For Want Of A Nail… Horses and The Historical Novel – Guest Post

I’ve invited a very special guest to write a post for me this time out.

I first met Helen Hollick through her Arthurian books, and I loved her vision of Dark Age Britain. A Gwenhyfar who was fierce and real and very solid, Arthur who was very much un-shiny and probably smelt of horse a lot. And the two horses he likely smelt of – Hasta and Onager. Who may or may not have influenced Tyburn and Doubting Thomas….

Nearly every historical novel has at least one horse in it somewhere. Unless it’s a nautical novel or set in the Americas pre-Christopher Columbus. Although, even sailors came ashore, where they would, one way or another, meet with a horse.

So, horses are important. You are unlikely to read a contemporary novel that didn’t, somewhere, mention a car or a bus or a ’plane … a mode of transport, which is exactly what horses were. Cart horses, plough horses, riding horses, carriage horses, war horses. All of them in a variety of colours, heights and breeds. Big horses, little horses. Fat ponies, thin ponies. (Oh, and donkeys and mules.)

You would think, then, that authors would take more care about their inclusion of the  Noble Equine in their novels. The majority of authors take great care, time and trouble with researching their historical facts, diligently describing within the narrative the accuracy of locations, living conditions, clothing, food, battle tactics. Accuracy adds believability to the characters who move through the text as they love, laugh, squabble – or whatever. But the research and accuracy of fact all too often falls short once a horse trots into a scene.

The thing is, when reading historical novels I can pick up straight away whether the author has, or hasn’t, a clue about horses beyond the fact that they have four feet and can gallop about. Good novels have believable characters doing believable (or sometimes unbelievable in the ‘astonishing heroic adventure’ sense of the word) things. But it is a rare treat to read a novel that has believable horses or horsey scenes. (I might add that TV and movies are even worse for this – including horse-orientated TV dramas or movies!) That luxury carriage, or rough and ready stagecoach, cannot be pulled for miles by a team of horses running at a gallop. Come to that, a single horse carrying a rider cannot gallop for miles without serious consequences. The longest British horserace is the Grand National, which covers a little over four miles … but these horses are athletes, fit, healthy and trained. Oh, and carrying very lightweight jockeys. In North America the Quarter Horse  excelled at sprinting short distances of a quarter mile or less. Think sprinter Usain Bolt rather then long distance Sir Mo Farah. Even when used for hunting, horses would not be galloping about all over the place for hours at a time. (Much of hunting is standing around in the rain or cold waiting for hounds to find a scent.)

So there is speed to consider, and distances – how far can horses go in a day? The answer will vary depending on the nature of the terrain, the type of horse, the ability of the rider. A horse can probably travel about 25-35 miles (40 – 56.5 km) without a rest if it is walking at a steady pace. Maybe about 50 miles (80.5 km) if it is fit and healthy, and again the pace is steady, alternating between walk and trot. An endurance competition horse can manage about 100 miles (161 km) in a day. But most horses of the past were not modern, fit, healthy endurance horses!

Then there is the ‘tack’ – bridle and saddle. Saddles have changed a lot from Roman times to present day, especially where a lady’s side-saddle is concerned. Modern side-saddles have only been around since the mid-1800s. Oh, and while I’m on the subject, it is actually more comfortable and safer to ride ‘aside’, providing the rider is seated properly and the saddle fitted correctly. And men also rode aside: grooms would ride a lady’s horse and wounded soldiers returning from war who had lost limbs could continue to ride with a side-saddle.

Breeds. Ponies and horses are very different – one is not just a smaller version of the other! (Give me a pony every day if you want something intelligent and robust. Horses, however, if you want fences to not be knocked down, hedges squeezed through, and to know that of an evening they will be where you left them in the morning. Harry Houdini is not a patch on an escape artist Exmoor pony!) We have lost many breeds over the years: the warhorse Destriers, the lady’s quiet Jennet… Nor is it realised by many an author that in the earlier centuries, up until about the thirteenth, most horses were under fifteen hands high. (A hand = 4 inches and you measure to the withers. If you don’t know what the ‘withers are – look it up!)

If you look at the Bayeux Tapestry all the riders seem to be riding small horses – that’s because they were riding small horses! In one novel I looked at some while ago, set during the fifth century King Arthur was riding a very large horse with lots of hair around its feet: the description of a Shire horse. The story was, apparently written by a history academic. Well he or she needed to go back to the classroom, Shire horses were not around pre-Tudor.

