Ballad of Favour

by Monica Dickens

  But he and Rose communicated a lot of things to each other, and today as she brushed him down after a ride on the moor with Abigail and a group from the stable, she told him how she had seen the grey horse in the lightning, and how she believed that he was ready to take her on another journey. Today? Tomorrow? She shared her excitement with Moonlight, and her secrets. He was her four-legged version of Mr Vingo.

  ‘You croon to that old mule as if he was a baby.’ Joyce looked over the loosebox door. ‘I don’t know what he’ll do when you graduate to better things. You looked pretty good today, trotting along beside your friend on that snappy dun pony of hers. I may let you have a go on Sheba next time.’

  ‘Could I?’ Rose was torn between loyalty to Moonlight and the chance to ride the bay mare Sheba, who was trained for the show ring and would break into a smooth canter if you only thought about it.

  ‘We’ll see.’ Joyce loved the power of keeping you in suspense. ‘Come on, girl, put some elbow grease into it. Lean on the brush. He’s not made of china.’

  Rose leaned. Moonlight staggered.

  Abigail had ridden her pony home. Rose followed her on the bicycle that was called Old Paint, because it was old and repainted, and small enough for her to swerve around stones and puddles as if she were neck-reining a Western cow pony. She was saving her work money to buy a new one, but she would miss this old faithful friend when it was gone.

  ‘How come you don’t ask Joyce to give you a better horse?’ Abigail asked, when Rose got to the farm.

  ‘Well, she might. She even said so. But –’ she had not yet resolved the conflict between loyalty and ambition – ‘I don’t think I’m ready for something like Sheba.’

  ‘Baloney. You could ride O.K. on a better horse.’ Abigail was leading her dun pony Crackers to turn him out in the field. ‘Here, get on Crackers and have a go around the yard.’

  ‘Bareback?’

  Moonlight’s spine was a bony ridge. Rose had never ridden bareback, except during her dream-like gallops with the grey horse Favour, and that was more like flying.

  ‘Sure, he’s used to it.’

  ‘In a halter?’

  ‘Come on, Rose, don’t be chicken. Here, stand close up to him and bend your leg back.’

  Abigail could leap on to the pony’s back with ease, but Rose had to be hoisted and boosted.

  ‘Trot around the yard.’ Abigail gave her the halter rope. Rose tried to hold on to the pony’s mane, which was very thin and short, so that Abigail could plait it for the shows she would go to this autumn.

  ‘Ter-rot!’ Abigail imitated Joyce’s roar. ‘C’mon there, get ’em going, you bunch of layabouts – ter-rot, I said!’

  But the yard was cluttered with various farm things, and as Rose kicked the pony too heartily, he leaped forward, and a cat shot out from under a wheelbarrow, and he jumped sideways and Rose fell neatly off on to a pile of wet feed sacks.

  ‘New way of dismounting?’

  What was so great about Abigail was that she could always make a joke about whatever happened. They turned the pony out with his mate, a chestnut called Cheese, and watched him roll, teetering on the black stripe that ran down his back, until he finally thumped over on the other side with a satisfied grunt. Then Abigail put her arm through Rose’s and said, ‘Come on up to the hay loft and I’ll show you my new toy.’

  It was a real farmhouse where Abigail lived, with a barn and cart sheds, and two old-fashioned looseboxes with low thatched roofs built against the side of the barn. The land was let to a tenant farmer, and his wife looked after the house when the Drews were in America.

  The hay loft over one end of the barn was Rose and Abigail’s favourite place. They slept there sometimes, instead of in Abigail’s comfortable bedroom which had its own bathroom and patchwork quilts on the beds. They were made by Abigail’s mother’s grandmother years ago out of pieces left over from the dresses and shirts and tablecloths she had sewn for her family out on the Western frontier.

  Abigail’s flute was in its case on a ledge among the beams of the loft, a lovely slender instrument like a shepherd’s pipe.

  ‘I’ve been practising up here, because my dad laughs at me if I play in the house. He says it sounds like cats on the backyard fence.’

  ‘Don’t you mind?’

  ‘Nah, it’s just a joke.’

