Rocking Horse War Read online

“It’s part of the mare’s bridle, and I think it’s trying to follow her. It might be useful.”

  “Why? I don’t ever want to see that nasty beast again.”

  “It might be useful to know where she’s gone.” Pearl sat up, dropped the gold ring in a pinafore pocket and buttoned it up tight. She felt the ring twist and bump against her leg.

  “Now,” she turned to her little sister, “tell me what’s going on.”

  Ruby flopped onto the grass beside her sister and started to sob again.

  Pearl found a stained hanky in another pocket and shoved it at her sister. “Stop snivelling and talk to me. Those horses still have Emmie and Jasper, so I need to know what’s happening.”

  “But I don’t know myself!” Ruby flung her arms round her big sister.

  Pearl gave her a hug, then pushed her away. “Tell me what you do know.”

  Ruby sobbed and shook her head.

  Pearl watched impatiently as her sister wept. Even with watery eyes and a dripping nose, Ruby was a very pretty child. Big green eyes, long dark lashes, slim curved eyebrows and a pouting mouth, framed by blonde curls tied with a red ribbon.

  When Pearl left her hair loose, it looked like a tangle of socks. When Ruby left her hair loose, it curved and twined like vines on a statue.

  Pearl gave her sister’s golden curls a swift tug to get her attention and demanded again, “Tell me what you know.”

  Ruby gabbled, to get the telling over quickly. “We were riding our horses this morning, being knights at a tournament, when suddenly there were splintering sounds and lots of light and the window swung open. Jasper’s horse jumped out first, then Emmie’s, then mine and it was like flying, then the horses galloped away so fast we were whooping and laughing. Then they started to get bigger and we realised they didn’t pay any attention to our feet or knees or reins and just went their own way and we couldn’t stop them or slow them or turn them, so we got scared, at least I did, but then we were out through the gate and into the wood. And before we knew what was happening, the horses all took different paths and I shouted ‘help’ but the others didn’t answer me. And my horse ran by the stream and found this pool, and I thought she was just stopping for a drink, so I slid down, and she bit my dress and I pulled away — look!” Her red dress was ripped at the shoulder. “And I thought about climbing up that tree, so I just jumped and grabbed the branch, and I was higher than I thought I could be, and I tried to think about jumping even higher, but I was too scared, so I just sat there. If I was quiet, she left me alone. And then you came.” She hugged her big sister again.

  Pearl said carefully, “So you didn’t climb that tree. You just jumped?”

  “Yes. Like the time you got me and Jasper down from the chandelier and the … em … the other times … It was just a thought and I got light and floaty for a minute and I aimed for the branch.”

  “Can you do it again?”

  Pearl watched closely as Ruby stood and reached upwards. “No. I think my snottery nose is weighing me down.” She blew noisily into Pearl’s hanky and sat beside her again.

  Pearl didn’t demand more answers about flying. There were other vital questions. “When the rocking horses came off their rockers and leapt out of the window, was anyone else there? Did you see or hear anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing at all? No songs or words, no people or animals?”

  “There were some swans in the sky. We’d just noticed them and wondered if we should be princes enchanted into swans and wait for our sister to save us, but then the horses took us away …”

  “So there were swans. Was there a tall boy? At the gate, or anywhere else?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Can we go home now?” Ruby rested her head on Pearl’s arm.

  “Home? But we have to find Emmie and Jasper.”

  “They can look after themselves, Pearl. Or you could come back and find them once you’ve taken me home.”

  Pearl felt the shivering ring in her pocket as she stood up. “No, we’re going to find them now. Come on!”

  Ruby wailed, “I don’t want to see those horses again! I just want to go home to Mother. It must be nearly time for elevenses by now!”

  Pearl thought of her simple mission to bring the triplets down for breakfast. “It’s not nearly time for elevenses yet, Ruby, because we’re not going home without the others.”

  Chapter 5

  Pearl dragged Ruby along the path. As they walked briskly beside the mare’s hoofprints, the frantic ring in Pearl’s pocket calmed down, turning gently in the direction of their steps towards the chestnut tree.

