The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

“What? Oh, the horse. The clubfoot horse. No. Grimes fixed it. Grimes and
the farrier.”
The trees opened up and in front of us was a huge stone building, big like I
imagined the dock warehouses must be. Big like the London train station. It
couldn’t be right. Whatever the place was, it wasn’t a house.
The horse shook his head at my attempts to rein him in. Instead of heading
straight for the massive building, he went around to the side, to what even I
could recognize was a stable.
An elderly man came forward at a sort of running limp. Grimes, I thought.
“What’s happened?” he asked.
“Our Maggie’s hurt,” I told him. She tumbled sideways into his arms. He
staggered, but held on to her. “She fell off an’ smacked her head,” I said.
“Hurt her shoulder too.”
Grimes nodded. “Can you stay with the horse a moment? I’ll get her to the
house.”
“Of course,” I said, trying make my voice sound like Maggie’s. Grimes
fixed a horse with a clubfoot. Fixed a clubfoot. How?
He carried Maggie away. I slid off the horse—a very long way to the
ground—and looked around. There were stalls just like the closed-up ones at
Miss Smith’s house, only more of them, and fancier, and mostly occupied.
Horses looked over the open tops of the stalls’ half-doors, their ears pricked
with interest. Some of them made little murmuring sounds.
I led Maggie’s brother’s horse into an empty stall. The horse thrust his
head into a water bucket and then into a pile of hay. I got the saddle off him—
not hard, just buckles under the flap bits—and slung it over the door, then got
the bridle off. I shut the horse in the stall and carried the tack and bridle to
their storeroom, which I found without any trouble. One row of racks held
saddles, and another bridles, and I put the kit I held into the empty spaces. I
wandered around looking at the other horses until Grimes returned.
“Thank you,” he said. “She’s in bed now, and m’lady has phoned for the
doctor. Don’t think there’s anything more we can do. She doesn’t know where
she is right now. You get that sometimes, with a smack on the head.”
“She seemed all right at first,” I said. “She got worse as we were going.”
“I’m not surprised.” He pointed to my foot. “What happened? You get hurt
too?”
I looked down. A small bloodstain was seeping through the bandage. “Oh,”
I said. “It does that, sometimes. When I don’t have my crutches.” I hesitated,