The secrets of wild hill, p.1
The Secrets of Wild Hill, page 1
Lara and Jasper, as always
The young man swung lightly into the saddle, patting the beautiful horse. The horse had once been dismissed as dangerous, but the man had seen something in his amber eyes. It had taken a long time to gain his trust, but now the horse would jump through fire for him. Cantering up through the russet browns and purples of the hill, he looked behind him, at the patchwork fields that would soon be filled with horses, his horses, his fields, hardly daring to believe his luck. Not just the small brown ponies who roamed free, but sleek and beautiful racehorses, just like the one he was riding. His mentor had told him he had a gift. A true horseman, he’d called him with sadness in his voice, who deserved to live the life he’d always dreamed of. Who would continue the legacy that had been so carefully built up, and could so easily be destroyed in the wrong hands. There was just one dream left, the Gold Cup, and this was the horse who could do it.
But there was something different about the horse today. The girl had been right, he thought in alarm. The horse was nervous, as though it was their first ride all over again. He leapt to the side, snorting, dancing, the reins slipping through the young man’s hands like water, and then he was no longer in control.
“Easy,” he breathed, sitting quietly in the saddle, but it was no use. The horse was galloping, blind bolting, careering wildly through the bracken, and the young man felt his stomach clench with fear. He couldn’t stop. The horse wouldn’t stop. It was as though he was galloping from an unseen force. The man yelled out, knowing what was up ahead. And suddenly they were flying, plunging and turning, and the rider’s cries and the galloping hoofbeats were stilled forever more.
Failing the entrance exam on purpose had been the best thing Lottie had ever done, she reflected in satisfaction as she stuffed her blazer into her backpack and skipped out of the doors. Now, instead of being stuck at Telsteads, the fancy private school her parents wanted her to attend, she went to St Johns, renowned as one of the worst schools in the county. But Lottie didn’t care about the dismal playground, or the tired buildings, or the teachers that never stuck around for long, because it wasn’t the school she was interested in. It was something far more important than that. Just fifteen minutes’ walk away from the school lay Wild Hill, home to her grandparents, her very own paradise.
St Johns was on the edge of a tiny market town, beyond which the hills rose up mist-shrouded, a hue of browns and greens and purple. The hills lay between the sea and the farm, wrapping the fields in a protective embrace. There were ponies on the hills, little brown ones with mealy noses and fuzzy manes, an ancient breed that only added to the magic. The whole area was now criss-crossed with gallops, installed by racehorse trainers who used the undulating lie of the land to keep the thoroughbreds fit, just like Lottie’s family had generations before. But there were no racehorses at Wild Hill any more, just an assortment of ponies belonging to livery clients. And then there was Patch. Her heart lifted as she thought about the beautiful, wildly talented skewbald pony with his bristly mane and enormous jump. She’d see him soon, she thought happily. In just a few minutes time…
“Dad!”
Lottie stopped in her tracks, startled to see a familiar figure waving at her. He was standing next to his huge car parked in the school lane, wearing his work suit. He did something in banking, but Lottie wasn’t exactly sure what. Her mum did something similar. Long hours, meetings all over the world, networking and mingling and crunching numbers. She crossed the road, feeling anxious. Her dad never collected her from school. What if he had bad news? Mum, or Granny, or her brother over in America? But Lottie’s dad was looking positively cheerful.
“Great news, Lottie!” He beamed, and Lottie peered up at him. “I’ve just come from Telsteads. They’re considering my appeal.” Lottie swallowed, remembering how she’d failed the exam deliberately. She’d felt fine about it at the time, sitting in the hall, tracing the grains on the wood desk with her finger and gazing out of the window, hoping to spot some horses.
The fallout had been explosive, and her dad didn’t even know that she’d done it on purpose, believing she just hadn’t revised properly, which had been bad enough. He’d been on a one-man campaign ever since, determined to get Lottie a place at the school.
