No one would come to fix the lights, because they always came on by themselves (or so it seemed) in a matter of minutes. The two guards were embroiled in their stories and smokes and when the barn went dark, one guard got up and looked, swore and flashed his torch around, but in another ten seconds was back to talking and smoking.
Nell carefully pressed in between Stardust and the side of her stall, laid a hand on her muzzle. When the mare uttered a small sound, Nell did it again and Stardust went quiet. Then she took the small boning knife from her pocket and cut first through the front rope, then the one that held the right rear ankle. The horse remained perfectly still as if the imprint of Nell’s hand on her muzzle remained.
To Nell, the stillness was no miracle, nor was it even strange. Stardust responded perfectly because that’s what she’d been taught to do. Very slowly she backed Stardust out, put her hand on the mare’s left shoulder to turn her, then slowly walked her out into the night.
FOURTEEN
It was the barn that had told Nell where she was and she could hardly believe it; it nearly paralyzed her to think that all of this time she had been only a few miles from home.
She and Stardust had to stop halfway there so that the mare could rest for an hour; the place was too far to travel in one go, too hard on the horse. From Hobbs’s barn that afternoon she had taken hay and oats. She had slung the oats in a sack behind her over the blanket and tied up half a bale of hay, which she’d tied with a rope to the saddle. It was enough to keep the horses going for a couple of days and nights.
Two outlying barns, for years unused, stood nearly a half mile from the other Ryder Stud buildings, which was one reason why her granddad had stopped using it. Also, the barn was unnecessary when he started trimming back on stock and land.
Nell did not believe in luck, certainly not in the good kind, certainly not her own. But she did believe in fate. She did believe a person was led to something, although it was often hard to tell what finding it meant, or what was meant for you to do there. It was a necessary belief; it kept her going. When she’d come upon Ryder land and the empty barn on that first night, it had deepened her belief in fate-not in luck, not in guidance and not in God. Fate was different; fate was the thinking through and the working out of a pattern already laid down. You had to believe in something, she thought, even if it’s a cold, impersonal and imperious something.
The Ryder stables would be a source of bulk food and maybe some bran or barley. Where she would get her own food, after the supplies she’d taken from the house, she wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t worried about it. There were other things to worry about.
She remembered hanging her head, as if this absence from home were her own fault. She had stood beside the tired mare whose neck was bent, cropping at black grass in the dark and wondered what heavy hand was stopping her. It wasn’t as if she’d run away, and yet it felt like it, it really did. In the place she was taken to, it hadn’t been mere physical boundaries that had kept her from running; she had become inured to those. No, it was more an irrational notion that she shouldn’t be free; this had become entrenched in her mind, strong as her mind was. She had relearned the limits of freedom.
But she did know, didn’t she, what kept her in this now self-imposed exile? Even though she wasn’t responsible, except, perhaps, for having a pretty arse. She put it that way, crudely and sarcastically, hoping she could diminish the awfulness of the rape. The footsteps on the stairs, the opening door, the dark and then being pushed down, turned over and forced to lie flat on her stomach. Always, he came at her from behind. Every time. A dozen times. She had seen him once, but no more than a glance grazing his face. She believed she knew him. It was a belief unsustained by memory because her memory, her conscious awareness of him had been wiped out. But she also believed that the memory could be triggered by something and then she’d know. Until then she never wanted to speak of it; it was something she would have to settle for herself, probably, if at all.
And she’d learned the limits also the first time she’d seen the mares in those two barns. When she walked down the line, rubbing each of them on the rump or flank, she saw a number of them were pregnant. Yes, some of them were unmistakably in foal.
The stillness was eerie, unnatural. Fugitive sounds-a tiny rustle of hay, the soft movement of a tail flicking- were all. Nell thought these horses projected a resignation unlike any she had ever witnessed.
She studied the stalls. The panels separating the mares were thin. Where the panels on each side came together with the dividing wall, they squared off a little platform that she might be able to sit on if there was any way to climb up there. Nell did not know why she wanted to do this; for some reason she felt it was important. Maybe once she got up there, she’d know.
She found an old crate against the wall that she pulled to the entrance of the stall and got up by standing on it and letting her arms power her the rest of the way. Then she sat down, legs dangling. “All right,” she said. She could touch the heads of the two horses in front and if she turned around, the two horses behind her. Maybe that’s why she’d wanted to get up here; up here she could reach them. From here she could see down the rows in both directions. She turned her head and saw they were looking at her. I wonder if they think I’m something else to be drained of fluids. On the ceiling, fluorescent lights stuttered and shimmered. It was day, but the lights were on and she wondered if this was to extend daylight or spring to confuse the mares into foaling in the dead of winter.
Nell looked toward the end of the barn and, seeing no one about, began to hum a few bars of her favorite song, and then to sing in a voice barely over a whisper. “Love walked right in-” She went on with what she could remember of it.
