The Secret Horses of Briar Hill Read online

  Anna lets out a snort from behind her mask. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Benny ignores her. “He doesn’t eat them himself, no.” Everyone’s faces are fixed on Benny’s. “Though he’s tried a bite every now and then, of course—it’s hard not to when their meat smells so delicious. He snatches them for the witches that live in the woods. Keeps them in cages in his cottage, feeds them milk to fatten them, just like the lambs, and then delivers them to the witches.”

  Anna leans forward in her chair tensely. “Stop this at once, or I’ll fetch—”

  “He took pity on a child once.” Benny talks right over her. “A little baby who wailed and wailed, and so he brought it back to its family in Wick. The witches were so cross that they took his arm in its place, as punishment. Cut it off like felling a dead branch.”

  “That’s absurd,” Anna says. “He was born without his arm.”

  But no one is listening to Anna, except for me.

  “And that dog. Do you know why he’s called Bog? Because he’s the one who finds the children, and herds them to the bog to drown them after Thomas fattens them up for the witches.”

  “Enough!” Anna stands shakily. She pulls off her gas mask. Her curls are wild now, and her face is red from the rubber seals. “Enough, Benny. Not a word of that is true, you’re making it up like something out of your comic book, and I’m tired of your stories and—”

  A click comes from the basement door. Sister Constance holds the timer clock, its popped button showing that the half hour has passed. Her gas mask is off, and she gives Anna a long look.

  Anna quickly sits down in the chair.

  “Back upstairs, children,” Sister Constance orders.

  We file out into the rear lawn with heads hung low, masks dangling from our hands, as we walk back to the kitchen terrace. I toss a look at the garden wall. As soon as I can, I will visit the white horse once more.

  And then my eyes settle on Thomas’s cottage.

  Benny’s story isn’t true, of course.

  It isn’t.

  Inside, we learn that Jack is right. The tea has gone cold.

  I SHOULDN’T TELL ANYONE about the horse in the garden.

  I shouldn’t.

  But I’ve kept the secret all afternoon, and it is gobbling me up like worms on a dead bird. I burst into Anna’s room as soon as Sister Constance dismisses class, and find her quietly reading. I jump on the bed and press my lips to her ear.

  “There is a white winged horse in the sundial garden,” I whisper.

  She laughs warmly as my breath tickles her curls, and marks the place in her book with the pink colored pencil and pulls me in close. “My goodness. I thought they were only in the mirrors.”

  “I thought so too!” I glance at the door. “But one has gotten out. I don’t dare tell anyone but you, because they might take her away. And besides, her wing is hurt.”

  There is a white winged horse in the sundial garden.

  Anna nods slowly, deep in thought. “I suppose she needs you to look after her, then. You took care of your horses back in Nottingham, didn’t you? They were bakery horses, you said?” She runs her hand lightly over my hair. “It’s rare to see horses in a city these days.”

  I press my ear against her chest, because I like to hear her heart beating. When I slide lower, her stomach goes gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, just like Mama’s does.

  “Papa looked after them, mostly.”

  She’s stroking my hair softly, looking wistfully out the window. I’ve never really noticed before that Anna’s window looks out onto Thomas’s cottage and the turnip patch, so she must spend all day watching him work.

  “I’ll tell you a secret of my own,” she says conspiratorially, “if you promise to keep it to yourself.”

  I sit up and nod enthusiastically.

  “I’ve never been kissed,” she whispers, as her cheeks go as pink as the colored pencil in her book. “Can you believe it? By the time my older sister was sixteen, she was engaged.”

  She looks back out the window, then her eyes dart, just for a moment, to the red ticket affixed to her open door. I wonder if she is thinking that no one will ever kiss her now, not with the stillwaters. Even the Sisters scrub their hands after touching us.

  She gives a sort of a sad laugh that becomes a cough that she muffles in her sleeve. I pat her shoulder gently.

  “You’ll get better, Anna,” I say. “You’ll be kissed, I know it. After the war is over, you’ll go home and marry a handsome man and have lots of little babies.”