  Just as Pearl caught sight of the glossy green chestnut ahead, the sky above the treetops dimmed, and they heard a sudden tapping. Ruby jumped and looked round nervously.

  “Calm down!” snapped Pearl. “It’s only rain on the leaves!” Then she looked at the path. The few drops getting through the leaf canopy were already splattering dark dots over the hoofprints.

  “Run!” she yelled. “Run! We have to follow the trail as far as we can before we lose it!”

  Pearl broke into a sprint, and as soon as she reached the crossroads, she fell to her knees and tried to read the tracks. The narrow moor path, the wider river path and the straight path home, all still showed the marks of hooves. But the rain had already blurred the prints so much she couldn’t tell which path now had an extra set of hoofprints. She had lost the riderless palomino’s trail already.

  “Hurry up!” she shouted at Ruby, who was running into the raindrops in a flappy, half-hearted way.

  “I can’t. My legs are sore.”

  By the time Ruby had panted up to the tree, the paths had darkened almost to black, and the prints were nearly gone.

  “What do you think, Ruby, should we head for the moors or the river? Should we follow Jasper or Emmie?” But her little sister was shivering too much to answer.

  “You are pathetic, Ruby! If you ran faster you’d keep yourself warm!”

  Ruby’s bottom lip quivered.

  “Oh, for goodness sake!” Pearl would never catch up with the other two if she had to keep mollycoddling Ruby. She hauled her sister off the path into a stand of birch trees, where she had spotted a line so straight it must be man-made.

  “Where are we going now?” Ruby whimpered, as Pearl felt the ring jump violently in her pocket.

  “I’m going to find you shelter, and you’re going to stay there until I get back.”

  “But I want to go home!”

  “If you can go home all on your own, and not meet any wooden horses or boys with guns, then fine, off you go. Or you can wait here, and I’ll come back for you.”

  In front of them was a wooden hut, which Pearl guessed was the gamekeepers’ storeroom.

  Pearl pushed the door, but it was locked. She knelt down and looked at the keyhole. A hand’s width below it, a hole was drilled in the wood. She carefully poked two fingers in, and felt a rough string dangling behind the door. Pearl nodded. The gardener’s toolshed at home used the same trick.

  She gripped the string between her fingers, and pulled it through. There was a key tied to the end. She unlocked the door and waved Ruby in.

  Ruby wrinkled her nose at the stink of aniseed, a smell pheasants love so much the keepers used it to encourage them to stay in the wood. Ruby tried to back out again, but Pearl gave her a gentle shove. “At least it’s dry,” Pearl said firmly, as she found a stool, a blanket and a tin of shortbread among the full bags of grain and empty chick coops. “These will keep you warm and fed. So stay here, and stay quiet.”

  Ruby gulped down a sob.

  “I’ll lock the door when I leave,” Pearl said, “then I’ll push the key back through. Untie the key and keep it in your pocket so no one else can get in. Don’t unlock the door until I get back. Don’t unlock it for anyone else. No one else but me.”

  “How will I know it’s you? Should we have a password?”

  “A password?” Pearl laughed.
“Passwords are for people who don’t know each other, like spies. If you don’t recognise my voice, I’ll just tell you what I think of your new beaded frock. No one else in the whole world will be as honest as me.”

  Pearl gave Ruby a quick kiss and left, locking the door and shoving the key back through.

  She was on her own again, but at least she could move faster now.

  She ran back to the chestnut tree, where the horses had split up, and where the shrew still dangled. The rain had wiped away all the hoofprints. There were no tracks left to follow.

  Pearl thought for a moment, then unbuttoned her pocket and grasped the twisting ring between wet fingers.

  “You want to be reunited with your horse and her bridle, don’t you? I can’t follow Emmie or Jasper, but if I follow Ruby’s horse I might find out what’s going on.”

  She flicked the golden ring into the air, and watched it fall to the ground faster than the silver raindrops.

  The instant the hoop hit the path, it began to roll.

