Henry put on his coat, picked up his briefcase, went out the door to his apartment, closed the door behind him, made sure it was locked, put on his rubbers, wrapped his scarf around his neck, and went down the three steps to the outside door. Several kids had come home for lunch from the nearby elementary school, and were making snowballs in front of the apartment building next door. Henry waved to them. It was January. There had been four snowstorms before this, and all three of the boys knew that Henry had good aim, so they smiled, shouted hello, and kept their hands down.
Henry swore that he would open Sandra’s letter when he got home that evening.
He had five students. Whether they would get through all thirty-two hundred lines of Beowulf by May, Henry had no idea — that was sixteen weeks. Two hundred lines a week might be a lot. But anything was better than nothing. They looked at him expectantly, and so he opened a large book to a marked page and pushed it to the center of the seminar table. He said, “See that mound? I wish the picture were in color. It’s a beautiful grassy green. It is Eadgils Mound, in Uppsala, in Sweden. When it was excavated in 1874, it contained a corpse lying on a bearskin, with his sword and other precious possessions, indicating that he was a king. He seems to have died in the middle of the sixth century. When you are translating this poem, I want you to think of it as not only a monster tale, but also a historical record. This poem is considered to be about Eadgils, the king in the grave.” The students’ heads went up and down.
Class lasted two hours. They got twenty-five lines translated — from “Hwaet! We Gardena” to “man geptheon” (“What! We learn of the Danes of the Spear…” to “a man shall thrive”). It did not make much sense, but the students seemed to enjoy the puzzle. That’s what Henry said at the end of the class: “Think of the poem as a puzzle, not only a translation, but a jigsaw puzzle that will only become a meaningful picture when you’ve put all the pieces together. That means we have to be patient.”
He ate his supper at a café near the campus, then trotted all the way home, which took a single invigorating hour. Once home, he put off reading Sandra’s letter by working on his last chapter, a consideration of “The Battle of Maldon” and the monk Byrhtferth.
Finally, he picked up Sandra’s letter, slit it open, and got into bed with it. He was so sleepy that he hoped he wouldn’t really understand a thing that she wrote. The letter was surprisingly short. It read, “Dear Henry, I have only one thing to say. I no longer think that our engagement failed because you are American and I am English. I know I said that, and it made sense at the time, as Americans are known for their enthusiasm which then falters as novelty and amusement give way to commitment and familiarity. My sister told me about a fellow she went for at University who treated her as you treated me — always kind and more and more distant. He came up queer as a nine bob note. You might think about it. Yours truly, Sandra Boulstridge.”
The interesting thing to Henry was that he wasn’t offended. But he also decided to complete his dissertation before thinking any more about it.
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HER MOTHER AND FATHER could not afford to buy her a horse. No plan or scheme that Debbie had managed to come up with (including sending Uncle Frank and Aunt Andy a letter, asking very respectfully for a loan of a thousand dollars, to be paid back in ten years, at 5 percent interest) had worked. But now that Debbie had met Fiona Cannon, who was a year ahead of her at school, she didn’t care about a horse of her own. Fiona had two horses — or, rather, a horse (Prince) and a pony (Rufus) — and riding with Fiona was far more fun than any camp or lesson she had ever experienced. She rode Rufus, who was a pinto and very low to the ground. She had fallen off Rufus dozens of times — she was expected to fall off Rufus. She was also expected to watch Fiona, who rode Prince. Debbie knew the expression “He rode rings around her,” but she had no idea that it was so much fun to have rings ridden around her.
Fiona lived three stops farther on the school bus. She was an only child, and she kept Rufus and Prince at home, but home was not a fancy place with a stable and a riding ring — home was a two-story house with a wraparound porch down by the road, and a big fenced field that dipped, ran up the hillside, and ended at the trees. Rufus and Prince lived together in the field, and all of Fiona’s equipment and tack was stored in the garage. Fiona’s mom was a teacher at the high school, and her dad had a diner in town that served breakfast and lunch but not dinner. Debbie had been there; she liked the waffles.
When Fiona invited her — not every day, but lots of days — Timmy was supposed to tell Mom that she was going to Fiona’s, and most times he did. They dropped their books inside the house, changed clothes (she was just a little shorter and thinner than Fiona), and went out back, where Fiona stood at the gate with a bucket of oats and a lead rope, smacking the chain of the lead rope against the bucket and shouting, “Come in, come in!” And then the best thing happened — Prince and Rufus came galloping down the hill, exactly as if they were happy to see them, Fiona of course, but also Debbie, it seemed. While Prince ate from the bucket, Debbie fed a couple of handfuls to Rufus. Then they brushed them and picked their hooves.
Debbie stood Rufus up next to the fence and clambered on bareback. He was slick beneath her, so she entwined the fingers of one hand in his mane and gripped the lead rope with the other. Fiona eased onto Prince, and sat there, limber and relaxed, until Debbie felt secure; then Fiona clapped her legs against Prince’s sides and headed diagonally up the hill in a big walk. Rufus jogged a little to keep up. Prince was a beautiful horse, a Thoroughbred who had raced at Pimlico. He was a chestnut (Debbie mouthed the word “chestnut”) with a blaze and two white feet.
As far as Debbie could tell, Fiona could do anything on a horse. It was not only jumping and fox hunting — in Virginia, lots of people did that. Fiona loved riding bareback, and she could do some things that you only saw in movies, like slide to one side and show her face under Prince’s neck at a canter, and then pull herself upright again. She could also ride backward, jump off at a trot and a canter, and get Prince to turn, stop, and back up without any bridle or halter at all, just voice commands and the weight of her body.
Debbie wasn’t sure what Fiona saw in her — they weren’t special friends at school. Debbie was in a group of seventh-graders who took Latin instead of French and thought serving on the Student Council was important. Most of them didn’t know who Fiona was, but in the fall, at the bus stand, Fiona had overheard Debbie say to one girl that she was going to have a set of riding lessons, and then she had started talking to her that afternoon. The next day, she had invited Debbie to meet Rufus and Prince, which was, of course, fine with Mom, who thought that Debbie did not need to copy her homework over twice just to make sure every word was perfect.
The horses ambled along nicely, until the dip was below them and the hillside stretched damp and green before them. All along the fence to their left, the dogwoods were blooming against the darker background of the not-yet-leafy trees, and there were a few bluebells. In the fall, they had picked blackberries at the top of the hill, right from the backs of their horses, while the horses ate grass. Now they walked along the fence about halfway up the slope; then Fiona said, “Stop a minute and watch this.” Debbie pulled on Rufus’s lead rope, and Rufus halted. Fiona trotted on up the hillside for another ten or fifteen feet and turned Prince, still trotting; as he trotted down the slope, she squatted on his bare back, and then stood up. After a few strides, she dropped the lead rope and jumped into the air, bending her knees. He trotted out from under her. She landed on her feet. Debbie clapped, and Fiona gave a little bow. She pulled a piece of carrot out of her pocket and called, “Prince! Come in!” Prince looped a lazy circle and took some bites of grass, but after thinking about it for a moment, he came up the hill and received his carrot. Rufus wanted a piece, too. When Fiona had given him a tiny bit, she said, “I started doing that over the weekend. I want to try it at a canter.”