The Secret Horses of Briar Hill Read online

  Benny rests a hand on the stairwell eave and leans over me. “Same goes for you, flea.”

  I press a hand against my tufts of hair. “I don’t have fleas.”

  Benny’s favorite Popeye comic book rests on the stairs by his feet. There is a faint smell of smoke. I don’t know where Benny and Jack got a cigarette. Not even Dr. Turner can find cigarettes for sale in Wick.

  I let my hand fall angrily. “Sister Constance will skin you alive when I tell her you’ve been smoking up here.”

  Benny’s eyes go dark and his nose gets extra houndlike and I start to shrink an inch or two, but then he glances down and scoops up something lying next to the comic book. “What’s this?”

  “Another secret?” he sneers. “You’re terrible at keeping secrets.”

  A flash of silver wrapper. My chocolate!

  “Give that back!”

  He holds it high, shaking his head as his eyes light up. “Who’d you swipe it from, flea?”

  “I didn’t steal it! Someone gave it to me, but I can’t tell you who!”

  “Another secret?” he sneers. “You’re terrible at keeping secrets.”

  “Am not!” I snatch for it. “Give it back!”

  But his eyes are on fire. Chocolate means the same thing to him as it does to me—to all of us. A break from dry bread and soupy beans. A sweet memory, something just for you, something from before.

  Benny suddenly pinches me just below my shirtsleeve. I yelp, but he only twists harder. He is thin for a boy of thirteen, but strong. “Promise you won’t tell Sister Constance about the cigarette.”

  “Ow!”

  “Say it.”

  “It’s mine! Give it back or I’ll tell!”

  I can feel Jack pacing at the edge of the stairs like a wild dog. He snakes out a hand and pinches my other arm, too, and then snickers.

  “Promise you won’t tell her, and I’ll give you your chocolate back,” Benny says.

  “Ow! Fine.”

  He gives me one more sharp pinch and then lets me go. I pull back, rubbing the red welts on my arm. Jack is grinning with his yellow teeth, so excited that he starts coughing and has to double over.

  I hold out my hand.

  Benny just smiles slowly.

  He tears off the rest of the wrapper and pops it in his mouth. “Waat choholaat?” he mumbles, while lines of brown spit dribble down his chin.

  Now I grow an inch, two, three, until my anger towers over him.

  “I hate you!” I shove him, but he just laughs, and I run down the stairs. I run past Dr. Turner’s old butler’s pantry, where little Arthur who never talks is crying silent tears over an injection he’s about to receive, and then down into the kitchen. Sister Mary Grace is bent over a copper pot on the stove. She looks up with a tired face that glistens with steam.

  “Emmaline, fetch me an onion from the larder. If you dig deep, there’s still some good ones, when you peel off the outer layers—”

  I shove open the back door and run out onto the kitchen terrace. Children are tossing turnips back and forth and trying to juggle. When their backs are turned, I dart around the corner and run to the garden wall, even though it’s against the rules to go so far.

  I don’t care about the rules.

  I’ll take my chances with the foxes.

  IT IS COLD OUTSIDE, and still foggy in the low parts of the fields. I run straight until I reach the gardens’ grand front gate, which Thomas padlocked long ago. No one goes beyond the garden wall now. Before the war, the hospital wasn’t a hospital at all. It was the house of a beautiful, rich princess, only she was old, and you are probably thinking that doesn’t sound like a princess, but it’s true. When the bombs started, the princess went to live with relatives and gave the house to the Sisters of Mercy, who added more beds to all of the bedrooms and blacked out the windows with blankets, and the nuns came, and then children came, all on trains. Rumbling, rumbling, while the bombs burst outside. My neighbors were evacuated to Dorset on the first trains. They didn’t have the stillwaters. Benny does. Anna does. I do. All the children at Briar Hill hospital have the stillwaters, and so we are here, because we cannot infect each other because we are already infected.

  Sister Mary Grace told me that when the princess lived here, the grounds were beautiful. Young men and women from as far as London would come to walk through the walled gardens, amid the rosebushes and statues and gurgling fountains. They used to throw open the ballroom doors so that music would pour onto the sprawling lawns, where her guests would play croquet. But the princess had an army of gardeners, and now we have only Thomas, and Thomas has only his one arm. So that is why the garden gate is locked, and why the little creeping briars grow longer and longer each day.

