The Death-Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean Page A

resolved to surrender, then and there. The angel host was the color of gentleness, not wrath. So he walked toward them, while the flies blipped him in the face and the mosquitoes gorged on his palms.
    What had seemed close proved to be half a mile away, but he finally picked his way to the lakeshore, over scabs of salt and knots of razor grass: “Here I am!” he called. “Look! It’s me!” And he put his arms straight up in the air.
    Hundreds of blush-colored shapes rose into the sky en masse.
    “Here I am, look!” he called again, but they flew on: They were in flying formation, and Pepper could see that if they tried to turn back in midair, they might collide and tumble out of the sky. Once again, he had come too late and missed his moment.

SEVEN
BLOODSTOCK
    W hen Pepper tried to retrace his steps to the road, he could not find it. So, lost, famished, and starting to panic, he was very glad indeed to come across the thoroughbred-horse breeder.
    “I like horses,” he said, when the thoroughbred horse breeder came out to ask what Pepper was doing on his land. “What are their names?”
    “Names? They’re horses. What do they want with names?” said the horse breeder.
    The horses in question were brown and black but with peculiarly light manes and almost white tips on their noses. Perhaps it was a distinguishing feature of a thoroughbred horse: a pale, shaggy mane and a creamnose. The air hummed with flies.
    “If you whistle, do they come to you?” asked Pepper.
    “No teeth,” said the man, and opened his mouth to prove it. Pepper whistled. The creatures swiveled their ears at the sound, but they did not trot over.
    “Do you ride them?” asked Pepper.
    “Nah,” said the man. “Hernia in the unmentionables.”
    “Can I ride one?”
    “You just try it, lag,” said the man, with a snort.
    There were three horses on the estate at home, but Pepper’s mother had forbidden him to ride them, for fear he might fall off and break his neck. Besides, just at the moment, he could not quite see how to negotiate a path through the barbed wire.
    “You good with horses, then?” asked the man flatly.
    “I like them,” said Pepper, hoping it sounded like the same thing. “Do you need a hand?”
    For a while it seemed as if the thoroughbred breeder must have lost his ears at the same time as his teeth, because he looked Pepper up and down, turned away, and headed back indoors. “I know who you are, youknow,” he called, without bothering to turn back. “Read about you in the paper.”
    Three mosquitoes died as Pepper clenched his fists in panic.
    “If you stay, you work, right? But I don’t pay wages to scummy lags like you, right?” said the thoroughbred horse breeder.
     
    “I wish I was a horse,” said Pepper, standing once more at the paddock fence a week later.
    A dozen brown beasts looked back at him, blinking away flies. Can’t recommend it, said the tall one with fluffy feet.
    Pepper really had found himself outdoor work, and he was delighted with it. Well, he could have done without the five-o’clock start and dragging around bales of hay that weighed as much as he did. But the customers here were so easily satisfied: They threw up their heads and whinnied as soon as they saw him.
    There were horses in all four paddocks to north, south, east, and west of the thoroughbred breeder’s farmhouse. Well, it was not a farmhouse exactly, but a shed built from old billboards. And they were notexactly paddocks but small patches of bald ground surrounded by rolls of barbed wire. Still, the man in the shed said that he traded in “high-class bloodstock—for the cavalry and dressage and the like.” So Pepper reckoned he had stumbled into the glamorous world of jodhpurs and rosettes.
    He had no idea what Monsieur Jacques had read in the newspaper—his death notice? One of Pepper Papier’s articles? Or something about the sinking of L’Ombrage? The mystery was: How had he recognized Pepper just by looking