The Secret Horses of Briar Hill

A shadow ripples over the winged horse. A dark one with outstretched wings that swallow up the horse and the sundial. A shrill siren wails to life from the direction of the hospital. The horse’s ears go straight, and I turn toward the wailing sound. Its shriek rises and falls.

The air raid siren.

I gape up at the shadow. A plane! The Germans, attacking! I drop to all fours and cover my head like they taught us in school. I can’t believe the Germans are here, in Shropshire. They bomb cities, not turnip fields. We’re supposed to be safe here. The trains, the countryside. It’s supposed to be safe.

After a minute no bombs shatter the earth, and I look up. The air raid siren is still wailing and wailing. The winged horse is blinking calmly in the mist.

I was wrong. The dark shadow was far too silent to have been a plane.

And the siren…

“Drat!” I run toward the garden wall. “Don’t worry, it’s just a drill,” I call over my shoulder to the horse. “?‘Half an hour, once a week, to keep us sharp and at our peak.’?” As I clamber over the ivy wall, I think of my schoolteacher in Nottingham, waving her hands as we all recited the rhyme together behind our thick rubber gas masks.

The other children are already forming a tidy line on the edge of the kitchen terrace. With their masks on, their faces are black rubber with two gaping eyes and a long round iron snout. Thomas and Sister Constance are helping carry Anna, in the wheeled wicker chair, up the sunken kitchen stairs, though she is attempting to wave them away. She insists she can walk, if they’d only let her. Sister Constance insists she won’t allow anyone to fall on stone stairs and crack a head open and ruin her drill.

“Emmaline!” Sister Mary Grace sees me running and presses a hand to her chest in relief, but her face quickly turns to consternation. She holds out my gas mask, which I left dangling on the corner of my bed, and then slides her own over her face.

“I’m sorry, Sister—”

“In line.” Her voice has been transformed to that of a creature from outer space. ?

??Go on. Quick feet.” She points to the far end of the row of children.

I fumble with the straps and then I am an outer-space creature too. Once we’re in line and Anna is up the stairs, Sister Constance stops turning the siren handle. She gives us a sharp nod, and then we march, high knees and pumping fists, around the corner of the house to the sunken entrance of the basement, down the basement stairs, and then sit cross-legged in the straw, staring at each other’s masks.

Sister Constance ducks in the doorway with a handheld timer clock. She presses a button.

“Half an hour, children.” The straps of her mask make her habit bunch around her face. “No talking. This is time to pray for our soldiers who are fighting on the front.”

Then she and Sister Mary Grace are gone, and it is only us twenty small outer-space creatures shifting uncomfortably, coughing behind our masks. Anna, in the wheeled chair, delicately arranges her skirt over her knees. The small girls who are always clinging to each other like three little mice hold hands and play a squeezing game they’ve never taught anyone else. Peter picks a scab on his elbow.

Children start shifting, trying to keep warm.

Someone coughs loudly.

“Blimey, this is dull,” someone else groans, kicking his feet out. Behind the mask, I can’t tell if it is Jack or his brother, Peter. “And it was breakfast time, too. The tea will go cold.”

“Don’t be such a baby, Jack.” Benny’s thin sneer sounds like he’s speaking from the inside of a tin can.

Jack folds his arms. “Or else what?”

Benny sits up straight. “Or else what? I’ll tell you what.” He leans forward, the gas mask making his breathing sound like slow and dangerous waves at sea, out and in, out and in. “Do you know what Captain Cook discovered on his travels in the South Pacific? That cannibals don’t like to eat grown-ups. Too tough and chewy. They much prefer children, with their tender flesh. Especially babies who play with toy trains and whine over cold tea. They’d just love you.”

“That’s rubbish,” someone says.

Benny spins his rubber face toward the voice, looking from one child to another. “It’s true. And if you think you’re safe here, you’re wrong.” His voice drops. “Why do you think Thomas lives out in that little cottage? It’s because it’s far enough away from the hospital that the Sisters won’t hear the screams of the children he snatches.”

Anna lets out a snort from behind her mask. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Benny ignores her. “He doesn’t eat them himself, no.” Everyone’s faces are fixed on Benny’s. “Though he’s tried a bite every now and then, of course—it’s hard not to when their meat smells so delicious. He snatches them for the witches that live in the woods. Keeps them in cages in his cottage, feeds them milk to fatten them, just like the lambs, and then delivers them to the witches.”

Anna leans forward in her chair tensely. “Stop this at once, or I’ll fetch—”

“He took pity on a child once.” Benny talks right over her. “A little baby who wailed and wailed, and so he brought it back to its family in Wick. The witches were so cross that they took his arm in its place, as punishment. Cut it off like felling a dead branch.”

“That’s absurd,” Anna says. “He was born without his arm.”

But no one is listening to Anna, except for me.