Loving Spirit

her when he’d collected her at the airport, just looked her up and down as she came through customs with the flight attendant who had been looking after her. ‘You got here all right then?’ he’d said in his gruff accent.
    Ellie hadn’t really known what to say to that. It wasn’t a proper question. Of course she’d got there, otherwise she wouldn’t be standing in front of him. Desperately miserable, she’d just nodded.
    ‘Car’s this way.’ He’d signed the flight attendant’s forms, taken the handle of her trolley and then set off towards the car park.
    The flight attendant had called goodbye. Ellie thanked her and then hurried after her uncle.
    She studied him now across the car. She had never heard much about Uncle Len; she just knew that her dad, who had been four years younger, had never really got on with him. They had written once a year at Christmas, but otherwise hadn’t kept in touch and never visited each other. Her dad had gone to university, become a vet and then moved to New Zealand, whereas her uncle had left school as soon as he could, gone to work at a racing yard and now had his own stables in north Derbyshire near to where they had both grown up. The only thing the two of them seemed to have in common was that they had both chosen to work with animals. Looking at her uncle’s set face, Ellie felt glad that he wasn’t more like her dad; it would have been much harder to be with him if she was reminded of Dad all the time. She missed both her parents so intensely – her energetic, bubbly mum who had been a kindergarten teacher, and her quieter, more thoughtful father. She had often travelled around with him as he had done his vet rounds, seeing the animals, helping out. She stopped her thoughts there as the tears threatened again.
    Len seemed to sense her gaze and glanced across. Ellie dropped her eyes to her lap. But now eye contact had been made, the silence suddenly seemed to fill the car.
    ‘How … how many horses do you have?’ she asked, to break it.
    ‘Twenty-nine on the yard, some liveries, some mine,’ he answered. ‘You ride, don’t you?’
    She nodded.
    ‘Then you’ll ride the smaller ponies for me,’ he said. ‘You’re a good size for them.’
    ‘Ponies?’ Ellie echoed.
    ‘Four-legged creatures, head at one end, tail at the other, hay goes in, muck comes out.’
    Ellie’s cheeks coloured. From some people the comment might have been a joke, but her uncle didn’t seem the joking sort.
    ‘You’ll have to make yourself useful if you’re staying with me,’ he went on. ‘You’ll work just like everyone else. You’ll ride the ponies in the shows and when we have buyers round, and then you’ll work on the yard like we all do.’
    Ellie disliked the tone of his voice, but she had no energy to fight right then. She just wanted to be left alone. She shrugged, wrapping her arms tighter around herself.
    Her uncle turned his gaze back to the road.
    *
    After another twenty minutes of driving through small villages with grey stone houses, the road twisted round a corner and began to head downwards again. There was a town just visible in the valley below. Len pointed across the fields to the left where there was an old farmhouse nestling beneath a ridge of bare-branched trees on the mountainside. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘That’s your new home.’
    Ellie swallowed at the word as her eyes took in the farmhouse. It was three storeys high. There was a large courtyard of stables and two big horse barns with stalls inside. Behind the barns the land had been levelled and there was an outdoor all-weather ring and a field with bright jumps in, the only splash of colour on the green and grey landscape. She could see horses and ponies grazing on the hillsides, wearing waterproof rugs and hoods over their necks.
    Len turned the car down a bumpy lane with a white and black sign saying High Peak Stables . As the car jolted over the rough pot-holed surface, Ellie looked at the house looming ahead and shivered. It looked very lonely.
    The drive ended in a tarmacked parking area with two horseboxes, a trailer, a motorbike and a few cars. There was a smaller outdoor school at the end of it. A dark bay pony with a white star was being trotted around. His ears were pricked and his eyessoft. The boy who was riding looked too big for the pony, but he was slimly built and he rode lightly. Sitting down in the saddle, he moved the pony into a flowing canter.
    Despite her