The Horseman

by Tim Pears

  The boy had never seen this exercise performed yet he understood it. The pony’s fore-legs followed one line, his hind-legs another parallel to it. The girl kept the roan’s hind-legs on the correct line, and his hind-quarters from veering to the left as if to make a circle, by bringing his left leg back behind the girth with her own left leg. The roan’s head and neck remained still. Leo judged the two of them had practised this exercise many times. He did not know whose patience he admired more, the girl’s or the pony’s.

  When they had trotted four times around the paddock the girl once more embraced her pony and told him of his unequalled virtuosity, then she turned him and walked him in the opposite direction along the fence, shouldering him this time to the left. Once more she walked him then she trotted him. Leo studied them carefully. So far as he could tell she used so little force as to be insignificant, yet the roan did as she intended. When they passed in front of him he saw the horse was sweating and the girl too.

  The girl rode to the gate. She brought the roan beside it. Leo wondered whether he should stay where he was or run the yards along the fence and open the gate for her. He did not know which she would prefer, but he knew that if she chose to remain mounted then he wished to see how she negotiated the obstacle.

  The pony was beside the gate, facing away from the post upon which the gate was hinged. The girl leaned forward and lifted the loop of rope off the fence post. She let go of the rope and grasped the top bar of the gate, and heeled the pony’s girth. The pony stepped away from the gate and stepped backwards at the same time, enabling the girl to pull the gate open. When the gap was sufficiently wide she let go of the gate and walked the horse through, then turned him round and brought him back and closed the gate in the same way as she had opened it but in reverse.

  She looped the rope over the post and walked the horse along the fence to the boy. She looked down at him. He did not look up at her but kept his gaze upon the fetlocks of the roan, and upon his hair, whose colour he had never seen before. Close to, the hairs were a mixture of black and white. Yet from a distance the gelding’s coat appeared to have a tinge of blue. The boy could not quite understand it.

  ‘Is it the purpose of a gentleman’s daughter,’ he heard the girl ask, ‘to provide entertainment for some idling servant boy?’

  Leo wished to ask the girl if she spoke to all in this manner. He said nothing.

  ‘Do you not have something better to do with your time?’ she asked. ‘Leopold, is it not? Did my riding amuse you?’

  ‘No, miss,’ Leo answered.

  ‘I doubt you have any idea what we were doing, Embarr and I.’

  Leo glanced up, then down. ‘You was bendin his spine, miss. It seemed to me he had to flex his hocks, and bring em underneath him. If I may say so …’

  ‘You may say what so?’

  ‘… most horses would wish to bend their neck only, miss, but this roan a yours put all the parts a his frame at your disposal. He is a rare beast, I believe. I know I have not seen so many horses, but this one is mightily responsive.’

  Leo closed his mouth to stop himself from saying more. He could have. He understood how odd it was that he should be able to speak with such garrulity to this girl of all people, even if it was of horses.

  ‘Do you give the rider no credit?’ she asked.

  Leo frowned. ‘You are as fine a rider as I have seen,’ he said.

  ‘Of the many riders you have seen.’ He glanced up for long enough to see the girl’s smile. ‘It must be strange for you, attached like most to cruelty, to see a horse trained with gentleness.’

  ‘It is strange to me, Miss Prideaux,’ the boy agreed. ‘I am much taken with it.’

  ‘My father does not approve,’ the girl said. ‘He likes the way your father and those on the stud farm break their horses.’ Leo could tell from a change in her voice that she was no longer facing him but had raised her head. ‘Daddy is old-fashioned in his thinking,’ she said quietly, as if to herself. Then she turned back to the boy and said, ‘I saw what that idiotic stable lad did to you. If I had a whip I would have applied it to him. But you appear quite dry now.’

  Leo said, ‘The Lord did guide me, miss, to a scorched place, and He makes my bones strong.’

  The girl did not say anything to this. Perhaps she was smiling again. Leo said nothing more, but studied the horse. When she brought him out of the paddock he was breathing hard from the exercise, but already he was calm, his lungs easing in and out, barely registering.

