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I’m in a bad mood when I go down to breakfast. Finn can tell. I know this because a) Finn can always tell, even if he doesn’t say anything about it; and b) Sean Kendrick isn’t here. That would be enough to tell him about my mood even if he didn’t look at my face.
Being Finn, he doesn’t say anything about it. He just sits quietly and spoons up his oatmeal as I crash the pots and pans louder than I need to.
“We have eggs,” I say. Store-bought eggs, even, enough that we don’t have to ration them. “You don’t need to eat oatmeal.”
Finn continues to not say anything. I feel guilty, so I scowl harder. I could make eggs myself, but I don’t feel like it, and I’m too annoyed to eat the rest of the oatmeal, so I grump back upstairs to get dressed.
The door to the guest room is still open. It used to be Gabe’s room, but it doesn’t look like Gabe’s room without the familiar sheets and blankets. He took them with him; I went upstairs after he left a month ago to find the bed bare. The sheets and blankets on it now were purchased more recently.
They’re going to be musty enough to need washing soon in this damp weather, if nothing else changes. I stomp past them and into my room.
I go back downstairs when I’m in my trousers and jacket and open the refrigerator. There really are too many eggs. Enough that we should try to use them as soon as possible. Grocery shopping while rich is apparently as dangerous as grocery shopping while hungry. I should cook some, or at least eat the oatmeal that Finn left for me on the stove. But I’m going to be late if I don’t leave now.
I bring Dove her breakfast first. She nuzzles at me as I give her her grain, and it makes me feel worse about being short with Finn. It feels good to be greeted like this.
“Ready to go?” I whisper in her ear, and she whickers as if she understands. I saddle her and swing a leg over and feel her powerful body moving underneath me as we go out to the road.
It is the first of December, and it has been a month since anyone died.
***
Malvern Yards is a circus that gets fractionally less overwhelming each day. I know which peg holds my gloves now and which direction to go to get the fork. I know which horses’ stalls to muck out first and which to leave for later, when their inhabitants will be out exercising. I know which trainers give good advice and which to avoid if I don’t want my bottom pinched.
I finish the mucking out by mid-morning and head to one of the tracks, where a six-month-old piebald is going through her paces. I pretend not to notice Benjamin Malvern watching me from the fence as I learn the commands to train a horse I haven’t been riding since childhood. I ignore the dugout ring, where a month and a half ago capaill uisce might have been racing in circles. I feel the wind in my hair and breathe the scent of the horses and don’t let my mind leave the present instant.
Dove likes my new job less than I do. She gets less freedom in a stall here than she does in our yard back home. But I have to travel somehow, and I always make it up to her at lunch. That’s when I take her to the field with the hurdles.
Today, that’s when Benjamin Malvern approaches me: when Dove and I are trailing off the field, our sweat being wicked away by the December wind. He’s leaning against the side of the gate. I stop in front of him.
Benjamin Malvern is not a good man, but he is a fair one, and I am not afraid of him as I might have been once. I am still afraid of too many things in life, so it makes a nice change.
“She has good form,” Malvern says. It’s not an idle compliment coming from the premier horse breeder on Thisby. “Have you thought about breeding her?”
There are two things he could be asking me here: whether I’ve thought about breeding her, and whether I’m thinking about racing her again. The answer to the second question is no, but Benjamin Malvern doesn’t need to know that.
“I’ve thought about it,” I say.
He nods, slowly. “Have you talked to Sean Kendrick recently?”
The two questions seem unrelated, but they are not, in a way that makes me bristle. “I don’t see how it’s any business of yours,” I say before I remember that he is my boss now and I need to be polite.
Even if I had thought about it, it probably wouldn’t have helped. The truth is that I have not talked to Sean Kendrick recently. Not in ten and a half days.
“I imagine you’re concerned about resources,” Malvern says. “We have a good training operation, here.”
It’s a generous offer. If it is an offer. “Joint ownership?” I ask, and he nods.
He must have great faith in the saleability of Dove’s offspring, then. His trainers put hundreds of hours into each horse, molding them into racers that attract buyers from all over the world. Far more work and expertise than I could put in on my own, in my tiny yard, still working here.
It’s a good offer, unless: “You mean joint ownership of her foal. Not of Dove.”
