The Wild Boy and Queen Moon Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  About the Author

  Also by K. M. Peyton

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Kathleen M Peyton is a top-selling author of more than thirty novels, the best-known of which is FLAMBARDS which, with its sequels, was made into a TV serial. The winner of both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Award for her work, this is her seventh title for the Transworld children’s lists.

  THE WILD BOY

  AND

  QUEEN MOON

  K.M.PEYTON

  To Anna, Pip and Buster

  SANDY MADE THE fateful remark on the school bus when they were going home. It fell into one of those spasmodic silences that sometimes happen in a crowd, so that everyone heard.

  ‘Any fool can win a hundred rosettes in a season when they’ve got a pony that cost twenty thousand pounds.’

  The fool she was talking about, Julia Marsden, was sitting in the front seat and did not turn round. She felt as if a knife had sunk itself between her shoulder-blades.

  Sandy went scarlet and hid her head in her voluminous duffle bag, scrambling for a book. Her friend Leo, beside her, whispered, ‘That’s a bit miaouwy for you,’ and Sandy’s brother Ian, sitting next to Julia, said to Julia kindly, ‘Don’t take any notice. It’s sour grapes. Her pony’s never won a rosette in its life.’

  Then the hubbub started up again and everyone forgot the moment’s awkwardness. Save Julia. And Sandy.

  * * *

  Last off the bus, far out in the country, Ian and Sandy got off at their lane end and dawdled home. The fields on either side were striped gold with stubble, basking in the early-evening, harvest-rich sun which was low over the ridge behind them. A small white sail drifted on the river below, beyond the marsh fields where the heifers were grazing. It was awful going back to school when the weather was still so good.

  Sandy was an outdoor girl. She was gold and brown like the fields, her hair sun-bleached like the outside of a haybale; she was tough and stocky like a boy. When her hair was short she was taken for a boy. Yet her brother Ian, three years older, was willowy like a girl, wiry and hard and clever and not given to the outdoors. He scowled a lot, tied to a farm ten miles from his urban friends and interests.

  ‘You shouldn’t have said that,’ he said. ‘She can’t help it.’

  ‘I didn’t mean anyone to hear, only Leo! It was awful. I could’ve died!’

  ‘It’s not her fault.’

  ‘I know that! Honestly. I feel really mean.’

  ‘She’s got terrible parents.’

  ‘Don’t go on!’

  Sandy’s evening was blighted. She didn’t like Julia, but she was sorry for her. Julia’s parents were very ambitious and had bought her a top JA pony which nearly always won, but also bit and kicked, bucked and bolted. Julia had a very hard life. She had a bad temper like her pony and was fast losing her nerve. Sandy knew that Julia did not deserve any more unkindnesses than she had to bear already.

  Guilt lay heavily.

  She sighed as they came down the slope to the dishevelled cottage where Flirtie Gertie lived.

  ‘I’ll call,’ she said. ‘Be nice to her.’

  It might assuage the guilt. Usually they slipped past quietly, hoping the old woman wouldn’t see them and waylay them with her batty remarks. Flirty Gertie was eighty-one, the widow of their grandfather’s cowman, still living in the tied cottage, and their mother sent her up meals and kept a neighbourly eye on her. Their mother expected them to chat her up when they passed by – ‘Sometimes she sees nobody all day!’ – but they hated it. The old lady was no sweetie, but acerbic and smelly. She still hopped about like a mangy sparrow, sweeping and dusting and digging her potato bed, but her conversation wasn’t very interesting.

  ‘Tell your da the water’s coming through the dormer window at the back – I’ve got to keep a bucket under it. And will you get me some elastic from the shop when you’re up there next? Me knickers keep falling down. I’ve no fat left on me backside any longer, that’s the real trouble.’

  Ian had gone on, grinning, and Sandy stayed just long enough to feel good about it. The old girl wasn’t bad; sometimes she laughed, but mostly it was complaints. She had a face as brown and wrinkled as a walnut, and black beady eyes which missed very little. Her wrists and ankles were thin as sticks and she wore old-fashioned brown stockings which wrinkled over her shoes, and a cross-over pinafore with tapes behind. She had wispy hair through which her skull showed through, none too cleanly.

