The Horse From Black Loch, page 15
We rose over the last of the encircling hills and stretching away in a billion sparkling diamonds was an island-fretted sea. Without pausing the Horse sped down towards it.
The sound was at first merely the wind as it snaked past my ears, then more insistent, more unmistakable. Stray wisps of sound that joined and linked and became the urgent fluting of Fergus’s pipe.
The Horse raced now along the flat sea verge. Wavelets curled milk smooth, crinkled and seeped in foam about its flying hoofs. The sea, the early sunlight, the white curving wings of the gulls, the great shoulders and powerful neck of the Horse were all a glory and a joy. The Horse of the House of Innes was free and I, Kay of Innes, had saved it. I knew no words to contain my ecstasy but I screamed my joy, as I galloped on, in a timeless, wordless pæan of praise.
The music of Fergus was now clear and strong and undeniable. And then I saw him standing out darkly against the sea dazzle. He was waiting by the shore, his pipe to his lips, his cloak loose about him. At his heels the Grey Ones lay, heads on outstretched legs, ears erect triangles. In the water close by him a rowing boat danced lightly to the tide’s movement. The Horse saw Fergus and whinnied with a deafening roar, thundering out its delight, and we plunged on towards him.
When the Horse reached Fergus it sighed from its very heart and laid its head on Fergus’s shoulder, safe and at peace after all its miseries.
Tears misted my eyes and I could only sit twisting the halter rope in my hands, choking on the lump that swelled in my throat, and struggling to find something to say to Fergus.
“You have done well, Kay. You did not fail. When the day comes you will make a fit guardian for the Water Horse and under your care Deersmalen will come again to its old splendour.” Fergus’s eyes looking up into mine sparkled with green and peat-brown lights.
“If it hadn’t been for you,” I mumbled. “I didn’t know what to do, Fergus. If you hadn’t called the Horse I could have done nothing,” and I shivered, suddenly cold in the morning air, remembering my helplessness as the Horse galloped back to the Black Loch.
“Ah, do not be afraid, child, you will never be without help,” and a smile of infinite gentleness softened Fergus’s gaunt features. “But come now, for I must be away to the island.”
He held out his arms to catch me as I dropped from the Horse’s back. My legs collapsed under me and I crumpled down on a boulder too stiff and aching to move.
Fergus slipped the halter off the Water Horse’s head and it sprang back, free at last. On the shore it reared and bucked and plunged. The sun glinted upon its jet black coat with lines of white light that flowed like tongues of fire to the play of its mighty muscles. Then with a shrill scream it trotted into the sea. For seconds it flirted at the water’s edge. Lifting its legs high as a hackney’s, kinking its tail, dropping its head to blow and squeal over the travelling froth of the wavelets.
Then it reared up, straight and high, striking out with its forelegs against the golden orb of the sun. Then swift as an unleashed dam it burst into the deeper water until it breasted the sea and it was swimming, every powerful stroke taking it farther from land.
I was filled with a great sense of emptiness and loss. I hardly saw Fergus, followed by the Grey Ones, climb into the boat and row after the Horse. It was all over. I would never ride the great Horse again. The reality must fade now to a dream.
Now only Fergus’s boat was visible, yet as I strained my eyes to follow it before it disappeared behind the nearest island I was sure I saw a black head rise by the side of it. Burning visionary in my mind’s eye I knew the proud arch of the neck, the soft denseness of the fall of the mane, the lustre of the eye and the cathartic beauty of the line of the face from forehead to soft muzzle. As I stared even the boat was gone. The gulls screamed their eternal fish-wife clamour, the sun threaded the glinting sea with extravagant beauty and I was utterly alone.
I sat staring out to sea while the morning ripened to day.
Over the road from the hills a scarlet Post Office van rattled down. I turned and watched it as it came along the shore road. It was broad daylight now but I’d no idea of the time. My watch had stopped ages ago. Someone was leaning out of the van window anxiously searching the shore for something. It was a boy, a boy whose fair hair blew in the sea breeze. It was Jamie.
