The Girl Who Rode the Wind Read online

  “There is a letterbox in the front door of the contrada,” Nonna said. “Post this through it and come straight home.”

  I hesitated.

  “Nonna?”

  “Yes, Piccolina?”

  “We didn’t just come here for a holiday, did we?”

  Nonna looked serious. “No, Piccolina.”

  “So why did you want to come back?”

  Nonna took a deep breath. “I am back for the same reason that I stayed away so long,” she said. “Because many years ago, something unforgiveable happened here. And now, perhaps at last, I am ready for forgiveness.”

  It was near dusk as I walked the streets of the Via di Vallerozzi for the second time that day. Sure, I’d said to Nonna. I’m fine about going back there and posting the letter through the door. But as I made my way to the red-brick building I had this tight knot growing in my belly. What if the Prior was still there? I had this image in my head of him lunging at me with scissors.

  When I reached the contrada I went up to the corner where the streets intersected, where I’d seen the Prior tending the rose bushes. There was no one there. I cast a glance up the street and then turned up the path that led to the entrance.

  The front door was really huge, like the door of a castle, but the mail slot set into it was regular size. I took Nonna’s letter and pushed it through. I held the envelope for a moment, hesitating, and my fingers had just let it go when I felt a hand fall down on my shoulder and clasp me from behind.

  “Hey!”

  I jerked my head around, expecting to see the Prior wielding his scissors.

  Instead, I was looking into the face of a boy. He had pale skin and dark eyes, and his black hair was slicked right back off his face so that I could see the hint of a widow’s peak at his hairline. It gave him the impression of being older, but I judged he was about my age.

  He took one look at me and pulled his hand back as if he had stuck it on a hot plate.

  “Hey yourself!” I replied, trying to act sassy to cover up the fact that he had made my heart stop.

  “So sorry!” the boy said. “I thought you were someone else.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not,” I said.

  “You speak English?” he asked.

  “I speak American,” I corrected him.

  “I didn’t mean to …” the boy stumbled on. “You have your hair tied up and it made you look from behind like you were one of the other boys.”

  He saw the look on my face. “So sorry again! I keep saying the wrong thing. I didn’t mean to be rude. I just …”

  “I get what you mean,” I smiled. “It’s OK.”

  I stuck out my hand awkwardly – he was standing rather close to me. “My name is Lola, Lola Campione.”

  “Hello, Lola,” he said. “I am Francesco, but everyone calls me Frannie.”

  I might have boy’s hair, I thought, but at least I don’t have a girl’s name.

  Frannie looked behind me. “You were planning to go inside?” he asked.

  “Oh no!” I stepped away from the door. “I was just dropping something off. How about you? Are you a member of the Wolf contrada?”

  “Me?” Frannie seemed taken aback. “No, I do not belong here. I was delivering the straw bales so that they can prepare the stable for the Palio.”

  “There’s a stable?” I looked the building up and down. “Where?”

  “Downstairs, in the basement.” Frannie pointed over the edge of the building to an enclosed courtyard below. “You see those iron bars?”

  “They keep horses down there?”

  “Not horses,” Frannie said. “Just one horse. And not all the time, just for one night – right before the race. Every other night of the year the stall stands empty – the horses do not live here.”

  “Where do the horses live then?” I asked.

  Frannie smiled. “They live with me.”

  Frannie’s grandfather was a horse trainer. He had a stables on the outskirts of the city where he bred, raised and trained horses for the Palio, which he sold to all the contradas. He had almost thirty horses, and right now they were preparing many of them for the race in a month’s time.

  Frannie told me all of this as we walked down the Via di Vallerozzi together.

  “That is so weird,” I said. “My dad is a racehorse trainer too, back in New York.”

  “You like horses?” Frannie seemed pleased. “Then you should come and visit my farm. Come and see the Palio horses.”

  “Awesome,” I said.

  Frannie grinned. “Awesome,” he repeated.

  “Did I say something funny?” I frowned.

  “No, no!” Frannie looked embarrassed. “I like the way you speak … American.”

  “You speak it pretty good too.”

  “I have a very good English friend,” Frannie said. “He came to ride horses for my grandfather for many years and he taught me how to speak just like him.”

  We had reached the gates of the Porta Ovile.

  “I go this way,” he said, pointing in the opposite direction to the avenue of trees that led me home.

  “Well, goodbye then, it was nice to meet you,” I said.

  Frannie dug around in his pocket and found a piece of paper. “I’m going to write down the address of my house. It is just over the hill here, not far. You could walk over tomorrow, if you have time? In the afternoon maybe?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “OK!” Frannie looked really pleased. He shoved the piece of paper into my hand. I put it in my pocket.

  “See you tomorrow then?” he said.

  “OK,” I replied.

  I was just about to walk away when Frannie yelled out to me again. “By the way,” he said. “I really like your shoes. They’re cool!”

  I was wearing those white trainers that Nonna had bought me.

  “No, Lola.”

  Nonna shook her head in disbelief. “No, no, no. You must not get involved with this boy. It is best if we have nothing to do with the people of the Wolf.”

