“Ah, well. Have you been at this long enough to know how the horses will go?” Malvern means which of his water horses is the fastest.
“I knew that the first day.”
Malvern smiles. It is not a pleasant smile, but its unpleasantness is not directed toward me. “Which, then, is the slowest of them?”
“The bay mare without white,” I say, without pause. I haven’t named her because she has yet to earn a name. She’s flighty and sea-wild; she is not fast because she takes no pleasure in what the rider wants.
Malvern asks, “And which is the fastest?”
I pause before answering. I know what I say dictates who he puts Mutt on this November. I don’t want to answer truthfully, but there is no point lying, as he’ll find out eventually. “Corr. The red stallion.”
Malvern says, “And which is the safest?”
“Edana. The bay with the white blaze.”
Malvern looks at me then. Really looks at me, for the first time. He frowns, as if he is seeing me anew, the boy who has spent years growing up above his stable, raising his horses. I look at my teacup. He asks, “Why did you jump into the sea after Fundamental?”
“He was my charge.”
“Your charge, but a Malvern horse. My son owned that horse.” Benjamin Malvern pushes his chair back and stands. “Matthew will ride Edana. Turn the other bay loose, unless you think she’ll shape up next year.”
He looks at me for verification. I shake my head.
“Turn her loose, then. And you’ll” — he tucks some coins beneath the edge of his teacup — “you’ll ride Corr.”
Every year I wait and wait for him to say it. Every year when he makes his decision, it eases my heart.
But this year, I feel like I’m still waiting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
PUCK
By lunchtime the next day, I’m in poor spirits. When I find Gabe already missing by the time I get up, I decide to take matters into my own hands and go to the Skarmouth Hotel to find him. At the hotel they tell me he’s at the piers and at the piers they tell me he’s gone out on a boat, and when I ask which boat, they laugh at me and say maybe one that had a drink in the bottom of the glass.
Sometimes, I hate all men.
When I get back, I rant to Finn about how we never talk to Gabe anymore. “I talked to him this morning,” Finn tells me. “Before he left. About the fish.” I manage to contain my fury, but only barely. “Next time you see him, I need to talk to him,” I tell Finn. “What fish?”
“What?” Finn answers. He is smiling at a porcelain dog head in a faraway fashion.
“Never mind,” I say.
Then I take Dove to the beach for the afternoon high tide and she’s irritable and sluggish, in no mood to work. She’s had plenty of days like that in the past, of course, but they’ve never mattered. Not that it matters today, either, but if she’s like this on the day of the race, I might as well not get out of bed.
When I get her back to the house, I turn her loose in her paddock and toss a flake of hay over the fence. It’s cruddy islandgrass hay, I know, though I’ve never cared much until now. I glower at Dove’s hay belly and open the door to the house.
“Finn?”
He’s not here. I hope he’s out fixing the stupid Morris. Something on this island ought to work.
“Finn?” I ask again. No reply. Feeling guilty, I go to the biscuit tin on the counter and rattle the coins that we’ve stashed inside. I count them, then put them back in the biscuit tin. I imagine what Dove might do with better feed. I pull them back out again. I think that this will only buy her a week’s worth of better feed, and use up all of our money. I put the coins back in.
We’re going to lose the house anyway, unless I do something.
I fist my hands and stare at the tin.
I’ll get Dory Maud to advance me on the teapots.
Leaving a few of the coins in the tin, I stuff the rest in my pocket. Without Finn or the probably still dead Morris here, there’s no chance of me getting a ride to Colborne & Hammond, the farmer’s supply, so it’s out to the lean-to, shoving Dove out of the way to reach Mum’s bicycle. I check the tire pressure and teeter off down the road, avoiding potholes. I’m glad that Finn’s storm prediction has yet to pass, because Colborne & Hammond’s is in Hastoway, all the way past Skarmouth. My shins will be sighing enough from the ride without soaking them in rainwater as well.
I pedal off the gravel road and onto the asphalt, glancing behind me to make certain no cars are coming. They rarely are, but since Father Mooneyham got knocked into the ditch by Martin Bird’s truck, I’m careful to look.
The wind is coming straight across the hills as I pedal. I have to lean against it to keep the bicycle from tipping. Ahead of me, the road winds to avoid the more formidable outcroppings. Dad said that when they first paved the road, it looked like a scar or a zipper, black against the muted browns and green hills around it. But now the asphalt and the painted lines on it have faded so that the road seems like just another part of the crooked, angular landscape. There’s patches on the road, too, where craters have opened up in it and been sealed with darker tar. It’s like camouflage. At night, it’s almost impossible to stay true to it.
Behind me, I hear the sound of an engine separate itself from the sound of the wind, and I pull over to the side to let them pass. But instead of passing by, the vehicle stops. It’s Thomas Gratton in his big sheep truck, a Bedford whose headlights and grille make it look like Finn when he’s making his frog face.
