The Devil on Horseback

The price of admission to my own mind cost less than a Godiva chocolate bar at Barnes & Noble.

The Indian summer sun beat down radiantly on my bare shoulders as I picked my leisurely way through a massive flea market beside the Mississippi River in Iowa with my daughters. We were giddy fugitives from routine on that rare weekend together, and meandering and winnowing and pointing things out proved to be a bottomless well of amusement.

Hey, look at those Saint Bernard puppies lounging over there in the shade! Get a load of the cute Halloween yard decorations! What do think this weird metal utensil was used for fifty years ago? Whaddaya think, should I buy this?

We turned over crockery and porcelain teacups, priced knick-knacks, pored over collections of used CDs, sniffed fragrant soaps, eyeballed cheap jewelry. And as I casually glanced at a box of second hand books, the past nearly bit me on the finger.

There, atop a stack of other unmemorable novels, was the key to my formative years: a “romantic suspense” novel by Victoria Holt, called “The Devil on Horseback.” The original paper dustcover was still intact, though faded. Centerstage was occupied by a wasp-waisted young, beautiful blond with long ringlets trailing from beneath a feathered blue bonnet the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. She was flanked by images of a booted, sneering nobleman (in a smaller but just as ridiculous feathered hat) astride a somber chestnut steed, and a tumbrel full of doomed aristocrats parked conveniently by a guillotine. I flipped the cover open, and scanned the thumbnail description of the plot—the beautiful schoolmistress’ daughter, caught by unkind circumstance between the worlds of education and aristocracy and the hired help, forced by fate to make do while a “dark and cruelly handsome” French count thought she was “just the kind of mistress he had to have.”

A bright yellow sticker advertised a handwritten price of a dollar. I couldn’t resist. I didn’t counter, haggle, barter or quibble. This book, I had to have. Reading it, I figured, would be like stepping into a time machine.

The title was vaguely familiar, though at that exact moment I couldn’t remember if I’d actually read it before. But odds are, since I’d read everything I could get my hands on by Victoria Holt decades earlier, I’d have bet good money I most certainly had.

I’ll be the first to confess that as a child, I didn’t play well with others. There could be a thousand explanations for that, but we’ll skip them all here. Suffice it to say that I read my way through my childhood. Growing up on the northwest side of Chicago, I practically wore grooves in the pavement to the local library at Pulaski and North Avenues, especially in the summertime. No sooner would I finish an armful of books—Greek mythology, Nancy Drew novels, everything the library had about horses, especially the entire Black Stallion series by Walter Farley—then off I trekked, past Woolworth and the Tiffin movie theater and the bowling alley and the delicatessen that carried those boxes of delicious Dutch chocolates but always smelled like smoked herring—arms aching from the load, to return them and bring back another. The window of my second story bedroom fronted on the street, and from the middle of my bed there in the afternoon light I retreated into a world of language and imagery, Homeric adventures and western canyons, mustangs and mysteries.

It didn’t do much for my social life…but it gave me one hell of a great vocabulary and—years later—unquestionably fabulous verbal scores on my SAT and ACT exams.

Somewhere along the line, though, I outgrew my hunger for stories about teenaged sleuths and Smokey the Cow Pony and turned avidly to a new genre, romantic suspense. Phyllis Whitney, Victoria Holt and Mary Stewart were the new must-read authors, and my imagination was steeped in tales of young and lovely heroines in difficult circumstances drawn to brooding, distant men who magically turned out alright at the end. Given that my first two years of high school were spent in a sea of plaid jumpers at an all-girls Catholic high school, sightings of actual males of the species were somewhat sporadic, and these books provided a more sophisticated window into love, courtship, and happy endings.

Or so I thought.

Fast forward a few decades. Back from the weekend getaway, I wasted little time in finally cracking open a window to a younger, less complicated time. Curled up in bed with a light at my elbow one weekend and a few pillows propped comfortably behind me, doors and windows locked and cat, dog and son soundly asleep, I began to read. But a journey that started with amused anticipation segued quickly into a dutiful slog through repeated disappointment, finishing at long last with a sense of acute nausea…and relief that it was over.

Good grief, I thought, what mind-warping tripe! What a toxic influence had cast its malignant and formative shadow on such an impressionable young mind!

Knee jerk reaction, of course. Nobody reads romantic suspense to get a dose of reality—all the ormolu clocks and clattering horse-drawn carriages and borrowed evening finery would see to that. But this was ridiculous. I could buy—if pressed—the potential quandary faced by the milquetoast heroine Minella of choosing a loveless if affectionate marriage to the Lord of Derringham Manor, or the reckless and tempestuous life of being the mistress of the sneering, bad-mannered and still-married Comte Fontaine Delibes. But for heaven’s sake, did this woman never think outside the childish fantasies of her own mind? Did it never occur to her to just ask someone a question point blank about their motives or their feelings? If someone threw a brick through the window of the chateau, wrapped in a menacing note… did ya think that maybe she’d just go tell somebody??

Patience worn thin, I closed the cover and thought about what to do with this new revelation. The trash can seemed too…undignified, disrespectful of the past and the arduous journey to the present. Keeping it seemed…unthinkable. Giving it away to charity…well, that would be like donating poison to a food bank.

The book sat for weeks in a corner of the living room, as I left daily for work or other errands, paid the bills, toted the firewood, got the oil changed in my car. And then the skies parted, and the ending to this tale became clear.

As evening fell after a day of working in the yard with Chuck and our chainsaws, I stood at the edge of the bonfire blazing with the dusty and cobweb covered scrap lumber I’d pulled from the garage and the mountains of brush we’d cut and dragged from the edge of the driveway and raked into the crackling pile. The heat was a palpable, ominous force, smacking my face and my shins if I stepped just a little too close, but step forward I did anyway from time to time, to drag the smoking vines and branches from the edges back to the middle where they popped and hissed before dissolving into ash. I felt exhausted, but triumphant as well--a primitive goddess of firetending.

I’d grown proud of my incremental post-divoce independence over the past couple of years, and I stood surrounded by the fruits of my hitherto most unlikely labors—the tons of gravel moved, the paddock fences repaired, the mulch spread, the plants dug in, the branches trimmed, the shrubs taken down to the ground with a hand saw. And I stood in the shadow of the house where I’d…fixed the leaky toilet, patched and sanded and painted the bedroom, installed knobs and handles on the basement cabinets, and even managed, after six months of peering through murky darkness on the stairs, to tackle the dreaded light fixture over the foyer.

I pitched the offending book into the fire. And as the sparks wafted upwards in the dark and the flames curled greedily around the pages, I sent the “devil” back home.