by Stacy Gregg
This afternoon, though, I didn’t have to pay an entry fee. Because I was the artist. And this was the opening of my show. The guests spilled out on to the lawns outside the pavilion as we approached and there were waiters pouring out glasses of champagne and handing around platters of fancy snacks. It was like the most glamorous garden party ever, and standing in the crowd, being more glamorous than any of them, was a woman in a gold leopard print gown with outrageous flowing red hair.
“Petite Anglaise!” Nicole Bonifait gave me a wave and strode across the lawn towards us with this wide smile. Behind her, Françoise, who had been prowling the platters of food, grabbed three puff pastries and raced behind her mother to join us.
“I’ve been inside already,” Nicole told me. “There are red sold stickers on just about everything! It is just as well I chose my work over the video conference last week or I would have missed out entirely.”
I felt like my knees were going to give way underneath me. “Seriously?” I said. “They’ve sold?”
“Of course they’ve sold!” Françoise chimed in through a mouthful of pastry. “Once the Chapman Gallery bought one, everyone wanted one.”
“The Chapman Gallery?” I was stunned.
“Yes!” Françoise said. “They got the big one at the end. But that’s not my favourite. I like the one we bought better, even if it is a bit smaller …”
Françoise carried on burbling as we all walked inside together, and now I was in the main room of the gallery, and on the walls around me were the works that had dominated the past year of my life. Sixteen paintings in total. And Nicole was right – they all had a red sticker next to them, indicating that all of them had been sold.
“I added them up,” Françoise muttered to me. “You are a millionaire!”
“You see?” A voice behind me said. “I told you you’d become rich and famous in your career.”
I spun around. “Oscar!”
I threw my arms around him and hugged him hard. “You came! I didn’t think you would.”
Oscar smiled. “But I had to come! I wanted to see him.”
He cast his gaze around the walls. “I have missed him so much. Until now, I had forgotten how handsome he always was …”
Oscar’s voice caught a little, choking with emotion as he stared at my paintings. They were of Claude, you see. All sixteen works. Every one of them was a painting of the same black horse with four white socks and a white star on his head. In each of them, my subject was captured in a different pose. In one of the paintings Claude was in motion, cantering free without a rider with his mane and tail flowing in the wind. In another he was caught in close-up so that you could see the details of his muzzle, the whiskers and velvet, the soft sooty blackness of his profile against a bruised lilac sky. And in the big work, the one that the Chapman Gallery had bought, Claude was up on his hind legs rearing and in the background behind his silhouette the streets of Paris were on fire. That one, if the truth were told, was my favourite work too, although I still didn’t find it easy to look at even though I had painted it myself. It was called Terror in Paris.
A sold-out show, attended by all my friends. For the next hour I stayed and I tried to enjoy myself, to accept my ascension to the top of the art world. But the truth was, I was not comfortable being the centre of attention, and as soon as I could, I made excuses and slipped away.
I didn’t mean to be rude and leave my friends, but I had things to do and someone I needed to see. And so I walked around the loops of the pathway from the Serpentine and into the wooded walkways of Hyde Park itself. There, under a tree, I dug through my bag and I pulled out the book that I always kept with me.
Is it wrong that I never told Nicole Bonifait that I had her great-great-great-grandmother’s diary? Yes, I suppose it is. But in all this time, I had found it harder and harder to part with it, to let go of Rose. We were such kindred spirits she and I. So many times I had turned to her pages to try and figure out my own life. It’s funny too, to read back over her entries now, knowing what I do, how Grignons de Camargue would make her world famous. And yet, even though she had unflinching faith in her talent, she really had no idea what was to come. I opened the diary and I read her final entry …
August 12, 1853
Aunt Mimi’s art critic came today. I knew they were here when I heard the wheels of the carriage outside on the gravel, the horses snorting and the leathers of their harnesses creaking. By the time I had risen from bed, got into my chair and dressed, I could already hear the voices in the drawing room. Familiar voices. I came in to find my aunt laughing and smiling, and on the sofa beside her was none other than Papa and Dorian!
Dorian came running for me and he grasped the handles of my wheelchair and began spinning me around in circles, and I was laughing and dizzy and loving it and begging him to stop at the same time. My brother is such a fool – I do love him.
My greeting to my father was considerably cooler. I still remembered how he had told my aunt that Christmas at Fontainebleau that he couldn’t stand the sight of me, that he wanted me gone from Paris. But for his part, he seemed delighted to see me and bent down and kissed my forehead, and when Mimi suggested they must be tired by the journey and perhaps required something to eat and drink, my papa shook his head and said, “First of all, let’s do what is important. I want to see what Rose has been working on. Where is this exciting new painting that you wrote to tell me about?”
And so we all went together, Dorian pushing my wheelchair and Chantal, Mimi and my papa side by side behind us.
“I don’t think it is worth all this fuss you are making,” I told them as we walked.
“It had better be worth a week-long carriage ride from Paris is all I can say,” Dorian teased me.
Had they really come just to see my painting?
