The Secret Horses of Briar Hill(4)

I hold out my hand.

Benny just smiles slowly.

He tears off the rest of the wrapper and pops it in his mouth. “Waat choholaat?” he mumbles, while lines of brown spit dribble down his chin.

Now I grow an inch, two, three, until my anger towers over him.

“I hate you!” I shove him, but he just laughs, and I run down the stairs. I run past Dr. Turner’s old butler’s pantry, where little Arthur who never talks is crying silent tears over an injection he’s about to receive, and then down into the kitchen. Sister Mary Grace is bent over a copper pot on the stove. She looks up with a tired face that glistens with steam.

“Emmaline, fetch me an onion from the larder. If you dig deep, there’s still some good ones, when you peel off the outer layers—”

I shove open the back door and run out onto the kitchen terrace. Children are tossing turnips back and forth and trying to juggle. When their backs are turned, I dart around the corner and run to the garden wall, even though it’s against the rules to go so far.

I don’t care about the rules.

I’ll take my chances with the foxes.





IT IS COLD OUTSIDE, and still foggy in the low parts of the fields. I run straight until I reach the gardens’ grand front gate, which Thomas padlocked long ago. No one goes beyond the garden wall now. Before the war, the hospital wasn’t a hospital at all. It was the house of a beautiful, rich princess, only she was old, and you are probably thinking that doesn’t sound like a princess, but it’s true. When the bombs started, the princess went to live with relatives and gave the house to the Sisters of Mercy, who added more beds to all of the bedrooms and blacked out the windows with blankets, and the nuns came, and then children came, all on trains. Rumbling, rumbling, while the bombs burst outside. My neighbors were evacuated to Dorset on the first trains. They didn’t have the stillwaters. Benny does. Anna does. I do. All the children at Briar Hill hospital have the stillwaters, and so we are here, because we cannot infect each other because we are already infected.

Sister Mary Grace told me that when the princess lived here, the grounds were beautiful. Young men and women from as far as London would come to walk through the walled gardens, amid the rosebushes and statues and gurgling fountains. They used to throw open the ballroom doors so that music would pour onto the sprawling lawns, where her guests would play croquet. But the princess had an army of gardeners, and now we have only Thomas, and Thomas has only his one arm. So that is why the garden gate is locked, and why the little creeping briars grow longer and longer each day.

But the ivy forms a twisting ladder, and it is easy to climb over the garden wall. I just have to tuck my skirt between my legs. On the other side I drop down into a forgotten place. There are benches that are being slowly disappeared by honeysuckle, and crumbling statues of Greek gods with moss clinging to their faces. I wander the maze of walls and find a smaller garden, tucked away in the corner. There is a column in the center that reaches to my shoulders, and on top is a sundial. It has a circular base with a triangular arm pointing toward the sky to cast a shadow that tells the time. It looks to be made of gold or brass that might once have been reflective enough to show the mirror-horses, but now it’s too tarnished. I sit on a bench, crunching the vines, and blow into my hands.

Something rustles, and I go stiff.

I haven’t forgotten about the foxes.

I hold my breath so it won’t cloud in the air and give me away, and listen. There. More rustling, just around the corner. Something moving. Can that really be just a fox? And there. Back from the direction of the statues. The vines climbing the garden wall tremble suddenly, and I suck in a breath.

That is too big to be a fox.

I go completely still. Except for my breath. Except for my heart. Is this what Papa feels like on the front? That at any moment bullets might splinter the walls? That gas might cloud like morning fog?

Clomp.

I shriek. The ivy trembles violently. Should I run?

Clomp, CLOMP.

It’s getting closer! I drop down to the frozen earth. I crawl elbow over elbow through the trenches of dead grass. Benny told us a story once of a German plane that got lost in a storm and crashed on English soil. What if this is a German pilot, lost and angry? My heartbeat thunders in my chest. A willow branch snaps under my elbow, and I shriek.

Clomp, clomp, clomp.

It’s a German pilot, I know it, and he’s going to have a gun and he isn’t going to listen when I tell him I’m just a girl because he doesn’t speak English and he has no way of knowing I’m not a spy!

CLOMP.

He’s right around the corner now. There’s no time. I grab the snapped willow branch and brandish it, rising to my feet. Foxes or German pilots, Papa would be brave. I must be brave too.

A snort.

A heavy clomp, clomp, clomp.

A horse swivels its head around the corner. It is almost entirely white—it has long ropes of silken white mane, and a soft gray muzzle, and wings, snow-white wings, wings that are soft and giant and real.

I drop the willow branch.

“You aren’t a German soldier!” I cry.

The horse blinks.

“What are you?”

But I know what it is. Oh, I know.

Dry grass itches at my ankles and wind bites at my nose, but all I can do is stare at this horse. It’s from the mirror-world. But how did it cross over? And why? The winged horses never leave their world—they barely even glance at me when I tap on the hospital mirrors.