Nine White Horses (6 page)

“And you say you don’t believe in democracy,” I said. “If
keeping this out of a museum isn’t democratic, then what is?”

“This is simple sense, and giving a masterpiece the setting
it loves best.” She sipped delicately from the little china cup. “It’s been in
the family for a very long time. When it first came to us, we promised its
maker that we would care for it as he asked us to do, never to hide it away and
never to sell it, or to give it except as a gift to one who could love it as he
loved it. It was the eldest daughter’s dowry, when such things were done. Now I’m
the last,” she said, “and it goes to no daughter after me.”

I was still wrapped up in the wonder of the thing, or I
would never have said what came into my head. “Janna says you have daughters.
Two of them. And granddaughters.”

“Stepdaughters,” she said. She didn’t seem offended. “I was
my husband’s second wife. We had a son, but he died early, and he had no
children. My husband’s children were never quite sure what to make of me. Now
that I’m old, you see, I’m permitted to be eccentric. But when I was younger,
with children who resented their father’s marrying again so soon after their
mother died, I was simply too odd for words. All my antiquities, and my books,
and that dreadful garish thing that I
would
hang in the parlor—”

“It’s not garish!”

She laughed. “It’s hardly in the most contemporary taste;
especially when contemporary was Art Deco. And pockets full of coins of the
Caesars, and gowns out of the
Très Riches
Heures
, and once, as a favor to a friend, a mummy in the basement: oh, I
was odd. Alarmingly so. The mummy went back home with as many of her treasures
as we could find. I, unfortunately, lacked the grace to do the same.”

“So you are Greek,” I said.

She nodded.

“The artist—he was, too?”

“Yes,” she said, “very. He wouldn’t sign his work. He said
that it would speak for itself.”

“It does,” I said, looking at it again, as if I could begin
to help myself. “Oh, it does.”

That was in the early spring. In late spring, just after
lilac time, I came to ride Bali—those days, I was riding him almost every day,
or driving them both with Mrs. Tiffney—and found the place deserted except for
one of the stablehands. She was new and a bit shy, just waved and kept on with
the stall she was cleaning.

The stallions were both in their stalls. Usually they were
out at this time of day. I wondered if they’d come up lame, or got sick. Zan
didn’t whip his head out the way he usually did and snap his teeth in my face.
Bali didn’t nicker, though he came to the door when I opened it.

His eyes were clear. So was his nose. He didn’t limp as I
brought him out. But he wasn’t himself. He didn’t throw his head around on the
crossties, he didn’t flag his tail, he didn’t grab for the back of my shirt the
way he’d taken to, to see me jump. He just stood there, letting me groom him.

I looked in Zan’s stall. Zan looked back at me. Nothing wrong
with him, either, that I could see or feel. Except that the spirit had gone out
of him. He actually looked old. So did Bali, who was still young enough to be
more a dapple than a grey.

“You look as if you lost a friend,” I said.

Zan’s ears went flat. Bali grabbed the right crosstie in his
teeth and shook it, hard.

I had a little sense left. I remembered to get him back in
his stall before I bolted.

o0o

Mrs. Tiffney was in the hospital. She’d had another fall,
and maybe a heart attack. They weren’t sure yet. I wouldn’t have got that much
out of anybody if Janna hadn’t driven in as I came haring out of the barn. She
looked as worn as the horses did, as if she hadn’t slept in a week.

“Last night,” she said when I’d dragged her up to the office
and got coffee into her. “I was downstairs borrowing some milk, or she’d have
gone on lying there till God knows when. The ambulance took forever to come.
Then she wanted the paramedics to carry her up to her own bed. I thought she’d
have another heart attack, fighting them when they took her out.”

I gulped coffee. It was just barely warm. My throat hurt. “Is
she going to be all right?”

Janna shrugged. “They don’t know yet. The harpies came in
this morning—her daughters, I mean. Aileen isn’t so bad, but Celia . . .”
She rubbed her eyes. They must have felt as if they were full of sand. “Celia
has been trying for years to make her mother live somewhere, as she puts it, ‘appropriate.’
A nursing home, she means. She’s old enough for one herself, if you ask me.”

