“That’s what I bargained with-not running.”
“And she believed that?”
“Why not? It’s true.” At least it had been for nearly twenty months.
It had taken her weeks to make the stables habitable. How had the mares stood it? Horses were fastidious creatures, like cats. They had stood it because they had had no choice. The smell was almost overpowering, or would have been to anyone who had never mucked out a stable. This was much worse. And mucking out was done on a daily basis, often twice a day, even more. It was done for the comfort and health of the horses, not to make the environment more pleasant for the humans; it was done as part of their care. The floor was cement rather than earth, not a good standing for a horse, but easier to clean, and still they often stood in their own feces.
On that morning she had first found them, Nell walked up the line of narrow stalls. There was barely room for a person to squeeze in next to the horse, to shove in between the horse and the insubstantial wooden partitions on both sides, shoulder high to the horse. There were two rows, fifteen horses in a row in these constricting stalls, thirty altogether and thirty in the barn beside this one. A rope was attached to the rear leg of each mare and when she peered into the shadows of each stall, she saw another rope anchoring one of the front legs-opposite rear and front legs, which meant the horse couldn’t move more than a few inches forward or backward. Each mare had a rubber cup attached to its hind quarters. Nell crouched, keeping to one side, and looked at the hose that led from the cup to a container. The cup and hose were there to gather urine. Urine, for God’s sake.
The horses weren’t important in themselves; they were important in foaling, or, rather, in staying pregnant. If a mare had a hard time doing this, she was taken away. Nell didn’t ask what happened to these horses. The little that she knew was bad enough. So they were kept for the urine that collected under them in plastic bags. She didn’t understand that, either.
“Why are they kept like this? Why don’t they get any exercise?” she had asked Mr. Mackay. It was hard standing up to him; he took as blame any question you put to him. He was the meanest man she’d ever come across. He was in charge of the stable lads and was no nicer to them. The lads, though, had the huge advantage of knowing these people and knowing why they were here. And getting paid for it.
“You ask too many questions.”
She had also asked her questions of Bosworth, the assistant trainer, who she’d discovered over a period of time did not like this place and did not like the people who ran it. Consequently, he was more likely to be sympathetic to any criticism of them or questioning of the rules.
“Exercise? They’re only here to pee and stay pregnant, the sorry beasts.”
It was known that Bosworth was father to two dreadful boys who were in and out of the nick and, therefore, did sympathize with anyone forced to bring another creature into the world and have to put up with him.
The only exercise the mares ever got was when they were led into the breeding arena. Led there and back. As far as she could tell, that was their life, as Bosworth had said it was. Some of them, such as Belle and Jenny, looked exhausted. They were the oldest, the ones who had foaled most, and she despaired that they were undoubtedly looking death in the eye.
On those mornings or afternoons Mackay was off out of sight of the house she led each one out, one at a time, to a bit of pasture that was hidden from view by a tall, boxy hedge. They stood, the mares did. They stood and watched her in perfect silence.
“You don’t have to just stand there, Belle. You can walk around, you can even run around.”
But Belle didn’t move. Like the others, she was too wedded to her little space. And that, Nell realized, was how she herself had felt until they’d finally permitted her to go outside. Belle du Jour. Nell had named them all. So that she could remember the names, she’d drawn a diagram of the stalls and set down the name of the mare who occupied each of them. Marie had been the first she’d taken. Marie was one of the mares at the rear where the big doorway opened on to the stand of birches and was more secluded than the front. Anyway, the guards stood at the front. She had named the mares either with names or words she especially liked. She felt that these good names would make the mares feel good for something other than foaling. All of this was before she’d made her bargain with Mrs. Hobbs. Had she been caught letting them out, she’d get hell. Later on she got hell for giving them water. (
Yet she was never caught letting the horses out for a few minutes. Since only she was interested in the mares, only she went to the stables, except of course when one of them foaled.
At first she thought the foals must be the object. She knew Aqueduct was being used to cover several mares, and that must be why they’d wanted him. But it wasn’t the foals that were important, she discovered. Most of the time they were taken away, two, maybe three at a time, a big horsebox backed up to the barn and the foals loaded in. For the poor mares, the foals were the only particle of real life they experienced, the only hint that they were not machines. Once in a while, though, a foal was left with its mother, left until it could take her place and live the same life from foal to yearling to its first visit to the breeding arena, and the whole thing start all over again.
Yet the farm did have outstanding Thoroughbreds who’d won big purses. So why were they not the ones used for stud? Again, Bosworth had told her. “Because they’re not worth it, these mares. They’re not here for their bloodlines. I told you: it’s the urine.”
“Is it illegal, what they’re doing?”
At that, he laughed. “ ‘Illegal’ wouldn’t stop her.” He looked off to the house.
“She’s not a bad woman,” said Nell, who felt a reluctant kinship with Valerie Hobbs, or perhaps it was an odd empathy-the woman’s scatterbrained and uneasy alliance with the business end of things.
Nell held out a colored folder. “What’s this?”
Bosworth brought his glasses down from their station on top of his head and looked and turned the thing over, front to back, in his hands. He shrugged. “Probably has to do with those mares.” He shrugged. “Where’d you get it?”
This time Nell shrugged. “I just found it.” She could feel Bosworth looking at her.
“Sure,” he said.
There was a room off the kitchen that Valerie kept locked. Nell had noticed the closed door a number of times and wondered what was in the room. This morning, the key had been left in the door. Valerie was absentminded; she was always looking for keys, wallets, even her Wellies. Nell turned it, went in and saw nothing spectacular, even particularly interesting. Indeed, it looked much like her granddad’s office, only smaller. There were photos tacked on the wall (horses, mostly), a largish desk, breeder’s books. Nell leafed through one, looked to see how Go for the Gold was performing (very well), returned that to its place and moved to the desk, awash in papers: bank accounts, articles downloaded from the PC on the desk, bills, stationery and printed literature-folders, brochures-such as the ones she’d picked up.
The one she had shown Bosworth dealt with a drug which would offset many of the problems and symptoms of menopause. It pictured a woman looking supremely happy, ostensibly because she didn’t have to worry about hot flashes, not if she took this drug. The company was an American one: Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories. The drug was Premarin.
Nell ran her finger along a row of dark-green ledgers, yanked one out, not knowing whether it would be helpful. It wasn’t-nothing but rows of expenditures on feed and equipment, money
