The Secret Horses of Briar Hill

“Another secret?” he sneers. “You’re terrible at keeping secrets.”

A flash of silver wrapper. My chocolate!

“Give that back!”

He holds it high, shaking his head as his eyes light up. “Who’d you swipe it from, flea?”

“I didn’t steal it! Someone gave it to me, but I can’t tell you who!”

“Another secret?” he sneers. “You’re terrible at keeping secrets.”

“Am not!” I snatch for it. “Give it back!”

But his eyes are on fire. Chocolate means the same thing to him as it does to me—to all of us. A break from dry bread and soupy beans. A sweet memory, something just for you, something from before.

Benny suddenly pinches me just below my shirtsleeve. I yelp, but he only twists harder. He is thin for a boy of thirteen, but strong. “Promise you won’t tell Sister Constance about the cigarette.”

“Ow!”

“Say it.”

“It’s mine! Give it back or I’ll tell!”

I can feel Jack pacing at the edge of the stairs like a wild dog. He snakes out a hand and pinches my other arm, too, and then snickers.

“Promise you won’t tell her, and I’ll give you your chocolate back,” Benny says.

“Ow! Fine.”

He gives me one more sharp pinch and then lets me go. I pull back, rubbing the red welts on my arm. Jack is grinning with his yellow teeth, so excited that he starts coughing and has to double over.

I hold out my hand.

Benny just smiles slowly.

He tears off the rest of the wrapper and pops it in his mouth. “Waat choholaat?” he mumbles, while lines of brown spit dribble down his chin.

Now I grow an inch, two, three, until my anger towers over him.

“I hate you!” I shove him, but he just laughs, and I run down the stairs. I run past Dr. Turner’s old butler’s pantry, where little Arthur who never talks is crying silent tears over an injection he’s about to receive, and then down into the kitchen. Sister Mary Grace is bent over a copper pot on the stove. She looks up with a tired face that glistens with steam.

“Emmaline, fetch me an onion from the larder. If you dig deep, there’s still some good ones, when you peel off the outer layers—”

I shove open the back door and run out onto the kitchen terrace. Children are tossing turnips back and forth and trying to juggle. When their backs are turned, I dart around the corner and run to the garden wall, even though it’s against the rules to go so far.

I don’t care about the rules.

I’ll take my chances with the foxes.

IT IS COLD OUTSIDE, and still foggy in the low parts of the fields. I run straight until I reach the gardens’ grand front gate, which Thomas padlocked long ago. No one goes beyond the garden wall now. Before the war, the hospital wasn’t a hospital at all. It was the house of a beautiful, rich princess, only she was old, and you are probably thinking that doesn’t sound like a princess, but it’s true. When the bombs started, the princess went to live with relatives and gave the house to the Sisters of Mercy, who added more beds to all of the bedrooms and blacked out the windows with blankets, and the nuns came, and then children came, all on trains. Rumbling, rumbling, while the bombs burst outside. My neighbors were evacuated to Dorset on the first trains. They didn’t have the stillwaters. Benny does. Anna does. I do. All the children at Briar Hill hospital have the stillwaters, and so we are here, because we cannot infect each other because we are already infected.

Sister Mary Grace told me that when the princess lived here, the grounds were beautiful. Young men and women from as far as London would come to walk through the walled gardens, amid the rosebushes and statues and gurgling fountains. They used to throw open the ballroom doors so that music would pour onto the sprawling lawns, where her guests would play croquet. But the princess had an army of gardeners, and now we have only Thomas, and Thomas has only his one arm. So that is why the garden gate is locked, and why the little creeping briars grow longer and longer each day.

But the ivy forms a twisting ladder, and it is easy to climb over the garden wall. I just have to tuck my skirt between my legs. On the other side I drop down into a forgotten place. There are benches that are being slowly disappeared by honeysuckle, and crumbling statues of Greek gods with moss clinging to their faces. I wander the maze of walls and find a smaller garden, tucked away in the corner. There is a column in the center that reaches to my shoulders, and on top is a sundial. It has a circular base with a triangular arm pointing toward the sky to cast a shadow that tells the time. It looks to be made of gold or brass that might once have been reflective enough to show the mirror-horses, but now it’s too tarnished. I sit on a bench, crunching the vines, and blow into my hands.

Something rustles, and I go stiff.

I haven’t forgotten about the foxes.