The Secret Horses of Briar Hill

  “Where exactly did you find those long black feathers you had the other day?” I ask.

  “Right there,” she says proudly, pointing to the corner of the terrace where Sister Mary Grace does our laundry. “They blew off the roof, I think. When the snow melts, I bet we’ll find hundreds of them. Kitty says they must come from giant crows that have flown all the way from America.”

  I let her go, and she flounces back to the others, who are waiting.

  I look toward the roof.

  I do not think that there are crows that big anywhere, not even in America.

  And then I take a step toward the far edge of the terrace, where laundry basins are stacked, and go no farther, in case one of the Sisters is watching from a window.

  My foot squishes in something wet and smelly.

  Cripes.

  Sheep droppings. I drag my boot across the bricks to wipe the muck off, but pause. Something isn’t right. There are small bones of tiny animals in the clumps. Bird wings and mouse teeth. Things that shouldn’t be in manure at all. Perhaps these droppings are from foxes. Or perhaps they are from a wicked horse that hunts other animals, a horse that leaves angry hoof prints on the roof and rains down long black feathers. I smell a trace of rotting seaweed.

  I jerk upright, feeling queasy.

  I hurry back into the hospital and slam the kitchen door, heart racing fast. Even through layers of stone and wood and slate tiles, I can feel the Black Horse circling overhead. Foxfire may be safe now, but each night the moon will grow brighter. Before long, the Black Horse will see her, and she will not be able to fly away.

  I need to find something yellow. Soon.

  DR. TURNER PRESSES the silver stethoscope to my back.

  I can see his face in the mirror. He is frowning. Woolly-worm eyebrows knit together. Mustached mouth pinched. He lowers the stethoscope around his neck and lets out a sigh, but when he turns to me the frown is gone. He dissolves two fat aspirin tablets in water and hands me the glass.

  “Gargle this and count to twenty, then spit.”

  I count slowly in my head, and then spit into a mug. When I look up, he is holding a yellow ticket. His eyes are not quite on mine. He clears his throat. “And affix this outside your door.”

  I stare at the ticket.

  Yellow?

  The Sisters and Dr. Turner think we do not know what the tickets mean, but of course we do. Of course. Yellow means extra doses of cod liver oil. Yellow means only feeling the sunlight from a window.

  Yellow means red is one step away.

  “You’re wrong,” I say, and my voice is hard. “I’m getting better. I’m not like the really ill children. I only cough sometimes. I’d like the blue ticket, please.”

  He does not give me the blue. He does not say anything. His eyebrows go extra woolly, and he turns away to write notes in his book.

  My voice rises unsteadily. “Can I at least have a chocolate?”

  His pencil stops, and he takes a deep breath, and then keeps writing. He sighs deeply. “There are no more chocolates.”

  I shove the ticket into my pocket, beneath an apple I brought to give Foxfire later. While Dr. Turner writes, I watch the winged horses in the mirror-room, but I am too stunned to laugh when they bump the edges of the butler’s pantry, sniffing around the mirror-medicine bottles, nosing through Dr. Turner’s mirror-medical bag. One accidentally knocks over a box of tongue depressors and it clatters to the floor, and the horses jerk up in surprise and race each other for the doorway.

  I turn away from them. On our side of the mirror, the real box of tongue depressors still sits on the sideboard.

  Then I see it: the label on Dr. Turner’s big bottle of aspirin. It is yellow—863-CANARY YELLOW—the exact match to Anna’s colored pencil in my pocket. The label is old and peeling at the edges, but what matters is the bright, bright color, so bright it will hurt the Black Horse’s eyes.

  Dr. Turner mumbles to himself and turns to the cabinet to write something on his pad of paper.

  I glance at the bottle. I could take it. Now, while his back is turned.

  In the mirror, one of the winged horses has stuck its head through the door once more, watching me.

  Now.

  I grab the bottle and try to peel off the yellow label, but it sticks. I’ll have to take the whole bottle. There are only two pills left in it. Two pills cannot save Anna’s life. Two pills cannot stop Kitty’s cough. But that yellow label might help Foxfire. My heart pounds, pounds, and something stirs in the stillwaters. I stash the bottle in my pocket just as Dr. Turner turns around, and the stillwaters flood my lungs, and my whole body shakes.

