Sara Waters - Dancing with Mr Darcy - Stories Inspired by Jane Austen

‘I’m not sure I’d fancy that,’ he said.

He stood at the pony’s left shoulder, his back towards its head, and bent over to lift its left foot and slip it between his legs, so that the back of the pony’s knee rested against the back of his, and its foot was cradled in his hand. The clipped horn fell to the ground like crescent moons.

A dozen seagulls had joined the polka-dot sheep, skimming low, strutting their stuff on the green baize, searching for food. Perhaps there was a storm out at sea. Wasn’t that what they said? That seagulls inland meant bad weather at sea?

Her parents had inhabited polarised worlds. All air and water, she thought. Not a scrap of solid ground between them. Even their languages were not translatable from one to the other. It was a simple question of semantics. Neither of them had any vocabulary for taking responsibility. So, she’d had to find her own piece of solid ground, her own shoes to walk away in.

‘I’ll put new shoes on the front,’ he said. ‘The hind ones can go back on this time.’

The small furnace roared in the back of the van. The red-hot shoes would hiss with seeming fury when they were plunged in water. A cloud of steam would rise and disperse. This much she knew.

She and her parents had stopped speaking. It was for the best. Her new language had words with meanings that simply could not exist in theirs, like love and solid and rock. She had her own clichés now. The man she loved was as solid as a rock. He had once wondered, out loud, who would look after her if something happened to him. “Who would look after you if something happened to me?” he had said. She had supposed she would look after herself.

Again, he drew the pony’s leg between his thighs and placed the shoe. He held the nails between his lips, taking each one as he needed it. They had flat, rectangular heads, and the shaft tapered to a fine point.

‘Do you know the story,’ she said, ‘of the Black Bull of Norroway?’

He hammered a nail into place and glanced up at her, sideways, with two nails still held softly between his lips. He paused before answering her, pinching the nails between the thumb and index finger of his left hand and holding them away from his mouth so he could speak.

‘I don’t know that I do,’ he said. ‘But if you tell me what it’s about, perhaps I’ll recognise it, all the same.’

‘It’s about a young woman who, by her own small error, finds herself abandoned in the Valley of Glass. The floor and walls of the valley are all made of glass, and the more she tries to scramble up the sides, the more she slides back. In the end, she can do nothing but crawl on her hands and knees around the edge of the valley, looking for a way out.

‘Just as she is about to give up, to curl up and wait for death to come to her, she finds a blacksmith’s forge tucked deep into the side of the valley. The blacksmith – he can be young and handsome or old and gnarled, whichever you wish – listens to her story and takes pity on her. He promises to make her a pair of iron shoes to help her climb out of the valley, but first she must work for him for seven years without complaining.

‘And so the young woman – she can be any age you please, really – pumps the bellows and holds the tongs and passes the blacksmith his tools for seven long years without once complaining, though it is hard and heavy work, and the heat from the furnace scalds her skin red and raw.

‘Finally, at the end of the seven years, the blacksmith thanks her for her work and makes her a pair of iron shoes whose soles are set with spikes. But he knows no way of fastening them other than to nail them to her feet, which is what he does.

‘Of course, the young woman is in agony, and every step she takes sends pain shivering through her body. But, as we already know, she is a stalwart soul and she clambers up the smooth side of the Valley of Glass until she reaches its rim and is free. The End.’

‘You mean that after all that she doesn’t even get to marry a prince?’

‘Well, of course she does, but it’s a long story and I’ve told you the interesting bit.’

‘I see,’ he said. ‘But I’d like to hear the ending, nonetheless.’

He drew the pony’s leg forwards and upwards, placing its foot on the metal tripod. He clenched the tips of the nails and rasped them smooth and safe. Like a manicurist, he filed the edges of the hoof tight to the shoe, sending slivers of horn falling to the ground.

‘There,’ he said. ‘All done.’

She slipped the head collar from the pony’s head and they sat on the top bar of the gate to watch as the pony went back out into the field. It moved slowly at first, as though getting the feel of its new shoes. Then it dipped and tossed its head – like a ballerina, she thought – before arching its neck and trotting away towards the herd, its steps slow and elevated and its tail raised like a fine plume behind it.

He turned to her and smiled. ‘So,’ he said, ‘she marries the prince in the end. But how did she come to be in the Valley of Glass? What was her own small error? And who is the Black Bull of Norroway?’

She stared at him. ‘So many questions,’ she said. ‘And I am not Scheherazade.’

He jumped down from the gate. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just—’

She watched him as he wiped his hands against his leather chaps and gathered his tools, ready for the next pony. He was a very kind young man, she thought. Perhaps there was something about him that reminded her. Perhaps that was why she had started to tell him the story. She had lied about the prince. And the beginning of the story had never been told.

In the beginning, she had felt as though she had been saved from herself, though she had not understood quite what she meant by that, at the time. He had been tall and strong and big of bone and heart. She had felt safe. She had imagined she might be looked after for the first time. For the first time, she had imagined she might be looked after. But he had gone away and he had not come back, though she had waited and waited and waited.

‘The girl and the bull,’ she said, ‘are travelling together. At first, she is uncertain of him and has no idea of their destination. But he carries her gently and safely, and she finds that she can lean against his great, black shoulders without fear.

‘They have been travelling some time together in this way, in quiet companionship, when they come to a dark valley overhung with brooding cliffs. This is the Valley of Glass and the Black Bull of Norroway must fight its guardian if they are to pass through safely.

‘“Sit on this rock,” the bull tells her. “If the sky turns blue and the sun begins to shine, you’ll know the battle is won. But should everything turn red, you’ll know I’ve lost. Above all, don’t move. If you so much as wriggle your toes, I’ll never be able to find you again.”

‘So the girl sits on the rock and waits. And when the sky turns blue and the sun begins to shine, bathing the valley around her in blue-gold light, she smiles. She watches as the bull comes ambling back towards her, his broad shoulders flecked with blood. But he cannot see her. She calls to him, but he does not hear. And he never sees or speaks to her again, although she sees and speaks to him all the time.’

There was a long silence between them. The ponies had settled to grazing beneath the line of oak trees that ran across the centre of the field. A chaffinch hopped around the edges of the manure pile, seeking delicacies. Traffic hummed on the main road through the village.

‘So her one small error wasn’t an error at all,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘She didn’t do anything wrong. But she broke the spell that joined their worlds. The door was still there, but it had been closed on her. And even if she had been able to open it, perhaps she would have found nothing on the other side.’