The Dancing Years by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Author:Cynthia Harrod-Eagles [Harrod-Eagles, Cynthia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780748122615
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2010-11-04T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Spring came bursting up from under the earth in a torrent of energy: new grass almost clamouring to be grazed, new shoots thick in the cornfield and vegetable plots, new leaves breaking in a pale green wave over the bare black bones of winter. Horses shed their winter coats, revealing themselves as glossy as chestnuts under the rough outer casing. Dogs rushed outdoors and clowned madly, driven wild by the feast of smells. Cows’ milk grew richer for the fresh grazing. And everywhere the high, childlike clamour of lambs, and the deep knuckering replies of their dams, made the glad music of a Yorkshire spring.

Polly rode out one morning on Vesper who, though now a matron of eight, nevertheless could not help responding to the vivid scents coming down on the quick little breeze. She danced about, flirting her tail and looking for objects to shy at – blown white blossom petals, the bowing daffodils on the bank, a pair of lambs stotting away from the hedge as if on springs, a blackbird giving his alarm call, hidden in the sweet olive-yellow curdle of new leaves in the oak tree.

‘You’re such a fool,’ Polly told the mare, sitting her bounces with ease. Vesper flung her ears back and forth in acknowledgement, and then decided that a rivulet of water running across the path to the drainage ditch was a dangerous snake, paused to kill it with two fierce stabs of her forefoot, and leaped extravagantly over the corpse, clearing it by several feet in both dimensions.

Polly rode out to Twelvetrees, for the pleasure of seeing the mares with new foals at foot – stilt-legged woolly toys, still surprised by their own ability to run and buck – and then turned aside and rode across the fields to Holgate Beck, to follow its course and make a circuit home across Hob Moor. She never liked to go back the same way she went out.

‘And you shall have a gallop,’ she assured her dancing mare.

Her mind was a pleasant blank as they went along together, absorbed with the sights and sounds of spring without thinking about anything. She was pulled from this reverie when she reached the place where the beck crossed the track that came up from Tyburn and led to Morland Place, for there was a man standing there, watching her approach. Vesper snorted a warning, and started lifting her legs showily, like a hackney. Polly rode on towards him, unalarmed, though she did not recognise him. There were often tramps and wandering unemployed on the roads these days, but she had nothing about her to steal, and she could outrun anyone on Vesper. Besides, she sensed no danger from this man.

He was tall and thin, wearing nondescript brown clothes like a countryman, with a strange, shapeless hat that shaded his face. As she came near he pulled off the hat, and she drew a breath of surprise. It was Father Palgrave; but he was much changed. He was very thin, his face quite gaunt, and his short-cropped hair had turned completely silver.

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