Phantom: One Last Chance (6 page)

Chapter Nine

THE next morning the four girls turned out their ponies, except for Phantom, who hated going in the field. They’d planned to hide on the yard all day so they could keep a lookout, which meant no riding. They mucked out, refilled haynets, scrubbed water buckets and swept the yard. Mrs Millar had texted Charlie, saying that she had got her message, was doing a bit of digging for information, and then would call.

Charlie stayed a while in Phantom’s box. “Things will get better, I promise,” she whispered, to convince herself as much as to persuade the black horse. Phantom stood warily, unmoving, at the back of the box. He turned his deep liquid eye on her, the whites showing, and Charlie felt
a tingle of nerves run through her. He made her feel so tiny, with just one look. He still scared her, no matter what she tried to tell herself. She let herself out of the stable, and headed into Rosie’s cottage with the others for some hot buttered toast and hot chocolate.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Mrs Honeycott said vaguely as she put the plates on the table. “There was something in the post for Charlie this morning.”

“For Charlie?” Rosie asked. Mrs Honeycott scratched her nose with the end of a thin paintbrush which she’d found behind her ear. She frowned, looking taxed, before nodding her head.

“Yes, definitely Charlie,” she confirmed, picking up the pile of red and white envelopes, stuffed with Christmas cards. In among the pile was a brown rectangular envelope which had been folded over at the end and stuck down with tape. Charlie’s name and ‘Blackberry Farm’ were written
on the front in thick marker pen, nothing more. Mrs Honeycott put the envelope on the table, narrowly avoiding a splodge of strawberry jam.

“This can’t have been posted,” Mia said, examining it. “There’s no stamp or address.”

“It must have been delivered by hand,” Alice agreed, getting excited.

Charlie lifted it up and turned it over. It felt curiously solid as she carefully unpeeled the sealed end and then tipped it up. With a thud, a slim red hardback book fell onto the table. The word ‘Diary’ was foiled on the front in faded gold, along with the year.

“This is from six years ago,” Mia whispered as the others held their breath, already realising what that meant. Charlie checked, but there was nothing else in the envelope.

Charlie opened the book and saw, on the first page, the flowing, hand-written words: ‘Fable’s diary’. She carefully turned the page and saw the next inscription, which she read aloud:
“This diary is dedicated to the memory of Fable and her dear little foal.”

“It’s Caitlin’s diary!” Alice said, looking at it in awe. “Fran must have found it!”

“I’m going to start reading it today,” Charlie said. She couldn’t wait to get going. “Right now, in fact, as we’re staying here all day!”

“Ooh, we can all read it by the fire in the living room!” Rosie said, picturing them curled up on the sofas around the Christmas tree eating piping-hot mince pies straight from the oven.

“We can’t exactly keep a lookout from there,” Mia corrected her. “I think we should hide in the tack room and use this opportunity to do a marathon tack-cleaning session. That way the yard’s never left unguarded.”

Rosie sank down in her chair. The thought of soaping and polishing her bridle all day under Mia’s watchful eye filled her with gloom. She wished now that they were going on a marathon ride instead, despite the arctic temperatures.

Charlie frowned as she saw her Mum’s number flash up on her phone.

“Is everything okay?” she asked, then listened quietly before adding, “No, no I didn’t.”

Charlie ended the call, looking thoughtful.

“Who was that?” Mia asked.

“It was Mum,” Charlie explained. “The woman in the post office just called her to ask if I’d taken down the advert for Pirate early.”

“Why?” Rosie asked.

“Because”, Charlie said quietly, “it’s gone.”

Alice suggested that they should check the other adverts they’d put up. Mia stayed behind with Rosie to keep watch on the yard, while Alice jumped bareback onto Scout and jogged him into the woods, Charlie biking beside her. They got to the fork in the bridleway and caught their breath, staring up at the bare tree.

“The pin’s still there,” Alice said.

“But no advert,” Charlie puffed.

“Maybe someone who wants to loan Pirate has taken it?” Alice suggested.

“Maybe, although Mum didn’t mention anyone else calling about him,” Charlie reasoned.

They checked the final tree and found the same – a pin but no advert. Then they headed back to the yard and found Mia and Rosie in the tack room. Mia added a line in her notebook when they updated her.

“Megan might have taken them down so no one else saw them,” Rosie said.

“That fits,” Mia agreed, “if it’s definitely Megan, that is.”

“I guess we might find out today,” Charlie said.

Mia organised Alice and Rosie as they stripped down their bridles into pieces. They had a bucket of warm water on the floor between them, with sponges and saddle soap at the ready. Just as they
began Charlie opened the first page of the diary, sitting cross-legged on the blanket box with Beanie on one side of her and Pumpkin on her lap. She started to read aloud:

The description hit Charlie – it sounded just like Phantom. He never responded to her presence much any more, yet it still felt as if he hated and resented it. In an instant, she knew exactly what to do.

“As cosy as it is in here,” Charlie said, gently moving Pumpkin and standing up, “I think I should be reading this with Phantom. Caitlin wrote this while she was near Fable, so the mare could get used to her. I’m going to try the same with Phantom.”

