I feel, suddenly and alarmingly, like the races are very close. All at once I realize that it’s only days before I will walk Dove down to the beach, and I feel completely unprepared. I don’t know anything about this. Nothing at all.
I’m resurrected from my funk by Joseph Beringer, who dances around behind me singing some poorly rhymed and slightly dirty song about my odds and my skirts.
“I don’t even wear skirts,” I snap at him.
“Especially,” he says, “in my daydreams.”
I had thought, for some reason, that being one of the riders in the Scorpio Races would get me a bit more respect, but it’s ever surprising, the things that don’t change.
I ignore him, which helps a little, if only because it feels familiar, and thread through the people toward Dory Maud’s booth, avoiding puddles and Joseph as best as I can. I can hear the commotion from the beach already, even among all the people poking in the booths. There’s something about the sound that seems unlike the normal noise of the training, and I’m not sure if it’s just because everyone is down on the beach at once as the races draw close.
“Puck!” Dory Maud spots me before I spot her. She is festively dressed in a traditional scarf and rubber boots, a combination that is at once ridiculous and, unfortunately, extremely representative of Thisby. “Puck!” she says again, this time shaking a string of November bells at me — an action that attracts the attention of at least two others near me. She carefully lays the bells down on the table in front of her so that the price tag is showing.
“Hi,” I say. There’s a great shout from the direction of the beach, which I find oddly unsettling.
“Where’s your horse?” Dory Maud asks. “Or do you mean to practice out there without her?”
“I rode her back from Hastoway yesterday evening. She’s taking a break and I’m going to watch from the cliffs.”
Dory Maud eyes me.
“It’s strategy,” I add crossly. “I’m devising strategy. Not all of racing is riding, you know.”
“I know nothing about it,” Dory replies. “Except that Ian Privett’s horse likes to come on strong from the outside at the very end, if it’s anything like the last year he rode him.”
I remember what Elizabeth said before about Dory Maud gambling on the horses. Mum once told Dad that vices were only vices when looked at through the frame of society. I see a possible ally in Dory’s vice. “What else do you know?”
Dory Maud reaches up to better secure a bit of the flapping canvas tent, and then she says, “I know that I’ll tell you more if you come back after and mind the booth for an hour while I go get lunch.”
I regard her darkly. Again, it’s not something I thought I’d have to do as a rider in the races. “I’ll think about it. What’s that commotion anyway, do you know?”
Dory Maud looks enviously down at the road to the beach. “Oh, it’s Sean Kendrick.”
Interest prickles in me. “What about Sean Kendrick?”
“They’re taking his red stallion down there. Mutt Malvern and some of the other boys.”
“With Sean?”
Dory Maud looks wistful then that she’s trapped in the booth instead of down seeing the action. “I didn’t see him. Talk’s going around that he won’t be in the races. That he and Benjamin Malvern fought over the stallion and he quit. Kendrick, I mean.”
“Quit!”
“Are you deaf?” Dory Maud rings the bells right by my ear. She calls out to someone just behind me. “November bells! Best price on the island!” Sometimes she reminds me a lot of her sister Elizabeth, and not in a favorable way. Then she says to me, “It’s all talk, isn’t it? They say Kendrick wanted to buy the stallion and Malvern said no, so he quit.”
I think of Sean folded low over the red stallion, riding bareback at the top of the cliffs. Of the easy way they had with each other when I met him to look at the uisce mare. I think, even, of the way Sean looked when he stood on the bloody festival rock and said his name, and then Corr’s, like it was just fact, one after the other. Of the way he said “the sky and the sand and the sea and Corr” to me. And I feel a bite of unfairness, because in everything but name, it seems to me that Sean Kendrick already owns Corr.
“So what are they doing with him?”
“How should I know? I just saw them parading past and Mutt Malvern looking like it’s his birthday.”
Now my sense of injustice is truly ringing. I abruptly change my plans from going to the cliff to watch from above to going down the cliff path to find out what’s happening on the beach.
“I’m going down there.”
“Don’t talk to Malvern’s son,” Dory Maud warns.
I’m already heading away, but I glance back over my shoulder. “Why not?”
“Because he might talk back!”
I hurry down the cliff path past the rest of the tents; as the path descends steeply, the vendors can no longer get their tables to sit evenly so it grows more quiet. And there, down below, is the red stallion, surrounded by four men. I recognize the square form of Mutt Malvern, and the man holding the lead — David Prince, because he used to work Hammond’s farm near us — but none of the others. There’s a loose circle of people gathered around them as well, watching and laughing and shouting. Mutt shouts something back to them. Corr lifts his head, jerking the arm of the man who holds him, and calls to the sea, high and pure.
Mutt laughs. “Having some problems holding him, Prince?”
“I’ll hold him!” shouts someone from the gathered group, and there’s more laughter.