  Anna takes my hand in hers and gives it a squeeze. Then she looks down at the naturalist book in her lap, and runs her fingers softly down the cover. “And you?” she asks. “What are you going to do when you are better?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know.”

  My sister, Marjorie, wants to study the natural world, like Anna, only she’d rather collect stray animals than read about them. In Nottingham she feeds an endless stream of cats. Mama puts up with it only because they kill the mice that gnaw through flour sacks. (Mama doesn’t know that Marjorie feeds the mice, too.) Marjorie would probably like to work here at the hospital, tending to us as though we were helpless cats too.

  “Perhaps you’ll become a baker, like your parents,” Anna says. “All those rolls and loaves of bread. You’ll puff up like a little pig.” She pokes at my ribs teasingly, but I don’t smile. The bakery feels so very far away in this moment. I am already forgetting the sounds of Mama humming as she kneads dough.

  I shake my head.

  “Well, think about what makes you happy,” she says.

  I think hard.

  I like to draw. And to go to the cinema with Marjorie—Heidi is the best movie I’ve seen. I like to climb the garden wall even though Sister Constance told us not to. And I like the winged horse. Yes, that is what makes me happy. That she is mine. That she is secret.

  “I’d like to be an explorer,” I say at last. “I’d like to discover new things that no one else has. Go places other people won’t.”

  And then I feel embarrassed, because it is a silly wish. Explorers are brave, dashing men who fly airplanes and hunt Germans and have lungs that aren’t choked with stillwaters.

  Anna blinks in surprise, and then the most beautiful smile crosses her face. “But, Emmaline,” she says, “you already are.”

  “EMMALINE’S BEEN OUTSIDE! Look at her dress!”

  Benny jumps up from the breakfast table the next morning and points to the back of my skirt. I reach around and feel a briar. Drat. There are only briar bushes in one place—the gardens—and it must have caught yesterday during my visit to the white horse. Sister Constance rubs her tired eyes and gives me her God would disapprove look.

  “Emmaline, remember the rule. It’s for your own good, with the foxes out there, growing hungrier as it gets colder.” She shakes her head, muttering something about how fresh air won’t cure any of us if we freeze to death first.

  I sit at the table and eat my porridge with plum jam. Most of the younger children’s seats are empty, their bowls already licked clean. Only Benny, and Jack and his brother Peter, and the three small girls who are always clinging to each other remain. Thomas is at the far end of the long table, where the adults eat, hunched over his bowl like a piece of twisted driftwood that has somehow washed up in our breakfast room. His arm-side is facing me, and if I lean forward a little, I can almost pretend his other arm is there, just hidden.

  I eye him sideways. He doesn’t look like the type to fatten children for witches, but who does?

  “Where’d you go, then, Emmaline?” Benny asks, his head jutted forward. “To the loo outside? I bet you like to feel fresh air on your bum.”

  Jack snickers. The three little mice do too.

  “That’s a lie!” I say. My head whips toward the kitchen pantry door, but Sister Constance is cataloging cans inside and hasn’t heard this injustice. “I was in the sundial garden. I found a winged horse there—”

 
I clamp a hand over my mouth.

  So much for keeping secrets.

  Benny starts laughing. “A what? A flying horse?” He pretends to laugh so hard that he has to grip the edge of the table to keep from falling off the bench. But then the stillwaters rise up and he coughs and coughs, and it sounds like a dog barking in the night.

  Jack jumps in. “Winged horses don’t exist, flea.”

  “They did!” one of the mice pipes up. “In the Bible they lived in the Garden of Eden, but then the great flood came and there wasn’t any room left on Noah’s ark, so they drowned. That’s why there aren’t any more of them.”

  Even doubled over in pain, Benny manages to shoot the little mouse a sneer. “That’s unicorns.” He coughs more. “And it isn’t true, anyway. It’s just something Sister Mary Grace made up to make you pay attention in church.”

  The little mouse sulks back to her porridge.

