“Boys,” Thomas Gratton says, and though he sounds jovial, I can see that he’s cautious. “I think it’s time you push off.”
As if Thomas Gratton hasn’t spoken, Sean leans into Mutt, and he says, “Five years I’ve kept you alive on that beach. That’s what your father asks of me, and that’s what I’ll keep doing. You’ll ride what I tell him you’ll ride.”
He turns to Gratton and nods sharply, suddenly old, before striding inland. Mutt makes an obscene gesture to his back. When Mutt sees Gratton looking at him, he takes his time lowering his hand and putting it in his pocket.
“Matthew,” Gratton says. “It’s late.”
Dr. Halsal glances in my direction. His eyes narrow, as if he’s convincing himself of what he sees, and I hurry to retrieve Finn’s bike before he can say anything. I should be off anyway. Like Thomas Gratton said, it’s late. And I have to be up early tomorrow.
Sean Kendrick is no one to me that his worries should be mine. He’s just another rider on the beach.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PUCK
That night, I dream about Mum teaching me to ride. I’m nestled in front of her like we are one creature, her arms around me. Her fingers are stubby like mine, and it’s easy to compare them — my hands are fisted on the pony’s mane, and hers are light on the reins. It is neither raining nor sunny, but somewhere in between, as it often is on Thisby. My hands are wet with the sky’s sweat.
“Don’t be nervous,” she tells me. The wind beats her hair against my face and my hair against hers. It’s the same color as the ruddy fall cliff grass that bows down to the ground and back up again. “The Thisby ponies love to run. But it’s easier to get a barnacle off a rock than a Keown woman off a horse.” I believe her, because she feels like a centaur, like she’s part of the pony. It’s impossible for either of us to fall.
I wake from my dream. I have a memory of the door to the house closing and I think this is what woke me. I lie there, looking at nothing because the room is too dark to see, waiting for my eyes to adjust or waiting for sleep to return. I wipe some of the tears off my cheeks. After a few minutes, I start to doubt that I actually heard the door close.
But then there’s the smell of salt water, momentarily terrifying, and Gabe, standing at the door to my bedroom, peering in. I can see the line of his neck as he looks. Inside my head, I say please come in, over and over again. I want so much for him to sit on the end of my bed like he used to, before our parents died, and ask me what my day was like. I want him to tell me he’s changed his mind and I don’t have to ride after all. I want him to say where he’s been out so late.
But most of all, I just want him to come in and sit.
He doesn’t. He silently knocks his fist against the door-jamb as if I’ve said something to disappoint him. Then he turns away, and eventually, I fall back asleep. But I don’t dream of our mother again.
SEAN
The Malvern stables are a haunted place at night.
Though I have already been awake for seventeen hours and need to be up in another five if I’m to have the beach to myself in the morning, I don’t go straight up to my flat. Instead, I take my time in the chilly stable, walking up and down the dimly lit aisles, making sure that the grooms have fed and watered the thoroughbreds and drafts as they were supposed to. They’ve mucked out most of the stalls but now that it’s nearly November, they’re too cowardly to enter the few stalls occupied by the capaill uisce, even when I had the water horses down at the beach. Part of that is the water horses’ reputation, I think, and part of it is the stable’s. Regardless, it leaves me with three stalls I don’t want the capaill uisce to stand in all night. As head trainer, my time’s supposed to be too valuable to be bothering with mucking, but I’d rather do it myself than have Malvern’s two new frightened mice do it badly.
So while the horses make their soft, slow night noises, and the dark, knowing walls of this place hold me close, I clean out the three stalls. I wipe down the surfaces in the feed room. I give the water horses their meat, though I think they’re too wound up to eat it. And all the while, I imagine that this massive stable is mine, that these horses I care for are in my name, that the buyers who try them will nod approvingly at me instead of at Benjamin Malvern.
The Malvern stables are not truly the Malvern stables, after all, but a complex of stone barns that housed horses on Thisby long before the Malvern name existed on the island. The only thing that can match these buildings in stature, especially the main stable, is St. Columba’s in Skarmouth. The barns were constructed with the same spiritual fervor. The ceiling is held up with carved columns that depict wide-eyed men whose hands support the feet of men whose hands support the feet of other men in turn and again in turn, and at the top of all of them are men with the heads of horses. Like the church in Skarmouth, the sloped ceiling of the main barn is supported with ribs of stone, and in between, the surfaces are painted with complicated animals whose limbs knot around each other. The walls, too, are painted, with small, twisted figures jotted into the oddest places: a corner of a stall, in the center of the floor, along the left side of windows. Men with hooves for hands, and women coughing up horses, and stallions with tentacles for manes and tails.
And the most impressive painting of all covers the wall at the end of the main stable. In it, there is the sea, and a man — a forgotten ocean god, perhaps — dragging a horse down into it. The water is the color of blood and the horse is red as the sea.
It’s an old animal, this stable, the oldest on the island.