  He reaches for a fresh handkerchief. “You must remember to cover your mouth when you cough. It’s very important.”

  How can I remember to do anything at all, with a yellow ticket burning a hole in my pocket? I slide off the examination table. It isn’t until I open the back door to the terrace and breathe fresh air that my lungs start to calm.

  The sound of clanking pots comes from the opened kitchen window. I don’t have much time before Sister Mary Grace will come find me to peel potatoes. She’ll take one look at the yellow ticket and tell me I can’t go outside anymore, not even to the terrace.

  I dart to the garden wall, and climb it.

  When the snows first fell, and the world was pristine and white, Foxfire blended into it as if she were made of snow herself. But the snow is not pristine anymore. It’s muddy with earth. Dirty snow coats Foxfire’s legs and underbelly. When she tosses her head, her mane falls in thick clumps that are in need of a good combing. Winter-dead sticks tangle in her tail.

  But my heart still soars when I see her.

  “You are a mess,” I say. Then I realize my own hair is just as tangled, my own boots caked in mud. “Well, we are a mess.”

  Foxfire tosses her head as though she agrees. She comes right up and noses at my pocket until I take out the apple. She chomps at it before I can even lay my palm flat.

  Hesitantly, not sure if I’ve earned her full trust yet, I reach up to her mane. “Easy there. I’m just going to untangle these sticks.”

  She stops mid-bite, eyes swiveling toward my hand, but she doesn’t buck or rear. I am close. So close. And then my hand is on her neck. Oh, she feels alive. Her white hair is caked in cold clumps of mud, but there is warmth underneath. I can almost feel her heart fluttering. Can she feel mine, too?

  “That’s lovely. See? That’s nice.”

  Slowly, I stroke her neck from ear to shoulder, ear to shoulder, and bits of crumbly mud and dust rain down to the ground and make me cough. She seems to calm with each stroke. I free all the twigs I can, but the dirt goes deep. I will have to ask Thomas if he has a comb.

  I leave her and take the pill bottle out and search through the wall of ivy near the red ribbon until I find a vine just the right size, and tuck the bottle into it. The bottle’s yellow label looks even more yellow, like the first sunshine crocuses that peek out after a long winter. My mother used to scold Marjorie when she would pick those flowers, but Marjorie did anyway. She would press them between the pages of Mama’s fattest recipe book until they were thin as tissue, and then frame them above her bed, so that it would always be spring.

  In my pocket, Dr. Turner’s yellow ticket rustles. Foxfire watches as I take it out and quietly tear it into pieces, and then bury them under the snow.

  A cloud passes overhead, casting the garden into shadows, and we look up. We are thinking the same thing: You never know where the Black Horse might be lurking. Behind the twisting winter-dead branches of the old oaks in front of the hospital; behind the low-sitting clouds; just waiting for a sliver of moonlight, when he can resume his hunt.

  “Do you think the Black Horse can see that bottle from way up high?”

  Foxfire moves her head in a way that could be a nod, or a shake, or a shrug, then goes to stand in the corner of the garden that gets the most sun. The light cuts her body in two. Half in light, half in sh
adow.

  She snorts.

  I look back up at the sky. The clouds have moved, and the sun shines right onto the bottle. It makes the glass glow and the label gleam. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, in the full moon, I think that will burn the eyes right out of his head.”

  KNOCK, KNOCK.

  “Come in,” Thomas calls from the other side of the barn door. I peek inside. He is mucking out the pen into a wheelbarrow. Bog is curled on the barn’s dirt floor next to the stack of pine boxes. His face breaks in one of those smiling-dog pants.

  I step all the way inside and let my eyes wander over the barn. The barn is Thomas’s domain. A place of men, and animals, and tools with sharp points. But it smells nice in here, like the hay in my straw mattress, and like sweet oats. A gas mask hangs on the back of the workbench, half forgotten. I fiddle with the rubber strap.

  “I was looking for a comb for Foxfire.”

