by Stacy Gregg
I could feel myself shaking now as I asked the question.
“Is he going to die?”
“It is hard to know. The vet came to assess the extent of his injuries but he couldn’t get a needle in to sedate him. Claude fought violently every time he tried to get close to him.”
Alexandre was still holding my arm. He looked at me very hard and serious now. “Promise me, Maisie, when you are in his stall you will keep your wits about you. Claude is not the horse that you knew. In this condition right now he is dangerous. There is talk from the head of the Célestins that he may still have to be put down.”
“Oscar would never allow that!” I was horrified.
“Oscar has no say in such matters,” Alexandre said. “Claude is not his horse, he belongs to the Célestins. If his wounds are too extreme, what else is there for it?”
So I understood now how grave the situation was as we hurried side by side through the courtyard in the rain. Up ahead in the corridor I could see Claude’s loose box with the lights on inside.
“He’s alone in there. The vet is coming back again soon,” Alexandre said. “In the meantime, perhaps if you sit with him? But please, Maisie, be careful. I tried to approach him earlier and …”
Alexandre pushed back the long sleeve of his raincoat and I saw that underneath his shirt was ripped and there was a nasty purple bruise with two livid red marks where Claude had clearly sunk his teeth into his flesh.
“He did that to you?”
“I was trying to check the wound,” Alexandre said. “He got angry. It was my fault, I should have tied his head off, but then he gets so furious if he is restrained …”
None of this – the attacks, the fear, the fury – sounded like the Claude I knew.
At the door, Alexandre stepped back. “He might react better if it is just you that he sees,” he explained.
I unbolted the lower door of the stall and walked inside.
“Claude?”
He was in the furthest corner of the stall, lying prone on the straw. The way his head hung down low so that his muzzle rested over his forelegs on to the floor almost broke my heart straight away, and the sound of his breathing! It was so loud it echoed in the stall, each gasp more laboured and rasping than the last.
As I got closer, I could see that his flanks were heaving and he was drenched in sweat. And the wound on his leg was even more horrific than I had anticipated. It looked like something out of Rose Bonifait’s abattoir visits – an open gash that ran almost the full length of his haunches, and near the hock the skin had split away and the flesh had been gouged so that I was pretty certain I could see all the way through muscle and sinew and down to the bone itself. It looked like the leg was broken too, it stuck out at such an impossible angle, and now I was trailing my eyes down it and, yes, there was more blood and swelling all the way down to the fetlock.
But if the leg was disturbing to see, what worried me most were the hidden injuries. I’d seen the way the van had struck Claude and knocked him down so that he was crushed beneath the wheels. It was entirely possible that they had run over his body and Claude had internal wounds, too.
I stepped closer, watching his laboured breathing, his glassy eyes. There was a foam of white sweat on his neck and he still hadn’t raised his head to look at me.
“Claude?”
When I spoke his name, I had hoped he would hear my voice and respond. But he didn’t, he just lay there. I felt my heart choking in my chest at the sight of him. My own breath now came out in little sobs and I was about to burst into tears when I heard the loose box door behind me open again.
A torrent of French words. I looked up and a burly man in navy overalls was standing there holding a syringe with a long needle in the end of it.
“What?” I looked at him blankly. “I can’t speak French.”
The man disappeared and when he came back, he had Alexandre with him to translate.
“This is Marcel, the vet. He says he wants you to move away from the horse, that he’s dangerous. But I have explained to him who you are.”
“What’s in the injection?”
“A painkiller and antibiotics to fight infection from the leg wound,” Alexandre said.
I looked at Claude on the floor. His ears were flattened in anger, his muzzle wrinkled in fury. He had refused to let Marcel near him last time and this time would be no different.
“Claude trusts me. Maybe if I hold his head the vet can get the injection in?”
The vet looked dubious as Alexandre explained this.
“Claude knows me,” I repeated.
Alexandre and the vet both came into the stall now and stood beside me next to Claude.