“So that’s super, isn’t it?” Lottie’s dad continued, cutting into her thoughts. “If they agree, they’ll want you to retake the exam soon, probably early in the summer holidays. Then you can start there in the autumn. You’ll have missed the first year, but you’ll soon catch up. And you can leave this place at last.” He looked up in undisguised disgust at the school, side-stepping a boy who lumbered past, football in hand. “Dreadful.”
“It’s all right.” Lottie felt a flash of anger. The local comp suited her just fine. She could take the early bus, have an hour at Wild Hill before school, and then take the last bus home after an evening helping out in the yard. Homework would get done at lunchtime – or sometimes, Lottie admitted, not at all. But St Johns wasn’t like Telsteads with its high academic standards, so she just about scraped by, with a mixture of luck and a quick brain.
“I’ll be OK staying on here. I wouldn’t fit in at Telsteads. It didn’t suit Harry, and it wouldn’t suit me!” Her voice was growing shriller as she referenced her older brother.
“It did suit Harry.” Lottie’s dad frowned. “And he could have succeeded there if he hadn’t thrown it all in to go and live goodness knows where in America. Your granny filling his head with silly ideas, and now you too!”
Lottie felt her lip tremble. She missed her brother terribly. Always on her side when it came to horses, he’d left almost two years ago, quitting sixth form and heading over to Florida to work in a fancy showjumping yard.
“There’s nothing for me here, Lotts,” he’d said at the time, using the nickname he’d given her when she was little. “Wild Hill’s gone to pot. Just a load of eccentric horse ladies. I want the big time.”
“It hasn’t!” she’d protested, heavily defending her grandparents’ livery yard. “It’s perfect.”
At first, Harry had kept in touch with lots of messages and photos, but now she hardly heard from him at all.
“So I’m your last hope then?” She brushed away an angry tear. “Harry didn’t live up to your expectations, so now you’re pinning them all on me?”
Lottie’s dad sighed.
“No, it’s not like that,” he said, his tone slightly softer. “We just want the best for you, Lottie. And don’t you remember, when we looked around Telsteads? The horses, Lottie. They do riding lessons. You even said how smart the equestrian centre was. Harry rode there.”
Lottie thought back. Telsteads did indeed have horses, and offered lessons as part of the curriculum. But it was all so regimented, so timetabled. Trotting around once or twice a week on the pale sand on a school horse she wouldn’t have a connection with, not like Patch. She couldn’t just hang around the stables, soaking it all in like she did at Wild Hill, or canter on her own up the russet hills. And she remembered how fierce and uptight the equestrian manager had been, nothing like her granny. Harry used to call the manager an old dragon.
“I don’t want that,” she muttered. “I just want Wild Hill. Please, please let me stay at St Johns.”
Lottie’s dad folded his arms.
“You know things aren’t easy at Wild Hill. Your granny and grandad, they’re getting older, and Grandad’s suffering with his back. They won’t be able to cope with that big house and all that land forever, and look.” He paused. “Your mum and I have been doing a lot of thinking.”
“What thinking?”
Lottie looked up sharply. This subject seemed to be cropping up a lot lately.
“I mean, they ought to be selling in the next couple of years. I know Granny always brushes us off, but it’s got to happen at some point, and if they don’t do it themselves, their hands are going to be forced anyway, the way the business is going. Nothing’s getting better there. Worse, in fact. And your mother and I can’t take it on. It’s a huge amount of work; an endless money drain. And what do we know about running a yard?”
Lottie shook her head. This conversation had been had already, and every time, Annie and William had rebuffed any thought of selling Wild Hill. It was just talk, Lottie thought desperately. The stables were full of livery yard clients. It was busy and, to Lottie, thriving.
“We’ll look over some past exam papers again later, just in case.” Her dad opened the passenger door, and Lottie shot him a confused look. She always went to the yard after school. “Your mum’s got an evening meeting, so it’ll just be you and me. We can have chips. I’ll pick them up on the way home.” Lottie felt a stab of guilt. It was rare her dad was around for her tea.
“But I’m off to Granny’s,” she said, and her dad shook his head.
“Not tonight,” he said. “If we’re going to have a chance with the resit, we need to take it seriously, don’t we?” He raised an eyebrow and Lottie remembered how cross he’d been about the first exam. “I’ll let Granny know.”