  “But he’s not a Wolf!” I said. “He said he doesn’t even belong to the contrada. He was just there to deliver some straw bales.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes!” I said. “He’s not a Wolf and he was really nice. And he has horses!”

  I couldn’t believe she wouldn’t let me go! Frannie wanted to be friends with me. Not a single kid in Ozone Park had ever asked me round to their house.

  “Please, Nonna? Please!”

  Nonna sighed. “I suppose you can’t just sit here with me all day. Very well. What time are they expecting you?”

  Frannie had told me to come in the afternoon so I left home at two o’clock. The address he wrote down for me didn’t have a street or anything. It just said Castello delle Quattro Torra but he had insisted it would be easy to find.

  At Porta Ovile I took the path that I’d seen Frannie take the day before and as soon as I came around the bend of the city walls the Castello delle Quattro Torra was right in front of me set high on the green hills ahead. Frannie was right – you could hardly miss it. A fortress with four turrets, one at each corner, jutting up against the blue sky. The turrets must have been how the place got its name – Castle of the Four Towers.

  The castle seemed to dominate the landscape, with deep valleys on either side covered with stands of oak trees. On the hills on the eastern side, instead of the usual olive trees and vineyards, there was bare pasture divided up by post and rail fencing, perfect for horses.

  It took me another fifteen minutes on foot to reach the castle. As I got closer, the fortress walls seemed to rise up in front of me. Conifer trees marked out the sweep of the driveway that led to a massive oak front door. It was in proportion to the castle walls and must have been twenty feet high. But there was another normal human-sized entry cut into the door. I turned the heavy cast iron handle and stepped into a cobbled courtyard within the castle walls. I looked up to the sky above and called out.

>   “Hello?” My voice echoed. “Anybody home?”

  I stood and waited but no one came. To my left there was a flight of stairs built into the wall and I went up them and through a doorway. The stairs continued to the next level where there was yet another door, but when I tried this one it was locked. There was a button on the door, I pushed it and heard footsteps on the other side and then the door swung open and there was a dark-haired woman wearing a white dress standing there.

  “Lola?”

  I stood there for a moment, saying nothing as if I didn’t know my own name.

  “Yes,” I managed to squeak.

  The woman smiled at me. “Come in, we’ve been expecting you.” Then, turning back over her shoulder she called out. “Francesco! She is here!”

  The woman swung the door open. “Come in,” she said. “I am Violetta, Francesco’s mother. He won’t be long. Make yourself at home.”

  I was in a living room filled with overstuffed floral couches, antique furniture and vases full of flowers. “This place is amazing!”

  “Would you like me to show you around?” Violetta asked.

  “She doesn’t want to see the castle, Mama,” Frannie said as he came bounding in. “She’s not a tourist.”

  “She is new in town, though,” Violetta said, “At least I could take her up the turret to see the view.”

  “Lola didn’t come here to look at views,” Frannie said. “She came to see horses!”

  He grabbed my arm and led me off through the house. “We go this way to the stables,” he said.

  Through the kitchen and the dining room I followed Frannie. Then through another door and down a narrow staircase and another landing and more stairs until at last we reached an archway that led to the stables. There were twenty crumbling brick loose boxes covered in ivy arranged around a small courtyard. The sound of our footsteps prompted nickers and whinnies from inside the stalls as the horses began to poke their noses out to see what was going on.

  “Oh wow!” I breathed.

  They were like works of art in a gallery, and the loose boxes, with their split Dutch doors closed at the bottom, but open at the top, served as individual picture frames, capturing each glorious face like it was a portrait as they stuck their long, elegant necks out over the doors.

  There was something almost fairy tale about their appearance, as if they weren’t real horses at all. The wide set eyes and broad foreheads gave them a fierce intelligence, and the flared nostrils and delicate dish of their muzzles added an exotic quality to their beauty.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “You mean their breeding?” Frannie said. “They’re Anglo-Arab. Half of their bloodline is pure Thoroughbred like your racehorses, but the other half is Arabian. It’s the desert blood that gives them the stamina and the agility they need for the Palio.”

  “They’re beautiful,” I said.

  Frannie seemed pleased. “My grandfather has a good eye.”

  Almost every one of the loose-box doors now had a horse looking out over it. There was a pretty dapple grey and a flea-bitten grey right alongside, two bays and a black horse with a thick white stripe down its muzzle.

  “How many horses do you have?”

  “Twenty in work and some young stock,” Frannie said. “Not all of them are ready to race, though. We have maybe ten horses who are good enough to be selected for the Palio.”

  There was a loud, insistent whinny coming from the stall in the far corner of the yard. The ivy that grew over the stable portico hung low, obscuring my view so that I couldn’t see the horse. But I could hear him all right! He was stamping and fretting and kicking up a fuss.

  “Is that horse OK?” I asked Frannie.

  Frannie frowned. “I moved him there because he was causing too much trouble, always playfighting with the horses in the stalls beside him. But he hates it out of the way in the corner. He likes to be where the action is.”

  “What do you mean, ‘causing trouble’?” I asked.

  “Watch,” Frannie said. “You’ll see.”