“Of course,” Malvern says, smoothly. I wonder what the answer would be if I hadn’t asked.
He’s right about one thing: I wouldn’t be able to do it myself. Finn and I have a bit of money left over from the races, but it will be gone soon, and my salary is barely enough to keep us. Especially if Finn never gets up the nerve to stop sniffing around the bakery door and go in and ask for an apprenticeship. I don’t want to go back to barely enough, and I don’t want to rely on the faint hope that Gabe will send money from the mainland.
I could never manage a racing-caliber foal on my own. I might once have thought—but it’s been hard to think like that, the past ten days.
I wonder who he has in mind for her. It won't be a water horse with a coat as red as blood.
“I’ll think about it,” I say, and go on toward the stable without waiting for his leave.
***
There’s no one waiting for me in the road when I’m done for the day. I don’t expect there to be.
I ride Dove over to Fathom & Sons. Ostensibly it’s to see if any money has come in on my teapots, but really I want to check on Dory Maud and Elizabeth.
It’s been three weeks since Annie left for America with the well-dressed and gentle-tongued George Holly. I’m happy for her—there was more life in her face on the day she left than I’d seen in at least a year previously—but her absence has left things feeling off-kilter.
It’s funny how much a person can matter without seeming to. I would never have figured on Annie’s departure having much of an effect on Dory Maud, but when I come in the door she hugs me.
Being hugged by Dory Maud is like being hugged by a wardrobe. You are briefly contained and then released, but you don’t get any comfort out of it. It might be a lack of practice. I don’t think I had ever gotten a hug from Dory Maud prior to three weeks ago.
Dory Maud lets go of me quickly, probably because I smell of horse. “Not a lot’s come in over the past four days,” she says, like she’s scolding me for coming too often, though I can see otherwise in the way she looks me over head to toe, just checking.
“That’s okay.” I accept the little envelope of coins she hands me anyway. There won’t be much more after this; I don’t have time to paint teapots and work all day at Malvern’s and also keep the house from becoming a hovel with no clean dishes. These coins are for the back stock. I spare a moment to wonder whether I might be able to change that, to give us a bit more of an income when we need it again, but it was always a better short-term plan than a long-term one. Not a lot of money or future in teapot painting on an island where the tourists only visit in October.
“And how have you been keeping?” she asks me, turning her sharp eyes away from the money box and back towards me. It’s not fair of me to feel resentful of the sharp look, since I came by with the primary purpose of making sure she and Elizabeth were all right, but I do anyway.
“Fine,” I say.
I can hear the real questions underlying the one she asked. Have you fallen apart yet, with Gabe on the mainland? Has Finn managed to get his head out of the toolbox long enough to find a future for himself? And what about that Sean Kendrick—last time he was here, you two looked…
Fortunately, Dory Maud isn’t blunt enough to ask them directly. She turns to page through the catalog perched on the clutter, and then, just when I think I’m safe, she says, “Sean Kendrick was in here this morning.”
It’s probably not subtle, the way my breath catches. “Oh?”
“He was looking for some kind of fancy gear we don’t carry.” She looks up from the catalog and pierces me with a glance.
Now I’m the one with questions I can’t ask. Fathom & Sons doesn’t carry horse gear; what was Sean in here for? I can tell she wants me to say something about it, but I can’t do that. “Hm,” I say instead, and we’re both quiet, silenced by the things we can’t talk about.
***
The island feels deserted and wild as I ride Dove across it that night. If it is night; it’s barely six o’clock. But it feels like it, anyway: the sun sets before the end of my workday this late in the year, and by the time dinner rolls around, it might as well be midnight.
I haven’t been spending a lot of time out after dark. Not in the last week or so.
It was on the cliffs at night that I last saw him, Sean Kendrick. It was a starry night—if night is the right word—and stars are a rare enough sight on an island as cloudy as Thisby that just being under them made me feel rich. I felt rich a lot in those few weeks: Sean waiting for me outside Malvern Yards, his quiet form next to me as we walked to the cliffs. His hand sneaking into mine as the night got later.
He wasn’t waiting for me every night, but he was on that night, eleven days ago. He always waited just outside of Malvern’s property. Just beyond the border, as if he knew where it was to the inch. Another boy might have been slouching, in his position, but Sean is one of those people with only one possible height. He wasn’t slouching; he was leaning.
