by Lou Kuenzler
“Your … your groom?” Poor Wilson looked as if he had swallowed a fly. “Very good, my lady,” he said as he gathered himself together.
That night as I snuggled down in the nursery, my head was whirling with schemes and plans for the new stables, wondering what sort of horse the dealer from Newton would bring.
Chapter Forty-three
I was round the back of the stable block, by the muck heap, whitewashing a wall when the dealer came. He wasn’t due until two o’clock but he came early and took me by surprise.
“Hello,” he called picking his way across the bumpy ground. “You must be the new stable lad, I mean groom. I mean … oh dear.” He looked me up and down in confusion. I was wearing a pair of baggy corduroy trousers I had borrowed from the gardener, a white shirt tucked in at the waist and a big red-and-white spotty handkerchief tied around my hair.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, wiping my hand and leaning down from the ladder. “I’m Josie, and you are quite right, I am Lady Hexham’s new groom.”
“William Thoroughgood, pleased to meet you too, miss.” He smiled in a way that seemed friendly, even if he was surprised. “I left the horse tied up in the yard,” he said. “We’re ready when you are.”
“Do you mind if I just finish this patch, while I’m up the ladder?” I said, pointing to a last square of wall which needed whitewash before I was done.
“Go ahead,” said Mr Thoroughgood, leaning against the fence behind him and watching me work. He had probably never seen a girl paint a wall before. “You carry on, miss. Old Jack won’t mind waiting a minute or two in the sunshine.”
“Jack?” I asked, pausing before dipping my brush into the whitewash.
I remembered how Arthur had seen a black cab horse passing the opera house once or twice. He said the cabby had called him Jack. I dipped my brush again and saw that my hand was shaking. It was silly. It wouldn’t be Beauty. It couldn’t be. I tried to stop the little flame of hope that was leaping in my chest.
“I hear you get horses from London sometimes?” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “Is that where you found Jack?”
“Jack? No.” Mr Thoroughgood shook his head.
The flame snuffed out. Of course it wasn’t him. There must be a million horses known as Jack. Still –
“What colour is he?” I asked.
“Black,” said Mr Thoroughgood. “Nice-looking horse. Or would have been once. That’s why I thought he might suit Lady H—”
“Black?” The foolish flame flickered inside me again.
“Dark as midnight,” said Mr Thoroughgood. “I picked him up at a fair the other side of Newton from a corn dealer. Now you mention it, he did come from London before then. He was a cab horse they say, well-looked after before his owner got sick.” He grinned. “Although I’ll bet he didn’t pull a cab all his life. Not this one.”
“No?” I was gripping the ladder tightly with both hands. My knees were shaking. If I moved an inch, I would fall.
“You all right up there, missy?” said Mr Thoroughgood.
Before I could answer I heard a high-pitched whinny from the stable yard.
“Beauty!” I cried, leaping from the ladder and sending the pot of whitewash flying as I ran.
“Beauty? Now that would be a good name for him,” Mr Thoroughgood called after me. “He’s got a…”
“A star in the middle of his forehead. I know,” I shouted as I skidded around the corner. And there he was. My beloved, beautiful horse, standing in the yard. We looked into each others’ eyes and neither of us moved for a moment. It was really him. I felt if I blinked he might vanish and I’d find the whole thing had been a dream. Then he threw his head in the air and whinnied with delight. I dashed forward and flung my arms around his neck.
“It’s you!” I said, as he nuzzled my ear. “I promised I would find you, Black Beauty. But you found me … you did it, Beauty. I should have known you would.”
When I stopped hugging Beauty at last, I looked up and Mr Thoroughgood smiled.
“You two know each other then?” he said.
“Yes.” I wiped the tears from my eyes. Grooms probably aren’t meant to cry. “We are dear friends.” Although, now I looked at Beauty, I could see he was very different from the fine horse I had known. Earlshall and London had taken their toll. His coat was dull and he was dreadfully thin.
“And your poor knees,” I said, sinking to the ground and running my fingers over the scars.
“He’s battered but not broken,” said Mr Thoroughgood. “Lots of grass and plenty of rest and he’ll make a fine horse again.”
“And love too,” I whispered in Beauty’s ear as I led him to a stall. “We’ll buy him from you, Mr Thoroughgood, whatever price you ask. He is just what we want.”
Beauty soon grew fat on summer grass and I groomed him every day until his coat shone like polished ebony again.
“What a beauty he is, indeed,” said Lady Hexham when I walked him up to the front of the house for her to admire.
And we started to go as far as the village and back in the trap most days. Beauty was as quiet as a lamb, of course, but his ears were pricked and I could feel his old spirit coming back.
When the repairs in the yard were finished, I brought a useful cob and a pair of bay carriage horses from Mr Thoroughgood too.
