The Island Horse by Susan Hughes

Author:Susan Hughes [Hughes, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Children's Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-55453-994-9
Publisher: Kids Can Press Ltd.
Published: 2012-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

The next day, the morning sky was dark and cloudy. The wind was high.

Ellie was slow getting up. It seemed like night. She yawned, stretched and dozed.

Her father knocked gently on her bedroom door. He poked his head in. “It’s a fierce day,” he warned her. “Stay inside.”

She wanted to roll over. She wanted to pull up the bedcovers and go back to sleep where everything could be as she wished. But something pulled at her. Something would not let her fall back into that deep place.

Ellie got up. She dressed and ate, listening to the wind rattle the windows. She did her chores. Found four eggs. Swept the kitchen floor. Made the beds. Even baked a simple cake for supper, remembering to keep the fire low and even, like her father had shown her. Then, the kitchen warm with the smell of cooked apples, she knew she should sit and draw, or talk to the cow in the barn, or look out to sea from her bedroom window. After all, her father had told her to stay indoors. But it was also her father who had brought her to this nowhere island in the first place. Her thoughts kept returning to the dunes. Orchid might be there!

She remembered to close the shutters. She put on her sweater, her waterproof slicker over top and her boots. Then she set out along the beach.

The ocean waves were high and rolling. They broke on the shore wildly. Her hair whipped her face. She was nervous.

She kept walking. Once she turned, feeling as if perhaps she was being followed. But there was nothing behind her. No one.

She thought about Sarah. Ellie had been so upset imagining that Sarah was spying on her. She wanted Orchid to be her secret, her one good thing in this empty place. But maybe I was too harsh, she thought. If Sarah did see me with Orchid, maybe she didn’t tell anyone. Maybe she understands. Maybe she just wants to be friends, after all.

Ellie reached the place where the dunes came right to the edge of the beach. Orchid was not there.

She waited, crouching, then sitting. Knees pulled up to her chin. The grass bent around her. The sand was damp. The sky was threatening. The horse was not there.

An island of sand. What if the wind blew it all away? What if we’re left without anything? Ellie wondered.

The storm hit. The rain came suddenly, and the wind drowned out all other sounds.

Ellie sprang up, covering her head with her hood. Discouraged and disappointed, she peered into the distance, inland. No horses were there. She looked along the shore. No horses here either, although there were seals. They had hauled out along the beach. Gray seals. Dozens of them. They lay on the sand as if they had always been there and would never move. As gray as the air, as the rain-filled skies.

Hunched, holding her elbows, Ellie turned quickly back toward the station. She walked briskly along the dunes, drenched.

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