I beckoned to Alessandro and he came as near as his rocking-horse permitted.
'You don't have to ride him on the Heath,' I said.
Traffic turned his quarters towards us and Alessandro called over his shoulder: 'I stay here. I choose.'
Etty told him to ride fourth in the string and everyone else to keep out of his way. She herself climbed into Indigo's saddle, and I into Cloud Cuckoo-land's, and George opened the gates. We turned right on to the walking ground, bound for the canter on Warren Hill, and nothing frantic happened on the way except that Traffic practically backed into an incautious tout when crossing Moulton Road. The tout retreated with curses, calling the horse by name. The Newmarket touts knew every horse on the Heath by sight. A remarkable feat, as there were about two thousand animals in training there, hundreds of them two-year-olds which altered shape as they developed month by month. Touts learned horses like headmasters learned new boys, and rarely made a mistake. All I hoped was that this one had been too busy getting himself to safety to take much notice of the rider.
We had to wait our turn on Warren Hill as we were the fourth stable to choose to work there that morning. Alessandro walked Traffic round in circles a little way apart-or at least tried to walk him. Traffic's idea of walking would have tired a bucking bronco.
Eventually Etty sent the string off up the hill in small clusters, with me sitting half way up the slope on Cloud Cuckoo-land, watching them as they swept past. At the top of the hill they stopped, peeled off to the left, and went back down the central walking ground to collect again at the bottom. Most mornings each horse cantered up the hill twice, the sharpish incline getting a lot of work into them in a comparatively short distance.
Alessandro started up the hill in the last bunch, one of only four.
Long before he drew level with me I could see that of the two it was the horse who had control. Galloping was hard labour up Warren Hill, but no one had given Traffic the message.
As he passed me he was showing all the classic signs of the bolter in action: head stretched horizontally forward, bit gripped between his teeth, eyes showing the whites. Alessandro, with as much hope of dominating the situation as a virgin in a troop ship, hung grimly on to the neckstrap and appeared to be praying.
The top of the rise meant nothing to Traffic. He swerved violently to the left and set off sideways towards Bury Hill, not even having the sense to make straight for the stable but swinging too far north and missing it by half a mile. On he charged, his hooves thundering relentlessly over the turf, carrying Alessandro inexorably away in the general direction of Lowestoft.
Stifling the unworthy thought that I wouldn't care all that much if he plunged straight on into the North Sea, I reflected with a bit more sense that if Traffic damaged himself, Rowley Lodge's foundations would feel the tremor. I set off at a trot after him as he disappeared into the distance, but when I reached the Bury St Edmunds Road there was no sign of him. I crossed the road and reined in there, wondering which direction to take.
A car came slowly towards me with a shocked looking driver poking his head out of the window.
'Some bloody madman nearly ploughed straight into me,' he yelled. 'Some bloody madman on the road on a mad horse.'
'How very upsetting,' I shouted back sympathetically, but he glared at me balefully and nearly ran into a tree.
I went on along the road, wondering whether it would be a dumped-off Alessandro I saw first, and if so, how long it would take to find and retrieve the wayward Traffic.
From the next rise there was no sign of either of them: the road stretched emptily ahead. Beginning to get anxious, I quickened Cloud Cuckoo-land until we were trotting fast along the soft ground edging the tarmac.
Past the end of the Limekilns, still no trace of Alessandro. The road ran straight, down and up its inclines. No Alessandro. It was a good two miles from the training ground that I finally found him.
He was standing at the cross roads, dismounted, holding Traffic's reins. The colt had evidently run himself to a standstill, as he drooped there with his head down, his sides heaving, and sweat streaming from him all over. Flecks of foam spattered his neck, and his tongue lolled exhaustedly out.
I slid down from Cloud Cuckoo-land and ran my hand down Traffic's legs. No tenderness. No apparent strain. Sighing with relief, I straightened up and looked at Alessandro. His face was stiff, his eyes expressionless.
'Are you all right?' I asked.
He lifted his chin. 'Of course.'
'He's a difficult horse,' I remarked.
Alessandro didn't answer. His self-pride might have received a body blow, but he was not going to be so soft as to accept any comfort.
'You'd better walk back with him,' I said, 'Walk until he's thoroughly cooled down. And keep him out of the way of the cars.'
Alessandro tugged the reins and Traffic sluggishly turned, not moving his legs until he absolutely had to.
'What's that?' Alessandro said, pointing to a mound in the grass at the corner of the cross roads where he had been standing. He shoved Traffic further away so that I could see; but I had no need to.
'It's the boy's grave,' I said.
'What boy?' He was startled. The small grave was known to everyone in Newmarket, but not to him. The mound, about four feet long, was outlined with overlapping wire hoops, like the edges of lawns in parks. There were some dirty looking plastic daffodils entwined in the hoops, and a few dying flowers scattered in the centre. Also a white plastic drinking mug which someone had thrown there. The grave looked forlorn, yet in a futile sort of way, cared for.
'There are a lot of legends,' I said. The most likely is that he was a shepherd boy who went to sleep in charge of his flock. A wolf came and killed half of them, and when he woke up he was so remorseful that he hanged himself.'
They used to bury suicides at cross roads,' Alessandro said, nodding. 'It is well known.'
There didn't seem to be any harm in trying to humanise him, so I went on with the story.
The grave is always looked after, in a haphazard sort of way. It is never overgrown, and fresh flowers are often put there- No one knows exactly who puts them there, but it is supposed to be the gypsies. And there is also a legend that in May the flowers on the grave are in the colours that will win the Derby.'
Alessandro stared down at the pathetic little memorial.
There are no black flowers,' he said slowly: and Archangel 's colours were black, pale blue, and gold.
'The gypsies will solve that if they have to,' I said dryly: and thought that they would opt for an easier-to-stage nap selection.
I turned Cloud Cuckoo-land in the direction of home and walked away. When presently I looked back, Alessandro was walking Traffic quietly along the side of the road, a thin straight figure in his clean clothes and bright blue and white cap. It was a pity, I thought, that he was as he was. With a different father, he might have been a different person.
But with a different father, so would I. And who wouldn't.
I thought about it all the way back to Rowley Lodge. Fathers, it seemed to me, could train, feed or warp their young plants, but they couldn't affect their basic nature. They might produce a stunted oak or a luxuriant weed, but oak and weed were inborn qualities, which would prevail in the end. Alessandro, on such a horticultural reckoning, was like a cross between holly and deadly nightshade; and if his father had his way the red berries would lose out to the black.
Alessandro bore Etty's strongly implied scorn with a frozen face, but few of the other lads teased him on his return, as they would have done to one of their own sort. Most of them seemed to be instinctively afraid of him, which to my mind showed their good sense, and the other, less sensitive types had drifted into the defence mechanism of ignoring his existence.
George took Traffic off to his box, and Alessandro followed me into the office. His glance swept over Margaret, sitting at her desk in a neat navy blue dress with the high curls piled as elaborately as ever, but he saw her as no bar to giving me the benefit of the thoughts that he, evidently, had also had time for on the way back.