HartsLove (4 page)

Buffeted by the horse's antics, Skelton was chuckling. Animals had to learn. ‘Unbelievable! He's not even used to a saddle! Just wait until we get a boy up,' he joked, swinging harder on the reins as the horse reared. ‘Master Garth! You're light enough! Come and be jockey!'

Garth paled.

‘Ignore him,' said Daisy. She began to walk towards the horse, leaving Garth behind.

‘Ah, Miss Daisy,' Skelton said, doffing his cap in mock respect. He glanced at her legs. ‘I'm afraid you won't do.' Daisy coloured. Skelton liked to remind you of things you would rather forget.

The colt was blowing hard, the skin on his shoulders ridged with dirty froth and his long chestnut ears pointing in the direction in which he was hoping to fly. He launched himself into the air again. Daisy was forced to duck. Skelton swore and whacked the horse with the reins. The horse reversed at speed. ‘Take care!' cried Daisy as two hind legs slithered on to the drawbridge. ‘There are holes!'

‘Damned animal,' roared Skelton.

Attacked from the front, with his hind legs scrabbling and the horrible saddle still on his back, the horse became
wilder than ever. He tried to gallop forward, dragging Skelton with him, but his mouth was too sore. In the end, quite suddenly and amid a shower of saliva, all the fight went out of him. His head drooped. He panted.

Daisy approached him again. ‘Miss Daisy . . .' Skelton warned.

She did not reply. She manoeuvred her legs to crouch down. The horse blinked miserably. ‘Can't you take the saddle off?' she said in a low voice. ‘He hates it.'

‘Not until we get back into the stable yard,' Skelton replied. With the horse temporarily quiet, he took out his pipe and clamped it between his teeth. ‘He should have been saddled months ago if he's to race this year. He's got to learn to carry a rider as well.'

‘But he's only been here a few hours,' Daisy argued. She wished she had Rose's authority or Lily's defenceless frailty, or even the twins' cheekiness. Skelton might take more notice. As it was, he just struck a match on the bottom of his boot. At the flash, the horse flicked his head briefly, but he was beaten and he knew it. His lower lip quivered.

Daisy remained where she was, though pins and needles prickled her feet. Gradually the horse stopped panting and they observed each other more minutely. In the horse's white-rimmed eye Daisy saw herself, and in Daisy's eye the horse saw his own darkly reflected. The reflection reassured him. He allowed her to touch the snip on his nose.

Skelton chewed his pipe for five minutes more before
bending down and knocking it on the gravel. As he did so, Garth came to inspect the horse, first on one side then the other. His fingers moved at lightning speed. The horse breathed sharply. Garth helped Daisy to get up. He had a strange expression on his face.

Skelton finished with his pipe and tugged on the bridle. With a last, desperate flourish, the horse twirled round quicker than the groom was expecting and pulled the reins from Skelton's fingers. Free for the second time that day, he trotted off, then quickly broke into a canter.

At first he chose to canter down the drive towards the main gate, but changing his mind for no reason at all he executed a small pirouette round the largest of the many potholes and returned, bypassing Daisy and Garth at increasing speed. Skelton shouted and tried to block his path. The horse skittered away round the old chestnut tree, his unkempt mane banging this way and that. Surprised by the flat tombstone, he leaped over it, whereupon, to his enormous and evident joy, the saddle flew into the air and hung, birdlike, for an instant before landing with an inelegant splat on the grass. Daisy laughed and clapped. Relieved of his burden, the colt slowed to a trot, then a walk. He passed the saddle and stopped to sniff at it. He put out his tongue and gave it a tentative lick.
What's this?
he seemed to ask. He appeared to have no idea that only moments before it had been the enemy on his back.

Skelton dived, caught the reins, and with bad grace
picked up the saddle. The girth was not broken: it was missing entirely. He searched the grass. He stared at Garth and Daisy. They stared right back. It was Skelton who carried the saddle to the stables.

