Father Mooneyham considers this. “Leaving doesn’t mean not coming back. It wouldn’t hurt you to meditate on the story of the prodigal son.”
This is about as comforting as a cold brick when you’re lonely. I stuff Father Mooneyham’s handkerchief back under the curtain, and when he takes it, I scowl at the stained-glass window over the altar. There are thirteen red panes in the middle of it, and Mum or someone told me once that they were supposed to represent drops of Columba’s blood. He was martyred here. It was back before the natives knew that confession and priests and sin were good for them, so they stabbed Columba and threw him off one of the western cliffs. Then his body washed up with the capaill uisce one October and because it wasn’t disgusting, even after being in the ocean for so long, he was sainted. I think his jawbone is still kept there behind the altar.
This reminds me, suddenly, of how Gabe had decided when he was fifteen that he was going to be a priest. He’d been absolutely no fun for about two weeks. It was Gabe who’d told me the story of Columba; I remember sitting in the pew with him then. His hair had been slicked back with water because he’d felt it added to his ethereal appearance. I feel a sudden pang of longing for that foolishly serious Gabe and the trusting and always ill-contented Puck that I’d been then.
“Aren’t you going to give me a penance, Father?” I ask.
“Kate, you have yet to confess any sins to me.”
I cast my mind back over the past week. “I considered taking the Lord’s name on Monday. Well, not ‘God.’ I thought about saying ‘Jesus Christ!’ I also ate an entire orange without telling Finn, because I knew he’d be annoyed.”
Father Mooneyham says, “Go home, Kate.”
“I have been horrid. I just can’t think of them right now. I don’t want you to think otherwise.”
“Will it make you feel better to say two Hail Marys and a Columba Creed?”
“Yes, thank you.” He absolves me. I feel absolved. As I get up, I see that someone is waiting in the pews on the opposite side of the church, waiting to confess. It’s Annie, Dory Maud’s youngest sister. Her lipstick is a little smeared, but it seems cruel to tell a blind woman that, so I don’t say anything. I almost don’t notice Elizabeth, sitting at the end of the same pew with her hair pinned up to her head and her arms pinned across her chest. I can’t decide which of them is confessing. Annie looks dreamy, but she always does because she can’t see farther than three feet away. Elizabeth looks vaguely angry, but she always does because she can see farther than three feet away.
“Puck,” Elizabeth says.
Annie says hello to me in her soft voice.
“Where are you headed?” Elizabeth asks.
I feel a little lighter. “I have to return a jacket.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
PUCK
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.