The Scorpio Races

“Well, I came for them, too.” Holly wipes the mist from his eyebrows. “But I could’ve sent my agent for them. How many times have you won?”

“Four.”

“Four! You’re the man to beat. A national treasure. Regional treasure, perhaps. Does Thisby have home rule? Why don’t you race on the mainland? Or maybe you do and I’ve missed it. We get your news slowly, you know.”

George Holly didn’t know it, but I had been to the mainland once with my father, for one of the races there. It was vests and flat caps and bowlers and canes, horses in snaffle bits and jockeys in silks and a track contained by a white rail, and wives who looked like dolls. The benevolent hills stretched gently on either side of the stands. The sun had shone, the bets had been cast, the favorite won by two lengths. We came home and I’d never gone back.

“I’m no jockey,” I say. Corr starts to come in toward us, and I push him back out to the wall with a flick of my stick.

The stick isn’t long enough to touch him, but it’s got a length of red leather fixed to the end, and it snaps to remind him of his place.

“Me neither,” Holly announces broadly, putting his hands in his pockets like a boy. He rotates on his heel as I turn, watching Corr circle around us. “Just a horse lover.”

Now that he’s said his name, I know exactly who he is. I’ve not met him before, but I know his agent, who comes over each year to import a yearling or three. Holly’s the American equivalent of Malvern, the owner of a massive breeding farm known for show jumpers and hunters, wealthy and eccentric enough to come all the way to Thisby for a chance to improve his stock. “Horse lover” is a stark understatement, albeit one that makes me like him better.

And Malvern has me babysitting him. I should be flattered. But still, I’m wondering how difficult it will be to hand him off in order to get down to the beaches.

“Do you think Benjamin Malvern would part with this beast?” Holly asks. He’s watching Corr’s tireless stride and imagining it, I think, on his home soil.

My breath’s uncertain. For the first time, I’m relieved by the answer to that question, though it’s caused me sleepless nights before. “Malvern won’t sell his water horses to anyone.”

Also, it’s illegal to transport the capaill uisce from the island, but that doesn’t seem like something that would stop someone like Holly. If he were a horse, I think I’d have to trot him around this round pen for a long time to take the edge off.

“Perhaps he hasn’t been offered the right price.”

My fingers tighten on the lunge line enough that Corr feels the tension and flicks an ear toward me, always sensitive to my mood. “He’s had good offers.”

At least one very good offer. Everything I had saved over the years, everything from my share of the winnings. I could buy ten of Malvern’s yearlings, ten of any of his other horses. Just not the one I want.

“I expect you would be the one to know,” Holly says. “Sometimes it’s not money they’re looking for.” He doesn’t sound upset; a man so used to both buying horses and being refused them that neither scenario surprises him. “I sure do like the look of him. Malvern horses! Sh-ite.”

He’s so clearly delighted by it all that it’s hard to fault him.

I ask, “How long are you here?”

“I’m on the ferry the day after the race, with whatever Benjamin Malvern has convinced me I can’t live without. Want to join me? I could use a boy like you. Not a jockey, but a whatever you call yourself.”

I allow him a thin smile that reveals the impossibility of this.

“I see how it is,” Holly replies. He gestures his chin toward Corr. “Can I hold him for a moment? Will he let me?”

He is so polite about it that I hand him the lunge line and my stick. Holly takes them delicately, his feet automatically moving apart to give him a better base of support. The stick rests lightly in his right hand, an extension of his arm. The man must have lunged hundreds of horses.

Still, Corr immediately tests him. He tosses his head up and moves in, and Holly has to flick the stick at once. Corr keeps pushing inward.

“Snap,” I say. I’m ready to take him back if I must. “It has to snap.”

Holly flicks the stick again, this time hard enough to audibly snap the leather, and Corr twists his head, more conciliatory than ill-tempered, before trotting back out to the wall. Holly’s smile is broad and pleased. “How long has it taken you to get him like this?”

“Six years.”

“Could you do this with the other two mares I saw?”

I had tried the lunge line, in fact, with the pure bay mare, and though it hadn’t been a disaster, it hadn’t been pretty, either. Surely I wouldn’t have wanted Holly or anyone else with me in the round pen that day. I’m not entirely certain that six years with either of the mares would end up the same way that six years with Corr has. I’m not sure, after all this time, if it’s because he understands me better than they do, or merely because I understand him better than them.

“Who taught you this? Surely not Malvern.” Holly glances at me.

In that brief moment of distraction, the bare second it takes for Holly to look toward me, Corr surges away from the wall toward us. Swift and soundless.

I don’t wait for Holly to react. I snatch the stick from his hand and jump to meet Corr, pressing the tip of the stick into his shoulder. Corr rises up, away from the pressure of it, but I follow him. As he rears, I lay the red leather against his cheek, daring him to test me as he tested Holly.

We’ve played this game before and we both know the outcome.

Corr drops to the ground.

Holly lifts his eyebrows. He hands me the lunge line and wipes his palms on his slacks. “First time behind the wheel. At least I didn’t wrap her around a tree.”

He’s not at all fazed.