As soon as Skelton was out of sight, Garth produced the girth from under his cloak. ‘Garth, you genius,' said Daisy. Garth grinned and with one accord, he and Daisy ran on to the drawbridge, Garth slowing so that they could keep pace together. When they got to the middle, Garth tossed the girth into the moat with a grandly romantic gesture and they both watched it disappear noiselessly into the slimy thicket. Daisy made to follow Garth as he ran into the castle, then hesitated and went back to the moat. With great difficulty she scrambled down the steep bank, her callipers catching in the tangled reeds. She pushed her way through, grimacing as her shoes squelched and her skirt stuck to her knees. Eventually she saw the girth and picked it up. It was leather and expensive, and though the horse did not like it, if he was to race he would have to wear it. Hating herself for being so practical, she struggled out of the moat. Then, not knowing quite what else to do, she wiped the girth down and left it where Skelton would find it.

The next morning, the children held a council of war. Rose sat under the portrait of their mother. In repose, their faces had a similar faraway look and Daisy was sometimes frightened that Rose would disappear too. However, Rose was no cobweb and she wasn't often in repose. Rose barked and snapped. She did not look like their mother at this moment. She was grim-faced.

There had been a scene earlier. The destruction of the wine cellar had been discovered the previous evening and Garth had owned up at once, defying his father with bloodshot eyes. It had taken until breakfast for their father to react; half outraged, half apologising. That was the way with drink: wanting it and being ashamed to want it. Fuelled by the bottle he kept in his room, Charles had ranted about the extra work clearing up the cellar meant for Mrs Snipper. Garth had said nothing. In the end, Charles had closed his mouth and walked round and round the dining room. The
children had sat tense on their chairs. They knew what was coming next. With a sudden dart, Charles had wrenched from its hook a picture of Sir Thomas de Granville painted in all his early-eighteenth-century finery. Tucking it under his arm he had hurried off, calling for Skelton and the vegetable cart. When the front door had slammed, all the candles in the castle had blown out and refused to light again.

Rose, Lily, Daisy, Clover and Columbine were now trying not to look at the empty space on the wall. Garth was poking the fire. He tossed five glowing embers into the air and began to juggle, defying them to burn him. Not even Rose liked to tell him to stop. Garth's behaviour had become so erratic. Any moment now he might throw the embers at the curtains. ‘Another ancestor for the sale room,' Garth said, tossing the embers higher and higher. Sparks cascaded. He allowed them to smoulder.

‘Our ancestors are abandoning us,' whispered Lily, eyes glued to the sparks.

‘No,' Garth corrected her. ‘Pa's abandoning them.'

‘Don't,' Lily begged. She could not criticise even a character in a book for fear of hurting their fictional feelings. She stroked the lily she had found threaded through the handle of a cage containing two white doves.

‘You shouldn't have smashed the bottles,' Rose said, eyes also glued to the sparks.

‘Smash them, drink them – what's the difference?' Garth retorted.

‘When they're drunk, they don't all go at once,' Rose said. She gestured at the portrait behind her. ‘Next time he might take Ma.'

Two embers dropped. ‘You idiot!' Rose cried. They all leaped up, scorching the hems of their dresses as they stamped out fiery flakes. Garth threw the rest of the embers back into the fire. He was sorry and not sorry, just as he was sorry and not sorry for smashing the bottles. A mocking ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy' pulsed through his head. He wiped his hands on his shirt and shoved them into his pockets.

Wisely, Rose moved to the more important point. ‘We've all seen the “for sale” sign. Now we've got to decide what to do.'

‘Will Aunt Barbara even be able to have us all?' For Lily, the thought of being separated from Rose was worse than the thought of being separated from Hartslove.

‘I don't know,' Rose said, trying not to sound impatient. ‘I really don't know why she would want
any
of us. I wouldn't, if I were her.'

‘Couldn't you marry somebody, Rose?' asked Columbine. ‘You're old enough. If you were married, we could live in your house.'

‘I'm not getting married,' said Rose, blushing furiously.

‘But you
could
marry,' Columbine insisted.

‘She'd have to find somebody to marry her, stupid,' said Clover, ‘and that wouldn't be easy.'

‘I think Mr Rose would do it.' Columbine was dogged. ‘I mean, he looks at Rose like Gryffed looks at his dinner.'

