by Stacy Gregg
“They tell me he is stable, which is good news, but they have him in intensive care and he isn’t allowed visitors yet,” Nicole said.
“What about Claude?” I asked.
“Claude is back at the Célestins stables and the vets are with him now.”
“Is he going to be OK?” I felt my heart race. I had seen the way the van had struck him down. Claude had been right in the path of the vehicle. I kept seeing him in that moment when he charged forward at a gallop, the terror in his eyes and that look on Oscar’s face too as he realised what they both had to do. There had not been a split second of hesitation from either of them – they were there to protect the public and they did their job. And now … who knew? I felt sick with worry for them both.
“They won’t say anything about what is wrong, but they admit that Claude is critical,” Nicole continued. “Leave the vets to do their work, Maisie. I promise you, if there’s no more news by morning, we’ll go down there and force our way in to see him if we have to, OK?”
So I went to my room and pulled out my sketch book and looked at my drawings of Claude. Oh, but he was such a handsome horse! And then as I flicked through the stack, my eyes took on a fresh perspective, and for the first time I could see the truth – there was something missing in my pictures. I had this sickening feeling as I scanned the sketches. Augustin had been right all along about my work. I was holding something back in my heart, not truly expressing myself. These old drawings that he had so disliked, I could see their fatal flaw now too. They lacked emotion; they had no soul.
I curled up on my bed, still shaking a little from the day’s events. I looked at the clock. It was still only 4 p.m.! How could the world have changed so much, so fast? My mind was racing, and in an effort to drown out the fear that haunted me, I turned to Rose’s diary once more. I opened the page to where I had left it last time and began to read.
February 10, 1853
I have been cooped up for eight days in the carriage journeying to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Eight days with nothing to do! Yes, I tried to draw. But the roads were too bumpy, and I couldn’t keep the pencil steady. And I tried to read a book, but I felt sick, so instead I just stared out of the windows at the countryside. France, it turns out, is full of trees.
We overnighted in small inns along the route in Nevers, Moulins, Le Puy and Avignon. Each evening upon arrival the coachman would uncouple the horses and feed them and put them in the stalls below the inn with hay and water. Such lovely horses – a team of four – all of them dark bay. There was a time when I would have helped the coachman to tend and groom them. Now I couldn’t even tend to myself. I needed help to get anywhere at the inns as there were too many stairs to use my wheelchair so it got left on board the coach. I hate that chair anyway. It is so slow and cumbersome! It cannot cope with rutted ground or grassy terrain. It is a useless thing.
But then I am a useless thing too. I can’t move without the chair. So we are two useless things together.
It was midday when I arrived at Flamants Roses. There was a sign at the gate, but all the same, once we drove up to the house I was in disbelief.
“Is this it?” I asked the coachman. “Really?”
The house was a simple square stone building with a grey slate roof. The stone must have been painted a pale pink at some point, but so much of it was now lost beneath the overgrowth of rambling roses that smothered the façade, it was hard to tell.
The gardens, too, were overgrown as if nobody lived here, and beyond them the rest of the farm seemed like nothing more than a few outlying sheds bordered by swamp waters. I was underwhelmed. I had expected a mansion to rival the grandeur of our family chateau in Fontainebleau. Aunt Mimi seemed to have got the short straw when it came to inheritance. So this was to be my new home?
Even more distressing, after a whole week of travel to get here, there was nobody waiting to greet me. I sat in my wheelchair, wondering what to do, when suddenly I heard the barking of dogs. A moment later, two enormous beasts came bounding around the southern end of the house. They were strapping great dogs. Hunting hounds I guessed by their sleek physique, but not like any I had seen before. They had black heads and their bodies were speckled like a plover’s egg. Their long, floppy ears swept behind them and bright pink tongues lolled from their mouths as they ran to me. In just a few strides they were upon me and I was in danger of being licked to death as they smothered me with kisses. A moment later, a dark-haired woman in a very modern white-and-blue striped dress, that had none of the usual Parisian fancies like a tight bodice and a crinoline hoop, came striding around the house from the same direction. She was very pretty even in her plain gown, and she had a bright smile on her face as she called to them. “Berlioz, Balzac!! Heel!”