“Welcome to Thisby,” I say.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

PUCK

After Peg Gratton leaves, Finn and I pack up to go into Skarmouth. I find this pretty disagreeable, being once again denied the proud, lonely entrance on Dove, but we need to bring all of the teapots into town and the Morris won’t start. So in the most discouraging turn of events so far, I have to hitch Dove up to our little cart. My future embarrassment makes me cross and I make a lot of noise while loading up the pottery.

I have a sudden thought. “How are you going to get the cart back home?” I ask Finn, who is working on carefully aligning the boxes in the cart so the corners match perfectly. His side of the packing looks like he is laying bricks, but it’s taking him a long time. I don’t care if the largest boxes go on the bottom or the top so long as they aren’t going to crash around. “I’m taking Dove down to the beach and the cart is not going down there.”

“I’ll bring it back myself,” Finn says pleasantly. He feathers two of his fingers on the edge of a box in order to move it the distance of a butterfly’s breath.

“Yourself?”

“Sure,” Finn says. “It’ll be empty then.”

I get a momentary image of my brother trudging out of Skarmouth with a pony cart behind him, an emaciated troll in a giant sweater, and I wish that I, too, could disappear to the mainland where no one knew my name. But it’s that or get to the beach after the tide has come up. The mist is still clinging to us, but it’s starting to brighten, reminding me of time passing.

“Maybe Dory will let us leave it behind the shop,” I say. “I’ll pick it back up with Dove when I’m done.”

Finn scratches Dove’s rump with one finger, which makes her stamp her back hoof like he’s a fly. He says, “Dove says she doesn’t want to pull a cart after you make her run away from sea monsters.”

“Dove says you’ll look like an idiot pulling a pony cart.”

He smiles vaguely at his stack of pottery boxes. “I don’t mind.”

“Obviously!” I snap.

We haven’t come to an agreement by the time we load up, but there’s no more time, so off we go, me leading Dove and Finn trailing behind. Puffin the cat follows us for a while, with Finn shooing at her, which only makes her longing to join us more intense.

Partway into town, I smell something like rotten meat on the wind, and Finn and I exchange glances. The island is no stranger to terrible smells — storms throw up great fish onto the beaches to rot, fishermen’s spoils go bad on warm days, a cross-eyed wind brings the smell of brine and wet things in the evening — but this is not a sea smell. Something’s died that shouldn’t have and has been left where it shouldn’t have been left. I don’t want to stop, but it could be a person, so I make Finn stand by Dove’s head as I climb up over the stone wall in the direction of the scent.

The wind is coming straight toward me — the wind manages to cut through the mist instead of pushing it out of the way — and I crumple over myself to stay warm as I step around sheep poo. All the while I am wishing that I could have sent Finn to investigate the smell, but he’s queasy and useless with blood. So I am the lucky one to discover the source, which is a pile of parts that used to be a sheep. There’s not much left but hooves, a bob of its short tail, a lump of its innards, which is what smells, and its furry skull, which is mangled and crushed around the eye socket. What’s left of the wool at the back of the neck is spray-painted blue, to mark it as one of Hammond’s flock. There isn’t much back of the neck left to be painted, though. My skin prickles with an automatic tickle of fear, though I doubt that the capall uisce responsible is anywhere near. Still — this is far inland for one of the horses to come.

I return to Finn and Dove. They’re playing a game that seems to involve him tapping Dove on the upper lip and Dove looking peevish. Finn looks up and I say, “Sheep.”

He says, “I knew it was a sheep.”

I reply, “Next time you can cast your seeing eye into the pasture before I walk through the mud.”

“You didn’t ask.”

And we start on again toward Skarmouth.

We’re headed to Dory Maud’s shop, which is called Fathom & Sons for no reason that I can imagine, as Dory has no sons and no husband for that matter. She lives with her two sisters, neither of whom are named Fathom or have sons, and she collects things year-round to sell to tourists during October and November. As a child, the chief thing I noticed about Dory was that she was always wearing a different pair of shoes, a strange and extravagant thing on the island. Now mostly what I notice about her is that she and her sisters have no last name, a strange and extravagant thing just about anywhere.

Fathom & Sons is down one of the little side streets in Skarmouth, a stone-lined track barely wide enough for Dove and her pony cart. Neither the mist nor the sun can reach inside this alley, and we shiver as Dove’s hoofsteps clatter and echo up the sides of the buildings.

Standing in the blue-morning shadows a few doors down is Jonathan Carroll, throwing pieces of biscuit at a collie. Both Carroll brothers have dark, curly hair, but one of them has a lump of uncooked dough for a brain and the other has a lump of uncooked dough for his lungs. Once, when I came into town with Mum, we ran across Brian, the one with dough for lungs, crouched by the quay, shaking and starving for air. Mum had told him to breathe all of the bad air out before he tried to get more in and then she’d left me watching him while she went to buy him a black coffee. I’d been very annoyed, because she’d promised me one of Palsson’s cinnamon twists, which sold out very quickly. I’m a bit ashamed to recall that I told Brian that if he died and kept me from my cinnamon twist, I’d spit on his grave. I don’t know if he remembers it at all, since he’d seemed very focused on breathing through a cup made of his hands. I hope he doesn’t, because my character’s improved a lot since then. Nowadays I would’ve only thought the spitting part instead of saying it to his face.