat pattern of flying legs. Cold thrills run under my skin. A loose stone, a rabbit hole, an old nail, a dip in the ground, if she doubts for a moment, if she puts a foot wrong, we’ll break our necks. The egg shivers, thrums, a hundred feet ahead. The land rushes towards us at a gallop. Matilda is nowhere to be seen; golden lichen and grey rock flash by. Past the egg.
I pull Nell up, cheeks stinging. Her breath comes in hard explosions. She slows gradually like someone waking from a dream. I stroke her hot neck, sticky under my palm. I tell her she’s wonderful. My ears ring in the sudden quiet; we’re windblind.
Behind me Tom says, ‘She had me off at the wall.’ He’s leading Matilda with one hand; the other hangs limp, strange. Fine scratches cross his cheek. Black mud covers his side. Matilda pushes Tom with her face. He pushes her back with the awkward hand. This is all wrong. Tom never falls off.
‘Serves you right,’ I say at last. ‘Going over the wall’s cheating. Not in the game.’
‘I didn’t.’ He comes to lift me down, one hand limp, the other formal.
‘No,’ I tell him. I slither off, wet, awkward.
Tom says, ‘You smell like an old woman’s wig.’ Lilies.
We tether the horses to a small twisted rowan tree that grows from the side of the hill, and go up. We find a patch of high shade in the tumble of stone and sit.
I spread my skirts wide to dry, an expanse of wet serge. On the rock pile below an adder emerges from a shaded crevice. It coils itself decidedly, silently in the sunshine. Around us the land is blue and green and purple. Clouds pass. Somewhere in the warm distance sheep make complaints.
‘I didn’t do it to shame him,’ Tom says suddenly. ‘Dropped you. Saw you fall. He’s worse, Iris. These days.’
‘I was all right.’ I am belligerent for form’s sake. I try not to think of the strange grey man who took my father’s place. I try not to think of how he reached for me, and called me by my mother’s name. ‘I was angry,’ I say. ‘Not because of Father. Or, yes. In part … Are you going away, Tom? Are you going somewhere?’
He says, ‘No, are you?’ The words are light, pattering.
I take the wrist lying at his side, bend it slowly back. He shouts, sits up. The adder vanishes into the dark like water poured from a pitcher. The wrist is swollen, pink beneath the brown of his arm. The bones feel too far away beneath the skin.
I fumble beneath my wet skirt.
‘Knife,’ I tell him. He eases it from his pocket, puts it in my hand. The crack of tearing cotton.
‘You’ll have a job to explain it,’ he says.
‘Tear my things all the time.’
When I have three long strips of petticoat I take his wrist, bind it tight and smooth. He bears it, shivering. I give him back his knife, his wrist.
‘You’re going away,’ I say. ‘Don’t lie.’ His eyes are on Matilda, below. She rubs her poll against the rowan bark. I say, ‘I heard you and Shakes yesterday.’
‘What’s that?’ he says, and turns to me. The lines of his face are strange and thoughtful. His cheekbone beaded, smeared with blood.
‘That Papa gave you money.’ The words are fragments in my mouth.
His good fingers drum the granite. They stroke the wet dark line of my skirt where it lies. He rubs the hem between finger and thumb. ‘This bugger,’ he says. ‘Nearly killed you.’
‘It was my mother’s,’ I say. ‘Are you going to the war, Tom?’
‘Where,’ he says, ‘do I go if not there? What do I do? Going to be your groom for ever, am I?’ He pulls his cap off. Lies back on the rock, face to the sky, eyes closed. In the bright day his face is thin, white, absent. An old bruise the colour of plum jam spreads over his forehead, disappears into the eye socket. Another, older than that, yellowing beneath it. The hand that clasps the cap to his chest is swollen, the knuckles rich purple, soft black.
Rawblood Page 13
