The Death-Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean Page B

at him—without even hearing his name? In actual fact, Monsieur Jacques never asked or used Pepper’s name, but got by calling him “scum,” “halfwit,” “bane,” “cockroach,” and “lag.” To a boy from a respectable home, it sounded nasty, but Pepper had gotten used to strange expressions aboard ship and tried not to mind. The horse dealer rarely spoke, but when he did, he stood still to do it, and the words fell out of him— splat! —so flat that Pepper could have picked them up with shovel and bucket. Monsieur Jacques was very like a horse in that respect.
    Sometimes, wild horses would come roistering through the spiny, wind-crazed scrub and stand inthe distance, looking at the horses corralled behind the barbed wire. They were curd white and shaggy, so their outlines blurred against the skyline, shapeless as spray. Pepper, who did not believe in ghosts, thought the cart driver must have seen these and made an understandable mistake. He whistled to them, but they never came.
    “They want to meet you,” Pepper told the tall horse, “but they’re too shy to come closer.”
    I’ll master my disappointment , said the horse, and lashed itself with its tail.
    Pepper felt a special bond with a tall, dun cob with fluffy feet. At some time it had stumbled and fallen onto its front knees, and cankers had formed over the scarring so that the beast appeared to wear the badge of a good Catholic: devout kneecaps.
    “When did you last go to confession?” asked Pepper.
    I rarely get the opportunity to sin these days.
    “Not even unclean thoughts?” asked Pepper, who had often fobbed off Father Ignatius with “unclean thoughts” when he had nothing else to confess to.
    Hay, observed the cob. I think about hay, generally. Eternity sometimes. Do you taste soap, or is it just me?
    The wild horses, curiosity satisfied, suddenly brokeinto a gallop and disappeared over the horizon; they never did anything unless it was sudden. The thoroughbred bloodstock in the four paddocks all turned to face the way they had gone, and dipped their heads.
    Just once, Pepper had asked the stockbreeder if he should “let the horses out for a run.” The stockbreeder had said he would shoot Pepper’s head off if he did, and had shown him the shotgun to prove it, so Pepper did not ask again.
    There is nowhere high in the sea-fringed Camargue region of Provence: nothing much for a boy to climb. So Pepper kept a watch on the horizon and the mare’s-tail clouds that streamed out on the hot, incessant wind. And he comforted himself that, by now, Aunty Mireille would be saying lots of Masses for the repose of his soul. (What did God do with those, he wondered: all those masses of Masses people recited in church? Were they like fresh straw for Him to walk on, or did they just make Heaven smell nice?)
    “Do horses go to Heaven?” he asked the tall horse with fluffy feet.
    Naturally, said the horse. Who do you think pulls the fiery chariots?
    The countryside around them spread out in shadeless folds: bleached patches of land stitched together with tall reeds. The air buzzed with flies and blood-sucking mosquitoes. Pepper was glad that his seagoing jacket was also bleaching in the strong light and getting stained—he must have become much harder to spot from up above.
    He did not mind at all not getting paid: He had never been paid—not even pocket money—and you can’t miss what you’ve never had. Anyway, he loved the work. Chiefly he loved being alive.
    The horse breeder’s shelter was constructed like the beginnings of a house of cards—as if Jacques had intended to build up and up, a Tower of Babel made out of words:
     
    COGNAC MONNET— Sunshine in a Glass!
     
    L’OIE d’OR—Queen of Creamy Foie Gras
     
    For Cooking, Nothing Is Better Than
VEGETALINE!
     
    Pepper slept sandwiched between a floor that advertised:
     
    SAVOYARD SAVON FOR SOFTER SKIN
     
    and a ceiling that exhorted him to
     
    BE A MAN: JOIN THE FOREIGN