The Scorpio Races

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Benjamin Malvern wants to meet at the hotel in Skarmouth. That’s a game itself, somehow, because these days the Skarmouth Hotel will churn with people, every room filled with tourists for the races. While the butcher’s is a local hub for betting and news, a place where the riders know to come for talk, the hotel is where the mainlanders compare notes and talk about the day’s training, scratch their heads, and wonder if this mare or that stallion will calm down enough to be a contender in the race. For me to stand in the hotel lobby where Malvern arranged for us to meet is for me to be gobbled up.

So I step into the hotel, out of the cold, but I slide through the lobby as quickly as I can and find a stairwell to wait in. It looks like it leads upward to only a few of the guest rooms, so the odds of being bothered are slight. I rub my arms – it’s drafty – and peer upward through the stairs. The hotel is the grandest building on the island, everything about it designed to make someone from the mainland feel at home. So the architecture inside is painted columns and civilized wooden arches, cornices and polished wood. A Persian rug cushions my feet. On the wall adjacent to me is a painting of a thoroughbred posing in a bridle, standing before a halcyon landscape. Everything about the hotel says that those who stay here are gentlemen and scholars, cultured and safe.

I steal a glance into the lobby, looking for Malvern. Knots of race tourists stand in twos and threes, smoking and discussing the training. The room is full of their foreign, broad accents. From a room off the lobby, a piano plays. The minutes move sluggishly. It’s a strange neverland, right now, between the festival and the races. The most die-hard of race enthusiasts arrive for the Scorpio Festival, but Skarmouth isn’t large enough to entertain them long. There’s nothing for them to do until the races but watch us live and die down on the sand.

I retreat back into the stairwell and cross my arms against the draft. My thoughts won’t be contained, and they run out again to the memories of the image of Mutt Malvern on Corr. Of the sound of Corr’s cry. Of the curl of afternoon-red hair on Puck Connolly’s cheek.

This feels like dangerous ground.

I hear the stairs above me creak as footsteps descend. I look just in time to see George Holly trotting brightly down the stairs, like a boy. When he catches sight of me, he checks himself sharply and ducks against the wall as if it were his destination all along.

“Hello and hello,” Holly says to me. He looks like he hasn’t slept, like the storm cast him up on the shore and left him to choose land or sea for himself. It’s an odd thought, as I can’t think of what George Holly does with himself when he’s not watching the horses. Something loud and enthusiastic, no doubt, anything that can be accomplished in a white sweater. It’s strange how I’ve come to feel friendship with someone so different from myself.

I nod.

Holly says, “Right, and always the nod. So you’re waiting on Malvern, then.”

I’m not surprised that he knows. News of my quitting took only a moment to spread across the island like a cough, and I’m sure that whispers of Corr’s violent morning took even less. I nod again.

“And of course he’s meeting you in this stairwell.”

I glance out into the main room again. I realize that I’m at once impatient for Malvern to come and say his piece, and hoping that he’ll be late so I can delay hearing what he has to say. I ball my fists up in my armpits, but this cold inside me is nerves, not temperature.

“What you want is a jacket,” Holly says, observing my posture.

“I have a jacket. Blue one.”

Holly ruminates on this for a moment. “I remember it now. Thin as a dead child?”

“That’s the one.” In Puck Connolly’s custody. That might be the last I see of that jacket.

“Did you ever wonder…” Holly says, after a pause. “No, perhaps you don’t. Perhaps you know. If anyone knows, you do. I’ve been wondering as I’ve been here, why it is that Thisby has the capaill uisce and no one else does?”

“Because we love them.”

“Sean Kendrick, you’re an old man. Do you smoke? Me neither. We might as well with the air in here. Have you ever seen so many men doing nothing so busily? Is that your final answer, by the way?”

I shrug and reply, “This island’s had horses for as long as it’s had men on it. On the other side of Thisby, there’s a cliff cave with a red stallion drawn on the wall. Ancient. How long do you have to be in a place before it’s your home? This is their home on land.”

I’d found the drawing once while looking to catch a capall. At low tide, the cave led so far into the island that it felt I’d come out the other side if I pressed much farther. Then, all at once, the tide had roared in so fast and sudden that I’d been trapped. I’d spent hours braced on a tiny, dark ledge, each push of the surf soaking me again. Below me, I’d heard the low shrills and clucks of a water horse somewhere in the cave. To keep myself from falling, I’d eventually rolled onto my back on the ledge, and there, high above me where the water couldn’t reach: the drawing. A stallion brighter than Corr, painted in a red that had only faded a little, the pigment out of the reach of the sun. There was a dead man at his feet, too, in the drawing, a dash of black for his hair, a line of red for his chest.

