from the Little Chef raid. He unwrapped them and held them out to the horse. Criminal Type was not as polite as Aggrieved. He nearly got Jury’s hand into the bargain. But that was the way when you were mobbed up: eat first, ask questions later. Jury smiled and left the stables.
Vernon had gathered thirty of the mares in the meadow and stood watching them, leaning against a post-and-rail fence, his foot hooked on the bottom rail.
He said, when Jury came up to him, “I thought I’d have to round them up, cowboy style, but they just seemed willing to follow one another out to the field.” He pointed at one. “That’s Daisy and Daisy’s foal. Nellie said”-he stopped and cleared his throat-“Nell said that Daisy was a kind of leader. But look at them. They just stand there.” He turned to look at Jury. “Do you think it’s from being tethered in those narrow stalls for so long? But shouldn’t they remember their lives before…?”
His voice trailed off.
The mares were standing in a crescent, a head occasionally bent to look for graze, or a mother nudging at a foal-there were three foals now-but aside from that they stood quite still in that strange half-circle as if indeed they had been lined up there and tied.
“Probably they need a little time to get used to freedom,” said Vernon.
He appeared to Jury to be almost desperate to explain their eerie stillness. Jury said, “Freedom can be hard to get used to, you’re right.”
“And the sky,” said Vernon, looking upward, “is so blue.”
As if the day were a perfect setting for the horses to break away for a gallop, or perhaps as if nature had broken a bargain.
They stood side by side in silence for a long time, not speaking. Then Jury saw one of the foals leave the line and run for several yards, then another foal, and then one of the mares. And after that it was like an ice slide, ice calving, glaciers tumbling into the sea.
At least it seemed to Jury as extraordinary as that. As if someone had actually waved a wand and broken the spell and raised them from their sad and anxious sleep; first one, then another and another of the mares were running, manes and tails flying, running for what was surely joy, pushing the race to its limits.
There would always be a filly like Go for Wand, thought Jury; there would always be a girl to ride her.
Together, they would wire the field.
SIXTY-TWO
The door of Tynedale Lodge was opened by the pretty maid Sarah, whose eyes widened even more when she saw him standing there. His image reflected in her eyes; he could almost see himself shaping up as a hero, which only made him feel more of an idiot. What had he done, after all, for the Tynedales?
“Hello, Sarah. This isn’t an official visit; I came to see how Gemma’s doing. Is she about?”
Sarah’s hand fell away from her hair. “Oh, why, yessir. I mean, I expect she is. I expect she’s out in the garden.”
“Thanks. I’ll just have a look.”
He made his way through the dining room to the study and the French doors that opened off Ian Tynedale’s study. Outside to the left of the patio was a long colonnade, a walk flanked by white pillars. He saw her, as he had seen her before, on the same walk across the garden in which a marble figure stood in a marble pool, pouring water from a marble jug. The path she was on ran parallel to his. A line of tall cypresses bordered it. As they both walked, he felt as he had the first time, that they were somehow woven together. There was a poignant sense of belonging: everything that was there-man, child, statue, pillars, trees-was rightly there.
When they came to the end of their paths and she still didn’t see him, he called, “Gemma!”
She didn’t so much turn as swerve toward him, as a car might do, hoping to ward off a collision. She stood transfixed, as if she were the marble figure in the fountain.
“Gemma-” He walked toward her and then knelt down and kissed her cheek.
She held her doll in one hand and put her other hand on the spot. “You got shot.”
“I did.”
“You didn’t die.”
“No. Didn’t anyone tell you?”
She shook her head.
“Did you think I had?”
Very slowly, still holding her hand against her face, she nodded.
“Come on, let’s sit down.”
Seated with her (the doll Richard between them), Jury thought it was hard to believe no one had told her he was all right. Was it because she hadn’t asked? For Gemma wouldn’t, one of those children who felt so dangerously deeply they could only survive by pretending indifference.
She was feigning it now, adjusting the doll’s bonnet as if that, not Jury’s life or death, was the issue.
He said, “What happened to Richard’s black clothes? I thought he looked quite smart in that coat and hat.”
“He’s being punished!” Her voice went up a decibel, nervously loud.
“He is? But what did he do?”
“He kicked you and yelled at you. Don’t you remember?”
“Yes.”
It was Gemma herself who had used Richard as a club to give Jury several whacks because he’d left her in danger.
“Well, if he hadn’t done that, you probably wouldn’t’ve got shot.”
Jury looked at her solemn, remorseful face, which now gave tremulous signs of dissolving into tears, as if a pebble had been tossed into a pool. No little girl, he thought, should have to exert so much effort in trying not to cry. But from Gemma’s point of view, strong emotion can kill. She had displayed it once-she had cried and yelled-and look at the result: Jury had nearly died.
Jury thought for a moment, then picked up the doll and sighed deeply. “Poor Richard,” he said. “No one understood, did they?”
Her face free of incipient tears, now completely forestalled by this surprising new development, Gemma put her hand on Jury’s arm. “Understood what?”
“Well, Richard helped save me, didn’t he?”
“
“Not the night I was, no. But he’d been there before, when he and Sparky saved you.”
This wasn’t going down a treat. “I did most of the work!”
“I know, but, see, Sparky went back the second time-”
“Christmas night.”
“-because he had found you and Richard there once, he knew it was a place that needed watching. Richard understood that.”
