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The bank is muddy and it sucks at Miss P’s hooves, making her jerk her feet higher, but that’s fine. She’s going forward and my eyes are up, so I see the moment Sapphire heaves herself out of the water and up the other side. A cheer and a round of applause goes up for Hettie and that’s the moment when Miss P loses her footing. Her hind end lowers as her back feet slip. Her front feet splash into the water and there’s just enough time for a string of curse words to explode in my head before the grenade-formerly-known-as-Rum-Punch detonates. She leaps straight up, all four legs in the air as if she has never before touched such a thing as water, as if this water is a boiling hot river of lava. But her leap isn’t enough to propel her across, and when she lands, it’s only to splash back into the stream.
Pippa has just enough time to holler, “Well sat!” before Miss P, with the punchiest of punches, launches herself airborne again. I’m dimly aware of gasps from more than one person, and Pippa amending her earlier statement to a new one: “Oh, bugger! What a load of bollocks! Hope those are sticky-bum jodhpurs!”
Time stretches like an accordion, and as Miss P lands, her front feet on the mud of the other embankment, her hind feet still in the evil, treacherous stream, I realize with irrevocable certainty that my horse is shooting forward out from under me and there’s nothing I can grip or grab or do to stop from falling. Just before the time accordion snaps back to real speed, my name, in a ragged, raw, accented male voice—Mariano’s—rips through all the noise. In the very next instant, the freezing cold, muddy water of the stream splashes my back and closes over me.
SHORT-LIVED
Mariano Arias. Water Crossing. The Cotswolds, England.
Lolly lands flat on her back and is swallowed whole by the water. I am off my horse, the reins tossed from my hand to Pippa’s, and knee deep in the water while Rum Punch scrambles and stumbles and scrambles again, struggling up the muddy slope. Lolly is unconscious, that is my greatest fear. She is hurt. She is—
Her feet come up first—no bueno, no bueno. I have seen a million falls, witnessed thousands of crashes, suffered hundreds, and never has a single one touched me the way this one does. It is seconds, a lifetime,uneternidadbefore I can splash to where she landed, to where—Gracias a dios!—she is alive.
I scoop her out of the frigid water, and she comes up spluttering. Or, not spluttering—flailing and gasping like a fish on land.
The wind has been knocked from her. I splash through the stream, water filling my boots, clutching her to my chest, desperate to get her on land. “Deep breaths, Lolly. Deep breaths.”
But as ever, she does not listen to me. She twists about wildly until her eyes land on Rum Punch, who rights herself, looks about for one heartbeat, and then blasts away as if a water demon were on her tail. Lolly points, still unable to speak as she gasps and wheezes. I want to kiss her, this woman who cares more about the well-being of her mount than herself.
“Thecaballo!” The last thing we need is for the horse to cause injury to herself or do more to excite the others.
The useless helper standing on the other bank becomes useful, wading across the water in rubber boots and taking Whiskey’s reins from Pippa. And then Pippa kicks her horse across the water in a great leap and dashes off to catch Rum Punch.Dios mio,that woman canride.
I step with great care so as not to slip and fall as I carry Lolly up the bank, and now that I know she will be all right, I savor having her in my arms again.
But it is short-lived.
With a gasp, her lungs fill. “Oh, my god! I’m fine! Put me down. This instant.”
I set her on her feet as she wishes, applause bursts out from the assembled hilltoppers, and Lovely Lolly turns her back on me. She bows, rolling her arm in front of her with great flourish, then, standing with her shoulders back and her hands on her hips, she displays her mud-drenched clothes as if she were modeling the highest fashion. In that moment, for the first time in days, she is Lolly of the Laughter again, she is the woman who danced the tango with me, who straddled me at a wedding reception and performed for me. Some nameless, fathomless more-than-love emotion swells inside me, too big to contain, too much to ever express, and I cannot laugh along with everyone else at Lolly-on-Display because I am too busy praying this is not the last time I will ever hold her in my arms.
Pippa, who has done some cowboy stunt and rounded up Rum Punch, gallops back and delivers the horse to Lolly to more applause. And then Lolly’s kissing the filly and calling her Miss P and stroking her nose and telling her what a naughty girl she is as if nothing has happened, though I see a slight limp in her step and her hand at her side as if she has some insult to her person she wants no one to know about.
“My fault entirely.” She allows Alan—of all people, Alan has his hands on my woman!—to give her a leg up. “I hadn’t turned my notifications off and my phone spooked her. Good lesson for all of us. If you’re riding a new horse, don’t do anything untested. Unfamiliar sights and sounds can send them into a panic, and even the most experienced rider is going to find themselves drenched in ye olde English mud!”
She meets my gaze, her face falls flat, and she turns back to Alan,et al, full of smiles. “If we were going to spend more time together, we’d do some desensitization training with Rum Punch—expose her to a ding or ring or ping from my phone while pairing it with something pleasurable—”
Something pleasurable. I retrieve Whiskey from the helper and remount—anything to stop myself from thinking of all the pleasures that have passed between Lolly and me, all the pleasures I have yet to give her.
“So, you need to travel with a pocket full of carrots?” Alan gets a laugh. The more I see him in action, the clearer it is that playing the fool—or even the knave—is a front. He seeks to lower people’s guard and keep them on their back foot, so he’s always subtly in charge.
“Carrots would be good, but as with training dogs, you want to train to the lowest common denominator. The thing you have with you at all times. Something that doesn’t require you to run to the market for a pound of carrots. Can anyone tell me what that is?”
“Your voice.” Pippa’s beside me, whispering, and no one else answers.
“You always have your voice,” Lolly doesn’t look in our direction. “What you want is for the sound ofyouto be the reward your horse seeks.”
The sound of Lolly’s voice would be reward enough, would she but direct it at me.
“Rum Punch and I barely know each other—and I flubbed the approach to the water—but with time, I’d have been able to steady her and try again more calmly.” She leans forward, stroking Miss P’s neck. “There are nonaughtyhorses, only inexperienced riders and new challenges and rider errors.” She doesn’t make a point of looking at anyone in particular, but I believe that jibe was for Alan. I need her not to needle him.
Try as I might, I can find no pretext to interrupt her otherwise excellent instruction and am instead shunted to the back of the herd, sick to my stomach because my heart has been shredded with no reprieve in sight. This should be a slice of paradise: the English countryside, a hunt that has no prey, the woman who makes me shake to her touch just a couple of horses away, but it has become a hell. I go through the paces, keeping my pony on the straight and narrow, but all I can think is:Look at me, Lolly. Talk to me. I can make this right, if we only talk.She has to know I’d never lie to her.
When the hunt has run its miserable course, Lolly is glued to her phone, which miraculously survived its drenching. Too sharp is her concentration, too acute. She’s using the damned thing as a way to block me.
TEXTLSTART_Do you knowTu Risa? The poem by Neruda?_TEXTLEND I type and hit send.
Her head snaps up from her phone and she swings directly to me. If she hadn’t been tracking me, she couldn’t have found me that fast. She’s watching me even as she avoids me. All is not lost.