The two dogs whimpered as if they were children who had been caught being particularly naughty and they went straight to her, tails wagging. They fell into step at her side as she approached me.
“It is so lovely to meet you, Mimi has been so excited about your arrival!” Chantal greeted me warmly. She took the handles of my chair and began to wheel me to the house, chatting away as if we were already great friends. “She is out bringing in the bulls with the gardians,” she said. “I packed us a lunch to take to her. We’ll put your bags inside and then depart. Now, where is Pierre to get your bags? Pierre!”
We had come around the back of the house, and here the swampy fields became a lake. There were two small punting boats moored up next to a tiny jetty, and in one of those boats a boy about my age was lazing with his hat tilted down over his face to keep the sun off. At the sound of Chantal calling his name, he roused himself dozily out of the vessel, tilted the hat back and sat up.
“All set to go!” he said, trying to act as if he hadn’t just been fast asleep.
“Then grab Rose’s bags and take them inside and we’ll be off,” Chantal said. “The gardians will be waiting for their lunch.”
Pierre got up lazily, and there was something about the way he walked towards me that made me feel as if he were more accustomed to being on the water than land.
I liked him straight away. He had sandy blond hair, and freckles on his tanned cheeks, and his eyes smiled even more readily than his mouth. He reminded me a little of Dorian.
He went and took my bags indoors and meanwhile Chantal loaded wicker baskets into the front of one of the boats.
“You can take Rose in your boat,” Chantal told Pierre when he returned.
Pierre stared at me. “How do I get her into the boat?”
Chantal rolled her eyes. “Lift her, of course!”
And he did. This totally strange lad I’d never met before stood in front of my wheelchair and lifted me up and plonked me down on the prow bench of the punting boat as if I were a sack of flour being taken to market.
“Hey!” I squeaked.
It was such a different motion – bobbing up and down inside a tiny boat after a week inside a cramped horse carriage. I looked over the edge into the water and saw that it was shallow and murky beneath us.
“When the tide is out, the boat may sometimes touch the bottom with two of us in it,” Pierre said, clearly not realising that my objection was to being thrown into a boat rather than whether the water was deep enough. “This is high tide now, though, so we will float, I’m sure.”
And with me in the prow, and Chantal accompanying us in the boat alongside – which was stacked high at one end with wicker baskets – Pierre used a stick to punt us off from the shore. Then he stood up and used it to strike the bottom of the swamp and push us on. Chantal did the same thing in her vessel.
“Why don’t you just row?” I asked.
“The water isn’t deep enough to scoop in the oars,” Pierre said poking the punting pole down to show me just how shallow it was. “Punting is easier, especially as we get further into the rice paddies.”
On the carriage ride from Paris we had passed many wheat fields, and these rice paddies looked a little like the
m, except that instead of being planted in the ground, these crops were in water, with tiny canals that we could punt along between the rows. We moved silently through the rice fields, sometimes scaring a duck here and there off its nest so that it would quack accusations at us as we glided gently past. Beyond the paddies, we entered the estuaries where the groomed landscape gave way to the wilderness of the salt marshes. Here, the only things that grew in this bitter, salty soil were stalky outcrops of sea lavender and grey-green purslane. Wading through the expanses of these slowly moving waterways was a flock of pink flamingos. They had such long legs that the water only came up to their knee joints. Their plumage was unlike that of any bird I had ever seen, with feathers the colour of a rose-tinted sunset.