‘But Rose couldn't end up as Mrs Rose Rose,' Clover argued, ‘and anyway she doesn't have fancy dresses or a corset or a crinoline or anything. She just has the Dead Girl and the statues and the Cannibal and Father Nameless, same as the rest of us, and I don't suppose they're much use if what you're looking for are normal things like fashionable clothes and hair that's pinned properly. But it doesn't matter,' she added hastily, seeing that Lily was about to cry. ‘Aunt Barbara will take us. I heard Mrs Snips say so.'

‘You shouldn't eavesdrop, Columbine,' Rose snapped.

‘I'm Clover,' Clover said.

Rose glared. ‘I don't care which you are. You shouldn't eavesdrop.' She had been very touchy on the subject of Arthur Rose, the young veterinary surgeon, since Father Nameless, in terrible distress, had brought an injured thrush to the castle. Arthur, dressing a hunting wound of Gryffed's, had invested the bird's dying moments with grave importance and even officiated at the burial service for which Father Nameless had tolled the bell. For some reason that Rose herself did not quite understand, the bird's death had reduced her to helpless tears and Arthur had set himself quietly to comfort her. Rose was not a fool. Though Arthur said nothing lover-like, she knew he loved her. She
knew because whenever he was called to Hartslove, he looked for her even before his patient. She knew because he was always happy to walk down the drive in her company. Most of all, she knew by the way he said goodbye. It was this that had captured her heart. He said goodbye as though, above everything else, he wished he was saying hello.

Arthur's love for Rose had been obvious to all after the day with the bird, and Columbine and Clover liked to make sly references to it. It was not so much the jokes that Rose hated, it was that Clover and Columbine were right: the de Granvilles
were
too strange for anybody normal to marry, and Rose resented this. She loved Hartslove as much as any of them, but since their mother left, both castle and family felt increasingly like a shipwreck to which she was forced to cling whilst the great steamer of the world forged on without her.

She jerked, just in time to hear Clover or Columbine say, ‘Anyway, it wasn't Mr Rose who made the offer.'

Lily breathed, ‘Enough, enough.'

Yet that was true too: Rose's only offer had not come from Arthur but from Arthur's employer, Mr Snaffler, who, last Christmas, had impudently declared to Charles, in front of them all and Mrs Snipper, that ‘despite everything' – this accompanied by a disparaging gesture at the castle, its ancient peculiarities and its dusty contents – he would ‘take your oldest girl off your hands and without a
dowry too. Best bargain of the day.' Rose still shuddered at the thought.

Clover and Columbine knew they had gone too far and quickly changed the subject. ‘Couldn't the people who buy Hartslove buy us too? We could work with Mrs Snips. We could “work our fingers to the bone”. We could “drive ourselves into early graves”. We could “work until we could work no more and die at our posts, still in uniform”.'

Rose recovered herself. ‘Where on earth do you learn such phrases?'

‘The dead people's section of the newspaper,' Clover or Columbine said, pulling the
Manchester Guardian
from under her seat.

‘You spend far too much time reading those stupid things,' Rose said. ‘We should throw them all out.'

The twins were aghast. The newspapers stacked in their father's library were their only source of information about anything. Their loss would be a calamity. ‘Actually, I think it would be horrible, cleaning up other girls' mess in our room,' they said quickly and in unison, to distract.

‘Better to live somewhere else, do you think?' Columbine asked.

‘Don't be silly,' Clover rejoined. They began to argue.

‘What would happen to Garth?' Lily was growing unhappier by the moment. The twins stopped arguing. The newspaper danger was past.

‘I'd join the army,' Garth said. Silence. Only Rose, Lily
and Garth could remember their father going off to the Crimea, his sword spangle sharp and his boots shining. All of them, however, could remember his return, his sword broken and his boots cracked. That he had returned at all was a miracle, so their mother had told them. But an odd sort of miracle, because he'd looked so strange and thin, and along with spent shells for Garth, a horseshoe for Daisy and some peculiar Turkish hats and shawls for the others, he had also brought home his drinking habit.

‘What about Father Nameless?' Lily's eyes brimmed with anxiety as one worry tumbled over another.

‘Aunt Barbara wouldn't take him,' said Clover or Columbine matter-of-factly. ‘He smells, and she's no bell for him to toll.'

‘And the Dead Girl? What will happen to her?'

Nobody had an answer to that. Garth turned himself upside down. ‘I know what will happen to Pa,' he said.