Sea Horses: the Talisman

by Louise Cooper

  It was true, and Tamzin spent nearly all her time with the horses, discovering their names and making friends with them. By the time the visit was over and the class went reluctantly back to the minibus, she had made several sketches of the great creatures, and was determined to complete some paintings of them in time for the sale.

  On the bus Marga sat next to Tamzin again. Tamzin had not seen much of her during the visit but she could tell that Marga was excited about something. As the bus moved off, she found out what it was.

  ‘You know what we were saying on the way here,’ Marga began. ‘About someone organizing a gymkhana? Well, I’ve been thinking – why don’t we do it?’

  ‘What, you and me?’ Tamzin was surprised.

  ‘Well, not just us, of course. But what about the stables you go to? They’ve got lots of horses and they must have enough land. Mightn’t they help? We could raise more funds for the animal sanctuary, and it’d be good for the stables too.’

  Tamzin started to catch Marga’s enthusiasm. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘I’m sure they’d be interested!’

  ‘Great! We can call it… I don’t know – a Pony Fun Day or something. We’ll have all sorts of competitions, like jumping, and bending races; and perhaps we can even do a musical ride display –’

  ‘Hang on!’ Tamzin laughed breathlessly. ‘We haven’t even asked the Richardses yet.’

  ‘Well, that’s your job, isn’t it?’ Marga beamed. ‘Ring them tonight. We’re not on the phone yet and I haven’t got a mobile, but you can tell me what they say at school tomorrow.’

  ‘All right,’ Tamzin agreed. ‘I’ll call them as soon as I get home.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Marga, then grinned. ‘You know what? This could really be the start of something!’

  Nan was waiting with the car when the minibus arrived back at the school and, as they drove to Chapel Cottage, Tamzin told her all about the day and what Marga had suggested.

  Nan thought the idea was an excellent one. ‘Just after Christmas would be ideal,’ she said. ‘People always feel a bit flat when the festivities are over, and this would give them something to look forward to.’

  By the time they got to the cottage Tamzin calculated that Joel would probably be back from his school in Truro, and she hung up her coat and fished in her bag for her mobile phone. But as she pulled it out, she suddenly stopped.

  ‘Oh, no…’ There was horror in her voice.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Nan asked.

  Tamzin was staring at her own wrist. ‘My bracelet – it’s gone!’

  ‘What?’ Nan hurried to look. ‘Are you sure? Check your coat sleeve; it might have come off in there.’

  Tamzin fumbled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t. I must have dropped it somewhere. Oh, Nan…’

  ‘Now, let’s be logical,’ said Nan firmly. ‘It’s bound to be somewhere. When did you last see it, do you remember?’

  Tamzin thought back. ‘It was definitely on my wrist when we had lunch at the sanctuary,’ she recalled. ‘I know, because they had some blue glasses in the café and I noticed they were almost the same colour as my fragment.’

  ‘Well, then, there are three possibilities. You dropped it at the sanctuary or in the minibus or in the car. Come on.’ Nan reached for a torch. ‘Let’s go and look in the car, for starters.’

  The bracelet was not in the car and though they shone the torch carefully over the ground they had covered, there was no sign of it.

  ‘Right,’ said Nan. ‘We’ll ring the sanctuary and the minibus company, and see if it’s been found.’ She looked at Tamzin’s stricken face and knew what she was thinking. ‘Don’t worry, love. We’ll get it back.’

  ‘But what if we don’t?’ Tamzin whispered.

  For a moment Nan looked uneasy. Then she forced herself to smile. ‘Let’s make those phone calls. The bracelet will turn up, I’m sure of it.’

  But it didn’t. The people at the sanctuary and at the minibus firm were very concerned and helpful but said that nothing had been handed in. They would search fully tomorrow, of course they would, and if the bracelet was discovered they would phone straight away.

  Tamzin could tell that Nan too was worried, though Nan tried to hide it and be reassuring. She herself was more than worried: she was desperate. She forgot all about the pony event and spent the evening brooding over the bracelet’s loss. If it wasn’t at the sanctuary and wasn’t in the bus, where could it possibly have gone? She imagined one of the heavy horses treading on it and shattering the glass, or even accidentally eating it with a mouthful of grass. Her one small hope was that one of her classmates might have found it. If they had, and didn’t know whose it was, they would probably hand it in at school tomorrow.