“Maybe she thinks she’s doing what’s best,” I said.

“I’m sure she is,” said Janna. “What’s best for Celia. She’d
love to have this place. She’d sell it for a golf course, probably. Or condos.
Horses are a big waste of money, she says. So’s that great big house up there
on the hill, with just two women living in it.”

“And kids,” I said, “in the summer, when you have camp.”

“Not enough profit in that.” Janna put down her half-empty
cup. “She married a stockbroker, but Mrs. Tiffney always said Celia did the
thinking for the pair of them, in and out of the office. If she’d been born
forty years later, she’d have been the broker, and she probably wouldn’t have
married at all.”

It still wouldn’t have done Mrs. Tiffney any good, I
thought, after I’d bullied Janna into bed and done what needed doing in the
barn and driven slowly home. Mrs. Tiffney’s horses didn’t look any brighter
when I looked in on them, just before I left, though Bali let his nose rest in
my palm for a minute. Thanking me, I imagined, for understanding. Just being a
horse, actually, with a human he’d adopted into his personal herd.

o0o

Mrs. Tiffney wasn’t allowed visitors, except for immediate
family. In Janna’s opinion, and I admit in mine, the hospital would have done
better to bar the family and let in the friends. Aileen did answer Janna’s
calls, which was more than Celia would do; so we knew that Mrs. Tiffney hadn’t
broken her hip again but she had had a heart attack, and she was supposed to
stay very, very quiet.

She’d been asking after her horses. Janna was able to pass
on some of the news, though Aileen wasn’t horse people; she didn’t understand
half of what Janna told her, and she probably mixed up the rest.

o0o

I actually saw her with her sister, a few days after Mrs.
Tiffney went to the hospital. They’d come to the house, they said, to get a few
things their mother needed. I think Celia was checking out the property.

They were a bit of a surprise. The slim blade of a woman in
the Chanel suit turned out to be Aileen. Celia was the plump matronly lady in
sensible brogues. She knew about horses and asked sharp questions about the
barn’s expenses. Aileen looked a little green at the dirt and the smell. She
didn’t touch anything, and she walked very carefully, watching where she put
her feet.

I was walking Bali down after a ride. He was still a bit
off, but he’d been willing enough to work. If he’d been human, I’d have said he
was drowning his sorrows.

I brought him out of the ring for some of the good grass
along the fence, and there was Aileen, stubbing out a cigarette and looking a
little alarmed at the huge animal coming toward her. Little Bali, not quite
fifteen hands, kept on coming, though I did my best to encourage him with a
patch of clover. He had his sights set on another one a precise foot from Aileen’s
right shoe. She backed away.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “He’s got a mind of his own.”

“He always did,” said Aileen. She eyed him. He flopped his
ears at a fly and took another mouthful of clover. “You must be Laura—Ms.
Michaels, that is. My mother has told me about you.”

For some reason I wanted to cry. “Has she? She’s talking,
then?”

“She’s very frail, but she’s quite lucid. All she can talk
about, most days, is her horses, and that dreadful platter of hers. You’ve seen
it, she says. Isn’t it gaudy?”

“I think it’s quite beautiful,” I said a bit stiffly—jerkily,
too. Bali had thrown up his head on the other end of the leadrope, near
knocking me off my feet, and attacked a fly on his flank. For an instant I
thought he was going after Aileen. So did she: she beat a rapid retreat.

But she didn’t run away completely. She seemed to come to a
decision. “Mother has asked to see you. Celia said no, but I think you should
go.”

I stood flatfooted. Bali was cropping grass again, not a
care in the world. “Why?” was all I could think to ask.

“You ride her horses,” said Aileen.

Mrs. Tiffney looked even frailer than Aileen had warned me
she would, white face and white hair against the white sheet, and tubes and
wires and machines all doing their inscrutable business while she simply tried
to stay alive. I’d been not-thinking, up till then. I’d been expecting that
this would go away, she’d come back, everything would be the way it was before.

Looking at her, I knew she wasn’t coming back. She might go
to a nursing home first, for a little while, but not for long. The life was
ebbing out of her even while I stood there.

