by Stacy Gregg
I realised what he meant to do, to take me back with him now. “Pierre, I can’t go,” I said. “Loulou’s foal is too weak to leave behind. If we abandon him in this storm, he will die.”
Pierre looked over at Loulou who stood only a short distance from us, fussing over her new baby, but the rain was making him wet again as fast as she could lick him dry. As the wind drove the rain towards us in bleak sheets, she moved to use her body as a shield to protect her newborn from the elements as much as she could. But her efforts could not stop the floodwaters from rising. The storm had yet to reach its peak and the water was still climbing and showing no signs of receding. The foal had fed, and he looked alert and bright now, but it was only a matter of time before his young body succumbed to exhaustion. Newborn foals cannot remain on their feet for long, they need to sleep. And when this foal lay down, he would be lost, he would take his last breath and disappear forever beneath the floodwaters.
“What can we do?” Pierre shouted to be heard above the storm. “The foal will not leave his mother’s side. And we can’t take him alone. He needs the mother, he has to keep feeding or he’ll die.”
I looked at Loulou. She was exhausted, by both the force of the elements and her own efforts to bring her reluctant foal out of her belly and into this world. Her tiredness was evident, and yet in her eyes there was still that same fire and spark there had always been. Her ears swivelled forward and back as she listened to us talk, as if she instinctively knew that her fate relied on us now. In these past months, my bond with Loulou had become so powerful, and I knew she trusted me, I was sure of it, and it would be that trust that I needed to rely upon now.
“Use your cattle rope,” I said. “Take it from the saddle, knot it into a halter and put it on Loulou.”
Pierre looked at me, confused. “You want me to halter the mare, not the foal?”
“The mare is accustomed to the hand of man. She is branded – which means she has been saddle-broken in the past, you said so yourself. She can be ridden and the foal will follow at her feet. If we can get Loulou home, then the foal will follow us and we save them both.”
Pierre shook his head. “I cannot ride one horse and hold on to you and lead another horse all at the same time …”
“You won’t have to lead her,” I said. “I’ll be riding her.”
“But you cannot!” Pierre’s reaction was immediate. “Rose! You have no legs.”
“I have legs,” I pointed out. “It’s true that I cannot kick with them or hold on tight, but they will provide me with enough weight to balance myself. I can sit upright and stay on board. And if you give me a switch, a tree branch to use, I can tickle Loulou onwards instead of kicking.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Pierre insisted. “You’ll fall.”
“Before I lost the use of my legs, I had an excellent seat,” I told him. “I could ride bareback at a gallop.”
I looked hard at him. “I have ridden horses my whole life, Pierre, do not presume to tell me I can’t do this.”
“I’ll take you home and come back for them …”
Even as he said this, I could see Pierre knew it was impossible. He’d had enough trouble finding me. How would he find Loulou and the colt as the storm worsened. And how would they survive that long?
“Stop trying to think of another way, because there isn’t one,” I said. “There is only my way. Grab the rope now and make a halter and put it on Loulou. Every moment that we stay here and discuss it we only put ourselves in the path of the storm.”
Loulou must have known we were helping her. She didn’t object when Pierre stuck the rope halter on her head. Then he came back for me. I was freezing cold when he picked me up to lift me on to her back.
“Wait! what about the others?” I gestured across at the herd, standing knee-deep in the seawaters that were still rising.
“They will be fine, they are bred to weather such storms,” Pierre assured me. I think he was worried I would come up with a new plan to take all of them with us!
With me in his arms, Pierre searched the floodwaters for a suitable stick and in the dark murk of the sea, he snatched up a slender broken-off branch of a tree.
“Your riding crop,” he said. I reached out and took it, and it felt strange in my grasp since I had never been one to whip a horse before. I tucked the branch down my trousers so that I could use both hands to grip Loulou’s mane.
“Get me up on to her back now,” I told Pierre.
