‘We’ll never catch him,’ Ginnie said as we reached the road. ‘It’s no use running. We don’t know which way he went.’ She was in great distress: eyes flooding, tears on her cheeks. ‘Where’s Dad?’
‘I should think he’s out in his car, looking. And Nigel’s in a Land Rover.’
‘I heard a horse gallop through the Watcherleys’,’ she said. ‘I was in one of the boxes with a foal. I never thought... I mean, I thought it might be a mare...’
A speeding car passed in front of us, followed closely by two others doing at least sixty miles an hour, one of them dicily passing a heavy articulated lorry which should have been home in its nest on a Sunday. The thought of Sandcastle loose in that battlefield was literally goose-pimpling and I began for the first time to believe in his imminent destruction. One of those charging monsters would be sure to hit him. He would waver across the road into their path, swerving, rudderless, hopelessly vulnerable... a five million pound traffic accident in the making.
‘Let’s go this way,’ I said, pointing to the left. A motorcyclist roared from that direction, head down in a black visor, going too fast to stop.
Ginnie shook her head sharply. ‘Dad and Nigel will be on the road. But there’s a track over there...’ She pointed slantwise across the road. ‘He might just have found it. And there’s a bit of a hill and even if he isn’t up there at least we might see him from there... you can see the road in places... I often ride up there.’ She was off again, running while she talked, and I fell in beside her. Her face was screwed up with the intensity of her feelings and I felt as much sympathy for her as dismay about the horse. Sandcastle was insured — I’d vetted the policy myself — but Oliver Knowles’ prestige wasn’t. The escape and death of the first great stallion in his care would hardly attract future business.
The track was muddy and rutted and slippery from recent rain. There were also a great many hoofprints, some looking new, some overtrodden and old. I pointed to them as we ran and asked Ginnie pantingly if she knew if any of those were Sandcastle’s.
‘Oh.’ She stopped running suddenly. ‘Yes. Of course. He hasn’t got shoes on. The blacksmith came yesterday, Dad said...’ She peered at the ground dubiously, ‘... he left Sandcastle without new shoes because he was going to make leather pads for under them... I wasn’t really listening.’ She pointed. ‘I think that might be him. Those new marks... they could be, they really could.’ She began running again up the track, impelled by hope now as well as horror, fit in her jeans and sweater and jodhpur boots after all that compulsory jogging.
I ran beside her thinking that mud anyway washed easily from shoes, socks and trouser legs. The ground began to rise sharply and to narrow between bare-branched scratchy bushes; and the jumble of hoof marks inexorably led on and on.
‘Please be up here,’ Ginnie was saying. ‘Please, Sandcastle, please be up here.’ Her urgency pumped in her legs and ran in misery down her cheeks. ‘Oh please... please...’
The agony of adolescence, I thought. So real, so overpowering... so remembered.
The track curved through the bushes and opened suddenly into a wider place where grass grew in patches beside the rutted mud; and there stood Sandcastle, head high, nostrils twitching to the wind, a brown and black creature of power and beauty and majesty.
Ginnie stopped running in one stride and caught my arm fiercely.
‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it. You stay here. Keep still. Please keep still.’
I nodded obediently, respecting her experience. The colt looked ready to run again at the slightest untimely movement, his sides quivering, his legs stiff with tension, his tail sweeping up and down restlessly.
He’s frightened, I thought suddenly. He’s out here, lost, not knowing where to go. He’s never been free before, but his instinct is still wild, still against being caught. Horses were never truly tamed, only accustomed to captivity.
Ginnie walked towards him making crooning noises and holding out her hand palm upwards, an offering hand with nothing to offer. ‘Come on, boy,’ she said. ‘Come on boy, there’s a good boy, it’s all right, come on now.’
The horse watched her as if he’d never seen a human before, his alarm proclaimed in a general volatile trembling. The rope hung down from his head collar, its free end curling on the ground; and I wondered whether Ginnie would be able to control the colt if she caught him, where Lenny with all his strength had let him go.
Ginnie came to within a foot of the horse’s nose, offering her open left hand upwards and bringing her right hand up slowly under his chin, reaching for the head collar itself, not the rope: her voice made soothing, murmuring sounds and my own tensed muscles began to relax.
At the last second Sandcastle would have none of it. He wheeled away with a squeal, knocking Ginnie to her knees; took two rocketing strides towards a dense patch of bushes, wheeled again, laid back his ears and accelerated in my direction. Past me lay the open track, down hill again to the slaughtering main road.
Ginnie, seen in peripheral vision, was struggling to her feet in desperation. Without thinking of anything much except perhaps what that horse meant to her family, I jumped not out of his way but at his flying head, my fingers curling for the head collar and missing that and fastening round the rope.
He nearly tore my arms out of their sockets and all the skin off my palms. He yanked me off my feet, pulled me through the mud and trampled on my legs. I clung all the same with both hands to the rope and bumped against his shoulder and knee, and shortly more by weight than skill hauled him to the side of the track and into the bushes.
The bushes, indeed, acted as an anchor. He couldn’t drag my heaviness through them, not if I kept hold of the rope; and I wound the rope clumsily round a stump of branch for leverage, and that was roughly that. Sandcastle stood the width of the bush away, crossly accepting the inevitable, tossing his head and quivering but no longer trying for full stampede.
Ginnie appeared round the curve in the track, running and if possible looking more than ever distraught. When she saw me she stumbled and half fell and came up to me uninhibitedly crying.
‘Oh, I’m so glad, so glad, and you should never do that, you can be killed, you should never do it, and I’m so grateful, so glad... oh dear.’ She leant against me weakly and like a child wiped her eyes and nose on my sleeve.
‘Well,’ I said pragmatically, ‘what do we do with him now?’
What we decided, upon consideration, was that I and Sandcastle should stay where we were, and that Ginnie should go and find Nigel or her father, neither she nor I being confident of leading our prize home without reinforcements.
While she was gone I made an inventory of damage, but so far as my clothes went there was nothing the cleaners couldn’t see to, and as for the skin, it would grow again pretty soon. My legs though bruised were functioning, and there was nothing broken or frightful. I made a ball of my handkerchief in my right palm which was bleeding slightly and thought that one of these days a habit of launching oneself at things like fleeing stallions and boys with knives might prove to be unwise.
Oliver, Ginnie, Nigel and Lenny all appeared in the Land Rover, gears grinding and wheels spinning in the mud. Sandcastle, to their obvious relief, was upon inspection pronounced sound, and Oliver told me forcefully that no one, should ever, repeat ever, try to stop a bolting horse in that way.