And as for feed… Horses do eat grass and hay, but to be kept fit, for strenuous use – pulling carriages and carts for instance – they need corn. Note to USA readers: no, this does not refer to corn on the cob/maize, which would not have been known in England before the likes of the Conquistadors and Sir Walter  Raleigh. A ‘corn fed’ horse means one fed on grain like oats and barley.

On the other side of the coin, to read a novel where the writer clearly knows her horses is a treat. I cite mine host here. Ms Logue and her motley crew of (alas fictional) rogues ride believable horses, doing believable equine things.

Black Beauty became such a classic because Anna Sewell knew her stuff, and any horse person will instantly understand the ‘for want of a nail’ quote:

“For want of a nail the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a horse the rider is lost, for want of a rider the battle is lost, for want of a battle the kingdom is lost – and all for the want of a nail.”

I’ll leave you to figure out why just one lost horseshoe nail could cause such devastation.

Horse people will know.

Helen’s Exmoor pony, Mr Mischief  © Helen Hollick

Website: https://helenhollick.net/

Amazon Author Page: https://viewauthor.at/HelenHollick /

Join My Newsletter for ‘read it first’ updates! ©http://tinyletter.com/HelenHollick

Discovering Diamonds: reviewing historical fiction, submissions welcome  

https://discoveringdiamonds.blogspot.com/

Rebel Remounts #3 – The Unnameable Returns (aka Blossom)

So today’s rebel remount is Blossom – aka, for most of two books, The Stupid Brown Horse. Now, this is the first time any of the sixth (!!!) Uncivil Wars books has seen the light of day, and it’s quite long. But it’s set after Marston Moor, after Hollie’s beloved Tyburn has been invalided out of the Northern Horse, and it’s the first time he’s set eyes on his family in almost a year. (Thomazine is just two, at this point. You can see how this is going to pan out for him.)

Oh God but he was lame, he trotted with the tip of his off fore barely grazing the grass so that he lurched rather than the old smooth flow of water flowing downhill –

But he was still Tib, and his head came up and his ears swivelled towards Hollie with the same fierce joy as if he had four sound legs instead of a great ugly puckered scar torn across his chest and all the muscle under it in rags.

Hollie slid off the brown horse’s back and his black pearl limped those last strides to bury his head in the breast of his master’s coat. (And Hollie wept, not silently and not beautifully, but there was no one here under the shifting underwater golden light of the willow trees to know, save for the ungainly brown horse from the Yorkshire campaign.)

Tib grew bored. Someone – a number of someones, possibly – had made a pet of the black stallion, and after he had lipped Hollie’s hair with the evident satisfaction of someone who had found a thing that had been missing, he turned his back and limped away. It was not a dismissal. It was, if you liked, a confirmation. Here you are, and the world is as it should be.

Tib was steel and shadow, but the stupid brown horse stood apologetically with the tips of its ears almost touching with the earnestness of its concern, looking like a clod of earth. It wasn’t even a proper colour. It was a murky, messy, indeterminate brown.

He whistled Tyburn, and the black horse came about in a great slow circle. He’d have simply pivoted on his quarters, once. Hollie had something in his eye again. He must be touching the beast, patting and smoothing and straightening, he must be reminding his hands of the feel of a solid shoulder and the sleek of muscle and the long cobweb-drift of a mane –

“Daddy!”

A scream like a mortar-shell overhead, and he automatically stiffened, catching the horse’s head because Tib was a battle-horse, he was made to react with fire and fury to every unexpected thing, and Hollie was suddenly cold as his tiny precious firstborn went thundering under the stallion’s feet.

And that lethal battle-hardened engine of fire and fury jerked a little, but more in a sort of indulgent disapproval, and then shook his head and touched his muzzle to Thomazine’s tangled bright hair.

Exactly as he had done to Hollie. Here you are, too, and the world is as it should be twice over.

There was something stuck in his throat that refused to be swallowed away, looking at his little daughter whose arms barely reached around the stallion’s chest but who was hugging him for all she was worth. (Possibly she should prefer the society of other gently-born children. Possibly she ought to have a cap on decently and not to be covered in grass-stains and horse-slobber. Possibly she would have to be somebody else’s daughter to be any different.) “Daddy, then, does not get a hug?” he said dryly, and she managed to extract one arm and bury her face in the top of his boots, and Tyburn rumbled grumpily and limped sideways so that he was leaning against both of them.

