The mares were less active. They stuck close to their foals, but they did not really graze much, I noticed – they were too anxious. And Loulou was acting particularly oddly. She kept sniffing at her flanks and she refused to stay still, pacing about and raising her muzzle to the air with nostrils flared, trying to catch the scent of a predator on the wind. I was sketching her as she did this when she gave a funny little shake of her mane and then, suddenly, she dropped to her knees and lay down. She was flat on the ground and now she gave a grunt and thrashed about on her side and then stood up again and shook her whole body.

As I watched her, she repeated this once more. This time she lay flat on the ground and didn’t get up again. Then she kicked at the air with her hind legs.

“Loulou? What’s wrong?”

Loulou cow-kicked at her own belly with a hind leg and rolled over in the grass, flipping one way and then the other. Then she lay on her side, and let out a miserable groan. I looked at the protrusion of her enormous belly, rising up like a whale in front of me and I knew. Once, in our stables at Fontainebleau, one of the Thoroughbred broodmares had birthed a foal and my papa had woken me from my bed and taken me out to the stables so that I could watch it happen. Now, I was seeing the same familiar signs of a mare in labour and I knew: Loulou was about to foal.

But what a time and a place to have a baby! All around us the wind whipped mercilessly and the rain was beginning to fall from the storm clouds that boiled and seethed above us. How could nature be this perverse? And then I remembered what Mimi had said about mares giving birth in a storm so that the weather would mask the smell of the foal. The tempest would act as a protector and give the newborn a chance to rise to its feet and suckle without fear that predators might scent it on the air and attack.

This birth was hardwired into Loulou by nature. Her sudden labour in the storm was a bloodright handed down from her ancestors. And now, from here, everything would happen very fast. Horses were quick to deliver their foals. That Thoroughbred mare I had watched in the stables at Fontainebleau had given birth in a matter of minutes, not hours. Loulou’s delivery would be quick too.

Except it wasn’t.

Almost half an hour passed as I watched her heave and strain. She stood up several times over this period, kicked at her belly as if confused and then dropped to the ground again. And nothing happened.