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  I can see myself at three the next morning, too, rolling down the stairs to answer the telephone. Wondering what catastrophe had hit the family now. Shivering unbelievingly in the cold November night while the riding mistress informed me that Annabel and Henry had eloped. They were over there with her, two miles away. She'd captured Annabel and tied her to the kitchen door. Henry was running about in the road and wouldn't be rounded up. She was in her pyjamas. And would we please come over at once.

TWELVE

The Elopement

We felt like Henry V before Agincourt that night, with everybody so patently abed and sleeping as we sped at panic stations through the lanes. Everybody, that was, except us and Miss Linley, keeping vigil in her pyjamas on the main road.

  It was the moonlight, we thought, that had done it. The clear bright moonlight shining enticingly on the road that led out of the valley, and Henry made restless by the fact that Annabel had been taken for a walk and fancying one himself.

  The moonlight, the night before, had enticed another local pony from his field. He, too, had broken out and gone clattering down the road and woken Miss Linley who, alone perhaps in the whole district, was attuned to hearing horses in her sleep. He, she said, had been going too fast. Almost before she was out of the house and running after him, he'd run into a lorry and been killed.

  That was why she was worried about Henry. That was why we were worried, too. That; the fact that he didn't belong to us so that we had an added responsibility as his guardians; and the heart-sinking realisation that once we did succeed in rounding him up we were faced with the prospect of leaving the car at the stables and walking him and Annabel the two miles home.

  There was an air of unreality about the journey. The silence; the silver landscape in which nothing moved; the cardboard shadows of the trees across the lanes. Miss Linley, waiting by the roadside in a hastily pulled-on coat, seemed more like part of a dream. So – except that it was more like part of a nightmare – did a familiar voice shouting advisorily over the wall when she heard us that she was Tied up in Here and not to believe them if they said she Wasn't. And the lights, following that sleep-shattering outburst, that immediately went on like lighthouse lanterns in bedroom windows all around us. And Miss Linley telling us she'd managed to round Henry up after all and chase him into the Plaices' drive and shut their gates behind him.

  We could have fallen on her neck with relief. We haltered Henry, who by this time had spotted a mare and foal in the Plaices' paddock and was gazing fascinatedly at them over the fence. We led him back to the stables, where Annabel was standing unrepentantly by the kitchen door in the first professionally put-on halter she'd ever had, looking exactly like a circus Shetland.

  Wasn't she a poppet? demanded Miss Linley. We'd never think, would we, that when she caught her the little minx wouldn't move out of the road, and she'd had to call her mother down to help, and between them they'd practically carried her into the yard.

  Neither, seeing her standing there so innocently, would anybody guess what else she'd done. Annabel at home was most particular. She never used the garden as a lavatory and only certain parts of her paddock. Annabel at the stables, to show her opinion of having a halter put on her, had gone as far into the kitchen as her rope would allow and misbehaved on the rug.

  Miss Linley only laughed. They might as well stay in her paddock for the night now, she said. We could fetch them back tomorrow.

  We enjoyed that part of it very much. The walk over to the stables on a morning that was more like spring than autumn. The sight of Henry lying stretched out in the paddock when we got there – resting, we supposed, after his night's adventures. The sight of Annabel – after an initial shock when we couldn't see her at all and thought she was missing again – stretched out similarly a short distance away. Almost invisible in the grass, obviously imitating Henry – wasn't it marvellous, we said, the way they'd taken to one another? Even – if one overlooked the shock they'd given us – the way they'd run away together, just like Hansel and Gretel.

  We went home pack-horse style. Henry first, led by Charles and walking as ponderously as a police horse up the busy main road. Annabel behind, led by me and for the first time in her life acting neither like a yo-yo nor a sheet anchor on the end of her rope but walking equally ponderously in the rear in imitation of Henry. Charming it was, apart from an undoubted resemblance to a procession en route for the sands with us in the role of donkey boys. Really quite touching when we turned off the road into the valley and whenever Henry disappeared round a bend ahead Annabel ran like mad till she had him in sight again, while every now and again Henry himself stopped and turned deliberately round to make sure that Annabel was following.

  We tethered them in a nearby field while we carried out repair work on the paddock. Inspiring though it was to see the latest development in their relationship, we could work a whole lot faster without the prospect of being kicked to the boundary if anything upset Henry, or of Annabel's latest little trick of leaning innocently on the fence wire while we were stringing it so that when she stood upright again it hung in loops and was – as she archly demonstrated by lifting it with her nose – absolutely useless.

  All day long it took us. Strengthening the fence. Enlarging Annabel's house with the help of Timothy so we could lock them in at night. Roofing it with hurdles and a huge tarpaulin and filling it with straw. We brought back Heloise and Abelard. Put them in the house and fed them. Fastened them in as it was now nightfall. Looked through the hurdle door a little later to see Henry stretched out like a great black sultan in the straw and Annabel contentedly eating hay...

  If only it could have continued like that. Annabel and Henry together for the winter. Miss Wellington happy at last. Ourselves sleeping blissfully at night with the thought of all our animals under lock and key. But the next night Henry broke out again. At dusk this time, before we'd even thought of shutting them in. Fortunately we heard the twanging of the paddock wires as he squirmed his way through and the sound of his hoof-beats going like coconuts on the hill. Fortunately the wiring was too complicated this time for anybody but an expert to get through it and Annabel was unable to follow him. Even more fortunately, as we panted desperately up the hill in his wake Farmer Pursey came round the corner in his land-rover and headed him back to the valley.

  That was the end as far as Henry was concerned. Obviously he was a bolter and had escaping in his blood. Keep him, said Farmer Pursey, and not only would we never, however much we wired the place, fence him in, but he'd teach Annabel his tricks as well. Keep him, he said, and we'd probably have the pair of them killed. What Henry wanted was exercise to tire him out, not mooning round a field with Annabel.

  So Henry went back to his owner. To our regret because we liked him. With such regret on Miss Wellington's part that she turned up two days later with the news that she'd seen several donkeys in a field from a bus window and had got off at the next stop to enquire. The man, she said, was perfectly willing for us to have one of his little donkeys to keep Annabel company, and when Charles said he bet he was – one of his little bolters too, he expected, and if anybody brought any more donkeys here we were emigrating to Jamaica – she went off us again for days.