I sprang to my feet and waved my arms wildly in the air. “Jamie,” I screamed. “Jamie.”
He saw me and waved. The van stopped to let him out and then hurried on its way again. Jamie came rushing towards me.
“Where’s the Horse?” he was yelling. “Did it get away from you? Where is it?” He reached me and stood flushed before me. “Tell me what’s happened.”
“It’s safe,” I said. “It’s with Fergus. He’s taken it to the island.”
“Oh Glory! Glory! Glory!” Jamie shouted. “From the look on your face I was sure you’d let it go. We’ve saved the Water Horse!” and he sprang and flipped and doubled in ecstatic handstands and cartwheels. He seized me by both hands and whirled me round and round. “We’ve saved the Water Horse! We’ve saved the Water Horse!” he cried in joy. As I spun dizzily round my loneliness left me and I too was filled with the triumph of our achievement. “We beat Buffy,” Jamie cried, letting me go so that we both sat down suddenly on the shingle. “Go on,” he commanded. “Tell me.”
I told him and he listened in silence, lying flat on his back staring up at the sky.
“You rode the Water Horse,” he said longingly. “Oh, Kay, why couldn’t it have been me?” For a minute he was silent, struggling in his own mind with the question that no one could answer. Then he sprang to his feet. “What’s it matter?” he said. “As long as the Horse is safe with Fergus. The man in the G.P.O. van said he’d look out for us on his way back and give us a lift to Lintore and from there we should manage to hitch a lift to Gartleven.”
“What did Buffy do when he realised we’d got away?” I asked as we walked back to the roadside.
“They just abandoned me and tried to follow you. You must have left the road pretty quickly because they went after you at a terrific speed with Buffy hanging out of the window his lasso at the ready. In the end I think they went back to the Black Loch hoping the Horse would head back that way. Least they passed me going in that direction. I wandered about over the moors shouting for you, then I decided that it was useless. When I got back to the road it was just getting light and I walked on towards here. It was while I was walking the horse-box passed me going towards the Black Loch but they didn’t see me. Then I got a lift from the van and here I am. Oh, Kay, I can hardly believe it. The Water Horse safe.”
“They’ll never find it on the island,” I said.
“Fergus will stay with it. While he’s there nothing can harm it,” Jamie assured me.
The G.P.O. van took us to Lintore and from there we got a lift in a telephone van that took us all the way to the road that ran past Deersmalen and on to Craig Garth.
In the dim grey evening we jumped down from the van and thanked the driver, a huge, kind, walrus of a man who peered at us through thick lensed glasses. “That’s okay,” he said when we thanked him. “But next time you have a day in the country how about taking some food with you?” He had given us sandwiches and lemonade when he discovered we had nothing to eat. “We will,” Jamie said. “We were in an awful hurry when we left. Good-bye and thank you again, very, very much.”
Together we walked up the long drive to Deersmalen. Overhead the pines swayed and whispered, sighed and surged like the sea.
“Home,” said Jamie, “is the sound of the wind in the pines. I couldn’t live away from them. If Buffy had won we would have had to leave Deersmalen. Dad would never have stayed here if the Horse had gone. Thank you, Kay, for saving it.”
“It wasn’t just me,” I said.
“Without you we couldn’t have saved it,” Jamie said decisively. “Look,” he said changing the subject, “the ponies are back.” There grazing on the long grass at the edge of the pines were the ponies. Only the dun, Turk, who was with Fergus, was missing.
“They’re home too,” I said contentedly.
Light flowed golden from the open front door and Shona ran to meet us.
“The Horse is safe. On the island with Fergus,” Jamie called to her.
“Oh-h!” Shona gasped, standing still with relief. “Oh thank you, thank you, thank you. I’m so glad. Oh Jamie, I’m so glad I could cry.”
“What did Aunt Sadie say?” I asked.
“Mad at first,” Shona said. “But Dad’s back now and it’s all right.”
Uncle Vincent had followed Shona to the door and he stood now, black against the lighted hall, waiting for us. “The Horse?” he asked.
