Neither of them spoke for a moment, just sat there, gravely assessing the boys. Eric was trying to light a cigarette but Tim kept aiming the hose at him.
'She was asking me if there were horse psychiatrists,' said Liz. Logan laughed.
'That horse doesn't need a shrink, he needs a lobotomy.' He thought for a while. 'There's this horse chiropractor guy over in Pittsfield but he doesn't do cases like this. Can't think of anybody who does. Can you?'
Liz shook her head.
There was no one. Logan sighed. The whole thing, he concluded, had been one goddamn miserable fuckup from the start. And there was no sign he could see of it getting any better.
Part Two
Chapter Six
It was in America that horses first roamed. A million years before the birth of man, they grazed the vast plains of wiry grass and crossed to other continents over bridges of rock soon severed by retreating ice. They first knew man as the hunted knows the hunter, for long before he saw them as a means to killing other beasts, man killed them for their meat.
Paintings on the walls of caves showed how. Lions and bears would turn and fight and that was the moment men speared them. But the horse was a creature of flight not fight and, with a simple deadly logic, the hunter used flight to destroy it. Whole herds were driven hurtling headlong to their deaths from the tops of cliffs. Deposits of their broken bones bore testimony. And though later he came pretending friendship, the alliance with man would ever be but fragile, for the fear he'd struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged.
Since that neolithic moment when first a horse was haltered, there were those among men who understood this.
They could see into the creature's soul and soothe the wounds they found there. Often they were seen as witches and perhaps they were. Some wrought their magic with the bleached bones of toads, plucked from moonlit streams. Others, it was said, could with but a glance root the hooves of a working team to the earth they plowed. There were gypsies and showmen, shamans and charlatans. And those who truly had the gift were wont to guard it wisely, for it was said that he who drove the devil out, might also drive him in. The owner of a horse you calmed might shake your hand then dance around the flames while they burned you in the village square.
For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled ears, these men were known as Whisperers.
They were mainly men it seemed and this puzzled Annie as she read by hooded lamplight in the cavernous reading room of the public library. She had assumed that women would know more about such things than men. She sat for many hours at one of the long, gleaming mahogany tables, privately corralled by the books she had found, and she stayed until the place closed.
She read about an Irishman called Sullivan who lived two hundred years ago and whose taming of furious horses had been witnessed by many. He would lead the animals away into a darkened barn and no one knew for sure what happened when he closed the door. He claimed that all he used were the words of an Indian charm, bought for the price of a meal from a hungry traveler. No one ever knew if this was true, for his secret died with him. All the witnesses knew was that when Sullivan lead the horses out again, all fury had vanished. Some said they looked hypnotized by fear.
There was a man from Groveport, Ohio, called John Solomon Rarey who tamed his first horse at the age of twelve. Word of his gift spread and in 1858 he was summoned to Windsor Castle in England to calm a horse of Queen Victoria. The queen and her entourage watched astonished as Rarey put his hands on the animal and laid it down on the ground before them. Then he lay down beside it and rested his head on its hooves. The queen chuckled with delight and gave Rarey a hundred dollars. He was a modest, quiet man, but now he was famous and the press wanted more. The call went out to find the most ferocious horse in all England.
It was duly found.
He was a stallion by the name of Cruiser, once the fastest racehorse in the land. Now though, according to the account Annie read, he was a 'fiend incarnate' and wore an eight-pound iron muzzle to stop him killing too many stableboys. His owners only kept him alive because they wanted to breed from him and to make him safe enough to do this, they planned to blind him. Against all advice, Rarey let himself into the stable where no one else dared venture and shut the door. He emerged three hours later leading Crusier, without his muzzle and gentle as a lamb. The owners were so impressed they gave him the horse. Rarey brought him back to Ohio where Crusier died on 6 July 1875, outliving his new master by a full nine years.
Annie came out of the library and down between the massive lions that guarded the steps to the street. Traffic blared by and the wind funneled icily up the canyon of buildings. She still had three or four hours of work to do back at the office, but she didn't take a cab. She wanted to walk. The cold air might make sense of the stories swirling in her head. Whatever their names, no matter where or when they lived, the horses she had read about all had but one face. Pilgrim's. It was into Pilgrim's ears that the Irishman intoned and they were Pilgrim's eyes behind the iron muzzle.
Something was happening to Annie which she couldn't yet define. Something visceral. Over the past month she had watched her daughter walking the floors of the apartment, first with the frame, then with the cane. She had helped Grace, they all had, with the brutal, boring, daily slog of physical therapy, hour upon hour of it, till their limbs ached as much as hers. Physically, there was a steady accumulation of tiny triumphs. But Annie could see that, in almost equal measure, something inside the girl was dying.
Grace tried to mask it from them - her parents, Elsa, her friends, even the army of counselors and therapists who were paid well to see such things -with a kind of dogged cheerfulness. But Annie saw through it, saw the way Grace's face went when she thought no one was looking and saw silence, like a patient monster, enfold her daughter in its arms.
Quite why the life of a savage horse slammed up in a squalid, country stall should seem now so crucially linked with her daughter's decline, Annie had no idea. There was no logic to it. She respected Grace's decision not to ride again, indeed Annie didn't like the idea of her even trying. And when Harry Logan and Liz told her again and again that it would be kinder to destroy Pilgrim and that his prolonged existence was a misery to all concerned, she knew they were talking sense. Why then did she keep saying no? Why, when the magazine's circulation figures had started to level out, had she just taken two whole afternoons off to read about weirdos who whispered into animals' ears? Because she was a fool, she told herself.
Everyone was going home when she got back to the office. She settled at her desk and Anthony gave her a list of messages and reminded her about a breakfast meeting she had been trying to avoid. Then he said good-night and left her on her own. Annie made a couple of calls that he'd said couldn't wait, then called home.
Robert told her that Grace was doing her exercises. She was fine, he said. It was what he always said. Annie told him she would be late and to go ahead and eat without her.
'You sound tired,' he said. 'Heavy day?'
'No. I spent it reading about whisperers.'
'About what?'
'I'll tell you later.'
She started to go through the stack of papers Anthony had left for her but her thoughts kept sliding away into farfetched fantasies about what she'd read in the library. Maybe John Rarey had a great-great-grandson somewhere who'd inherited the gift and could use it on Pilgrim? Maybe she could place an ad in the Times to trace him? Whisperer wanted.