Rocking Horse War

  To Mirren and Gowan, my two top heroines, who inspired this one by demanding a quick story about horses, and got an entire novel!

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Also by Lari Don

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  The triplets were stolen on a sunny Monday morning.

  Pearl ran upstairs to call them for breakfast. She’d heard her sisters and brother singing one of their made-up nonsense songs just a few minutes before, but now the schoolroom was empty.

  Surely they were too old to be playing hide and seek with her? She glanced between the school desks, behind the piano and under the kilts in the dressing-up chest.

  “Emerald! Ruby! Jasper! Come out! I’m not in the mood for games. I don’t want to spend all day chasing after you.”

  There were no toes poking out under the red velvet curtains, but Pearl stomped over to the windows to punch at them anyway, and saw that the middle window was wide open.

  She sighed. The triplets weren’t trying to fly again, were they? She was tired of building steps out of chests of drawers, or bumping long ladders through narrow corridors, to fetch the triplets down from impossible places before anyone noticed.

  She glanced up at the sky first to check it was empty. Just a couple of swans, no truant triplets. Pearl shook her head. She didn’t really expect to see her brother and sisters flying. There must be a rational explanation for their habit of appearing on top of unclimbable trees and locked buildings.

  Then she looked down at the ground. The triplets weren’t there either. The lawn, three floors below, led to the rockery and the garden wall, then to the woods, moors and mountains beyond. But the smooth grass was torn, clods of dark earth clustered around a pattern of round holes and deep gashes. Had the triplets jumped down, hitting the ground so hard they’d ripped into the grass when they landed?

  The trail of damage continued across the lawn, not towards the northern mountains which Pearl had climbed with Father, but towards the southern ones which Mother had forbidden anyone to approach.

  Pearl considered jumping straight out of the window to follow the triplets. But even if they had stayed on their feet after such a long leap, she would probably break her legs, so she decided to run down the stairs instead.

  As she swung round, her big toe banged against a hard object. She bent down to rub the pain away, and suddenly noticed six long pieces of wood lying flat on the floor round the open window. Each one was shaped in a smooth curve like the cavalry sabre on Father’s study wall. The wood was dark and varnished, but towards the ends of each curve were scars: round patches of wood, paler, unvarnished, splintered. Scars where something had been torn off.

  Then Pearl recognised the wooden shapes. They were the rockers from the triplets’ rocking horses. Their beautiful wooden rocking horses, with jewelled bridles, leather saddles and real horsehair manes and tails. Emmie always said they looked like warriors’ horses, chargers from the age of chivalry, with their flared nostrils, bared teeth and sharp hooves.

  The horses had been a gift on the triplets’ fourth birthday. No one knew who’d sent them, though Mother had ransacked the house for the missing gift tags.

  Even at the age of ten, far too old to play with their other wooden toys, the triplets still rode their rocking horses every morning. They galloped off on imaginary quests Pearl couldn’t join, because her tatty brown horse was too short for her twelve-year-old legs. But as the triplets’ legs grew, their horses seemed to grow with them. Pearl had mentioned this to Father once, and he had chuckled, “Everything seems to change size as you grow up, dear girl. Wooden horses don’t really grow.”

  She touched the splinters on the nearest curve of wood. The horses’ legs had been wrenched free of the rockers, and the horses had vanished too.

  Pearl stood up and looked out of the window at the hacked holes slashing away across the grass.

  Hoofprints.

  The triplets and the rocking horses had disappeared together.

  But had the triplets taken the horses? Or had the horses taken the triplets?

  Pearl frowned. Whatever daft or dangerous nonsense the triplets were up to this time, she had to find them before Mother realised they’d gone. So she jumped over the rockers and sprinted out of the schoolroom.

  As she hurtled down the main stairs into the entrance hall, she passed the new Chayne family portrait, finished just last month. She stuck her tongue out at it. The artist had been so enthusiastic about painting the triplets. “Classically perfect,” he’d called them, with their golden curls, green eyes, clear skin and sincere smiles on demand.

  The artist was told of their angelic voices, so he’d put sheet music in their hands. But the triplets never bothered to read music, they just sang new tunes suddenly in harmony with each other, while Pearl struggled with her scales on the piano.

  No one could suggest an artistic accomplishment for Pearl, so when she stood in front of his easel, the painter asked her to clutch a new illustrated geology textbook. Then he sketched her at the back of the picture, brown plaits and scowling face in the shadows of the triplets’ brilliance. She would have preferred not to be in the painting at all.

  Her running slowed as she reached the bottom of the stairs. Why was she bothering to chase the triplets? If they wanted to get into trouble, perhaps she should let them. She glanced back up at the portrait. Ruby and Jasper simpered at her; Emerald twinkled.

  She slithered to a stop on the hall tiles. The triplets were probably off having an adventure together. But if she didn’t follow them, she’d have to listen to Mother worry about them all the way through breakfast.