“Who that, daddy?” Thomazine murmured. Typical of Thomazine that she considered the stupid brown horse a who, rather than a what, and he grinned into Tib’s mane for Tib was his dear and his only and the stupid brown horse was –

“Brought me from Yorkshire. Had to make do, lass.”

“What’s his name?”

The stupid brown horse did not have a name. It was too much like admitting the stupid brown horse would be staying. He turned his clumsy head towards Thomazine, stupid ears swivelling with an eagerness to please that was almost painful. “He hasn’t got one, love. He’s not mine.”

“Whose horse, daddy?” – and with a mercurial change of subject that dizzied him, “Where Uncle Lucey, daddy? Apple come home? Daddy bring Zee present?”

He had a forlorn hope that she would cease asking questions, for she barely seemed to pause for breath between them – no, nor did she wait for answers, which was a relief, for then she released both him and Tyburn and flitted over to the brown horse. “Daddy, hot!” she said accusingly over her shoulder, and before he could stop her she started to unbuckle his harness.

Every. Single. Buckle. Of every single strap, so far up as she could reach, presumably having watched Mattie Percey unharness the family’s riding-horses. And once she had dismantled the bridle – left him with his forelock looped up under the cockeyed browband, and the grassy bit pulled through his mouth – and dragged his saddle off sideways by one stirrup, the stupid brown horse stood there as naked as a foal. “You done that, daddy,” Thomazine said, glowering at him with her arms full of loose sweaty leather. “He’s hot.”

The brown horse blinked at them both, his head turning from one to another.

It crossed Hollie’s mind for the first time that the brown horse was, perhaps, not stupid. Not precisely stupid, then. Timid, maybe, and confused, and missing his own place and his own people – that he would never see again, that he had been taken from untimely without knowing for what reason or to what place.

Not bright, obviously. Not like Tyburn. He would never replace Tib. Nobody would ever replace Tib.

Very warily, the brown horse who was possibly not stupid, stretched out his neck and gave himself a little shake. Thomazine grabbed a fistful of grass and held it out.

(Hollie, in nine months with the beast, had never petted it. Never given it titbits, or troubled himself to find the places where it liked to be scratched, or given it any more than the attention he gave to his sword or his carbine or his harness. Something mean in him curled up a little and squirmed at the recognition of his neglect.)

“Nice horse, daddy,” she said happily. “Zee keep him? Please?”

She was attempting, now, to rub a patch of sweat from where the saddle had been, with a twist of wet grass. If she had been one of his troopers he’d have pointed out that she wasn’t trying to get a spot of rust off a blade, and it was only by God’s grace that she had not been kicked from here to Colchester. Tib’s tolerance would not have extended so far. Not even for Thomazine. Most of the horses Hollie knew would have put her on her back by now, had she scrubbed them so.

The brown horse stood like a table, with the tips of his ears pointed together and his brow earnestly furrowed. He was not at his ease. He was stiff and uncomfortable and all four of his ungainly legs were braced for flight, and yet he stood and let this strange small person scour him as if he were the kitchen floor.

The brown horse was worse-made than Russell’s Doubting Thomas. Thomas only looked on the surface as if he had been cobbled together from three other beasts. The brown horse was swaybacked, ewe-necked, over at the knee –

“Job,” he said, for the patience of the beast, and his arm tightened around Tib’s neck I still love you the best –

“No, daddy,” Thomazine said, and the brown horse looked at her out of the tail of his eye. Not menacingly, but shyly – am I done?– and Hollie’s little daughter slapped the horse’s shoulder like an ostler born to have him stand over.

Very carefully, the brown horse walked away from them. Tyburn jerked his head up in a fractional affront, and then dismissed a badly-made gelding as below his entire masculine contempt and ambled off in the opposite direction, nosing the grass. Keeping a wary eye on the brown horse all the while, mind, just in case.

The spring grass was coming in. There were still patches of winter mud between the trees in the orchard.

Hollie wished, briefly and passionately, that Luce Pettitt was with him. (This time tomorrow, likely, after his mother had gone over him with a nit-comb and bewailed the state of his linen.) Russell would ha’ been better than nothing, though he’d have had to explain the joke three times to the marred lad. Slowly and ponderously, the brown horse lowered himself into the darkest, boggiest patch of sloppy mud and squirmed on his back, wallowing in the wan sunlight, the pale flash of his underparts bright as a guinea. Looked like a fat unhorsed officer in a buffcoat, trying to roll himself back to dignity, and God knows they’d seen enough of them throughout Yorkshire. “Goring,” Hollie suggested, thinking of that unprincipled Malignant bastard, last seen flat on the cobbles at Wakefield and cursing in all directions.

