“This is amazing!” I say. I move slightly so the dusty antique fertility statue by the door will stop poking my shoulder with her stone fingers. She’s been for sale for a long time. “How did you do it? Look at the letters! They’re so perfect.”
“Mr. Davidge the printer did that,” Dory Maud replies, pleased, looking over my other shoulder.
“Because Dory Maud did Mr. Davidge,” Elizabeth says from the stairs. She’s still wearing her nightgown and her invented curls are two days old.
“Oh, go on back to bed,” Dory replies, without heat. I don’t want to think much on this. Dory is what Mum used to call a “strong-looking woman,” which meant that, from the back, she looked like a man, and, from the front, you preferred the back. Elizabeth is the pretty sister, with long straw-colored hair and a nose turned up by lineage and habit. No one notices what the third sister, Annie, looks like, because she’s blind.
I page through the catalog. I know that I’m being stalled but I discover that I’m rather happy to be stalled. “Are our teapots in here? Who will see this?”
“Oh, the three people who read the adverts at the very end of the Post,” Elizabeth says. She’s gone up two more stairs but is far from back in bed. “And who are willing to wait a few years for shipping.”
“The Post? On the mainland!” I exclaim. I’ve found our teapots — there is a very precise line drawing of one of the stout pots with my utilitarian thistles on the side of it, and now I can see that the illustrations are in the same hand that draws the adverts in the back of our own little Skarmouth newspaper that comes out each Wednesday. The printing says that the teapot pictured is a “representative design” and that “supplies are limited.” It also says that they are signed and numbered, which my teapots are not. It is strange to think of something of mine heading over the ocean without me. I point to the signed bit and ask, “What’s this?”
Dory Maud reads the description. “That makes them more valuable. It won’t take you but a moment to sign and number them. Come in and have tea. Elizabeth will stop grousing. Where is your brother?”
“I can’t stay,” I say regretfully. “I need to take — Dove — tothebeach. Do you think Finn can leave the cart behind the shop when he’s done unloading?” I run all the words together to avoid being asked about it, but the sisters aren’t paying any attention, so I needn’t have bothered. Dory Maud has opened the door and found Finn standing there holding Puffin, who has followed us all the way to Skarmouth after all.
“I hope you enjoy the taste of poverty in your bowl,” Elizabeth is saying. “The price of that advert was dear enough, but have you thought of what it will cost to ship those catalogs out to mainland wives?”
Dory Maud says, “They pay for the catalog. It says that right in the advertisement that I showed to you not an hour ago. If you didn’t have shingles for eyes, you might have seen it. Finn Connolly, come in here. Why do you have that cat? Is she for sale as well? Has it come to that?”
Finn says, “No, ma’am,” as he enters the shop, where he gets poked directly in the chest by the fertility goddess. I move a step backward so he can get away because the last thing I need is for Finn to suddenly decide to become fertile.
“I really have to go,” I say. I don’t want to seem rude.
“Where are you going again?” Dory Maud asks me.
“Perhaps I should ring Mr. Davidge, too,” Elizabeth says from the stairs. “Then I might not mind the bills, either. How is it done, sister? ‘Mr. Davidge, will you set my type?’”
Dory Maud turns to her and thunders pleasantly, “Shut up, you cow.”
Finn wears his wide-eyed expression. So does Puffin. Dory Maud seizes his arm with great enthusiasm and begins to propel him toward the back of the shop, where the teapot waits.
“Bye,” I whisper to him. I feel a little bad about abandoning him to their clutches, but at least he’ll get tea out of it.
I let the door close behind me.
Dove, patiently waiting by the door, looks up as I step out. Finn has unfastened the cart but she still wears her harness. She doesn’t look much like a racehorse.
I pull my hair back into a new ponytail; two or three dozen strands had already begun to escape.
I probably don’t look much like a jockey, either.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SEAN
There’s a girl on the beach.
The wind’s torn the mist to shreds here by the ocean, so unlike on the rest of the island, the horses and their riders appear in sharp relief down on the sand. I can see the buckle on every bridle, the tassel on every rein, the tremor in every hand. It is the second day of training, and it’s the first day that it isn’t a game. This first week of training is an elaborate, bloody dance where the dance partners determine how strong the other ones are. It’s when riders learn if charms will work on their mounts, how close to the sea is too close, how they can begin to convince their water horses to gallop in a straight line. How long they have between falling from their horses and being attacked. This tense courtship looks nothing like racing.
At first I see nothing out of the ordinary. There is the surviving Privett brother beating his gray capall with a switch and Hale selling charms that will not save you, and there is Tommy Falk flapping at the end of the lead as his black mare strains for the salt water.
And there is the girl. When I first see her and her dun mare from my vantage point on the cliff road, I am struck first not by the fact that she is a girl, but by the fact that she’s in the ocean. It’s the dreaded second day, the day when people start to die, and no one will get close to the surf. But there she is, trotting up to the knee in the water. Fearless.
I make my slow way down the cliff road to the sand. Any wicked thoughts Corr might have had this morning have been jolted out by his trot earlier. But the two mares are neither as tired nor as tame as Corr. Their hooves jangle every time they dance sideways; I’ve tied bells around their pasterns, reminding me every moment that I cannot let down my guard. The worse of the two mares wears a black netted cloth over her haunches. The cloth, passed down from my father, is made of thread and hundreds of narrow iron eyelets: part mourning cloth, part chain mail. I hope it weighs her to the ground. It’s the sort of thing I’d never use on Corr — it would only make him irritable and uncertain, and in any case, we know each other better than that.