  But the ivy forms a twisting ladder, and it is easy to climb over the garden wall. I just have to tuck my skirt between my legs. On the other side I drop down into a forgotten place. There are benches that are being slowly disappeared by honeysuckle, and crumbling statues of Greek gods with moss clinging to their faces. I wander the maze of walls and find a smaller garden, tucked away in the corner. There is a column in the center that reaches to my shoulders, and on top is a sundial. It has a circular base with a triangular arm pointing toward the sky to cast a shadow that tells the time. It looks to be made of gold or brass that might once have been reflective enough to show the mirror-horses, but now it’s too tarnished. I sit on a bench, crunching the vines, and blow into my hands.

  Something rustles, and I go stiff.

  I haven’t forgotten about the foxes.

  I hold my breath so it won’t cloud in the air and give me away, and listen. There. More rustling, just around the corner. Something moving. Can that really be just a fox? And there. Back from the direction of the statues. The vines climbing the garden wall tremble suddenly, and I suck in a breath.

  That is too big to be a fox.

  I go completely still. Except for my breath. Except for my heart. Is this what Papa feels like on the front? That at any moment bullets might splinter the walls? That gas might cloud like morning fog?

  Clomp.

  I shriek. The ivy trembles violently. Should I run?

  Clomp, CLOMP.

  It’s getting closer! I drop down to the frozen earth. I crawl elbow over elbow through the trenches of dead grass. Benny told us a story once of a German plane that got lost in a storm and crashed on English soil. What if this is a German pilot, lost and angry? My heartbeat thunders in my chest. A willow branch snaps under my elbow, and I shriek.

  Clomp, clomp, clomp.

  It’s a German pilot, I know it, and he’s going to have a gun and he isn’t going to listen when I tell him I’m just a girl because he doesn’t speak English and he has no way of knowing I’m not a spy!

  CLOMP.

  He’s right around the corner now. There’s no time. I grab the snapped willow branch and brandish it, rising to my feet. Foxes or German pilots, Papa would be brave. I must be brave too.

  A snort.

  A heavy clomp, clomp, clomp.

  A horse swivels its head around the corner. It is almost entirely white—it has long ropes of silken white mane, and a soft gray muzzle, and wings, snow-white wings, wings that are soft and giant and real.

  I drop the willow branch.

  “You aren’t a German soldier!” I cry.

  The horse blinks.

  “What are you?”

  But I know what it is. Oh, I know.

  Dry grass itches at my ankles and wind bites at my nose, but all I can do is stare at this horse. It’s from the mirror-world. But how did it cross over? And why? The winged horses never leave their world—they barely even glance at me when I tap on the hospital mirrors.

  The horse takes a cautious step sideways, its dark eyes fixed on me.

  I glance at the golden sundial, but even if it were still gleaming, the horse is much too large to have squeezed through it. And if it had climbed through any of the mirrors in the hospital, surely we would ha
ve heard the crash of broken glass. Perhaps it climbed up through the fountain’s reflective water—but no, the horse is not soaked with ice water.

  Slowly, I press my hand to my mouth.

  What if…what if it hasn’t crossed over into our world? What if I’ve crossed over into its world?

  I pat my dress, my hair, the ivy. No, we are in our world. The sky is gray. The ground is gray. My clothes are gray. The world behind the mirror, I think, would not have so much gray.

  The winged horse watches from across the garden, the frozen fountain between us. It snorts loudly, then tears the earth with a hoof the color of quicksilver. Rust-red soil rains against the briars. I think of how when Benny chases me, I run to the kitchen, where the table is an island that keeps him away.

  But this horse is not Benny. It has powerful hooves. Powerful teeth. A fountain will not stop it.

  I grab the willow branch, brandishing it again.

  We stare each other down. My heart thunk-thunks, thunk-thunks, my mind spins. I cannot believe it is here. I cannot believe, even after watching its kind in the mirrors, that it is real.

