“I don’t have to. How about this? I won’t race, and you’ll stay here.” But as I say it, I know that he’ll say no, and that I’d race anyway.
“Puck,” Gabe says, “I can’t.”
“Well,” I reply, pushing the gate open and leading Dove out past him, “there you go.”
But I don’t feel angry about it. There’s the old sting, but no surprise. It feels like I’ve known all along, ever since I was little, that he was going to leave, and I’d just been ignoring it. I think Gabe knew, too, when he started this conversation, that there was no way that he’d keep me and Dove off the beach. It was just something we both had to say. As I pass by, Gabe snags my arm. Dove amiably stops as he pulls me into a hug. He doesn’t say anything. It is like any number of hugs he’d given me growing up, when the six years of difference between us was a canyon, me a child on one side, him an adult.
“I’ll miss you,” I say into his sweater. For once it doesn’t smell of fish; it smells of the hay that he moved for me the night before and the smoke from the funeral pyre.
“I’m sorry I made such a hash of things,” he says. “I should’ve trusted you both more.”
I wish that he’d said it before, before he was sad and scared. But I’ll take it now.
Gabe lets me go. “I’ll go find where they’re handing out the race colors.” He looks at me. “You look just like Mum right now.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
SEAN
It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.
I hear a tap on my cracked door and it pushes open.
“How is Skarmouth’s prize hero on the morning of the races?”
I open my eyes and turn my head to where George Holly stands in my doorway. He glances around at the furnishings of my small flat; there’s nothing but a bed and a sink and a tiny stove shoved under the slanted ceiling, everything turned lavender in the weak morning light.
I give a nod that’s both a greeting and a gesture for him to enter.
“This is grim,” he says. “You look grim as well.” After a pause, he pulls a crate of tins out from next to the sink and sits on it, his legs folded up. He rests his red flat cap across his knees and strokes it like an animal.
“I cannot settle,” I say. I close my eyes. “I can’t go into his stall like this or Corr will feel this on me and I might as well not step foot on the beach at all.”
“Is this about the races?” Holly asks. “Are you afraid of them?”
“I’ve never been afraid,” I reply without opening my eyes.
Holly says, “Is this because you race for Corr this time? What is it you really want, Sean?”
I press my hand to my face, searching somewhere inside myself for the quiet that must be there. For the certainty I wear every year before every race. Every morning before I get onto any horse.
“Is it the freedom? Don’t bother with the race. Come back to the States with me, and I’ll make you partner in my stables. Not head groom. Not head trainer. Come and go as you please.” When I still don’t speak, Holly says, “Now, there, you see? So you were lying to me when you told me it was the freedom you wanted. We’ve discovered it’s not about the freedom at all. I call that progress.”
I turn my face away. Downstairs, I hear the commotion of the yard on race day, and me not among it.
“So it’s about that red stallion, then, you say? You will lose the race and lose him in one swift stroke of Malvern justice? But you’ve won four years out of six, haven’t you, and aren’t those good odds? So I think it’s not about that, either.”
I open my eyes. Holly shifts his weight under my gaze; the crate creaks beneath him.
“Twice I’ve lost to Ian Privett on Penda. The third year he fell and lost Penda and this year he has him again. Blackwell has Margot —”
“— she’s a fast bitch —” notes Holly, my words in his mouth.
“— and there is that piebald. I don’t know her. I think we should all be afraid of her. I think I could lose it all.”
Holly scratches his neck and looks at the shadows beneath my narrow bed. “This ‘it all’ seems to be the heart of it to me.
When you say ‘it all,’ do you by any chance mean Kate Connolly? Ah, I see that you do.”
I say, “Myself I can be sure of.”
“Hmm,” he says.
“Don’t say ‘hmm’ to me, Mr. Holly. You can’t come in here with your red hat and those shoes and play the wise man.”
“Yes, says the man wearing no shoes at all,” says Holly. He stands and takes the step that brings him to my stove. “How do you live here, Sean? How do you make a cup of tea without burning your johnny? If you rolled over in your bed, you’d end up in the sink. Every morning is breakfast in bed because there’s no floor to speak of.”
“It’s tolerable.”
“Hmm,” says Holly again. “Tolerable covers a wide range of situations. If you win, this is what you come back to?”
“My father’s house is an hour’s walk from here, on the northwestern cliffs. If I was free to live anywhere, that’s where I’d live.” I can’t quite remember living in my father’s home, though I’ve ridden by it before. My memories of the space inside are fragmented: me in bed, me at a window, my mother in a chair. It’s quite run-down now. It’s still in my name, but it’s too far to serve me well working for Malvern.
“That’s where you would keep the broodmare I just bought until she had a lovely red colt by your stallion?”
I reach for my socks on the radiator and the boots beneath them. “I didn’t say I would start a yard.”
“You didn’t have to. I’ll come back next year and you’ll have a nest of horses outside your window and Puck Connolly in your bed and I’ll buy from you instead of Malvern. That’s your future for you.”
“The future sounds much kinder in your accent.” I sigh and reach for my jacket.
“Where are you going? I’m not nearly done with my prognostication.”
I shoulder on my jacket. “To the beach. You’ll never get that colt of yours if I don’t win Corr.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
PUCK
In the night, I’ve shrunk and everyone else on the island has grown. They’re all nine feet tall and men and I’m four feet and a child. Dove, too, is a toy or possibly a dog as I lead her through the throngs of people. The cliff road is already seething; the early races began hours ago and fifths are running the short skirmishes down on the sand. I hear groans and laughs from the spectators on the cliff. The wind tears at us all.