  ‘She’s awful,’ they complained to their mother.

  ‘Yes, it’s called old age,’ their mother said cheerfully. ‘We’re all moving towards it, even you.’

  Grandpa called her Flirty Gertie because when she was young she ‘was a great one for the lads. She were a real pretty little thing.’ Sandy couldn’t think that far back. It was beyond her powers to see Gertie as a pretty little thing. The most awful thing she could think of was being really old. Yet neither Gertie nor Grandpa seemed to actually realize they were old. They still kept doing things old people shouldn’t and falling over and being surprised. Grandpa had fallen off the cowshed roof quite recently, where he had been replacing slipped tiles. He was eighty-five.

  Drakesend, where they lived, had been farmed by Grandpa and his father before him. It was halfway up what passed for a hill in these lowland parts, between the tidal river below and the wooded brow of the old parkland above. The house looked very picturesque, with its oak timbering infilled with bricks in patterns and its sagging roof of old brown tiles, but it was uncomfortable to live in, having no central heating and lots of cold, stone-flagged passages. Sandy always thought it ought to have ghosts, but no apparitions, friendly or otherwise, had ever disturbed her sleep. She assumed she wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up their vibrations. In the bottom corner of the window in her bedroom, engraved on the glass, was a spidery signature: Hannah Rosewall, and the date, 1776. Sandy thought of Hannah Rosewall when she lay in bed during the light summer evenings and wondered what her life was like at Drakesend in 1776. But absolutely no visions came to haunt her.

  Below the house were the old brick yards that dated back a century or two, but Bill Fielding, Sandy’s father, had built a modern block of barns alongside the old ones, and a new milking parlour for the cows. The best of the old yards he had fitted out as stables and set up as a do-it-yourself livery yard, his gesture towards ‘alternative farming’. He more or less left the running of it to Sandy – ‘You’re the horsy one round here’ – but as some of the customers were twice or three times her age and thought they knew everything, they didn’t take kindly to being told what they should do by a young girl. The best thing about it was that her schoolfriend, Leo, kept her pony in the yard and came down every evening on her bike.

  At least they could do what they liked with their own spare time and their own ponies.

  Unlike Julia, whose mother met her off the school bus in her second-best Rover and rushed her home to change into her jods and get some schooling in. Without even having any tea.

  Minnie, short for Big Gun from Minnesota, which was the pony’s registered name, was tied up in his loosebox, already saddled and bridled. A brown gelding of just under fourteen two hands, he was mostly thoroughbred and extremely good-looking. His winter coat, just coming thro
ugh, was dense as mole fur and shone with good health and over-feeding; his neat oiled hooves jigged impatiently over the floor, eager to go. As usual, Julia’s heart sank at the sight of him, instead of lifting with eager anticipation.

  ‘Take him for a good long hack,’ her mother ordered. ‘We won’t jump him tonight, so he won’t get too wound up for tomorrow.’ Tomorrow night he had to compete under floodlights in an indoor arena some twenty miles away. They would not get home before eleven, and Julia would fall asleep in the horsebox. Just hacking was, in effect, a rest-cure.

  Sandy’s remark in the bus had upset Julia.

  Everyone at school thought she was stuck-up and a show-off, but it was only how her parents made her seem, not how she herself wanted to be. Her brother Nick and sister Petra were very competitive and sharp but both had left school now and Julia was too young to join in with their activities, nor did she want to. She had few friends, not even Minnie who bit her as soon as looked at her. Sandy’s pony, George, although useless, looked for Sandy over the gate with his ears pricked and his upper lip quivering with devotion. Julia had seen him, and envied.

