Accidentally turned into a horse by his lover (who’s a witch) a young lawyer's plan to defraud a billionaire goes wildly wrong. Destined to see the cruel crazy erotic world through equine eyes, finally he manages to escape to become an animal rights activist.
Retranslated and (liberally) adapted in today’s world (of London) from the original Latin of Lucius Apuleius (a Tunisian Roman citizen), which itself came from the Ancient Greek he wrote it in.
WARNING: The Greeks and Romans had no problem with 'adult themes' and outlooks on life (from 2,000 years ago!) which are sometimes very different from today's and may shock some readers to the core.
As Yogi Berra said, "When you come to a fork in the road. Take it."
"Golden Horse" is your fork.
Afraid of what lies on the very rocky road ahead? Then turn back.
Chapter 17 - Part 1
As I sauntered along the High Road, attracting little attention at such an ungodly hour, I pondered my predicament. A horse, it seemed to me, was rather surplus to requirements in a 21st century metropolis. Soon my spirits began to flag and I worried that I'd eventually be picked up by some other opportunistic butcher. I shied at the approach of any white van and fairly galloped past any butchers shop. It wasn't until about 9 o'clock, some four hours since my daring, masqued escape, that I remembered the Ada Cole Horse Sanctuary. Situated in the rolling hills just north of the North Circular, the Sanctuary provided convalescence and rehabilitation for about hundred horses. After my ordeal at the hands of the eunuch priests, this was just what the doctor (vet) ordered. But how, you might ask, did I know about such a cheesy place? I'm ashamed to say that it was a favourite venue for first dates, the perfect backdrop for a display of masculine sensitivity. Let me tell you, there was no-one more attune to his female side, no-one more metrosexual, than I.
And thus the die was cast, my mind made up and my future secure. Soon, very soon, I'd be all right.
Dis aliter visum, as the Romans used to say. And they were damn right. I was within a mile of my destination when a horse-box drew up alongside and a Barbour wearing, Captain Mark Philips look-alike peered out of the driver's seat and started to scrutinise me with worrying thoroughness. Here we go again, I thought, with a sinking heart, but a fiery determination to live. To escape the knackers’ knife, whatever cost. I was just about to start another bout of mad-horse-disease, when I realized that his intentions were benign (-ish).
As I gathered from a rapid telephonic exchange, the horse-box driver was in fact a horse-trader. And very much in the line of Black Ferdie and other rustlers of yester-year. Like them, he stole horses. Like them, he stole only the best (well, come on, you didn't think that I had been changed into a rough old nag, did you?). Like them, he somehow managed to pass on the goods with bona fide letters of reference, even the odd forged blood-line. I soon discovered that I was meant to be (and would soon be sold as) a champion show jumper from Captain Herriot's famous St Stephen's Stables. It was with the greatest regret that I was being sold, but since Nancy de-camped to Rodean, no one had been able to do anything with me. It was hoped that a new environment and a fresh pair of hands might just do the trick. I came very highly recommended and even possessed a glowing letter of introduction. It was such a good CV that even I was proud of my achievements.
I was even more intrigued when I happened to catch sight of the said letter of introduction, lying on the front passenger seat.
My dear Mrs Ormsby-Harmsworth,
I am writing to throw myself on your mercy. Is there by any chance a spare stable at Cherry Tree Farm for a very well-behaved, but rather lonely little pony called Jody? He has been with us for nearly three years and I can give him an absolutely glowing report. Five rosettes at last month's gymkhana, including the notorious three-bar-plus-water-obstacle. He is quite the star of the local Pony Club and best friends with all the other horses. And only last week, he won the cup for the best looking horse under five hands. You can imagine how delighted we all were. There was a double page spread in the local rag and even a mention in Horse and Hound.
But the thing is, following Georgina's unfortunate kidnapping - (there was a little discrepancy here with Captain Phillips' story, but no one seemed to notice except me), there has been no one to look after him. No one to groom him and ride him. No one to feed him sugar lumps and tell him how clever he is.
So we, are, I suppose, throwing ourselves on your mercy. And I am sure that a new horse is just the challenge that young Jilly needs. There have been some worrying rumours - untrue, I'm sure - of her going rather off the rails. Only last week, the Bishop's wife told me that she had seen Jilly in the public bar of the Barley Mow with some very unsavoury characters. What Lady Margot was doing there herself is quite another story. And you know how I hate to spread gossip, but we all know what happened to Lord Whithers' youngest. One moment, your average horse-mad teen, the next moment married to Peter Stringfellow.
So, we all pray that you will rise to the challenge and take on dear Jody. Much though it will break my heart to say good-bye to the dear little fellow, I am convinced that it will all be for the best in the long run. And I am quite sure that you'll work wonders with him. And I can make you this promise. He will not disappoint. There'll be no return to sender! In no time at all he'll be the star of his new club and young Jilly's safest route to a normal, crime-free adolescence.
I shan't embarrass you with any of the boring financial stuff. It's all being handled by the usual dealers. They will soon be in contact.
Thanks ever so for getting us all out of a rather nasty hole.