Charlie walked quietly over to Phantom’s stable. As usual, the black horse was standing in the shadows in his freshly laid, thick straw bed, his coat glistening. He shook his head as Charlie let herself in, and tried to swing away from her as she caught his headcollar. She clipped him to the lead rope, which she tied loosely to the baler twine attached to the metal ring at the front of the stable, near his haynet so that he could still pick at it if he wanted to. The black horse reluctantly stood near her, stretching his lead rope as far as it would go so that he could keep as much distance between them as possible.

At first Charlie was alert to every twitch Phantom made, her heart racing with each thud
of his back hoof or irritable swish of his tail. But the more absorbed she became with the black horse in the diary, the less aware she grew of Phantom. She gasped as she raced through Caitlin’s early struggle to keep the mare alive. She felt her eyes well up as she got to the part when Caitlin truly feared that she was going to lose Fable, and smiled in relief at the happiness that spilled out on the page from Caitlin’s pen, when the mare finally began to take an interest in the world around her.

As Charlie read on through blurred eyes, Caitlin described Fable’s introduction to Molly the Hope Farm sheep and how Molly’s solid, quiet presence seemed to settle her. Fable still didn’t trust Caitlin to get too near, but she and Molly quickly became inseparable. Caitlin then began to patch together the life that Fable had endured before she finally ended up at Hope Farm. She even traced her original breeder, who described her as a cheeky, feisty foal, and clearly
promising. But that part of her character was quickly forgotten as she gained a reputation and got labelled as ‘difficult’ instead. She’d been shipped about from new yard to new yard, with expectations of her ability high, but was given no time to settle. Her nature was delicate, and Caitlin could track the change in her behaviour as it became increasingly unsettled and fractious. Each owner had sold her on, keen to get rid of the tricky-to-handle mare, until she’d ended up, broken, misunderstood and unloved, with Tim Leech – the nasty breeder who was going to take her to the knackers’ yard. Tim said that Fable was defensive, ill-tempered and dangerous. But Caitlin could see beyond that to a fragile horse of whom too much had been asked, too quickly. Caitlin had found her just minutes before it was too late. Now it was down to Caitlin and Molly to mend Fable, whose heart had finally cracked on the day that her foal had been taken from her.

Charlie felt a lump in her throat, and a tear
trickled down her cheek. She heard a big sigh, fluttering through velvety nostrils.

She looked up. She realised that while she’d been reading, Phantom had stopped standing so rigidly, and was no longer filling the box with his unease. She sat quietly for a second, looking at him. He was so beautiful, but she’d stopped seeing it. All she’d seen when she looked at Phantom in the last couple of months was trouble and bad manners, just as all Fable’s owners had done with her. She’d lost sight of the little foal he’d once been. She suddenly realised that she’d learned more about Fable, a horse she’d never meet, in one morning than she had about Phantom after three months. Her eyes widened for a second as a thought struck her. What if Phantom was more like Fable than she realised: what if he was apprehensive and fearful underneath his scary behaviour too, rather than mean and unfriendly?

Suddenly Phantom started, and Charlie looked up to see Rosie, bringing her a steaming mug of
hot chocolate. At once Phantom was transformed back into his grouchy self, and as Charlie stretched her cramped legs, she realised how bored and lonely Phantom must be, standing on his own in his stable for most of the time – especially as she hardly spent any time with him either. She let herself out and walked back to the tack room with Rosie.

“I’m going to take Phantom to pick at some grass,” she said. “Is that okay?”

“I’d better come with you, just in case you need a hand,” Mia suggested, placing her gleaming bridle on its hook, feeling a bit restless after spending so long hidden in the tack room.

“Ooh, me too!” Alice quickly volunteered. After cleaning her bridle to Mia’s high standards, her fingers were aching, and if she heard the same Christmas songs on the radio one more time she might go crazy. She stood up and passed the lunge line to Charlie. “I can open gates, that sort of thing.”

Rosie looked down at the mass of leather pieces still in a pile on the rug box, waiting to be put back together. She started to wish she’d spent less time playing with Beanie and more time concentrating on her bridle. “I guess that means I’m the one stuck here keeping an eye on the yard, then.”

“You’ve got Beanie and Pumpkin to keep you company,” Alice smiled.

As the other three disappeared out of the tack room, Beanie scrabbled at Rosie’s knee, asking her to throw his squeaky toy again.

Charlie felt her heart quicken and her fingers shake as she clipped the lunge line to Phantom’s headcollar and led him out of his stable. Alice ran and opened the gate. Charlie remembered what Neve had said about not holding him too tight. She held the lunge line loosely, so that he didn’t have anything to fight against as he was led to the paddock. As she turned in through the open gate of the schooling field she glanced over
and noticed Pirate grazing with the other ponies in the corner. Suddenly a robin flitted out of the bush beside her and spooked Phantom, who danced at the end of the line. Charlie knew that, for now, the black horse needed her full concentration.

Alice and Mia climbed onto the post-and-rail fencing, huddling up together to keep warm. Mia wrapped her big, fluffy pink scarf around both of them, and Alice tucked her gloved hands into her pockets. They watched as Charlie let the lunge line out. At first Phantom stood, with his head up, then slowly he began to dip and nibble icy grass, raising his head and staring into the distance between bites, and starting at sounds only he could hear. But as Phantom started to relax, so too, Mia and Alice noticed as they glanced at each other with a smile, did Charlie.