by Stacy Gregg
Then there was a moment where the roan stopped pulling at the reins and slowed a little, and suddenly it was magical and we were riding onwards, all of us in unison through the trees, the lilt of the horn calling us forward and the wind smacking my cheeks and blowing back my hair. I felt free and at one with nature and then … then I heard the arrows being loosed, and there was a guttural cry of pain so hideous and heartbreaking it took me straight back to the abattoir. And we were pulling to a halt and my horse was heaving and twitching because, there in front of us on the ground, flailing about, panting and wild-eyed, was the stag.
I can see that I seem childish now, but truly I had never thought about what would happen when we caught him. I just saw the hunt as a chance to ride out through the wilds. Now, I saw it for what it was – the ruthless running down and murdering of a magnificent beast.
I threw myself down from my horse’s back and began to try and work one of the arrows out that had pierced the deer.
“Rose!” My father was shocked. “Move away! You’ll get injured.”
“But we have to help him!” I begged Papa.
“It’s too late for that,” my father said. “Now move! You are ruining the shot.”
I looked up and saw my papa sitting on his horse, crossbow drawn. He had his sights set square at me. Which was to say, they were set on the deer and I was in the line of death.
Behind me, the stag was breathing in a laboured fashion. I looked at his glassy eyes, the blood on his coat where the arrows that had taken him down were embedded deep. I stepped aside and let my father take the final shot.
He was always going to die. I know that. Those first arrows had already done the damage before I’d stepped aside and let my papa end it all. If I’d refused to move, I would have just made his suffering last longer. I told myself all of this on the long ride home through the forest. We went slowly on the way back because we had the stag with us, slung over the front of one of the duc’s horses, while his huntsman walked alongside on foot leading the horse.
Last night, it was venison for dinner. I told Papa I would rather starve to death, and he said that was fine by him and sent me to my room. Here, I felt the injustice and horror of the day well up inside me, and I began to rework the painting – the one of the horse and the lion. I could see now where I had gone wrong. Until this moment, I had captured only the pain of the horse, but now I was trying to show the intensity of the struggle that existed for both the hunter and his prey. After all, if the lion didn’t kill he would starve to death. The same was not true for us today when my father shot the stag – we have a kitchen full of food!
I think the revisions are successful enough for me to pass my end of term. Tomorrow we go back to Paris. Next week I’m back at school. I look forward to having the smell of oil paint on my hands once more instead of blood. I’m going riding in the morning before we leave. I shall take the roan and go alone.
August 31, 1852
I did not anticipate that the roan would be no better behaved alone than he was in company. From the moment we departed the yard he was atrocious, shaking his head and pulling the reins again and again, reefing until my fingers were raw, even through the gloves that I was wearing, and my nerves were frazzled from constantly fighting his urges to bolt with me. He trotted and sidestepped through the forest like a crab, constantly looking this way and that with his eyes on stalks and spooking at anything and everything on the ground. A leaf! A fallen bough! A squirrel! He was driving me demented and the ride was not in any way enjoyable, and after half an hour of this nonsense I had decided to turn for home when it happened.
The pheasant was right underneath his hooves when it flew up and the racket the bird made with its wing beats and the flash of rainbow feathers would have frightened even the most sensible horse. The roan went straight up. I remember thinking that I should try to stay on board, even though he was right up on his hind legs, that it would be safer to remain on his back than to fall and be trodden on. And then there was this sickening lurch and I felt gravity working in all the wrong directions and he was coming over backwards on top of me as we fell down to the ground. And then everything turned black.
When I woke again, it was black still. Night had fallen, and I was so cold. The roan was gone. As it turned out, it would be him that saved me from dying out there. The horse had bolted straight for home, and the stable boy had found him trotting about the yard and had realised I must have fallen. When I hadn’t come home by the afternoon, a search party was sent out. In the darkness I saw their lanterns and I called out. I was shocked at how reedy and thin my voice was, as if the strength had ebbed from me. In its place, there was blind terror. Because, I couldn’t go to them. They would have to come to my voice, they would have to find me. And that was what terrified me. The fact that I couldn’t move.
When they found me, I told them my legs wouldn’t behave and insisted that I was certain they were still sticking up in the air. I don’t remember this at all. I just remember them picking me up, and at that moment realising that it was not just the cold that had made me numb. I literally could not feel anything at all from the waist down.
They threw me over the back of one of the huntsmen’s horses to get me home. What else could they do? I couldn’t sit up. I couldn’t ride. I lay there, spread across with my limbs dangling, just as the dead stag had done a few days before. I came into the yard like this and my papa tore those grooms to shreds for treating me as if I were a sack of potatoes to be flung about. Gently, he lifted me down and carried me to the grand upstairs room with the windows that looked out over the courtyard. Then he ordered a bed warmer to be prepared even though it was summer and there were no hot coals in the fireplace to use for such things. He barked at the grooms to ride out and fetch the doctor to come and examine me, threatening Madame Gris with the guillotine if she didn’t hurry herself to bring me soup and warm bread to fill my stomach.