“But, Dad,” Lottie started, but she knew it was no use. She climbed reluctantly into the car with a growing sense of dread. She’d deliberately failed her exam, but had she now made things ten times worse? Her dad wouldn’t stop until she was walking up those intimidating Telsteads steps. Wild Hill and the ponies and Patch would be the very least of his concerns.
The next morning Lottie and her granny, Annie, sat in the sunshine, morning chores complete.
Annie took a sip from the tea she’d concocted from herbs grown in the stone trough in front of her kitchen window. Lottie had made a face, and Annie had laughed and taken out the tin of hot chocolate powder instead.
Lottie’s parents didn’t really have a choice about her going to the yard in the mornings, both having to leave the house early to get to work. They lived in a smart new-build in a small village about half an hour away. Despite living there for years, her dad complained about tractors on the roads and the slow Internet access, making himself quite unpopular with the locals.
Lottie sighed, stretching her legs as her granny’s dog Jet curled up beside her.
“Not sure,” she said. “I can’t get away with failing it again.”
“Ah.” Annie gave her a knowing look and Lottie’s cheeks reddened; she’d been caught out. But Annie chuckled. “I didn’t hear that,” she said, tapping the side of her nose, and Lottie grinned. Truthfully, she knew she could have breezed the exam.
“Let’s see what happens,” Annie said, looking at her watch. “Right, we’ve got twenty-five minutes before you need to go. We can tack up in three, which gives you twenty-two minutes to ride, if I untack.” She smiled. “You can ride Patch around the fields. Just watch the fence up on the top hill. Grandad’s made some repairs so Patch might spook.”
“The deer fence?” Lottie asked. “It’s a shame. It would look so pretty up there without it.”
She said the last bit without thinking, and then winced as her granny’s eyes flashed.
“It’s necessary,” she said shortly. “Boundaries.”
Lottie nodded. It was an unspoken rule: never mention the property next door, Highfield Acres. The high, ugly fence divided the fields, making the boundary very clear. But Lottie remained ever curious about the other side.
In record time, Lottie was up on Patch. At just over thirteen hands, but solid as a tank, Patch appeared much larger until he stood next to Diamond, an ex-racehorse who was seventeen hands and belonged to Jenny, one of the livery clients. Patch had a thick mane, half brown and half white. The brown bit stuck up like a hedgehog, no matter how much Lottie tried to coax it over, plaiting it overnight in a vain attempt to get it to lie straight. His fluffy forelock fell over one eye, giving him a mischievous look, like a naughty schoolboy.
Annie had decided against everyone but Lottie’s wishes to buy her granddaughter a pony she could keep at Wild Hill when Harry had left for America. Annie had seen Patch advertised on the wall of the feed merchant’s, a torn slip of paper with spidery handwriting detailing a cob pony, cheap. Lottie had gone with her to look at him. He’d been kept by an elderly couple on an allotment at the back of the amusement arcades in a tired coastal town a few miles away. They told Annie a girl had come and ridden him for a while until she lost interest. Annie had been set to turn him down; he was bigger and younger than she wanted for Lottie, and he hadn’t allowed himself to be caught anyway. But Lottie didn’t want to leave him. Something in his eyes told her he wanted to be free of the allotment and the dingy arcades. She didn’t have a choice though. Annie was already talking about plan B, a sensible little pony she knew through a friend. They were just about to get back into the truck, when Patch gave two strides of canter and in one effortless movement jumped the boundary fence out of the allotment. It must have been well over a metre. Annie and Lottie had fallen in love instantly, and one bucket of carrots later they managed to both catch and load Patch, handing over the three hundred pounds he’d been advertised for. Nearly two years later, the little pony was her very best friend.