It was not elegant, I admit. Even though Loulou stood remarkably still, it took a shove and a push from Pierre to forcibly swing my dead right leg over the mare’s back so that I had one leg on each side and sat astride.
When I sat up, I was aware of the strangeness of being on a horse on my own for the first time in a very long time! There was a brief moment in which I felt this miraculous joy swell in me. This sensation I was feeling now was one that I thought had been lost to me forever. I was riding! And then Loulou swung her hocks and moved suddenly to the left and I lurched and swung with her. As I gave a startled squeak, I realised this was no time for misty-eyed memories. I was on a strange horse in the middle of a wild storm and had every chance of being thrown headfirst into the sea with no way of keeping myself afloat if I fell. So this wasn’t the time for fey daydreams, harking back to my old life. I had a task ahead of me, and I must not lose sight of it. It was up to me now to get my horse home.
“I’m all right,” I assured Pierre. “You can mount up. I have her now and we will follow you.”
Pierre ran to his mare, wading as fast as he could through the waves which now reached above his knees. He sprang up into the saddle, gathered up his reins and turned her into the prevailing storm so that he formed a blockade of sorts, taking the brunt of the weather ahead of us.
“Stay behind me!” he shouted over his shoulder. “It might shelter you a little.”
Riding in this way, yes, he made a decent enough wind break. And because I had no time to think about it, I found myself immediately adjusting to my new riding style in which my makeshift riding crop served the purpose that had once belonged to my now limp and useless legs.
Loulou must have been broken in by a gardian at some point in her life, but she was still half-wild, as all the horses here are. And I was half the size of the gardians she must have been used to in the past, so she could have easily thrown me. But she didn’t. I think she knew that we were trying to help her, because she kept me safe as we ploughed on together through the water. She understood the slightest shift in my weight or the touch of the makeshift reins, and I didn’t even need a twitch from the switch to spur her on.
As for the foal, there had been a brief hesitation when we set off and he didn’t quite understand that he should be coming too. Then Loulou gave him a commanding whinny, as if to say, “Hurry up, little one”, and in a frantic gambol of skinny, ridiculously long legs, he gave chase. The waves were so high up on him that he had to do an ungainly waterbound canter to catch us up, and then within a few seconds he was at Loulou’s flank, where he took his place tucked in tight against his mother.
In this way, a bedraggled caravan beset by the storm, we departed the submerged marshlands. As we traversed the watery coastline with the sea to the left of us the roar of the waves was deafening. The sea was still coming in and the tide had not yet reached its apex. We followed the shoreline, along the beaches, until we reached the swift-flowing waters that now surged inland through the rice paddies.
“Be careful!” Pierre called back to me over his shoulder as he entered the rice fields. “The water here is deep!”
And then we were plunging in and the seawater was all the way to Loulou’s chest and I looked back and the foal was being pushed this way and that by the currents. He was such a plucky little fellow! I watched as he braced against the current and kept valiantly alongside his maman. Soon we were through the worst of it – we had entered the calm waters of the broader inland canals, the ones that Pierre had punte
d me along in his flat-bottomed boat when I had first come to live here, the day he had taken me out to meet Mimi and the gardians. Up ahead in the distance I saw the stables and the grey slate rooftops of Flamants Roses and I knew for certain at that moment that we’d made it! We were going to get Loulou and her foal home.
“There’s Chantal!” Pierre exclaimed. And through the rain I saw her riding for us, mounted up on her horse Dante, waving and shouting with excitement.
“We’ve been out searching for you!” she cried. “When the gardians brought Babette back to us, we were so worried …”
She was soaked to the skin by the rain and her horse was flecked with foam and sweat. She pulled up alongside Loulou and threw her arms around me, hugging me, and then she realised.
“Rose! You’re riding!”
“Rose!!”
Mimi was coming for us too now. She was on foot, running with the dogs at her heels.
“Get them inside the stables,” she shouted at us, struggling to be heard above the high winds of the storm.
