Patricia Leitch: Ride Like the Wind (eBook) Jinny 8

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The dream gripped Jinny Manders, pulling her down into its depths. Although she struggled to wake, as a drowning swimmer fights for air, it held her down in the place where there was nothing but a nameless, total, terror. An evil force crashed about her, and Jinny held up her arms to drive it away. But she was not strong enough. There was nothing she could do against it. She cowered away, still screaming; felt the ground move beneath her feet, so that there was no place of safety in the whole universe, and nowhere for Jinny to be except curled into herself, wrapped in her own screaming fear forever.

Jinny woke smothered in a web of her own long red hair, the echoes of her screaming still disturbing the security of her bedroom. For seconds she lay pinned down by the memory of her dream, then slowly let her gaze slide round her room. Nothing had changed, all was as it should be, dim in the early grey light of a summer morning.

Then Jinny thought of the horses. She leapt from her bed to the window in one panic-swift movement. Vivid in her mind’s eye was the morning last spring when she had woken, gone to her window as she always did to call a greeting to Shantih, her beloved chestnut Arab, and looked out on to an empty field. But this morning the horses were all there—Jinny’s Arab, Bramble, a solid black Highland the Manders borrowed from Miss Tuke’s trekking centre, and Easter, an aged white pony whom Jinny had saved from a cruel riding school. They were all safe. Jinny sat down on the edge of her bed, too scared that she might fall back into her dream to risk going to sleep again.

Even to think about it dragged her back into its power. She shivered uncontrollably. “Don’t let it happen,” she thought. “Please don’t let it happen.” But she didn’t know what it was she was afraid of, what it was she dreaded.

“Now look here, Jinny Manders,” she told herself, speaking aloud to hear the normality of her own voice. “Stop all this nonsense. You’ve finished with school for six whole weeks. Weeks and weeks of freedom and here you are getting your knickers in a knot because of a stupid dream.”

But the darkness was still there. All the things on the surface of Jinny’s life were as good as they had always been since her family—Jinny’s mother and father, Petra, Jinny’s sixteen-year-old sister, and Mike her ten-year-old brother—had left their city lives behind them in Stopton and come to live in Finmory House, a grey stone house that stood alone, four-square between the moorland and Finmory Bay. But now, underneath the surface of things, there was an uneasiness, a sense of autumn in the summer air that wouldn’t leave Jinny alone. Although she hardly knew what it was, it followed on her heels like a shadow, was always there under the surface of her mind.

“Can’t think about it here,” Jinny decided and knew what she would do. She would go down to the horses and tell Shantih, her Arab, the things that were worrying her. Shantih would understand.

Jinny scrambled quickly into her clothes but before she left her bedroom she went through the archway that divided her room. The window in this part of the room looked out over the moors to where mountains shouldered up against the sky. The walls were covered with Jinny’s drawings and paintings. There was a table and a chair, in term time used for Jinny’s reluctant homeworking but now holding paints, pastels and piles of paper.

On the wall was a mural of a red horse. It had been there, painted on the wall, waiting for Jinny when she had arrived at Finmory two years ago. Jinny and an old tinker woman had repainted it and now it stared out at Jinny, harsh and bright, its yellow eye commanding as a collie’s eye. It was a being of power, holding a strange magic force that linked Jinny to her own depths; but this morning it was too close to Jinny’s nightmare.

She turned swiftly away from it, skeltered down the steep ladder of stairs that led from her room to the long upstairs corridor. She sped past doors that closed in her sleeping family, down the main flight of stairs, along the hall to the stone-flagged kitchen and out through the back door.

The world was without life, waiting, breath indrawn.
“My world,” thought Jinny as she ran through wet grass, down past the stable, feed house and tack room that had been decaying outbuildings when the Manders had first arrived at Finmory. On she went, down to the horses’ field, sea in front of her, glimpsed metallic and glittering between the black jaws of rock that held Finmory Bay within their bite.

“A dewdrop world that could vanish in a split second—all my family doing safe, correct things. Petra playing her piano, passing her music exams; Mike over the moon because Mr. MacKenzie is letting him drive his tractor; and me—Jinny and her pony.”

As she ran, Jinny saw herself as if she were the beginning of a film where a skinny girl with long red hair ran through the grey morning, not knowing that these were the last moments of her old life; that in a moment the necessary action of the film would change everything, carrying her on against her will into an unknown future where nothing would ever be the same again.

“We have so much,” Jinny thought. “Mountains and sea and freedom. So much. We’re not real in our fairy-tale world.”

But Shantih waiting at the field gate was real. No dream horse, but the Arab who had once been billed in a circus as a killer horse and now belonged to Jinny. She had found a bit in a book about a sheikh praising his Arab horse and it was how Jinny felt about Shantih. “Her face is a lamp uplifted to guide the faithful to the place of Allah.”

Jinny flung herself over the gate and threw her arms round Shantih’s neck, pressing her face against the warm bulk of horse.

“Dear horse,” she murmured. “Dear real horse.” And the threatening shadow of her nightmare drew back a little as Shantih turned her head and blew sweet-scented breath over Jinny’s neck.

Easter, the white pony, lay flat on her side, spindle legs stretched from the coarse-coated barrel of her body. Her quarters and shoulders were no more than bones beneath her skin. Her long neck, almost without muscle, looked if there was not enough strength in it to lift her fine-boned head from the ground. Only her tail and mane, lovingly brushed by Jinny into silver cascades of hair, showed no sign of the extreme age that blurred away the last traces of the top-class show pony that Easter had once been. At first, when Jinny had brought her from the Arran Riding School, Easter had flourished, and Jinny had been filled with the certainty that Easter had a long retirement ahead of her— summer days grazing with Shantih and Bramble, winter nights bedded down in deep straw while the gales stormed outside her thick stable walls.

“Blooming miracle she’s still alive,” the vet had said when he had wormed Easter. “Forty if she’s a day. Hardly worth worming her.”

“But she is so much better,” Jinny had declared.

“Give her a last summer and then … ” the vet had said, leaving his death sentence unfinished.

“Don’t talk nonsense. Easter’s going to live at Finmory for years.”

Then Jinny had been certain, but now she could hardly bear to look at the pony as she stood long hours without moving, head hanging, hardly bothering to even pick at the grass. She had refused all Jinny’s offerings of treacle-laced bran mashes, oats mixed with chopped apple, milk pellets or sugar beet begged from Mr. MacKenzie whose farm was close to Finmory. Even when Jinny had grated a plateful of carrots for her, Easter had only breathed over it then walked slowly away.

Jinny pressed her face harder against Shantih’s shoulder to blot out the thought of Easter, for surely, surely she had earned just one summer at Finmory to make up for the life she had led at the riding school.

Bramble stood close beside Easter. He was solid as a tank, self-willed and dour. When Easter had first been turned out into the field at Finmory, Bramble had welcomed her with gusty whickerings and urgent neck nibblings. Jinny was sure that at some time in their past lives they had known each other. Now they were always together.

Humans: Jinny, Mike, Petra and Mr and Mrs Manders, Ken, Mr MacKenzie, Miss Tuke, Mrs Simpson, Nell Storr, Paul Dalton, Helen Dalton, Kat Dalton

Horses: Shantih, Bramble, Easter, Lightning

1. For Love of a Horse
2. A Devil to Ride
3. The Summer Riders
4. Night of the Red Horse
5. Gallop to the Hills
6. Horse in a Million
7. The Magic Pony
8. Ride Like the Wind
9. Chestnut Gold
10. Jump for the Moon
11. Horse of Fire
12. Running Wild