She’d been asleep, I thought, till her eyes opened. They
were still the same, bigger than ever in her shrunken face. Her smile made me
almost forget all the rest of it. She reached out her arms to me. I hugged her,
being very careful with her tubes and wires, and her brittle bones in the midst
of them.

Aileen had come in with me. When I glanced back to where she’d
been, she was gone.

“Aileen was always tactful,” Mrs. Tiffney said. “Brave,
even, if she saw a way to get by Celia.”

Her voice was an old-lady voice as it never had been before,
thin and reedy. But no quaver in it.

“And how are my horses?” she asked me.

I had fifteen minutes, the nurse at the desk had told me. I
spent them telling her what she most wanted to know. I babbled, maybe, to get
it all in. She didn’t seem to mind.

“And my ponies?” she asked. “My Xanthos and Balios?”

I’d been saving them for last. I started a little at their
names. No one had told me that was what they were. Then I smiled. Of course the
woman who had Achilles’ shield—as genius had imagined it, long after Achilles
was dead—would name her horses after Achilles’ horses. She’d had a pair like
them, Janna had told me, for as long as anyone had known her. Maybe it was part
of the family tradition, like the shield on the wall.

“They’re well,” I answered her, once I remembered to stop
maundering and talk. “They miss you. I had Bali out this morning; Janna and I
did a pas-de-deux. We walked them past the surrey after, and they both stopped.
I swear, they were asking where you were.”

“You haven’t told them?”

She sounded so severe, and so stern, that I stared at her.

She closed her eyes. The lids looked as thin as parchment. “No.
Of course you wouldn’t know. And they’d have heard people talking.”

“We’ve been pretty quiet,” I said. And when she opened her
eyes and fixed them on me: “We did talk about it while we put the horses out.
We’ll tell them properly if you like.”

“It would be a courtesy,” she said, still severely. Then,
with a glint: “However silly you may feel.”

I didn’t know about feeling silly. I talked to my cats at
home. I talked to the horses when I rode them or brushed them. “I’ll tell them,”
I said.

She shut her eyes again. I stood up. I was past my fifteen
minutes. The nurse would be coming in to chase me out, unless I got myself out
first. But when I started to draw back, she reached and caught my hand. I hadn’t
known there was so much strength in her.

“Look after my horses,” she said. “Whatever happens, look
after them. Promise me.”

I’m not proud to admit that the first thing I thought of was
how much it would cost to keep two horses. And the second was that Celia might
have something to say about that. The third was something like a proper
thought. “I’ll do my best,” I said.

“You’ll do it,” she said. “Promise!”

Her machines were starting to jerk and flicker. “I promise,”
I said, to calm her down mostly. But meaning it.

“And the shield,” she said. “That, too. They go together, the
horses and the shield. When I die—”

“You’re not going to die.”

She ignored me. “When I die, they choose to whom they go. It
will be you, I think. The horses have chosen you already.”

“But—”

“Look to Xanthos. Balios is the sweet one, the one who loves
more easily, who gives himself first and without reservation. Xanthos is as
wise as he is wicked. He was silenced long ago, and never spoke again, but his
wits are as sharp as they ever were.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. She’d gone out of her head.
She was dreaming old dreams, taking the name for the thing, and making her very
real if by no means ordinary horses into horses out of a story. I’d done it
myself when I was younger: little rafter-hipped cranky-tempered Katisha was the
Prophet’s own chosen mare, because she was a bay with one white foot and a
star. But that hadn’t made her the first of the Khamsa, any more than Mrs.
Tiffney’s wishing made her horses Achilles’ horses. Or her shield—her
neoclassical masterpiece—Achilles’ shield.

They were treasures enough by themselves. I almost said so.
But she was holding so tight, and looking so urgent, that I just nodded.

She nodded back. “The first moonlit night after I die, make
sure you’re at the barn. Watch the horses. Do whatever they ask you to do.”

What could I do, except nod?

She let me go so suddenly that I gasped. But she was still
breathing. “Remember,” she said, no more than a whisper.

Then the nurse came charging in, took a look at the
monitors, and ordered me out. The last I saw of Mrs. Tiffney was the nurse’s
white back and Mrs. Tiffney’s white face, and her eyes on me, willing me to
remember.