  “Weren’t you fetching the triplets for me, Pearl?” Her mother’s quiet voice startled her. Pearl spun round to face the pale figure in the dining room doorway.

  “They’re up already, Mother, and … em … we’re going out for a picnic breakfast. Emmie’s idea. She packed the baskets last night.”

  “Going out? Not going far, I hope.”

  Mother’s fingers were already twitching. She hated not knowing where the triplets were. She got nervous when they left the house and frantic if they were out of sight of the windows. She never seemed bothered about where Pearl went, which was usually very convenient.

  “You will stay with them, won’t you? Look after them? Bring them home?”

  “Of course. I’m following them right now. We’ll be back when we run out of food.”

  Pearl turned and stepped out of the front door.

  Behind her, she heard Mother wrench open the nearest cupboard. Mother always tidied when she was worried about the triplets. She would dust and sweep as if she could find her missing children on the mantelpiece, behind old photos of her eldest son in uniform, or in the shoe cupboard, reflected in the polished toes and heels of the family’s boots.

  If Pearl took too long to f
ind the triplets, Mother would empty drawers and bookcases, rearrange pictures, and move furniture from room to room. It would be the cleanest, neatest house in Scotland, but no one would be able to find anything for weeks.

  Pearl dashed to the stables, hoping the groom had already brought her bay pony in from the field. She saw Conker’s dark tail flick at the entrance to his loose box, so she saddled him as fast as she could, then leapt on his back.

  Pearl trotted her pony round to the south lawn, feeling his strong warm muscles stretch as he enjoyed the morning air. Much better than riding on a cold wooden horse.

  But when Conker reached the churned-up grass below the schoolroom window, he stopped so abruptly that Pearl crashed forward onto his neck.

  “Walk on,” Pearl ordered. But he backed away, shying at the hoofprints, shaking his dark brown mane.

  “Come on, let’s have an adventure, searching for those precious triplets and their mighty steeds. Walk on, boy.” She clicked her tongue and urged him on with her hands and legs, but the pony refused to follow the trail.

  Pearl grunted in frustration. She considered getting off and leading him, or using the crop and forcing him. But Conker was even more stubborn than she was, and she was in a hurry, so she loosened the reins and let him gallop the short distance back to the stables. She put him in his box, and took off his saddle and bridle.

  “If you won’t take me, I’ll just have to go on my own two feet,” she murmured, looking around for a treat to distract him from his fright.

  She stuck a hand in the biggest pocket of the old-fashioned navy pinafore hanging up on a nail. Pearl wore it for expeditions and experiments, so its deep pockets were filled with string and pencils and other useful things. There was usually leftover food too. She found a slightly chewed carrot and offered it to Conker.

  Then she tugged the old pinafore over her grey dress. Today already felt like an expedition.

  Pearl sprinted from the stables to the damaged lawn. She looked up at the open window, the red velvet hanging limp on the sill. Then she turned her back on the house and followed the rocking horse hoofprints.

  Chapter 2

  The hoofprints were clear and stark in the bright morning light. As she ran beside them, Pearl took note of how hard the hooves had hit the ground, and how far apart the three sets of prints were. The rocking horses must have galloped along three abreast. But even at a gallop, the strides were long for toy ponies. And they seemed to be getting longer.

  Had the horses been growing as they galloped away with Ruby, Jasper and Emmie?

  The last time Pearl had tracked the triplets Mother hadn’t known they were gone, so there had been no rush. They’d left a trail of bent nettles, torn docken leaves and broken daisy chains, which even a city tourist could have followed. Pearl had found them singing nonsense rhymes round a bush in the woods, claiming they were trying to ripen berries for tea.

  Pearl followed the hoofprints to the rockery. Hardly any flowers grew there; it was a heap of spiky rocks rising out of the earth, selected and arranged to look like the Swiss Alps. The gardener often told Pearl how her older brother and his best friend had built the rock garden as a joke one summer, when she was a baby, to remind them of a holiday spent skiing and climbing.

  Both boys were killed the next spring in the trenches of France. Pearl knew no one would ever knock down their folly and build a more practical rockery.

  Pearl paused and looked up from the summits of the rockery to the real mountains surrounding the house. The mountains to the north she knew well, because Father was an old school friend of the family who owned them, so the Chaynes had permission to climb and track and hunt on them whenever they liked.

  But the mountains to the south she only knew from her older brother’s maps, because for as long as Pearl could remember, Mother had forbidden any of the family to go out of the southern gate. Mother’s only explanation for this unbreakable family rule was that the neighbours to the south were unfriendly, unpredictable and best left alone.

  Pearl smiled cautiously when she saw that the horses had hurdled the Alps, then kept going towards the gate in the south wall. Perhaps the triplets’ escape was her chance, at last, to explore the southern lands.

  Then her smile faded. She might walk the southern moors today, but she might never climb the northern mountains with Father again.

  Last night, she had been running downstairs to show Father a map she’d drawn of the River Stane’s source, when she’d heard his voice booming out of the study.