  “They do exist,” I say. “Only not in our world. They live in the other world, the one behind the mirrors. You would see them, if you ever looked, but I can tell from your greasy hair that you haven’t laid eyes on a mirror in days. Anyway, the horse in the sundial garden got out somehow.”

  The other children are quiet. The only sound is Thomas’s metal spoon, scraping the last of his porridge at the far end of the table.

  “I’ll prove it,” I say. “Come and see.”

  “And how are we supposed to do that?” Benny tries to twist the words into a sneer, but the truth is, I think he’s a little curious. “We aren’t allowed that far, and anyway, the garden gate is locked.”

  “You’re a boy. If I can climb over the wall in a dress, you can.” I give him a hard look. “Are you afraid of the foxes?”

  Benny glances in the direction of the pantry. “Of course not.”

  The three little mice confer among themselves in their secret mouse language. Thomas stands up and dumps his bowl in the soapy dishwater, and they hush. I think they forgot he was there, so silent and flat, as unnoticeable as the shadows that have been cast on the wall this whole time. He wipes his one hand on a kitchen towel, and then hitches up his trousers with all the grace of a bear.

  “We’d better not,” announces Kitty, the leader of the mice. Her eyes are on Thomas as the wooden kitchen door smacks shut behind him. “Besides, they really don’t exist, Emmaline. It’s just a game you’re playing.”

  Benny reclines, folding his arms as though, now that Thomas is gone and the Sisters aren’t present, he is the ruler of the breakfast table. “There’s a war on, Emmaline. It might have been fun to make things up before, but we have to grow up now. In war there are no children. Only adults.” Seeming very satisfied with himself, he licks the jam off of his thumb.

  I push to my feet. Don’t they even want to see? The winged horse is right there, just on the other side of the garden wall. I set my bowl angrily by the kitchen sink, and then storm out onto the terrace.

  It is cold, and I didn’t bring my coat, but I don’t want to go back inside with Benny and his talk about growing up and war. I sit on the highest of the kitchen steps, hugging my arms tight, worried for the winged horse. But it is starting to rain, and I can’t escape now.

  “Emmaline.”

  I straighten toward the voice. It’s Thomas, his one arm holding a shovel, ropes slung around the shoulder with the pinned-up sleeve. I overheard the Sisters talking about Thomas in the larder one time, while I was taking a nap on the flour sacks. It can’t be easy for him, Sister Constance said. His father’s made such a name for himself, in the last war and now in this one, too. And here Thomas is, shoveling turnips all day, no girls to be sweet on except poor dying Anna and a couple of nuns.

  “Emmaline,” Thomas says again.

  “What?”

  “I see the winged horses too.”

  My heart goes thump, thump, thump. I’m not the only one! But I look away, because Thomas is like the shadows on the wall. Dark and ever-present, and just a little bit scary. I know Benny’s stories about him aren’t any more true than the story in the pages of his comic book. I know this. And yet, if anyone else is going to be a part of my secret world, I do not think I want it to be Thomas.

  IT RAINS FOR DAYS and days. It is a sleeting kind of rain that wants to be snow but can’t figure out how to turn white and fluffy, and so it just slaps against the windows. There is no escaping to see the white winged horse. I can only hope she is all right.

  I lie on my bed at night, drawing with chalk by the light of a fat candle because Anna only lets me use her colored pencils when I am in her room. It’s cozy here, beneath the attic eaves. I was the last to arrive at Briar Hill. All the beds were taken, and Thomas had to clear out one of the attic rooms and make this bed out of wood and rope. Little bits of straw poke through the mattress and itch my skin. I like the smell, though. It reminds me of home. Of Nutmeg and Ginger, and of Spice, throwing their heads to shake out their dark manes as soon as Papa takes off their harnesses, in just the same way Papa tosses his own hair when he takes off his baker’s cap.

  I’ve drawn the horse’s ears right at last, I think, but her wing is giving me trouble—it hangs limply in my drawing just as it does in the real world. Outside, lightning crashes, and my hand jerks and draws a snaking white line. The thunder takes its time rolling in. You can tell how far away a storm is by how many seconds pass between lightning and thunder. Three, four, I count, and then it comes. Four. Four miles off.

