Bitterhall, Helen McClory [red queen free ebook TXT] 📗

Sliver

I wiped my face at a sink, someone was using the bathroom and they yelped but I was out. White stumbling steps. I wiped my nose which had blood on it – my fingers had blood on them. And shocked laughter burst behind me like a flower in a hedge. I scrambled through the nearest door – white, close fitted to the wall – and closed it behind me. It was a kind of walk-in wardrobe, close and delicately fragrant with a Jo Malone type scent – my grandmother and her friends’ houses – a sensor light turning on as I came in. Coats made shadows in fingers on the floor. The book – that would help – I pulled it out and in my fingers it fell open to an entry after the midway point:

J and the hunters returned to Bitterhall about two, and went into the house for refreshments, leaving the horses to the grooms. I stayed a little while. I have always loved J’s horse almost as much as my own. It is a great black stallion with a white star a white saddle. No one might normally ride him unless they were very much the master of themselves. I decided I would brush him myself and led him into the stables. They were full with hay; the hayloft overhead was flowing over, sending golden arrows of straw down upon my shoulders. I brushed them off with the horse-brush, laughing. The men removed the leather saddle, reins and snaffle, and joked about the hunger of hunters who have only caught a fox. I said we had not caught any beastie at all. All that had happened was a dog had caught a thorn in its muzzle.

I blinked and looked up at the room and there – I could see Bitterhall clearly before me. I couldn’t have dreamed something in such high resolution. It stood grey-stone austere in the frail wintery Scottish fields with double wings and stables and a long winding drive through a ride of naked winter trees. There was the smoke: something burning in the courtyard where the stable hands were huddled. The room’s walls were still faintly there. The room itself was both tiny and massively vast. I felt my breathing speed up, and I pressed my back to the door. But out there was only more chaos, and in here, at least, was what needed to be seen: One of the stable-hands hailed me. He was walking towards me and I was walking towards him. He had Daniel’s face. And the clothes I had recovered. And he was standing right in front of me.

‘James,’ he said.

‘I’m – I’m not James,’ I said, voice high and stupid. I wasn’t James. I had a small, pinched feeling I was not James to him.

‘No. But I call you that if I want to,’ said the man, ‘Here and now. And why not, if it’s James’ diary you carry about with you. Who else could you be?’

I was in the stable. The man was standing beside me, holding a horse’s saddle in his arms. He hauled it up and hung it across a half-door. Inside the stall a sturdy black horse stood, large as a house itself almost, facing the wall, tail flicking. Stink of hot horses and cold sweat. Further back from the horses a table stood with a lantern on it. Bedding in one corner, where there was a lantern, a rolled pack. I did not belong here. He belonged here. In fact, he had invited me in to his particular home – the size of a sleeping roll, the warm bodies of horses. I went over and touched the top post of the stall. It felt real: I got a splinter. All the while he watched me, even as he rubbed his hand on the leather of the saddle, smoothing it down like it was the horse itself.

‘I’ve a splinter,’ I said, holding up my hand. It throbbed – suddenly deep in and unexpectedly raw pain. I thought, what if it gets infected, what if I fall ill, here, in this stable, and I have to go to my bed and lose a week or more, or die from it.

‘Let me look at it,’ he said, moving with terrible deliberation to me. He wasn’t – I thought for the name – Daniel. Not Daniel. He was his own man, and not mine either. But he was, in a way. Mine. Like an extension of myself. I shook my head. He had my hand in his. It was rough and had dirt in the cracks and it was held roughly and made my hand dirty.

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘well . . .’ he bent his head over my finger. I felt him gently nibble at the place the splinter had gone in. He pulled his head back; a little piece of the wood stuck out from the teeth. He spat it out cleanly.

‘You could have used your nails,’ I said.

‘Suppose I could’ve, sir,’ he said, looking away. We were both ashamed. I knew his nails were trimmed too short to have been any use and that my own would have worked. He’d done it the best way he could. He held my hand still. My ears were hot. The horse stamped. I could hear muffled music, silken, playing through the wooden walls.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘then – don’t do it again,’ he gently let my hand go. He turned to his work. I walked over to another stable where a mottled white and grey horse was facing outwards. I put my hand carefully on the top of its head.

‘Wait,’ I said, ‘one moment. You were talking about the diary? This one?’

I held it out to him. He reached out but drew his hand back.

‘No, you’re to keep it,’ he said.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why is it mine?’

‘James,’ he said.

‘I’m not James.’

And then I was only in a wardrobe, lost in