  “Everyone lost someone in the war, Beryl. Everyone! The rest of the country is just getting on with life. It was more than ten years ago. You can’t stay cooped up here for ever.”

  Father’s courtroom lawyer voice had carried up the stairs; Mother’s answering voice had faded away into nothing. As Pearl had dithered on the cold steps, wondering if she should come back later, she’d heard Father speak again.

  “You can’t keep the triplets cooped up for ever either. You can’t keep babying them. It isn’t healthy. They should be roaming the moors and mountains, like Pearl. And they should all be going off to school this year, rather than exhausting another poor tutor. It’s time they grew up.”

  Mother’s voice had risen like a bird, and Pearl had been drawn down a couple of steps to hear it.

  “If we’re talking about growing up, John, then you have to realise that Pearl is growing up too. She’s growing into a young woman. You can’t keep dragging her through boggy moors and up rockfaces as if she were a boy.”

  Father had snapped back, “If you would let me take Jasper out, then I wouldn’t need to take Pearl. Let him act like a boy his age, then perhaps I would leave Pearl at home.”

  Pearl had turned back to her room, the map hanging from her fist, crushed. She hadn’t bothered to show it to Father early this morning before he drove off to his week’s work in Perth Sheriff Court.

  She could still hear his words as she stared at the mountains. The hours lying side by side in the heather watching deer. The days scrambling on the rocks and cliffs of the Axehead and the Rhymer on the northern ridge. Not because Father enjoyed her questions and her company, but because his son was still at home riding rocking horses and singing with his sisters.

  If Father didn’t want to climb with her in the northern mountains, then she would use Peter’s maps to get to know the southern mountains, whatever Mother said about the neighbours.

  Pearl strode round the rock garden, following the hoofprints towards the high wall which separated the Chayne grounds from their neighbours’ woods and moors.

  Ahead of her, the three lines of prints merged into a confusion of hooves; the horses had gone single file through the gateway.

  The spiked metal gate had been left open. Of course. When did the triplets ever close a door behind them?

  Pearl blinked. The gateway had been empty a moment ago, but now someone was blocking her way through. Between the gateposts, polished black boots astride the line of hoof marks, stood a tall boy.

  As Pearl walked briskly nearer, she could see he was dressed for hunting: tweed jacket, white shirt, red waistcoat, dark trousers and tall riding boots, all perfectly fitted and cleaned, not baggy and patched like her own outdoor clothes. He had no hat on, so his curly black hair flopped over his forehead.

  Her stride faltered when she noticed he was gripping a silver rifle under his left arm and twirling a long stick in his right hand.

  He smiled broadly at Pearl as she walked towards him. He was no more than a year or two older than her, but he was a head taller.

  Pearl shoved her hair out of her eyes, then realised she’d probably smeared dust from the stables all over her face. At least it would cover the freckles.

  She stopped a couple of steps in front of the boy. “Good morning. Were you here when my sisters and brother rode through? Did you see which way they went?”

  “I was not here, no.” He stamped his heel into the earth between the gateposts. “Had I been he
re when someone rode through, I should have been trampled.”

  “Of course. But did you see them? Three blond children riding … em …” Riding rocking horses? She wasn’t going to admit her fanciful suspicion to this patronising boy.

  “Three blond children riding what?” He grinned like he would eat every one of her silly questions.

  “Three blond children riding three horses.”

  “What kind of horses?”

  Pearl shut her eyes briefly and pictured the triplets’ rocking horses. “A chestnut stallion, and two mares: one white, one palomino. Did you see them?”

  “I’m afraid I got here just a moment ago. They must have passed through before that.”

  “Well, thanks for all your help, but now I have to go and call them in for breakfast.”

  She stepped closer to the shiny bars of the gate, closer to the boy and the twirling stick.

  The gnarled staff was longer than a walking stick, and made of very dark wood, as if it had been charred or rubbed with soot before it was varnished. And it was blocking her path.

  “Excuse me, please.”

  The stick kept swinging, circles and figures of eights and straight swipes slicing the air, as the long fingers of the boy’s right hand twisted and shifted their grip.

  “Aren’t you too young to be leaving the garden by yourself?” he asked. “It might be dangerous.”

  “I’ll be fine, thanks. I’m used to walking the moors and mountains to the north. I know the land.”

  “Do you? Do you really know the land?” His wide smile faded, and his brown eyes looked at her seriously. His still face looked like a statue she had once tried to sketch in the art gallery in Edinburgh, with its straight nose and smooth cheeks.

  She answered confidently. “Even if I’ve never walked this land before, I’ll be able to read it, and the animals and people who’ve crossed it, like you can read a book.”

  He smiled again. “Will you really? Perhaps the people who know the woods, moors and mountains best are those who listen rather than look.”

  Pearl snorted. There was no point in arguing. She just needed to get through the gate. “Let me past, please. I have to find the triplets, and you’ve no reason to stop me.”