The Pretty Horse-Breakers

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“But why did you have to run away?” Candida asked.

“So many questions!” her mother exclaimed. “But, as I have said, you have a right to know. Life might have been very different for you had you been the child of the marriage that my parents desired for me.

“But I would not have been the same if my Papa had not been Papa, would I?” Candida enquired.

Her mother had suddenly put her arms round her and drawn her close.

“No, darling,” she said, “and that, of course, is exactly the right thing to say. You would not have been the same and I would not have had these wonderful, golden, marvellous years with a man I love and who loves me with all his heart.”

“But why did you have to elope?” Candida asked, determined that she should hear the end of the tale.

“My father – your grandfather – was enraged,” her mother replied. “He was a very overbearing autocratic man who was not used to having his wishes crossed. He had chosen, as he thought, a suitable son-in-law and he was not going to be circumvented by a penniless and unimportant poet. My father abhorred poetry! He manhandled your father from the house!”

“Oh, poor Papa! Did he mind?”

“He minded terribly,” Candida’s mother replied. “It was done in a most humiliating and brutal manner. Your grandfather also threatened to horsewhip him if he ever spoke to me again.”

“How cruel!” Candida cried.

“It was indeed and it was something your father was the least fitted of anyone I have ever known to bear. He was too sensitive, too decent in himself not to be wounded by such a sadistic assault.”

“And so you could not see him,” Candida suggested.

“I saw him,” her mother replied and now there was a note of triumph in her voice. “I went to him. I crept out at night and went to his lodgings. It was an outrageous thing to do, but your father had been treated outrageously. We knew then there was only one thing we could do and that was to go away together.”

“How brave, how very brave of you!” Candida exclaimed.

“I was frightened that your grandfather would prevent us actually getting married, but I need not have been troubled. The moment I crossed his wishes I was dead as far as he was concerned.”

“How do you know?” Candida asked. “Did you go back and speak to him?”

“No, I could not do that,” her mother replied, “but a year later, when you were born, I wrote to my mother. Of course I did not tell your Papa I had done so, but I knew she loved me and I knew that, even if my father was unforgiving, I was still her daughter and close to her heart.”

“Did she reply?”

Her mother shook her head.

“No, dearest. Your grandfather must have found the letter before it reached her and, recognising my handwriting, returned it unopened.”

“How cruel of him.”

“It was what I might have expected. I knew then there was no going back – the past must be forgotten, wiped out of my mind, even as your father had asked me to do.”

“Do you ever regret having run away with Papa?” Candida asked in a low voice.

Once again her mother swept her into her arms.

“No, darling, never, never, never!” she replied. “I am so happy and your Papa is so wonderful to me. No woman could have a more unselfish, considerate, adoring husband. It is only that we are so poor and I mind for your sake. I would like you to have the social life, the balls, silk gowns that I enjoyed. But there is no use wishing for the moon and I only pray, my darling, that you will be as content as I have been.”

“I am happy and you know that I love you and Papa.”

“Then, if you truly love your Papa, you must never speak of this again,” her mother admonished her. “It distresses him so deeply to remember how badly he was treated. He is also always afraid that I will compare my present circumstances with the life that I lived when he first met me. It is stupid of him – no money in the world could buy what I have now.”

She smiled.

“But any reference to the past makes him long so desperately to give me all the things I had then.”

“I understand, Mama,” Candida assured her, “but you have not told me what was your name before you married.”

To her surprise her mother’s lips tightened and for the first time there was a hard note in her voice.

“My name is Emmeline Walcott, I have no other name. There is nothing else for you to know, Candida.”

It was only when she was alone, thinking over this strange and exciting story that her mother had told her, that Candida had wondered, not once but many times, who her mother had been. It was obvious that her grandfather had been rich and he must too have been a man of importance.

It was tantalising that her mother would tell her no more, but there had been a firmness about Mrs. Walcott’s refusal that had warned Candida against further indulging her curiosity, nonetheless she could not help wondering.

Sometimes she told herself stories that her grandfather was a Prince or a Duke and that he suddenly decided to forgive her mother and came to see them bearing luxuries that they had never been able to afford.

This story alternated with one in which her father suddenly achieved fame. His poems sold not in the few hundreds that were achieved year after year, but in thousands, so that overnight he became famous like Lord Byron, admired and acclaimed and once again her mother could have beautiful clothes and jewels.

Candida wanted nothing for herself. As long as she had Pegasus, which her father had given her when he was only a foal, she was happy.

The foal had been a birthday present, bought from a travelling horse-coper. He had grown from an adorable, rather gawky long-legged animal into a coal-black stallion of unbelievable beauty and elegance. Candida knew whenever she rode him that she was admired and envied by everyone who came their way.

Yet now Pegasus had to go.

There was nothing else left to sell. When her father had taken that five-barred gate in the rain on his way home from The King’s Head, he had broken his neck and Juno, with two broken legs, had to be destroyed.