If she balanced carefully, she could lean back on the narrow ledge of the panel. She looked at the light, which threw a veil of sickly white over the horses. It might as well have been a layer of frost covering everything-the barn, the mares and her, even the stillness, even the singing.
FIFTEEN
She had this recurrent nightmare: a vast track of sand, an endless sweep of dunes, some ridged and shadowed like steps that a moment later would be swept away and another bit of geography would form in the sand. Along the horizon she saw a chain of what she took to be camels until her dream eye, coming closer, told her they were mares. There were no stalls, but still the mares were chained. But to what? There was only the sand. Yet they couldn’t move. They stood exposed to sun and wind, a black line across the farthest dune.
And the awful silence, except for the wind, the subtle shifts in the sand, the wind rearranging the dunes.
Every time she had awakened from this dream, she recognized the peculiar amalgam of shame and remorse was caused not by what she had done, but by what she hadn’t. She dropped her head on her raised knees. Sixty mares: there was no way in the world she could get all of them out, or even most of them. No matter who the people there thought was responsible, they would still have increased security. But she depended upon their thinking: if it was she who had taken the mares, why hadn’t she taken her own horse, Aqueduct? That was why she’d left him for last: it might be the one thing that would throw them off the track.
Her head stayed down and she shook it back and forth against her knees when an image was too painful. Don’t go there, don’t go there. One thought struck her as incongruous: did they miss her? Despite wanting to blow the place to kingdom come and kill every last one of them-face-to-face, so that she could see the cold fear in their eyes-despite this she wondered, did they miss her? It was all too complicated, too hard to grasp, an emotional thicket, tangled and barbed.
In this dream tonight something had brushed against her face that wasn’t the wind. There was nothing else there. She awoke in the deep dark rubbing her face, and saw Charlie, the little foal that she had brought along with its mother, looking around the open barn door. Charlie had been inspecting her and apparently hadn’t decided whether she was trustworthy.
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br /> She fell back against her straw pillow, glad to have been awakened and thought about the dream again, for every time she had it she would go to sleep one person and wake up another, her sense of herself subtly changed, as was the surface of the desert in the dream. What clung to her nearly sunken consciousness was that there was something she had to do.
I’ve done enough.
No, you haven’t. Somebody else? Perhaps. But you? No.
“Oh, who says?” she had yelled one night at the stars, scaring the horses, who started whinnying and snorting. She had gone into the barn and from one horse to another, offering each lumps of sugar, a stroke on the cheek and an apology.
Tonight a soft whinny came from the barn. The mother Daisy probably looking for Charlie. The foal trotted back to the stall.
They had grown so used to being tethered; it was difficult now for them to move around. They were anchored here by ghost chains, as the amputee still feels a ghost leg. A limb there and not there.
Again she thought of the dream and the chains in the sand. But you couldn’t chain anything to sand. She wondered if she herself was that line of dark horses on the horizon, that she felt chained even though she had not been, literally. This had not come about merely as a result of her forced imprisonment in that gabled room under the eaves. “When can I go home?”
There was no answer.
She had felt herself to be a much younger self, more vulnerable, less aware, one who had regressed. Her passivity, while it had lasted, was a means of self-protection, a mildness that would appease these people and would convince them she wouldn’t try anything.
From the window of her room she could see the courtyard and stables, three long lines of them. This had shown her it was a stud farm, like Ryder’s, only slightly larger. But down below there was little activity, which she found strange. Only Aqueduct (and why had they wanted him?) and a few other horses were led from their stalls to the exercise ring. She would watch from her window for hours, interrupted only by a tray brought in by a girl who’d been told not to speak to her. But the girl, Fanny, having told her she was not to speak, continued speaking (feeling, apparently, that she had already broken the rule when she opened her mouth). Fanny was trying to earn enough money to go to America. This was the girl’s single wish. She had an aunt who lived in Chicago.
“Do you take care of the horses ever?”
“Oh, no,” Fanny answered. “It’s got to be done just right.”
“What has to be?”
Fanny shrugged.
A little while after she’d been here, Nell realized she would have to stop acting fifteen and be herself again, with every ounce of self-control and resourcefulness she could muster. She would never find a way out of this place if she couldn’t convince them it was safe for them to give her a little freedom. The “When can I go home?” part of her would have to go and that other part of her, cool and in command, would have to reassert itself. It did not actually take a lot of effort; it had come over her quite naturally. Sometimes she wondered about this.
This composure and self-command might have been induced by the horses, the way she knew a person had to handle them. One had to be calm, consistent, efficient and dependable. You couldn’t be a certain way one day and a different way the next.
Hadn’t she said something like that a couple of years ago to Vernon Rice? Being around horses, she had said, “gives a person poise.”
Vernon Rice. She wondered what he was doing right now (except making money, of course). He had just walked in when I was currying Samarkand. A total stranger, a stepbrother.
Nell looked again at the white patches of stars and felt comforted.
He just walked in.