The doctor arrived in the depth of the night. He examined me. Asked me if I could feel my arms and hands – I could. And my legs? I could not.
He pressed my toes, massaged my calves, and then, using a needle that he produced from his black bag, he pricked the tip into my toes one by one.
Any sensation at all? Nothing I said. And again. And again. Both sets of toes, and the soles of my feet. And now further up my legs and it was amazing to me, to see the pin prick my skin until my blood was drawn to the surface in tiny red flecks. I felt nothing at all.
Later, after he had gone. I tried it myself. I had slipped a needle out of his black bag without his noticing and I tested just as he had done. Nothing. In the end, in desperation, I stabbed the needle so deep into my leg it should have made me scream. Instead, I lay and sobbed. I cannot move my legs. The doctor wouldn’t talk to me, but I heard him. I heard what he said to my father in the hallway as he left this morning when he had come to check my progress and found me the same as the days before. He whispered his prognosis, but my ears are not broken, just my back. The doctor says that I am paralysed from the waist down. He says he is quite certain. The damage to my spine is absolute. I will never walk again.
I am sure that the doctor is wrong. Rose is going to recover. She is not much older than me, and she has yet to paint her greatest works. Doctors make mistakes about things. I saw a woman come out of a coma once on Grey’s Anatomy, and no one was expecting it, so it happens.
Today, as I walked across the cobblestones to get to class, I thought about what life would be like without my legs. If I couldn’t stand at my easel then I couldn’t paint. Mind you, Augustin thinks I’m a useless artist anyway. He hasn’t said a kind word to me. I thought he might try to encourage me after being so brutal about my work last week, but no.
In class I’ve continued to try to rework the sketch as a painting, to give it the soul he keeps telling me it needs to have. All I’ve managed to do is make it overwrought and now the paint is so thick and gloopy it won’t dry.
After school today I couldn�
��t face going home. I walked out of the gates and went left, heading down the avenue to the Célestins Guards’ quarters.
The guard on the gate gave me a smile. “You’re Oscar’s little friend, aren’t you?” He raised the barrier. “He said you might be back.”
I couldn’t believe he’d just let me in like that. I felt my heart racing as I walked across the courtyard. And then I got to Claude’s stall and found it empty, and all the excitement drained out of me.
“They’re out on patrol.”
It was Alexandre. He was standing behind me in the corridor dressed in his police uniform, the navy jodhpurs and long black boots with a tight navy polo shirt.
“You’re looking for Claude, yes?” he asked me. “He is out on duty at the moment, him and Oscar. Their shift finishes in half an hour – wait for them in the gardens if you want.”
“Can I wait here?” I asked.
“Sure,” Alexandre said. “You know, if you wanted to make yourself useful, you could even muck out his stall?”
“I don’t know how,” I said. When he looked oddly at me, I added, “I’m from Brixton.” Which I thought explained it.
“Brixton?” Alexandre looked puzzled, as though he didn’t know what I was talking about. “I’m not suggesting you do brain surgery.” Alexandre shrugged. “You get a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow. You pick up the dung. That’s all there is to it. You don’t need an art school education for this, I don’t think.”
Oscar must have told him about me being at art school. We’d talked about why I was in Paris the other day. I had hung around in the courtyard after the show was over and Oscar had let me help as he had unsaddled Claude. We’d talked a lot that day.
“It’s good for me to talk with you,” Oscar had said. “I like to practise my English.”
“Your English is already good,” I’d said. I’d noticed though that sometimes he would say strange words like, “ten-four” and “Roger that.”
“I grew up watching lots of American cop shows when I was a kid.” Oscar smiled. “So I speak American a bit.”
We talked then about how Oscar had grown up always wanting to be a policeman. “I was an ordinary police officer, you know?” he said. “Then I was handpicked for the Célestins.”
I had asked Nicole about the Célestins. She said they were a little like the British mounted police, but also like the Queen’s Guard who rode in parades in London. I thought it would be amazing, to have a job riding horses, and I’d assumed Oscar had been a rider before he came here, but he wasn’t.
“I had never been a rider, but when I became a policeman I found it so dull. I thought it would be exciting – catching robbers, car chases. It turns out being a gendarme in the French police is mostly paperwork. Very boring. So I applied to the Célestins. They taught me to ride.”
“I think I’d like your job,” I said, “riding horses all day for work.”
“It’s pretty good,” Oscar agreed. He stroked Claude’s muzzle. “To be paid money to be with your best friend on the streets of Paris every day. There are worse jobs.”
He smiled at me. “But you, Maisie, you already have a future career. You are at the Paris School. Fame and fortune as an artist are bound to follow.”
“Not if my work sucks as much as Augustin thinks it does,” I said.
“Does it matter what he thinks?” Oscar replied.
“Augustin has the final say about which paintings are chosen for the art school auction night at Lucie’s,” I said. “If I don’t get selected, that’s kind of like failing.”