“No, daddy! A nice name!” She straightened her thin little shoulders, stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled wetly. (Her mother was going to kill him when she got good at it, he thought wryly. The child hadn’t learned that trick by herself.) The brown horse upended himself, gave himself a thoroughgoing shake, and then came up at a lollop. “Flower,” Thomazine said, “Flower, daddy? Pretty horse.”

“A weed more like, wench. Some great raking thing that grows out of cracks where you don’t want it.”

“Daddy!”

“Blossom,” Hollie said, with his tongue firmly in his cheek. “The leaves are just on the trees, look, so it will be apple blossom time soon. What do you think to Blossom?”

“Blossom,” she said, testing the word, “Blossom.” And then a great smile spread over her fox-pointed, freckled face, “Zee’s horse, daddy! To keep? Promise?”

“Aye,” Hollie said, and he hefted her up by the waist. First time he had set his hands on the child in more than a year and he had forgot, almost, how fragile she looked and how solid she felt. All arms and legs, like a little harvestman spider.

She sat on the brown horse’s muddy back looking straight ahead of her with her hands clutching his mane and her grubby skirts kilted up around her knees, and neither of them looked as embarrassed as propriety would dictate they ought to.

“You might have to let me borrow him, lass,” he said, and she gave him a stern look.

“Look after him, daddy.”

“I know,” he said meekly, “I’ll try and remember.” He clicked his tongue and the brown horse – Blossom, who was no longer nameless, but who had a name and a place and a little girl who loved him for his kindness when her father had not – ambled into a walk. “Come on, then. Your mother’s waiting on us.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rebel Remounts #2 – meet Doubting Thomas

An excerpt from The Smoke Of Her Burning, in which Hollie thinks he’s doing Russell a favour and if you observe the painting above of the horse Cehero by Johann Georg de Hamilton, you can see why the scarred boy might have taken offence…

“Got a surprise for you, Hapless,” Hollie said smugly.
Percey had groomed the bay horse till its coat gleamed like a dark conker. He’d even acquired some chalk from God knows where and he’d whitened the gelding’s stockings. There were times when you had to wonder about Mattie Percey’s previous career in a stable-yard in Essex. Just how honestly he might have come by certain skills. That lad was a better painter than Lely.
What he hadn’t done was improved the big horse’s temper, and it came out of the line rearing, ears pinned against its skull. Mattie had his hand gripping the bit-ring, trying to keep the horse’s head down, and even so the bay nearly had him off his feet.
It was a bloody fine horse, though. Big-built, not one of your lightweight sprinters like Luce Pettitt’s spindly witless Rosa: backside like a gable end and a proud arch to its thickly-muscled neck that hinted that someone might have been a little behindhand with the shears to its gelding. That was a beast that’d go all day chasing Malignants and come in at the end of it dancing. It was the sort of mount any junior cavalry officer with any dreams of a future career in the Army might covet, provided a man could train some sense into its thick head. Plenty of staying-power, plenty of fire and dash, though possibly a bit light on good humour. Hollie closed one eye and looked at the bay horse consideringly where it ramped and curvetted like some maniac heraldic emblem.
“What d’you reckon to him, then?” he said, and looked at the scarred lieutenant, expecting to see gratitude and pleasure on that cold, half-lovely face.
Instead the lad was white to the lips, the great scar on his cheek standing out a most unlovely purple, and his eyes were as mad as the bay horse’s.
“Is – thish – intended to be meant in humour?” he said stiffly, and his voice had that funny slur it had when the ragged muscle in his cheek had gone stiff as wood, like it did when he was tired or ungovernable. Or drunk. That was still always a clear and present possibility.
Hollie shook his head, thinking he must have misheard, or Russell must have misheard, because –
“All right, ain’t he?” Percey said happily, still being jerked around like a rag doll by the beast’s flinging head, but as cheerfully good-humoured as ever he was even when his arm was being yanked from its socket by an unwanted cavalry remount. “Want to take him out, Hap- uh, Lieutenant Russell? Take a bit of the ginger out of his heels?”
“I. Should. Rather. Be. Dead,” Russell said, through gritted teeth. Flung his own head up, looking not unlike the bay horse, and glared fiercely at Hollie, and Hollie would have sworn to it the lieutenant’s dark eyes were brimming with wholly incomprehensible tears. “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.”
“What?” Hollie said blankly, and Russell snarled at him, actually snarled, baring his teeth like a dog.
“The Book of Proverb. Ss.” He bit off the last consonant with a hissing, furious sibilance, and then hit himself in the temple with the heel of his hand. “Shir.”
And then wheeled about and was gone, shoving Luce rudely out of the way, storming back to the house. “What,” Hollie said again, shook himself, “what the bloody hell was that all about?”
“What on earth did you say to him – oh, sir, that was not well done!”
There were times when Luce didn’t half remind Hollie of Het. Well, Hollie’s wife was his cornet’s father’s little sister, it wasn’t so much of a surprise, but even so. That hurt, shocked, disappointed look was pure Het, an expression she reserved for when he did something completely stupid. What, precisely, he’d done this time, he did not quite know, save that he was still trying to make things all right for a lad who was as tricksy to handle as a barrel of rotten gunpowder, and he didn’t know from day’s end to day’s end what mood he was going to be on the receiving end of. Like walking on eggshells, if eggshells were volatile, suspicious, and prone to soothing their tempers by getting fiercely rat-arsed.
“What wasn’t?” he said warily. “What, seriously, sir? You did not mean to be – um – funny?”
“No, of course I bloody didn’t!”
Luce gave a great sigh. “Ah, God. So you – you know – did you look at the beast? Other than, um, you know – professionally?”
“What -” With one final jerk of the bit, Mattie had the bay horse with all four feet on the ground. It was still a handsome beast. It was just – odd-looking. Three white feet, and a great lopsided white blaze to its face. One blue eye, and one, slightly manic, brown one.
A perfectly sound, sturdy, fine cavalry mount, who just happened to look both ugly and irregular. It was a bloody good horse, sound in wind and limb, beautifully put together, a mount a man could rely on – could be proud of. But now Luce came to mention it, the brute did look a bit like it had been sewn together from bits of at least two other horses. Good ones, but -.
And that had been a coincidence.
“Ah,” said Hollie.