SIXTEEN
Aqueduct needed to run. She could feel his frustrated energy through her legs on his flanks and see it in the way he shook his mane and looked ahead as if the world were a row of hurdles he knew he could jump. She knew he wanted to jump that string of walls that zigzagged across the fields for almost half a mile. They called them Hadrian’s walls. It was the way she’d been taken that night, and the man who’d taken her had been a very good rider because some of those walls were dangerously high. She’d never been able to jump all of them. But Aqueduct could; Aqueduct loved the walls.
At two a.m., an hour when no one would be out, she rode the horse to the main buildings of her grandfather’s farm. It took a half hour, so she wasn’t surprised that the outlying barn in which she’d stabled the mares was no longer used.
They could have galloped along this road between the barn and the main Ryder property, but Nell wanted to save Aqueduct’s energy for the training course. She wanted things to appear to be back to normal, or at least to have the illusion of normality, the comfort of the familiar, no matter how small.
It was lovely in this wood in winter; it always had been along this old road, no matter what the season or the hour. Iridescent with frost or thin coatings of ice, the small twigs broke and fell. But Aqueduct, never a skittish horse, did not start or stop. With the moon itself like ice, as hard and bright as she could remember, the scene was a landscape of dreams. But we’re always dreaming, she thought, images floating upward when the mind is off guard. There’s always a dream going on down there, some part of the mind that didn’t care what was going on up here. She pushed a low-hanging branch out of the way, ducked under it, came out on the narrowing path to the stables and house. Her mares needed hay; she planned on hooking a bale of it onto the saddle if it would hold, maybe half on each side. She could walk beside the horse if the load seemed too heavy.
When they neared the barn, she hesitated, pulling back on the reins. They would remember Aqueduct-Samarkand and Beautiful Dreamer and Criminal Type. She thought they would remember.
“Come on, Duck,” said Nell as she slipped down from the saddle. She walked the horse to the first row of stalls, afraid almost to look, afraid she would see unfamiliar faces in every stall, improbable, in the relatively short time she’d been gone, yet she felt that time to be fatal, to be her fault, as if her absence had been deliberate, as if she had forgotten them and, having forgotten, had nullified them. Such a fancy was arrogant, she supposed, as if her absence could make such a difference, as if it were a magic act, that she could throw up a veil that would make them disappear at will.
But the horses were here and if they weren’t sure of her, they knew Aqueduct soon enough. It had always made her feel good to watch horses greeting one another. Aqueduct stopped at a stall and then went on to the next as if looking for someone. In the frozen stillness the only sounds were the soft nickerings. The horses were far enough from the house that no one would hear.
Yet it was like walking back into a past that no longer belonged to her, as if she’d mislaid it, left it deliberately behind and could no longer lay claim to it. She had forfeited it by not coming back. You wake up one morning and everything’s changed. Or you go along thinking you can take a step back to find the ground is gone behind you. You get careless and profligate with your time and your feelings, and then find out it’s too late.
Two years ago she would have said that she was happy; what she now knew was that happiness was irrelevant.
She stopped at each of the stalls, Samarkand’s and Beautiful Dreamer’s, and Criminal Type’s and Fool’s Money’s (where she thought of Vern and smiled), stroking the neck of each, getting in return what she hoped were (but wasn’t sure of) signs of recognition. Of course they must remember in some small way, some instinctive way. She could not be romantic or sentimental about it. She found the hay, small bundles of it.
In the tack room, she took her favorite saddle from the bench, thinking it wonderful the saddle was still there, as if everything connected to her then, her absence could have rendered nugatory. Then she took the too large one from Aqueduct’s back, adjusted her own saddle on him, then secured the hay to it. She hoisted herself up once more and walked Aqueduct across the horse yard, away from the barn and along the bridle p
ath past the house. The house was at some distance; she stopped and gazed at it.
It was not that she could not imagine her father’s sadness, and her grandfather’s, and Maurice’s-somehow especially Maurice’s-desolation. But she couldn’t return yet, not quite yet.
They reached the training course and she leaned down and opened the gate. When they walked onto the track, a feeling of exhilaration washed over her, and she felt it in her horse, too. She wished that Maurice were here with his stopwatch, measuring time not by seconds but by halves of seconds. Split seconds, photo finishes. Faster than drawing breath. But he wasn’t.
Aqueduct shook his head and lowered it; she could feel the tension bulk his shoulders. She had rarely done this; racing was more Maurice’s job, not his job, but his pleasure. They had jockeys for this. She untied the hay and let it drop to the ground. She rose slightly in the saddle, leaned forward, hugged the horse’s flanks with her legs, gathered the reins and in the dead dark whispered, “Go, Duck!”
The horse leaped forward so quickly she thought he’d leave her behind. Then she forgot everything but the horse, the reins and the rushing air; it blew over her like a cowel. Nothing she’d ever felt had been this fast, at least nothing she’d felt a part of. The track was a mile long. It was around the second turn that she saw something lying in their path but it was too late to stop. Three seconds after she’d seen it, Aqueduct jumped it as if it were a low hurdle.
SEVENTEEN
The Grave Maurice Page 9
