Horse of fire, p.7
Horse of Fire, page 7
‘There’s that shop in Inverburgh,’ said Jinny. ‘If I’d known sooner I could have gone in there and looked for stuff. They’ve glass jewels and braids, super wools and glitzy remnants.’
With the air of a magician Ken took a five pound note from his pocket.
‘Glitter for the kings,’ he said giving it to Jinny, and her mother said the car was going into Inverburgh tomorrow morning. Jinny’s eyes sparkled. Five pounds to spend on glitter! There might even be enough to buy gold stickers for Shantih’s bridle.
‘Thanks very much,’ she said. ‘Super.’
‘Perhaps you’ll find a remnant that would make you a cloak, or a trimming of some kind to jazz up that yellow material,’ Mrs Manders said, but Jinny knew that wasn’t a chance: a hundred pounds would hardly buy the kind of cloak that the Golden King should wear in Jinny’s nativity play.
‘Anyway, that’s all I can do for you tonight,’ continued her mother. ‘Must get some mince pies baked,’ and she began to put away her sewing machine.
‘They are absolutely smashing!’ exclaimed Jinny, gathering up cloaks, tunics and paints. ‘I’m overflowing with thanks,’ and she went back up to her room.
She stood uncertainly outside her door, swallowed hard and went in. The air was silent; the Red Horse only a painting. She looked out of the window and the moors stretched moon-silver, silent, undisturbed as she had known they would.
‘Only the red horse you ride can save.’
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Jinny defended herself. ‘I was coming if Dad hadn’t pounced. Honestly I was.’
But in her mind the ghost of Sara’s voice murmured its warning of greed and evil.
Suddenly Jinny remembered that she hadn’t gone down to say goodnight to the horses, hadn’t seen Shantih since she had ridden home from the rehearsal and Ken had offered to see to Bramble and Shantih, letting Jinny get on with the costumes.
For a second Jinny hesitated. It was late and Shantih would be perfectly all right until tomorrow morning. She didn’t really need to go and see her. Silly to think that Shantih would know whether she had been down to see her or not.
Beneath the good reasons there was the real reason: she had failed Sara and the Red Horse and she was afraid.
‘Course I’m not,’ Jinny told herself severely.
She went downstairs, put on her duffle, and wrapped her school scarf round her head and shouted to her parents that she was going out to see Shantih.
‘Nothing more. Just to see her. Promise.’
Jinny shut the door and gritting her teeth she walked into the enchanted, moon-bright world. As she walked down to the stables she counted her footsteps, the numbers linking into a chain that held her to the safety of the house.
Jinny picked up the powerful torch they kept just inside the stable doorway. In its beam Bramble was a giant stuffed toy, curled in the straw. But Shantih stood with her chest straining against her half door, her neck over it, her great eyes staring from her face, the pits of her wide nostrils scarlet and her bed soiled and trampled, rugs hanging to the floor.
‘Whoa, the horse,’ Jinny murmured in dismay. ‘Steady now, what’s wrong?’ and she crossed quickly to her then saw to her astonishment that Shantih was soaking with sweat as if she had just come back from a fierce ride.
‘Witch ridden,’ thought Jinny and felt the shadows take forms about her. ‘Stop it,’ she warned herself. ‘Don’t start,’ and she went into the box, took off the rugs, twisted a straw wisp and began to rub Shantih down, talking low and gentle to her as she worked.
‘What happened to you?’ Jinny whispered. ‘What’s upset you?’ but really she didn’t need to ask. She knew that Shantih had heard the white stag, been aware of its presence and had been trying to join it on the moors.
At last when Shantih was dry again and her bed squared up, Jinny left her. Shutting the stable door she stood staring up towards Finmory. By the tack room wall Jinny was aware of a deeper darkness in the moon shadows. Someone was there. Tam? Sara? Jinny didn’t wait to find out. She took to her heels and ran for home. No running steps followed her, no shadow waited for her.
‘Nothing,’ thought Jinny scornfully as the lighted kitchen welcomed her in. ‘Running away from nothing!’
‘I was just coming down to look for you,’ said her father, the only one of her family left up. ‘Make sure the kitchen light is off before you go to bed. And don’t waste time mooning around here. If you’re coming to Inverburgh with me tomorrow you’ll need to be up sharpish.’