  But what if that didn’t happen? What if the bracelet was lost for ever? Tamzin went to bed haunted by that thought. The blue glass fragment was her talisman. If, as she believed, it protected her from the Grey Horse, could that mean that she would now be vulnerable to the evil power again…?

  She spent the night tossing and turning restlessly, and was wide awake long before dawn. Nan wasn’t up and about yet, and for a few minutes Tamzin lay in bed with her lamp on, trying not to think about the missing bracelet. Then, gradually, she became aware of sounds outside that hadn’t been there last night. A hooting, whistling moan – and in the background, faint and distant, a dull roaring…

  She scrambled out of bed and ran to the window. Though it was still dark outside, enough light spilled from the room to show the shrubs in the garden bending and shuddering under the attack of a violently gusting wind. It had risen in just a few hours, blowing from the sea and hurtling its way up the valley. And the background roaring was the sound of breakers whipped to a fury by the gale and pounding the beach and cliffs.

  Tamzin shut the curtains again and hastened back to bed. She had heard the weather forecast last night and it had said nothing about this. It was so sudden. Her mind crept with unease, and she felt in her bones that this unpredicted change in the weather was more than mere coincidence. It was a sign. A warning.

  A message from the Grey Horse…

  Nan drove Tamzin to school that morning with the squally wind hurling rain against the car windscreen. Tamzin still couldn’t shake off the feeling that the weather was an omen, and she hoped fervently that someone had found her bracelet and handed it in. No one had. Mrs Beck, the class teacher, made an announcement and asked everyone to search but there was no trace of it.

  At lunchtime Tamzin didn’t feel like eating anything. All the same she made herself go to the canteen with everyone else, and was dismally nibbling a sandwich when Marga came up to her table.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Marga asked.

  ‘Not really,’ said Tamzin. ‘I’m worried about my bracelet.’

  Marga sat down without asking. ‘Is it very valuable?’

  ‘No, but it’s special. To me, anyway.’

  Marga’s face was full of sympathy. ‘Don’t get too down. Maybe someone will find it; you never know. Why not put a “lost” ad on the school noticeboard? Then people won’t forget to look.’ Marga hesitated a moment, then asked, ‘I suppose you didn’t phone your friends at the stables last night, did you?’

  ‘Oh – no, I didn’t. Sorry.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. You had other things to worry about. But do you think you’ll be able to ring them tonight?’

  With a huge effort Tamzin tried to shake off the heavy feeling inside her. She couldn’t let the loss of the bracelet take over her whole life. Marga was right. It might be found. She mustn’t give up hope. And she mustn’t give in to her secret fears.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I will. And I’ll tell you what they say tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s better!’ Smiling again, Marga put a hand over Tamzin’s and squeezed her fingers. Then she glanced towards the windows. ‘Look at that rain! If the Fun Day goes ahead, we’d better keep our fingers crossed that it isn’t like this.’

  The
words sent a shiver through Tamzin as she remembered how suddenly and unexpectedly the squalls had begun. Marga’s remark was completely innocent, of course. She couldn’t have known what Tamzin was thinking, and didn’t notice the dismay in her eyes.

  Which was just as well.

  It was still raining when Nan collected Tamzin at the end of the school day. Nan had phoned the sanctuary and the minibus firm again, but with no luck. The bracelet was gone.

  ‘Now, Tamzin, you must try not to worry,’ said Nan when they got home. ‘Worrying doesn’t help a bit. The best cure I know is to make yourself concentrate on something else.’ She smiled. ‘Such as that Pony Fun Day idea that you and your school friend were planning. You haven’t asked Mr and Mrs Richards about it yet, have you? Well, why don’t you go and ring them now?’

  ‘I suppose I could…’ Tamzin sounded doubtful.

  ‘That’s better!’ Nan gave her a hug. ‘And you can say that I’ll be happy to help out too. I’m a bit out of practice for any riding, but I could be a steward or something.’

