The Wicker Tree (15 page)

Beth came down into the eat-in kitchen wearing a Japanese cotton kimono, the kind you can buy for two dollars in Hawaii, her hair still wrapped in a towel after her shower. She had just completed a long and complex prayer. She was beginning to believe that she would one day, like the Rev. Pat Robertson, be able to have a dialogue with the Lord. Right now, satisfied that the Lord was approving of the course of action she and Steve were taking, she was ready for coffee and hoping for eggs.

'Good morning, Beth,' said Mary. 'There's tea over there. Or coffee if you don't mind instant.'

Beth didn't care for British tea. Iced tea back home was OK, but it was an odd thing about these people, she thought, that they ate or drank everything at the wrong temperature. Instant coffee at least gave you a shot of much needed caffeine, even if it tasted blah. Beer was warm, she'd heard. The OJ Mary poured her was tepid. To her relief she was handed a carton of fresh eggs and told to cook them any way she liked. Beth couldn't cook much, at home. Vashti did all that. But eggs were Beth's speciality. She made a big fluffy omelette and was flattered that the girls, and even Mary, all wanted to have a taste.

'Can I call Steve again at the inn, Mary?' she asked. They'd spoken the night before about the guy he'd hit, with good reason she thought, although she didn't say that. She wanted to tell him about the May Queen dress and to plan the day.

'Why certainly. You know where the phone is,' said Mary, who was putting finishing touches to the Queen of the May dress.

'He might not be there right now, Beth,' said Bella. 'I hear Sir Lachlan has leant him Prince to go riding with Lolly this morning.'

Beth felt irritated at this news, almost angry. What made it worse was that she knew it was irrational to not want Steve riding around on horses together with that Lolly. She forced herself to just shrug and give them all the smile.

'It's all part of their plan, Beth,' Mary was saying. 'Sir Lachlan and Lady Morrison's plan. They're hoping that Steve can be persuaded to be the Laddie this year so that he can be the one to crown you Queen of the May.'

Steve knew all about English saddles, had seen them used in Texas, but had never had an opportunity to do more than just sit in one to see what it felt like. Used to his legs stretched long in the stirrups, having them shortened so that his knees bent and the toes of his precious boots turned up was going to be a novelty. But Lolly, who helped him get the length just right, seemed to think that he would have no trouble getting used to it. Nor did he. The delicacy of Prince's mouth was another thing. The horse's response to the slightest pressure on the bit made Steve soon lighten the use of his hands on the reins.

As they rode out of town, across the bridge over the Sulis River, splashing through the water meadows that bordered it, through yellow carpets of marsh marigolds, slowly moving onto higher dryer grazing land, Steve realized what he hadn't really considered before, that these horses, his magnificent gelding Prince, and Lolly's feisty little grey mare Pompadour, were bred for hunting, for jumping over everything from stone walls to five-bar gates – led by hounds in full cry – in pursuit of deer or fox.

He had his pony jump things as a kid, but cattle didn't jump so there was little call for cowboys to do so. So he let Lolly take the lead at the first dry-stone wall that barred their way. He watched her lean into the jump as she gave Pompadour her head. It seemed effortless and indeed it wasn't very high. Prince followed with a vigour that took Steve by surprise. His backside left the saddle and he lost one of the stirrups for a moment, but the horse had cleared the wall as if he was jumping a much higher obstacle and Steve had entirely recovered himself before Lolly turned to look at her pupil.

Next it was a long gallop side by side uphill towards some woods. She watched him jump a deep ditch, letting the eager Prince lead the way. Steve felt much more in command this time; he was beginning to feel at one with the horse.

Riding was second nature to him. They talked horses. He learned that his saddle was 'straight cut', in other words without much padding. Old-fashioned these days, but designed for hunting. He told her about his quarter horses back home. She confided that Pompadour had been, 'a great head tosser, if you'll forgive the expression. But we disciplined her with a Martingale.' Steve looked at Lolly, after she'd said this. Looked at her straight. She was laughing. A wonderful bawdy, chuckling laugh. Her whole face lit up with her amusement, particularly her eyes. Steve had noticed that laughter was never far away for her.

'A head tosser?' Steve knew perfectly well what she meant, but he liked the sudden sexual tension she had introduced between them. She certainly was one extraordinarily sexy woman.

