The Scorpio Races

“Mr. Malvern,” I say, “do you want me back or do we still play a game?”

“Want and need are two different things,” Malvern says. “Two hundred ninety.”

“Mr. Holly has offered me a job.”

Malvern looks pained, though I’m not certain if it’s at the idea of losing me or at the mention of Holly’s name. “Two hundred fifty.”

I cross my arms. Two hundred fifty is unattainable. “Who else will touch him after today?”

“They’ve all killed someone.”

“Not all of them have killed someone with your son on their back.”

His expression is cut glass. “Tell me a price.”

“Two hundred.” This is dear, but doable. Only just. Only if I can count this year’s unwon purse as part of my savings.

“This is where I walk away, Mr. Kendrick.” But he doesn’t. I stand and I wait. I realize that the hotel lobby has gone quiet. I realize that this is the reason why we aren’t meeting in the tea shop or the stables or his office. Here, it’s the best advertising Malvern can get. His name will be on everyone’s lips.

Malvern exhales. “Two hundred. Enjoy your races, gentlemen.”

He puts his hands in his pockets and walks away. Calvert opens the door for him, letting in a shaft of brilliantly red afternoon light.

I have to win.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

PUCK

“Kate, you do realize that you aren’t at fault.”

Father Mooneyham sounds a little tired, but he always seems to sound that way to me when I go to confession. I smooth my hands over my smock. I felt badly coming to church in my trousers, but I wasn’t about to ride Dove in a dress, so I put a smock on over my pants. I feel it’s a fair compromise.

“But I feel guilty. I was the last one to hold his hand. And when I let go, he was dead.”

“But surely he would have died anyway.”

“Maybe not, though. What if I’d stayed and held his hand? I won’t ever know now. I’ll always wonder.”

I stare at the brilliant stained-glass window over the altar. The peculiarity of the confession booth allows me to see the rest of the building from my vantage point. Because St. Columba’s apparently predates confession or priests or sin, the booth was added much later. The confessional is open to the rest of the church, and the curtain is only between the confessor and the priest. And the curtain is ridiculous not only because Father Mooneyham can just watch the penitent walk through the pews toward him, but also Father knows everyone’s voices on the island, so even blind, he’d know whose sin was whose. The only real benefit of the curtain is to allow you to pick your nose without a holy audience, something I’d seen Joseph Beringer take advantage of before.

Now Father sounds a little cross. “This sounds more like egotism to me, Kate. You are ascribing much power to what was, after all, only your hand.”

“You’re the one who says that God works through us. Maybe he wanted me to stay there and keep holding it.”

There’s silence for a moment on the other side of the curtain. Finally, he says, “Not everyone’s hands can always be the site of miracles. We would be afraid to touch anything. Did you feel called to stay by his side? No? Then put down your guilt.”

He makes it sound like something I can wrap in wax paper and leave by the door for Puffin. I slouch back in the chair and look at the ceiling of the church.

“I’m also very angry with my brother,” I add. “Anger’s a sin, right?” I remember, however, that God sometimes came over all righteously angry, and that was all right. I feel slightly righteous about my anger over Gabe’s decision to leave the island, so perhaps it’s not a sin after all.

“Why are you angry at him?”

I wipe a tear off my cheek. It’s a very cunning tear, because I didn’t even feel it coming. “Because he’s leaving us behind, and not even for a good reason. Nothing I can change.”

Father Mooneyham says, “Gabriel.” Because of course he knows which brother I mean now.

He doesn’t say anything for a few minutes, just lets me cry. Orange and blue light from the stained-glass windows finds its way through my hands cupped over my face. It’s very quiet in the church. Finally, I wipe the sleeve of my shirt across my cheek.

The curtain shivers slightly and I see Father Mooneyham’s hand offering a handkerchief. I use it to dry my face and his hand withdraws.

“I can’t tell you anything that he’s said in here, Kate. And I don’t know if it will make you feel any better to know that he has sat in that same chair where you sit now, and he has cried as well.”

I try, without success, to imagine Gabe crying. Even at our parents’ burial, he had looked dry-eyed into the hole in the ground, shivering in the wind, letting Finn and me lean against him and weep. Despite that, the image of him in this chair, crying, creeps into my head, and I can feel myself softening toward him. I’m resentful that this hypothetical Gabriel can work such magic on me. I say, “But he doesn’t even have to go.”

“Mm. I will tell you one thing he said, Kate. He said that you don’t need to ride in the races.”

“Of course I do! We need the money.”

“And the races are your answer to that problem. It’s how you feel you can solve it. Gabe has a problem, too, and leaving is how he feels he can solve it.”

It’s a horribly wise way of looking at it, and it annoys me. “Isn’t there something holy about taking care of widows and orphans? Isn’t he supposed to be taking care of us?” But even as I say it, I remember him saying I can’t bear it. He had been taking care of us. From that dry-eyed funeral where he let us lean on him in our grief to working late on the docks to trying to spare us from Malvern. I suddenly feel very selfish to begrudge him his escape. I sigh. “Why does it have to be leaving, though? Can’t he come up with a different answer? Can’t I change his mind?”

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.