‘I’m coming to explain,’ he said, ‘but I won’t bring my friend, I’ll attach him to your fence, darling. He’s so sad and good, he won’t do any harm, I promise.’
A moment later he joined me in the garden. I put the baby back in its pram and was turning to Cedric to ask what this was all about when Norma came up the lane which passes my garden on her afternoon trudge with her dogs. Now the Boreley family consider that they have a special mandate, bestowed from on high, to deal with everything that regards the horse. They feel it to be their duty no less than their right, and therefore the moment she saw Cedric’s friend, sad and good, standing by my fence, Norma unhesitatingly came into the garden to see what she could do about it. I introduced Cedric to her.
‘I don’t want to interrupt you,’ she said, her eye upon the famous piping of the seams, brown today, upon a green linen coat, vaguely Tyrolean in aspect, ‘but there’s a very old mare, Fanny, tied up to your fence. Do you know anything about it – whom does she belong to?’
‘Don’t, dear Mrs Cozens, tell me that the first horse I have ever owned is a female!’ said Cedric, with a glittering (brush) smile.
‘The animal is a mare,’ said Norma, ‘and if she is yours I must tell you that you ought to be ashamed of yourself for keeping her in that dreadful condition.’
‘Oh, but I only began keeping her ten minutes ago, and I hope that when you see her again, in a few months’ time, you simply won’t know her.’
‘Do you mean to say that you bought that creature? She ought to go straight away to the kennels.’
‘The kennels? But why – she’s not a dog!’
‘The knacker, the horse-butcher,’ said Norma impatiently, ‘she must be destroyed, put down immediately, or I shall ring up the R.S.P.C.A.’
‘Oh, please don’t do that. I’m not being cruel to her, I’m being kind. That horrid man I bought her from, he was being beastly, he was taking her to the knacker. My plan was to save her from him, I couldn’t bear to see the expression on her poor face.’
‘Well, but what are you going to do with her, my dear boy?’
‘I thought – set her free.’
‘Set her free? She’s not a bird, you know, you can’t go setting horses free like that – not in England, anyway.’
‘Yes I can. Not in Oxford perhaps, but where I live there is a vieux parc solitaire et glacé, and it is my intention to set her free there, to have happy days away from knackers. Isn’t knacker a hateful word, Mrs Cozens?’
‘The grazing at Hampton is let,’ said Norma. It was the kind of detail the Boreleys could be counted on to tell you. Cedric, however, took no notice and went on,
‘She was being driven down the street in a van with her head sticking out at the back, and I could see at once that she was longing for some nice person to get her out of this unpleasant situation, so I stopped the van and bought her. You could see how relieved she felt.’
‘How much?’
‘Well, I offered the man forty pounds, it was all I had on me, so he kindly let me have her for that.’
‘Forty pounds!’ cried Norma, aghast. ‘Why, you could get a hunter for less than forty pounds.’
‘But my dearest Mrs Cozens, I don’t want a hunter, it’s the last thing, I’d be far too frightened. Besides, look at the time you have to get up – I heard them the other morning in the woods, half-past six. Well, you know, I’m afraid it’s “up before seven dead before eleven” with One. No, I just wanted this special old clipper-clopper, she’s not the horse to make claims on a chap, she won’t want to be ridden all the time as a younger horse might, and there she’ll be, if I feel like having a few words with her occasionally. But the great question now, which I came to tease practical Fanny with, is how to get her home?’
‘And if you go buying up all the horses that are fit for the kennels, however do you imagine hounds are going to be fed?’ said Norma, in great exasperation. She was related to several Masters of foxhounds and her sister had a pack of beagles, so no doubt she was acquainted with all their problems.
‘I shan’t buy up all the horses,’ said Cedric, soothingly, ‘only this one, which I took a liking for. Now, dear Mrs Cozens, do stop being angry and just tell me how I can get her home, because I know you can help if you want to and I simply can’t get over the luck of meeting you here at the very moment when I needed you so badly.’
Norma began to weaken, as people so very often did with Cedric. It was extraordinary how fast he could worm his way through a thick crust of prejudice, and, just as in the case of Lady Montdore, the people who hated him the most were generally those who had seen him from afar but never met him. But whereas Lady Montdore had ‘all this’ to help in her conquest of disapproval, Cedric relied upon his charm, his good looks and his deep inborn knowledge of human, and especially female, nature.
‘Please,’ he said, his eyes upon her, blinking a little.
I could see that he had done the trick; Norma was considering.
‘Well,’ she