  Tamzin’s face brightened a little. ‘That would be great, Nan. All right – I’ll ring.’

  Mrs Richards answered the phone and, when Tamzin explained Marga’s idea, she was enthusiastic. ‘It’ll be marvellous publicity for the stables,’ she said. ‘And we’ve certainly got enough land to put on a good show. Well done, Tamzin, for thinking of it!’

  ‘It wasn’t really my idea,’ Tamzin confessed. ‘It was Marga’s.’

  ‘Well done both of you, then. Joel will be excited too. I expect he’ll ring you later, when he gets home from school. Oh, and by the way, what are you and your nan doing at Christmas?’

  Tamzin had hardly thought about Christmas, but to her surprise realized that it was only a couple of weeks away. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Well, we’re going to have a little Boxing Day party here. We’d like you both to come, if you can.’

  ‘That would be lovely. I’ll tell Nan.’

  ‘Good. And invite your friend Marga too. Then we can all talk about the Fun Day.’

  Tamzin returned to the kitchen feeling much better. Concentrating on something else did help. Nan was delighted by the Christmas invitation, and said that they had better start planning their own festivities or they would be ‘all behind like the horse’s tail’, as she put it. Tamzin laughed at that and Nan smiled with relief. Just for a little while, the Grey Horse was forgotten.

  But not for long. That night, Tamzin had a terrible dream. It had happened once before: running through howling, gale-swept darkness, desperate to reach safety because the sea was raging behind her. She could see nothing but she knew that a vast wave was rising, and in a few more seconds it would roar in and crash over her, to engulf her and sweep her away. And there was a noise like wildly galloping hooves in her head, and somewhere a huge voice was booming out: ‘GREY! GREY! GREY!’

  She woke up with a whimpering cry, and for several minutes lay shivering and shuddering until the worst of the fright faded. The voice in her nightmare had been full of hate, and she knew that the hate was directed at herself. The Grey Horse had reason to hate her. Centuries ago her ancestors had defeated it and imprisoned its spirit in the stone statue. And though Tamzin had set it free, she had not meant to, and now she was on the side of its ancient enemy, the Blue Horse. The Grey Horse did not like being defied. To Tamzin the dream was a warning that it would destroy her if it could. And now she no longer had her bracelet to protect her.

  With a trembling hand she switched on her bedside lamp and let out her breath in relief as light filled the room. The rain had stopped but the wind was still rampaging outside, and Tamzin stared hard at Nan’s big painting on the wall; the one that showed a beautiful blue-white horse galloping out of the sea. Blue Horse, Blue Horse… She repeated the name silently, over and over again, to comfort herself. But at the back of her mind she could still hear the voice of her dream.

  ‘GREY! GREY! GREY!’

  As if somewhere, not too far away, something dark and dangerous was laughing at her.

  Soon after the night of the dream, Tamzin started to have small accidents.

  The first happened on Friday evening. She was chopping vegetables for the evening meal when suddenly the knife slipped and sliced across her finger. The cut wasn’t serious but it shook her, and even when Nan had cleaned and dressed it, it still hurt.

  Then on Saturday morning she almost fell down the stairs. She simply wasn’t concentrating and she missed the top step and stumbled, only just managing to save herself by clutching at the stair rail. At the stables in the afternoon, one of the ponies trod on her foot. And on Sunday evening she spilled an entire cup of tea – luckily it wasn’t too hot – into her lap.

  Apart from the cut (which was healing) there was no real harm done and normally Tamzin would not have been worried. Everyone was accident-prone from time to time. But there were so many mishaps. Too many to be coincidence. It was as if the bracelet had been her shield; now that it was gone she was vulnerable to the malevolent influence of the Grey Horse. And these small incidents were just the beginning. The Grey Horse could do much, much worse. And it would. If it could, it meant to kill her.

  She wanted desperately to talk to Nan about her fears but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Nan, though, seemed to understand without any need for words, as Tamzin realized when she came out of school on Monday afternoon. Nan was waiting as usual, and on the back seat of the car were several carrier bags.