“It’s from the pink flamingos that Flamants Roses takes its name,” Chantal told me as she manoeuvred through the flock, and we punted behind her. I marvelled at the casual ease with which she handled the boat, leaning right over on the wooden pole to drag herself this way and that. We were winding our way through the waters, and up ahead I could see an island of sorts, an expanse of firm, dry land heavy with scrubby undergrowth. We beached on the shore of the island and Chantal pulled her boat up on to the sand so it wouldn’t float away and then Pierre did the same with me still on board.
“Wait here,” he said to me without any irony.
“What else would I do?” I replied.
They walked off together into the scrub and the trees and left me there! And what followed seemed like the longest wait of my life – and remember I had just been in a carriage for eight straight days. I listened to the cries of the birds, felt the heat of the sun burning the back of my neck, wished I had worn a hat and was glad I was in trousers at least to keep the mosquitoes at bay as they were buzzing around me like tiny demons.
Chantal and Pierre had disappeared completely from view, I should add. They had walked into the trees directly ahead of me and now they were nowhere to be seen. And so I waited. And just when I was about to begin to shout out for help, fearing I had been abandoned, I heard the thunder of hoof beats.
Through the trees the sounds echoed, hoof beats and voices crying out. And then from the forest before me, the bulls burst forth. There were three of them. Enormous black creatures. They charged out of the undergrowth with the whites of their eyes showing, their horns glinting in the sun. Even if I hadn’t been a regular at the abattoir, there was no mistaking these creatures in front of me for cows. Only bulls looked like this, with long horns, broad brows and massive necks set into powerful shoulders. These were creatures whose whole being was built for fighting. And now they were thundering out of the forest, and all that lay between them and the sea was me – sitting there helplessly in my shallow-bottomed boat.
I would have screamed at that moment – I admit it. I was terrified. Luckily, I didn’t have the chance to make a fool of myself because before I could shriek or squeal, the gardians emerged behind the bulls. There were three of them too, mounted on great grey horses. The gardian who rode at the head of the three charged directly towards me, outstripping the bulls for speed, and then he turned his grey horse so that the sand skidded up from beneath his hooves. Reaching down, he plucked me out of my boat and threw me up behind him so that I sat across the horse’s flanks directly behind the saddle.
“Hold tight around my waist!” he instructed.
And he turned his horse on its hocks and rode out of the way of the bulls while, at the same time, the two remaining gardians used their capes and sticks to lure and herd the bulls away from us. At one point, the bulls actually ran into the sea. Even then, the horses continued to give chase, cantering as they hit the water, splashing noisily as they followed after the bulls who were now knee-deep in the waves ahead of them.
“These three bulls, they are trouble,” the gardian said to me over his shoulder. “They constantly run wild through the rice paddies and ruin the crops. Today it has taken all three of us to hunt them out of the forest so that we can take them home and reunite them with the herd. I tell the Maitresse that we should give them up to the matadors to be used for sport. They are bad bulls! We would be better off without them. But she will not listen. She is stubborn! She is impossible –”
“She is right behind you!”
Out of the forest now emerged a woman on yet another grey horse, almost identical to the ones ridden by the gardians.
“Antoine, we are not giving up my bulls to those brutes just because they misbehave from time to time. All God’s creatures deserve a happy life, even you!” my aunty Mimi barked in a good-natured fashion at her embarrassed gardian. Then, flanked on either side by Chantal and Pierre, also on grey horses identical to the rest, she rode towards me. I noticed how she rode with her legs long in the stirrups like the gardians did, and with her reins in one hand too – so unlike the Parisian style of equitation. Yet it suited her, and she looked so at home on that horse. And in that moment, as she smiled at me in a way that made me realise I was truly welcome in this strange, wild place, I realised I might somehow have found a home too.
“Beloved niece. Welcome to Flamants Roses.”
I was roused from my exhausted sleep later that evening by Nicole. I took one look at her face and knew it was good news.
“Oscar’s going to be OK. He’s no longer in intensive care. He’s awake and he’s asking to see you, Maisie.”