Coming in from a world of moon-haunting shades Jinny could only blink her agreement.
‘Goodnight, then,’ said her father. ‘Sleep well.’
‘Goodnight. And you,’ said Jinny.
When her father’s footsteps were lost in silence Jinny made herself a mug of chocolate and sat down at the table wrapping her hands round the mug for comfort. Whatever had happened on the moors that night the white stag had needed her and she hadn’t been there. It wasn’t only Sara’s voice in her head, Shantih had known too.
Jinny sipped her chocolate and then went slowly upstairs. As she walked along the corridor she stopped outside Petra’s empty bedroom door. Turning the knob with both hands she let herself in and slid the door shut behind her, stood for a second in the perfumed dark then switched on the light. Petra’s pink and white bedroom was as perfect as a room in a show house. It always fascinated Jinny. There was literally not a thing out of place. She stared in disgusted amazement at the neat pile of fashion magazines, the bottles and jars in precisely the correct places on Petra’s dressing table and her frilly, high heeled slippers by the side of her bed.
‘We’re not sisters,’ Jinny thought. ‘I’m a foundling,’ but before her imagination could lure her into the delightful byways of who she really was, Jinny remembered Petra’s golden shawl. She knew exactly where Petra kept it wrapped in tissue paper in the bottom drawer of her dressing table.
‘I’ll only look at it,’ Jinny told herself. ‘It won’t do any harm to just look at it.’
Jinny opened the drawer, pushed back the neat layers of folded sweaters and took out the long, flat folding of tissue paper. She crouched down on the floor and opened it to reveal Petra’s shawl.
‘Put it back. You’ve no right to touch it,’ Jinny thought. But she didn’t. She took it out of its tissue paper and holding it to her shoulders she posed in front of Petra’s mirror.
‘Must see what it looks like when I’m wearing my tunic and my crown,’ Jinny thought and checking carefully to make sure that she hadn’t left any telltale signs behind her, Jinny put the shawl back into its tissue paper and took it up to her room.
There, in the comfortable clutter of books, drawings, shoes and clothes, Jinny dressed in her costume, settled the crown on her head and held the shawl to her shoulders again. As she moved about, the shawl floated out in a golden sheening.
Jinny knew that never in a hundred million years would Petra let her borrow her shawl. She wouldn’t even lend it to her for a royal garden party, let alone to be a cloak for a king. But it would be smashing.
‘If I did borrow it,’ Jinny thought, ‘Petra need never know.’
Tonight she was staying with a school friend. She was not coming to the nativity play and when the play was over Jinny could find some way of putting it back into Petra’s drawer. If her parents came to the play, her father would never notice that the Golden King’s cloak was Petra’s shawl and her mother wouldn’t tell on her. Petra need never know.
‘Say it was torn or mucked up?’ Jinny thought. ‘Perhaps I’d better take it back.’
But Jinny didn’t. She folded the shawl back into its tissue paper wrappings and hid it in her cupboard. It would be just right for the Golden King.
9
Jinny’s night was tormented by dreams. She galloped Shantih over a desolation of cinders, the geologists swinging their choppers, pursued her with the thunderous noise of the helicopter, or she was wandering alone in a mist, dressed in rags when she should have been a king and all around her Sara’s voice cried out in distress.
Although she had spent most of the night tossing and turning, more awake than asleep, her mother had to wake her, telling her it was half past seven and if she didn’t get up she would be too late to go into Inverburgh with them.
‘It’s all happening too soon, too quickly,’ Jinny thought as she washed and dressed. ‘It can’t be the play tonight, Christmas Day tomorrow. I’m not ready for it. It’s all too sudden.’
She dashed down to the stable, feeling the air less bitter than it had been. The sky was low slung with massed clouds. The wind had changed.
While Shantih and Bramble were feeding, Jinny mucked out around them.
‘Tonight,’ she told Shantih, strapping on her New Zealand rug and putting on her halter, ‘You will be a king’s horse in the best ever nativity play. They will all see how you are.’
When she led Shantih outside the Arab pranced at her side. Her head was high as she searched the moor and sent her call bannering over the hills, her ears tense for an answer.
