paid out to vets, farriers, trainers, stable lads. Routine accounts. She put it back, pulled out another. This one was a record of the mares-their dates of acquisition, many of them having been here for as long as four years. Four years of living like this. Recorded also were histories of pregnancies, foals born, foals removed for slaughter, rates of “production” of urine. Mares whose production was low or who were too difficult to impregnate also were sent to slaughter.
She forgot she shouldn’t be in this room; she forgot the room itself as she stared at nothing, the room, its furnishings, photos, windows replaced by the memory of that big horse van pulled up to the farthest barn and as she watched three foals and one mare were loaded onto it. They were going to slaughter because the stud farm had no use for them. That’s all. Was there someone here rotten enough to do all of this? Yes, and he had walked up those attic steps a dozen times.
It was then, right then that she knew she’d have to do something, but had no idea how to do it.
Her opportunity had come when this farm and two others some miles away received threats. The letters had directed them to pay fifty thousand pounds or horses would be harmed. She had waited until the third night after the letter had appeared. That night she had stolen one of the mares, Marie, whose heart had not been destroyed by her imprisonment and who was only too glad to gallop, when the terrain permitted, away to the new place.
Then she returned before dawn, “woke up” the following morning and expressed her own shock and puzzlement that the horse thieves would have taken one of the mares instead of the far more valuable Thoroughbreds. Go for the Gold, or Prime Time, for instance. They put it down to stupidity, almost relieved that the thieves knew nothing about racing or horses.
The next night she repeated her mare theft by taking Domino. In Domino’s case, she stopped every twenty or thirty minutes to let the mare rest or drink from the little stream. It took her four hours to make the three-mile trek.
They questioned now the motive for taking the horses. She had listened to them the next morning trying to work it all out. Maybe it was animal activists who were behind this. Maybe asking for money was just a cover-up.
Whatever it was, thought Nell, no one ever followed up on the threats; no horses were harmed.
But tonight, after taking Stardust and Aqueduct, she could not go back; Aqueduct’s absence would tell them it was Nell doing this, even if nothing else would. Until now, most of the blame had been put at the feet of animal-rights groups. It could only be animal activists they were sure. On six different nights over the past month, she had taken six mares, three like Jenny, who was having a hard time conceiving and whom she was certain would be put down because of it. They might think she simply took the opportunity to run away, but that she’d had nothing to do with the horses that had gone missing. She would still try to save the other mares, but knew she couldn’t manage more than a very few this way. When she was out of here, she would find another way.
When she reckoned the guards were deep enough into their story or joke, she moved very slowly down the row of stalls to where the circuit breaker was located. She flipped a switch. The lights fluttered and died.
No one came. She had done this before on an erratic basis so that when she actually needed the dark no one would be suspicious of the lights going out and would conclude there was something wrong with the connections; faulty wiring is what they put it down to. The lights were supposed to be on at night to fool the mares into thinking it was spring as if conception was more likely in April.
No one would come to fix the lights, because they always came on by themselves (or so it seemed) in a matter of minutes. The two guards were embroiled in their stories and smokes and when the barn went dark, one guard got up and looked, swore and flashed his torch around, but in another ten seconds was back to talking and smoking.
Nell carefully pressed in between Stardust and the side of her stall, laid a hand on her muzzle. When the mare uttered a small sound, Nell did it again and Stardust went quiet. Then she took the small boning knife from her pocket and cut first through the front rope, then the one that held the right rear ankle. The horse remained perfectly still as if the imprint of Nell’s hand on her muzzle remained.
To Nell, the stillness was no miracle, nor was it even strange. Stardust responded perfectly because that’s what she’d been taught to do. Very slowly she backed Stardust out, put her hand on the mare’s left shoulder to turn her, then slowly walked her out into the night.
FOURTEEN
It was the barn that had told Nell where she was and she could hardly believe it; it nearly paralyzed her to think that all of this time she had been only a few miles from home.
She and Stardust had to stop halfway there so that the mare could rest for an hour; the place was too far to travel in one go, too hard on the horse. From Hobbs’s barn that afternoon she had taken hay and oats. She had slung the oats in a sack behind her over the blanket and tied up half a bale of hay, which she’d tied with a rope to the saddle. It was enough to keep the horses going for a couple of days and nights.
Two outlying barns, for years unused, stood nearly a half mile from the other Ryder Stud buildings, which was one reason why her granddad had stopped using it. Also, the barn was unnecessary when he started trimming back on stock and land.
Nell did not believe in luck, certainly not in the good kind, certainly not her own. But she did believe in fate. She did believe a person was led to something, although it was often hard to tell what finding it meant, or what was meant for you to do there. It was a necessary belief; it kept her going. When she’d come upon Ryder land and the empty barn on that first night, it had deepened her belief in fate-not in luck, not in guidance and not in God. Fate was different; fate was the thinking through and the working out of a pattern already laid down. You had to believe in something, she thought, even if it’s a cold, impersonal and imperious something.
The Ryder stables would be a source of bulk food and maybe some bran or barley. Where she would get her own food, after the supplies she’d taken from the house, she wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t worried about it. There were other things to worry about.
She remembered hanging her head, as if this absence from home were her own fault. She had stood beside the tired mare whose neck was bent, cropping at black grass in the dark and wondered what heavy hand was stopping her. It wasn’t as if she’d run away, and yet it felt like it, it really did. In the place she was taken to, it hadn’t been mere physical boundaries that had kept her from running; she had become inured to those. No, it was more an irrational notion that she shouldn’t be free; this had become entrenched in her mind, strong as her mind was. She had relearned the limits of freedom.
But she did know, didn’t she, what kept her in this now self-imposed exile? Even though she wasn’t responsible, except, perhaps, for having a pretty arse. She put it that way, crudely and sarcastically, hoping she could diminish the awfulness of the rape. The footsteps on the stairs, the opening door, the dark and then being pushed down, turned over and forced to lie flat on her stomach. Always, he came at her from behind. Every time. A dozen times. She had seen him once, but no more than a glance grazing his face. She believed she knew him. It was a belief unsustained by memory because her memory, her conscious awareness of him had been wiped out. But she also believed that the memory could be triggered by something and then she’d