“And he doesn’t like your work?”
I shook my head. “He thinks I’m old-fashioned and I lack emotional depth. Although his idea of ‘deep’ is stupid modern art that is all squiggles and blobs.”
“I would rather have a horse on my wall than a blob.” Oscar frowned.
“It was easier at home,” I said. “I could go to Hyde Park and set up my easel and paint the horses there.”
“You can do the same here,” Oscar said. “If you want. Come and paint Claude any time you like. He struggles with life here sometimes. He is happy when he’s out working on the streets, but he gets bored and misses human company when he’s confined to his stall. If you visited him he would love to model for you.”
As if to prove this, Claude had pricked his ears forward and struck a pose.
“See!” Oscar smiled. “He’s a natural! Come and paint him anytime.”
***
Did Oscar really expect me to take him up on the offer or was he just being kind? I filled up the wheelbarrow with dung while I waited for them to return. If I could make myself useful at the yard, perhaps it would feel less like he was doing me a favour.
Alexandre returned when my barrow was full and directed me where to dump it on the dung heap out the back of the yards. He showed me the pile of fresh sawdust too, and I took a barrowload of it back with me to the stall. I was spreading it on the floor when there was the chime of horseshoes on cobbles as the officers came back from their afternoon patrol. I came out into the corridor to see Oscar dismounting and leading Claude in through the courtyard.
Claude gave a nicker at the sight of me. I found it very heartwarming that he’d remembered me, and Oscar smiled and waved. “Maisie!”
He seemed genuinely pleased to see me.
“You’ve brought your easel, I hope?” he asked.
“Just my sketch book,” I said.
“Bien. Well, you’ll have to give us a few minutes. I need to wash Claude down before he goes into his stall.”
“I can help?” I offered.
“Do you remember what the halter looks like?” Oscar asked me.
“It’s the thing you stick on his head to tie him up, yeah?”
Oscar nodded. “Go grab it for me from the tack room. His section will have his name on it – you’ll find it.”
I got the halter and came back and Oscar slipped the saddle, martingale and bridle off – he named them all for me as he worked – and put the halter on. Then he handed me the lead rope and showed me how to lead Claude. “Always stand on the left hand at his shoulder.” And I walked Claude over to the wash-down bays and Oscar showed me how to tie him off with a slipknot and how to hose him. It was a bit like watering the garden.
“Don’t be afraid to wash his face,” Oscar told me. “He loves the water.”
When I turned the hose on his head Claude flattened his ears a bit, but he seemed to enjoy it. The water had turned him glistening black. He looked so sleek in the sunlight, shining and wet, his eyes dewy. As Oscar walked him back to his stall I ran ahead and got my sketch pad out.
Oscar turned him loose in the box without his halter and went to clean his tack and I began to draw. It was very different to how I had sketched horses in the past. Claude was right there next to me now, so I could really capture every detail of his face. I didn’t bother with the rest of his body. Instead I just drew the head. I was trying to capture the tiny details, like the whiskers on his damp muzzle and the way his long, thick eyelashes trimmed his coal-black eyes, as if he were a film star. Oscar didn’t interrupt me as I worked. He must have gone to join the other guards – I could hear voices in the corridor from time to time. It was getting dark when at last he returned to the stall with Claude’s feed – Claude whinnied vigorously at this. Oscar put the feed in the wall bin, strapped up the haynet full of hay, then smiled at me and said, “Hometime.”
At the gates he offered to walk me home.
“I’m OK,” I insisted. But Oscar laughed and said, “I am offering you a police escort.” So I said yes and he walked me to the apartment door. It was dark by now, but the street lamps made everything look pretty, and the macaron shop had the windows all lit up so that the tiny cakes looked like colourful sparkling jewels.
Françoise was lying on the velvet sofa in the living room under a pile of cats.
“You’re home!” she said. “At last! Maman! She’s back! We can have dinner!”
> Nicole burst out from the kitchen, looking quite relieved to see me. “I was about to phone the school and ask whether you were there,” she said.
“I was at the Célestins again,” I said. “I’m sorry. I should have asked first.”
“I don’t mind that you go there. Just text me, perhaps? Let me know next time?” Nicole said. “Otherwise your dinner will be overcooked!”
“She’s English, Maman,” Françoise rolled her eyes. “They like their food overcooked.”
I took the insult with a smile. But when Nicole asked me how I liked my steak I lied and said I would have it rare just to prove Françoise wrong. It was all bloody inside. I thought about Rose, how she refused to eat meat.
“Is there something wrong with your meal?” Nicole asked me.
“I … I’m a vegetarian,” I said suddenly. The words surprised even me.
“Oh.” Nicole seemed quite taken aback. “I should have asked. Now I feel dreadful.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
Nicole didn’t seem cross, just confused. She picked up the plate with the rare steak. “Let me find you something else. Do you eat cheese? You’re not vegan?”
