The Scorpio Races

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

I don’t bother tacking up Dove on Sunday after church. Everyone and their grandpa will be tacking up their capaill uisce after they get out of Mass, and I think it might be a good opportunity to learn something about my competition. I’ll bring Dove up to the cliffs this evening, maybe, after she’s had the day to eat expensive hay and get used to the idea of being fast.

I leave Finn and Gabe alone back at the house – Gabe came to service with us, though he looked at his watch and left halfway through, which made Father Mooneyham stare first at him and then at us. Father Mooneyham’s homilies are not generally painful, but you’re meant to suffer through them nonetheless. If your leg falls asleep, you don’t move. If the tea you drank before Mass has you dreaming of toilets on the way to Damascus instead of epiphanies, you pinch and burn and bear it. If you are Brian Carroll and you have been night fishing, you tip your head back so that holding your eyes open is not such an impossible task.

You don’t get up and leave. But Gabe did. And then Beech Gratton did as well. If Tommy Falk hadn’t been too pretty to come to church in the first place, I’m sure he would’ve left, too.

And now I definitely need to go to confession because I’ve not only thought dark things about my brother, I’ve thought them while in Mass. It is slightly uncomfortable to know that if I die in the next few hours, I’ll go to hell, but I have to get outside before the tide comes in and all the riders disappear.

Anyway, all of that seems far away when I’m out on the cliffs above the racing beach. Because though I don’t want to ride on the windy cliffs, I don’t mind sitting on them. I trudge out with a pack on my back made of a wool blanket gathered into a pouch, and when I get there I release its contents on the ground and find myself a secure perch close to the edge where I can see the training down below. I wrap the blanket around my shoulders, take a sip of tea from my thermos, and start on one of the November cakes. I heated three of them in the oven this morning along with some stones, and now the stones have kept them nice and hot. I’m feeling quite virtuous and useful as I take out my paper and pencil and the stopwatch that Finn found for me. If I sit here long enough, surely the horses will give up their secrets. I want to know how fast they cover the ground, and then I plan to take Dove over the same stretch and time her as well. If I know what my handicap is, maybe I can prepare better.

I’ve been sitting for about ten minutes when I catch movement out of the corner of my eye. Someone sits down a few steps away from me, one knee drawn up, an arm resting on top of it.

“So you’ve discovered the secret to winning, have you, Kate Connolly?”

I recognize the voice without turning my head and my pulse goes bump bump bu – and thinks about starting again, but doesn’t quite manage it. “I said you could call me Puck.”

Sean Kendrick doesn’t say anything else, but he doesn’t get up, either. I wonder what he’s thinking as we sit here, watching the horses down below. They look so different from above: The training looks orderly, quiet, on purpose, not like the chaos it felt like when I was down there. Even when I see two horses rear up to fight, their handlers working to tear them apart, the sound is muffled by distance and wind and this somehow lessens it. Toy soldiers.

I watch Ian Privett on his gray – Penda – as they gallop parallel to the water. I click my stopwatch and make a note.

“He’ll go faster than that,” Sean Kendrick says. “Later. He’s not pressing him now.”

I’m not sure if he’s being condescending that I’m bothering to write down this meaningless time, or if he’s awarding me with knowledge I wouldn’t otherwise have had. So I just trace my pencil over the numbers again, imprinting them into the paper. I want to ask him why he spoke up for me last night, but Mum told me that it was rude to dig for compliments, and this feels like it would be digging for compliments. So I don’t ask, though I want to, badly.

Which means we sit in silence some more, the storm wind cutting through my blanket and my hat and ruffling the pages of my notes. I reach into my pack and take one of the precious November cakes – still warm – and offer it to Sean.

He takes the cake without saying thank you. But the thank-you is somehow implied. I’m not sure how he does it, because I wasn’t looking at him to see his face when he took it.

After a moment, he says, “Do you see the black mare? Falk’s? She’s excited to chase. If she were mine, I’d keep her just behind the lead so she’d stay motivated. Make my move late.”

I frown down at the beach, trying to see what he sees. The beach is a mess of fake races and aborted gallops. I find Tommy and his black mare and watch them for a moment. She’s a fine-legged thing for a capall uisce, and when she steps, her head bobs just a bit when her left rear hoof touches the ground. “Also,” I say, because I have to say something, “she is a bit lame in the left rear.”

