The Forever Horse by Stacy Gregg

Author:Stacy Gregg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-08-27T17:00:00+00:00

February 10, 1853

I have been cooped up for eight days in the carriage journeying to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Eight days with nothing to do! Yes, I tried to draw. But the roads were too bumpy, and I couldn’t keep the pencil steady. And I tried to read a book, but I felt sick, so instead I just stared out of the windows at the countryside. France, it turns out, is full of trees.

We overnighted in small inns along the route in Nevers, Moulins, Le Puy and Avignon. Each evening upon arrival the coachman would uncouple the horses and feed them and put them in the stalls below the inn with hay and water. Such lovely horses – a team of four – all of them dark bay. There was a time when I would have helped the coachman to tend and groom them. Now I couldn’t even tend to myself. I needed help to get anywhere at the inns as there were too many stairs to use my wheelchair so it got left on board the coach. I hate that chair anyway. It is so slow and cumbersome! It cannot cope with rutted ground or grassy terrain. It is a useless thing.

But then I am a useless thing too. I can’t move without the chair. So we are two useless things together.

It was midday when I arrived at Flamants Roses. There was a sign at the gate, but all the same, once we drove up to the house I was in disbelief.

“Is this it?” I asked the coachman. “Really?”

The house was a simple square stone building with a grey slate roof. The stone must have been painted a pale pink at some point, but so much of it was now lost beneath the overgrowth of rambling roses that smothered the façade, it was hard to tell.

The gardens, too, were overgrown as if nobody lived here, and beyond them the rest of the farm seemed like nothing more than a few outlying sheds bordered by swamp waters. I was underwhelmed. I had expected a mansion to rival the grandeur of our family chateau in Fontainebleau. Aunt Mimi seemed to have got the short straw when it came to inheritance. So this was to be my new home?

Even more distressing, after a whole week of travel to get here, there was nobody waiting to greet me. I sat in my wheelchair, wondering what to do, when suddenly I heard the barking of dogs. A moment later, two enormous beasts came bounding around the southern end of the house. They were strapping great dogs. Hunting hounds I guessed by their sleek physique, but not like any I had seen before. They had black heads and their bodies were speckled like a plover’s egg. Their long, floppy ears swept behind them and bright pink tongues lolled from their mouths as they ran to me. In just a few strides they were upon me and I was in danger of being licked to death as they smothered me with kisses.

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