'Oh you know what I mean, Steve!' she tossed her head, and flicking her reins so Pompadour's bit tightened suddenly, the mare tossed her head too.

'Guess so,' he acknowledged, laughing. 'So where are we going?'

'Lachlan thought you might like to see the route the Laddie takes when we do the Border Riding. By the way, England is only five miles away just over those hills.'

They had gained altitude and could see the little town of Tressock clustered close to where the river Sulis meandered through the water meadows to curl round the castle like a silvery crook in the spring sunshine. Behind the castle, pale purple and green hills stretched under grey clouds blowing in from the chilly North Sea. Beyond that lay the land of the ancient enemy. To Steve this view was but a pretty picture that belonged in a movie, yet not so pretty that it seriously distracted him from the discovery of Lolly.

'Who is the Laddie?' he asked.

'Och, you've never heard tell of the Laddie?' Lolly seemed as surprised as if he'd never heard of Pete Sampras or Muhammad Ali. 'He's always the brightest and best. The handsomest, the goodliest, the kindest… perhaps the best rider. I have known him to be the best lover…'

'No, I mean what is his name?' asked Steve. 'Does he live in Tressock?'

'Didn't Lachlan tell you? Lots of Border towns have them; Selkirk, Hawick, Kelso and others, but ours is a bit different. The Laddie is elected, chosen each year. Like the May Queen. She's the real star of course, but it's the Laddie that crowns her and it is he who spends the day and the night by her side. Suppose she was your friend, Beth? Wouldn't you want to be her Laddie?'

'Beth? May Queen? What the hell is that?' Steve thought the whole idea was so weird he could hardly take it in. He just knew that he really didn't want to think about Beth right now that he'd met Lolly. She had actually said that this Laddie guy – she'd known him to be the best lover. Sounded like she put out big time.

'Is this like the prom at high school? Most popular gal goes with most popular guy?' he asked, because it sure sounded like it.

'Well, a bit different from that. May Day is the spring feast round here. As important to us as your Christmas is to you. But you got the general idea. Look, if they were riding after the Laddie today, you could see it all from up there. C'mon, I'll show you.'

Lolly had pointed to a higher eminence across some upland pastures divided, in some places, by hedges and littered, here and there, with boulders. She turned her horse and spurred it into a gallop as if to challenge Steve to ride just as hard up to their objective.

Perhaps Lolly already knew that he would, this morning, follow her almost anywhere. She gave not a glance backward as Steve really put Prince to the test. They cleared several clusters of rocks, passed some Aberdeen Angus cattle who peered at them lazily, the horses stretching themselves to a pounding speed between jumps. Then, almost hidden in a declivity in the pasture, came a hawthorne hedge. Steve, hugely exhilarated by this chase, had taken his hat off and held it flapping in the wind when the hedge was suddenly upon him. Prince didn't wait for any signal from his rider. He simply soared up and over. But the other side of the hedge was a drainage ditch, quite wide and deep. Prince almost stumbled, stretching to avoid it. The stumble was sufficiently severe to catapult Steve out of his saddle and into a somersaulting landing in a pile of cow pats.

Lolly had just reached the summit of the hill, a hundred yards beyond where Steve had fallen. She turned Pompadour just in time to see Prince nuzzling the recumbent figure of Steve, who was lying flat on his back. Appalled at what had happened, she rode back down the hill as fast as the mare could carry her. But just as she arrived level with Prince and slipped out of her saddle, she found Steve talking to the horse, and starting to stand up while trying to wipe some of the cow dung off himself with tufts of grass and handfuls of dock leaves.

'Sorry to leave you sudden like that, partner,' he was saying. 'But I didn't figure you were goin' to do that. Leastways, not in quite that way.'

Before Lolly had time to speak, he was back up in Prince's saddle and stretching what was certainly a rather sore back. Then they trotted the horses up to the summit of what Lolly called the Laird's Hill and she described the ritual ride of the Laddie to him, all the while wondering whether she had his full attention on what she was saying. Because, while he seemed to be listening, and asked the more or less appropriate questions, he was feeling an urge to touch her, to stop her mouth describing any more of this insane local ritual – with a long lingering kiss.

