“To be out riding with a storm brewing isn’t exciting! It’s madness!” Pierre snapped at me. His complaints were thankfully lost on the wind from there on in as the weather worsened. Pressed up against his back, perched in my ridiculous little basket like a pet monkey, I didn’t bother to try to speak as the headwinds whipped my words away as soon as they left my mouth.

As we rode on, I stared out at the horizon, watching the way the sky tinted as if it were a stained-glass window in a great cathedral, and the way the clouds shifted shape and rolled in the wind like tumbleweeds. I had never seen so many colours in the landscape, nor the light so extraordinary. I wished I had my paints on hand, instead of just a sketch book. I closed my eyes to try to imprint the coloured image into my memory so that I could paint it when I got home again. I even began to match the hues in my mind with the colours in my palette, mentally dipping the brush a little here and there to recreate the sky on my imaginary canvas.

“The sky is so pink!” I said to Pierre. “And that cloud there, it looks like a flamingo!”

“It looks like a storm, that’s what it looks like!” Pierre was not in the mood for my romantic nonsense. And, possibly to avoid speaking to me any longer, he urged Babette on into a canter, and the wind against our faces got even fiercer and made it impossible to say another word as we headed for the marshlands.

Over the past weeks the grass had regrown in the coastland where I had first encountered the herd. The new growth had lured the horses back again. Pierre saw them back there grazing the day before, so he was almost certain that we would find the horses there again today.

“You must promise to be careful around them today,” Pierre lectured me. “Don’t take risks or get underfoot. Storms always make horses crazy.”

As if to prove his point, Babette, who is a very sane mare, began skittering about beneath us as if there were snakes in the water at her feet – which for all I knew there were. The looming storm was making all creatures change their nature. The birds, apart from the flamingos, had taken to the skies and headed out to sea to ride out the worst of the weather.