“You’re doing a grand job, these old stables are coming back to life,” he said, looking around and nodding. I felt a warm glow of pride.
And when Miss Ellen, Lady Hexham’s goddaughter came, we found her a sidesaddle mare and a spare hunter for her gentleman friends. She was a laughing, happy girl, who was gentle with the horses and kind to me.
“This is all splendid, Josie,” said Lady Hexham as I drove her past the woods full of bluebells one sunny evening. “You are proving a fine stable girl. But it’s too much work for you on your own, I think. We should get a coachman too.”
“I know just the person for the job,” I said.
And I wrote to James at Earlshall, begging him to come.
I kept the letter simple. There were so many things he did not know. Things I would need to tell him face to face. That poor Ginger was dead. That I was a girl.
I wrote only:
Dear James,
Please come to Hexham Hall. It is a fine place and there is a job as coachman if you want it.
Beauty is here too.
Your dear friend,
J –
What should I write? How should I sign my name?
Your dear friend,
J. Green.
He would see the truth for himself soon enough.
Nanny Clay made me write another letter too.
“You must tell your aunt and cousin what has become of you,” she said.
“Why? They don’t care,” I objected.
“It is proper, that’s why,” said Nanny Clay. “And your dear father and I raised you to know what is right.”
I couldn’t argue with that. So I wrote:
Dear Aunt Lavinia and Cousin Eustace,
I have arrived with Lady Hexham at last. She is most kind, but I am not her companion as you had planned. I am her stable girl. It is a job which I love. You always did say I was fit for nothing but horses and hay.
Yours dutifully,
Josephine.
No one from Summer’s Place ever wrote back. But I like to think of Aunt Lavinia and The Slug looking shocked as they read my letter at breakfast one morning. Perhaps Eustace almost choked on his boiled egg!
It was a long time until I heard from James and I started to wonder if I ever would. We had a letter from Mr York the coachman, who wrote to say that James had left Earlshall without a reference; Lady Magpie had refused to give him one. But Mr York said he had forwarded my letter to a livery yard where he heard James was working early in the summer.
At last the reply I had been waiting for came.
I will be with you on Tuesday.
Your grateful friend,
James Howard
All morning I paced up and down in the stables, stopping to stroke Beauty every time I passed.
Then, silently as a shadow, James was there, behind me in the yard.
“Hello!” As I spun round, the smile dropped from his lips and he raised his eyebrows and stood staring at me. “Why – why you’re…”
“A girl,” I said, talking so fast my words fell over each other. “I’m sorry, James. I should have told you.” I was wearing the gardener’s corduroy trousers again, with the red-and-white handkerchief tied around my hair. “It’s just…”
“No.” James shook his head. “It’s not that. You’re…”
“A groom,” I said, pointing to the stables. “I know! Imagine me, being in charge of all this…”
“No,” said James, a red blush creeping up his cheeks. “It’s not that either. You’re…”
“What?” I cried. “What am I, James?”
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
“Oh.” Now my cheeks were burning too.
Then, thankfully, Beauty whinnied and we both began to talk about the horses as fast as we could.
Later, when we led Beauty out to the paddock to graze, we leant against the gate and I told James about Ginger and how I had last seen her carried away on that dreadful cart. I told him too how I had bought a posy of fresh violets from Meg and laid them on the spot outside the church where Ginger had passed by.
His eyes filled with tears. He turned away and bit his lip. Then he kicked the bottom of the gate.
“Damn them at Earlshall. Damn them all,” he said.
“It will be different here. You and I are in charge of the horses now,” I said.
One of the first things we did together was to buy a brood mare. The following spring she had a chestnut foal, the first to be born at Hexham Hall for many years. We called her “Little Ginger” and she followed James wherever he went.
There was a bay gelding called Oscar that James liked to ride too. Sometimes, when our work was done, we rode to the common above Fairstowe village. James and I would race; him on Oscar and me, clinging to Beauty’s neck with the wind in my long red hair. And often we would win! For although Beauty’s knees were scarred, his spirt was not. He could still gallop – perhaps not as fast as he once could. But we could still beat James Howard. And, despite all my very great happiness at Hexham – with Nanny and James and the horses, and all my grand plans – I was never happier than when I was riding on Beauty’s back or just standing with him under the apple trees… A horse and a girl, the very best of old friends.
“Joe is the best and kindest of grooms … I shall
never be sold and I have nothing to fear;
and here my story ends.”
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (1877)
Author’s Note
I first imagined I was riding Black Beauty when was I was eight or nine years old and reading Anna Sewell’s heartbreaking classic for the very first time. I was lucky enough to live on a farm and have my very own (small, fat) pony who I rode nearly every day. Suddenly, hairy little Flora was transformed in my imagination – no longer shaggy and slow she was the sleek and speedy Black Beauty.
