Ariadne(75)

I laughed. ‘We have fine stable hands who will care for your animals,’ I assured him.

He shook his head. ‘No, thank you,’ he said. ‘I will not let anyone else handle them.’

I was not sure if his response was rude or not, but his eyes held mine with a warm and steady gaze that told me he meant no offence. I was yet to learn how he loved his horses, above all else, but I felt in that moment I would grant him any request. I inclined my head towards an attendant, who scurried forward at once to take our guest to the stables as he wished.

I watched him leave. He was so very unlike anyone else who had ever come to our court. And nothing at all like his father.

At first, Theseus did not trust his long-lost son. He did not know how to understand a character so unlike his own. He could not believe the simple virtue of this youth; Theseus mistook the shy reservation for surliness, arrogance, hidden resentment and a thousand other follies that never touched Hippolytus’ soul. It spoke more of how tarnished Theseus’ heart was that he could not recognise one so pure. But over the next few weeks whilst Theseus watched, mistrustfully and eternally on his guard, and Hippolytus continued to quietly tend to his horses – feeding them the grasses that he lovingly gathered, brushing out their manes into thick and lustrous ripples, plucking out any thorn that dared to pierce their flesh and swatting away the flies that irritated them – he began to see that there was no hidden malice in his son and that he bore no secret wish to overthrow his father and seize his kingdom.

We watched him one day together, Theseus and I, as he rode his finest stallion across the fields. It was a truly enormous beast of pure white, with great muscles rolling beneath its flanks. I saw how Hippolytus guided this vast and powerful creature with the gentlest of touches – he did not crack a whip or yell into its ear as I had seen Theseus do so many times to his steeds, reducing them to cowering shadows of themselves, slavering foam from their jaws in fear and exhaustion. Hippolytus bent his head to the stallion’s sleek neck and murmured into its ear, and it moved like water beneath the touch of his expert fingers. He began with a sedate trot, building up the pace until the horse flew like an eagle beneath him, running for the sheer joy of the exercise and to please its beloved master.

I could watch him for hours, long past the time when Theseus would grow bored and wander away in search of wine or one of the other stable hands to play at jacks. I stayed near the stables, watching Hippolytus return from his gallops, noting how he would fill a trough with water and rest his hand solicitously on the horse’s back as it drank its fill. I watched how the horses would incline their long necks towards him and bend their heads beneath his hands so that he could fondle their ears; the way they would rest their long noses on his shoulder in bliss at being close to him.

Still, he and Theseus got along very well. Surprisingly so, for two such different people. I could not fathom what they might talk about with one another, but I found them often deep in conversation. It frustrated me that I barely spoke to Hippolytus myself. I longed to hear more of his days with his Amazon mother and what he had learned, for he seemed mature beyond his years. But whenever I tried to draw him out of his shyness and discover more about him, perhaps even to pierce the serious and sometimes grave exterior that he presented to the world, to find the warmth I was sure ran deep within him, there would Theseus be – boastfully recounting some epic quest or other he had performed, in the sure certainty that Hippolytus wanted to hear all about it. How Hippolytus endured it, I cannot imagine.

At last, I stole away to the stables early one morning before Theseus stirred himself. Dawn was only just beginning to lighten the sky in the east, staining it with a soft pink glow. As I had known he would be, Hippolytus was there in amongst the animals. In the slumbering silence of the hour, his quiet tones and the horses’ contented whickers of reply were all that could be heard.

I stood for a moment, watching. I could never truly believe how kind he was with his horses. Perhaps I thought that if he believed himself to be unobserved, I would hear a sharpness or a threat – some private brutality in the morning that would explain their quiet submission to him all day. But there was none. He chattered to them freely, nonsensically for the most part, a rhapsody of devotion, and in response they swung their great heads to him and closed their eyes in ecstasy as he stroked their muzzles and tickled them behind their ears as though they were placid young foals.

It seemed there really was nothing hidden within Hippolytus. He was that impossibly rare thing – a man who was exactly who he presented himself to be. The wonder of it, I could not help but marvel at him.

I had crept up on him and thought I would be the one to startle him, but I must have become lost in something of a reverie because it was the clearing of his throat that jolted me back to reality, and I realised his eyes were fixed on me.

‘My Queen,’ he said respectfully. ‘What brings you to the stables so early this morning?’

I was thrown off balance, and for a moment did not know how to reply. ‘I could not sleep,’ I answered finally, which was true. I had lain awake for hours, waiting to see the first streaks of light presaging the dawn.

He shrugged. This answer obviously satisfied him and he did not need to know more. There was such simplicity in his nature, I thought. He felt no need to make unnecessary conversation, to fawn or to flatter or to seek any kind of gain. He asked a question only if he actually wished to know the answer.