Behold, A Black Horse

 

Yes, I know I have been significantly MIA for – well, a year, basically. There has been writing done, there is a new Uncivil Wars book on its way, the third Russells mystery is all but done, and there will be another Russells novel in the autumn.

In the meantime, I was chatting on Twitter last night about horses. I thought it was overdue that I introduced you to the bridle side of the rebel rabble. (I can’t believe it’s six years since the world met Doubting Thomas, so I’ll re-share that again in a day or so.)

First, though, meet Tyburn, in a previously unpublished short story. Hollie’s first acquaintance with the colt who was to become his best friend and at times, and quite well deservedly, the only friend he did have…

Amsterdam, 1633

“You can’t keep this up, Red.”

Hollie scooped his tangled hair out of his eyes with one hand and squinted up at his spotless sidekick. “I bloody well can, lad. And you can stop there and watch, if you don’t believe me.”

He probably would, too, knowing Rackhay. He was a lovely lad, was Nathaniel. Loyal, generous to a fault, good-hearted. Shame he knew bugger-all about pain. Nat thought pain was the immediacy of having a wound searched, or a bone broken; not when you woke up every morning and just for a few heartbeats looked at the dawn with a sense of expectancy before you remembered there was no bloody point, none whatever. And you couldn’t not go on, because you didn’t know how to stop; all you could do was to keep putting one foot in front of the other and stop it hurting the best way you could. He remembered at Dessau Bridge – the first real battle he’d fought in – remembered afterwards, in the pale spring sunshine, sitting in the grass with a white-faced lad not much older than he was. Talking to the lad about the spring sowing, like Hollie had known anything about farming more than the bits they mentioned in the Bible, while the lad tried to hold his guts from spilling in the churned grass. The lad had asked Hollie to cut his throat in the end. Wallenstein’s camp surgeon had took one look at the wound and agreed.

He wondered what Nat would say if Hollie asked him to perform the same service.

You might not be able to see any of Hollie’s internal arrangements, but it didn’t mean there wasn’t a hole where half his heart had been cut away and buried in a neat, respectable grave in Amsterdam. And that was a remarkably lucid thought for someone who’d been drinking solidly for two weeks, and that probably meant he was getting sober and that would not do at all.

