The Shadowy Horses

by Susanna Kearsley

  “God.” She grimaced. “That is terrible.” Pushing the tumbled hair out of her eyes, she drew her knees up and rested her chin on her hands. “I was just thinking, we don’t really know that this ghost is roaming about at night, do we? I mean, Robbie’s only seen him in the daytime.”

  “That’s true,” said Jeannie, sagely. “But it does seem rather a safe bet…”

  “Ghosts always prowl at midnight,” Adrian cut in, with smooth authority. “Didn’t you watch films at all, when you were growing up?”

  “He’ll be here,” Wally said. His voice was simple, calmly knowing. “He walks by night as well as by day. Just ye ask yon dog.”

  I looked to where the collie lay sprawled out upon the grass, head up, ears perked, and I remembered it would probably be Wally who took Kip out late at night, when Robbie was in bed. Perhaps Wally had seen what I had seen—the collie dancing at the heels of an invisible companion, begging to be patted, broad tail waving. It was a sight one didn’t soon forget.

  Something, some animal, scuttled through the rough grass and Kip gave an eager whine, but Wally’s hand reached out to keep the collie still. My own gaze moved from the waiting dog to the old man’s moonlit profile, and I rubbed my leg with a thoughtful hand. “Do you believe in ghosts, Wally?”

  His shrug was noncommittal. “Depends.”

  “You’re all daft,” Adrian pronounced his judgment lazily, leaning back on his elbows. “A ghost is merely a projection of a less than stable mind.”

  David’s voice came quietly. “Is that a fact?”

  “It is. Christ, I’ve been working here two months now, puttering about this field with my equipment, and I think I would have noticed anything out of the ordi—”

  “Salve,” Robbie said.

  He was sitting close beside me, near my feet, and the sudden sound of his small voice made me jump. Just as suddenly, he turned round and showed me a brilliant grin. “Hey, it works!”

  My throat worked for a moment before the words found their way out. “That’s wonderful, Robbie. Where is he?”

  I wouldn’t have believed my voice could sound so calm, when I was anything but calm inside. My nerves were thrashing wildly, like a netted bird, and my heartbeat pulsed a hard and rapid rhythm in my throat. It was one thing to come up with the idea of talking to the Sentinel, I thought, but my bravado shriveled with the knowledge that our ghost was standing right in front of us.

  “Right there,” said Robbie, pointing to the vacant air.

  David slid the few feet down the slope to join us, coming to an abrupt stop directly behind me and steadying himself with a hand on my shoulder. I could feel the warmth of him through the thick folds of my sweater, but I don’t believe he even noticed the touch. Above my head, he watched the darkness steadily. “Say ‘salve, custos,’ Robbie,” he instructed.

  “What’s custos?”

  “Sentinel.”

  We were all silent now, leaning slightly forward in anticipation as Robbie dutifully repeated the words. I counted my heartbeats… one… two… before the boy turned round a second time, his eyes going over my head, seeking David’s. “He’s not saying anything, but he’s smiling. He’s looking at you, now.”

  “Is he, by God?” David frowned a moment at the nothingness, then raising his voice he explained in perfect Latin that we couldn’t see or hear our long-dead visitor; he would have to talk through Robbie.

  “Now, Robbie,” David murmured, “if he says anything, if he makes a sound, you repeat it, all right? Like a parrot.”

  “All right.”

  David nudged my shoulder. “Go on, then,” he invited me. “It’s your party. You ask the first question.”

  Fabia, who’d been holding her breath all this time, let it out again in a swift, expectant rush. “Ask him,” she hissed, “if he knows he’s a ghost.”

  Adrian ventured drily that, after walking the same field for several hundred years, a person must surely begin to suspect…

  Turning, I sent him a withering look. “Will you be serious?”

  Adrian rolled his eyes. “Oh, right. You’re talking to thin air, and I’m meant to be serious.”

  I opened my mouth to respond but the big hand on my shoulder tightened warningly, cutting me off, at the same moment Jeannie breathed an urgent whisper: “Verity!”