Belinda Cameron
And so it was that I began a new and entirely different life at Cherry Tree Farm. I never found out exactly what Mrs Ormsby-Harmswoth paid for me, but it was quite a lot.
For the first time in months, I could honestly say that life was good. I was housed in a very plush stable, with heaps of fresh straw every day. I was meticulously groomed, night and morning, by a chubby, cheerful girl called Jill, who also mucked me out and fed me top-of-the-range oats three times a day. She even plaited my mane and polished my hooves. The whole set-up was so exactly like an Enid Blyton story, that - at first - I kept looking for cameras. But after I while I realized that this was not a set. This was Real Life. Or as real as it gets for pre-pubescent aristocrats living in the middle of nowhere. There really were people who still lived like the girls in 1930s children’s stories. Girls who loved horses more than people, who had learned to ride before they could walk and who devoted every waking hour to every conceivable form of equine activity, from ordering meal to hunting. But by far the favourite activity of Jill and the chums was show-jumping. The competition was fierce and, at times, bloody. There was even talk of a doping scandal. The Pony Club was every bit as vicious as an inner-city gang and just as alluring.
I had not, of course, jumped before, but I proved a quick learner and Jill and I were soon the talk of the County. The unstoppable dream team. Together, we won every competition in every gymkhana from Tettbury to Stowe-on-the-Wold. My stable was quickly plastered with cups, ribbons and rosettes. Not only did we excel at jumping and dressage, we invariably won 'Best Condition and Turnout.' No other pair were ever more immaculately groomed than me and little Jilly: we positively gleamed with it. The other horses at Cherry Tree Farm were very high class (ie very expensive) and tended, at first, to exclude such an obvious parvenu, but my suave sophistication and constant, seemingly effortless success soon won them over. In no time at all, I was king pin of the farm, the Pony Club and the whole damn Cotswolds. There was even talk of our qualifying for the Horse of the Year Show. I might be a failed lawyer and even - for the moment - a failed human being, but I was a champion horse. Champion, the Wonder Horse. Jilly and I were soon winning all the qualifying heats and heading straight for Olympia. Bragging aside, I'm sure we'd have won there, too, had circumstances beyond our control not cruelly intervened.
Strange as it might seem, I was actually very familiar with the whole Pony Club malarkey. From, as it were, the other side of the fence. The upper classes of Nigeria had copied this, along with so much else, from their erstwhile colonial masters. The sprawling, arid estates behind Lagos were littered with jumps, paddocks, riding schools and even the odd hunt (with hyenas replacing the traditional fox). There were the polo clubs and jockey clubs, where the new, blood-stained rich could impersonate the old, blood-stained rich. The Agar Khan and even the Princess Royal were, from time to time, spotted in the more exclusive ranches. Throughout my childhood, my sister, Agnes, had been as horse mad as any other spoiled little rich girl. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, it's easy to say that it was the jodhpur-clad girls, with their muscled thighs, that most aroused her interest. And how she must have loved the point-to-point uniform of top hat, tails and riding crop. At the time, however, she seemed as innocently engaged as the young Elizabeth Taylor and just as likely to win the Lagos Grand National. My parents and I would follow her loyally around every event, until she was inevitably discovered rolling in the hay with a similarly-minded teacher. That was the beginning of the end for my sister, of her gradual expulsion from the paradise of Nigerian high society. Little by little, bit by bit, her friends, her family and even (especially?) her Church shunned her. The love that dare not speak its name had shouted it, loud and clear, and damned itself. My sister now lived as an outcast, a pariah. Were it not for her long suffering partner and fellow gay-activist, she would surely have sunk beneath the waves of cruelty and prejudice.
But all this was a long way from the summer orchards and rolling hills of Cherry Tree Farm. In this little corner of Merry England, everyone and everything was so robustly 'normal' that it was almost weird. The girls, and even their horses, seemed so much of a cliché that I sometimes wondered if anything was actually real. Before she was fifteen, Agnes had been 'outed' as a cross-dressing dyke who liked other women to whip her with a point-to-point birch. No such perversity had ever disrupted the gilded life of young Jilly. She was as happy as the day is long. Happy as a sand boy. Or maybe she was simply as happy as the rich, healthy and young always are.
I'm afraid that life was not so good for my new owners, Jill's parents, Mr and Mrs Ormsby-Harmsworth. Nor was it particularly good for their two sons, Jill's bothers. Be warned, dear reader, that this particular story doesn't have a happy ending.
Mr Ormsby-Harmsworth was a fine upstanding man, a pillar of the community, a local worthy in every sense of the word. He was a magistrate, a governor of several local schools - even a couple of comprehensives! - and, naturally, the Lord Lieutenant of Gloucestershire. Every night, he dined with the great and good of the Cotswolds, including, of course, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall. But even he had known tragedy. Some thirty years ago, his wife, the brilliant and beautiful youngest daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, had been killed at the Boxing Day Hunt, leaving a young son and a devastated husband. For six long years, the squire had devoted himself to his grief. He had nurtured and cosseted it like a second child. He never left the big house and even neglected the famous stables.
