John motioned Lewis towards the door. “I’ll put it to her, Mrs. Slocum, but you know what she’s like when she’s made up her mind.” He touched his cap and followed Lewis outside.
The white horse gleamed palely in the dusk. It stamped and shifted in its harness as they approached, rocking the dogcart. John jumped up to the seat and gathered the reins, then frowned down at Lewis. “Well, what are you waiting for, boy?” Then he added, a bit more kindly, “Have you never seen a pony cart before?” He patted the seat beside him with the flat of his hand. “Hop up here, quick now. We’ve a ways to go and supper’s waiting.”
The word “supper” fell enticingly on Lewis’s ears. Deciding he could always run away afterwards if he didn’t like the place, he tried to climb up on the cart as if he’d done it often.
John clucked to the horse and they set out at a gentle pace. The village was dark as pitch with the enforcing of the blackout, except for a splash of light as someone pulled aside the curtain over the door of the pub on the village green.
Lewis’s heart lurched with homesickness at the briefsight of the men gathered near the door, pints in hand, enjoying the warmth of the evening. But they soon left such comfort behind, and as the lane began to climb, the darkness grew ever more dense. The horse’s footfalls were muffled by a carpet of leaves, and Lewis sensed as much as saw the interlacing of the boughs above their heads. He felt lost in the blackness, as insubstantial as the mist he’d seen forming in the hollows.
Fixing his eyes on the faint glimmer of the horse’s rump in front of them, Lewis asked, “How does he know where to go in the dark?”
A snort that might have been a laugh came from the man sitting beside him. “Have you never driven a horse before, lad? He knows my signals from the reins, but he doesn’t need me up here. He can find his way home just as well as you or I.”
“What’s his name?” asked Lewis, encouraged by the patient answer.
This time the chuckle was unmistakable. “Zeus. Daft name for a horse if you ask me, but then nobody did.”
Lewis glanced at his companion, relieved that the sharp nose he could see faintly silhouetted under the peaked cap did not seem to indicate a bad temper. “Are you the groom, then?”
“You are a cheeky sort.”
“It’s just that I thought you might be a chauffeur,” Lewis hastened to add, afraid he’d overstepped the bounds with his new friend. “But you’ve not got a car.”