  Beneath the ivy I caught a glimpse of a chestnut muzzle poking over the top of the Dutch door. Then I saw the horse’s lips wrap around the bolt on the door and heard the sound of metal scraping.

  There was a sudden, heavy clonk as the horse gave the bolt a firm pull and it slid back so that the door unlatched. Then, using his chest, he barged against the bottom door and it swung open and out he strutted into the courtyard. He looked quite pleased with himself as he walked across the cobbles towards us.

  “Nico!” Frannie called out to him and the horse nickered back enthusiastically, lengthening his stride to come to us.

  “He opened the door by himself!” I marvelled.

  “Yeah,” Frannie said darkly. “I thought it was a cute trick too, at first, but I am over it now. He is too smart for his own good, this horse. What is the point of putting him away at night if he decides when he comes and goes?”

  He sighed. “At least he hasn’t figured out how to open the drawbridge and get out of the courtyard.”

  The golden chestnut shook his mane as Frannie said this, as if to say “Give me time and I’ll figure out how to do that too!”

  It was a luxurious mane. Thick and bushy, the colour of honey with streaks of flaxen-blond. The prettiness of the pale colour of his mane was all the more striking against the warm treacle of his chestnut coat.

  He stood about sixteen-two, as big as the Thoroughbreds back home, but he was burly, all muscle and sinew, with his rounded hindquarters and crested neck. As he walked up to us he kept shaking his handsome head and nickering as if he was actually having a conversation. I thought he must have been talking to Frannie, but as he got closer he walked straight past him and right up to me, and without any introduction whatsoever he thrust his muzzle into my arms and buried his face in my chest.

  “Nico!” Frannie scolded. Then he apologised to me. “I’m sorry. He doesn’t usually do that with strangers, it’s just he’s very affectionate, you know?”

  “I can see that!” I giggled.

  Nico was butting me with his head, demanding that I scratch his muzzle.

  “You are good with him,” Frannie observed. “I can tell by the ease that you handle him with, you have grown up around horses.”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling self-conscious at the compliment, “except I don’t think I’d be like this with the horses on our yard!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, standing around with no halter or anything. Our Thoroughbreds are way too strung out for that. You open the loose-box door and they come out at you like a steam train! They’re real high-strung and you have to watch your back. There’s one of them, Ginge, he bit a groom a couple of weeks ago, skinned his finger to the bone.”

  “He sounds very unhappy, this Ginger.” Frannie sounded really worried. “Perhaps he needs a hug?”

  I gave a hollow laugh. “I don’t think anyone is willing to risk getting that close!”

  Frannie frowned. “Our horses love company. To be with people is almost a craving in them. It is the Arab blood. Arabians belong to one person only and they are very loyal to their master, like a dog almost.”

  “Who is Nico’s master?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t have one yet,” Frannie said.

  “Nobody rides him?”

  Frannie laughed. “Oh no, I mean, I do. I ride him. My grandfather broke him in and I am the one that exercises him and does trackwork with him to get him fit and ready to race. But he has no jockey yet for the Palio. One must be chosen.”

  He looked around the stables. “Many of the horses here belong to different contradas. That grey mare over there? She belongs to the Contrada of the Goose. And that bay, she is the horse of the Snail. The other one next to her is the horse who will race for the people of the Giraffe.”

  I looked back at Nico. If I had been clinical about his prospects as a racehorse I would have said that burly physique of his indicat
ed he was built for sprinting, not for distance. But Nonna told me once that a sprinter could win a distance race if he had enough heart. Did Nico have heart? Did he have that all-important will to win? I looked into his eyes, like Nonna had told me, and I saw straight away the softness of him, the quality that made him so affectionate and gentle. I focused hard, trying to see deeper, to find the light, the way Nonna had taught me. Was there that spark that would come alive in him when the race began? A fire that would drive him on and on to the finish line with the raw passion to win at all costs?

  There it was! Beneath the gentle, sweet softness of him I caught a glimpse of it. Like catching sight of a wolf dashing through the trees of a forest. I only saw it for a moment, but in that instant I knew it was in him. This horse was special. One day he would be a champion.

  “Which contrada will Nico race for?” I asked. And I could feel my heart beating hard as I waited for the answer to come.

  “He belongs to the Lupa,” Frannie said. “The Contrada of the Wolf.”

  I headed back to the villa that afternoon with so much news to tell Nonna. Frannie had already asked me to go back again tomorrow

  “Come early in the morning,” he’d said. “That is when we exercise the horses, before it gets hot. If he is in a good mood I will ask my grandfather if you can ride Nico.”

  I was so excited about this that if it hadn’t been so baking I would have run all the way home. As it was, I was sweating just walking in the afternoon heat.

  The key beneath the geranium pot was missing and I was about to knock when the door swung open.

  There was a grey-haired man standing in the doorway.

  “Hello, Lola,” he said.

  Lo ti conosco …

  I know you

  The Prior! In our house!

  “What are you doing here? Where’s my grandmother?”

  He didn’t answer either of my questions. He gave me this gracious smile, real courteous, as if we were old friends and he always dropped by like this.