Kitty’s War. Terri Nixon

good ambulance driver.’

      I looked at her, guiding the pony with a practised, elegant hand, and wondered what she believed it was like out there. Did she think we sat quietly behind the wheel while we were loaded up, then drove up the road and waited again, chatting with orderlies and doctors while they lifted out the quiet, smilingly grateful soldiers? I shook my head, and she saw me from the corner of her eye.

      ‘You may think I’m a bit silly,’ she said, a little tightly, ‘but I can drive, at least.’

      ‘There’s more to ambulance driving than driving ambulances,’ I said. ‘It’s truly awful out there, Bel. You should think yourself lucky to be here.’ I waved to encompass the hedges, the fields and the uneven, but relatively smooth road.

      ‘Evie doesn’t feel a bit lucky,’ Belinda said. ‘She hates it here; she can’t wait to get back.’

      ‘It’s different for her,’ I said quietly. For a moment we drove on in silence, then Belinda cleared her throat.

      ‘Look, it’s a lovely day. We’ve practically been banned from the house… Why don’t we have some fun while we’re out? We’ve ages before the train.’

      I perked up. ‘What kind of fun?’

      ‘While you were harnessing Pippin I went into the barn, to get some rope for Jessie’s bags.’ She glanced over her shoulder into the trap. ‘Found something else as well.’ I followed her gaze and saw a bag, wedged upright in the corner, and the clear outline of a bottle inside it. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty left.’

      ‘Frances will be furious!’ I breathed in dark delight.

      ‘Not with you,’ Belinda said wryly. ‘You can’t do anything wrong for her. She won’t find out anyway.’

      ‘What if she does?’ Frances had a way of just knowing things. It was uncanny.

      ‘She won’t! All right, if she does, we’ll have to say it was your idea, then neither of us will take a strafing.’

      I remembered feeling woozy and uncomfortable last night, but as I started to say so, a breeze lifted my hair, and almost took my hat off, and I also remembered I’d only felt horrible once I’d gone indoors. A moment later I scrambled into the back and seized the bottle.

      ‘Salut,’ I said, and pulled the cork out with my teeth. I climbed back onto the front seat, and took a drink before passing the bottle over.

      ‘Cheers,’ Belinda said, and did likewise. ‘Almost there, better drink up before someone sees us.’

      After a minute she took the bottle off me, and peered into it with an expression of disappointment. ‘You drank more last night than I thought,’ she complained. ‘Either that, or you’ve drunk a lot more now.’ She threw the bottle back over her shoulder, where it landed on the floor of the trap and rolled under the seat. ‘There. Out of sight, out of mind. We must be sure to tell Nathan it went down well.’

      ‘What do you think of him?’ I asked, curious. ‘I mean, I know he’s good-looking, but Evie obviously doesn’t rate him, and she’s met him before.’

      ‘I tend to trust a man who’s not afraid to cry in front of strangers. And besides, Evie didn’t know who he was. It’s Will he’s hurt, and if Will forgives him, who are we to judge?’

      ‘You’re right.’ The pleasant part of the wine-hum was back now, and I squinted through the midday sunshine at the grey little village. ‘It’s lovely here.’

      She gave me an amused look. ‘Drunk a lot more now,’ she decided, and I aimed a light blow at her arm.

      ‘All right, it’s not pretty, but it’s very dramatic. Especially compared to Ecclesley.’

      ‘Will you ever go back there, d’you think?’

      I shrugged. The wine had loosened my tongue or I would never have said, ‘Perhaps. I miss my family, even though they don’t miss me.’ Then I cleared my throat, hurrying on before she could press me any further. ‘Slow down—station ahead on the left.’

      ‘I know. I was born here!’ But instead of turning in, she urged Pippin on with a flick of the reins. ‘I want to show you something first.’

      As we passed out of the village my gaze was drawn down to our right, where the fields fell away to meet the stone wall that housed the massive and notorious Dartmoor Prison. Although since the prisoners had all been freed for service, they called it the Princetown Work Centre. Small figures still worked in the fields just outside the wall—a party of conscientious objectors. I thought, with a twist of sorrow, about Oliver in his London prison, with none of this stark but beautiful landscape to take some of the grim loneliness away from his days.

      But Bel wasn’t interested in the prison. She drew to a stop, instead, just beyond the sawmill on the outskirts of the village. ‘Look, what do you see there?’ She pointed into the field that lay immediately behind the smaller one by the road, and I squinted.

      ‘A horse.’

      ‘Not just a horse! Look again.’

      I did so, and realised I was looking at something altogether more special than a lumber-lugging workhorse. The animal grazed, calmly unaware of his audience, and the smooth, clean legs shifted slightly in the grass as he moved to a fresh clump. It was hard to look away again.

      ‘I come here all the time to look at the horses,’ Belinda said, and her voice had dropped. ‘But now most of them have been called up there’re usually just workhorses left. I saw this one when I dropped Jane back home last week.’

      ‘Where did he come from then?’ I realised my voice had taken on the same hushed tones, as if we stood right next to the animal and didn’t want to startle him.

      ‘According to Jane it’s on loan from the ARS.’

      ‘The what?’

      ‘The Army Remount Service. It’s a stud.’ She paused, and her expression altered subtly, but tellingly. ‘I used to ride Mrs Adams’s horses, you know, before they were called up. I miss it.’

      I looked at her with dawning suspicion. ‘You’re not suggesting you try and ride that thoroughbred. Are you completely mad?’

      In answer, Belinda threw Pippin’s reins to me, and climbed into the trap to start rummaging under the seat. She pulled out the rope we’d brought with us to tie down Jessie’s bags, around twenty feet of it, and shoved a few sacks out of the way to make a space on the floor of the trap. She looked at it for a moment, considering, and swiftly tied two simple knots around a foot apart along its length; I could feel my eyes narrow, recognising the technique but hoping I was wrong. Then she knelt down, and, with her tongue firmly locked between her teeth, she laid the rope out, and began tying a series of further, more intricate knots.

      I resigned myself to the fact that I’d been right, and sighed. ‘You’re making a halter.’

      Belinda looked up briefly, and grinned. ‘Come on, Kitty! I said we should have some fun!’

      ‘But that horse is huge!’ I looked over at the field again and tried to guess just how huge. ‘Probably at least seventeen hands.’

      ‘Ah, you know about horses.’

      ‘I used to ride. I didn’t have my own horse, like Evie did, but some friends of my parents used to let Oli and me ride theirs.’ I couldn’t bring myself to mention that Archie had been my more frequent companion, and that he was the most natural horseman I had ever seen—it had been a joy, even before I’d acknowledged my more mature feelings for him, to watch him on horseback. ‘I’ve never ridden anything bigger than fifteen hands though,’ I said, ‘and never bareback.’

      ‘Then it’s high time you did.’ Belinda looked critically at the mess of rope in front of her, then she picked up an end, threaded it over and under one of the bigger knots