Angelina managed her well, making up for her own lamentable lack of interest in everything except drawing and music by being charming.
‘I wish I were as clever as Beatrice,’ she’d say, when their governess chided her for failing to rote learn her French verbs.
Angelina, it’s not cleverness, it’s application you lack.’
‘But I try and try and try. I do. And I think I’ve got them all in my head and they simply fly out again.’
‘I would suggest that you hadn’t learned them thoroughly the first time. Now try the written exercise again, and this time, remember what I told you. There’s a pattern to the endings if you take the trouble to look for it.’
‘It’s not as if we’ll ever need to speak Frog,’ Angelina muttered. ‘And it’s utterly unfair that Beatrice knows it already.’
‘Only the spoken language, dear, and she’s not quite perfect there. Remember, I studied the language in Paris. She needs to work as hard as you do on the grammar. Now, girls, poor Hetty has been waiting ages to read to me, so please continue the work by yourselves then try the reflexive verbs.’
‘They really aren’t hard,’ Beatrice told Angie at luncheon in the nursery. ‘Je me suis couchée à huit heures. It means I put myself to bed at eight.’
‘Do you? Well, who else would do it for you?’ Angie said sulkily. ‘Don’t you think it’s so silly?’
‘Angie, it doesn’t matter whether it’s silly or not, it just is like that. I’m only trying to help you.’
‘I know. Good old Bea. I’m sorry. Will you forgive me? It must be awful to have to put up with someone as stupid as me.’
She would look so sorrowful, Beatrice always forgave her. Immediately and fully. If Angelina didn’t smile at her, it was as though the sun had darkened.
And always there were the horses.
‘Here you are again, miz, like a bad penny,’ Harry, the weath-erbeaten old groom grumbled as he carried another straw bale into Jezebel’s stall and cut it open with his pocket-knife, but Beatrice saw he didn’t really mind.
So often was she to be found in the stables, feeding Cloud handfuls of sweet hay, stroking his nose, that sometimes Harry saddled up the pony and let her sit on the beast whilst he led them round the cobbled yard on a long rope.
‘Sit up, miz,’ he ordered her. ‘Grip him with your legs there. Don’t hold the reins all sloppy. Show him who’s boss.’
‘Oh! He is!’ Beatrice giggled, as Cloud bucked his head and she snatched at the saddle, thereby losing the reins, but after several of these sessions in the yard she learned confidence and how to control him with a gentle kick and the slightest tug of the bit in his soft mouth.
‘You’ll do, miz,’ was as good as a compliment from Harry. ‘We’ll try a trot next time if you’re ready.’
Beatrice nodded shyly, but Harry caught her happiness all right. ‘Get yourself a thicker pair o’ trousies or you’ll be sore,’ he told her, as he helped her dismount.
She often visited Cloud and Jezebel on her way home. She loved to watch Harry groom them, or was content to stand and stroke them in their stalls, seeing their muscles twitch and the way they flicked their tails against the flies, breathing in the sweet smell of their manure. She whispered secrets to them, satisfied that their snorts and whinnies passed for conversation.
Often, on her walk over the cliffs in the mornings, she would glimpse Oenone Wincanton on Jezebel, prancing along the beach, sometimes with the military man she’d heard the other children refer to as ‘Rollo’, or cantering across a field in the distance, woman and horse moving as one, and she yearned to be there, too.
Angelina, by her own admission, was a sack of potatoes on a pony, but she too loved Cloud and was sometimes to be seen riding away, Harry on Jezebel beside her, as Beatrice set off on foot for home.
There came a day when Beatrice was practising rising and falling to a trot that Mrs Wincanton appeared unexpectedly in the yard. Harry wheeled Cloud to a halt. Beatrice was worried that she was doing something she shouldn’t with her secret riding lessons, but she needn’t have been.
‘Oh, bravo!’ the woman cried, applauding. ‘You have a natural seat, Bea.’ All the family had caught this nickname. Only Miss Simpkins, the governess, persisted in calling her Beatrice, sometimes in an Italian accent – Bayatrichay. ‘Like Dante’s lost love,’ she sighed, her eyes soulful, thinking perhaps of her own fiancé, buried far away in Belgium.
Mrs Wincanton had come to tell Harry to saddle up Jezebel at four. She wanted to ride across the next valley to see a friend who’d had a baby. Orders given, she said, ‘Don’t let me delay your lesson any longer,’ and strode away, hands in pockets, singing a gay little tune to herself.