The Forever Horse Read online

  “I see you have brought your own canvas,” Augustin said. “Put it aside as we are working on paper and sketch pads at this point. I don’t think we are ready to commit our ideas to canvas for posterity quite yet.”

  There were sniggers from my classmates. I turned bright red, and stared hard at my shoes. “I haven’t brought a sketch pad,” I replied.

  “Then you can borrow mine for the day,” Augustin said.

  He handed me the pad, and then he went back to the front of the class and began to shuffle papers on his desk. I stood nervously behind the easel, staring at him until he looked up again.

  “Yes?”

  “I was just wondering,” I said. “What we are drawing?”

  There was another snigger from my classmates. Augustin looked imperiously down his nose at me.

  “Mademoiselle Thompson,” he said. “This is my class, but you have your own mind, do you not? I’m not here to guide your hand. What you decide to draw is up to you.”

  I wanted to say, well, why did I come all the way to France just so I can stand here with no direction or input then? I could draw by myself at home just as easily. But I got my pencil out and began to sketch. I was thinking about the last series of pictures that I’d done – works based around those big black-and-white cobs who hacked around Hyde Park. I decided to continue with that, and drew from my memory.

  Soon, I had the outlines down and I was sketching detail, the tree boughs above them, the riders on their backs. Behind me, the rest of the class were laughing at something. I tried to ignore it, and then the girl right behind me spoke up. My French was poor but I could make out what she was saying – it was something like: “Look, sir. I have my end-of-year assignment completed ready for the auction at Lucie’s.”

  There was laughter from the class as she showed off her drawing. It was a stick-figure pony with a circle for a tummy and four sticks for its legs.

  “Stop wasting time, Antoinette,” Augustin replied. “Get on with your work.”

  “Ah, but, sir,” Antoinette persisted. “Isn’t this all you have to do now to get into the Paris School and the auction too? Draw pictures of pretty ponies!”

  There were more giggles until Augustin snapped. “Enough! All of you!”

  But it didn’t stop. For the rest of the day I could hear them, making little whinnies and clip-clops. It turned out that the auction the girl was talking about was the big deal for the students. Being selected to sell your work at Lucie’s was a prestigious achievement for the best pupils at the school. At the end of term, only the superstars of the Paris School would make the cut and be picked. Needless to say, after today I wasn’t thinking that short list was going to include me. At the end of class Augustin had looked at my drawing and hadn’t uttered a single word.

  He hated my work – I could sense it. And the students hated me. So that was it. I had come all the way to Paris to be teased – just as I had been back home – for drawing horses!

  ***

  There was a bath in my private rooms. I love baths and we don’t have one at home. That night, I lay back in the tub with my eyes shut tight, and I heard the laughter of Antoinette and her friends in my head and I felt like no matter what Nicole had said, I was never, ever going to be a real artist. I didn’t belong here. I lay there and listened to the tap drip, and then I stretched my hand back to grab the soap and I felt my knuckles rap against the wood panelling of the bathroom wall. It was a hollow sound, an empty clonk. The wall panel wasn’t solid. I tested the other panels. The sound was solid. The hollow panel was different from the rest. I knocked my knuckles against it again and this time, the panel twisted and pivoted away. I panicked, thinking I had somehow broken the wall! Then I realised it wasn’t broken at all. I had somehow uncovered a secret hidden chamber. A hidey-hole, just big enough to put personal items. I peered in but I couldn’t see anything.

  I got out of the bath, towelled myself down and went and got my phone. I turned on the torch function and squinted inside the hidey-hole. At first I thought there was nothing inside at all – it looked entirely empty. But then I saw something sitting on the bottom of the cupboard. I picked it up and dusted it off. It was a book, wrapped in an ancient cloth-cover. Inside, where time hadn’t faded it, the cloth was dark brown but the exterior had been bleached like bone to grey, and on the front it was imprinted with three dark blood-red gilded letters – MRB. Later, I would discover that they were initials and the M stood for Marie. It was her first name, although no one knew her as Marie; everyone always called her Rose. Rose Bonifait. And the book I had just discovered in the secret chamber that day was her diary.