But such is the way of the world that, one fine spring morning, the squire fell in love all over again. Very soon, he had married again and had a second son.
By the time of my sudden arrival on the scene (the set?), the first son had grown into as fine a man as his old father. Eton and Sandhurst and a commission in the the Cold Stream Guards. For two years running, he had featured as London's 'Most Eligible Batchelor' in both Hello! and Tatler. Inevitably, his step-mother had fallen head over heels in love with this paragon.
The second Mrs Ormsby-Harmsworth was one of those lucky women who look perpetually twenty years younger than they really are (except when they are fifteen. Obvs, as Jill would have said.). She was blessed with a lustrous mane of blonde hair, the figure of Sophia Loren and the face of an angel (maybe a fallen angel, but an angel nonetheless). And it was a well-known secret that she had had affairs with every eligible young man in the County, from the stable boys at the Stud farm (while I discretely averted my gaze) to the head boy at Marlborough College (ostensibly putting in some last minute dressage practice). She had never yet known failure and was piqued, to say the least, that her step-son seemed impervious to hints, to hints that were becoming less and less subtle as the months past.
At first, Mrs O-H had contented herself with a discretely applied, wildly expensive perfume (a bespoke mixture from a fashionable pharmacy in Jermyn Street) and new underwear (a Rigby and Peller Wonderbra for the over 50s). When subtle flirtation failed to rouse the lad, she turned to a more overt approach. She was now surprising him in his bath (there are no locks in moated, medieval manors), sunbathing topless and giving him The Story of O for his twenty-fifth birthday. When even this didn't work, she concluded that the boy was gay. No one - no one - except a raving nancy could possibly fail to fall in love ith her. Of course, this face-saving theory did nothing to assuage the surging hormones and raging desire that tortured the spurned lover. And it was, moreover, cruelly dashed by a close-up photo in Tatler's back pages of the Hon Peregrine Ormsby-Harmsworth and Miss Sophie Rheinstein at the Sandhurst Ball, snogging each other's face off.
Some two weeks after my arrival, the Honourable Perry made the mistake of inviting the aforementioned Miss Rheinstein to Sunday lunch at the farm. It was, as even I could see, a strained affair, despite the obvious and oblivious happiness of the young people.
It is interesting how much you overhear when you've been turned into a horse. At about two o'clock on that very Sunday, after the port and the coffee, the young people went out to 'stretch their legs'.
"What the fuck's wrong with your step-mother, Perry? She's dressed up like a sub-Madonna look-a-like in skin-tight gold lame. For Sunday lunch in the Cotswolds? And wearing more make-up than Barbara Cartland. And did she have to keep stroking your arm and pecking you on the cheek? Has she got some sort of menopausal crush on you? It's all pretty sick. Pretty embarrassing for all concerned. Or didn't you even notice?"
"Honey, baby. You know I've got eyes only for you."
With that sickeningly obvious entree, they were soon at it hammer and tongs (hammer and tongues) right there and then. Against the stable door. When they finally peeled themselves apart, the perceptive Sophie returned toher theme.
"She's hot for you, baby. And it won't end well. You mark my words."
"Tears before bedtime?"
The canny Miss Rheinstein gave her young lover a not so friendly punch in the ribs.
"I'm serious, darling. You mustn't let this get out of hand. It's like something from a Greek tragedy. Sex-starved, wicked step-mother and hot young stepson."
Miss Rothstein was a very rara avis amongst the Gloucestershire gentry: she was an educated woman. It dismayed many people, but they put it down to her Jewish ancestry.
"Ok, I'll watch my back."
"Fuck your back, it's your dear little cock I'm worried about."
"Less of the 'little', sweetheart."
Sensing another clinch in the offing, I tactfully took myself away to romp with a young filly of my acquaintance. You can get used to anything after a while and even start to enjoy it. But, while Peregrine, Sophie and I were all having a jolly good time, the grown-ups were certainly not. Au very contraire.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that unrequited love soon takes its toll. However beautiful the wronged party, however glossy, pampered and soignée. However sexy, however desirable, however Forever 21. And so it was with the second Mrs Ormsby-Harmsworth. She seemed to shrink before our very eyes. She refused to eat and refused to sleep. Even Jilly, hardly the most sensitive and perceptive of girls, began to notice that all was not right with her step-mother. One evening, as she was grooming me with more than usual care and vigour, it all poured out.
"Oh, Jodie, Jodie, you've no idea what's been happening inside. You are so lucky to be living in this super plush stable, away from all the arguments. I think I'll move in. Swear to God! And now that Perry is off at that silly training camp and Charlie is out all day with Bella, it leaves me alone in the house with those two. If they hate each other so much, why don't they just divorce? And Mummy is now looking like an old witch. She hasn't bothered to dye her hair in weeks. Yucksville. You can see all the ugly grey. It's, like, really embarrassing when she picks me up at the school gates. I have to pretend not to know her and secretly whiz off in Julia Featherstonehough's mother's Porsche."
© 2017 Mimi L. Thompson
For previous chapters (some of which are posted as nsfw because of 'adult themed' content not photographs) please visit my blog page. Your support is much appreciated and comments are most welcome
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