  It moved faster than Pearl expected; she had to run to keep up as it sped along the path towards the moor. She hoped it was leading her to Ruby’s mare and Jasper’s stallion. She hoped she wasn’t following the boy with the burnt black stick.

  The rain was slowing to a drizzle, almost as if it had done its work obscuring the trail, and as the last drops fell to the ground, Pearl burst out of the woods into the deer forest.

  The name always made her smile. It had been one of Emmie’s favourite jokes when she was little: what kind of forest has no trees? A deer forest.

  A deer forest was land where deer were bred, stalked and hunted. In Scotland, that was rarely woodland; it was usually moorland and mountaintops.

  So Pearl followed the golden circle out of the trees into the treeless forest.

  The hoop stopped, balanced on its edge, then began to roll uphill towards the first ridge. The path was bumpy and rough, and the ring skipped and wavered. Pearl, running hard, was able to keep close behind.

  Then the ring rolled straight into a stone, and ricocheted off like a billiard ball. Spinning backwards, it banged into Pearl’s right boot. She stumbled and stood hard on the hoop. When she lifted her foot, the ring lay flat and still on the path, crushed into the ground.

  “Sorry!” she said automatically. She shook her head at her own clumsiness and at her attempt to apologise to a bit of metal. Then she tried again. “Come on. Get up. We need to find that horse.”

  She bent forward, and stroked the motionless hoop with her fingers. Suddenly it sprang up, hitting her hard on the nose, and rolled off.

  Pearl followed, rubbing her nose and staying further back this time.

  The ring led her to the top of the ridge, and a perfect view of land she only knew from her brother’s maps.

  The top drawer of Pearl’s desk was packed full of Peter’s maps, locked securely against Mother’s panicked clearouts: maps her older brother had drawn when he was younger than the triplets, of the garden and the road to Perth; maps he had drawn when he was Pearl’s age, of the pathless moorland ahead and the rocky mountains above, with tiny notes of campsites and caves and other intriguing places; maps he had drawn when he was older, of climbing holidays in the Cuillins and the Alps.

  And his final map. A map of the trench in France where he spent his last days. A map with depth rather than height. A pencil sketch of a long muddy hole.

  Pearl didn’t need to carry these maps in her pockets; she held all the details in her head.

  As she followed the ring off the ridge, she could see to the southeast the rocks marked on Peter’s maps as the Twa Corbies, and further off, the River Stane curving south round the base of the mountains.

  It looked as if nothing large could possibly hide in the open moor. There were no trees or hills to shelter behind. Surely a huge wooden horse, or a missing younger brother, could be seen at a glance.

  But Pearl knew, from long frustrating days stalking on similar ground to the north, that an antlered stag and a dozen hinds could hide from hunters just a few yards away.

  The moor ahead was crumpled, like a rug shoved up against a wall. Dozens of streams from the mountains had worn away narrow gullies. There were soft soggy bogs in sudden hollows, and tangles of low ridges which made it hard to walk in a straight line.

  Ruby’s horse, Jasper’s horse, Jasper, the boy with the stick, even Emmie and her horse, they could all be in the deer forest ahead of her, and Pearl wouldn’t find them unless she fell right over them.

  Or followed this spinning golden ring.

  The ring had been moving more slowly through the maze of heather stalks. Then suddenly it rolled faster again, over a patch of grass at the bottom of a slope. Pearl spotted a hoofprint where the heather met the grass, so she knew they were on the right track.

  The ring skipped merrily over the bright green ground, quivering on the surface like a skimming stone, then it wobbled and started to sink.

  Pearl jerked backwards. She suddenly realised why the ground was soft enough to hold a print even after rain.

  This slope slid downhill into a bog.

  “No! Come back!” But it was too late. The ring couldn’t roll back or forward in the soft wet ground. It was being slowly sucked down.

  From a tuft of dry heather, Pearl watched the ring founder. It twisted and twitched, but couldn’t free itself. More than half its edge had sunk into the grasping earth. Its movements were getting smaller and more feeble.