  “What?” I brought my head back round, and saw what had alarmed them.

  The Sentinel had moved.

  Robbie, beside me, was watching the air not two feet from my face. I drew a sharp breath and then found that I couldn’t breathe out again, so I swallowed instead. “Robbie,” I said cautiously, afraid to move a muscle, “what is he doing?”

  “He’s kind of crouched down,” came the reply, “to see you better, like. Now he’s reaching out his hand, I think he wants to touch your hair.”

  David swore softly, the word brushing warm down the back of my neck. I might have imagined the ghost’s gentle touch and the sweeping thrill of cold—I’d always had a rather wild imagination. But it didn’t stop me shivering.

  Adrian, unconvinced, raised the wine flask for another drink. “Go on, then, Verity, my love. Here’s your chance to clear up one of history’s little mysteries. Ask your friend what legion he belonged to.”

  He meant it in jest, of course, but I found my voice and asked the question anyway.

  The night gave no reply. And Robbie, if he heard an answer, didn’t pass it on. Instead he scrambled to his feet, staring uncertainly into the darkness. Behind him, Kip whined sharply, struggling to break free of Wally’s hold, but Robbie didn’t seem to hear that, either. Slowly, as though following another’s gaze, he turned his head and looked toward the house.

  The windows were no longer dark. Lights blazed in both the kitchen and the upstairs hall, and even as I registered the fact a small familiar sound came echoing across the field—the sound of someone starting up a car. The engine coughed, and caught, and purred; was pushed till it became a roar, and two clear yellow headlights plunged between the trees that fringed the drive.

  The headlights struck the red walls of Rose Cottage and sharply wheeled away again as the car spun out into the road with a panicked shriek of brakes.

  “He’s going,” said Robbie, urgently. “Davy, he’s going. He’s…”

  He didn’t finish. His large eyes swung toward us, suddenly anguished, and even as Jeannie leaped forward to catch him, he crumpled like a broken doll and fell facedown upon the grass.

  “It’s all right,” said Jeannie, lifting him gently. “He’s only had a vision, he’ll be fine.” But her face, in the cold moonlight, didn’t look so self-assured.

  Adrian, in his typically selfish fashion, had noticed only one thing. “That was my car,” he burst out, indignantly. “The bloody bastard took my car!” And then he turned and sprinted for the house, and the rest of us, after an exchange of glances, followed.

  On the level sweep of gravel at the top of the drive, we found Brian McMorran brushing off his trousers. “Crazy bugger,” he said sourly. “Nearly ran me over.”

  Fabia stared at him, disbelieving. “It wasn’t Peter, surely?”

  “He took my car,” Adrian repeated, bleakly, his eyes fixed on the empty square of gravel where the bright red Jaguar should have been.

  Wally eyed his son-in-law suspiciously. “What d’ye think yer doing, then, coming home at this hour?”

  Straightening, Brian raked a hand through his silver hair and laughed lightly, without humor. “If I’d known this was the welcome I’d get, I’d have stopped the night in town,” he told us. He fished in his pocket for his cigarettes and lit one, lifting an eyebrow at Jeannie above the brief flame of the match. “I might ask the same of you, at any rate—the cottage was empty when I got here.”

  “We were out in the field,” she answered.r />
  “In the—?” He broke off, seeming for the first time to notice Robbie’s condition, and his lips compressed impatiently. “Aw, bloody hell, you’ve not been after the ghost? Where’s your head, woman? Give him here.” The tattooed arms closed protectively around the little boy. “You’ve been putting a strain on him, can’t you see?”

  Jeannie set her jaw in self-defense. “He wanted to help Peter,” she explained. “And it wasn’t the ghost that made him faint. He saw something else, something…”

  Robbie stirred at the sound of his mother’s voice. “Granny Nan,” he mumbled, weakly. “Davy, Granny Nan… you have to go.”

  In the sudden silence, David leaned in closer, his jaw tightening. “Go where, lad?”

  “Hospital…”

  “Oh, Jesus.” David straightened and wheeled, his eyes darkening. “Fabia, get me the keys to the Range Rover.”

