Page 8 of The Giver of Stars
Frederick Guisler turned back to Alice, shaking his head. ‘You sure you’re okay? I can fetch you some water.’
Alice tried to look nonchalant, as if her elbow wasn’t throbbing and she hadn’t just realized that a fine layer of grit was decorating her upper lip. ‘I’m fine. I’ll just … sit here on the step.’
‘The stoop?’ He grinned.
‘Yes, that too,’ she said.
Frederick Guisler left her to it. He was lining the walls of the library with rough pine shelves, beneath which stood boxes of waiting books. One wall was already filled with a variety of titles, neatly labelled, and a pile in the corner suggested some had already been returned. Unlike the Van Cleve house, the little building held an air of purpose, the sense that it was about to become something useful.
As she sat rubbing dirt from her clothes, two young women walked past on the other side of the road, both in long seersucker skirts and wide-brimmed hats to keep off the worst of the sun. They glanced across the road at her, then put their heads together, conferring. Alice smiled and lifted a hand tentatively in greeting, but they scowled and turned away. Alice realized with a sigh that they were probably friends with Peggy Foreman. Sometimes she thought she might just make a sign and hang it around her neck:No, I didn’t know he had a sweetheart.
‘Fred says you took a fall before you even got on the horse. Takes some doing.’
Alice glanced up to find Margery O’Hare looking down at her. She was atop a large, ugly-looking horse with excessively long ears, and leading a smaller brown and white pony.
‘Um – well, I –’
‘You ever rode a mule?’
‘Is that a mule?’
‘Sure is. But don’t tell him. He thinks he’s a stallion from Araby.’ Margery squinted at her from under her wide-brimmed hat. ‘You can try this little paint, Spirit. She’s feisty but she’s sure-footed as Charley here, and she don’t stop at nothing. The other girl ain’t coming.’
Alice stood up and stroked the little mare’s white nose. The horse half closed her eyes. Her lashes were half white and half brown and she gave off a sweet, meadow-grass scent. Alice was immediately taken back to summers spent riding around her grandmother’s estate in Sussex, when she was fourteen and free to escape for whole days at a time, rather than constantly being told how she should behave.
Alice, you are too impulsive.
She leaned forward and sniffed the baby-soft hair at the mare’s ears.
‘So you going to make love to her? Or you going to get on and ride?’
‘Now?’ said Alice.
‘You waiting for permission from Mrs Roosevelt? C’mon, we got ground to cover.’
Without waiting, she wheeled the mule around and Alice had to scramble aboard as the little paint horse took off after her.
For the first half-hour Margery O’Hare said little, and Alice rode silently behind, struggling to adjust to the very different style of riding. Margery wasn’t stiff-backed, heels down andchin up, like the girls she had ridden with in England. She was loose-limbed, swayed like a sapling as she steered the mule around and up and down slopes, absorbing every movement. She talked to him more often than she spoke to Alice, scolding or singing to him, occasionally turning 180 degrees in her saddle to shout behind, as if she had just remembered she had company: ‘You okay back there?’
‘Fine!’ Alice would call, trying not to wobble as the mare tried again to turn and bolt back towards the town.
‘Oh, she’s just testing you,’ said Margery, after Alice let out a yelp. ‘Once you let her know you’re in charge, she’ll be sweet as molasses.’
Alice, feeling the little mare bunch crossly under her, wasn’t convinced, but she didn’t want to complain in case Margery decided she was not up to the job. They rode through the small town, past lush fenced gardens swollen with corn, tomatoes, greens, Margery tipping her hat to those few people who passed on foot. The horse and the mule snorted and backed up briefly as a huge truck bearing timber came past, but then abruptly they were out of town and headed up a steep, narrow track. Margery pulled back a little as the track widened, so they could travel side by side.
‘So you’re the girl from England.’ She pronounced it Eng-er-land.
‘Yes.’ Alice stooped to avoid a low-hanging branch. ‘Have you been?’
Margery kept her face forward, so Alice struggled to hear her. ‘Never been further east than Lewisburg. That’s where my sister used to live.’
‘Oh, did she move?’
‘She died.’ Margery reached up to break a switch from a branch and peeled the leaves from it, dropping the reins loose on the mule’s neck.
‘I’m so sorry. Do you have other family?’
‘Had. One sister and five brothers. ’Cept there’s just me now.’