“OK, if you take his head then …” Alexandre began, but Claude knew what was coming and before I could even get near him to take hold of his halter, he began to flail about, teeth bared and his neck whiplashing like some creature from a Greek myth that had suddenly burst to life. All three of us scrambled back, getting out of the way just in time.
The vet was speaking French again. I had the feeling it was mostly swear words.
I looked at Alexandre. “I can do it by myself.”
“What?” Alexandre shook his head in disbelief. “Don’t be ridiculous, Maisie.”
“Get the vet to direct me. I’ll do it.”
Alexandre looked sceptical, but I think he knew it was the only way.
He handed me the syringe. I waited for them to leave and shut the bottom door and then I stepped forward and knelt down beside Claude, hiding the syringe on the floor behind me.
“Hey, Claude,” I whispered softly to him. “It’s me. Oscar sent me to check up on you.”
Claude had laid his ears back, flat against his head. But I kept talking, kept saying his name over and over, and then I saw it. One of the ears flicked up and turned to me. He was listening. Then I saw a softening in his eyes and I took my chance. I reached forward and stroked his muzzle. Claude gave a sigh, and the sound was so full of despair it was heartbreaking.
“I’m going to help you, Claude,” I whispered to him. “I swear. I won’t let them harm you, but you have to let me do something to you, OK? It’s just a little scratch, I promise.”
“OK.” Alexandre was at the door, guiding me in English as the vet gave him instructions in French. “This injection has to be into the muscle. You see on Claude’s neck there is an area below the mane? Put your hand on it.”
I did as he said.
“Very good,” Alexandre said. “That is where the injection needs to go. Take your hand away now. Use the other hand to thrust the needle in. You will have to punch down quite hard, I’m afraid, to get it into the muscle. He may try to bite when you do this.”
I took my hand away and surreptitiously picked up the syringe. Talking to Claude the whole time, holding his gaze, I poised the needle above his neck.
“My hands are shaking,” I said to Alexandre. “I can’t do this.”
“You can, Maisie.” Alexandre was calm, positive. “One quick, hard push into the neck muscle and then inject the fluid! Keep talking to him the whole time. You’re doing great!”
I took a deep breath; I looked at Claude and then, with my heart pounding, I thrust then needle deep into his neck!
Claude put his ears back and shook his head in anger at the pain, but he didn’t bite me. I injected the fluid and pulled the needle back out again.
“Done it!”
“Bien!” Alexandre was delighted.
It was enough for him for one day, the vet told Alexandre. The antibiotics would see him through the night. Tomorrow he would come back and he would sedate Claude and examine the leg properly. If I could be here then, that would be useful, to help control him.
“Of course I’ll be here,” I told Alexandre. I knew now that I couldn’t leave Claude’s side. The horse needed me.
When Nicole came to visit me that night to see if I was ready to come home, I told her I was staying. “I’ll sleep here,” I said.
She agreed to bring me a sleeping bag and some dinner and a change of clothes and, as she was leaving, I looked at Claude, asleep now in the straw, the pain and exhaustion having overwhelmed him at last, and I called to Nicole before she went.
“Please,” I said. “Could you bring me my easel too, and my stack of canvases and my paints and the bag that contains my sketch book?”
That bag, I knew, contained Rose’s diary too. I would read it late that night when I couldn’t sleep. I would be exhausted from painting by then – I’d be working for hours and hours until well past midnight.
***
As I picked up the diary much later that night, I could see that my hands were covered in oil paint and my fingers were red from holding the brush so tight for so long. But it was worth it because on the canvas before me I could see the beginnings of my portrait of Claude. I had painted him just as he lay before me there on the straw of the stable floor. I painted everything, the froth of sweat on his neck, the terrible gash on his leg, the sinew and the bone. All of it was exposed, but what the portrait truly laid bare went deeper still. For the first time in my work, I was seeing the heart of a horse. Claude, so brave and so heroic, was fighting a great battle, and the dark spectre of death was looming over him, so close that I could feel its presence. In death’s shadow, I couldn’t sleep. So I curled up in my sleeping bag and opened the diary to the page where I had left off before, returning once more to the watery wastelands of Flamants Roses.