“The right, I think,” Sean Kendrick says, but then he corrects himself. “No, left, you’re right.”

And I feel pleased, although he is only agreeing with what I already knew.

Now I feel brave enough to ask him, “Why aren’t you riding?” I look at him, too, when I ask, studying his sharp profile. His eyes jerk back and forth, following the movements down below, though the rest of him stays motionless.

“Racing is about more than riding.”

“What are you watching for?”

There is, again, a tremendously long pause between my question and his answer, and I think that he’ll just not reply, and then I think that maybe I only thought the question and didn’t actually say it, and then I consider that possibly it had been somehow insulting though by now I can’t remember exactly what it was that I said to double-check my words to be sure.

And that’s when Sean says, “I want to know who’s afraid of the water. I want to know who can track straight. I want to know who will tear Corr apart as soon as overtake him. I want to know who can’t hold their horses. I want to know how they like to run. I want to know who’s lame in the left rear. I want to know how the beach has worn this year. I want to know what the race will look like before it’s run.”

Down below, the piebald mare screams, loud enough that we both hear it, even up here on the cliff. I can’t believe that last night I was regretting not taking her on when I had the chance. I follow Sean’s gaze.

“And,” I say, “you think the piebald mare is something to be watched out for.”

“By you and me both.”

Just then, the piebald mare surges forward, exploding along the line of the aggressive surf. She angles sharply toward the sea and jerks back toward the cliff again as quickly. She is so fast that she’s gotten to the end of usable beach before I’ve thought to look at my stopwatch.

“Your brother is going to the mainland,” Sean says.

I hold my breath in my mouth for a long moment, and finally say, “Right after the races.” There’s no point in treating it as a secret; everyone knows. He already heard me talking about it with Gratton in the truck.

“And you’re not going with him.”

I’m about to answer he didn’t ask but I realize before I do that that’s not the reason, anyway. I’m not following him because this is home, and everywhere else isn’t. “No.”

“Why aren’t you going?”

The question infuriates me. I demand, “Why is it that going away is the standard? Does anyone ask you why you stay, Sean Kendrick?”

“They do.”

“And why do you?”

“The sky and the sand and the sea and Corr.”

It’s a lovely answer and takes me entirely by surprise. I hadn’t realized we were having a serious conversation, or I think I would’ve given a better reply when he asked me. I’m surprised, too, by him including his stallion in his list. I wonder if, when I talk about Dove, people can hear how I love her the way that I can hear his fondness for Corr in his voice. It’s hard for me to imagine loving a monster, though, no matter how beautiful he is. I remember what the old man said in the butcher’s, about Sean Kendrick having one foot on land and one foot in the sea.

Maybe you need a foot in the sea to be able to see beyond your horse’s bloodlust.

“It’s about wanting,” I say eventually, after some considering. “The tourists always seem to want something. On Thisby, it’s less about wanting, and more about being.” I wonder after I say it if he’ll think I sound like I have no drive or ambition. I suppose in comparison to him it must seem that way. I seem at once cursed to say precisely what I’m thinking to him and unable to tell what he thinks about it.

He says nothing at all. We watch the horses mill and surge below us. Finally, he says, not looking at me, “They’ll still try to keep you off the beach. It won’t have ended last night.”

“I don’t understand why.”

“When the races are about proving something about yourself to others, the people you beat are as important as the horse you ride.” His eyes don’t leave the piebald.

“But that’s not what they’re about for you.”

Sean pushes up to his feet and stands there. I look at his dirty boots. Now I’ve offended him, I think. He says, “Other people have never been important to me, Kate Connolly. Puck Connolly.”

I tip my face up to look at him, finally. The blanket falls off my shoulders, and my hat, too, loosened by the wind. I can’t read his expression – his narrow eyes make it difficult. I say, “And now?”

Kendrick reaches to turn up the collar on his jacket. He doesn’t smile, but he’s not as close to frowning as usual. “Thanks for the cake.”

Then he strides off across through the grass, leaving me with my pencil touching my paper. I feel like I’ve learned something important about the race to come, but I’ve no idea how to write it down.