  “But Davy…”

  “Just do it,” he snapped.

  Robbie, in his father’s arms, slipped back into delirium. Even after David had gone, when the taillights of the Range Rover were receding points of red, the boy kept calling out to him. “Davy… Davy… Granny Nan. Must help, must… nona…”

  “What was that?” Startled, I turned. “Robbie, what did you—”

  “Leave the boy be.” Brian gathered his son closer, staring me down with contempt. “He didn’t say nothing, just leave him alone.”

  But I knew what I’d heard.

  “Nona”—that’s what Robbie had said. It was, I fancied, a belated answer to the question I had asked the Sentinel, before the boy collapsed. Which is your legion? I had asked.

  And nona was the Latin word for “Ninth.”

  Chapter 19

  Somewhere in a shadowed recess of the dining room a mantel clock whirred softly and began to chime the hour: four o’clock. I shifted on my window seat and sighed. The house felt very lonely, with everyone asleep.

  Fabia, having sensibly decided there was nothing she could do, had long since said good night and gone to bed. I’d expected Adrian, still worrying about his precious car, to wait up longer with me, but after comforting himself with a well-aged brandy from Peter’s drinks cabinet, he had drifted off as well. I’d left him snoring in the sitting room, stretched out full length on the old sofa. Even Wally, who’d displayed no great desire to hurry home with the McMorrans, had eventually taken his leave, and the little cottage slumbered now in darkness at the bottom of the drive.

  Which left me on my own, fretful and sleepless, wandering from room to room with only the cats for company.

  And even the cats lacked a certain enthusiasm, I thought. Murphy had given up following me in favor of a warm seat in the kitchen, where he patiently waited for me to reappear as I made my restless rounds. Charlie, more persistent, had begun to gently protest my constant movement by simply flopping onto my lap whenever I sat. This time, as I prepared to leave the window seat, the little gray cat tested her claws on my knee and let out a plaintive meow.

  “Sorry, love.” I scooped her up and held her while I stood, turning away from my reflection in the tall glittering window.

  In the kitchen, I set Charlie down on the chair beside the big black tom, and put the kettle on for yet another pot of tea. The two cats exchanged a rather long-suffering glance, and I rather fancied Murphy sighed before he began to clean himself. I was disrupting their nightly schedule, and I knew it. Ordinarily at this hour they would be peacefully asleep on my bed, or on Peter’s.

  But Peter wasn’t here, and after what I’d experienced out in the field, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. To go upstairs to bed would prove a total waste of time. Even with the light left on, I’d be aware of every tiny seeping draft within the room, of every creaking floorboard, and of every slanting shadow.

  A month ago, I reminded myself, I hadn’t believed in ghosts. Now I heard them breathing in the silent air behind me, and felt the cold slow crawl of fear along my neck.

  It wasn’t the Sentinel himself that made me jumpy. It was the idea of the Sentinel—the knowledge that beyond the window, in the blackness, something walked, and watched, and waited…

  The kettle boiled. I turned from the window and forced my trembling hands to make the tea. Don’t be such a coward, I reproved myself. Fabia’s upstairs, and Adrian’s only a couple of rooms away, and Peter will be back soon.

  The thought of Peter was a welcome distraction. Frowning, I glanced up at the kitchen clock to check the time again. Four twenty. More than three hours now since Peter and David had roared away from Rosehill, and still no word from either of them.

  “I’m sure she’ll be all right,” I told the cats out loud, in an attempt to reassure myself. “She seemed like such a strong woman.”

  But my brave thoughts failed to convince me, and worrying about David’s mother only led to worrying about David, which was rather worse than thinking about the ghost. I sat heavily at the table and Charlie slipped onto my lap with a weary yawn, rolling and stretching in an effort to find comfort.

  The cats, at least, were quiet. They hadn’t once looked out toward the field, or arched their backs, or hissed, so I felt fairly sure the Sentinel was not pressed up against the window, peering in. But far off, fading in and out between the mournful moanings of the wind, I swore I heard the hoofbeats of a lone horse, galloping.

