Claude put his ears back and shook his head in anger at the pain, but he didn’t bite me. I injected the fluid and pulled the needle back out again.

“Done it!”

“Bien!” Alexandre was delighted.

It was enough for him for one day, the vet told Alexandre. The antibiotics would see him through the night. Tomorrow he would come back and he would sedate Claude and examine the leg properly. If I could be here then, that would be useful, to help control him.

“Of course I’ll be here,” I told Alexandre. I knew now that I couldn’t leave Claude’s side. The horse needed me.

When Nicole came to visit me that night to see if I was ready to come home, I told her I was staying. “I’ll sleep here,” I said.

She agreed to bring me a sleeping bag and some dinner and a change of clothes and, as she was leaving, I looked at Claude, asleep now in the straw, the pain and exhaustion having overwhelmed him at last, and I called to Nicole before she went.

“Please,” I said. “Could you bring me my easel too, and my stack of canvases and my paints and the bag that contains my sketch book?”

That bag, I knew, contained Rose’s diary too. I would read it late that night when I couldn’t sleep. I would be exhausted from painting by then – I’d be working for hours and hours until well past midnight.

***

As I picked up the diary much later that night, I could see that my hands were covered in oil paint and my fingers were red from holding the brush so tight for so long. But it was worth it because on the canvas before me I could see the beginnings of my portrait of Claude. I had painted him just as he lay before me there on the straw of the stable floor. I painted everything, the froth of sweat on his neck, the terrible gash on his leg, the sinew and the bone. All of it was exposed, but what the portrait truly laid bare went deeper still. For the first time in my work, I was seeing the heart of a horse. Claude, so brave and so heroic, was fighting a great battle, and the dark spectre of death was looming over him, so close that I could feel its presence. In death’s shadow, I couldn’t sleep. So I curled up in my sleeping bag and opened the diary to the page where I had left off before, returning once more to the watery wastelands of Flamants Roses.

Chapter 12: Wild Horses

May 10, 1853