It was then that Candida found that the house was mortgaged. Furniture had to be sold to pay the creditors, fetching a pitiful sum. Many of the pieces that her mother had cherished and loved had been bought by the villagers more out of kindness than because they attached any value to the well-polished wood or the carvings on which the gilt had been chipped away by age.

Some of the items had belonged once to her father’s parents, who had died when he was still very young and Candida had always believed them valuable. But caring for one’s possessions was a very different thing, she discovered, from obtaining money for them.

When everything was disposed of and the debts paid off, there was nothing left save a few personal belongings of her mother’s and Pegasus.

At first she fought in a wild panic against the thought of disposing of him, but she realised that she had to make some provision for old Ned. He had been with her father and mother since they were first married – groom, handyman, nursemaid and cook.

He was too old at nearly seventy to find another job. He must have some source of income in his retirement and the only way she could provide that for him was by selling Pegasus.

It was Ned who had told her there was to be a horse fair at Potters Bar. In her misery at her father’s death she had no time to think of anything but coping with the mortgage, settling the tradesmen’s accounts and deciding which of the few clothes and books her mother had left behind she would keep for herself.

“A horse fair at Potters Bar?” she had repeated almost stupidly.

“Ay, Miss Candida. ’Tis the annual one and the dealers and some of the gentry from London comes to it. You often get a better price there, they say, than anywhere else in the country.”

She felt as though Ned’s words stabbed at her heart, so that she almost cried out with pain. Then she knew, looking into his kind old eyes, that he was thinking of her, that she must have money on which to live or at least to keep herself until she could find employment of some sort.

“I suppose I could be a Governess,” Candida murmured beneath her breath, wondering at the same time how she could secure a position without a reference.

But whatever she decided to do, she had first to sell Pegasus. It was not possible for her to travel round the country with her horse and besides she must ensure that Ned did not starve. It was, she thought, almost a sacred trust imposed upon her by her mother.

“He is such a dear little man,” she had often said. “What would we do without him, Candida? He can turn his hand to anything.”

It was indeed Ned who had made certain that there were always fires in the house, lit from the wood he managed to collect without cost from adjacent estates. It was Ned who brought in a snared rabbit when there was nothing else in the house to eat.

“You have not poached it?” Mrs. Walcott would ask sometimes in horror, knowing the heavy penalties for anyone who poached game.

“I ’ave done no trespassin’, if that’s what you mean, ma’am,” Ned would reply. “If the poor creature strayed onto our land, that be his own foolishness!”

There had been an occasional pheasant that ‘strayed’, and more than once rook pie had helped them over a particularly lean period. Always it was Ned who provided what was necessary. He could not now be allowed to go to the workhouse because he was too old to find other employment.

‘I am young,’ Candida told herself, ‘I will manage somehow.’

When she reached Potters Bar and saw the horses travelling towards the fair, when she heard the bustle and noise of the fair itself, she felt as if she was taking the horse she loved to the slaughterhouse.

A number of hay carts had been drawn up to make a rough circle in which some horses were being paraded, while others were being walked round on the outside. Some were rough animals led by a dark-eyed gypsy or a vacant-looking farm yokel with a straw in his mouth.

Others, with their coats brushed until they shone, their manes and tails combed and trimmed, were ridden by grooms in the livery of a local Squire or mounted by a tradesman’s son dressed in polished boots and smart pantaloons.

There was a babel of innumerable voices punctuated by loud guffaws from those who had already visited the local inn and the shrieks of children rushing about, stimulated by the excitement of their elders and getting under the horses’ hooves and in everybody else’s way.

For a moment Candida felt at a loss.

The only thing she really wanted was to turn round and ride for home and then she remembered that home was no longer hers – already it had passed into alien hands and tomorrow she must remove herself and her few meagre belongings. It was with a sense of relief when she saw Ned waiting for her by the entrance to the ground.

“Ah, there you be, Miss Candida,” he said, coming up to take Pegasus’ bridle. “I’m wonderin’ what could ’ave ’appened to you.”

“I could not hurry, Ned,” Candida answered honestly.

“I knows that, miss,” he answered. “’Ere, you jump down. I’ve seen a gentleman who might be interested, he’s bought two or three of the top-notchers already.”

“Yes, you take Pegasus,” Candida said as she slipped to the ground.

She put out her hand to touch the horse and instantly he turned his nose to nuzzle it against her neck with a gesture she knew so well. At his touch she felt that she could bear it no longer.

“Take him away, Ned,” she said and her voice broke on the words. “I cannot bear to watch him go.”

She walked into the crowd, her eyes blinded with tears. She did not want to see or hear what happened, she only knew that everything she really loved had gone from her. First her mother, then her father and now Pegasus. They had been her whole world – now there was nothing left, nothing, except emptiness and a sense of despair that made her only want to die and put an end to her suffering.