  July 4, 1852

  I have spent all morning at the abattoir. You cannot imagine how much it upsets me, but I have to go – it’s my duty as an artist to understand the anatomy of the animals that I paint – from their skin to the very core, bone and sinew. It makes me glad every time I visit that I am vegetarian – even though Madame Gris complains so much about how difficult it is to feed me with my fussy, strange ways. One day, she will see. It will be considered normal to do as I do and choose not to eat God’s creatures.

  This morning it was with the usual sense of dread that I went in. But I steeled myself and I did it, and I stopped myself from gagging. I sat in the corner as the men went about their gruesome task and I drew. I looked at every detail, and I tried to be detached and professional, as if I were, say, a vet or a surgeon. It is easier said than done, however, and two hours later, when I emerged into the sunlight with six sketches in my book, I was shaking and in floods of tears. All I could think to do was to escape the misery of what I had witnessed by doing the one thing in the world that I love more than painting. And so I went to the stables beneath our Parisian city apartment and I saddled Celine.

  Of all the horses we own, she is the one. No other mare in our stables is as clever as she is, or as kind.

  I remember summer holidays at the chateau in Fontainebleau when Mama would put me on terrible Sebastian. That tiny grey pony with the flashing eyes and dainty hooves! Oh, Sebastian – what a terror he was! If you were on his back then his only thought was to get rid of you! His favourite trick was to sweep underneath the boughs of a low-branched tree to knock you off. If this failed then he bucked like a bronco. And if that didn’t work he would take himself off into the field and drop to his knees, preparing to roll on top of you! If you didn’t leap off his back at this point, he would crush you, and the trick was so effective that he broke the saddle twice before Mama gave up on saddles entirely. After that, she just used a saddle blanket and a surcingle on him to save the expense of buying a new saddle time and again. Sebastian was the closest thing I have ever seen to pure evil and yet, oh how we loved Sebastian! It was only once Mama despaired of his endless naughty antics and realised that despite his diminutive size he might actually do us harm, that she retired him and bought us Celine to ride instead.

  So when I say that my education as a horsewoman began with Celine it is true – because all Sebastian taught me was how to jump off very quickly to avoid being squashed.

  Celine is the opposite of Sebastian. You could not find a horse more even tempered, sweeter or more compliant. She’s almost twenty now – when we first got her she was nine years old, a mare in her prime. Celine is very beautiful, and I know that shouldn’t matter, but it does with horses. She’s a rich russet chestnut, with a blond mane and tail, deep-brown eyes and clean, slender legs. Her face has a perfect dish – a little Arabian blood saw to that. And the four white socks and the star on her forehead stand out like snow against the burnish of her coat. I have so many drawings of her in my sketch book. She is good at posing. She always pricks her ears forward and arches her neck for me.

  When people say that they prefer geldings because mares are moody and ill-tempered, I think to myself – well, you clearly never met my horses. Or me! I am a girl, after all, just like Celine, and I’m always cheerful and in good spirits and both my brothers, Philippe and Do
rian, can be very sulky boys indeed! I am a better rider than either of them too, and a better painter. Not that I’m boastful – no one likes it when girls are proud. Papa warns me constantly about that. And I reply that no one seems to like it much when girls do anything at all. I am working on solutions to this problem.

  Like when the Paris School turned me down because I was a girl. I wasn’t foolish enough to try to argue with them that my work was better than any. Instead, I accepted their rejection and I resolved to work harder still. Locked in my room, all I did was paint, night and day. I did not leave the house, save for twice each week, when I would pack up my easel and my paints and I would walk to Hospital Boulevard where the horse markets take place. Here, amongst the chaos, I would set up my equipment and I would focus my eye on the horses. The most amazing creatures went under the hammer at these auction yards. Men would enter leading cavalcades of mares, all rich bays or burnished chestnuts. There were pleasure horses for ladies to ride and work horses for pulling carts. Thick-set grey dappled Percherons and burly Ardennais were very popular and the men who brought them through to the yards for sale would plait their manes with stiff red ribbons and meticulously braid and bind their tails. Their coats shone from being strapped with hay wisps and their hooves were oiled and polished. I know this because I captured every detail on my canvases. I would stay there silent in the corner and paint and paint as the auction was underway until the last lot had been sold and the emptied-out yards stank of dung and cigarettes and sweat.