I was stunned. “Me? But why?”
“I don’t know,” Nicole admitted. “The hospital gave no more details. So, hurry now, grab your coat. My driver is bringing the car around to the front for us.”
We stopped quickly at Ladurée just before the doors closed and I got Oscar a big box of macarons – a rainbow selection, as I didn’t want to take the time choosing flavours as we were in a rush.
In the hospital they led me to Oscar’s room. He was sitting up in bed looking pale and dishevelled. His arm was in a cast, and he had stitches above his right eyebrow that zigzagged across his forehead.
“You look like Harry Potter,” I blurted out. Oscar gave a laugh and then regretted it, wincing in pain.
“I have cracked ribs,” he explained. “It hurts to laugh.”
“I’ll try not to be funny then,” I said.
Apart from the Harry Potter scar, Oscar had a belly scar too, where they had operated to take out his spleen because it had been ruptured when the van struck. His collarbone and his arm were both broken, and the head injury was still worrying the doctors.
“I have a small brain bleed.” Oscar shrugged. “They are doing scans and they might need to operate again – but on here this time.” He rapped with his knuckles on his skull.
“They’ll cut your head open?” I was horrified.
“It’s not so bad, they say,” Oscar said. “But it will be a while before I can leave, and I am worried about Claude.”
“Is he OK?” I asked.
“He is back at the Célestins, but his injuries are bad. Alexandre says they nearly put him down on the spot but he begged them to at least take him back to the stables and let the vet take a look at him.” Oscar’s eyes filled with tears. “He is a good horse … well, I don’t have to tell you this. You know how amazing and gentle he is, but he has such a dislike of vets. Ever since he was a young colt he’s been very scared of them, and he hates injections, needles, that kind of thing. He’ll be hard to treat because of this, and I worry that they will give up on him. I need someone there with him, someone to reassure him and calm him.”
“Alexandre is there though, isn’t he?”
“Not all the time.” Oscar shook his head. “He is on duty. And there is no one else in the yard that Claude trusts. I’ve seen how much he likes you. Right from the start when you first came to draw him and sit in his stall, I could see that he had a bond with you. He needs that now. He needs a friend. Maisie, I know it is a lot to ask …”
“No,” I said. “I mean, no, it’s not a lot to ask. I want to help Claude. Of course I’ll go and be with him.�
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I didn’t tell Oscar about Augustin and the threats he’d made to me about not being able to take part in the looming art auction if I didn’t deliver anything worthy. If Oscar had known I only had a couple of weeks left to produce an artwork that would finally please my teacher, well, he was so kind he would have told me to go home instead and focus on my art. But I didn’t even care about the Paris School at that moment, and the truth was that even if Oscar hadn’t asked me to be with him, nothing would have kept me from Claude’s side.
“They will be waiting for you at the Célestins,” Oscar said. “I have told Alexandre you are coming tonight. He will meet you at the gate.”
Nicole’s driver took me there. It was raining by then, and night had fallen as we drove through the same Paris streets that had been bathed in pink light only that morning. Now the city felt entirely different to me. The rain made it look as if Paris was weeping, the streets turned blue and grey, except for the pools of white street lights and the raindrops dazzling like diamonds as they fell.
Alexandre stood at the gates waiting for me in the rain, the peak of his Garde républicaine hat all that was visible of his face beneath the black cloak of his raincoat. I leapt out of the car and ran across the wet cobblestones to him.
“How is he doing?” I asked.
“You are in time. He is still alive,” Alexandre said.
The reply shocked me to my core. I hadn’t realised until he said these words that it was possible Claude might have died before I could even reach his side. I was shocked too when Alexandre gripped my arm tight and held me back, stopping me in my tracks.
“I need to prepare you, Maisie, for what you are about to see. His injuries, they are very serious indeed. I haven’t really told Oscar how bad his wounds are as I didn’t want him to get upset.”