  ‘When you speak, Leopold,’ the girl said, ‘it sounds as if there is grit caught in your larynx. Perhaps the stable lad should have stuck the hose-pipe down your throat and flushed it out. Indeed, I am thirsty myself.’

  The girl turned the roan away from Leo. He knew he should not speak what was on his mind, but if he did not do so now the chance may never come again. ‘Miss Prideaux,’ he called.

  The pony had taken a few steps away from him. The girl brought it to a halt. She did not turn him. Leo walked past her and turned and looked up at her. ‘Miss,’ he said, ‘I should love to ride him.’

  The girl parted her lips and made a sound at the back of her mouth, a gasp of surprise or indignation, or the performance of such. ‘You would, would you?’ she said.

  Leo swallowed and blinked, his eyes watering in the bright sun. ‘More than anythin in this world,’ he said.

  The girl nodded. ‘Then one day perhaps you shall, Leopold Sercombe,’ she said. She kicked the horse’s girth with her heels, and rode away into the shimmering noon, until the two became indistinguishable from each other, before they turned into the stable yard and disappeared.

  October

  The boy passed through the orchard. There was a buzzing all around, he walked through the sound. Wasps gorged themselves on windfall pears, damsons, plums. He prodded apples with the tip of his boot to see if any wasps lurked before picking them up. At other times he picked cob nuts, acorns. They called their pig the Pharoah. Each one was so christened. They called his sty and yard the palace.

  Leo tossed the apples into the pig’s sty and the animal grunted his approval. His sty was a lean-to against the wall of the cottage. Albert Sercombe had renewed it two years previously. Its walls were thick slabs sawn off the outside of elm butts he’d collected in a cart from the sawmill. The slabs were convex on the outside, flat inside. Their edges abutted one to another unevenly, allowing the draughts Leo’s mother believed were necessary for the pig’s wellbeing.

  When the pig had eaten all the apples he could find in his little yard he came up to the fence. Leo scratched his hairy spine. The pig stood still. It was hard to believe it was the same creature he had carried over his shoulder in a hessian sack less than six months before. They called him the Pharoah because he was a king of sorts and they his servants whose only duty was to feed him.

  Waste from the vegetable garden and scraps from the kitchen went into the stock-pot where they simmered to a pulpy mash. Cabbage leaves, potato peelings, greasy plates, any remnant of cooking or eating, Ruth poured it all into a wooden trough the pig cleaned so well he polished it with his tongue, enough to raise the grain. Leo’s father gave the pig cinders or nuggets of coal to crunch, to stimulate his saliva and so aid digestion. Fred cleared away the shit, shook up the straw, added more when necessary. Two weeks ago Ruth announced that the Pharoah was matured, his metabolism was changing and he could now put on the fat the men needed to sustain them working their long hard days. The Pharoah was ready to be fed extra and so Kizzie brought him barley, and potatoes.

  Pigs were less complicated or interesting in their thinking than horses, yet the boy had a fondness for them. He scratched the Pharoah behind his bristly ears.

  October

  Sid Sercombe took the doe from its bag and held it as Leo attached the muzzle to her head according to his brother’s instruction. It was like a tiny bridle whose foremost part kept her jaws clamped shut. The rear strapped around her neck, and was tightened with a bu
ckle. Sid checked it was secure, then he carried the ferret to one of the holes and presented her to it. She sniffed the hole, then looked back around her as if to say goodbye, farewell, to this world of light and space. Her posture was dramatic and comical. Sid told his brother not to laugh as it would put her off, but it did not seem to for she put her muzzled snout once more to the hole, and slithered in.

  The second doe the boy held as Sid put on the muzzle, the third likewise, and these too disappeared into the warren. The ferrets’ strong musky smell remained on the boy’s fingers. They stepped back to where Aaron Budgell stood loading the guns. He gave the boy a small old single-barrel gun fired by external hammer, and placed him between himself at one side and Sid the other. Their wait was brief. The first rabbit bolted out in front of Sid. Leo saw him swing the gun and squeeze the trigger. The rabbit appeared to run smack into an invisible wall. It fell back as if stunned.

