The Horse of Selene by Juanita Casey

Author:Juanita Casey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781915290014
Publisher: Tramp Press

And Paudi. Of whom they said could charm the birds out of the trees. He hadn’t long before he was to die. Beside a small fire on the side of an English road, with the cold never to leave his bones and the black tin boiling away into steam. The tin hissed and spat when the water had gone. Between hail showers a mistle thrush sang to the shouting blue, until the next storm reared over the hills to drum the fire into flat water, studding it and Paudi’s curled body like a nailed boot.

Letty was the only daughter. Her father was a doctor who spent his retirement misjudging the tides of his home creek, so that I’m going for a sail, dear, meant at least four hours dragging himself and his boat across the mud, leaving scored wriggles behind like an injured snail.

Time and tide wait for no man was one of the doctor’s favourite sayings, but he had never learned it. He and the village ducks would leave together on the falling tide, waltzing down the narrow channel under the hunched oaks. They would usually spend the day together on the lower reaches of the creek, the ducks swimming tantalisingly in the deep main river only a few yards away, the doctor as high and dry as a stranded whale. In the evening the ducks would swim back again, slapping round him with bright nods to lower into the trickle again and paddle out of sight with the tail of the last drake tight curled as a teacup handle.

As a child Letty had found one of the drakes curled frozen on the lower bank and had picked him up thinking his tail would be still too. She hadn’t thought of it as feathers. If you tipped him up he’d pour out, she thought, like a jug.

His feet were flat under him like a Chinese carving when you turn it over. She had never forgotten the flat brown parcel body and the eye gone in like a button missing.

You don’t want to be stuck away here all your life. You must get out and meet people. The doctor, hauling himself up like a water rat on the banks, was insistent. Letty had to join sailing clubs and rowing clubs, tennis parties and dramatic societies, all of which involved her in long, winding journeys down creeks and up lanes, and in the perennial political arguments of such bodies.

She was perfectly happy to laze around the little village, but her father was determined she should get out and about. See the world. Not vegetate. You’re in a rut, Letty, rocking the dinghy like a pig in a muddy trough.

Content to suck and mullet around in his creek, he warned her of Cornwall’s diabolical influence, the insidious lichen of destructiveness gnawing into her heart to turn it to stone. As a child she was afraid of the high moors behind the creek, of the wells bubbling darkly of saints and devils, of the stone maidens and frenzied giants.

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