  Pearl knew the best advice for people trapped in bogs was: ‘Don’t struggle! Struggling makes you sink in further. Stay still and shout for help.’

  The only person who could answer the ring’s silent call for help was Pearl. But if she got stuck, if she shouted for help, who would answer her call? She didn’t want to summon a rocking horse, or the tall boy.

  Pearl hesitated. If she tried to rescue the ring, she could be caught in the bog herself. But if she didn’t, she would lose her last chance of following the rocking horses and of finding Jasper and Emmie.

  The ring, heavy with mud, had stopped moving.

  Pearl searched the ground for anything she could use as a hook.

  There were no trees in the deer forest, so there were no branches lying around. Heather stems and roots were too bent and knotted to reach any distance.

  The only available tools were her own arms and hands. Pearl groaned in frustration. The ring was almost gone. She had to decide before it vanished completely. Would she risk herself for her brother and sister?

  Of course she would.

  So Pearl took off her pinafore and lay down at the edge of the bog. She spread her weight as widely as she could and inched forward towards the ring.

  She reached out her right hand. The ring was barely visible now, and there were bubbles popping round it as it sank. She couldn’t quite touch it.

  She flexed her toes against the springy heather and forced herself forward, feeling cold dampness seeping into her dress. As she pushed yet again, her body sank slightly into the clammy ground.

  She stretched her arm. Her nails clicked on the metal. She risked one more push with her toes, and felt the ring with her fingertips. She eased it out of the mud and clutched it tight.

  She wanted to leap up and run for the heather, but she knew that could be fatal, so she slid slowly backwards.

  Her feet and legs were safe on the heather. Then her hips and waist.

  She tried to drag her shoulders and torso through the bog, which made terrifying slurping sounds as it held her in its grip.

  Pearl couldn’t bear the feel of the ground holding her down, so she jerked up and swivelled round, shoving herself up onto the heather with her left hand. That hand and wrist were sucked down, but the rest of her was free. She leant backwards, using her whole weight to pull her hand out with a belch of boggy air. She fell over and stared at the sky. The ring wriggled between her fingers.

  The daft hoop was still trying to roll right over the misleading green
grass to where the long-legged mare had landed safely on the other side. If Pearl let it go now, it would just dive into the bog again.

  She held the ring tightly as she rubbed her hands clean on the heather, and covered the worst of the dirt on her dress with her pinafore.

  Then she walked round the edge of the bog, and let the ring go at the other side.

  The hoop bounced carelessly over the heather as if it had been in no danger at all. It clattered down a steep gully, right through a burn, and back up the other side. The dip in the water washed it bright gold again, so Pearl could see it easily. It was rushing towards the Twa Corbies.

  Pearl didn’t think the mossy grey boulders were big enough to hide people and horses. Then she remembered a gully marked on Peter’s maps, running along the side of the eastern Corbie, cut into the ground by a wide mountain stream. There might be enough shelter in there for a whole herd of rocking horses.

  She decided to let the ring go on ahead and follow at a careful distance. She didn’t want to meet Ruby’s palomino again without warning. She lowered herself into the thick heather, where she was surrounded by the warm scents of honey, thyme and juniper, and sudden rank whiffs of fox and weasel.

  She watched the ring curve round the Twa Corbies and leap into the gully beyond. Now she had lost sight of it, perhaps forever.

  Pearl followed cautiously, not pressing her weight widely as she had on the bog, but moving lightly on hands and elbows, knees and toes.

  What would she see when she reached the edge?

  If the gully was empty, and the ring had spun out of sight, her caution would have cost Pearl her last link to the triplets and the horses that had taken them.

  Pearl tried not to hear the blood beating in her ears, and the dry rustling of the heather. She listened to the sounds in the empty space beyond the rocks. And she heard laughter.

  Chapter 6

  It was Jasper’s laugh. Ringing, chiming, tinkling. Pearl thought he must be trying hard to make someone like him.

  She edged round the Twa Corbies, trying to creep as slowly as the glaciers she knew had formed this landscape. Her face was so close to the heather it pricked her eyeballs as she peered over the top of the gully.