“Puck Connolly,” Thomas Gratton, ruddy faced as always, says through the open window. He’s already opening his door. “Where are you headed on that?”
“Hastoway.”
I can’t quite figure how I make it off the bicycle, but the next thing I know, Gratton is lifting it over the side of the truck bed for me and saying, “I’m headed down there myself.”
I know good fortune when I see it, so I climb in the passenger seat, moving a tin, a newspaper, and a border collie out of my way before I settle.
“Also,” Thomas Gratton says, pulling himself into the truck with a groan, as if it takes a bit of doing, “have some biscuits. So I don’t eat them all myself.”
As we drive off down the road, I eat one and I give one to his dog. I cast a sly look to Thomas Gratton to see if he’s noticed — and if he’s noticed, if he minds — but he’s humming and gripping the steering wheel as if it might get away. I think about him and Peg talking about me and wonder if I’ve made a mistake trapping myself here in the cab with him.
For a moment we ride in comparative silence — the truck rattles as if the engine is climbing out of the compartment, so quiet is not exactly the word for it. I’m pleased to see that the cab is cluttered with cough drop wrappers and empty milk bottles and bits of mud-smeared newspapers made brittle by age. Neatness makes me feel like I have to be on my best behavior. Clutter is my natural habitat.
“How’s that brother of yours?” Gratton asks me.
“Which one?”
“The heroic one with the cart.”
I sigh so deeply that the collie licks my face to cure me. “Oh, Finn.”
“He’s a dedicated one. Do you think he’s up for an apprenticeship?”
An apprenticeship with the butcher would be a very wonderful thing indeed. It pains me to say, “He can’t stand the sight of blood.”
Thomas Gratton laughs. “He’s picked the wrong island.”
I think, not fondly, about the dead sheep I investigated earlier. And also about Finn haunting Palsson’s bakery. If he could apprentice anywhere, I’m certain it would be there. Where he could put salt in his hot cocoa. They’d have to apprentice someone else to pick up the kitchen after him, though.
“Oh, what have we here?” Thomas Gratton says. It takes me a moment to spot what he does, which is a lone dark figure picking its way parallel to the road. Gratton stops the truck and rolls down his window.
“Sean Kendrick!” Gratton calls, and I start at that. And it is Sean Kendrick, his shoulders hunched against the cold, dark collar turned up to the wind. “What are you doing without a horse beneath you?”
Sean doesn’t answer right away. His expression doesn’t change, but something about his face does, like he’s shifting to a different gear. “Just clearing my thoughts.”
Gratton says, “Where are you clearing them to?”
“I don’t know. Hastoway.”
“Well, you can clear your thoughts in the truck. We’re headed the same way.”
For a moment I am completely struck by the injustice of this, that I’ve been offered a ride and now I have to share it with Sean “Keep Your Pony Off This Beach” Kendrick of all people. And then I see that Kendrick, too, has seen me, and is uncertain about getting into the truck, and that pleases me. I would like to be terrifying. I glower at him.
But Gratton’s expression must counteract mine, because Sean Kendrick glances back the way he’s come and then starts around to the other side of the truck. My side. Gratton opens his door and tells the dog to get in the back, which she does, shooting us all a filthy look. I move into the seat she’d been occupying — now that I’m sitting right next to Gratton, he smells like the lemon throat lozenges whose wrappers are scattered on the floor. All the while, I’m madly trying to come up with something catchy to say when Sean opens the passengerside door, something that will at once indicate that I remember what he said to me on the beach and also carry that I am not impressed or intimidated, and possibly convey the message that I’m more clever than he thinks, as well.
Sean Kendrick opens the door.
He looks at me.
I look at him.
This close, he’s almost too severe to be handsome: sharp-edged cheekbones and razor-edge nose and dark eyebrows. His hands are bruised and torn from his time with the capaill uisce. Like the fishermen on the island, his eyes are permanently narrowed against the sun and the sea. He looks like a wild animal. Not a friendly one.
I don’t say anything.
He gets into the truck.
When he shuts the door, I am squeezed between Thomas Gratton’s great leg, which I imagine is as ruddy as the rest of him, and Sean Kendrick’s rigid one. We are shoulder to shoulder due to the size of the cab, and if Gratton is made of flour and potatoes, Sean is made of stone and driftwood and possibly those prickly anemones that sometimes wash up on shore.
I lean away from him. He looks out the window.
Gratton hums to himself.
From the back of the truck, the border collie whines. The vibration of the truck makes it a broken, intermittent whistle.
“I hear that Mutt — Matthew — is having a bit of an upset over the horse you’ve picked for him,” Gratton says pleasantly.
Sean Kendrick looks at him sharply. “And who’s saying such things?”
I’m surprised by his voice, for some reason, the way it sounds when he’s speaking instead of shouting over the wind. It makes him seem softer. I notice that he smells of hay and horses and that makes me like him a bit better.