Script quote and cartoon elephant on thighs

Nell Harker, who sold toffee apples from a barrow at the gate, saw the calf every morning. She noticed that Marigold never looked at the ground the way the others did. She looked up at the stake, the chain and the iron ring, as if they were the only things in the world worth studying. 'They hold you fast,' Nell said one evening, passing a paper cone of sugared nuts through the bars. 'That's all they're for.'

The storm came off the fens on the last night of the fair, black as a coal scuttle. The canvas went down in a rush, the horses screamed, and the stake pulled loose from the wet clay. Marigold did not run. She spread those enormous ears and let the wind take them, and the chain that had been her whole world swung her up over the tent poles like a kite on a string. Men shouted from the mud. Nell stood in the rain holding her empty barrow and watched until there was nothing left to see.

By morning the fair had moved on to the next town, and Marigold was never seen in Ashby Mere again. But in the spring a postcard came to the toffee seller with no stamp on it, showing a grey calf sailing over a silver river. On the back, in careful pencil, someone had written: the very things that held me down. Nell kept it in her apron pocket for the rest of her life.