  I shove the chalk in my pocket and push open the curtain.

  All I can see of the garden is charcoal-colored shadows slick with moisture, and the blowing skeletons of trees. I cannot see the winged horse, but I can feel her. Does the storm frighten her?

  Lightning strikes again.

  One. Two.

  Then thunder.

  Two miles off now. I shove back the curtain and sprawl on the bed. The candle flame flickers, then straightens as the wind howls.

  I reach for my chalk, and suddenly thunder crashes even louder.

  I shriek and huddle under my quilt. There was no counting. No miles. The storm is right on top of us! The wind howls louder still as it rips open the window. A freezing gust comes barreling in, rain and ice and everything in between. The candle flickers wildly and goes out. I tumble toward the window, knocking the candle to the floor. The storm isn’t allowed in my bedroom; neither is the night.

  Icy rain streaks my hair and face. Lightning flashes again, and for a moment, the night world is mine to see. Quaking branches throwing themselves on the wind’s mercy. Bare fields stretch into night.

  Acorns drop onto the roof like a volley of bullets. Rat-a-tat. Rat-a-tat. And then it’s dark again. Really dark. Black.

  I shove the window closed and twist the lock. When I blink, crystals clink together. The attic is nothing but shadows and the smell of extinguished fire. I feel for the quilt.

  RAT-A-TAT.

  More sounds, louder. It’s too late in the year to be acorns. Something is stomping, clomping, thumping, on the sloping roof.

  I know that sound.

  Horses.

  Outside, the wind howls louder. Only a horse with wings could get up three stories to stomp on the roof. Is it the one from the garden, prancing? But no, this is gnashing. This is pawing. This is the rat-a-tat of guns, only it is a horse tearing at the roof.

  I take a step backward.

  This can’t be my winged horse.

  My winged horse is chicken feathers and a soft gray muzzle. My winged horse is a blaze the shape of a spark.

  Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.

  Thunder comes again, and something cracks in the roof, as though whatever is on the other side is trying to tear its way in. I back up against the bed and trip over the fallen candle.

  Forget it!

  I grab my coat, throw open the door, and gallop down the stairs and straight into Anna’s room. She jerks upright at the sound, sweaty hair plastered to the side of her face, eyes squinting. I jump on the bed next to her and burrow
under the covers.

  “Emmaline! What’s the matter? Why are you wet?” She pushes the hair out of her face. “Have you been outside, you mad child?”

  Her bed is warm. Her bed is safe. The attic is far away, and the roof with the shaking rafters and the stomping horse is even farther. I take a long, deep breath. Icy rain and wind push at her bedroom window, but muffled by the wool blanket, it seems like only a storm. “The wind blew my window open.”

  “I’ve a towel on the—”

  “There was something out there, Anna. On the roof. I think another one of the winged horses has crossed over from the mirror-world. A bad one.”

  In the darkness, I cannot see her face. She switches on her light, and then studies me with frowning eyes. She glances at the small oval hand mirror on her bedside table. It reflects a small sliver of the window that the wool blanket hasn’t quite covered; a slice of the outside, which is dark now.

  “I thought it was the one from the garden,” I continue, “but it can’t be because her wing is hurt and she can’t fly. It was so loud, pawing and pawing like it was angry. Didn’t you hear it?” She is still looking at the mirror, oddly, as though her thoughts are elsewhere. “Anna, didn’t you hear it?” I shake her by the sleeve.

  She blinks. “No. But…I’m all the way down here on the second floor, and your room is right beneath the roof. Are you certain it wasn’t branches falling?”

  “I need to check on the horse in the garden. Something awful might have happened to her.” When I start to roll out of bed, Anna snaps upright and grabs me.

  “You can’t! You’ll freeze out there.”

  “She’s all alone!”

  She holds me firmly. “Well, you can check on her in the morning. You won’t be able to help her if you catch fever. Now fetch that towel from the banister, and put on these socks. You’re shaking.”