The Secret Horses of Briar Hill

“Perhaps you’ll become a baker, like your parents,” Anna says. “All those rolls and loaves of bread. You’ll puff up like a little pig.” She pokes at my ribs teasingly, but I don’t smile. The bakery feels so very far away in this moment. I am already forgetting the sounds of Mama humming as she kneads dough.

I shake my head.

“Well, think about what makes you happy,” she says.

I think hard.

I like to draw. And to go to the cinema with Marjorie—Heidi is the best movie I’ve seen. I like to climb the garden wall even though Sister Constance told us not to. And I like the winged horse. Yes, that is what makes me happy. That she is mine. That she is secret.

“I’d like to be an explorer,” I say at last. “I’d like to discover new things that no one else has. Go places other people won’t.”

And then I feel embarrassed, because it is a silly wish. Explorers are brave, dashing men who fly airplanes and hunt Germans and have lungs that aren’t choked with stillwaters.

Anna blinks in surprise, and then the most beautiful smile crosses her face. “But, Emmaline,” she says, “you already are.”

“EMMALINE’S BEEN OUTSIDE! Look at her dress!”

Benny jumps up from the breakfast table the next morning and points to the back of my skirt. I reach around and feel a briar. Drat. There are only briar bushes in one place—the gardens—and it must have caught yesterday during my visit to the white horse. Sister Constance rubs her tired eyes and gives me her God would disapprove look.

“Emmaline, remember the rule. It’s for your own good, with the foxes out there, growing hungrier as it gets colder.” She shakes her head, muttering something about how fresh air won’t cure any of us if we freeze to death first.

I sit at the table and eat my porridge with plum jam. Most of the younger children’s seats are empty, their bowls already licked clean. Only Benny, and Jack and his brother Peter, and the three small girls who are always clinging to each other remain. Thomas is at the far end of the long table, where the adults eat, hunched over his bowl like a piece of twisted driftwood that has somehow washed up in our breakfast room. His arm-side is facing me, and if I lean forward a little, I can almost pretend his other arm is there, just hidden.

I eye him sideways. He doesn’t look like the type to fatten children for witches, but who does?

“Where’d you go, then, Emmaline?” Benny asks, his head jutted forward. “To the loo outside? I bet you like to feel fresh air on your bum.”

Jack snickers. The three little mice do too.

“That’s a lie!” I say. My head whips toward the kitchen pantry door, but Sister Constance is cataloging cans inside and hasn’t heard this injustice. “I was in the sundial garden. I found a winged horse there—”

I clamp a hand over my mouth.

So much for keeping secrets.

Benny starts laughing. “A what? A flying horse?” He pretends to laugh so hard that he has to grip the edge of the table to keep from falling off the bench. But then the stillwaters rise up and he coughs and coughs, and it sounds like a dog barking in the night.

Jack jumps in. “Winged horses don’t exist, flea.”

“They did!” one of the mice pipes up. “In the Bible they lived in the Garden of Eden, but then the great flood came and there wasn’t any room left on Noah’s ark, so they drowned. That’s why there aren’t any more of them.”

Even doubled over in pain, Benny manages to shoot the little mouse a sneer. “That’s unicorns.” He coughs more. “And it isn’t true, anyway. It’s just something Sister Mary Grace made up to make you pay attention in church.”

The little mouse sulks back to her porridge.

“They do exist,” I say. “Only not in our world. They live in the other world, the one behind the mirrors. You would see them, if you ever looked, but I can tell from your greasy hair that you haven’t laid eyes on a mirror in days. Anyway, the horse in the sundial garden got out somehow.”

The other children are quiet. The only sound is Thomas’s metal spoon, scraping the last of his porridge at the far end of the table.

“I’ll prove it,” I say. “Come and see.”

“And how are we supposed to do that?” Benny tries to twist the words into a sneer, but the truth is, I think he’s a little curious. “We aren’t allowed that far, and anyway, the garden gate is locked.”

“You’re a boy. If I can climb over the wall in a dress, you can.” I give him a hard look. “Are you afraid of the foxes?”

Benny glances in the direction of the pantry. “Of course not.”

The three little mice confer among themselves in their secret mouse language. Thomas stands up and dumps his bowl in the soapy dishwater, and they hush. I think they forgot he was there, so silent and flat, as unnoticeable as the shadows that have been cast on the wall this whole time. He wipes his one hand on a kitchen towel, and then hitches up his trousers with all the grace of a bear.