He was looking up at the stars when I came out. And then he looked down and looked straight at me, and neither of us said a word as we turned and headed for the cliffs.
We didn’t touch as we walked. But I could feel him: the warmth of him, the angular solidity, just a few inches to my right. Dove followed behind me on her lead, and when we got to the cliffs, I tied the lead to a bush and we sat down on the cliff edge.
Next to each other, but not yet touching. Closeness between the two of us was always a slow and careful thing: something that had to be worked up to, as if we started each day, not as strangers, but as people at either end of a wide meadow, needing to pick our way across with caution.
The cliffs were a good place for that caution. This had become a thing we did, over the past few weeks since the races. We would meet up after I got out of work and walk down here, and then we would pick our way towards each other until I had to go home for dinner.
That night we talked of nothing for a while: the horses I was learning to train, the ones Sean had been in charge of until a few weeks earlier. He told me that I was probably misusing the bit on General Folly. He talked me through the finger positions I was looking for: his hands on mine, gently molding.
Then silence for a few minutes, nothing but the crashing of the waves, and then Sean said, “His leg is hurting him more.”
I didn’t have to ask who he meant, nor how he could tell. No one knows the capaill uisce like Sean, and Sean knows no capall uisce like he knows Corr. “Yeah?”
“He couldn’t walk to the end of the lane today.”
I hadn’t seen the lane in question. No place is truly far on Thisby, but the house Sean inherited from his father is about has far from my house as it’s possible to go. I hadn’t been there. But no lane is very long, and for Corr to not be able to walk one was a bad sign indeed.
I didn’t have any words to say, but I rested my hand lightly on the outside of his thigh. We both knew the choice that Corr had made, and we knew it was one that would cost him his comfort. He would never run again on land, never go at any speed, since he resisted all attempts to put him inside carts or on the bed of a truck. The only thing that would help him now was the sea, and he had chosen Sean.
I wondered what choice I would make, in that position.
We sat for a while in silence, my hand against Sean’s thigh, and eventually he tipped his head sideways so that the crowns of our heads rested together. Not much contact, but it set a thrumming through my body, as if we were a circuit that had completed.
I wanted to feel that more often. I wanted to feel more than that, and so I said, “The house is quiet, with Gabe on the mainland.”
I could hear the smile in his voice when he spoke. “Finn isn’t much of a talker.”
“It would be less quiet,” I said, “with three.”
The silence took on a tentative, probing quality. I hardly dared breathe into it.
Sean hadn’t been over since before the races. He had been at his father’s house, with Corr, and more evenings than not he had been with me, outside for the few hours between the end of work and a late dinner. Doing our slow dance towards wherever we were going, keeping things to our spot above the cliffs. I thought it was time for the next step. Dinner, at least.
I heard Sean take a breath. “You mean me to…” he said, wonder in his voice, and from the sound of it I thought he took me to mean more than I did. Or more than I necessarily did.
“We have a guest room,” I said quickly. “Now that Gabe’s gone.” He wouldn’t need it for dinner, but it was a long trip back to his father’s house, now that he had no horse to ride. “You would be…welcome. Whenever you choose to come.”
Sean’s head lifted away from mine, but not far. His face dipped close to mine, and I could feel the faint heat of his breath on my lips, see the darkness of his eyes with their spattering of reflected stars. Then he kissed me, and kissed me, and I closed my eyes and felt nothing but him.
***
I thought he would take me up on it. The next day he wasn’t waiting for me outside of Malvern’s, and I thought I might find him back at the house. When he wasn’t there either, I thought maybe the next day. Or the one after that.
Eleven days of riding up to the house and finding it empty.
Today it smells better than empty, because Finn has baked bread. I smell it as soon as I come in from currying Dove. “Oh,” I say, and Finn looks up from where he’s watching over the crusty loaves.
“It’s a cheese bread,” Finn says, and I’m impressed enough, and guilty enough about this morning’s snappishness, that I give him a smile. He looks intensely relieved.