It was so good to be out of the rain at last! Pierre unsaddled the horses and wrangled the foal and Loulou into a loose box together. Mimi mixed Loulou a hot mash and then made feeds for the rest of the horses and Chantal dug through the tack room to find a small woollen rug to put on the foal.
The storm had worsened by the time we left the stables and fought our way through the rain to reach the house, Pierre carrying me in his arms.
Inside the house, Chantal ran me a hot bath and my skin prickled in anger when it touched the hot water. I had been cold for so long, it seemed wrong to be warm again. I lay in the water and thawed out while Chantal prepared me some clothes. Mimi fussed and bustled in the kitchen so that by the time I was back in my wheelchair, clean and warm and dry with rosy cheeks and a famished hunger, there was an enormous pot of hot bouillabaisse. The rich tomato soup was full of scampi and mussels and there was crusty baguette on the table too. We sat together, and while Pierre told our story to them, I spooned the bouillabaisse to my open mouth, because eating seemed more important than speaking at that point, although at times I would pipe up to correct his version of events, but mostly I ate and I laughed and I thanked my stars I was alive and I was home.
July 23, 1853
It has rained solidly for the past three days. I have spent my time in the shelter of the stables watching the progress of Loulou and the foal. Even though I am only gone for a few hours each night to sleep, when I return again I marvel at the changes that have taken place in him every day. He grows so fast! And no wonder, he drinks very greedily from his maman. Loulou is a good mother and puts up with his demands and his playful antics, but also like a good mare she knows when her son has crossed the line and then she rebukes him, with her ears pinned back, delivering a quick, powerful nip – hard enough for him to feel and know that his mother is displeased and so to behave himself. The nips come quite often because the foal is a very cheeky boy and they are stuck in close quarters here in their stall. Looking back, I think the foal’s refusal to be born was the first sign of what may well be a troublesome nature. It is this miscreant streak that made me come up with his name. He is Sebastian – after my own first pony who was such a mischievous tyke in his own infamous way.
Each day, as Loulou and Sebastian grow stronger and the weather becomes settled and the king tides recede and the waters fall back, I know we are getting closer to the moment when we will have to let them go back to the herd.
“We cannot keep them too long,” Mimi tells me. “To be stable-reared like this at this stage of his development will only turn Sebastian into a farm horse. To live on the Camargue he needs to learn resourcefulness. He needs to discover the wildness in himself.”
And for the past three days I’ve nodded in agreement, and then I’ve said, “Just one more day, Aunty Mimi?” and she’s smiled and said, “Very well, Rose, one more day.”
And today? One more day I begged her. One more day, Aunt Mimi. Just for me.
July 30, 1853
The sun was out, the skies were clear and I saw the look on Aunty Mimi’s face this morning when she handed me my brioche.
“It’s time, Rose, we need to let them go.”
Pierre had seen the herd grazing not far beyond our paddy fields just the day before. Loulou and Sebastian were well and getting more than a little restless in confinement. There were no more excuses I could make.
We rode out together, all four of us. Pierre was mounted on Babette, whose wound has thankfully healed. Chantal rode her mare, Eloise, Mimi was on Fabrice and I was on a young mare named Coco. That’s right! I was on my own horse. And why not? I had proven in the storm that I could ride astride. So now, here I was, on horseback like the others. This time I rode with a switch in each hand to use instead of legs and because of this I couldn’t lead Loulou. That task was handed to Pierre who ponied her along by her headcollar. Loulou stuck obediently behind him, and Sebastian ran at her feet, and we went almost as far as the place where the bulls are grazed in our outlying fields until we reached the point where the herd could be seen in the distance.
Loulou gave a whinny, a clarion cry across the fields. And then a moment later her exhortations were returned by another horse – one of the stallions beckoning her back to them. Calling to her to come home.