  ‘Oh, I just bought a couple of little things for you,’ said Nan airily when Tamzin asked what was in them. ‘I had to go in to Truro anyway. Call them early Christmas presents, if you like.’

  In the bags were a fleece with a hood, some patterned tights and a pair of fashionably cut jeans. They were all blue.

  Tamzin said, ‘Oh, Nan…’

  Nan knew what she was thinking, and smiled conspiratorially. ‘And when we get home,’ she said, ‘why don’t we start work together on a few more pictures for the sale? Some blue horses maybe?’

  The Christmas sale was on Thursday, which was also the last day of term. It was a tremendous success. Tamzin, in her new clothes, helped on one of the stalls and by the end of the day almost everything had been sold, including all her pictures.

  Tamzin was feeling much better. Since Monday she had been concentrating on the colour blue. She took great care always to wear something blue, even if it was only socks or a T-shirt under her school clothes. Her bedroom walls were covered in pictures now, too; quick paintings that she and Nan had made, all of blue horses. Nan had even painted the bedroom ceiling blue.

  And since Monday there had been no more accidents.

  They had cleared up and put away the trestle tables, and Tamzin was saying goodbye to some of her classmates when Marga came over.

  ‘I bought one of your pictures,’ Marga said, and held up a carrier bag. ‘Christmas present for my mum.’

  ‘Thanks!’ Tamzin was pleased. ‘Is your mum here? Don’t let her see it or it’ll spoil the surprise.’

  ‘Oh, she didn’t come,’ said Marga with a shrug, then changed the subject. ‘Look, you know I said we’re not on the phone yet? Well, it doesn’t look as if we will be till after the holidays. So I was thinking, what about fixing up a time to get together and plan the Fun Day?’ She paused. ‘When are you next going to the stables?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning, unless it’s pelting with rain.’

  ‘Great! How about if I ride Lossie over and meet you there?’

  Tamzin thought that was a good idea. ‘Then you can meet Joel and Mrs Richards too. And I tell you what, why not come to my house for tea afterwards? Nan won’t mind – she says I’m always welcome to bring my friends home.’

  Marga’s face clouded a little. ‘Well… I don’t know if my mum’ll let me. But I’ll ask.’ She brightened again. ‘See you in the morning, then. I expect I’ll be there about half-past ten.’

  She hurried out of the do
or and Tamzin gazed thoughtfully after her. From what she had just said, and one or two previous remarks, it sounded as though Marga was not particularly happy at home. She had no brothers or sisters, Tamzin knew, and she never mentioned her father, but only her mother, who sounded strict and stand-offish. Tamzin felt a pang of sympathy. To be stuck out of the village, with no phone and no nearby friends, couldn’t be a lot of fun. No wonder Marga sometimes talked about Lossie as if he was her only friend.

  A voice behind her said, ‘Hello, Tamzin, love. Ready to go?’

  Tamzin turned round. Nan was there, holding her school coat, a smile on her face. Tamzin smiled back warmly, and thought how lucky she was.

  ‘Yes, Nan,’ she said and gave Nan a hug. ‘I’m ready.’

  The next morning was windy but dry, so as soon as breakfast was finished Tamzin set off for the stables. The wind was blowing from the sea and she could hear the waves’ distant roar as she was buffeted along the track. Tatters of low, dark cloud raced past over her head, making the rising land to either side look grim and faintly menacing. Tamzin thrust her gloved hands deeper into her jacket pockets and kept her gaze on the path as she hurried along.

  First to greet her at the stables was Barney, the Richards’ big, woolly dog, who came lolloping and barking across the yard with his tail wagging ecstatically. Climbing over the five-bar gate (which was less bother than opening and shutting it), Tamzin rubbed his head the way he liked best, then saw Joel and his mother in the middle of the largest paddock behind the stable buildings. They were schooling a young mare called Briar Rose, who was trotting in a circle round the edge of the paddock on the end of a long lungeing rein. Briar Rose was a beautiful creature with a coat of chestnut flecked with white that was known as strawberry roan, and a mane and tail the colour of champagne. She stepped out gracefully, head high and hooves flicking the grass, and Tamzin watched admiringly for a few moments until Joel saw and waved for her to join them.