  For three months I worked in this way until I had two paintings that I considered worthy of being submitted to the school. My third and best painting was a work created in the Jardin de Luxembourg, not far from our own stables. It was a portrait of Celine. In this work, I’d painted her side-on, standing in the sunshine dappled by trees. She was staring into the distance, ears pricked and eyes kind. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the work. There was something unnatural about her legs – perhaps the angle of her hocks – legs are fiendishly tricky to do. But all the same, I knew it was a good picture. Her proportions were perfect and the colours and contours were lifelike and shiny. All three paintings were far better than any of those works by the boys who had applied to art school that year. But, don’t say that out loud, Rose! Girls are not allowed to be boastful, remember?

  Anyway. I didn’t. I never boasted about these three paintings. In fact, I didn’t mention them to anyone at all. Except to Dorian. He’s the middle sibling and only a year older than me, and we’ve always been thick as thieves. We look alike too; pale and skinny, both with a dark sweep of fringe hiding our blue eyes. Dorian was eight when Mama died. I was seven and I used to cry myself to sleep every night until Papa decided that the two of us should share a room. Dorian moved into the bunk bed above mine and he would sing to me and tell me stories until I slept again.

  Anyway, it was to Dorian that I turned to solve my problem with the Paris School. My brother has quite the honest face so he seemed perfect for the trick I had in mind. Together, he and I wrapped the three canvases in soft muslin to protect them, and then Dorian tucked them under his arm and with me trailing behind him we went to the apartments of the Paris School.

  Being an artist is in the Bonifait blood. My papa and his father before him both attended the Paris School. So when Dorian went up to the front desk and introduced himself as a Bonifait and asked for an audience with the Directeur, the head of college admissions, Master Demarchelier, was more than willing.

  Master Demarchelier didn’t so much as glance at me waiting there in my chair as he ushered Dorian into his office. That was fine by me. I sat there outside his rooms in the corridor and while I couldn’t hear what was being said behind the closed door, I knew it was going well as they were in there a long while. Eventually my brother emerged, the Directeur with his arm around his shoulder looking most pleased with himself and burbling on about his delight in finding such a gifted pupil just at the eleventh hour when new enrolments for this school year were about to close. He was about to shake hands with Dorian to seal the deal when I leapt forward and pressed my own hand into his in my brother’s stead.

  “My name is Rose Bonifait,” I told him, “and I am the artist who painted these works, not my brother Dorian. So it is I, not Dorian, who will be attending your school.”

  It was a scandal of course. People are so easily scandalised. That a twelve-year-old girl should be admitted to the Paris School! The master was not best pleased at being tricked. Yet even in his annoyance he had to admit my work was so good he would overlook the naughty ruse and let me in. And so, I became the first-ever girl to attend his college.

  From day one at the school they all whispered about me. Nowadays they don’t even bother to whisper – they say it straight to my face. You are an impudent young girl and you do not belong here with us, the intellectual elite. It bothers them still more than I really don’t care, and I make it so obvious. Yesterday, in class, the Directeur tried to pick at the thread of my temper when he asked me what I thought I was playing at with my ridiculous costume I had taken to wearing.

  “I don’t know what you mean, sir,” I said.

  “You keep coming to these classes dressed as a boy,” the Directeur pointed out.

  I was so sick of trying to paint in my silly lace gowns that for several mornings now, with Dorian’s permission, I had raided his wardrobe for his cast-offs. He’d given me some old boiled wool breeches in dark charcoal, a white cotton shirt and a houndstooth waistcoat. I liked the way the wool trousers and the cotton felt against my skin. And, oh, the unbelievable freedom of movement! Dorian gave me jackets too – and socks and ties and it was marvellous to be dressed at last in clothes that were comfortable.