‘Forget it,’ said Jinny sharply. ‘You heard nothing last night. Nothing! You were only sweating because the weather had changed.’
‘Witch ridden, hag ridden,’ whispered Jinny’s imagination but she refused to listen. Grabbing Bramble’s forelock she urged both horses on to their field.
Turned loose, Bramble started to graze at once but even when Jinny came back with their hay Shantih was still hightailing it round the field, only stopping to whinny and listen for an answer from the reaching moors.
‘Stop it!’ screamed Jinny uselessly. ‘Stop it, idiot horse! You’ve to be a king’s horse tonight so bloomin’ behave yourself.’
Shantih came over to her hay, picking at it in mouthfuls, chewing it with her head up, listening. Jinny stood and stared, lost in admiration for the beauty of her horse – the carved line of her head against the grey sky, the cascading fall of her mane.
‘If Dad hadn’t caught me I would have ridden you out last night. I would, honestly I would.’
‘Jinny!’ yelled her father’s voice. ‘Jinny, come on.’
Sitting in the car behind her parents Jinny ate cold toast.
‘High as a kite,’ she thought. ‘That’s what I am.’
Her mind was an electronic excitement, whirling faster and faster – from Sara’s voice to Petra’s, from the thought of the nativity play happening in a few hours’ time to the distress of the deer fleeing from the helicopter.
‘And I never phoned the police again,’ Jinny thought desperately.
‘Now we haven’t much time,’ said her father, when they had at last found a place to park. ‘We’ve all to be back here in two hours. Jinny, is your watch going?’
Jinny checked, gave it a few quick winds in case it had been about to stop, for her watch was capricious, like time itself, not to be trusted.
‘I’ve three more presents to find, and food,’ said Mrs Manders.
‘And I’ve to go to the store to check up on how many more pots they want for the January sales,’ said Mr Manders. ‘Jinny?’
‘Only the remnant shop, I think.’
‘Then we meet back here at twelve on the dot. Right?’
Jinny slammed the car door behind her and ran into the busy Inverburgh streets. Last minute shoppers jostled and pushed, greed spangling from their eyes as they clutched crying toddlers, slapping at random or shouting at older children to hurry up. As Jinny fought her way through the crowds their voices of irritation and temper clawed at her ears. In the doorway of one of the big shops a Father Christmas clanged his bell and guffawed his false tinsel laughter.
‘It shouldn’t be like this,’ Jinny thought. ‘All this wanting, all this grabbing. This isn’t the way it should be. If you gave the Child the most expensive gift you could buy it would be worth nothing,’ and clearly Jinny saw how her headmaster was right. It had to be a gift from your inner self, from your heart. Something that cost you. The very best. Not something you just paid money for. He was right, a true gift would be to look at something, something you were afraid of, and accept it.
She smelt the butcher’s before she reached it, the blood smell stronger than the traffic fumes. The shop was glass fronted, pink tiles on ceiling, walls and floor, a glass counter with sliced meat displayed inside it. Carcases hung from chrome spikes, paper frills decorated the stumps of their necks and the shop assistants wore white overalls and white caps. A queue of people filled the shop, garishly lit by the neon lighting. As the queue moved up they rubbed against the yellow fat and red flesh of the skinned carcases so that they seemed to dance.
This year Jinny’s Christmas cards had been of a manger surrounded by worshipping animals – sheep, lambs and cattle. The same animals that hung here from their hooks. Jinny hated the thought of animals being slaughtered. All animals should be free to lead their own lives, as free as the deer living wild on the moors. Jinny caught sight of a pig’s head sitting in front of the window. She swung away from it and in an instant was back amongst the jostling crowds, all thought of the butchers cancelled from her brain. She could not bear to think about it.
Jinny trotted down two wrong streets before she found her way to the remnant shop. Usually it was fairly empty but today it was busy with people looking for last minute gifts, so that Jinny had to dodge and pry, trying to decide what she would buy.
‘I’m not shoplifting,’ she explained to a suspicious assistant. ‘I’m collecting.’
In the end she chose purple, silver and gold foil to wrap round the gift boxes, glass jewels for the crowns and a length of luminous plastic to make belts for their swords. ‘Four pounds seventy six,’ said the girl.