  Sometimes she thought she would like it if she had a pony like George. She only wanted to go down through the lanes and the water-meadows to the sea-wall and ride along by the river, watching the geese and the odd yacht. Dreaming. Wishing she didn’t have to win. Wishing she wasn’t the odd man out in her family. Wishing she had time to go out with other girls, or just mess about with someone else, doing nothing in particular, like Sandy and Leo. But even when she just hacked out she couldn’t wander along and dream, because Minnie was forever fighting for his head, snatching at his bit and pulling her arms out of their sockets. When he felt grass underfoot he went, whether she willed it or not. Julia was a good rider but her bravery grew thin sometimes. It was no fun fighting all the way, and being carted.

  She went out along the road and down the lane past Flirtie Gertie’s cottage towards the river. She was fairly sure she wouldn’t meet Sandy, for Drakesend lay on its own lane which forked off left just past Gertie’s, and the track she chose went straight down. Minnie walked like a cat on hot bricks, tucking his nose in and switching his tail irritably. The ground was hard after the long hot summer and Julia knew she mustn’t gallop if she could help it: it would be bad for the pony’s expensive legs. Not on this hard-baked track, at least. She let out her rein cautiously, wanting to relax the pony, but he only snatched the more, poking out his nose and walking faster and faster.

  ‘Oh, I hate you!’ she snapped.

  She was hungry and tired, and just wanted to enjoy the lovely evening. Self-pity swamped her. She had no friends, no kind, understanding mother, no super brother – like Sandy. Her mother was hard as iron, an ex-showjumper who now used her children to pursue the sport instead of doing it herself. Nick and Petra seemed to enjoy it and Julia had when she was younger, but now she had to ride Minnie she hated it. Minnie was brilliant, and when they didn’t win it was always her fault, not Minnie’s – her fault for not making the turn tighter, her fault for not taking a steadying pull, her fault for asking for an extra stride. Her mother expected her to win. Her mother was a bad loser. Her mother hadn’t bought her Big Gun from Minnesota to come second.

  ‘And you don’t like me, you pig, do you?’ she said out loud, and gathered up her reins and sent him on at a swinging trot down the grassy path. He had beautiful paces – if only his temperament were as sweet! She wouldn’t let him canter because she knew he would buck.

  She let him scramble up the sea-wall, and stopped him for a moment to look down the river. The tide was out and the river – called the Branklet – was only a channel between banks of shining mud. The Branklet wound lazily across the marshes, a small tributary of the big river, the Brank, some three miles away which went directly out to sea. The Branklet was navigable at high tide to some three or four miles beyond Drakesend, and one or two fishing boats came in and out when the water was there; small yachts came up to anchor so that their crews could walk up to the pub over the fields. There was a grass-covered wall on either side which was lovely to ride along, and the marsh below was patterned with reeds and ditches frothing with meadowsweet and ancient hawthorns gnarled from the east wind. Julia liked things like that, unlike her mother. Her mother thought there was nothing to beat riding in a menage with rails round it. She only sent Julia on hacks to try and ‘let down’ the evil Minnie. Tomorrow it would be the floodlit show-jumping arena again.

  In the summer if the water was high on a hot day, Sandy and Leo would ride their ponies down to the wall and turn them loose while they had a swim. Julia had seen them. Imagine doing that with Minnie!

  Minnie was tired of her dreaming and started to pull again. The turf on the top of the wall was springy and full of flowers. Julia’s arms ached so she gave up holding on and let Minnie go. As she galloped, she thought how much she hated all this action and spite, and wished with all her heart she could just lie in the grass until the sun went down over the trees behind Drakesend. And never go show-jumping again.

  ‘I say, look at Julia go!’

  Sandy and Leo were getting two of the horses in from the bottom field. (Do-it-yourself was a somewhat lax term, several of the owners much preferring Sandy to ‘do it’, rather than ‘themselves’.) As they walked down, swinging the headcollars, they could see the distant Big Gun from Minnesota tearing along the sea-wall in the distance.

  ‘The clock goes back at the end of the month,’ said Sandy. ‘She won’t come down here then.’

