Read The Wild Boy and Queen Moon Online
Authors: K M Peyton
The Wild Boy and Queen Moon
Contents
About the Book
Kathleen M Peyton is a top-selling author of more than thirty novels, the best-known of which is FLAMBARDS which, with its sequels, was made into a TV serial. The winner of both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Award for her work, this is her seventh title for the Transworld children’s lists.
T
HE
W
ILD
B
OY
AND
Q
UEEN
M
OON
K.M.PEYTON
To Anna, Pip and Buster
SANDY MADE THE
fateful remark on the school bus when they were going home. It fell into one of those spasmodic silences that sometimes happen in a crowd, so that everyone heard.
‘Any fool can win a hundred rosettes in a season when they’ve got a pony that cost twenty thousand pounds.’
The fool she was talking about, Julia Marsden, was sitting in the front seat and did not turn round. She felt as if a knife had sunk itself between her shoulder-blades.
Sandy went scarlet and hid her head in her voluminous duffle bag, scrambling for a book. Her friend Leo, beside her, whispered, ‘That’s a bit miaouwy for you,’ and Sandy’s brother Ian, sitting next to Julia, said to Julia kindly, ‘Don’t take any notice. It’s sour grapes. Her pony’s never won a rosette in its life.’
Then the hubbub started up again and everyone forgot the moment’s awkwardness. Save Julia. And Sandy.
* * *
Last off the bus, far out in the country, Ian and Sandy got off at their lane end and dawdled home. The fields on either side were striped gold with stubble, basking in the early-evening, harvest-rich sun which was low over the ridge behind them. A small white sail drifted on the river below, beyond the marsh fields where the heifers were grazing. It was awful going back to school when the weather was still so good.
Sandy was an outdoor girl. She was gold and brown like the fields, her hair sun-bleached like the outside of a haybale; she was tough and stocky like a boy. When her hair was short she was taken for a boy. Yet her brother Ian, three years older, was willowy like a girl, wiry and hard and clever and not given to the outdoors. He scowled a lot, tied to a farm ten miles from his urban friends and interests.
‘You shouldn’t have said that,’ he said. ‘She can’t help it.’
‘I didn’t mean anyone to hear, only Leo! It was awful. I could’ve died!’
‘It’s not her fault.’
‘I know that! Honestly. I feel really mean.’
‘She’s got terrible parents.’
‘Don’t go
on
!’
Sandy’s evening was blighted. She didn’t like Julia, but she was sorry for her. Julia’s parents were very ambitious and had bought her a top
JA
pony which nearly always won, but also bit and kicked, bucked and bolted. Julia had a very hard life. She had a bad temper like her pony and was fast losing her nerve. Sandy knew that Julia did not deserve any more unkindnesses than she had to bear already.
Guilt lay heavily.
She sighed as they came down the slope to the dishevelled cottage where Flirtie Gertie lived.
‘I’ll call,’ she said. ‘Be nice to her.’
It might assuage the guilt. Usually they slipped past quietly, hoping the old woman wouldn’t see them and waylay them with her batty remarks. Flirty Gertie was eighty-one, the widow of their grandfather’s cowman, still living in the tied cottage, and their mother sent her up meals and kept a neighbourly eye on her. Their mother expected them to chat her up when they passed by – ‘Sometimes she sees nobody all day!’ – but they hated it. The old lady was no sweetie, but acerbic and smelly. She still hopped about like a mangy sparrow, sweeping and dusting and digging her potato bed, but her conversation wasn’t very interesting.
‘Tell your da the water’s coming through the dormer window at the back – I’ve got to keep a bucket under it. And will you get me some elastic from the shop when you’re up there next? Me knickers keep falling down. I’ve no fat left on me backside any longer, that’s the real trouble.’
Ian had gone on, grinning, and Sandy stayed just long enough to feel good about it. The old girl wasn’t bad; sometimes she laughed, but mostly it was complaints. She had a face as brown and wrinkled as a walnut, and black beady eyes which missed very little. Her wrists and ankles were thin as sticks and she wore old-fashioned brown stockings which wrinkled over her shoes, and a cross-over pinafore with tapes behind. She had wispy hair through which her skull showed through, none too cleanly.
‘She’s awful,’ they complained to their mother.
‘Yes, it’s called old age,’ their mother said cheerfully. ‘We’re all moving towards it, even you.’
Grandpa called her Flirty Gertie because when she was young she ‘was a great one for the lads. She were a real pretty little thing.’ Sandy couldn’t think that far back. It was beyond her powers to see Gertie as a pretty little thing. The most awful thing she could think of was being really old. Yet neither Gertie nor Grandpa seemed to actually realize they
were
old. They still kept doing things old people shouldn’t and falling over and being surprised. Grandpa had fallen off the cowshed roof quite recently, where he had been replacing slipped tiles. He was eighty-five.