‘Just made it,’ said Jinny, laying Ken’s five pound note on the counter.
At the side of the counter was a wicker basket of fake jewellery. Waiting for her change Jinny picked out two gold brooches. They were just what she needed to pin Petra’s shawl to her shoulders.
‘Only fifty pence each,’ said the girl.
‘I’ll take them,’ said Jinny, not thinking before she spoke but saying the words because she so desperately wanted to wear Petra’s shawl as her cloak, and to pay a pound for the brooches meant she was really going to do it. There would be no question now of putting the shawl back into Petra’s drawer.
Jinny was ten minutes late getting back to the car.
‘Another five minutes and I really would have gone without you,’ said her father, but he was smiling so Jinny knew that the store must have sold a lot of his pottery and was wanting more for the sale.
‘Went in to a bookshop,’ she admitted.
‘Did you get your costume things?’ asked her mother.
‘Oodles,’ said Jinny opening the bag, spilling the jewels onto the car seat, taking care not to let her mother see the brooches.
They crawled out of the carpark into a jam of traffic which inched and stopped, inched and stopped its way along Inverburgh High Street.
‘Nip out and get a local paper,’ said Mr Manders, seeing a news vendor. ‘I forgot to get one.’
Jinny nipped out, bought a paper and had only to walk a few steps to catch up with the car.
‘Could be here all flipping day,’ grumbled Mr Manders and her mother wondered aloud whether she had enough food to last them over Christmas. Jinny sat back, leafing through the paper, her eyes skimming the usual photographs of weddings, dances and coffee mornings. There was a double spread about Inverburgh shops – the store that bought her father’s pottery, dress shops, grocers, the pink-tiled butchers and a page of hotels advertising Festive Fayre.
‘I’ll finish off the costumes whenever I get in and then groom Shantih,’ Jinny thought, turning another page.
The shock of the photograph shot through her as if she had touched an electric fence. For a split second she could not help seeing it.
It showed a tumbled pile of dead red deer. Creatures of such grace and beauty reduced to a pile of carcases. The shock was too sudden, the killing too impossible. With twitching fingers Jinny shut the paper and thrust it down. Shuddering she wrapped her arms round herself. Their car, her parents, were no longer enough to keep her safe. ‘No!’ she thought. ‘No!’ and shut it out of her mind.
Leaning over the back of her mother’s seat she gabbled on about the nativity play.
‘We’ll need to leave about ten,’ she said. ‘Miss Tuke’s coming to put on her costume and then drive on with Guizer to Glenbost. I expect she’ll want coffee. Better have something ready for her anyway, but don’t let her settle and do NOT offer her a drink or she’ll never reach Glenbost. End up in a ditch if she starts boozing.’
‘Miss Tuke?’ said her mother.
‘Oh yes,’ said Jinny. ‘I’ve seen her knocking back the whisky.’
It wasn’t true but Jinny didn’t care. She only wanted noise to blot out the dead deer, to unhook from behind her eyes the detail of a nostril dripping blood that was fixed there like a burr and wouldn’t go away.
When they got back Ken had painted the crowns – purple, silver and gold. When the jewels were fixed in place with fuse wire, they were glittering, fantastic creations.
‘Hope you don’t have to gallop too far wearing those,’ said Mr Manders.
Petra, returning, was so full of the news that she’d been invited to a bigger, posher party that night that she hardly noticed the crowns and when Jinny pointed them out to her she only said, with Infant Mistress condescension, ‘Bit home made but I don’t suppose anyone in Glenbost will care.’
Now that Petra was back Jinny was uneasily aware of her sister’s every movement. If she was not actually in the same room as Jinny it meant that she might be in her bedroom looking for her shawl.
‘Put it back,’ urged Jinny’s conscience. ‘Even if she catches you with it you can always say you were just looking at it.’
‘I can’t,’ swore Jinny. ‘I must have it as my cloak. MUST.’
Jinny followed her sister into the front room. Paper chains and lanterns hung from the ceiling, holly clustered around mirrors and picture frames. The Christmas tree stood at the window bearing its strange artificial fruit of baubles and fairy lights and round its base the temptation of unopened presents. Christmas cards were hung around the walls and crowded mantlepiece and cabinet.
