Read Online Summer at World's End by Monica Dickens - Free Book Online

weak and dizzy to ask him if he thought it was safe to ride double on Peter.
    Michael jogged beside them on Oliver’s short spry legs, trotting when they walked fast, rising very high and quick in the saddle like an animated toy, asking questions which Carrie only half heard, drowsily, with her head lolling to the rhythm of Peter’s long walk.
    When they were almost home, she heard a voice which must be her own, thick out of a swollen mouth.
    ‘If Peter goes so well for you in a halter,’ she said to the
    back of Lester’s dark alert head, ‘it won’t matter only
    having one bridle. We can ride together now.’
    *        *        *
    When Tom came home, he went to the village for the doctor. They had tried to stay clear of him. They were afraid that he might say they were undernourished or neglected, like Mrs Loomis and Miss McDrane at the school, who were always suspicious of what went on at World’s End.
    But the doctor was easy. Fairly young, small and thin with round spectacles and a pale tired face. If anyone was undernourished, he was.
    He didn’t say anything about neglect, or too many animals and too little house-cleaning. He looked at Carrie and murmured, and felt her knee gently, and drew the curtains and told them to let him know if she threw up.
    When he went away, he must have telephoned their mother, because Carrie woke from a confused sleep to find her sitting by the bed.
    ‘How funny,’ Carrie said. ‘I used to sit by your bed when you were in the hospital, and watch you sleeping. Your eyes moved under the lids like marbles.’
    ‘Did they?’ Her mother laughed. She looked brown and healthy. ‘How unattractive.’
    ‘No. I was glad, because then I knew you weren’t dead.’
    Living on their own was very fine. But having Mother there was fine too.
    Em and Michael took care of the horses, and Carrie lay under the window with the curtains blowing, and nothing to do but pick bits of gravel out of the graze on her face. When she asked her mother for a mirror, her eye was black and blue and green and her cheek was like a squashed tomato, so she didn’t ask for the mirror again.
    Her mother read horse books and poetry to her. She read ‘Reynard the Fox’, and ‘Right Royal’:
    …
And a voice said, ‘No,
Not for Right Royal.’
    And I looked, and, lo!
    There was Right Royal, speaking, at my side.
The horse’s very self, and yet his hide
Was like, what shall I say? like pearls on fire,
A white soft glow of burning that did twire
Like soft white-heat with every breath he drew
.
    …
And I was made aware
That, being a horse, his mind could only say
Few things to me. He said, ‘It is my day,
My day, today; I shall not have another.’
    And as he spoke he seemed a younger brother
Most near, and yet a horse, and then he grinned
And tossed his crest and crinier to the wind,
And looked down to the Water with an eye
All fire of soul to gallop dreadfully
.
    Michael read to her from an old book called
Bunny Brothers
, which he had found in the attic among musty clothes and sagging tennis racquets.
    ‘Mrs Bunny had lad the bake fast, and now she saw very busy tiring the podridge over the fire to keep it form bunning.’
    Em came up the stairs to bring her a few cats for bed company, and to read her a piece out of the local newspaper. It said that a lady called Miss Christabel May-berry, who lived on the gorse common, had seen the ghost of the famous Headless Horseman, who was supposed to have broken his neck hundreds of years ago, riding over the edge of the quarry. Miss Mayberry thoughtit was a disaster warning against sending men to the moon.
    At night, Carrie rode John up the star and took the piece out of the newspaper, to show that she and Peter were famous.
    An old bag of bones called Gunpowder started to tell a long-winded story of how he and his rider, Ichabod Crane, had been chased by a goblin on a black steed, carrying its head in front of it on the saddle.
    ‘And when we came