The Wild Boy and Queen Moon Read Online Free Page B

give him a dressing-down.
    ‘She’s useless! The knackers’ is all she’s any good for!’ he shouted at them angrily.
    ‘We paid enough money for it!’ they screeched back.
    Julia had heard it all before, but this time was struck by the demeanour of the bay pony. In its eyes she saw all the misery she was feeling herself – in fact, far more. She had never seen such utter dejection and bewilderment in a pony’s expression. It stood head down, trembling, its tail clamped down like a starving dog’s.
    Julia half pulled up and the little mare lifted her head, looked at Julia and gave a pathetic little whinny. Its rider, having dismounted, chucked it in the mouth.
    ‘Pig!’ Julia hissed.
    Whether the boy heard or not, she didn’t know. She rode on, disturbed, thrown by the funny little whinny . Ponies didn’t whinny like that except for a missing companion, or a food bucket. Perhaps I am the missing companion, Julia thought, with an extraordinary, emotional feeling of empathy towards the ill-treated mare. We both hate it, matie; we’re made for each other, Julia thought. What if she asked her mother to buy it? Sell the brutish Minnie and buy her the bay mare? Julia was so excited by this thought that she forgot all about her practice jump and heard her number called before she had even asked Minnie for a canter.
    ‘Are you fast asleep?’ her mother shouted at her angrily.
    ‘Oh, go and drown yourself!’ Julia shrieked.
    She swung Minnie round and rode into the arena. She did two circles at a canter, trying to pull herself together. The course was difficult, the jumps all at angles with lots of sharp turns and awkward distances. She had walked it with her mother earlier and paced out the strides, and her mother had told her exactly how to ride it, but now it all seemed to have gone out of her head. She had a job to find the first jump.
    Minnie was bombing underneath her as usual. The bell went to start and she rode down towards a brush and bar and jumped that easily, then on to some rails and then a funny thing that looked like a wall with a pergola over the top. Minnie jumped it so big that Julia nearly hit her head on the archway. Then he took off at a gallop and, by the time she had got him back, they came to a double spread all wrong. Minnie, being the ace he was, put himself right and jumped it well, but then Julia found herself at the top of the arena with a choice of jumps, one to the left and one to the right, and she had no idea which way to go. She chose the one that Minnie, she could feel, was fancying himself but no sooner had they landed than the bell went for wrong course and she was eliminated.
    She had never done anything like this in her life before – well, not since she was little. Minnie, eager to carry on, couldn’t understand why she was pulling him up and put in some angry bucks.
    ‘What are you dreaming about, Julia? Is it a boy?’ asked a friendly steward, but Julia could see her mother waiting, and couldn’t appreciate the joke. She was in a complete spin – all because of a distressed bay mare.
    She came back into the collecting-ring, passing a grinning Peter Farmer on his way in, and slipped down as her mother came to meet her. She buried her face under the saddle flap to ungirth as her mother let fly.
    ‘You stupid idiot child! Do you think I go to all this trouble to have you throw away your chance because you’re too bone idle to concentrate? You walked the course, didn’t you? We discussed that turn at the top – don’t you remember? Are you plain stupid, or ill, or what? If you ’re too gormless to ride a course we might as well sell up and call it a day!’
    ‘Do you mean that?’ Julia asked, emerging from under the saddle flap.
    ‘Do I mean what? Don’t I always mean what I say?’
    ‘Sell him. Sell Minnie?’
    ‘Are you mad?’
    ‘I hate him.’
    ‘You’d never find a pony as good as this anywhere. Don’t talk rubbish!’
    ‘You said it! Sell up, you