Pierre slipped off Loulou’s headcollar and she didn’t hesitate. She galloped off from a standstill, her whinnies echoing through the Camargue marshes. Behind her, also galloping, Sebastian with his long legs, no longer ungainly, matched his mother’s pace and her fluid strides.
“He will be quite the horse one day,” Mimi said as she watched him run. “In perhaps three years from now, Pierre, we must bring him in with the muster and then he can become a good riding horse for Rose.”
And then we headed home again, riding across the marshlands. Near to home we asked the horses into a trot for a stride or two. I am not bold enough yet to canter on my own, but when my balance improves it will come, I am sure of it.
August 5, 1853
My life now has a routine. Each day I rise at dawn and I ride one of the horses out with Pierre or Chantal, and then I return and eat lunch and begin to paint. I have almost finished my grand work now, the painting that is three metres long and has dominated my bedroom and my life over the past year. It is very nearly done, and my new concern is that I might push it too far, add one more brush stroke where it doesn’t belong and ruin it all. Aunt Mimi has just come in to look at the work, and I asked her what she thought.
“I have an art critic arriving tomorrow,” she said. “He has a greater eye than mine. Let us wait and ask him.”
An art critic? Coming here to Flamants Roses? Who can she possibly mean?
One mid-summer afternoon in June, my dad and I took the winding footpaths through Kensington Gardens to the Georgian-style red-brick building that stood by the lake. It was a lovely walk, except for the bit where I had to make Dad stop and wait while I threw up in a hedge.
“Are you OK?” he asked me as I emerged from the bushes looking pale and strung out.
I nodded. “It’s just nerves.”
“You’ve got nothing to be worried about,” Dad tried to reassure me.
But in truth he looked as sick as a dog too, and we both hesitated at that moment and stood on the path to catch our breath before I said, “Can we skip it and just go to McDonald’s instead?”
Dad laughed. Then he put his arm around my shoulder and hugged me tight. “That would mean we’d miss your debut exhibition at the Serpentine.”
“So that’s a no?”
“They’re all waiting for you, Maisie. Some of the most famous art critics in Europe will be there.”
And that was when I had to duck into the bushes and throw up a second time.
It has been a year since I left Paris. And in that year my life has been extraordinary. After the auction at Lucie’s, when Claude ended up selling for a colossal two hundred thousand euros, I became an
instant superstar. For some kids, I guess the fame would have gone to their head. With me, it had the opposite effect. I felt like it had all happened too fast and I didn’t deserve the accolades. I was worried that I had peaked in life at the age of thirteen! It would all be downhill from here!
Oddly enough, it had been Augustin who had helped me through that. My old art teacher who had been so tough on me in that term at the Paris School now became my greatest champion. At least once a week we would Skype each other and I would show Augustin what I was working on and he would critique my efforts, make suggestions and look over my virtual shoulder with the kind of clarity only an experienced artistic eye could provide.
My paintings continue to be large format, big oils on canvas, and since there was no way I could paint like that in our tiny flat, Dad helped me to rent an old garage space that had once been a car mechanic’s, two streets along from our place in Brixton. It turned out there was quite a cool artistic community there, and I had other painters and people making films who were right next door. I paid for it myself, using some of my artist’s portion of the auction price of the work that had sold at Lucie’s. I hadn’t realised at the time that, while the auction was for the college, the artist got ten per cent of the sale price at auction that day and for me that was twenty thousand euros!
I sold a few more works after that too. My bank account had all these zeros – or at least it did for a while. I’d spent a lot of it coming home from France. I had something very important to bring back with me, but I’ll get to that story soon enough …
The Serpentine Gallery has always been one of my favourite places in all of London. When I used to come here to Hyde Park with Dad to work on those early paintings of horses, we’d often buy an ice cream and go and sit beside the attractive brick building and look out across the lake. It cost money to go inside, but sometimes if there was an exhibition of an artist Dad thought I would really like, then we’d pay the entry fee and go in.
