Her saddle was longer and flatter than others I had seen, but it had none of the pommels and straps that I would usually see peeping from the folds of ladies’ skirts and I realised that Iris would not ride side-saddle but astride like a little girl on a rocking horse.
‘Iris, you are ready at last!’ cried Sir Howard, looking right past me. I turned to see Iris walking behind me in a riding jacket and britches. I had not seen such clothes on a girl before and I found myself staring at the curve of her legs and hips as if there was something indecent about her. I could not help thinking that she had forgotten her skirts and had left the house in just pantaloons.
‘Agnes and I will go ahead and open the gates,’ said Sir Howard, striding to the gate and beckoning my mother to follow him. ‘The beast seems to be a little calmer now.’
‘You said you had a pony,’ I whispered to Iris. ‘I might not know how to ride but at least I know that she is too large to ever be called a pony!’
‘She is as docile as one,’ she replied. ‘Despite what my father says. Look!’ She ran her hand along the horse’s flank, all the way to the curve of its rump until she was standing behind the tail.
‘Don’t!’ I said. ‘You should be careful, she could kick out!’
She laughed. ‘The stable lad at Waldley Court has been teaching me about horses. She wouldn’t harm me.’
‘Sam!’ I said. ‘Sam Denman. I know him.’
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Samuel.’ The way she said the name reminded me that Sam was just a servant and I suddenly felt ashamed that I had mentioned him.
Iris had to stretch her leg high to reach the stirrup but after a couple of hops she was towering above me in the saddle.
‘Miss?’ Dora held a rope out to me and I saw it was attached to the bridle.
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I…’ But then I saw that Dora’s other hand was on her back and she stood with her hip thrust out to balance the weight of her swollen belly.
‘Alright,’ I muttered, taking the rope reluctantly. ‘Walk on!’
But the horse did not budge, no matter how much I clicked my tongue and cajoled her.
‘What’s her name?’ I asked.
‘Edelweiss,’ said Iris, laughing.
It was a word that I had seen written in botany textbooks next to pictures of a small white flower but I had never heard it spoken. Iris pronounced the word in such a way I only just recognised it. I was reminded that there were things that could not be learnt from textbooks and that people of her class would always have a kind of knowledge that went beyond reading.
‘Edelweiss,’ I repeated, trying to harden the sounds the way that she had. ‘Edelweiss!’ Iris kicked her on a little harder and we moved forward at last.
We rounded the sunken fence and passed through the back gate, taking the track that led out on to the common, the horse’s hooves a soft thud on the rough grass. Edelweiss seemed to move at her own pace, happy to be out of the yard, I thought. There was a gentle bow in the rope between us. As we passed Sir Howard and my mother struggling up the slope, I was glad that the horse had none of the skittishness that Sir Howard had mentioned and when Iris said ‘walk on,’ I took it that she did not want to wait for them and I pulled the rope a little harder.
As we passed the small clump of trees, I peered into the branches, but the man I had seen from the window was gone and there was not so much as a track through the bracken or broken branch to suggest that he had been there at all. Soon we came to the top of a little ridge with a good view of the rest of the common.
‘Aim for the little thicket of wych elms, the one with the foxholes,’ Iris said. ‘We can join the low track from there and it should give us some shade from this sun.’
I pulled the horse on, the slow drum of its hooves sounding hollow on the springy turf.
‘My father knows nothing of horses,’ she said. ‘He grew up in London where they were only used to pull a carriage. I am late to get my first horse at fifteen. When we bought Edelweiss we had to completely clear out the end stable because my father was using it to store parts for his motorcar.’
I glanced up to her as she spoke, glad that I had a reason to at last, but whatever it was that kept drawing me back to her face remained a mystery and I found myself stumbling over the tussocky grass.
‘My father bought Edelweiss from a neighbour he despises,’ she continued. ‘He feels he paid over the odds just to get her for me, but Samuel the stable lad still comes over from Waldley Court to exercise her. My father won’t let me do that. He says she needs to gallop to get the madness out of her, and I’m not ready for that.’
She spoke of things that I could not reply to, subjects that were strange to me, for my mother and I could have barely afforded a donkey. Suddenly I remembered that I should dislike this spoilt little girl, who spoke of expensive motorcars, horses and staff to exercise them. I wondered how she thought we could ever be friends, and the fact that she had sat with me on the window seat in the library and mentioned friendship began to annoy me. I said nothing in reply to her, just led the horse forward, its hooves thudding behind me.
After a while we came to a little plateau and I led the horse down the gentle slope and on to the cart track, Edelweiss’s hooves kicking up dust as I led her into the patch of shade where the boughs of the elm thicket overhung the track.
‘Whoa!’ Iris pulled back on the reins. She turned her head and I followed her gaze back up the slope and only then did I realise that there was no sign of my mother and Sir Howard, and I imagined my mother still panting behind us, her skirts bunched around her knees as she stumbled over the scrubby bracken, trying to catch up.
‘This is why I like this spot,’ Iris said. ‘They can’t see us here, nobody can.’ She swung her leg from the saddle and landed next to me on the track, then she took the rope from me, stroking the horse’s neck.
‘I thought you said we came here to get out of the sun,’ I said.
But she just laughed. ‘Get on!’
‘What?’
‘Get on,’ she repeated. ‘Get up on the saddle.’
‘I told you,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how.’
‘Even you will need to learn sometime,’ she said.
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but not now, not like this!’
‘Put your foot in the stirrup,’ she said, her voice hardening.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’
‘My father knows you only as the vicar’s daughter,’ she said, ‘but I think you are more spirited than that. Am I wrong?’ She raised her eyebrows at me but she did not need to say anything more.
My classmates in the village school had often taunted me for being the vicar’s daughter, but this time the remark seemed to cut a little deeper and I wondered how she really saw me – the poor village girl, the performing monkey brought to entertain her, or the servant forced to lead her horse. Maybe she had heard that I was a delinquent after all, but at that moment, I thought that she understood something about me, and I fancied that maybe she sensed the same familiarity that I saw in her.
I bunched up my skirts and bent my knee, grasping it to my chest as I tried to wiggle my toe into the stirrup. The horse’s flank swayed against me and I grabbed the saddle with both hands, hauling my chest against the leather and twisting myself in the saddle until I could throw my leg clumsily over the back and sit upright. The horse moved underneath me in a slow lumbering waltz, every step about to topple me from the saddle.