  “Mademoiselle Bonifait,” the Directeur said to me. “You must dress like a lady to attend the Paris School.”

  “But, sir,” I replied. “I thought ladies weren’t allowed to attend the Paris School. And now I am dressed like a boy you do not like that either? You should make up your mind.”

  Even the boys in class, most of whom hate me for being there, had to laugh at that. As for the Directeur, he huffed that I had better “change my appearance by morning”.

  Well, that made me so cross I decided I certainly would change it! In the bathroom mirror that night I stared at my reflection and my long, dark ringlet curls, which I usually shaped each evening before bed by wrapping them in brown paper to keep the curl precise. Well, I thought, Monsieur Directeur, you are right. I must change. No more brown paper for me.

  I got out the scissors from Mama’s old sewing kit. The blades were so sharp that when I ran my finger along to test them, I nearly sliced the tip of my finger clean off. I sheared into my long, dark ringlets and the blade cut through the hair like butter. After I’d shorn them off, I tidied up using a pudding bowl to create a shape.

  The pile of hair on the floor beside me looked a bit like a rat scurrying across the floorboards. Then Dorian came in and asked me what on earth I had done.

  “I look more like you now, don’t you think?” I teased him.

  The short cut brings out my eyes, makes the most of my cheekbones. And it will be so practical! No more hair in my eyes when I am trying to paint. I can focus on the work. Anyway, curls never got me anywhere. The boys at the school seldom even acknowledge that I am alive, and the only other places I ever go are the auction yards and the abattoir, and curls are no use to me there either.

  Back to the abattoir. As I said, I was there this morning. I had skipped my lesson at school – I suddenly didn’t feel like facing the Directeur with my new hair. His endless, painful discussions about the failings of my gender were irritating me too much for me to hold my tongue, and going instead to a place where they slaughter animals felt like a pleasant change of pace.

  I’m being horrible. Truly, it is never fun to go to the abattoir. This morning, though, dealing with what I saw in that slaughter chamber upset me even more than usual, and I had a feeling of being deep
ly heartbroken when I emerged. As I saddled Celine, I wondered whether the stench of the place clung to me in some way because the mare skipped and danced as I tacked her up, but she settled when I mounted, and we rode out across the gravel of the forecourt of the stables and down the avenues to the park.

  The Jardin de Luxembourg is still my favourite place in the world. Winding bridle paths meander between trees and around the great lake, and there is a sense of wildness to the place so that you can scarcely believe you are in the city. One day I even spied deer bounding through the forest as I rode.

  Before Mama got sick, we would ride there together, and she would point out things and make me practise my English. L’oiseau is bird. L’arbre is tree. Jardin is garden. I chanted these words to myself today as I rode the bridle paths with Celine and then cantered my mare through the trees, watching the dappled late-afternoon light of Paris growing rose-pink as the evening closed in on us. By the time I returned Celine to her stall that evening, I had made my mind up about two things.

  The first was that, no matter what happened to me in my life, I would always love horses.

  The second thing I decided was perhaps more important. Until now, I have been quiet. I have apologised for my gender and been happy to let men consider me to be the weaker sex, have allowed them to make decisions that are unfair and unequal. But the Directeur’s silly fuss about something as pointless as my style of dress has strengthened my ambition, has turned my will to steel.

  No matter what Papa says about the importance of girls being modest and demure, I know I will never be these things and I refuse to be considered less than a man. Because the second thing that I decided today when I was out riding is that I am going to be the greatest artist in the world. That is my plan – and when I make my mind up, I do not fail.

  By the time I stopped reading Rose’s diary the bathwater had gone cold and my toes had turned wrinkly. Wiping my hands on my towel to keep the pages from getting damp, I carefully put the book back into the hidey-hole. That secret chamber was actually quite easy to manipulate now that I knew how. All I had to do was tap hard to pivot the false panel and it would open to the dark space beyond where the diary had been concealed, undiscovered for a hundred and fifty years.