Drakesend, where they lived, had been farmed by Grandpa and his father before him. It was halfway up what passed for a hill in these lowland parts, between the tidal river below and the
wooded
brow of the old parkland above. The house looked very picturesque, with its oak timbering infilled with bricks in patterns and its sagging roof of old brown tiles, but it was uncomfortable to live in, having no central heating and lots of cold, stone-flagged passages. Sandy always thought it ought to have ghosts, but no apparitions, friendly or otherwise, had ever disturbed her sleep. She assumed she wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up their vibrations. In the bottom corner of the window in her bedroom, engraved on the glass, was a spidery signature: Hannah Rosewall, and the date, 1776. Sandy thought of Hannah Rosewall when she lay in bed during the light summer evenings and wondered what her life was like at Drakesend in 1776. But absolutely no visions came to haunt her.
Below the house were the old brick yards that dated back a century or two, but Bill Fielding, Sandy’s father, had built a modern block of barns alongside the old ones, and a new milking parlour for the cows. The best of the old yards he had fitted out as stables and set up as a do-it-yourself livery yard, his gesture towards ‘alternative farming’. He more or less left the running of it to Sandy – ‘You’re the horsy one round here’ – but as some of the customers were twice or three times her age and thought they knew everything, they didn’t take kindly to being told what they should do by a young girl. The best thing about
it
was that her schoolfriend, Leo, kept her pony in the yard and came down every evening on her bike.
At least they could do what they liked with their own spare time and their own ponies.
Unlike Julia, whose mother met her off the school bus in her second-best Rover and rushed her home to change into her jods and get some schooling in. Without even having any tea.
Minnie, short for Big Gun from Minnesota, which was the pony’s registered name, was tied up in his loosebox, already saddled and bridled. A brown gelding of just under fourteen two hands, he was mostly thoroughbred and extremely good-looking. His winter coat, just coming through, was dense as mole fur and shone with good health and over-feeding; his neat oiled hooves jigged impatiently over the floor, eager to go. As usual, Julia’s heart sank at the sight of him, instead of lifting with eager anticipation.
‘Take him for a good long hack,’ her mother ordered. ‘We won’t jump him tonight, so he won’t get too wound up for tomorrow.’ Tomorrow night he had to compete under floodlights in an indoor arena some twenty miles away. They would not get home before eleven, and Julia would fall asleep in the horsebox. Just hacking was, in effect, a rest-cure.
Sandy’s remark in the bus had upset Julia.
Everyone at school thought she was stuck-up and a show-off, but it was only how her parents made her seem, not how she herself wanted to be. Her brother Nick and sister Petra were very competitive and sharp but both had left school now and Julia was too young to join in with their activities, nor did she want to. She had few friends, not even Minnie who bit her as soon as looked at her. Sandy’s pony, George, although useless, looked for Sandy over the gate with his ears pricked and his upper lip quivering with devotion. Julia had seen him, and envied.
Sometimes she thought she would like it if she had a pony like George. She only wanted to go down through the lanes and the water-meadows to the sea-wall and ride along by the river, watching the geese and the odd yacht. Dreaming. Wishing she didn’t have to win. Wishing she wasn’t the odd man out in her family. Wishing she had time to go out with other girls, or just mess about with someone else, doing nothing in particular, like Sandy and Leo. But even when she just hacked out she couldn’t wander along and dream, because Minnie was forever fighting for his head, snatching at his bit and pulling her arms out of their sockets. When he felt grass underfoot he went, whether she willed it or not. Julia was a good rider but her bravery grew thin sometimes. It was no fun fighting all the way, and being carted.
She went out along the road and down the lane past Flirtie Gertie’s cottage towards the river. She was fairly sure she wouldn’t meet Sandy, for Drakesend lay on its own lane which forked off left just past Gertie’s, and the track she chose went straight down. Minnie walked like a cat on hot bricks, tucking his nose in and switching his tail irritably. The ground was hard after the long hot summer and Julia knew she mustn’t gallop if she could help it: it would be bad for the pony’s expensive legs. Not on this hard-baked track, at least. She let out her rein cautiously, wanting to relax the pony, but he only snatched the more, poking out his nose and walking faster and faster.
‘Oh, I hate you!’ she snapped.
She was hungry and tired, and just wanted to enjoy the lovely evening. Self-pity swamped her. She had no friends, no kind, understanding mother, no super brother – like Sandy. Her mother was hard as iron, an ex-showjumper who now used her children to pursue the sport instead of doing it herself. Nick and Petra seemed to enjoy it and Julia had when she was younger, but now she had to ride Minnie she hated it. Minnie was brilliant, and when they didn’t win it was always her fault, not Minnie’s – her fault for not making the turn tighter, her fault for not taking a steadying pull, her fault for asking for an extra stride. Her mother expected her to win. Her mother was
a
bad loser. Her mother hadn’t bought her Big Gun from Minnesota to come second.