'We give the Laddie three minutes, start from outside the Grove Inn over there, opposite the church,' she was saying.

'Who's we?' asked Steve.

'Anyone with a mount, a horse, a pony; a carthorse would do if that is all you can find,' she said, 'I reckon you'd see a racing ostrich if one was around.'

'Kids?' asked Steve.

'We don't really have any kids. But if we did, sure. D'you see that island in the river Sulis over there – where the steam is rising from the pool? That's known as the King's Island. The Laddie has to get there without our catching him and then he's won.'

'Betcha I can get there before you!'

Steve was aching to race her. Anything to quench his mounting desire. Lolly looked genuinely hesitant.

'Are you scared for Prince?' he asked her. 'I promise I'll take good care of him. He and I made a deal. If he's goin' to dump me again it'll be in that nice soft old river. Then he can have a swim too.'

Lolly suddenly nodded her head and spurred Pompadour down the hill towards the Sulis. She gave a little shout of laughter as she did this and Steve, trying to gather Prince for the start, knew that the joke was on him for thinking she'd play fair.

But then she knew that he had much the more powerful horse. Quite apart from being at least two hands taller than the grey mare, Prince's bloodlines stemmed from champion steeplechasers. Without her stolen lead it would have been a most uneven contest. Even so, Steve showed that he was a quick learner. He revelled in the jumps he and Prince were able to achieve and he found the horse's speed on the flat, as they approached the river, to rival that of any horse he'd ridden back in Texas. Best of all, he won. Plunging Prince into the steaming river and emerging onto the little island, he turned to see Lolly just approaching the further bank.

THE ISLAND CONSISTED of a lush field of long grass, its banks lined with bull rushes and several willow trees weeping into the fast moving, vapouring Sulis. In its centre was some collapsed masonry, part of what might once have been a temple. It rather resembled a crude throne. Both Lolly and Steve dismounted, tethering their horses loosely to a bush and a willow respectively, allowing them to graze.

'So you won, Steve,' she called through the mist. 'You'd make a good Laddie.'

'I won?' laughed Steve. 'Prince won! Isn't Sulis, like, the name of some kind of goddess?'

'How d'you know that?'

'I already met up with Sulis,' said Steve, 'on the front of Lachlan's Rolls. I didn't realise goddesses could be that cute.'

'I'm glad you approved of her. I posed for that little statue. It was a great honour… I like to come here and swim, especially when the air is cold like this morning – besides this is a sacred spring.'

Steve now had the uncanny feeling that he was dreaming, that nothing he was seeing or hearing was quite real. As an average young man, even one committed to the Silver Ring Thing, he managed to desire several women every week. A waitress here, a girl in the Seven Eleven store there, a cheerleader seen at a football game. But even though he might visit them in his waking imagination or in his dreams, he never hoped for them to materialise, to throw off their clothes and beckon him on. Why? Because he knew it was just lust. And although this was, he admitted, a convoluted way of looking at it, the Lord never rewarded lust.

But here was Lolly taking off her shirt and riding britches, her bra and her panties, as naturally and unhurriedly as anyone who had no other motive but that they were getting ready to plunge in for a swim. She looked ethereally beautiful in the mist, like one of those nymphs you'd see in very old Coca-Cola ads. This was not 'come and get it' nudity like you saw at the Big Bamboo club in Fort Worth, where the girls writhed down a slithery steel pole from the ceiling to bumps and grinds music. Notatall! This – hell, she, Lolly was beautiful and if she was doing this for anybody – well, he was that anybody.

Still he must cling to reality. He was here on a mission with Beth. They were Redeemers come to save people like Lolly.

'I think you're kidding us with all this Goddess shit,' he forced himself to say. He feared the spell he thought she was casting upon him. The cruder his denunciation the safer he'd feel from its effect. He went on: 'I guess you think Beth and me, we're a couple of retards. You're just kidding me – right? It's just a hot spring, Yeah, I think I can smell the sulphur – right?'

But Lolly had started to part the reeds and walk into the river.

'You believe a certain virgin had a baby don't you?' Lolly paused, splashing her body with the warm water, before she went on:

'You probably believe that your God made the world and everything in it in seven days; that your Jesus fed five thousand people on those few little loaves and fishes – why can't you believe, as I do, that this water has a holy power?'