“He’s looking good.” William, Lottie’s grandad, interrupted her thoughts. He’d limped over to say hello. Lottie always thought of him as a tall, vigorous man, but recently he seemed frailer somehow, and her dad was right, she thought sadly. He did have endless trouble with his back. The yard, with its mixed collection of livery clients – twenty horses in total plus Patch – made for a lot of work. There was always something to mend and something to maintain. The yard was shabby: paintwork peeling, wonky doors and leaking roofs, it was a shadow of the beautiful place it had once been when William’s own grandfather had trained racehorses there. There were always stacks of envelopes piled up on the dresser on the kitchen and none of them ever looked as though they contained good news. Lottie thought about what her dad had said about selling up, and shuddered.
“I told you, he needed to fill out and gain some muscle,” Annie said, sounding pleased.
William nodded curtly.
“Still an odd-looking pony,” he said. “But he’s some character.”
Patch snuffled against William’s shoulder. William gave him a scratch. It was more affection than Lottie had ever seen him show the little skewbald before. He hadn’t been at all impressed when Lottie and Annie had turned up with Patch, the scraggly pony yelling at the top of his voice and clearing the trailer ramp in one flying leap. Lottie was desperate for her grandad to like him.
“Your mum’s been on about him again,” William said. “Don’t think you’ll win her round so easily, eh?” The gelding sighed and slobbered on William’s jacket as if in agreement.
“I’m sorry,” Lottie mumbled. “I hope he doesn’t cost too much to keep.”
But there was a rare twinkle in her grandad’s eye.
“He’s as cheap as chips, that’s the one good thing about him. Not like all these fancy ponies you see. She can’t complain too much.”
Lottie smiled gratefully, but she hoped her grandad was telling the truth. Every now and again her parents came over and shut themselves in the office to go through the accounts. No one ever came out of those meetings in a good mood.
“Thanks, Grandad.”
“Granny told you about the fence?” William then said, changing the subject. “There might be a bit of plastic still flapping around.”
“Yeah,” Lottie said. “Won’t they mind next door, with all their racehorses?”
The words died on her lips as her grandad’s face darkened.
“That’s their problem.”
Lottie knew not to question any further, but it was hard not to be curious.
Lottie nudged Patch on, heading around the outskirts of the farm. The news she might have to resit the dreaded exam had turned her world upside down, so she was going to treasure every ride.
As she rode up the boundary she stood up in the stirrups, hoping to catch a glimpse of next door’s yard, but the land sloped away at an annoying angle, meaning the stables and house were hidden from sight and, as they got higher, the ugly fence obscured the view further. She spotted the new section of fence, the strands of wire shinier than the rest. Through it she could see the fields, and the sand gallops, but not much else. Lottie was dying to see the stables, but she’d have no chance. She would recognise Ralph, head of the family, because he was well known in the area, but she barely ever saw anyone else. From the little she knew, mostly from Jenny, who loved a bit of local gossip, their family mirrored hers in many ways. The grandfather who ran the yard, parents with high-flying jobs (in Hong Kong, she thought, but she wasn’t sure). And a boy, about Lottie’s age. Felix. She’d seen him once, in a funny cap and grey wool knee socks, being pulled along by the hand as she and her yard friend Zoey had sat outside the shop, years ago now, eating ice creams and bemoaning the end of a hot and dusty pony-filled summer. Lottie remembered his shock of white blond hair, and the way their eyes had met for only half a second before his mother – Lottie had presumed, but it could have been the nanny – whisked him into the cream interior of their huge car.
From the boundary fence, Lottie could see a life-size bronze statue of a horse and rider standing at the highest point of Highfield Acres. Sometimes, in certain lights, the statue appeared alive, ready to gallop up into the hills. Lottie was both fascinated and unnerved by it. She’d made up a million stories, imagining who the horse was, and the rider – so young and handsome.
Just then, Patch spooked dramatically as a pheasant rustled out of the hedge and Lottie was shaken back to the present. She took a deep breath to calm her nerves. She’d never admit it, not least to Annie, but she was often afraid when she rode Patch. There was something different about him, something that set him apart from other ponies. He was always two steps ahead, always thinking, always sharp. She scratched his withers and felt the electricity surge through his body. He was on edge, and it wasn’t just because of the pheasant or the deer-fence repairs. There was something up ahead, and now Patch was dancing, throwing his head about. Lottie gripped a handful of his thick mane.
