Leonora Read Free

her calls. She departs the house saying: ‘Be good, I am off to a charity sale. If I get back in time, I’ll come up and say goodnight to you.’
    The girl enters her father’s library without knocking. No-one else dares open the door to this room with its narrow windows running up to the roof, ebony furniture, and Persian carpets, which muffle the sound of footsteps.
    â€˜Everyone hates me for being a girl. While I have my lessons, my brothers are out playing.’
    â€˜You’re not going out to play boys’ games,’ replies Harold Carrington.
    â€˜My brothers and their horrible friends say that girls can’t do what boys do and it’s not true because I can do everything they can. I can hit as hard as Gerard, and I can draw horses, dragons, crocodiles and bats better than Pat.’
    â€˜Who are these friends of theirs?’
    â€˜The sons of the Reverend Prince who tell the most disgusting jokes I’ve ever heard.’
    â€˜If you wish, you can come and play curling with me,’ he responds, admiring his daughter’s strength of character.
    â€˜I dislike both the flat stones and the long brooms for curling. You must listen to me. I’ve three brothers who do as they want because they’re boys. When I grow up, I want to shave my head and daub my face with hair oil to grow a beard. Pat has a moustache and at Stonyhurst they call him ‘Mickey Moustache’. Once, when I called him that, he hit me.’
    â€˜Then I shall punish him.’
    â€˜Let me finish, Papa. I am the only one who has to practise piano for hours on end, wash myself and change my clothes every day, and keep saying thank you for everything.’
    â€˜Leonora, a woman’s education is very different to a man’s. You require training in how to please.’
    â€˜I don’t want to please! I don’t want to serve tea! The only thing I do want in life is to be a horse!’
    â€˜That’s impossible … you could not even be a mare. You can only be yourself.’
    â€˜Mummy says I have such a bad temper that I’ll turn into a witch before I’m twenty.’
    â€˜Your mother may be mistaken. You have character and in that you resemble me.’
    â€˜Papa, I don’t care if I get wrinkles before I’m twenty. What I do care about is going down to the pond when I feel like it, to talk with the big fish, and climbing trees like a man.’
    Harold Carrington studies her from his high-backed chair behind the desk. ‘She’s a true daughter of mine. Carrington from the top of her head to the tips of her toes,’ he thinks.
    When coffee is served at the end of the meal, Mlle. Varenne informs him that his daughter’s energy is three times that of her three brothers, yet that she is the one Carrington who is difficult to control. So it is that Harold Carrington looks up from reading The Times and replies that his daughter will need to expend her excess energy horse-riding.
    Black Bess, her Shetland pony, always refuses to canter. She barely even breaks into a trot, but now, when Leonora yells, ‘Gee up, Bessie!’ suddenly Black Bess launches into a gallop. That night she dreams that Black Bess wins the Grand National, despite her plumpness. Imagining her sweet-natured, overweight pony could come in ahead of Flying Fox is sheer delight, because her grandfather’s horse has never yet lost a race.
    â€˜Go on, Papa, please give me another horse. I’m old enough now and Black Bess will never gallop like I want her to.’
    Her new mare is called Winkie. Leonora learns how to make her clear jumps. One morning Winkie refuses a jump, Leonora comes off and the mare rolls over on her.
    â€˜All right, so nothing happened to you this time, but it could still be that Winkie is not the best mount for you.’
    â€˜But Papa, I adore Winkie.’
    The groom doesn’t let Maurie know that her daughter takes the horse out of