The bread is thick and has enough cheese in it to make strings stretch between the slices when we try to separate them. We have it with leftover chicken, because we’re still riding the high of being able to afford real food again. I don’t say anything about how Finn had the bread ready early, as if he didn’t expect me to be delayed coming back from work; he doesn’t say anything in answer the questions I’m not asking about the bakery.
You have to pick your moments, when it’s just the two of you.
I go to bed early nowadays to be at Malvern’s at dawn, but not so early that it’s right after dinner. The two of us build a fire in the living room and roast chestnuts over it. It’s the first of December, and I haven’t even seen them for sale yet, but Finn has gotten a twist of them from somewhere, and we try to get them hot without burning our fingers.
“There’s a roasting pan somewhere,” Finn says, and I say, “Mm,” but neither of us gets up to look for it.
We sit by the fire after the chestnuts are gone, two people in a room meant for five, and I close my eyes lazily against the heat and feel the presence of the empty chair between Finn’s and mine. Gabe’s chair, until recently. No one’s chair, now.
My mother always told me that the trick of happiness is to think about what is, not what could be. That it’s easy to always be rushing to the next thing, trying to get things arranged perfectly. Putting off happiness until that perfect moment arrives.
This moment with Finn in front of the fire, this could be happiness. Maybe it should be.
Eleven days.
I could ride out to his father’s house talk to him. I’ve thought of it, plenty of times. It wouldn’t be a very long trip on Dove. I don’t know exactly where it is, but I could ask. But the thought of approaching Sean if he doesn’t want to be approached makes my stomach sink like a stone to the bottom of the sea. I don’t want to be that stone for him. I don’t want to be a weight.
Finn makes a small noise, and I look up to see him peeling the bark of a stubborn chestnut. He still has a few left; he’s always been slower than I am at things like that, better at drawing out the things he enjoys.
The firelight flickers warm over his face, and I try to make myself see the moment as happiness. I cannot.
***
The next two days pass much the same. I work at Malvern’s and get mud all over my jeans and take Dove over the jumps and look up at the apartment over the garage where Sean used to live, before he was free.
Lady Grace is going to foal soon, and the vet comes around every day to make sure her sweating and panting isn’t anything more than the discomfort of having another being inside of her. I watch her tremble under his hands and think that that is what comes of letting another person in.
Benjamin Malvern looks at me once, a question in his face, and I tell him I’m still thinking.
On the evening of the second day, we have a letter from Gabe.
I don’t even realize I’ve been waiting for one until I come in the door to see Finn bent over the sheet of paper. It’s full of news of his job on the mainland. It doesn’t sound much different from the job he had here, working on fishing boats and the marinas attached to them, but the world he describes is bright and bustling and nothing like Thisby at all.
The music halls. What made him think Finn and I would care about the music halls? When has either of us ever expressed a desire to go to a music hall?
“He’s miserable,” Finn says.
“What?” I ask.
He gestures at the letter. “Can’t you tell?” His voice is quiet like it always is. “He’s homesick.”
I look at the letter again and try to imagine it as the words of one who’s secretly miserable. Trying too hard to be cheerful. I can see it, the slight possibility, but it doesn’t to anything to make me feel better.
“Then he shouldn’t have left,” I say.
I go upstairs and tear the sheets and blankets off the guest room bed and throw them in a heap on the pile of laundry. They were getting musty anyway.
***
“We’re out of eggs,” Finn says the next morning. We’re eating biscuits for breakfast, and there’s eggy bread in the breadbox.
“Buy some more,” I tell him. His forehead creases, and I know he’s thinking about how much money there is left in the tin. I get paid on Friday, but it’s not much. “And go to the bakery today while you’re at it.”
He doesn’t answer until I’m almost out the door. “They’re not taking anyone on right now,” he says. “They said maybe in the spring.”
I pause in the door and wonder how long he’s been sitting on that news. “I’m sorry,” I say, and then there’s nothing else to say, so I go to work.
Benjamin Malvern is standing by the edge of the field when I take Dove through her paces at lunchtime. I go over to him when I’m done, and neither of us says anything as I tighten the girths on Dove’s saddle. Then, “Who were you thinking for the stud?” I ask.
“Sea Fury,” he says.
Sea Fury is sleek and strong. I’ve absorbed enough of horse breeding in my month here to guess that his speed and Dove’s will mix well together. Her foal will tend towards brown, not red, and no one will have to fight to keep it from the ocean.
“I could have a contract ready by tomorrow,” Malvern says.
I’m sure he has a contract ready already. But tomorrow is Saturday. We’re not doing this on a day when I’m his employee, then.
I think about what Sean and I talked about in those days on the cliffs, little bits of future floating in the wind. I think about Dove big with foal like Lady Grace. Thirteen and a half days of silence lie flat within me.
“Fine,” I say. I hold the inside of my cheeks between my teeth as I take Dove back to the stables.
The stretch of road outside Malvern’s is empty again when I leave for the day.
The sight should not make me angry, because it is not unexpected, but it does anyway. “Come on,” I say to Dove. “Let’s gallop.”
She doesn’t need the exercise—I worked her over thoroughly at midday—but maybe my anger infects her, because she is a demon made of the wind when we get to the cliffs. We run, and I let things fall away: the chair by the fire that Gabe will never sit in again. The evenings I spent here spinning futures that will never happen. The stupid hope that there would be a yard with Dove in it, and Corr, and Sean and I would stand at the edge of it and go inside together when the day is done.
Those things fall away, and in their place is a future where Finn and I make things work together. He gets his eggs and his internship in the spring, and I help Malvern train up Dove’s foal. Maybe another one next year. We keep on going. Dove’s hooves smashing into the ground at the top of the cliffs.
We ride until we’re both breathing hard, and when we stop, I feel curiously empty. Not in a bad way, like Gabe’s empty room, but clean. Free, for the moment.
We’ve reached a cluster of houses that spills down to a dock. A boat is unloading now, late in from the day’s catch. One of the people on the dock screams and points to the water.
I turn, and I see Corr in the ocean, with Sean Kendrick on his back.
I stare. You cannot ride a capall uisce in the ocean. It’s dangerous even to ride them near the shore; the sea calls to them, and more often than not when they plunge into its depths they’ll take their riders with them. But this is Corr: the capall uisce who was sent into the ocean and turned around and came back.
His blood-red head rises above the waves. Sean’s dark form is barely visible behind it, but I know it’s him.
A capall uisce in the ocean, and fourteen days.
I wheel Dove towards the path that will take us to the beach, and I’m barely close enough when I start shouting. “Sean Kendrick! What in the blazes are you doing?”
He can’t possibly hear me over the waves and the wind. But I see his head turn, and and then Corr is turning too, cutting straight through the waves toward the shore. There’s a clamber as they reach the shore and Corr heaves himself back up onto the beach. I spur Dove towards the water and leap down almost before she stops.
Sean is already off Corr’s back. He’s wearing some kind of rubber suit like you see on divers. Water drips from his hair and from the angles of his face, but his eyes shine like fire.
“It worked,” he says. “I knew it would.”
“You’re crazy,” I say, and his eyes hold mine, and I think maybe if he’s crazy, then I am, too.
“It worked,” he says, taking a step closer.
A gust of wind blows off the sea and chills me through my coat. My dry coat. It’s December. “You have to get inside,” I say. “My house—you can ride Dove.”
“I can’t,” he says, and of course: Corr.
Corr doesn’t look cold at all. He’s gleaming in the low light from the dock, arching his neck and showing off a little for Dove, but his hind leg is crooked up and not bearing weight. Sean’s lips are blue. “A cart…” I start to say, but I remember even before Sean shakes his head. Corr won’t ride in a cart.
“It makes him stronger,” Sean says. “The sea water. I’ve been soaking his leg in it.” I can picture it: Sean lugging great vats of water back from whatever bit of ocean is nearest his father’s house.
“For fourteen days,” I say.
He looks ashamed. “He can make it to yours now,” he says.
“But you can’t.” Not wet like that.
I look at Corr: at the shining red bulk of him, so large he makes Dove look like a child. The coat that doesn’t ripple even as water drips off it. The teeth that I have seen close around a man’s neck.
I don’t feel afraid of him. I don’t know if that’s folly or wisdom.
“I’ll take him,” I say.
Sean goes still. There’s a long moment where he looks at me, and I look at Corr. Then he hands me the reins.
