The Secret Horses of Briar Hill

“No children are allowed beyond the kitchen terrace, on account of the foxes,” she said.

But after lunch, I sneak beyond the terrace anyway.

I want to watch Thomas bury the bird. The others are scared of him, though he is only twenty—barely a man. Benny says he is a monster. But Sister Constance says God gave Thomas only one arm for a reason, and that reason was so that he couldn’t go fight the Germans like the other young men in the village, so that he would stay here with us, in the hospital, and take care of the chickens and the sheep and the turnip patch, so that we would have vitamins to keep us strong. I know that Sister Constance can’t lie because she’s a nun, but, sometimes, I’m scared of Thomas too. Which is why I hide behind the woodpile while I watch him bury the dead chicken.

It’s the start of December, and the ground is hard, and it must be difficult for him to dig with one arm, but he manages. Where the other arm should be there is only a sleeve fastened to his shoulder with a big silver diaper pin. He lays the dead chicken in the hole. When he thinks no one is looking, he runs his fingers over the chicken’s white, white feathers, and I wonder if it feels the same on his fingers as it would on mine, if soft feathers feel the same for Benny and Anna and Sister Constance and Thomas and me, or if it’s only beneath my hands that chickens feel warm and alive, like stones left in the sun. Then Thomas buries the bird under red dirt, and the bird is gone.

DR. TURNER COMES EVERY Wednesday to administer our medication in the little room that was once a butler’s pantry. “Tell me how you are feeling, Emmaline,” he says kindly. Everything about Dr. Turner is kind. The way he warms his stethoscope before he presses it against my skin. The chocolate squares he slips me when Sister Constance isn’t looking. The wink he gives me with his woolly gray caterpillar eyebrows.

Dr. Turner is like Thomas: He isn’t whole. Only whole men can go to war to fight the Germans. But what Dr. Turner is missing isn’t an arm or a leg or even a finger. It’s a part of his heart. It’s the daughter and wife he lost to the bombs. The missing part that makes him twitch when there is a thunderstorm, and that one time, when lightning struck the roof and he crawled under the kitchen table and made a strange whining sound like a dog, until Sisters Constance and Mary Grace coaxed him out with weak tea, and sweat was soaking into the armpits of his white coat.

Dr. Turner puts the end of his stethoscope on my back and listens while I breathe. Lining the room, the shelves that used to hold fancy plates are now filled with pill bottles and iodine swabs and tongue depressors.

“Are you taking your medication, Emmaline?”

In the full-length examination mirror behind him, a winged horse is scratching its ear against the window frame.

“Yes, Doctor.”

He frowns as if he might not believe me, and then pulls out a pad of paper and a pencil that he wets on his tongue. He turns his back to lean on the cabinet while he writes, and I make a face at the horse; it keeps on scratching its ear. I wonder what it sees, when it looks through the mirror, back at me. I wonder if the mirror-world feels any different from ours: if, over there, cold is still cold, and hot is still hot, and if Sister Constance’s rulers really taste as good as the horses make them look.

Dr. Turner finishes writing, folds the note in half, and hands it to me. “Give this to Sister Constance to take to the chemist in Wick.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“And paste this outside your door. I noticed the last one fell off.”

He hands me a blue ticket. He uses the tickets so the Sisters will know what treatment we need each week. There are three colors: Blue for patients who are well enough to go outside for exercise and fresh air. Yellow for those who must limit their activity to indoors. Red for the ones—the one, because it is only Anna—too ill to leave their beds.

Dr. Turner starts to leave, distracted, and I clear my throat loudly so that I’m sure he will hear. He pats his jacket pocket. “Ah. Almost forgot.” He hands me a chocolate wrapped in tinfoil, just like the soldiers get in their ration packs. “Our little secret, yes?”

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nbsp; I smile.

I am very good at secrets. I haven’t told anyone about the time I saw Jack peeing on a hedgehog by the woodshed, and he let me play with his Lionel steam engine if I stayed quiet.

Well, now you know, but you can keep a secret too. I can tell.

Dr. Turner consults his list. “Send in Kitty next.”

I slip off the examination table and pop my head into Sister Constance’s classroom, where she is giving the little ones their spelling lesson, to tell Kitty it’s her turn. Then I march down the hall. We older children don’t have our lessons until the afternoon, so my time is my own, for a little while at least. The mirrors here are empty, but the floors shake, and I wonder if winged horses are walking down it in their world behind the mirrors, or if it is just Thomas banging around on the furnace below. I match the thunk-thunk-thunk with my steps until I reach the narrow staircase. I peek over my shoulder for any wild-dog boys with parted red hair. Clear. I dart up the stairs, past the residence level, then up again toward the attic, start unwrapping Dr. Turner’s chocolate, and I am just about to take a bite when a face jumps out of the shadows.

I scream.

Benny laughs in his shrill way. Jack comes out from the other side of the rafters, laughing hard, holding in his sides as if scaring me is so funny that his ribs ache because of it.

“You can’t be up here!” I say. “You’re supposed to be helping in the kitchen until afternoon lessons!”

Benny rests a hand on the stairwell eave and leans over me. “Same goes for you, flea.”

I press a hand against my tufts of hair. “I don’t have fleas.”

Benny’s favorite Popeye comic book rests on the stairs by his feet. There is a faint smell of smoke. I don’t know where Benny and Jack got a cigarette. Not even Dr. Turner can find cigarettes for sale in Wick.

I let my hand fall angrily. “Sister Constance will skin you alive when I tell her you’ve been smoking up here.”

Benny’s eyes go dark and his nose gets extra houndlike and I start to shrink an inch or two, but then he glances down and scoops up something lying next to the comic book. “What’s this?”