Everywhere in it are clues to the stable’s previous life. The stalls are so large that in all but three, Malvern has put up dividers so that he can accommodate more of the sport horses that he sells on the mainland. The door frames are iron, the door handles will turn only counterclockwise, and there is something written in red runes above one of the thresholds. The floor of the teind stall, the stall closest to the cliffs, is stained with blood, the walls arced with a spattered spray like sea foam. Malvern has repainted it many times, but when the morning light comes in full and strong, the stains are still visible. One of them is the print of a human hand, fingers splayed near the door handle.
It was not always stylish sport horses that were housed in this barn.
I finish with the stalls and the feed room and every other chore that I can think of performing, and then I shut down the lights so it’s just me in the dark, ancient stomach of the stables. One of the capaill uisce makes a clucking sound and another one replies. Even though I know the horses, the sound instinctively makes the hairs on my arms rise. Every other horse in the stable has gone silent and watchful at the noise.
The thing is, I don’t actually want the Malvern stables, not in either of its forms. I don’t want Malvern’s rich buyers, coming each October to watch the races and buy his thoroughbreds. I don’t want his money and his reputation and his ability to come and go as he pleases from Thisby. I don’t need forty head of horses to feel complete.
What I want is this: a roof over my head that is my own, accounts at Gratton’s and Hammond’s in my name, and, most of all, I want Corr.
For the first time in nine years, I lock the door to my flat, thinking of Mutt Malvern’s purple face and fisted hands. I lie awake for a long time, listening to the ocean violent against the rocks of the northwestern shore of the island, and thinking about the piebald mare.
Finally, I sleep, and when I do, I dream of a day when I can turn my back on Mutt Malvern and keep walking.
CHAPTER TWELVE
PUCK
The morning is raw and pink as I make my way out to Dove’s pasture. Cold as a witch’s tit, my father used to say, and my mother would say is that the sort of language you’re teaching your boys? and apparently it was, because Gabe said it just the other day. It’s not cold enough to freeze the mud, however — only a few years does it ever get cold enough for that — so I slide and stomp and shiver my way across the muddy yard. I’m trying not to notice that I’m nervous. It’s nearly working.
I call Dove’s name and bash the coffee can of feed against the fence post. It’s not a lot — I’ll feed her more after we’ve worked — but it’s enough to tantalize her. I can see her muddy rump poking out from the lean-to. Her tail doesn’t even move as I jostle the can again.
I jump as Finn says, right at my elbow, “She knows you’re cranky, that’s why she won’t come over.”
I glower at him. Somewhere, someone in Skarmouth is making meat pies, because I can smell them on the wind and my stomach grumbles as it rolls to point in the direction of the scent. “I am not cranky. Aren’t you supposed to be cleaning the kitchen or something?”
Finn shrugs and stands on the lowest rung of the fence. He seems unperturbed by the cold. “Dove!” he calls gaily. I am gratified to see that Dove doesn’t move an inch for him, either.
“Well,” he says, “she’s a useless mule. What are you doing today?”
“Taking her down to the beach,” I say. I touch my nose with the back of my hand; it’s that sort of cold that makes me feel like it’s going to run, even though it’s not.
“The beach?” Finn echoes. “Why?”
The idea of answering him irritates me as much as the answer does, so I pull the rule sheet out of my woolly jacket pocket and hand it to him. I rattle the can while he unfolds the sheet, and try not to feel sorry for myself as he reads. It takes him awhile to get to the rule that answers his question. I can tell exactly when he gets to it, because his mouth gets thin. I had thought, when I first decided to ride Dove in the races, that I would be able to exercise her far away from the beach and go down there only for the race. But the rule sheet that Peg Gratton gave me tells me I can’t. All entries must train within 150 yards of the shoreline. Penalty: disqualification with no refund of the entry fee. It feels specifically designed to thwart me, even though I know there’s a good reason for it. No one wants water horses running amok over the island as it gets close to November.
“Maybe you can ask them to make an exception,” Finn says.
“I don’t want them to notice me at all,” I say. If I went to the officials and made a kerfuffle over Dove, they might disqualify me anyway. My plan seems frightfully thin at the moment. All for a brother who left before either of us got up.
Finn and I both start at the sound of a car coming up the road to the house. Cars are never a good sign. Not many people on the island have them, and fewer still have a reason to come out here. Usually the only people who come this way are men who don’t take off their hats as they hand over unpaid invoices.
Finn, valiant soul that he is, vanishes, leaving me to it. The same amount of money has to be handed over regardless, but it stings less if you aren’t the one who has to count it out for them.
But it’s not a bill collector. It’s a long, elegant car the size of our kitchen, with a tall, elegant grille the size of a dustbin. It has round, friendly-looking eyeballs with chrome eyebrows; its tailpipe breathes white puffs that creep around the tires. And it is red — not the red of the horse I saw on the beach yesterday, but red like only humans can imagine. Red like candy. Red like you’d like to taste or possibly paint your lips with.