“Copper,” he says, dropping some bits into my other hand, “in threes and sevens.” I nod. I’ve done this before. Though only with Sean there, too.
Dove looks none too pleased to have Sean’s wet rubber-covered legs around her, but she doesn’t shy much. “Home,” I say to her, as if Sean doesn’t know the way, and then they’re walking down the beach, Sean turning around to look back at me.
Fourteen days, but he’s on Dove, and I have Corr’s reins in my hands.
“Ready?” I say to Corr, and we start moving.
***
The half-mile walk to my house is longer than any journey I’ve ever been on. Corr doesn’t test my lead, but he tests himself with every step. His coat doesn’t ripple at the water but it does at the pain every time he puts his weight down on his hind leg. I remember him swimming proudly through the water, racing furiously across the sand just a month ago, and I bite down on my lips and take the next small step forward.
There’s a bad moment when we have to cross a road. A car comes barreling down it just as we reach it, and Corr jerks back and tosses his head. His eyes are wild enough that I’m reaching for the copper, but the next moment his head is down again, breath coming in pants. He must have reared back onto the leg.
I put my hand on his shoulder, and we keep going.
I can practically feel his pain in my own legs by the time my house is visible. I’m fervently glad Sean isn’t the one making this trip, soaked to the bone. Corr is shivering enough for the both of us now, fine tremors across his skin.
The scrape of the latch on our gate is sweet. I step inside, and Sean is standing there, his back to us.
He’s dry, at least. His rubber trousers are gone, and he’s wearing clothes that must be Finn’s, because they don’t fit him. He turns and takes us in, human and horse, and then he takes Corr’s reins from me and presses his head in near the side of Corr’s and whispers in his ear.
There is no time needed to create a physical connection between the two of them. I try not to be jealous. Sean is here.
He leads Corr across the yard, to the makeshift stable. Dove has already been rubbed down and fed, and she looks curious but not alarmed as Corr is led into the other stall. The stall isn’t the right kind for a capall uisce—nothing in this yard is strong enough to stand up to a water horse that wants to get away—but Sean runs his hands over Corr’s neck and whispers things to him, and I don’t think he’ll be trying anything tonight.
“I don’t have any food for him,” I say.
“He can make do on Dove’s food tonight,” Sean says. After tonight, the question hangs in the air, but I don’t ask it out loud. Corr is here, in a stall next to Dove. He looks incongruous in our shabby stable. He looks at Dove.
Sean takes a step back from him. “I had to figure out how to get him here,” he says. He takes a step closer to me, close enough that it would be uncomfortable with anyone else. “The ocean…it wasn’t easy, getting him that far.”
“You could have told me.” Those fourteen days of silence still gape within me, like a cut that is only starting to heal.
His face changes very slightly, enough for me to see that he is embarrassed. “I didn’t want to tell you if it might not happen. I didn’t want…if I was here, I wanted to know that I could stay.”
I consider telling him that I didn’t mean to invite him to stay. But maybe I did, really. “You should have told me anyway.”
His eyes look down on me, dark. Comprehending. “All right.”
When I breathe in, I can smell how close he is. My eyes skitter away. “We’ll have to build new stalls.” I can hear my own heartbeat.
“A training course,” he says. “There’s space in the yard.”
I can see it rising in my mind: a fenced ring. A new stable, meant for more horses than our two. George Holly leaning against the stable wall next October, maybe with Annie beside him, as we talk breeding.
I have a meeting to cancel tomorrow morning, but for now, I wrap my fingers around Sean’s wrist. “Come inside,” I say.
***
I don’t know where Finn is, but he isn’t on the first floor. There’s no one around as I lead Sean through the kitchen and hall and up the stairs.
We pass the open doorway of the guest room with the bare bed. Sean pauses a little and looks a question at me. I should say something, but instead I just look back and keep my fingers around his wrist. A minute later, we’re moving down the hall again.
When I first saw Sean, I thought of him like a stone. Carved from the rock, craggy with it. He feels like one in the doorway of my room. But I remember the fire in his eyes, and I feel the heat of him when I step close, and he bends when I put my arms around him.
We’re going to have a stable full of horses. They’ll have Corr’s sea-loving blood in them and be trained by our hands. Our children will ride them.
I pull him to my bed.