  It lets out another snort, breaking the standoff, and lurches forward. I clutch the willow branch like a sword, but it doesn’t attack. Its neck bends. It noses the fountain. Again. And again.

  I lower the branch.

  No, it is not a bloodthirsty creature out of one of Benny’s stories.

  It is only trying to drink.

  It looks at me, and I see more clearly this time. It is a girl. It’s something in her eyes, a gentleness. I can just tell.

  The fountain doesn’t flow anymore, but frozen rainwater fills the basin. The horse paws, paws, paws, with her quicksilver hoof. There’s a blaze of dark hair between her eyes in the pattern of a star—no, a spark. A tingling feeling spreads through me. All this time, Sister Constance and Dr. Turner were wrong. The winged horses weren’t in my imagination. They’re real. She’s real. I want to run back to the hospital on winged feet and tell them all, yell it out, and bring them here….

  But no.

  No.

  I remember Sister Constance’s face. Dr. Turner’s, too. And the whispers of the other children.

  They did not believe me before, and they will not believe me now. That is okay. I am very good at keeping secrets, never mind what Benny says. And this secret—this horse—is my secret. Something just for me.

  The horse paws again, muzzle nosing anxiously against ice. I take a step forward, cautiously, and raise the willow branch. The horse steps back, wary, like a deer at the edge of a wood. I use the branch to bust up the ice in the fountain, chop, chop, chop as hard as I can, and then step back quickly to the wall. My heart thunk-thunks. When I look at the horse, my mouth fills with the slightest, barely there taste of ash.

  She takes a step forward. And another. Cautious. And then she lowers her head and drinks long and deep from the water beneath the ice. I think she is very thirsty, and that it has been a long time since she has drunk her fill.

  I LIE AWAKE ALL night wishing there were no such things as schoolwork and supper and silent prayer so I could have stayed with the winged horse.

  At first I wonder: How did the horse get into the sundial garden?

  And then I remember: She has wings, you dolt, she flew in.

  But then I think: Why doesn’t she fly away again?

  And I start to worry that maybe she has.

  So I get up just after dawn and sneak out, even though I know God sees everything and might tell Sister Constance, and I climb over the garden wall with a mealy turnip from the larder in my coat pocket. I’m more and more afraid the winged horse won’t be there again, but she is. She is standing by the golden sundial, which is being slowly disappeared by briars, like everything else.

  She hears me coming. She stops scratching. She turns her beautiful gray muzzle and looks at me through the mist. She is even more miraculous than I remembered.

  “I brought you a treat.” My words turn to clouds of mist in the air. I hold out the turnip, but my hand is shaking. I taste ashes in my mouth. The horse is so very beautiful. She’s small for a horse, but small things can be lovely, too. Her wings are as white as sugar, and I bet they feel soft and warm, like the chickens.

  “Emmaline?”

  Someone is calling my name from the hospital. Sister Mary Grace, I think.

  The winged horse’s eyes go wide and wild. Papa tells stories of horses like this, untamed ones of the plains. He says in America there are whole valleys of horses that have never even seen a person before. The cowboys round them up into giant wooden pens that they keep moving closer and closer, until the horses suddenly find themselves caught. Some are happy to be tamed and pull carts and carry saddles on their backs. But others never are.

  “Do you have a name?” I ask.

  The winged horse’s nostrils flare.

  And I notice how she is holding one wing close to her body. I take a step forward, cautiously. The wing’s feathers are each the length of my entire arm, the width of my hand. They are packed tightly together, like a shield, and coated with a waxy substance that would make rain roll right off of them. They grow out of the horse’s shoulder, and where they meet the bone, the skin is red and swollen.

  “What happened to you?”

  The horse pauses. Her ears turn back, and then she swivels her beautiful long neck around and swats at a fly on her haunch with her tail. I try to memorize the shape of her back legs—the smooth arcs and long, straight shanks—so that I can draw them later with Anna’s colored pencils.

  I realize something. “I know why you have come,” I tell her. “I think you belong with the other horses, the ones that live in the mirrors, but you’ve come into our world somehow. Because you’re hurt, and you know this is a place of healing. It’s okay. No one comes here but me. You can stay as long as you like.”