  He pauses, wiping his bare hand over his forehead. Do the Americans knit special mittens for one-handed boys, I wonder?

  “Do you know how to groom a horse?” he asks, curious.

  I try not to look too long at his empty sleeve fastened with a diaper pin. I bend down to scratch Bog’s head. He rolls over and sticks one leg in the air so I can rub his belly with the tip of my boot. The action makes his whole body move up and down, up and down.

  “Because I could show you, if you don’t,” Thomas continues. “Picking out the hooves can be tricky.” He digs through his bin of old brushes and combs until he finds a hoof pick, and hands it to me.

  “And then there’s combing out the mane.” He holds up a wide comb with thin metal bristles. “You have to start at the ends and work your way up.” He gestures in the air with the comb. “Same with the tail. As far as the wings, leave them alone, I think, if she’s wounded. Best to let these things heal in their own time….”

  He trails off as footsteps approach outside.

  Knock, knock.

  Quick and almost apologetic. Thomas and I exchange a look. He sets aside the comb and opens the door. Sister Mary Grace is there. She jumps a little when he pushes the door wide.

  “Sister?”

  “Thomas. Men are here to see you.” She pauses. “Officers.”

  She pulls on the sleeves of her black nun’s habit as though even with yards and yards of fabric, it is still not enough material to hide behind. Her eyes shift to me and Bog. “Emmaline? What are you…” She sighs. “Go on back inside. Quick feet.”

  Thomas whistles for Bog, who is on all fours in a flash, pressed to his heels.

  I trudge back with them to the house. Sister Mary Grace rests a hand on my shoulder, rubbing the short tufts of my hair. Sister Constance’s pinched face peers through the glass windowpanes in the door, and then the door swings open for us. There are two men with her. They are young, with crisp uniforms and black hair beneath their caps.

  Sister Constance gives me a stern look. “You know you aren’t to go out now that you have a yellow ticket, Emmaline. Especially not as far as the barn.”

  “I’m sorry, Sister. I won’t sneak around anymore, I promise.”

  “Indeed.” Her voice is hard.

  She closes the door in Bog’s face before he can come in. He presses his dog-nose to the glass panes in the door, fogging it. Thomas starts to say something, but then stops. The soldiers seem young and affable, like they could be friends of his, but they do not smile.

  “Mr. Thomas Whatley?”

  “That’s me, yes.”

  I watch over my shoulder as I drift down the hall, moving as slowly as I can. When I reach the library, it is filled with whispers. How odd. I go inside, where Benny and Jack and ten other children who are supposed to be preparing for class are pressed against the wall.

  “What are you—”

  “Quiet, flea!” Jack says in a scowling whisper. “We can hear, if you shut your mouth.”

  I scowl back at him. His Lionel steam engine toy train with the real working whistle sits beside him; I’m tempted to kick it. Send the hunk of shiny green metal across the floor—

  My breath catches.

  Green.

  The train’s paint glimmers in the light: 865-EMERALD GREEN. It would serve him right, Benny’s little stoolie, if the train disappeared….

  Muffled soldiers’ voices come from down the hallway. Beth, one of the three little mice, scoots over and taps the floor next to her. Tearing my eyes away from Jack’s train, I press into the warm bodies of feverish children, my ear to the thin wall. I can only make out every few words in the soldiers’ soft voices. Something about a battle somewhere near Egypt. A shell and a hospital. Then Thomas lets out a single sharp moan.

  “What’s happened?” Susan, the littlest mouse, who has just come in, whispers. “Is it about the war?”

  “Of course it’s about the war,” Benny snaps. “It’s always about the war, if it’s soldiers. They’re talking about Thomas’s father. He was off fighting Rommel’s men in the western desert campaign. I think he’s been killed.” Benny tiptoes to the library door and peeks around in the hall. After a moment he comes back, and he makes a big gesture of taking off his cap, just as the soldier did. “They handed Thomas a package. I think it was his father’s last belongings from the hospital, paperwork and things. They said something about medals of honor, too, and gave him a little box stamped with the king’s own crest. Said his father was one of England’s finest heroes.”

  “Poor Thomas,” Susan says.

  Benny holds his chin high. “Such things happen. We must carry on.”