When we entered the room and stood in front of it my father said nothing. He stared long and hard and rubbed his beard in mannered consideration. Then he walked back and forth, along the complete length of the work. Finally, he stepped back to the furthest point of the room and looked at the painting in its entirety at a distance, so that he could take it all in at once. And all this time he said nothing! And I sat in my chair and felt my heart pounding in my head and my mouth turn dry with anxiety.
And then, when he did speak at last, his voice had a tremor to it, as if he were about to choke on his own words.
“I should like to be alone with my daughter,” he said.
Mimi sighed, and said, “Oh, very well, Jacques, but you don’t need to be so dramatic!” And they walked out and left us there.
So I expected the worst now. That my father was disappointed by the work, that he was going to spare me the humiliation of telling me this with everyone watching. Then he spoke, and his words were quite unexpected.
“Mimi tells me that you believe I sent you away because I couldn’t stand to look at you crippled in a wheelchair.”
I was taken aback. “What?”
“That is what she said to me,” my papa said. “Is that true, Rose?”
I began to tremble now. “You tell me,” I said. “Is it true?”
My father, reached down, took my hand and clasped it in his own. “No, Rose,” he said firmly. “It was because I couldn’t stand there and watch helplessly while your very spirit was dying. I didn’t want to let you go, but Mimi convinced me that here in the Camargue you would find your strength once more, that your joie de vivre – your joy of life would return.” He gave a wry smile. “And I see now, looking at this work you have made, that my sister, as usual, was right.”
He smiled and looked from me to the painting. “You come from a long line of artists, Rose, but you were always destined to be the greatest of all of us. This painting marks your elevation. With it, you will become the toast of the Paris art world …”
So the misunderstanding between Papa and me is over. And now, all I can think is that I should never have held my resentments so hard for so long. For we are
a family reunited now for just a brief time. Papa and Dorian plan to return to Paris next week and take Grignons de Camargue with them to hand over to Papa’s gallerists in the hope they might find a buyer. I will stay behind at Flamants Roses. For this is my home now, and Paris seems a lifetime ago, so perhaps I may never return.
***
It is extremely frustrating to me that Rose’s diary finishes there on this page. I have turned the pages over and over, hoping that somehow new words will miraculously appear on the blank sheets.
I don’t know why the diary ends so abruptly. I like to think that this is because her life became so fabulous after that she didn’t have time to write in it any more. It is one of life’s ironies, I think, that we keep diaries just when we are at our most boring, and when things get truly interesting we are too busy. I certainly didn’t have time for a diary now! I put Rose’s hardbound text back in my bag carefully nestling it there for safekeeping and kept walking.
The light was turning golden and it was that time of day when everything looks prettier than usual. I crossed at the lights heading across Bayswater Road to Hyde Park Mews. These were the stables where the black-and-white cobs that I had once painted to gain entry to the art school lived. It was a pretty cool place to keep a horse. From these stables it was just a quick two-minute ride to reach the bridle paths and arenas of Hyde Park. I remember watching the riders on their horses heading back to the mews after they’d been hacking through the park and thinking they were the luckiest people in the world to have their horses right here in the city. I never thought for one minute that one day I would be one of them, that I’d be able to keep my own horse here too.
“Maisie, hi!” Bonnie the stable girl gave me a wave as I walked through the cobblestoned yard. “I thought it was your exhibition today?”
“It was,” I said. “I left early. I wanted to take him out for a ride while the light was still good.”
Bonnie laughed. “He’ll be pleased. He’s missed you today. I mean, you’re always here and I think he was in a sulk when I did the feeds today instead. He turned his rump on me.”
I laughed. That sounded like my horse all right. He was fiercely loyal. All his life, he’d only had two owners. The first had been the Célestins, and now – now Claude had me.
“Claude?” I opened the stable doors and walked inside and from the far corner of the stall I heard him nicker back to me. There was such a tone to that nicker, though! As if he was accusing me of being late!
“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” I told him as I grabbed my brushes and began to groom him. He was literally the most handsome horse in the world, I thought. My muse. My forever horse. With his four white socks and his star, the jet-black coat shining like night. On his hind leg the evidence of his injuries would always be there. After the surgery and the three months he spent on box rest the bone had healed better than anyone could have expected. But the proud flesh that had grown on the wound meant that he never grew the hair on that leg back again, and you could still see quite clearly the scars where the van had struck him. To me, that only made him more handsome – it was a symbol of his courage and his sacrifice.
I used the money from the Lucie’s auction and my other sales to buy him from the Célestins and get him here. They had no use for him any more since he could no longer work as a police horse. I worried that Oscar might be upset, but he was delighted when I told him what I’d done. His visit to London was not just to see my show, but to visit the real Claude. At the gallery tonight we’d made plans and tomorrow the two of us were borrowing one of the cobs and were going riding together in Hyde Park.
Yes, riding. They thought Claude was going to die. Then they thought he was too wounded to ever be ridden again. They were wrong. Slowly, carefully, I had nursed him back to health, working a little more each day to strengthen the tendons and muscles in his broken leg. Soon he was walking perfectly soundly, and then trotting and cantering on the lunge. When the vet checked his X-rays and gave me permission to ride him, I cried.