“With Fergus,” Jamie said, and standing in the hall we told him all that had happened.
“ I can never thank you enough for what you have done nor tell you how proud I am of you both.” From the shadowy landing, where he had been listening, Edgar turned and crept away from the light. “You have both proved yourselves worthy of the honour entrusted to you, worthy to belong to the House of Innes. To-morrow you must return to your family, Kay, but some day you will inherit Deersmalen. I know the Water Horse will be safe with you.” He paused and I looked up into his grey eyes, so like my own, but I could find no words to tell him that my whole life and energy and will belonged to Deersmalen and the Water Horse.
“My dears, where have you been? You’re filthy! I’ve never seen you so dirty! Running off and leaving me that scrappy little note! Really Jamie, I’ve been worried stiff.” Aunt Sadie appearing from the kitchen was in full flood but Uncle Vincent must have told her where we had been for she obviously knew. “If I could have laid my hands on you when I read it I’d have tanned the hides off the three of you. And Shona coming back all that way by herself! Kay dear, you look worn out. Go and clean yourselves up a bit and I’ll have a good hot meal ready for you when you come down.”
As I finished packing a clock struck midnight. In another five hours I would need to be up and getting ready to leave Deersmalen. It was all over. To-morrow night I would be back with Mummy and Daddy, hearing about their holiday on the Continent. Sara lay sleeping and looking at her I was amazed at how different our holidays had been. I ran my hand along the smooth grained edge of the dressing-table. To-morrow it would still be here but I would be miles and miles away. “I don’t want to go,” I muttered to myself. “Why should I go?” but I was only a spoilt child kicking against the inevitable. Mowgli drove out Mowgli.
I went to the open window and stood behind the curtains looking out. There was nothing but utter blackness and the restless, searching, unending sighing of the pines. To-night under the same sky the Water Horse was free, in its own element.
As I stood there I heard the resonant wing-beat of a bird flying through the darkness, gently at first, then more certainly, gathering strength as it drew nearer. For a split second I glimpsed the mothy whiteness of a swan. Its great wings pulsed the night. It passed, and soft as a drift of feathers the sound of its wing-beats was absorbed by the great silence of the night.
I stood on for a minute longer staring out into the primeval blackness, remembering as I stood, the speed and glory of the Horse. For a second I felt it surge beneath me, saw the swell of its neck before me, knew again the power of its being and I was filled with the utter certainty that one day I would return to inherit Deersmalen.
Slowly I shut the window and turned away. The curtains swayed behind me. I undressed, put out the lamp and creeping into the high bed I slept.
About the Author
If you’re interested in pony books, you can read much more about them in Heroines on Horseback – the Pony Book in Children’s Fiction, by Jane Badger, now available as an e-Book. You can read an extract from it here on Patricia Leitch.
Before Patricia Leitch’s Jinny series was launched in 1976, she had written a range of solid (and at times outstanding) pony stories. Despite this, she was not well known. Only a few of her books had made it into paperback by the early 1970s, although she had by that time written fifteen titles, four under the name Jane Eliot. This belies just how good her books were: she rarely wrote a poor one. Alison Haymonds considers her as one of the major writers in the genre. Dream of Fair Horses (1975) she describes as ‘a remarkable work of imagination’, and the Jinny series as ‘still deservedly popular’.
Patricia Leitch (1933–2015) was born in Paisley, Scotland. She had a varied career, but her jobs as a riding instructor, librarian and primary school teacher all honed her ability to communicate. Despite two teaching careers, Leitch did not write didactic books. She understood the longings of the ponyless: she had to wait until adulthood before she bought her own first pony, Kirsty, a Fell-Highland cross who ‘almost broke her’, and who provided the inspiration for many of the Highland ponies who feature in her books. She understood, too, the haunting equines who stalked the imaginations of her readers, and she created one of the most vivid of them all: Shantih, a creature so real that some readers have gone on, years later, to buy their own chestnut Arab mares. Shantih was, Leitch wrote in correspondence with me, ‘all dream. In fact, I used to dream about the chestnut Arab mare long before I wrote about her … I still feel, if I could walk out onto the moor and call her she would hear and come galloping over the skyline to me. But then what is imagination for if not to call up the past?’