  So they worked for some time, shooting the vermin as they came out of the burrows. When it had gone quiet for a while Mister Budgell said that would do it and the boy put down his gun and collected the rabbits. He counted twenty-three. He did not know why they used guns rather than nets. For Aaron Budgell’s sport, perhaps. Sid meanwhile took a dog ferret from its bag. He clipped to a collar round its neck a length of cord marked with knots spaced equidistantly along its length. He put the ferret to a hole as he had the muzzled does, and it entered the darkness. Two more he despatched likewise. He tied the ends of their lines to stakes he hammered into the ground by each entrance.

  The boy helped Aaron Budgell tie the dead rabbits by their front paws to a pole lodged in the forks of the branches of two adjacent trees.

  Before long, the first of the loose-muzzled ferrets emerged, sniffing the air. Sid lifted her, removed the muzzle and returned her to her bag. The other two does soon followed. They each came into the light slowly, imperiously, as if upon a whim, though Sid assured his brother that the dog ferrets had driven them out.

  Aaron Budgell said there was no hurry. ‘They line ferrets won’t be goin nowhere,’ he said, and it was a good time for lunch. Mrs Budgell had provided a cottage loaf, which Mister Budgell cut into three with his ancient knife, and a lump of cheese he divided likewise. He and Sid drank mild, from earthenware bottles. Leo drank cold tea, but Sid allowed him some sips of his beer. Mister Budgell said he didn’t mind ferreting in much colder weather than this for then at lunch they would drink old beer, dark and thick, which always warmed him up lovely.

  They ate and drank. ‘I reckon, gaffer,’ Sid said, ‘that I likes ferrets as much as any creature.’

  The head keeper agreed that as well as being ferocious killers, ferrets were curious and quaint animals who seemed to treasure their relationship with man. In contrast to donkeys, he said, nodding towards the cart they had left standing some way off. ‘I do believe,’ he said, ‘that certain species improve in time, like they say. But if you studies the Bible at all you has to conclude that some, such as asses, do deteriorate in their character and their behaviour. They are nothing like they used to be in the Holy Land.’ Aaron Budgell sat up and raised his great chest. He opened his mouth as if to speak but let out instead a long and fruitful burp. Then he said, ‘Let’s get ourselves to diggin.’

  The head keeper explained to the boy that his dog ferrets had sought the rabbits backed-up in chambers and dead-ends of their burrows and killed them. The ferrets would not now come out voluntarily until they were starving. ‘If a man could train ferrets to come to his call,’ Aaron Budgell said, ‘he’d be as popular as he was rich.’

  Sid put his ear to the hole by which one of the ferrets had entered the warren. He pulled taut the line that had been tied to its collar. The knots on the string enabled him to measure how far in it had gone, allowing for unknown twists and turns in the tunnels. Aaron Budgell climbed on top of the bank. Sid gave him the figure of twelve or thirteen feet. The keeper judged it and dug the spade into the earth and heeled it in as far as it would go. The spade was an implement of elegance. It was spoon-shaped, and had a long handle made of beech. Inserted into the end of the wooden handle was a metal hook. He bent forward and put his ear to the long handle and listened. He stood back up to his full height and shivered the spade, then pulled it loose with ease, and repeated the procedure. And a third time. ‘Ah,’ he exclaimed. ‘I believe us can hear them scrabblin about.’ He began to dig. Sid fetched a second shovel. He told his brother to stay by the hole.

  Leo asked why they did not pull the ferret out. Sid shook his head. ‘He’d rather let hisself be throttled than be dragged out. I loves ferrets, but I ain’t sayin they’s the brightest animals in Creation.’