  Peter coughs.

  Sister Mary Grace sticks her head in the library and hisses that they can hear us whispering down the hall. We all scramble to our feet and rush out of the library, and there’s the sound of feet running upstairs and then doors slamming up and down the residence hall.

  I pause and look back toward the library once more; Jack’s train is gone. He must have taken it with him.

  “What’s happened?” Anna is calling from her bedroom upstairs. “Hello? Won’t someone tell me?”

  But no one answers her.

  By the front door, the soldiers are still talking quietly to Thomas, who is clutching a package filled with papers and things in his long arm. Sister Mary Grace has one of her hands over her mouth. Thomas has his back to me. His shoulders sag. I cannot see his face.

  Slowly, I climb the stairs all the way to my attic room. I feel hot tears on my cheeks. Thomas is not a monster, I am certain of it. And he is hurting.

  I push open the frosted window. If I lean out, I can see the corner of the walled gardens.

  I know that the red ribbon and the yellow bottle are there, tucked safely into the ivy. Soon, I hope, I can add a snotty boy’s emerald green Lionel steam engine with a working whistle to the spectral shield.

  I peer upward, just in case. The skies are clear. No Black Horse circling, though I know he is near. Waiting. Smelling. Hunting.

  Down below, on the front steps, Bog sits in the cold, face against the glass, waiting for Thomas.

  THE OLD PRINCESS LIKED to collect things. I know this because my room is in the attic. And except for that one time Jack and Benny sneaked up for a smoke, I am the only child who ever comes here. The stairs are narrow and steep. There are no lights, except for candles and lanterns, and a single window at each end. The storerooms are dusty and filled with crates covered in spiderwebs and stamped with words in foreign languages. Most of the crates are empty. When the princess left, she took almost everything valuable from downstairs, except the china plates and things we might need in the hospital. But I think, in her old age, she forgot about the boxes up here. I think everyone forgot.

  It is lights-out, and I promised Sister Constance I wouldn’t sneak around, but in the attic I can move unseen and unheard. I light a candle and put it on a plate, which I set down next to the biggest box, an old trunk with rotting leather straps and sea-salt stains in the corners.

  Outside, beyond the window, t
he moon is already a sliver, and it will grow more each night. I think of the box of Anna’s pencils. So many colors to find, and so far I have only two.

  The trunk’s lid is heavier than I expected, and I strain to lift it off and lower it so it doesn’t crash loudly. It is packed with straw that is so old it has turned to dust. It catches in my throat and I stifle a cough as I dig around and find a package wrapped in newsprint. I unwrap it to find a small carving of a frog. It’s lovely, but made of gray stone, and the last thing I need is anything else gray, so I place it back in the crate. I unwrap another object: a golden box with a beetle on top and little pictures and symbols drawn on the sides. I’m not sure if gold counts as a proper color, since it isn’t on the pencil manufacturer’s list of rainbow colors. I don’t like the beetle anyway, so back into the trunk it goes. Then I pull out a velvet bag filled with clinking trinkets, and roll them onto my palm. Loose stone beads and some small carvings to go on a necklace: a woman with wings and a creature with a man’s body but a dog’s head. And then. A long string of blue-green beads that sparkle in the lantern light, and for the briefest moment, I do feel like a real explorer.

  867-SEA TURQUOISE.

  The color matches Anna’s turquoise colored pencil exactly! I carefully place the turquoise beads in my pocket and stand, dusting off my nightgown. Beside the heavy trunk are smaller boxes from a millinery. Some are round, some are long and flat, with LOCK & CO. and EDE & RAVENSCROFT stamped on the side. In the first one, I find an old-fashioned black hat with a short veil. The second and third are empty except for miles and miles of tissue paper. When I open the last one, my eyes light up. It is filled with soft satin fabric. 848-BLUSH PINK! I grin in delight at my good fortune and tear through the crumpled tissue paper to snatch it up. Only—it is not just fabric. It is a garment, and there is lace on the edges, and as I hold it up to the light, my eyes go wide.

  It is a nightgown.

  Not like my nightgown. Like one of those nightgowns. A woman’s nightgown.