I did not only pretend to ride on Beauty when I was in the saddle; driving down the motorway I would stare out of the window for hours on end imagining I was leaping the hedges and fences as they flashed by in the fields beside the road. I wonder how many other children have imagined, as they stare out of the windows of city buses, rattle down country lanes in cars or pedal their bicycles across town parks, that they are riding the magnificent Black Beauty too? I wonder how many children have galloped through their imaginations since the story was first published in 1877? I wonder how many adults have? (I know I still do!)
But the gorgeousness of Beauty and those early sunny chapters of love and safety, chestnut trees and meadows, are only half the tale. There is the sadness and the suffering as well. Difficult as it was to read about the terrible treatment of cab horses in Victorian London, or to stumble, weeping, through those few painful short paragraphs of Ginger’s harsh and lonely death, I loved that too. I felt the wonderful release that crying at a story can bring.
I went on to study drama many years later and learnt all about catharsis – the process of an audience releasing their own emotion while witnessing a character’s suffering on stage. I knew nothing about that when I was first reading Black Beauty, of course. All I knew was that the chest-wrenching sobs I cried for Ginger and the other horses in Anna Sewell’s hard-hitting story had real power.
Anna Sewell wanted her readers to be moved, but she wanted them to take notice too. Black Beauty was penned not only as a story but as a way to draw attention to the need to treat animals – and especially horses – more kindly. She makes it all too clear how harsh life could be for an animal in the changing industrial world of the 1870s. It is Anna Sewell’s skill in sharing that message through the briefly glimpsed lives of her characters that has ensured Black Beauty’s enduring place in our hearts and on our book shelves – it sold around 100,000 copies in its first ten years and over forty million by the end of the twentieth century. Sadly, Anna Sewell died very shortly after the book was published and did not live to see any of this success for herself.
It is not only in the number of sales that we can mark the influence of this extraordinary book. Any author who ever writes an animal story – especially one about horses – must hear the distant rumble of Black Beauty’s hooves. It is there in War Horse, Michael Morpurgo’s exceptional, emotionally poignant account of a horse’s view of the First World War. It is there in Charlotte’s Web. It is there in Babe (The Sheep Pig) with all the little creature’s trials, triumphs and tears.
I have read the story of Black Beauty many times – over and over again as a child – and several times as an adult. I noticed, when I came to it again recently after a break of a few years, that there was a hidden story there just waiting to be told. Joe Green, the poor inexperienced groom, is only mentioned twice in the original tale: once when he nearly kills Beauty by mistake and once when he finds the magnificent horse much changed at the very end of the book. I found myself beginning to wonder what happened to young Joe between page 99 and page 295. Where did he go? How had he learnt to be a “fine” groom? I found myself wondering who he really was. Where did he come from? What happened to him even before the story of Black Beauty began?
Joe started to grow in my imagination – and suddenly I knew: he wasn’t Joe at all… Not Joseph Green but Josephine – a girl. That is why the young groom was so inexperienced, I decided. If he was a girl he would never have been allowed to work with horses before. After that, Joe’s voice just wouldn’t go away and I knew (if Anna Sewell didn’t mind such liberties – which I hoped she wouldn’t) that I would have to tell Joe’s story and invite Black Beauty, Merrylegs and Ginger, as well as many of the other original characters, back to life to help me.
Writing Finding Black Beauty has been an absolute joy. Above all, working with my tireless, intelligent and funny editor Gen Herr has been a flat out, whoop-aloud gallop (with plenty of terrible horsey puns shared in emails along the way). Thanks too to all at Scholastic, especially Pete Matthews for terrier-sharp edits, and everyone in sales, marketing and design. Huge thanks as always to Claire Wilson and Pat White at RCW – a finer stable of literary agents is impossible to imagine!
My knowledge of Victorian servant life – and the stable yard in particular – was helped enormously by visits to both Audley End house in Essex and Shugborough in Staffordshire. For sense of city life at the time I found Street Life in London by J. Thomson and Adolphe Smith invaluable. My brother Geoffrey – never really at home in the Twentieth Century let alone the Twenty-First – was a fount of knowledge on all things Victorian (including the underwear!). Sophie McKenzie has been invaluable as always – steering the jolts and wobbles of plot like a skilled coachman on a stormy night. Huge thanks to them both and to my fami
ly too of course who have been lost in the dust blown up by Black Beauty’s hooves for weeks on end. Above all I would like to thank my parents for a childhood of wide-open spaces where my imagination could gallop – this book is dedicated to them.
Scholastic Children’s Books
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First published in the UK by Scholastic Ltd, 2016
This electronic edition published by Scholastic Ltd, 2016
Text copyright © Lou Kuenzler, 2016
The right of Lou Kuenzler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her.
eISBN 9781407179629
A CIP catalogue record for this work is available from the British Library.
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