The Jinny series introduced new elements into a genre in which mysticism was a rare visitor, and a wild, tantrumming heroine even more so. There are two intertwining worlds in the books: the everyday one of family life and going to school, and that of the ancient spirits and Celtic gods who inhabit the moors. Leitch’s earlier books had hints of what was to come—wild Scottish settings, Highland and Arab ponies, teenage drama, and, occasionally, mysticism—but these early titles were rather more prosaic than the Jinny books. They were influenced, at least in style, by the Pullein-Thompsons and their mother, Joanna Cannan. Angy, the heroine of Riding Course Summer (1963), comes out with sentences that could have trotted, unaltered, from a Cannan heroine: ‘She said that I was the most careless child that she had ever known and a lot more meaning the same thing.’ That is not to say the early books are bad; they are not. Margery Fisher commends Janet, Young Rider (1963) for its ‘exceptional character interest as well as good technical details’.
From the start, Leitch did not enter wholeheartedly into writing the pony story as a fairy tale. Her first book, To Save a Pony (1960), although it nods to several conventional elements of the pony book genre, showed that its author was not going to produce plots that provided pat solutions. The Dallas family relocate to Scotland and start a riding school. They go to a local horse sale to find ponies, and Jane sees a pony she is desperate to save. However, no miraculous means to buy the pony appear, and Jane has to wait until the end of the book before she sees the pony again, when she discovers her condemned to the dreadful pony book fate of pulling a cart. But Jane is writing a pony book, and she is sure that if she can only get the manuscript to a publisher, it will provide her with enough money to buy the pony. (This had worked for other pony book heroines, Josephine Pullein-Thompson’s Christabel in I Had Two Ponies for one.) Gregory, who runs the riding school and has lived with the family since he was five, challenges Jane.
‘And where will you get twenty pounds from? No, don’t tell me. I can guess. Your book!’
‘Well, why not?’ I demanded.
‘Jane! Jane! Jane! Will you never grow up? Things like that just don’t happen. You’ve got to face up to it that life is brutal and hard and not a fairy tale with you as the principal fairy godmother.’
Her book is rejected.
Jane does get the money, but only by conquering her fear and doing what she has flatly refused to do before: jump a pony in a show. An author refusing to allow the pony book heroine to be ‘the principal fairy godmother’ was almost heretical at the time: title after title saw miserable ponies rescued by the strenuous efforts of the heroine. In Leitch’s world, which was a more realistic one than most, girls do not necessarily get ponies. The heroine of Riding Course Summer doesn’t have a pony at the beginning of the book, and she still doesn’t by the end.
Patricia Leitch maintained her ability to detach herself from her characters; she could stand back and see the humour in some of the situations in which pony lovers find themselves. The pony book can be a humourless beast (and the Jinny books, for all their strength, cannot be said to be funny), but among her books Patricia Leitch produced several which show a wry and understated humour. She was a fine observer of family dynamics. In Riding Course Summer Angy has set up a riding course, but won’t be able to take part herself, as she has no pony. She bemoans the fact to her family:
‘I do wish I had a pony,’ I told my family.
‘I do wish I had a fridge,’ said Mummy.
‘I do wish I had a new suit,’ said Daddy. And if Liz had been in she would have said that she did wish she had a new typewriter.
The later Pony Surprise (1974) has one of those identikit pony book titles which leads the reader to assume it is a conventional trot around the usual tropes. The book is much better than that. Ewan and Penny are both pony mad, but have no pony. Their potter friend, Miss Frobisher, who knows virtually nothing about ponies, agrees to look after a friend’s Highland, Augustus, for the summer. The children are delighted, and offer to take the burden of pony care from her. Augustus has other ideas. From the moment he appears, it is clear that he’s not a pony to be trifled with:
