The Scorpio Races

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Even before I get down the twilight-darkened lane to the Malvern Yard, I can see evidence of it – the fields and fields of horses – and I can smell it – good horses making good manure from good hay. I reckon horse manure is a lot like a cat scratch. There’s nothing too disagreeable about either of those things so long as there’s not too much of it and it’s not too fresh. And there’s nothing disagreeable about the grass-hay-manure scent of the Malvern Yard. Because it’s been a long day and there’s no reason to expect that it’s not going to get longer, I allow myself the small pleasure of imagining that the sloping fields and glossy mares on either side of the lane are mine, and that I’m strolling pleasantly down to my own yard, filled with the buoyant contentedness that comes from the certainty of one’s holdings and the knowledge that dinner will have once been a cow.

On the gallop to my left, there’s a scrawny guy on a trotting thoroughbred gelding. He’s got his stirrups strapped up short like a jockey, which I guess he is, and when he trots, he looks like he’s hovering over his mount instead of riding it. A man leans on the rail watching, and if I were a betting sort like Dory Maud, I’d put money that he isn’t from Thisby. He’s wearing white shoes, for starters, and I don’t think there’s a place on Thisby that sells white shoes. Closer to the main building, another groom leads a dusky gray with a soaking coat back toward one of the pastures. The horse looks cleaner than I feel, and considerably better fed. Then, through the open stable doors, I glimpse a chestnut standing in cross ties in the aisle while a boy brushes it down. The evening light pours in around them and makes a purple copy of the horse and groom on the ground behind them. A whinny peals across the yard, and another horse replies from inside the barn.

It’s all very much like I expected a famous race yard to look like, and I feel a little funny about it. I’m not an ambitious person, I don’t think, and it’s not as if I ever spent any time daydreaming of having a farm of my own. And I generally have a pretty dim view of people who waste time sighing and moaning and rending their clothing about things that they don’t have and never will, because Dad’s religion was all about knowing the difference between need and want. But standing here looking into the heart of the Malvern Yard, I feel a small, fierce pang of sadness that I won’t ever have a farm.

I try to decide if it would be worth being Benjamin Malvern if it meant that I could live in a place like this.

“Who are you looking for?”

I scowl at my shadow before locating the voice. It’s the groom with the just-bathed gray thoroughbred – imagine a world where the horses get baths; how does a horse ever get dirty in a place like this? – stopped halfway across the yard. The gray shoves at his back, but he ignores him.

“Sean Kendrick.”

It feels strange to say it out loud. I hold up his jacket, like it’s an invitation. My heart taps lightly against my breastbone.

“Where’s Kendrick?” the groom calls to a man who’s just come from one of the smaller buildings. They confer. I fidget. I didn’t expect to be taken seriously.

“Stable,” the groom says. “Probably. Main stable.”

They don’t ask me what I want with him or tell me to go away, though they have that curious, helpful look about them like they’re waiting for me to do something. I just say thanks and let myself into the yard. I’m careful to close the gate as I found it, because I’m aware it’s the worst crime on a farm to do otherwise.

I pretend I can’t feel the grooms looking after me as I step into the stable. It’s hard to think of it as a stable, even with the obvious presence of horses in it, because it’s awesome in the way that St. Columba’s is. It has the same high ceiling, the carved stone, the carried sounds. The only thing that’s missing is the afterthought confessional with the inadequate curtain. The stable reminds me, for some reason, of the great rock that all of the riders spilled their blood on.

With effort, I draw my eyes down. I don’t want to stare because the boy is still currying the chestnut in the aisle, and I don’t want to be seen looking like Finn with his round-eyed, ogling face. Both boy and chestnut look clean and purposeful, and I feel grubby and mismatched in my pants and smock and hooded sweater. I point to where the cross tie meets the wall, which is the universal way to ask, Can I duck under this? and the groom nods. He wears the same sharp, curious expression as the others. I think that the interest is simply because I’m a stranger, until I’m past him and he says, “I think you’ve got a real head of hair on you to ride that mare of yours in the races.”

The way he says it, I think it’s a compliment, but I’m not sure.

“Thanks,” I say, in case it is. “Do you know where Sean Kendrick is?” Again, I hold up his jacket. It feels very important that everyone know that I have a real purpose for seeking him out. The boy jerks his chin down the aisle past him, past endless beautiful, shining stall doors with stone arches over the doors as if each stall is a shrine and the horses gods within them. I walk past them until I see a stall at the end with pale white bars instead of iron ones, and the unmistakable shape of the red stallion’s head behind them.

I step quietly up to the stall, and I think, at first, that Sean’s not here. It’s a concept that, for some reason, aggravates me to no end – and then I see him in the dim shadows near the floor of the stall, crouched around Corr’s legs, wrapping them below the knee. He’s very slow about it – he turns the wrap around Corr’s leg once, then spits on his fingers and reaches up to touch Corr’s body. Then he winds it once more before spitting again. All the while Corr’s neck is arched and he’s looking out the small window of his stall. He has a view of bare rock with just a bit of sod clinging to the edges. It’s a dreary view, I think, but he seems to enjoy looking at it well enough. I reckon it’s better than the walls.

For a moment I just watch Sean wrap Corr’s leg, watching how his shoulders move when they’re not hidden by his jacket, how he tilts his head when he’s involved in his work. He either hasn’t noticed my arrival or he’s pretending that he hasn’t, and either’s fine by me. There’s something rewarding about watching a job done well, or at least a job done with everything you’ve got. I try to put my finger on how it is that Sean Kendrick seems so different to other people, what it is about him that makes him seem so intense and still at the same time, and I think, finally, that it’s something about hesitation. Most people hesitate between steps or pause or are somehow uneven about the process. Whether that process is wrapping a leg or eating a sandwich or just living life. But with Sean, there’s never a move he’s not sure of, even if it means not moving at all.

Corr turns his head to look at me with just his left eye, and the movement makes Sean look up. He doesn’t say anything, and I hold his jacket up high enough that he can see it.

“I couldn’t get all the blood out.”

Sean ducks back down, leaving me standing there with the jacket. I debate whether I’m supposed to leave it in front of the stall or wait for him to say something else, but before I can decide, Sean has finished the wrap and stood up to face me. His fingers press on the side of Corr’s neck.

“That’s kind of you,” he says.

“I know,” I reply. Dove’s blanket didn’t really need washing but it got washed anyway, since I had Sean’s jacket to do as well. I worked at it until my fingers became wrinkled and my benevolence became irritation. “What are you doing?”

“Wrapping his legs with seaweed.”

I’ve never heard of wrapping a horse’s leg with seaweed, but Sean seems to be approaching it with great confidence, so clearly it must have some good purpose.

I gesture with the jacket. “Do you want me to leave this somewhere?” I only ask it because it’s polite. I don’t want him to say yes. I don’t know what exactly it is I want him to say, only for it to be something that gives me an excuse to stay here watching him for a few more minutes. Admitting this to myself is a sharp blow to my pride, as, with the exception of my six-year-old self’s desire to marry Dr. Halsal, I’d always thought I was above being fascinated by anyone but myself.

On the other side of the stall door, Sean looks up and down the aisle, as if he’s scouting for a place for me to hang the jacket, but then he frowns at me as if that wasn’t what he was looking for at all. “I’m nearly done. Can you wait?”

I try not to stare at where his hand rests on the red stallion’s neck. It’s a warning, the way his fingers lean into his skin, telling Corr to keep his distance, but it’s a comfort as well, the way that I would touch Dove to remind her just that I’m there. The difference, though, is that Corr killed a man yesterday morning.

I say, “I suppose I have one minute or two to put together.”

Sean does the sweep of his eyes that he does, the one that goes from my head to my toes and back again and makes me feel that he’s scanning the depths of my soul and teasing out my motivations and sins. It’s worse than confession with Father Mooneyham. At the end of it, he says, “If you help, this will go faster.”

There is a little narrowing to his eyes at the end of it that makes me understand that this is a test. Whether or not I’m brave enough to go into the stall with Corr after yesterday morning, after I’ve had time to think about what happened. The thought of it makes my pulse trip. The question is not if I trust Corr. The question is if I trust Sean.

“What would helping look like?” I answer, and Sean’s face clears like a fair day over Skarmouth. He spits on his fingers again and pushes Corr toward the back wall of the stall to give me room to open the door. I stand inside the stall.

He says, “Don’t trust him.”

I narrow my eyes. “What about you?”

Sean’s expression doesn’t change. “I won’t be the one to harm you. Do you know how to wrap a leg?”

“I was born wrapping legs,” I say stiffly, because I’m insulted.

“Must’ve been a challenging delivery,” Sean notes, and points to a bucket against the wall. It’s black as pitch inside. “That goes under the wrap. It has to be even.”

Keeping a watchful eye on Corr, I pick up the bucket.

“Make sure the seaweed lies flat.”

“Okay.”

“Leave an inch below the knee.”

“Okay.”

“It’s got to be loose enough to put a finger in the top.”

“Sean Kendrick.” I say it emphatically enough that the stallion’s ears prick toward me. I preferred when he didn’t notice me. His attention reminds me of the black capall uisce that found Finn and me in the lean-to.

Sean doesn’t appear to be at all apologetic. “I think you’d better let me do it after all.”

“You’re the one who had me in here in the first place,” I say. “Now I think it’s you who doesn’t trust me.”

“It’s not just you,” he replies.

I glower at him. “Well, I tell you what. I’ll hold him and you wrap. That way, when it’s done wrong, there’s only yourself to slap. And take your jacket. I’m tired of holding it.”

Sean’s look is appraising, as if he’s trying to decide if I really mean it. Or maybe he’s just trying to decide if I’m capable.

“All right,” he says. He holds a hand in front of Corr’s face like a warning. We trade – with his other hand, he takes his jacket and I take the lead. He shrugs the jacket on, suddenly and magically becoming the Sean Kendrick I saw in the butcher shop as he does. He says, “The teeth are what to watch.”

My tone comes out unintentionally bitter. “I saw.”

“That wasn’t Corr,” Sean says. “You have to know them. You only use what you need. You can’t just hang every bell in Thisby on every horse in the sea. They react differently. They aren’t machines.”

“So you’re saying David Prince would still be alive if you’d been on Corr?” But it’s a question that we both already know the answer to, so I ask, “Why?”

Sean ducks by Corr’s leg, sliding his hand down it so that the stallion knows he’s there. “Don’t you know when your mare is anxious?”

Of course I do. I’ve grown up on her back and by her side. I know when she’s unhappy sure as she knows when I am.

I ask, “Did you un-quit?”

I glance up as the lights switch on in the barn, filling the stall with a yellow glow that doesn’t quite reach the floor. Sean’s much faster with the wrap now. He works steadily without stopping to spit, so that must’ve been something to keep Corr standing still while he had no one to hold him. Is there no one in this fancy barn who would hold Corr while Sean worked? All this time, Corr’s been standing sweet as a sheep, though his eyes are canny as a goat’s. Sean doesn’t look up when he replies. “Malvern told me I could buy Corr from him if I won.”

“Is that un-quitting?”

“Yes.”

“What about if you don’t win?”

Sean looks up at me. “What if you don’t?”

I don’t want to answer, so instead I fire back, “What will you do if you win?”

He’s done with the wrap, but he stays crouched by Corr’s leg. “With my savings and my part of the purse, I’ll buy Corr and I’ll move back to my father’s house out on the western rock and let only the wind change my direction.”

Perhaps because I’ve only just discovered the formidable beauty of the Malvern stables, I’m incredulous. “Wouldn’t you miss all this?”

Now he looks up at me, and from this angle, it looks like someone has smeared charcoal beneath the skin under his eyes. “What’s there to miss? This was never mine to miss.” This makes him heave a deep sigh, which seems like the closest thing to a confession I’ve heard from him, and then he pushes to his feet. “What about you, Kate Connolly? Puck Connolly?”

The way he says it, I feel certain he misremembered intentionally, because he liked the weight of the words when he said my name twice, and that makes me feel warm and nervous and agreeable.

“What about me?”

He trades me again, the bucket for the lead, and I step back. “What will you do if you win the Scorpio Races?”

I look into the bucket.

“Oh, I’ll buy fourteen dresses and build a road and name it after myself and try one of everything at Palsson’s.”

Though I don’t quite look up, I can still feel his gaze on me. It’s a heavy thing, this look of his. He says, “What’s the real answer?”

But when I try to think of a real answer, it reminds me of Father Mooneyham saying that Gabe had sat in the confessional and cried, and it makes me think of how, no matter what happens in the races, the best option still has Gabe sailing away in a boat. So I snap, “Do you think I just turn my secrets out for everyone?”

He is unfazed. “I didn’t know they were secrets,” he says. “Or I wouldn’t have asked.”

It makes me feel ungenerous, since he’d answered so honestly. “I’m sorry,” I say. “My mother always said that I was born out of a bottle of vinegar instead of born from a womb and that she and my father bathed me in sugar for three days to wash it off. I try to behave, but I always go back to the vinegar.” When Dad was in one of his rare, fanciful moods, he told guests that the pixies left me on the doorstep because I bit their fingers too often. My favorite was always when Mum said that before I was born, it rained for seven days and seven nights solid, and when she went out into the yard to ask the sky what it was weeping for, I dropped out of the clouds at her feet and the sun came out. I always liked the idea of being such a bother that I affected even the weather.

Sean says, “Don’t apologize. I was being too free.”

And now I feel even worse, because that wasn’t what I meant at all.

Beside Sean, Corr abruptly shifts his weight and the motion of his head seems more lupine than equine. Something in his expression makes Sean spit on his fingers and press Corr toward the wall again.

I’m afraid that he’s going to ask me to leave the stall now, so I ask hurriedly, “What is the spitting? I saw you do it before.” I don’t have to fabricate interest. It appeals to a part of me that has been repressed by years of studious effort on the part of the adults in my life.

Sean looks at his fingers as if he means to spit on them to demonstrate, and then he simply opens and closes them. He studies Corr as he thinks, as if Corr will somehow provide a way for him to frame his answer. “It’s – spit. Salt. Me. It’s a part of me, it’s a way for me to be somewhere. When the rest of me can’t be.”

I remember how Corr stilled for Sean as he would for no one else on the beach. How the scent of Sean on his shirt calmed him when nothing else would.

I reply, “Something tells me my spit wouldn’t mean as much to Corr as yours would.”

There’s a long pause before Sean speaks. He says, “Maybe not yet.”

Yet! I don’t think I’ve heard such a fine word before.

I say, “And the whispering. What do you tell him?”

Sean stands at Corr’s shoulder, and for the first time he smiles at me. It’s the smallest of things, and it’s not amusement or humor, so I’m not sure what it means. He’s younger when he has it on, easier to look at, which is maybe why he avoids it. He leans his cheek against Corr’s withers and says, “What he needs to hear.”

One of Corr’s ears flicks back to him; the other stays trained on me. I don’t want to look away from Sean leaning on Corr. There’s something about it – this massive red giant that killed a man and slight, dark Sean Kendrick beside him as if they are friends – that fascinates and terrifies me.

Sean watches me watching him and then says, “Are you afraid of him?”

I don’t want to say yes, because I’m not afraid of him right now when he looks more like a horse and less like a fiend, but I don’t want to say no, either, because yesterday morning, on the beach, I was horrified and terrified. I would just say no anyway, but I feel certain that Sean Kendrick with his lacerating gaze would see right through me to the vagaries behind that no. So instead I reply, “You said you didn’t trust him.”

“I don’t trust the ocean, either; it would kill me as soon as not. It doesn’t mean I’m afraid of it.”

I frown at him. I’m thinking again of that image of Sean crouched tightly on top of the red stallion, galloping bareback on the top of the cliffs. Of Sean, unable to watch Mutt Malvern on Corr’s back. For once, I don’t look away from his narrow gaze. “But you aren’t just unafraid. You love them, don’t you? You love Corr.”

Sean Kendrick flinches as if I’ve startled him. He is quiet so long that I notice the sounds of the yard outside the stable, the calls and whinnies and water running and doors shutting. Then he says, “And you love the island. Tell me how it’s any different.”

As soon as he says it, I know that I can’t counter his argument. Of course, it’s true the island would just as soon see me dead as alive and it’s also true that I love it despite that. Possibly because of it.

“I don’t think I’d like to argue with you,” I say. “I think it would be a very dissatisfying pastime.”

He looks out the window, as if in reply, and he studies that hopeless landscape so intently that I look, too, certain he must have seen something. It’s only because I’ve lived with brothers that I realize, after a moment, that he’s not looking outside but rather inside, wrestling with something inside himself. And there’s nothing for it but to wait.

Finally, he asks, “Do you want to ride him?”

I don’t think I’ve heard him right. I don’t want to say excuse me? because if I did hear him right, it sounds like I don’t want to, and if I’ve heard him wrong, it sounds like I wasn’t paying attention.

He adds, “I’ll ride with you.”

My mind is a jumble of thoughts. That I watched this horse rip a man’s throat out only a day ago. That he’s the fastest horse on the island. That I’ll dishonor my parents’ death. That I’m afraid that I’ll love it. That I’m afraid I’ll be afraid. That I want Sean Kendrick to think well of me. That I need to be able to live with myself at night when I’m lying in bed and thinking about what I’ve done that day.

“On the cliffs,” I say. The tide is high so it would have to be. I imagine the other capall uisce he rode, throwing herself over the edge.

He watches me for a long time. “You can say no.”

But he knows I won’t.