May 10, 1853
The light in the Camargue is not the same as in Paris. The sky is as soft as a watercolour, the dusky grey clouds on the horizon bleeding into the pale, pearly waves of the sea. It is this light that defines my painting now. The oil colours that I once relied on – the mustards and the browns, the dirty umbers that once created my world, all remain untouched in their tubes and instead I use different paint tones – chalky whites and dove greys, deep teals and muted greens.
I am painting every day, rising early to greet the dawn. I always think I will be the first one up, but in the kitchen Mimi is already there waiting for me, dressed in her uniform of jodhpurs and a cotton blouse.
“I have your breakfast, Rose,” she will say. “One egg or two?”
And I say, “Two, please.” Two fried eggs but no sausage because I am vegetarian – which Mimi still struggles with – and a brioche and café au lait. I eat mine while she takes Chantal’s breakfast upstairs to her on a tray to eat it in bed.
I never need to go upstairs. Mimi has converted the old library downstairs into a bedroom for me and there is a bathroom right beside it. My wheelchair slips in beside my bed and I’ve learnt to roll myself out of bed and straight into it, and then to wheel into the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. Mimi has installed a wooden rail by the toilet so that I can lift myself on to it and then back to my chair.
“You don’t need me. You can do it yourself,” Mimi tells me. She says the Camargue is no country for the weak, and life here will make me tough. She is right. I look back on the whining child I was in Paris and I cringe with shame.
I am a creature of the Camargue now, like the flamingos and the bulls and the grey horses that roam the coastline, cantering in wild herds through the white froth of the waves. I see them in the distance sometimes. The Camargue horses are a perfect combination of power and beauty with burly physiques, strong legs and noble heads. They are untamed things and yet, twice a year, Pierre and the other gardians who work Mimi’s farm will muster them into the yards and select out a few from the feral herd to turn into their riding horses for the next season.
Pierre has a very nice horse from one such muster – a stony silver-grey mare with very big round dapples on her rump and the most luxurious silken white mane you have ever seen. Her name is Babette, and she is very quiet, so she is perfect for her morning duties with me.
Pierre is ingenious. He has taken a wicker basket, the sort that the fishermen use to store their catch when they are at sea, and he has refashioned it into a seat of sorts, then padded the wicker on both sides so that it is soft against Babette’s back and comfortable for me to ride in. He straps the seat to her saddle-back with leathers so that it sits sideways like a tiny armchair on Babette’s broad rump. Pierre lifts me up to sit in it, and then he vaults up in front of me to sit astride in the saddle, and in this way, at a steady walk, we set off through the salt marshes, bound for my destination.
So this is how I ride a horse now. In a basket on the back like I am some groceries being carried from market.
When I’m asleep at night I dream that I am riding astride like I used to do. I’m galloping hard and fast on the back of a grey horse through the waves on the beach, and I can feel the thrill of the horse moving underneath me and the wind in my face blowing back my hair from my eyes and then I’m falling and I slide down off the horse’s back and before I hit the ground … I wake up. And I feel down through the blankets with my hands and I touch my legs and they are, of course, still numb and lifeless and it was all just a dream.
Pierre tours me around the whole estate of Flamants Roses, taking me to different parts of the farm so that I can find things to paint. Right now my favourite place is in the grasslands near the salt water flats. This is where the flamingos stalk the salty estuary. Salt-water beavers swim past, and sometimes a pond turtle pops his head up. The salt-poisoned land is bare except for the hardy marsh grasses and spindly tamarisk trees.
When Pierre reaches the expanse of high ground where the marsh grass grows thick, he halts Babette and first lifts me down, then unpacks my things: the canvases and the easel and my paints, and my lunch that Mimi has packed for me. Cheeses and baguette and a peach picked from her tree. He puts it all down beside me and then mounts Babette once more.