  ‘When my father laughs at me,’ Rose said with difficulty, because even with Abigail she found it hard to talk about inner things, ‘it isn’t funny. It hurts. When I was a silly little kid, I used to go away and cry and tell myself I hated him. But I don’t hate him. I want to like him. But we fight.’

  As she grew into her teens, she had become more at odds with her father. Even with her bright, companionable mother, whose jokes really were funny, Rose would sometimes storm and weep and argue, and about one in four family meals ended up with her crashing her chair backwards and running out of the room.

  ‘Well, you gotta understand.’ Abigail lay back luxuriously into a broken hay bale. ‘Adults have problems. You gotta make allowances.’

  ‘That’s what my father says about teenagers. When I get really angry with him, and start shouting and kicking the furniture, he tells me it’s adolescence, and I’ll grow out of it one day. Why is that so infuriating?’

  ‘Because they miss the point,’ Abigail said. ‘It’s not what’s going to happen one day that matters. It’s what’s happening now.’

  ‘And in any case.’ Rose was sitting up, looking out of the open window to the marvellous view of a sloping green field with two ponies in it, a stand of dark trees along the top edge, and beyond them the blurred pastel colours of the distant moorland hills. ‘I don’t know that I want to grow out of being this age.’

  ‘But poor old Rose, you gotta grow up and have adventures.’

  ‘I’m having them.’ Rose smiled to herself out of the window.

  ‘Nah, I mean the real adventures of life. You can’t just go on being old Rose that nothing ever happens to. Here, I’ll play you a tune to call you into life.’

  She sat up and put the long slim flute sideways to her lips and began to play, rather slowly, but with only a few mistakes.

  O Danny boy … the pipes, the pipes are calling …

  She sat in the hay with her lips pursed sweetly to the mouthpiece of the flute, her fingers moving gracefully on the keys on top of it, her eyes shut, because she was concentrating.

  She did not know it, but she really was calling Rose to the adventures of her life. Through the haunting tune, The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling…, the alluring music that called Rose to the grey horse began to rise and drown out the notes of ‘Danny Boy’.

  Rose had to get up and, without an explanation, jump down from the loft into the straw pile, and take off through the barn door towards the moor.

  Usually she went through the wood behind the hotel, across the sheep pasture and out towards the hills on a twisting sheep track that led her to the hidden valley. She did not know if she could find it from this direction, but she just ran, following the tune in her head. Soon, landmarks became familiar, a dead tree pointing like a scarecrow, the rounded masses of the far hills on one side and the triangular hill ahead, and as she came round the corner of an old broken wall, there it was. The huge dark grey rock that stood like a man keeping watch for her.

  Beyond it, she plunged into the dense thicket, and pushed through the undergrowth to where the lake called Noah’s Bowl should be.

  But the lake was not there. Only the thick swirling mist. She knew she had to step through the mist and down, feeling her way, down into the valley that used to be here before the flood filled it up into a lake.

  The valley was still here for her, because she was out of the world and out of time now, in a place and time where the horse had his being. Other creatures were here too. She began to sense them, moving around her like shadows in the mist: the hulking shapes of the soldiers, some of them cloaked and hooded in humped masses lik
e the dark rock above, some of them showing glimpses of their faces, a gapped grin of rotten teeth, a smouldering eye, a red wet mouth smiling at her through a tangled beard. She smelled their sweat, the hot scent of their horses, the smoke from their fires. She heard the stamp of a boot on cobbles, an iron chain shaken, the ringing of a hammer on an anvil.

  As she groped her way desperately through the weaving mist, using her hands to part it like thick cobwebs, they stayed away from her, the soldiers, but she knew that they were watching her, and her skin crept with fear. She made herself go on, until suddenly she was through the mist, beyond the soldiers, out into the bright sunlight of the valley floor, with the river leaping and turning in sparkling eddies under the old stones of the bridge.

  And there above her in a blaze of light as she ran on to the slippery planks of the bridge, the grey horse was poised on his platform of rock, mane and tail swept sideways by the wind that blew down the valley to where the little white fishermen’s houses huddled by the sea, his coat glowing and his shining eyes impatient for her to hurry.

  She scrambled up the other side of the valley, over the pile of stones and out on to the big rock above and behind him where she could feel his warmth and glowing energy, and make the jump that landed her on his strong, soft back just in time as he leaped up and away into the sunlight.

  The speed and rhythm of his flying gallop put her into a kind of trance of joy, through which, echoing faintly at first, then louder, she heard a girl’s sharp voice.

  ‘Hurry up, Linda, we’re late. Hurry up, can’t you?’

  The girl was walking fast ahead of Linda, looking over her shoulder with a scowl and a sneer of the lips that distorted her thickly made up face. She called back scornfully, ‘You’re a dead loss, you are. If the bloomin’ strap’s broken, take the shoes off and come as nature made you, even if nature made a horrible mistake.’

  ‘It’s all right, I’m fixing it. Wait for me, Susan – wait!’

  Rose was Linda, bending over the strap of her new high-heeled sandal, trying to push it through the stiff buckle, puffing, her heart racing, almost crying because she was enraged with the stupid sandal, and afraid that Susan would run off without her and scoop up the boys and leave her on her own for the evening, as she had done before.

  Rose was inside Linda. She could feel her emotions and what it was like to be her, but at the same time she was still Rose and could observe her.

  Rose had never worn high heels. When Linda, cursing and snivelling, finally got the strap through the buckle, pulled it tight enough to cut into her instep and stood up and tottered after Susan, it felt odd and insecure, like walking on stilts.

  ‘Wait for me, Suze.’

  ‘That’s all I ever do. Sometimes I wonder why I let you come out with me at all.’

  ‘I know. You’re nice. I really appreciate it, Suze, I really do.’

  Rose didn’t like the way Linda toadied to Susan, who was conceited and rather beastly. Linda seemed in some kind of panic to make Susan like her, and Rose could have told her she was going about it all wrong.

  When Susan said, ‘I had a tough time getting Fred to bring a fellow for you, and this Austin creep who’s coming is a totally dim person with spots and boils and only half your height, but it’s the best you’ll get,’ Rose wished Linda would retort, ‘Who needs him?’ But she knew from past journeys into other people’s bodies that she was only a passenger. She could not influence them.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be nice, Suze,’ Linda said weakly, although she was in a panic about boys, too.

  They were walking through back streets in a town that might be Newcome, or it might not. When Linda’s ankle turned in the tottery sandals and she had to stop to rub it, Susan went round a corner, and Linda hobbled to catch her up in a shabby, decaying street that looked as if most of the inhabitants had deserted it.

  A row of terrace houses on one side had windows that were broken or boarded up. Planks were nailed across the doors. Front steps were cracked and chipped. Rubbish and old metal were strewn in the weedy gardens between the houses and the dirty pavement.

  An open space, part Tarmac and part sour grass where a house had been demolished, had been used as a playground. Cricket stumps were chalked on the end wall among rude messages and crude pictures. The rusted remains of a climbing frame lurched sideways. One end of a see-saw stuck up in the air like a signal for help. The other was hidden in a heap of old newspapers.

  Where was this? And when was it? Sometimes the horse took Rose into the past, but from the clothes the girls wore and the people they were talking about – singers, rock stars – she must be in her own present time, but in an unknown place.

  ‘Cuba Libre,’ Linda said, trying to impress Susan. ‘My sister’s got their new album.’

  ‘Who cares?’ Nothing could impress snooty Susan, with her jeans bleached and shrunk to fit her skinny legs like a second skin, and an odd patch of lurid colour dyed into the front of her spiky hair. ‘Those people don’t exist. The only one that ever was and ever will be is Bagman, and you know I’d die for him.’

  ‘Oh, I know you would,’ Linda agreed, though she didn’t care for Bagman and his deafening blasts. ‘So would I.’

  ‘He doesn’t want creeps like you dying for him.’ Susan sneered with her purple upper lip. ‘Dying is strictly reserved for those worthy of it.’

  Bagman had only screamed his brutal way into the charts in the last two or three weeks, so Rose was right. She had not gone into the past this time.

  The high wall of a railway embankment cut off the end of this depressing street. Two or three houses that crouched in the shadow of the wall looked as if people still lived in them. Sad grey washing flapped without spirit in a bare garden on the left. A mangy cat sat pressed against the window in an empty flower box, waiting to be let in. The single house on the right, surrounded by what looked like several lifetimes of junk, was larger but even shabbier. The gate hung on one hinge. Slates had fallen from the roof. Torn curtains sagged at the windows. Missing panes were patched with paper. The paint on the front door was faded and peeling, and a pram without wheels was upside down in front of it. Against the side wall, among overflowing dustbins, an old rusted bicycle leaned with its front wheel turned at an exhausted angle, as if it had breathed its last.

  ‘Charming place,’ Susan said with a sniff. ‘They’d ought to have condemned it long ago.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s the only place the people can find to live?’ Linda suggested. ‘The housing shortage is wicked.’ Her mother worked at the Town Hall, and she knew about these things.

  ‘Don’t be soppy. Come on, stupid, we’re late.’

  As they approached the house, Linda and Rose heard behind a curtained window the blare of a pop song.

  ‘At least they got some music, if nothing else.’

  They had an unhappy child, too. From the upper floor they heard it crying, a desperate, frightened wail.

  ‘Hang on a minute, Suze.’ Linda stopped. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’ She had several younger brothers and sisters, and she knew one cry from another.

  ‘Oh, shut up. All little kids cry.’ Susan took her arm and pulled her roughly forward, but Linda held back.

  ‘No one’s doing anything for him.’

  ‘Why should they? Temper, that’s all it is.’

  ‘No.’ Linda knew. ‘It’s fear. Suppose they can’t hear him ’cos of the noise? Suppose they’ve left the music on and gone out? Suppose he’s all alone? Suppose he’s being beaten? There’s a lot of that about. We ought to do something. What can we do?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Susan dragged her past the drunken gate. ‘Stop being a rotten do-gooder. It’s not our business.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ For a moment, Rose had been proud of Linda for resisting, but now she was back under Susan’s control, and allowing herself to be pulled into the narrow tunnel that ran under the railway.

  ‘We’re late – we’re late!’ Susan ran ahead, her voice echoing
eerily in the sooty brick tunnel. Linda ran after her with her knees bent to stop her ankles turning, in her ears, pursuing her through the dismal, smelly tunnel, the pitiful wails of the child, growing fainter. ‘Mumma!’ She heard him cry, and choke on a sob.

  Rose ran out of the darkness of the tunnel into the sunlight of the moor. There was no Susan. No Linda. No railway wall and no mean streets. The only thing left of the odd, upsetting scene was the sound in her ears of the child’s crying. She shook her head, but it was still faintly there, as if it would haunt her for the rest of her days.

  When she went back to the Drews’ house to get her bicycle, Abigail came out of the back door, looking cross.

  ‘Where you been?’

  ‘Sorry I ran off. I just remembered something I had to do.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I –’ It was hateful to have to lie to Abigail, but she could not tell her the truth. ‘I found a bird with a dragging wing yesterday. I put him in a bush, and I had to go and see if he’s been able to fly away.’

  ‘Just like that? Gee, you are weird. Well – had he?’

  ‘Had he what? Oh yes – yes, he’d gone.’

  ‘Hope he wasn’t eaten by an eagle.’

  ‘There aren’t any eagles.’

  ‘There are in the States.’ When Abigail was put out, she wasn’t very logical. ‘You ran out on my flute playing. You’re worse than my father.’

  ‘It was the tune you played. It – it reminded me of – of the bird, you see.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The way it goes up, you know, in those rising notes?’

  ‘“Danny Boy” mostly goes down.’

  ‘Not that. The other tune you started to play.’

  ‘What’s got into you?’ Abigail said, as Rose got on to Old Paint and turned him towards the road. ‘I only played “Danny Boy”.’

  Chapter Four

  What did it mean? Rose knew that when the horse carried her into different scenes and different times, she was supposed to find clues there, which would fit together to show her the final solution.