I put my grooming brushes aside and grabbed my saddle and bridle, tacking up inside the stall before leading Claude out into the cobbled courtyard of the mews and mounting up there. Then I rode him to the Bayswater Road and stood at the lights and waited for the pedestrian signal to bleep so we could cross. Claude’s years on the streets of Paris mean that he is the perfect city horse. Even the red double-decker buses here don’t make him bat an eyelid. The other day there was a brass band in the park and some protestors with placards, and he just strolled along through it all like a superstar. He makes me feel so safe on his back. And I’m learning to ride. I can rise to the trot, and I can even canter now. You’re not supposed to in the park, but at this hour when there are no other riders on the tracks I’ve been practising.
We reach the bridle path that passes the Serpentine and I think of all those people inside the gallery, the bourgeoisie of London, raising their champagne flutes and talking about art and being fabulous. And I know there is no place I would rather be right now than here with my best friend. And I take up the reins and I close my legs and sit tall and look to the horizon, and I canter on.
In New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, in Gallery 812, you will find one of the most famous paintings of the nineteenth century and the only important painting of this era by a woman – The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur.
It took Rosa Bonheur almost two years to create her masterpiece, and her commitment to being an artist, despite the extreme sexism towards women painters at the time, marks her out as one of feminism’s greatest trailblazers.
Determined to create her art, Bonheur took to dressing as a man to avoid attention when she frequented the abattoirs of Paris, and made her twice weekly visits to the horse markets that took place in the boulevard de l’Hôpital, near the asylum of Salpêtrière. Here, she began to work up her sketches of the horses, the heavy draught Percherons and Boulonnaises and Selle Français, figuring out her plan and mapping out the proportions of her gigantic masterpiece that would end up measuring two and a half metres in height and over five metres in length.
When the work finally went on display in Paris in 1853 nobody believed that a mere woman could possibly have painted such a “masculine” and imposing work of art. In England, critics acclaimed it as the greatest work of its kind and yet there were many who remained adamant that a woman couldn’t possibly have created it! To prove them wrong Bonheur was forced to tour alongside her painting so that they could see her in the flesh.
When American art patron Cornelius Vanderbilt II bought the work for a record sum the purchase rocked the art world and secured Rosa Bonheur a place forever as one of the most important artists who ever lived.
The character of Rose Bonifait is based on Rosa Bonheur. As for the rest of this book, well, if you travel to Paris you’ll find much of the modern-day story is also based on real life. The Célestins – the stables that are the home of the horses of the Garde républicaine – are right there on the boulevard Henri IV. And Ladurée, the store that is renowned for having the best macarons in the world, has a branch just down the road.
The wild horses of the Camargue are very real too. They are always grey, and it is believed they were once the prized possessions of the Romans, descended from the Arabic Barb. Unlike the Barb, who learnt to survive the hardships of the desert, the Camargue horse has adapted to life in the salt marshes of the French coastlands. If you visit the Camargue you’ll see them cantering wild and free through the waves in the natural wetland reserves that surround the village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. For centuries they’ve been tended by the gardians, the French horsemen who manage the herd and muster them twice a year so that they can select young stock ready to be broken into saddle as riding horses, branded with the symbol of their lineage and let loose again to roam wild through the waves on the briny terrain of salt marsh and rice fields.
And if you are in London, visit the Serpentine Gallery, and watch the black-a
nd-white cobs go about their daily exercise in Hyde Park, and then travel across the city to Trafalgar Square to the National Gallery and you’ll find a painting by the English artist George Stubbs of a horse called Whistlejacket that was one of the chief inspirations both for Rosa Bonheur and for this story. Whistlejacket’s portrait is worth thirteen million pounds, and if I had the money he would be mine.
An epic, emotional story of two girls and their bond with beloved horses, the action sweeping between Italy during the Second World War and the present day.
One family’s history of adventure and heartbreak – and how it is tied to the world’s most dangerous horse race, the Palio.
Click on the cover to read more.
Books by Stacy Gregg
THE PRINCESS AND THE FOAL
THE ISLAND OF LOST HORSES
THE GIRL WHO RODE THE WIND
THE DIAMOND HORSE
THE THUNDERBOLT PONY
THE FIRE STALLION
PRINCE OF PONIES
THE FOREVER HORSE
The Pony Club Secrets series
MYSTIC AND THE MIDNIGHT RIDE
BLAZE AND THE DARK RIDER
DESTINY AND THE WILD HORSES
STARDUST AND THE DAREDEVIL PONIES
COMET AND THE CHAMPION’S CUP
STORM AND THE SILVER BRIDLE
FORTUNE AND THE GOLDEN TROPHY
VICTORY AND THE ALL-STARS ACADEMY
FLAME AND THE REBEL RIDERS
ANGEL AND THE FLYING STALLIONS
LIBERTY AND THE DREAM RIDE
NIGHTSTORM AND THE GRAND SLAM
ISSIE AND THE CHRISTMAS PONY
Pony Club Rivals series
THE AUDITIONS
SHOWJUMPERS
RIDING STAR
THE PRIZE
www.stacygregg.co.uk
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