Last Ditch

‘If we do, it doesn’t mean to say we approve,’ Julia said sternly. ‘Shall we?’ she asked Ricky and Carlotta. ‘I’d rather like to.’

They rode their bored horses into the paddock and down the hill. A long shadow from the blackthorn hedge reached towards them and the air struck cold as they entered it.

Ricky felt his horse’s barrel expand between his knees. It lifted its head, neighed and reared on its hind legs.

‘Here!’ he exclaimed. ‘What’s all this!’ It dropped back on its forefeet and danced. From far beyond the hedge, on the distant hillside, there came an answering scream.

Julia crammed her own now agitated mount up to the gap in the hedge where Bruno had jumped. Ricky watched her bring the horse round and heard it snort. It stood and trembled. Julia leant forward in the saddle and patted its neck. She looked over the gap and down. Ricky saw her gloved hand clench. For a moment she was perfectly still. Then she turned towards him and he thought he had never seen absolute pallor in a face until now.

Behind him Carlotta said: ‘What’s possessing the animals?’ and then: ‘Julia, what is it?’

‘Ricky,’ Julia said in somebody else’s voice, ‘let Bruno take your horse and come here. Bruno, take Carlotta and the horses back to the yard and stay there. Do what I tell you, Carlotta. Do it at once. And find Jasper. Send him down here.’

They did what she told them. Ricky walked down the slope to Julia, who dismounted.

‘You’d better look,’ she said. ‘Down there. Down.’

Ricky looked through the gap. Water glinted below in the shadows. Trampled mud stank and glistened. Deep scars and slides ploughed the bank. Everything was dead still down there. Particularly the interloper, who lay smashed and discarded, face upwards, in the puddled ditch, her limbs all higgledy-piggledy at impossible angles, her mouth awash with muddy water, and her foolish eyes wide open and staring at nothing at all. On the hillside the sorrel mare, saddled, bridled and dead lame, limped here and there, snatching inconsequently at the short grass. Sometimes she threw up her head and whinnied. She was answered from the hilltop by Mungo, the wall-eyed bay.

IV

‘I told her,’ Mr Harkness sobbed. ‘I told her over and over again not to. I reasoned with her. I even chastised her for her soul’s sake, but she would! She was consumed with pride and she would do it and the Lord has smitten her down in the midst of her sin.’ He knuckled his eyes like a child, gazed balefully about him and suddenly roared out: ‘Where’s Jones?’

‘Not here, it seems,’ Julia ventured.

‘I’ll have the hide off him. He’s responsible. He’s as good as murdered her.’

‘Jones!’ Carlotta exclaimed. ‘Murdered!’

‘Orders! He was ordered to take her to the smith. To be re-shod on the off-fore. If he’d done that she wouldn’t have been here. I ordered him on purpose to get her out of the way.’

Julia and Carlotta made helpless noises. Bruno kicked at a loose-box door. Ricky felt sick. Inside the house Jasper could be heard talking on the telephone.

‘What’s he doing?’ Mr Harkness demanded hopelessly. ‘Who’s he talking to? What’s he saying!’?

‘He’s getting a doctor,’ Julia said, ‘and an ambulance.’

‘And the vet?’ Mr Harkness demanded. ‘Is he getting the vet? Is he getting Bob Blacker, the vet? She may have broken her leg, you know. She may have to be destroyed. Have you thought of that? And there she lies looking so awful. Somebody ought to close the eyes. I can’t, but somebody ought to.’

Ricky, to his great horror, felt hysteria rise in his throat. Mr Harkness rambled on, his voice clotted with tears. It was almost impossible to determine when he spoke of his niece and when of his sorrel mare. ‘And what about the hacks?’ he asked. ‘They ought to be unsaddled and rubbed down and fed. She ought to be seeing to them. She sinned. She sinned in the sight of the Lord! It may have led to hell-fire. More than probable. What about the hacks?’

‘Bruno,’ Julia said. ‘Could you?’

Bruno, with evident relief, went into the nearest loose-box. Characteristic sounds – snorts, occasional stamping, the clump of a saddle dumped across the half-door and the bang of an iron against wood – lent an air of normality to the stable yard.

Mr Harkness dived into the next-door box so suddenly that he raised a clatter of hooves.

He could be heard soothing the grey hack: ‘Steady girl. Stand over,’ and interrupting himself with an occasional sob.

‘This is too awful,’ Julia breathed. ‘What can one do?’

Carlotta said: ‘Nothing.’

Ricky said: ‘Shall I see if I can get him a drink?’

‘Brandy? Or something?’

‘He may have given it up because of hell-fire,’ Julia suggested. ‘It might send him completely bonkers.’

‘I can but try.’

He went into the house by the back-door, and following the sound of Jasper’s voice, found him at the telephone in an office where Mr Harkness evidently did his bookkeeping.

Jasper said: ‘Yes. Thank you. As quick as you can, won’t you?’ and hung up the receiver. ‘What now?’ he asked. ‘How is he?’

‘As near as damn it off his head. But he’s doing stables at the moment. The girls thought, perhaps a drink.’

‘I doubt if we’ll find any.’

‘Should we look?’

‘I don’t know. Should we? Might it send him utterly cuckoo?’

‘That’s what we wondered,’ said Ricky.

Jasper looked round the room and spotted a little corner cupboard. After a moment’s hesitation he opened the door and was confronted with a skull-and-crossbones badly drawn in red ink and supported by a legend:

BEWARE!

This Way Lies Damnation!!!

The card on which this information was inscribed had been hung round the neck of a whisky bottle.

‘In the face of that,’ Ricky said, ‘what should we do?’

‘I’ve no idea. But I know what I’m going to do,’ said Jasper warmly. He unscrewed the cap and took a fairly generous pull at the bottle. ‘I needed that,’ he gasped and offered it to Ricky.

‘No, thanks,’ Ricky said. ‘I feel sick already.’

‘It takes all sorts,’ Jasper observed, wiping his mouth and returning the bottle to the cupboard. ‘The doctor’s coming,’ he said. ‘And so’s the vet.’ He indicated a list of numbers above the telephone. ‘And the ambulance.’

‘Good,’ said Ricky.

‘They all said: “Don’t move her.”’

‘Good.’

‘The vet meant the mare.’