In brief: The gossip started when Catherine became beautiful. This seemed to happen almost overnight, without her noticing. But others noticed. The child who had ridden the countryside with drover’s boy Deio to no one’s concern suddenly aroused talk of impropriety. Reverend Hughes rode out to deliver the community’s concerns, and with harsh words and the back of her father’s hand Catherine was forbidden from seeing Deio and his family again. Even her unhappy mother had been a party to it, and promises of trips for Catherine and her sister were made – trips she knew would mostly not occur.

The plan was to make Catherine more like a young lady – more like her contented sister Eliza. So baking and sewing were the order of the day. But Catherine had ridden wild across the windswept shores of Wales, and felt trapped in the snug kitchen, longing for her friend and companion Deio, and cursing her lot. But she had no alternative, and the year began to pass. She’d hear the drovers going out on their long adventures to London, and her spirit would fly along with them, but she remained where she was, thinking ‘is this it?’

Catherine didn’t see it coming. She knew her mother’s extremes of mood seemed to be getting worse, the highs higher, and the lows lower. But then her mother fell pregnant again, after so many years, and she became ever more unhappy. On the day her mother died Catherine had woken feeling cheerful, with no premonition of the awful day. It was only when her father sent her up to see her mother that she realised something was wrong. The most terrible thing about that most terrible of days was her own ignorance.

She had no clue what to do to help her, and nor did anyone else – so her mother died. Died through want of knowledge. At the day’s end, Catherine promised she would never be in that position again – she would do something with her life, she would learn to help herself and others, she would get away – but how? Catherine thought that Eleri, a local artist who had once painted her mother and who seemed to live a life of freedom, might be able to help her. Riding over to see her after another row with her father, she outlined her rather slim plan – to travel to London to learn to be a doctor, or a nurse. Eleri warned her that there was but one female doctor in the whole of the city, and nursing was not what she thought – but there might just be a way . . .

So one bright moonlit night, Catherine embraces her sister, and creeps from the house. She dresses in the clothes Deio gave her, becoming the young boy who would travel as a drover to London. She can’t imagine the journey, or all the pitfalls on the way to contact the doctor who Eleri says may help her in her struggle. And her wildest dreams could not foresee the trip she will ultimately take across the sea with Florence Nightingale, and the hardships she will encounter in the freezing Crimea.

But Deio also has dreams of making his fortune, and the madly contradictory Catherine has seemingly driven all sense from him, as he too finds his destiny in the mud and blood of the Crimea.

About the author

Julia Gregson has worked in women’s magazines in the UK, US and the Far East. She has had several serials and short stories published and read on the radio, and is the author of the Richard and Judy Summer Read East of the Sun. She lives in Wales with her husband and daughter.

About The Water Horse Julia Gregson says:

"Writing this book, my first novel, was an amazing journey of discovery for me. It began in Pumpsaint in mid-Wales. Beside a small chapel door was a plaque commemorating a woman called Jane Evans. It simply said that in 1853 she ran away with the Welsh cattle drovers in order to nurse with Florence Nightingale at Scutari. She was the daughter of a Methodist minister. Intrigued, I tried to find out more about her but failed – most of Nightingale’s nurses were illiterate and no information on Evans survived, so I decided to fictionalise her story.

"I persuaded a local farmer to take me on a long-distance ride on horseback along the drovers’ routes across Wales, past the foothills of Snowdon, and then to the Lleyn Peninsular, where my story begins. I wanted to find out what the drovers' roads felt like, what she would have seen.

"Later I went to Istanbul – with my 80-year-old mother, but that’s another story . . . I took a boat across the Bosphorus, where the Nightingale nurses landed in 1854, and where the gaunt Barrack Hospital, now a military installation, still stands. Amazingly, Florence Nightingale’s room was still there. I saw her dusty chaise longue, her writing desk.

"The book took me three years to write – I was teaching and writing short stories at the time. Finishing it and getting it published marked the beginning of a new and exciting journey for me, too. I am grateful to Jane Evans for it."

For discussion

• The author characterises the Welsh setting with stone and rock. Why do you think she does this?
• "The whole world of footling tasks that made up being a woman." Could Catherine have altered her situation in any other way?
• Why does Catherine’s mother not belong in the landscape?
• "Life was neither pretty nor fair, she knew that now." Is this still true?
• "To a Celt, the Devil is almost as important an idea as the idea of God." Why?
• "If you fear everything you can’t control, you’ll never do anything that matters to you." Do the horses in the book have any bearing on this, do you think? How are the horses important?
• "First drover’s clothes, now the parlour maid’s dress. Why must a woman assume so many disguises in order to live an independent life?" Is this entirely true? What about Eleri?
• "There was the world as it was, and the world as you wanted it to be." Do all the characters feel this, do you think?
• "But why must every joy bring pain?" Must it?
• How does the author deal with the brief nature of life in the 1850s?
• Are soldiers "the natural enemy of woman"?
• "One day she might tell him everything, but maybe not. Being an adult meant you didn’t have to say." What else has Catherine learnt?

Suggested further reading

The Rose of Sebastopol by Katharine McMahon
Letters from the Crimea by Florence Nightingale
The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies
The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller
Welsh Cattle Drovers by Richard J. Moore-Colyer