  I’d searched the fields around Rosehill for horses, and found Peter had been quite right—there were none. Only a small herd of mild-eyed cows, grazing drowsily down by the river, and a disgruntled-looking black pig in a fenced yard farther up the road. But the horses came anyway, out of the darkness, galloping over the high waving grass.

  I listened again, straining my ears to catch the rhythm of the running hooves. More than one, now, surely. I hear the Shadowy Horses… I summoned the line of the Yeats poem that Peter had quoted, wishing my imagination wasn’t working overtime. After all that had happened tonight, I could almost believe in those Irish sea-horses, the horses of Manannan, coming to carry the living away. It gave me the creeps, sitting there in the old house and hearing that sound drawing steadily nearer.

  By the time I’d finished my second cup of tea, my nerves were so completely frayed I chose a desperate remedy—I dragged the kitchen telephone off its stand and dialed the number of my London flat.

  My sister Alison answered on the third ring, her voice clear and coherent despite the fact that she had, I knew, just woken from a sound sleep.

  “How can you do that?” I asked her, skipping the preliminaries.

  “Do what?”

  “Sound so bloody alert when you’ve just woken up?”

  “It’s a gift. Are you all right?”

  “Just having trouble sleeping.”

  “Ah. Wanted to share it, did you?”

  “Brat.” Feeling better already, I settled back and poured another cup of tea. “How are you getting on down there?”

  “Marvelously, thanks. Your flat’s brilliant. I’m never going to leave.”

  I smiled. “Well, it won’t want me back, after you. I’m sure the place has never been cleaner.”

  “Dusting things,” my sister told me loftily, “does make a difference, Verity. Oh, and your African violet’s in bloom. Remember how you said you couldn’t ever…”

  “How on earth did you get it to bloom?”

  “I watered it.”

  “Ah.” I smiled again, feeling much less lonely. “That’s the secret, is it? And how is school?”

  “Less brilliant,” Alison admitted, “but not bad. Oh, by the way, I meant to ask you—what is the name of the man you’re working for?”

  “Peter Quinnell.”

  “Oh right. That was my mistake, then.”

  “What was?”

  “Well, I knew it was Quinnell, but I couldn�
��t remember the first name, and last week in Waterstones I saw this book by a man named Quinnell, so I bought it, thinking it might be your boss, you see.” She paused for breath. “But anyway, once I got it home and took a proper look, I saw it couldn’t have been your Quinnell, because the man who wrote the book is dead, according to the dust jacket.”

  “Ah.” I digested the information. “It was thoughtful of you to buy it, at any rate.”

  “Yes, well, I ought to have known that it wasn’t the sort of thing an archaeologist would publish. It’s just a lot of photographs… you know, a coffee-table book. But Quinnell’s not a common name, and I thought—”

  “Photographs?” I cut her off. “The author wouldn’t be a Philip Quinnell, by any chance?”

  “Hang on, let me check, I’ve got the thing right here. Yes, that’s it… Philip. Who is he, then?”

  “He was Peter’s son.”

  “Really? Well, his photographs are deeply weird,” was her pronouncement. “They’re those awful computer-enhanced things, all distorted. But the man himself looks gorgeous, in his photograph. Does his father look like that?”

  “Peter? Yes, he’s very handsome.”

  “Is he nice to work for?”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Then it must be Adrian.”

  I frowned, uncomprehending. “What?”

  “Making you unhappy. And don’t tell me you’re not, because you never ring me at five in the morning unless you’re unhappy. You’re not involved with him again, are you?”

  “With Adrian? Don’t be absurd.”

  “Then who—?” She broke off, paused, and switched gears subtly. “Who else is in your field crew, did you say?”

  The Spanish Inquisition, I thought, could have used someone like Alison. Once she hit on something she was like a terrier with a rat; she never let go.

  “You’re way off beam,” I told her, trying to sound convincing. “It’s nothing to do with a man. It’s just… well, we had rather a crisis here, tonight. Someone’s mother had a heart attack, and we don’t know yet how she is, and I’m just on edge, that’s all. Waiting.”