  Sandy didn’t like meeting Julia when she rode out. Julia always gave her a terrible inferiority complex. Minnie was so brilliant, and dear George would amble along while Minnie went on springs. Sandy didn’t know what it felt like to ride a pony like Minnie, and was aware of her ignorance. She supposed she knew as much about looking after and handling horses as Julia, because Julia’s place had grooms. But there was nothing impressive about that, compared with show-jumping.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to be Julia, all the same,’ Leo said, guessing her thoughts. ‘You don’t enjoy things you’ve got to do. We only do this because we like it. We haven’t got to.’

  ‘Speak for yourself! Miss Ball asked me to get them in. She can’t come down tonight!’

  ‘She’s a bit batty, Miss Ball. The weather’s beautiful. Why bring them in?’

  ‘Because the little darlings like their beddy-byes. You know her.’

  Miss Ball was a retired school teacher who had bought a black mare, which she christened Blackie (‘Oh, the imagination!’ cried Sandy’s mother), at a car-boot sale. She brought it to Drakesend and hacked happily around until, one morning, Blackie was found with a foal beside her. This was called Surprise. Miss Ball was over the moon with delight, in spite of having to pay two liveries, and now doted on her couple like a mother hen. Miss Ball, who was short and round, had a friend called Miss Stitchman, who was tall and thin. Sandy’s father called them Stick and Ball.

  The girls put Blackie and Surprise in their adjoining boxes where large haynets were hanging ready for them. Most of the horses were still at grass, the weather was so mild. Their clients were nearly all pottering sorts of riders. There were only one or two who rode seriously: a rather spectacular young woman with red hair called Polly Marlin, who had an eventer, and a spotty-faced but talented boy called Henry, her pupil, who wanted to be world champion at dressage. He was saving up to buy his dream horse, which he reckoned would cost about ten thousand pounds. In the meantime he was making do with a one-eyed mare from the Rescue who was already doing flying changes and a crabwise progression known as passage, which was quite impressive.

  Sandy and Leo went into the tackroom to hang up the headcollars, and then up the ladder into their private domain, the old hayloft above the tack and feedroom. They had their own kettle up here and had furnished it with thrown-out chairs and an old feed-bin for a table. Everyone knew better than to join them, and the customers would stand at the bottom and shout i
f they wanted Sandy. They had their own kettle and coffee things below.

  Leo (short for Leonie) wasn’t allowed to have animals at home, her parents being very clean and particular, so she spent most of her time at the farm, mucking out and messing about. Luckily she was very clever and could do her homework in a trice, so her parents couldn’t complain. She was a thin, earnest-looking girl with large spectacles and sparky brown eyes. Her hair was straight and fell down on either side of her face so that she was forever pushing it back, looking as if she was peering out of a thicket. She was brilliant at maths and science and hadn’t a hope of not going to university and becoming a professor in the years ahead, but she loved Drakesend and wanted to be a farmer. Sandy didn’t know what she wanted to be. Happy, really.

  Sandy put the kettle on and Leo crossed over to the opening that looked out over the yard and down to the river. She leaned her head against the jamb.

  ‘Do you think he’ll come tonight?’

  ‘No. Not up here. Along the sea-wall, perhaps.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Nobody else has noticed him, only us.’

  ‘Julia has. She’s seen him. Not close though. If he sees you, she says, he gallops off.’

  ‘He rides at night, in the moonlight!’

  ‘I wish I’d seen him!’ Leo said.

  ‘On the sea-wall, in the moonlight, on that grey horse! It looked fantastic!’

  Sandy’s bedroom faced the river and she had looked out, without putting the light on, and seen a rider on a grey horse galloping over the marshes, silhouetted against the wide, silver spread of the river at high water. Once the rider had come up the lane from the river and galloped past Flirtie Gertie’s in the dusk, but even then she never got a good look at him. It was a boy, they could see that, thin and dark, on a grey thoroughbred. He rode without a saddle and with only a rope halter as far as she could see.

  ‘The wild boy!’ Leo sighed. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Dad says he must be a gypsy.’