“No,” Nat said, correctly interpreting the sudden gleam in his friend’s eye. “That’s enough, Red.”

“No, it isn’t, Nathaniel. It isn’t nearly enough.”

“Fine.” And Nat had leaned across the table, snatched the bottle of geneva and necked it, straight. Shuddered. “Christ, Babbitt, that stuff’s like oil of vitriol.”

Hollie shrugged. “She’d not want me on the cheap stuff. I owe her that, at least.”

Rackhay screwed his face up. “Jesus, Babbitt. That’s – well,” he looked round the dingy inn with an expression of astonished disgust, “or have they barred you from the Cat as well these days?”

And without thinking, without any conscious decision on his part at all, Hollie was half across the table with his sword drawn, bottles crashing to the floor, bench overturned. And the worst of it was that Nat didn’t care, he’d just looked down his patrician nose at Hollie – as if he was a mildly annoying insect – and disarmed him, most ungently.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” he said coldly. “You think that’s what she’d want, to see you dead in a gutter?”

Not much Hollie could say to that, face down on a not very clean table with his arm twisted up his back. Other than – she’s dead, she don’t get a say in it. That’s sort of the point, isn’t it? She’s dead. She doesn’t get to tell me anything. That’s what dead means.

“Get up,” Nat said, still in that same cold, furious voice. “I’ll not put up with this. If you think the best way to honour your wife’s memory is by getting yourself killed, I’ve got more respect for her than that –“

The badly-scoured wood under his cheek was sticky. On the other hand, it might have been his cheek. Nat leaned, harder, on his twisted arm till Hollie felt the muscle creak but  he didn’t actually care. Not any more.

“Get off me, Nathaniel.”

“Or what? The state you’re in at the minute, I could snap you like a twig –“

He closed his eyes, went limp in Nat’s grip. Waited till his friend’s fingers loosened from hard enough to bruise to just damned uncomfortable, then wrenched himself free, not caring what tore in the process – rounded on Nat panting and shaking with a blinding rage. “Don’t you dare talk of my wife –“

And then he was blinded not by fury but by a flat-handed slap across the face that made his eyes water, and after that Hollie was lost to everything but the fierce joy of battle. Nat still had the advantage of weight – sleek, cream-fed bastard that he was. Neither of them, however, had the advantage of the massive bravo who provided the protection in this dockside tavern. He had a vague impression of Nat adjusting his cuffs and easing his way out of the bully’s grip. Hollie didn’t do urbane excuses – never apologise, never explain – and so the next thing he knew he was flat on his back in a stinking gutter with most of the breath knocked out of him and the world spinning in a way that owed regrettably little to a quantity of cheap geneva.

“Well I reckon that’s somewhere else you just got barred from, Red,” Nat said beside him, his voice shaking with laughter.

Hollie rolled over and shook his head, touching a hand to his bloody nose and spattering blood across the rotten cabbage leaves and fish heads. Stifling a wild desire of his own to laugh. “By Christ, I must be rough, then,” he said thickly – spat a further mouthful of blood into the gutter, ran his tongue across his teeth. All still there, which was something of an astonishment. The wind off the sea was very cold, very fresh, even in spite of the piles of debris from the market that surrounded them.

“You look better for a bit of fresh air,” Nat said. (He sounded like her. Oh, Christ, he sounded like her. If he told Hollie he’d feel better if he put a clean shirt on -)

He got to his feet – the fresh air had gone to his head, that or he was dizzy with want of food, but he couldn’t stand another bloody second with well-meaning Nathaniel, not without wanting to hit him again. Picked an wet onion skin off his sleeve with dignity, and dropped it on the cobbles at Nat’s feet. “I’m going for a walk. Don’t bother coming with me.”

Though not sure where he was going, for where he went she went with him. Or the lack of her went with him, and the great gap of not-knowing that went with it, for he had not been there, not at the last. (They had said. All along. Not good enough for her, they said, Let her down, they said. Rackety, they said. Unreliable. And he had, and he was, and she had died while he was outside the city walls of Nuremberg and he had no idea if she had wanted him or cursed him at the last because she was gone, she was dead, she was rotting in the ground and there was no more Margriete and no more light in the world, and God was a liar -)

He didn’t think he had the stomach for the sea, not to float on it and certainly not to drown in it. No, if Hollie was going to court extinction – and he wasn’t still sure that he wasn’t – he’d take it at the point of a blade like a soldier, thank you. Up through De Walletje – no, thank you, ladies, he wasn’t interested, and they’d have to be hard up to look at him in his current state – and on past the fish market. Without looking, he knew he’d reached the fish market, and once he’d finished puking into the Amstel he felt better. It put the whores off, at least, though. Onto Kalverstraat. Was it the spring market so soon? It had no right to be spring – the world had no right to keep on turning without Griete in it . It should stay frozen winter forever. He could hear the beasts – squealing and trampling in their pens in the marketplace, poor bastards –

– and that was no cow.