I imagine Dove taken from me in this way, and anger churns in my stomach.
I know that Sean must be here, somewhere. It takes me a moment to spot him, but by now I know how: look for the place with no movement, for the person who’s just a little part away from the rest. Sure enough, there he is, standing with his back to the cliff, an arm across his stomach, his other elbow resting on it. His knuckles push tightly against his lips, but his face is expressionless. There’s something terrible about the way he stands there, watching. He’s not so much still as frozen.
Farther down the beach, Corr keens again, and Mutt loops a scarlet ribbon tied with bells around Corr’s pastern, just above his hoof. At the sound of them, the red stallion flinches, as if the bells are physically painful, and I find myself unexpectedly blinking away tears.
Sean Kendrick turns his face away.
There’s something so wretched in that that I can’t just leave him there by himself. I elbow my way through the tourists and the locals who are watching this spectacle. My heart thuds in my chest. I think of Sean telling me: Keep your pony off this beach. It’s possible I’m the last person he wants to see.
I stand next to him with my arms crossed. We don’t speak. I’m glad that he doesn’t look up, because Mutt has put a saddle on Corr and now they’re draping a breastplate with nails and bells sewn into it over Corr’s withers. The stallion’s skin shivers wherever the iron touches him.
After a moment, Sean says in a low voice, still looking at the ground, “Where is your horse?”
“I worked her last night, after the rain stopped. Where’s yours?”
He swallows.
“How can they do this?” I demand.
Corr makes a strange, frenzied sound, like half a whinny, a sound cut off before it began. He stands still, but he jerks his head as if trying to rid himself of a fly.
“I reckon,” Sean says, in that same low voice, “that it’s wise of you to ride your own horse, Puck, even if she’s just an island pony. Better that your heart’s your own.”
Mutt Malvern says, “I thought he’d be bigger.”
He’s climbed onto Corr, though Prince still holds the lead rope. One of the other men stands between Corr and the sea, his arms held out on either side like a fence. Mutt swings his legs and looks at the ground as if he’s a child on a pony.
“This is Mutt Malvern’s gift to me,” Sean says, and there’s enough bitter in his words for me to taste it with him. “This is my fault.”
I try to think of what I can say to comfort him. I don’t even know if he wants it. I don’t know if I’d want to be comforted, if I’m being honest. If I’m being forced to eat soot, I want to know that somewhere else in the world, someone else has to eat soot as well. I want to know that soot tastes terrible. I don’t want to be told that soot’s good for my digestion. And of course, by soot, I mean beans.
“Probably it is,” I reply. “But in twenty minutes or thirty minutes or an hour, Mutt Malvern will get bored of this. And then he will be back on that wretched black-and-white creature that he’s put on the butcher’s board by his name. And I think the piebald’s quite enough of a punishment for anyone.”
Sean looks at me then, his eyes bright, in a way that makes me feel out of sorts. I glare back.
“Where did you say your horse was again?”
“Home. Trained yesterday evening. Why did you say you quit again?”
He looks away with a rueful snort. “It was a gamble. Like you and your pony.”
“Horse.”
“Right.” Sean looks back to Corr. “Why did you say you were racing again?”
I hadn’t said, of course. It goes against everything in me to confess the true reasons behind my decision. I can imagine it being chatted all over Skarmouth, as easily as Dory Maud told me how Sean Kendrick had quit over Corr. I haven’t told Peg Gratton, even though it seems like she is on my side, nor Dory Maud, and Dory Maud is nearly family. But I hear myself say, “We’ll lose my parents’ house if I don’t win.”
I realize then how foolish it is to say it. Not because I think Sean Kendrick will gossip. But because he’ll know now that I hope not only to race but to make money at it. And that’s a terribly fanciful thing to be saying to Sean Kendrick, four-time winner of the Scorpio Races. He is quiet for a long moment, his eyes on Corr and Mutt on his back.
“That’s a good reason to gamble,” he says, and I feel incredibly warm toward him for saying that, instead of telling me that I’m a fool.
I exhale. “So was yours.”
“Do you think so?”
“He’s yours no matter what the law says. I think Benjamin Malvern’s jealous of it. And,” I add, “I think he likes to play games with people.”
Sean looks at me in that sharp way of his. I don’t think he realizes how it impales people. “You know a lot about him.”
I know that Benjamin Malvern likes to drink his tea with butter and salt in it, and that his nose is big enough to hide acorns in. I know that he wants to be entertained but that few things manage it. But I don’t know if that means that I know him.
“Enough,” I reply.
“I’m not,” he says, “fond of games.”
We both look back to Corr, who has, against everything I would’ve thought, settled down. He stands perfectly still, looking over the crowd, his ears pricked. Every so often, he quivers, but otherwise he doesn’t move.