  When they’d dug the last of the ferrets and the dead rabbits out, and returned the dog ferrets to their bags, Aaron Budgell opened his old knife again. The blade had been sharpened so many times it was half the width it must have been when new. He sharpened it again on a stone and paunched the rabbits. Leo told him there were thirty-six. Some had bare patches on their backs. Mister Budgell said it was where a muzzled ferret had kept scratching the hind-quarters of a cornered rabbit when she couldn’t kill it. Sid gave his brother a shovel and gestured hence, and Leo dug a hole. He buried the guts while the keepers loaded the donkey cart.

  ‘See her now, how impatient with us her is,’ Aaron Budgell said. ‘Can’t wait to get back home.’ At that moment the donkey arched her neck forward and let out a long braying lament. ‘“Get a bloody move on,” er’s tellin us.’

  ‘Er’s a contrary beast,’ Sid agreed.

  ‘Aye, lad,’ his gaffer said. ‘What you have to admit is, what er’s got is character.’

  As they walked back beside the cart to the keeper’s cottage Aaron Budgell told the boy that a dealer from Taunton called on a Monday and paid cash for the rabbits, and that Leo would receive his share for a good day’s work. He told the boy he was a fine little worker and that he had a calmness that was welcome. He said he’d been considering asking the master if he might wish to raise more birds, in which case he would need a new boy keeper. ‘Your brother unfortunately tells me,’ Aaron Budgell said, ‘that we’s lost you already to horses. Is that right?’

  The boy looked up at the big keeper, and nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ Budgell said. ‘I’ve heard that they does that to a man.’

  November

  The boy was given a message to convey to the head sawyer. His father kept it terse. Leo walked away from Manor Farm in the hot afternoon sun. He took the track across the valley, down past the high elms. Rooks in the upper branches cackled their disapproval or ridicule of him.

  In the bed of the valley the track ran straight as a furrow ploughed by his father. Ploughmen, perhaps, once carved the lanes. He heard Isaac Wooland’s bullocks before he saw them. Then he saw them, gathered by the fence on the right-hand side of the track, jostling, pressing against the wooden poles. Heifers grazed across the track and over the brook, half-hidden by a scrawny hedge. The bullocks moaned and lowed and groaned to their female brethren. Leo passed between them. The heifers appeared to ignore the bullocks, or to be deaf to the noise they made.

  It reminded the boy of the German brass band who’d toured the villages the previous Christmas, tuning up their windy instruments. Loud farting bleats, trumpet blasts, pipe-clearing coughs of sound. Odd notes. It wasn’t music. But then after a pause their leader announced that they would play a Christmas carol. He named the title of it in German. He uttered some further words in their language, nodding his head, and then the band blew in unison. The audience of all ages listened to ‘Silent Night’ in rapt wonder.

  But the bullocks could not pause, and play together, they could only continue each his own lonely tuneless racket.

  The estate sawmill was on Warren Farm. A man stood with one foot on a huge log, the other on a length of wood placed upon the log and running from it to the ground outside the sawpit. He pulled the handle of the saw up and let it go back down, pulled it up, each time to the same
height. Let it fall to the same depth. The boy watched the slow creeping forward of the cut. The sawyer eyed his chalk-line the whole way. Sweat dripped from his chin. Leo stepped forward until he could see the lad below, sawdust spraying upon his head and face and shoulders. The bottom dog.

  Leo walked away, to the second sawpit. It was empty. He jumped down, out of the heat suddenly into a moist, cool tank. The odour of sawdust here. Tangy, sappy. From chinks in the pit’s slab-lined walls, yellow frogs peered out at him. He jumped and, scrabbling, hauled himself out.

  The top dog called down to the apprentice, ‘Yep,’ and stopped. He stepped from the pit and bent and picked up a hammer from the ground. He leaned over and from underneath tapped the plank on which he’d been standing. On the second tap it came loose. He shifted it two feet or maybe three along the log and knocked in the nail with a single tap. He dropped the hammer to the ground and stepped back onto the plank, and placed his left foot back upon the log. He grasped the handle of the saw and then, about to resume his labour, looked about him, his eyes darting and head jerking in the manner of a hen or some such creature that is prey to larger ones. Perhaps he had registered Leo’s presence at the edge of his vision, or heard him.