“I’m not after an easy life.”
“Maybe not.” He looked at me plainly. “But I’ve never seen anyone near as young as you with a proper English trainer’s licence. And I expect I don’t have to tell you you’ll be the only woman.”
“Somebody has to be the first at everything.”
“You wouldn’t be running away from Jock, would you?” His eyes had softened. I found I had trouble meeting them. “I was married for a very long time, you remember. I know how tricky things can get.”
“Don’t worry about me. All I need is a clear job to do. I don’t want any special treatment either. I’ll bunk in the stables like everyone else.”
“All right, all right. I won’t pry and I won’t coddle you, but if you ever do need anything I hope you know you can come to me.”
I nodded.
“I can be a sentimental old bastard, can’t I? C’mon, let’s get you settled.”
D showed me to a small wooden cottage beyond the far paddock. Inside, there was a camp bed and a scarred wide-planked floor, and a single hurricane lamp hanging on a wall peg. The room wasn’t much bigger than the stall Pegasus was sleeping in, and it was cold, too. He told me the terms of my stay—indenture was more like it—and where and to whom I’d report the next day.
“You said no special treatment,” he said, eyeing me as if he expected me to turn and run on the spot.
“I’ll be fine,” I promised him, then said good night. After he left, I built a small fire, boiled bitter coffee, and then ate tinned meat, cold, with the tip of my knife. Finally I curled up in the narrow bed, chilly and still a little hungry. I looked up into the shadows on the ceiling and thought about my father. He had written me only a few sparse letters since he’d moved to Cape Town, barely enough words to fill a teaspoon, let alone the yawning gap he’d left in my life. I missed him awfully, like someone who’d died—and yet just now, in my cold cot, I felt strangely close to him. It was his life I was reaching for in coming here, and if I couldn’t have my father back, exactly, maybe not ever, I could have the rightness of looking in the same direction, of stepping into his shadow with my own. I didn’t know a thing about marriage or men—that had been proven well enough. But I did know horses. For the first time in a long time, I was exactly where I should be.
Bit burrs. Tongue-tying. Saddling for exercise and saddling for races. There was shoeing and bandaging, conditioning and equipment. I had to learn to read track surfaces and stakes sheets, and calculate weight allowances. I had to know the diseases and ailments forward and back—bowed tendons and splints, foundering, bucked shins, bone chips, slab fractures, and quarter cracks. Thoroughbreds were glorious and also fragile in very specific ways. They often had small hearts, and the exertion of racing also made them susceptible to haemorrhaging in the lungs. Undetected colic could kill them—and if it did, that death would be on me.
There were things to look for in the conformation of the animal, the head, the legs, the chest, and many other things you couldn’t see, which were even more important. Each animal was its own written-out book or a map to study and then memorize, decisions made accordingly. To really know everything that went into this life would take for ever, and maybe not even then. The sheer scale and impossibility of that lent purity to my days at Soysambu. I walked from my cottage to the paddock, to the stables, to the track, and back to my cottage to read charts and tables until my eyes gave out.
In exchange for Pegasus’s stall and my own bunk, D gave me two horses to train. They were both past their prime, dull eyed and recalcitrant, but I was trying to prove myself. I would have to treat them like royalty. I laboured over their exercise and feeding schedules, filling notebooks, trying to meet them on their own territory, and to find or understand something untapped in them, something no one had yet seen.
Dynasty, a six-year-old mare, had a case of girth gall—tender blisters and raw chafed skin along her belly—that needed special care. Her groom had tried every kind of tack on her, but the sores never completely healed. He seemed embarrassed about this.
“You’re cleaning the tack well,” I told him. “I can see that…and it’s not too stiff. You’ve taken good care of her.”
“Yes, memsahib. Thank you.”