  “Emmaline?” Sister Mary Grace calls again. “Are you out here?”

  A shadow ripples over the winged horse. A dark one with outstretched wings that swallow up the horse and the sundial. A shrill siren wails to life from the direction of the hospital. The horse’s ears go straight, and I turn toward the wailing sound. Its shriek rises and falls.

  The air raid siren.

  I gape up at the shadow. A plane! The Germans, attacking! I drop to all fours and cover my head like they taught us in school. I can’t believe the Germans are here, in Shropshire. They bomb cities, not turnip fields. We’re supposed to be safe here. The trains, the countryside. It’s supposed to be safe.

  After a minute no bombs shatter the earth, and I look up. The air raid siren is still wailing and wailing. The winged horse is blinking calmly in the mist.

  I was wrong. The dark shadow was far too silent to have been a plane.

  And the siren…

  “Drat!” I run toward the garden wall. “Don’t worry, it’s just a drill,” I call over my shoulder to the horse. “ ‘Half an hour, once a week, to keep us sharp and at our peak.’ ” As I clamber over the ivy wall, I think of my schoolteacher in Nottingham, waving her hands as we all recited the rhyme together behind our thick rubber gas masks.

  The other children are already forming a tidy line on the edge of the kitchen terrace. With their masks on, their faces are black rubber with two gaping eyes and a long round iron snout. Thomas and Sister Constance are helping carry Anna, in the wheeled wicker chair, up the sunken kitchen stairs, though she is attempting to wave them away. She insists she can walk, if they’d only let her. Sister Constance insists she won’t allow anyone to fall on stone stairs and crack a head open and ruin her drill.

  “Emmaline!” Sister Mary Grace sees me running and presses a hand to her chest in relief, but her face quickly turns to consternation. She holds out my gas mask, which I left dangling on the corner of my bed, and then slides her own over her face.

  “I’m sorry, Sister—”

  “In line.” Her voice has been transformed to that of a creature from outer space. �
��Go on. Quick feet.” She points to the far end of the row of children.

  I fumble with the straps and then I am an outer-space creature too. Once we’re in line and Anna is up the stairs, Sister Constance stops turning the siren handle. She gives us a sharp nod, and then we march, high knees and pumping fists, around the corner of the house to the sunken entrance of the basement, down the basement stairs, and then sit cross-legged in the straw, staring at each other’s masks.

  Sister Constance ducks in the doorway with a handheld timer clock. She presses a button.

  “Half an hour, children.” The straps of her mask make her habit bunch around her face. “No talking. This is time to pray for our soldiers who are fighting on the front.”

  Then she and Sister Mary Grace are gone, and it is only us twenty small outer-space creatures shifting uncomfortably, coughing behind our masks. Anna, in the wheeled chair, delicately arranges her skirt over her knees. The small girls who are always clinging to each other like three little mice hold hands and play a squeezing game they’ve never taught anyone else. Peter picks a scab on his elbow.

  Children start shifting, trying to keep warm.

  Someone coughs loudly.

  “Blimey, this is dull,” someone else groans, kicking his feet out. Behind the mask, I can’t tell if it is Jack or his brother, Peter. “And it was breakfast time, too. The tea will go cold.”

  “Don’t be such a baby, Jack.” Benny’s thin sneer sounds like he’s speaking from the inside of a tin can.

  Jack folds his arms. “Or else what?”

  Benny sits up straight. “Or else what? I’ll tell you what.” He leans forward, the gas mask making his breathing sound like slow and dangerous waves at sea, out and in, out and in. “Do you know what Captain Cook discovered on his travels in the South Pacific? That cannibals don’t like to eat grown-ups. Too tough and chewy. They much prefer children, with their tender flesh. Especially babies who play with toy trains and whine over cold tea. They’d just love you.”

  “That’s rubbish,” someone says.

  Benny spins his rubber face toward the voice, looking from one child to another. “It’s true. And if you think you’re safe here, you’re wrong.” His voice drops. “Why do you think Thomas lives out in that little cottage? It’s because it’s far enough away from the hospital that the Sisters won’t hear the screams of the children he snatches.”