“Hastoway.”
I can’t quite figure how I make it off the bicycle, but the next thing I know, Gratton is lifting it over the side of the truck bed for me and saying, “I’m headed down there myself.”
I know good fortune when I see it, so I climb in the passenger seat, moving a tin, a newspaper, and a border collie out of my way before I settle.
“Also,” Thomas Gratton says, pulling himself into the truck with a groan, as if it takes a bit of doing, “have some biscuits. So I don’t eat them all myself.”
As we drive off down the road, I eat one and I give one to his dog. I cast a sly look to Thomas Gratton to see if he’s noticed — and if he’s noticed, if he minds — but he’s humming and gripping the steering wheel as if it might get away. I think about him and Peg talking about me and wonder if I’ve made a mistake trapping myself here in the cab with him.
For a moment we ride in comparative silence — the truck rattles as if the engine is climbing out of the compartment, so quiet is not exactly the word for it. I’m pleased to see that the cab is cluttered with cough drop wrappers and empty milk bottles and bits of mud-smeared newspapers made brittle by age. Neatness makes me feel like I have to be on my best behavior. Clutter is my natural habitat.
“How’s that brother of yours?” Gratton asks me.
“Which one?”
“The heroic one with the cart.”
I sigh so deeply that the collie licks my face to cure me. “Oh, Finn.”
“He’s a dedicated one. Do you think he’s up for an apprenticeship?”
An apprenticeship with the butcher would be a very wonderful thing indeed. It pains me to say, “He can’t stand the sight of blood.”
Thomas Gratton laughs. “He’s picked the wrong island.”
I think, not fondly, about the dead sheep I investigated earlier. And also about Finn haunting Palsson’s bakery. If he could apprentice anywhere, I’m certain it would be there. Where he could put salt in his hot cocoa. They’d have to apprentice someone else to pick up the kitchen after him, though.
“Oh, what have we here?” Thomas Gratton says. It takes me a moment to spot what he does, which is a lone dark figure picking its way parallel to the road. Gratton stops the truck and rolls down his window.
“Sean Kendrick!” Gratton calls, and I start at that. And it is Sean Kendrick, his shoulders hunched against the cold, dark collar turned up to the wind. “What are you doing without a horse beneath you?”
Sean doesn’t answer right away. His expression doesn’t change, but something about his face does, like he’s shifting to a different gear. “Just clearing my thoughts.”
Gratton says, “Where are you clearing them to?”
“I don’t know. Hastoway.”
“Well, you can clear your thoughts in the truck. We’re headed the same way.”
For a moment I am completely struck by the injustice of this, that I’ve been offered a ride and now I have to share it with Sean “Keep Your Pony Off This Beach” Kendrick of all people. And then I see that Kendrick, too, has seen me, and is uncertain about getting into the truck, and that pleases me. I would like to be terrifying. I glower at him.
But Gratton’s expression must counteract mine, because Sean Kendrick glances back the way he’s come and then starts around to the other side of the truck. My side. Gratton opens his door and tells the dog to get in the back, which she does, shooting us all a filthy look. I move into the seat she’d been occupying — now that I’m sitting right next to Gratton, he smells like the lemon throat lozenges whose wrappers are scattered on the floor. All the while, I’m madly trying to come up with something catchy to say when Sean opens the passengerside door, something that will at once indicate that I remember what he said to me on the beach and also carry that I am not impressed or intimidated, and possibly convey the message that I’m more clever than he thinks, as well.
Sean Kendrick opens the door.
He looks at me.
I look at him.
This close, he’s almost too severe to be handsome: sharp-edged cheekbones and razor-edge nose and dark eyebrows. His hands are bruised and torn from his time with the capaill uisce. Like the fishermen on the island, his eyes are permanently narrowed against the sun and the sea. He looks like a wild animal. Not a friendly one.
I don’t say anything.
He gets into the truck.
When he shuts the door, I am squeezed between Thomas Gratton’s great leg, which I imagine is as ruddy as the rest of him, and Sean Kendrick’s rigid one. We are shoulder to shoulder due to the size of the cab, and if Gratton is made of flour and potatoes, Sean is made of stone and driftwood and possibly those prickly anemones that sometimes wash up on shore.
I lean away from him. He looks out the window.
Gratton hums to himself.
From the back of the truck, the border collie whines. The vibration of the truck makes it a broken, intermittent whistle.
“I hear that Mutt — Matthew — is having a bit of an upset over the horse you’ve picked for him,” Gratton says pleasantly.
Sean Kendrick looks at him sharply. “And who’s saying such things?”
I’m surprised by his voice, for some reason, the way it sounds when he’s speaking instead of shouting over the wind. It makes him seem softer. I notice that he smells of hay and horses and that makes me like him a bit better.
“Oh, he is,” Gratton says. “Threw a tantrum right in the shop earlier. Says you want him to lose and you can’t stand competition.”
“Oh, that,” Sean replies dismissively. He looks back out the window. We’re passing by one of the pastures that Malvern owns, and there is a splendid spread of broodmares grazing among the green.
Gratton taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “And then of course Peg went off on him.”
Sean looks back again. He doesn’t say anything, but just waits. I see how it pulls the words out of Gratton and gives Sean a subtle upper hand, and I vow to learn how to use this technique.
“Well, he was saying that if he was on that red stallion of yours, he’d be a four-time winner, too. So Peg told him he didn’t know a thing about horses if he thought all there was to the race was the horse under you. She had a short fuse this morning, because it was a day that ended with y, you see.”
I laugh, which reminds Gratton that I’m there, because he says, “And of course, you don’t need Mutt Malvern for competition. You’ve got your hands full with Puck right here.”