The September Garden Read Free Page A

nominating long-departed horses: demi-sang Tatillon and demi-sang Ullis. Between the two stable doorsa narrow set of steps led up into the darkness of the hayloft above. She opened the door to Ullis’s stable and entered its cave-like chill. Whiffs of hay, leather and horses, as if their ghosts still lingered, greeted her. Nell imagined Ullis’s heavy iron-shod hooves ringing on the cobbles and, in the stable next door – now Uncle Claude’s carpentry workshop – Tatillon’s soft pliable lips pulling hay from the iron hay-rack still there on the wall. She blinked her eyes in the gloom and saw Sylvie’s lop-eared rabbit peering out from his hutch in the corner.
    ‘ Bonjour, Monsieur le lapin ,’ she sang. ‘You understand me, don’t you? What a fat, overfed, spoilt French rabbit you are.’ She reached for a carrot from the trug on the floor and, squatting down, pushed it through the chicken wire. The rabbit shuffled forward and reached with yellow teeth. Chewing steadily, the creature took so long to devour the carrot that Nell soon grew bored. She sat back on her heels and looked around her at Uncle Claude’s polished garden forks and spades lined up against the stone wall. Cobwebs, grey with dust, choked the corners; fronds of ivy crept through a gap under the eaves. Above the beams in the ceiling, the old hayloft, reached by those narrow steps between the two stables, Nell guessed, colonised by rats and spiders. She listened to the snuffling and chewing of the rabbit as she breathed in the earthy smell of the stable, counted the onions strung from the beams and watched a solitary cloud drift overhead through the tiny window.
    Then, suddenly, an unearthly shriek. The rabbit threw himself against the door of the hutch. Nell stared, her scalp shrinking tight to her skull, as he turned violent circles, his claws scratching, his rump banging the sides. She tooka step towards the commotion, but then, terrified, turned instead and ran. She slammed the stable door shut and raced back through the garden door, up the path, ignoring the calling of Edmund and Estella from behind the wall. Breathing hard, her curls plastered to her scalp, she slipped quietly back into the vestibule and up the stairs to the inferno of her room.
     
    In the stifling shuttered dimness, Nell finally slept, dreaming of Lednor Bottom, of her green valley, of her tree house above the cool bourn, of her father’s gramophone music. She was jerked awake by the screaming. Pulling herself up, groggy and confused, she went back downstairs, meeting a sleepy Adele in the vestibule.
    ‘ Qu’est-ce que c’est maintenant, ma petite Nell ?’ the maid asked, rolling her eyes, wiping a plump hand over her hair in a brief effort to tidy it.
    They hurried along the path towards the crescendo of cries, the banging and crashing from the stable yard. Edmund and Estella’s faces appeared once again over the wall and Adele told them to go away. Sylvie was pummelling the door of Ullis’s stable with her fists, her face red and enraged, her eyes flashing with fury. Her dark ponytail swung like a whip over her shoulders.
    ‘ Monsieur le lapin est mort! ’ she screamed. ‘ Il est mort! ’
    Adele thought that she’d better go and find Madame and hurried back to the house.
    ‘Dead?’ Nell asked her cousin in wonder, feeling a strange twisting in her stomach. ‘When I left him, he …’
    She was going to say ‘fine’ but realised he’d been somewhat deranged. She peered into the gloom of thestable to see the door of the hutch wide open, the fat, limp, brown body of the rabbit, his ears crisscrossed. The partly digested carrot amongst the straw.
    ‘When you what ?’ asked Sylvie, turning on her, her cheeks brick-red. Tears squeezed from her eyes; her perfect teeth gritted in startling whiteness. She poked Nell in the chest.
    ‘I came to see him,’ said Nell, ‘when everyone was asleep. He … he ran about a bit.’
    Sylvie took a sharp breath through