The Scorpio sea has thrown capaill uisce onto our shore since long before my father or my father’s father was born.

“Were they always revered? Never eaten?”

My expression is withering. “Would you eat a shark?”

“In California we do.”

“Well, that’s why California doesn’t have capaill uisce” I pause for him to finish laughing and add, “You have lipstick on your collar.”

“It’s from the horses,” Holly says, but he tries to catch a glimpse. He finds the edge of it and rubs his fingers over the mark. “She’s blind. She was aiming for my ear.”

It explains his rumpled look, in any case. I lean again to look into the lobby. There are more men than before, piling in as the afternoon gets elderly and the shadows get cold outside. Benjamin Malvern isn’t yet among them.

Holly asks, “Do you know what he’ll say? You’re so calm.”

I say, “I’m sick over it.”

“You don’t look it.”

Corr can hold a thousand things in his heart and reveal only one of them on his face, like he did earlier today. He is so very like me.

I let myself, for one brief moment, consider what Malvern may want to meet about. The thought stings inside me, a cold needle.

“Now you do,” says Holly.

Frowning, I look again, and this time I see Benjamin Malvern stepping into the lobby, closing the door behind him. He has his hands in the pockets of his greatcoat, and he strides into the lobby as if he owns it. Perhaps he does. He looks like a prizefighter, the slope of his shoulders in the coat, the forward jut of his neck. I hadn’t seen any of Benjamin Malvern in Mutt before, but I finally see the resemblance.

Holly follows my gaze. “I’d better go. He won’t be happy to see me.”

I can’t imagine Benjamin Malvern being displeased to see one of his buyers. Or at least, I cannot imagine him revealing that he was displeased to see one of them.

“We quarreled,” Holly says. “It’s a smaller island than I imagined. But don’t worry, my dollar bills mean that our friendship will endure.”

We part ways, Holly creeping toward the sound of the piano and me stepping into the lobby. I know the exact moment I am recognized, as everyone looks away so discreetly that it’s obvious they were just looking the second before.

It takes me a moment to spot Malvern in the crowd, but then I see him speaking to Colin Calvert, one of the race officials. Calvert’s kinder than Eaton, the anachronistic bully who Puck had to knock heads with, but he wouldn’t have been at the festival. His wife’s the brand of Christian that forbids a gathering that involves young women dancing in the streets but not races where men die. Calvert sees me and nods, and I return it, though my mind is already on the conversation ahead. Malvern approaches me slowly, like I’m not the destination.

“Well, Sean Kendrick,” Malvern says.

I want Corr.

I can’t say anything.

Malvern thumbs one of his ears and looks at a painting of two tidy thoroughbred racers over the great fireplace. “You’re a poor conversationalist and I’m a poor loser, so let’s put it at this. If you win, I’ll sell him to you. If you don’t win, I never want to hear about this again.”

And the sun’s come out over the ocean.

I realize now that I didn’t think that it would.

Four times I’ve won. I can do it again. We can do it again. I see the beach before me, the horses around me, the surf under Corr’s hooves, and at the end of it, there’s freedom.

“How much?” I ask.

“Three hundred.” His face is sly. My salary is one hundred and fifty in a year, and he’s the one paying it, so he knows it to the penny. Winning years, I get eight percent of the purse. I’ve saved what I can.

“Mr. Malvern,” I say, “do you want me back or do we still play a game?”

“Want and need are two different things,” Malvern says. “Two hundred ninety.”

“Mr. Holly has offered me a job.”

Malvern looks pained, though I’m not certain if it’s at the idea of losing me or at the mention of Holly’s name. “Two hundred fifty.”

I cross my arms. Two hundred fifty is unattainable. “Who else will touch him after today?”

“They’ve all killed someone.”

“Not all of them have killed someone with your son on their back.”

His expression is cut glass. “Tell me a price.”

“Two hundred.” This is dear, but doable. Only just. Only if I can count this year’s unwon purse as part of my savings.

“This is where I walk away, Mr. Kendrick.” But he doesn’t. I stand and I wait. I realize that the hotel lobby has gone quiet. I realize that this is the reason why we aren’t meeting in the tea shop or the stables or his office. Here, it’s the best advertising Malvern can get. His name will be on everyone’s lips.

Malvern exhales. “Two hundred. Enjoy your races, gentlemen.”

He puts his hands in his pockets and walks away. Calvert opens the door for him, letting in a shaft of brilliantly red afternoon light.

I have to win.