They were bidding on a thin, shaggy black colt, all legs and hair. Frightened out of its life, and wearing a heavy bridle with a cruel curb that tore blood and foam from the corners of its mouth – for God’s sake, you stupid butterboxes, the beast’s barely old enough to be broke, and you have him bridled with that? – lashing out with lethal forefeet at anyone stupid enough to come within range. There was a collective groan from the greedy, angry knot of fleshmongers gathered around the wild colt, and a sudden outburst of shouting – another scatter of shod hoofbeats on cobbles and a squeal of pain and distress –

One of the butchers was down, his thigh broken, apparently, by a well-aimed kick from the colt.

All those avid red faces, waving, stabbing fingers, making Hollie feel queasy. The black colt was scared nearly witless, panicked to madness by the crowd. “Bread and fucking circuses,” he said, aloud, in English, and was rewarded by a blank look from the nearest man. Switched to his slow, clumsy Dutch. “What is this? What happens here?”

“The horse is for meat, mijnheer. Unless -?”

“Me?”

The man shrugged. “The beast is useless for anything else. Incurably vicious, as you see. It has killed a man already, they say –“

And he probably bloody well deserved it, if he’d been beating the horse anything like the pig-nosed butcher currently taking a whip to its flanks. Blood and froth dripping from that cruel bit. Under the tossed, tangled black mane, the white roll of a dark eye. Not mad, not vicious. Just scared beyond reason, and hurting, and laying about him the best way he could to make it stop.

Between the two of them, maybe, they could make an understanding. Or they could kill each other in the trying, which was likewise a consummation devoutly to be wished.

“Mine, sirs.” He pitched his voice to carry. “What d’you want for the beast?”

Someone snatched at his arm. Nat. Who else would it be? As if Nat  Rackhay would think him capable of managing his own affairs without being tailed by his nursemaid. “Red, will you just listen to yourself – pull yourself together, man – you can’t afford to keep a horse in town, and you certainly don’t want that one.”

Hollie smiled, that sweet blank smile that he reserved for the times when he heard what had been said to him and he was being polite but it had gone in one ear and out the other without the words having touched the sides.

“I might as well be speaking bloody Welsh, mightn’t I?” Nat said irritably.

“Surely.” He reached into his doublet, weighed his purse ostentatiously. That had been what she’d wanted, wasn’t it? She’d left him a sufficiency of gold to kit himself out according to his commission. She’d been bloody proud of his commission. (And hadn’t the neighbours been outraged by that, that boy of eighteen with his forty year-old wife. Overlooking that that boy of eighteen had been a captain of horse by twenty, and not a penniless, beardless youth any more.)  His shoulders jerked though he wasn’t sure if he must laugh or cry.

The colt screamed again in fear, shrilly, going straight up on its hind legs, and the crowd scattered again.

Hollie put his shoulder to the nearest well-upholstered back and gave the man a shove. Who turned round, found himself almost nose to nose with a dangerous-looking ruffian with a well-used backsword hanging at his side, and did some shoving of his own – backwards. That much closer to the black colt, and Hollie bit his tongue because there was no use swearing at this lot in English and that was the language he cursed in most fluently. Close enough to see where the tender skin at the corners of the colt’s mouth was torn and bleeding – ripped to pieces by that vicious bridle some time previous, by the white scars on the black velvet muzzle – more white scars on chest and flanks and legs, where the horse had been most cruelly whipped. No wonder the beast was ungovernable. Hollie had been, too.

He drew his sword. Just behind him, he heard Nat groan. “The bridle,” he said, and he hated that his voice was shaking but he was just about furious enough to gut the butcher on the end of that rein. “Take it off, if you please.”