“Work hard!” he tells me as he wheels the mare and sets off at a canter through the marsh water. And I watch him go until I can’t see him any more, and I’m all alone in the middle of nowhere. Then I set up my canvas and I begin to work.
At the moment, I am intrigued by painting the flamingos. I’m using watercolours when I begin to bring them to life: cadmium red and scarlet to do their feathers, with chalk white blended in to capture their softer tones, and vermillion for their legs. They are such amazing creatures with ridiculous proportions. Their long necks and bulbous beaks should make them comical, but instead, they possess a mystery and an elegance of form that fascinates me.
The hours fly past as I work. Sometimes, I even forget to eat the lunch. The sun beats down hot in the afternoon, but I keep painting and then, before I know it, the day is over. The sky at the horizon is turning the colour of warm honey, and I hear hoof beats in the distance and I know Pierre and Babette are returning for me.
Pierre will leave Babette to graze beside the tamarisk trees and he will come to look at the easel to check my progress. He always has something smart and useful to contribute. Perhaps he’ll say, “There’s not enough action happening in this corner” or even more direct, “The beak on that flamingo in the middle is oddly misshapen”. He is often right, and so in spite of the fact that he makes me cross, I do listen.
He washes my brushes out for me while I pack the rest of my things. And then he loads me on the back of Babette along with my easel and the canvas strapped so that the paint won’t smear, and we journey home. This is how my days go. Or at least it was how they went. Until yesterday. Yesterday, Pierre deposited me on the grass by the tamarisk as usual, and I was beginning a new canvas, watching the flamingos as they fluffed up their feathers and stretched their legs in that long, absurd gait they do to wade the marshes. Then, out of the blue, the birds were startled and, in an ugly flap of wings, tried to elevate themselves. Their frantic efforts made them look like they were running on the surface of the marsh.
Eventually, ungainly and ridiculous, they took to the air. And the reason for their escape became clear a moment later. There was a herd of wild Camargue horses coming our way, cantering through the water i
n a direct line for the place where the birds had been just a moment before.
They were the most amazing sight. There were twelve of them in total. I counted twice over to check their number. It was hard to be certain because they all looked so alike! All of them the whitest shades of grey, with faint rosy dapples on their rumps and their eyes dark and muzzles sooty. Their tails were so long that they dragged in the salt waters behind them as they slowed to a trot, flicking mud on to their bellies as they ploughed through the water. The estuary was at mid-tide and the sea was up to their knees, and they moved through it as if they were a part of the water themselves.
Then the horse at the head of the herd spooked at the sight of me in the long grass ahead and she halted dead with her head raised high. She was large and imposing but clearly female as she did not possess the thick crest of neck that marks out the stallion in a herd.
It’s funny how people who do not know horses always think the stallion must be the one in charge, but in fact, the lead horse is nearly always a mare. Her job is to keep the other mares in line and look for danger. So was I danger? She certainly stared hard at me for a while longer, and then she left the rest of the herd, who had come to stand behind her, and stepped slowly through the marsh water, approaching the grassy outcrop where I sat. I could see her nostrils working like bellows, taking in my scent on the sea air, trying to decipher whether I was a threat. She sniffed and she stared and then, satisfied that I wasn’t going to cause trouble, she dropped her head down and began to graze on the marsh grasses quite near me.
On her cue, the other horses in the herd began to graze around me too and soon I was in a magical circle, surrounded on all sides by these incredible grey marsh-horses. I could see now that the lead mare herself was pregnant. Quite fat with a foal in her belly, in fact. And she was not the only one. Two other mares were heavy with foal. A couple of mares did not appear to be in foal, and the others were too young to be breeding stock, two yearling colts, three fillies and a pair of stallions. Of the stallions, it was clear that one was the sire, the more powerfully built and older of the pair. The other stallion was his second-in-command, and they did not fight, indeed they appeared quite the companionable pair, grazing on the outskirts away from the mares and the young ones, keeping watch and raising their heads constantly to listen for any enemy or smell any danger on the ocean air.