“Mijnheer, this is a dangerous beast, not loose in the street, if you please –“

“Then get me a – “ he had to stop, because he was so bloody mad he couldn’t even remember the word – “rope.” Oh, what the hell. “Five gold pieces, sir, for the horse. I’ll not want the harness.” He’d done this before. In another life, up on the moors in Lancashire, with the little black Fell ponies that were half this size and a hundred times more biddable, looping the length of rope into a makeshift halter, singing half-under his breath and God knows Hollie Babbitt’s singing would have frightened most people out of their wits but the colt was exhausted, shaking with it, and Hollie considered himself lucky to have only been bitten by the end of it.

And yes, he was aware that he’d spoiled their nasty little afternoon’s sport, but they could go and find a bear to bait or something. There were mutterings at the back of the crowd and no doubt with his Judas hair they’d be calling him a witch just on the edge of his hearing, making the signs against the Evil Eye, though there was no witchcraft in it. Common sense, and a spark of what decency he had left, maybe. Someone moved, suddenly, in the crowd, and Hollie turned just in time as the colt reared again, squealing in panic. If he hadn’t moved the horse’s shod hoof would have clipped his temple and he’d be dead on the cobbles with his head caved in. Instead the black colt had only – only! – slashed his shoulder, and it hurt like fire and he was buggered if he was going to let on. Sick with the pain of it, and thank God for his pause by the fish market because he had nothing in his belly to be sick with and he could just stand there grim and dizzy hanging onto the colt’s head until it passed.

“That bloody horse will end up killing you,” Nat said, quite calmly, and Hollie glanced at him. And then away, back to the shuddering black flanks where the sweat was drying rank and sticky-streaked.

“But you say that like I should care, owd lad?”

The cruel bridle hit the cobbles with a wet clink. Both Hollie and the colt looked at it with mutual disfavour. Somewhere under this mass of hair there was a good Friesland horse – an entire one, if his glimpse when the colt had reared was anything to go by – not such a bad bargain after all, Griete, if I can bring him round. No malice. No viciousness. Just fear, and pain, and misery. How soon one should know another.

“And how do you plan to stable the beast?”

“Oh, shog off, Nathaniel, and don’t be so bloody reasonable. I’ll find something.”

He knew he couldn’t keep the horse within the city. He hadn’t lived in Amsterdam for seven years without noticing the deficiency of accommodation for the common run of horse. Fine. He’d move. He’d go out of the city – it wouldn’t kill him – find himself lodgings in one of the farms outside – he wasn’t city-bred, he’d be useful to someone, and there was nothing to stay him in the city itself now –

“The animal doesn’t even have a name, Red. What d’you plan – Supper? Sausage?”

The black colt had likely never heard a man laugh before and Hollie thought he was somewhat out of practice himself. It hurt, too. Once he’d got the colt down from bouncing about on its hind legs like some kind of demented stork, he thought the pair of them would have to learn how to do any number of things together, that most civilised men took for granted.

It was like to be bloody hard work. But there. It was something.

********

It was near dusk when Nat finished his supper in the farmhouse six miles outside the city. Smiled at the goodwife, who carried on looking at him as if he was slightly touched in the head, and went out to the yard carrying a covered plate of bread and good cheese. He wasn’t sure he wasn’t slightly touched in the head, to be doing this.

The black colt was stabled and fed. Better than some of the quarters they’d enjoyed on campaign, he thought ruefully. A thick bed of straw lined the floor.

“Red?”

The colt lifted its head and looked up at Nat, ears flicking.

It hadn’t let them close enough to groom it. It still looked like it had slept in a ditch on campaign, all its ribs showed through its rough coat, and its ears were so suspiciously pricked that the tips of them all but touched. It had not, however, kicked its way through the stall, and Hollie Babbitt was bitten and somewhat bruised but despite all Nat’s suggestions to the contrary stubbornly unkilled.

In the gold evening light, sprawled full length in the straw, the redhead was stretched out sound asleep, his head pillowed on his doublet. There was blood on the shoulder of his shirt, bis breathing was easy, and he was relaxed, still. (He had not touched a drink in six hours. A coiled something in Nat’s belly that might have called itself fear, if that wasn’t too womanish a sentiment, uncurled itself.) The horse snuffed his new master’s hair warily and then turned away, apparently satisfied.

Nat wasn’t aware he’d been holding his breath, but he let it out in a great sigh anyway.

They’d be fine. The pair of them. They’d both be just fine. Give them time to heal, and enough work to keep the Devil from idle hands and hooves, and they’d come out the other side.

Pair of crazy bastards both. They deserved each other.