By evening, we are ready to strike out. The boys are so manly that they have to ride in Tommy’s car again, but I make a hasty bridle by looping Dove’s lead line back through her halter, creating reins so that I can ride her bareback after them.
The door to the house slams, and a moment later, I realize Peg Gratton has come out to stand by me. Her arms crossed, she watches silently as I curry off Dove’s shoulders.
“Thank you again,” I say finally, because I need to say something.
She doesn’t reply, just lifts her eyebrows, like a nod without the head movement. “There’s still a lot of people who don’t want you on that beach.”
I try not to feel angry at her. “I told you I wasn’t going to be talked out of it.”
Peg laughs then, a sound like a crow cawing. “I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about men who don’t want a girl in their race.”
My mouth says “oh” but my voice doesn’t.
“You just watch yourself. Don’t let anyone tighten your girth for you. Don’t let anyone else feed your mare.”
I nod, but I’m thinking that it’s easy to imagine someone being annoyed by me riding, but harder to imagine someone being willing to do anything nefarious about it.
I ask, “What about Sean Kendrick?”
I look at Peg Gratton, and she is smiling a small, secret smile at me, as masked as she was beneath the bird headdress. “You sure don’t like to do anything the easy way, do you?”
“I didn’t know,” I start truthfully, “that it was the hard way when I started on it.”
Peg plucks a piece of straw out of Dove’s mane. “It’s easy to convince men to love you, Puck. All you have to do is be a mountain they have to climb or a poem they don’t understand. Something that makes them feel strong or clever. It’s why they love the ocean.”
I’m not sure that is why Sean Kendrick loves the ocean.
Peg continues, “When you’re too much like them, the mystery’s gone. No point seeking the grail if it looks like your teacup.”
“I’m not trying to be sought.”
She purses her lips. “All I’m saying is that you’re asking them to treat you like a man. And I’m not sure either of you want that.”
There’s something discomfiting about what she says, though I’m not sure if it’s because I disagree or agree with it. I think of Ake Palsson backing his horse away from me and the combination of her words and the memory sit uneasily in my chest.
“I just want to be left alone,” I say.
“Like I said,” Peg replies. “You’re asking to be treated like a man.”
She makes a step out of her fingers laced together to help me up. Then she pats Dove’s rump so that Dove’ll move to follow Tommy’s car as it leaves. I turn around as we go. Peg’s still standing there watching us, but she doesn’t wave.
My spirits slowly lift as we put distance between us and the Grattons’ white house. After so much time cooped up, the air feels clean and well washed. The island itself looks like our kitchen — too much stuff, not enough tidying. There’s bits of wooden fence thrown far away from fence lines, shingles and roof tiles resting in hedgerows, branches from faraway trees abandoned in the middle of fields. Sheep wander freely across the road, which isn’t so unusual, but I spot some glossy mares grazing outside of their fence as well. The watery evening light is like a cautious smile through tears.
There’s no sign of the capaill uisce that came up out of the storm, and I wonder if they’ve all climbed back into the sea again. For the moment, the island seems so utterly peaceful, unmarked by trouble and horses and weather. I think we’d have entirely different tourists if this were the face Thisby wore all the time.
Only I know this isn’t the real Thisby. The real Thisby starts again at sun-up tomorrow. Just a little over a week to go until the races. I don’t think I’m ready. It’s hard to imagine that our story will end the way I told Finn. Good luck doesn’t seem to be something that holds the hands of the Connollys these days.
But when I get home, Finn’s face is shining and joyful. Behind him in the kitchen is Puffin the barn cat. Her tail is bitten off and ugly, and she’s very indignant and sorry for herself, but she’s also very alive.
This island is a cunning and secretive thing. I can’t say what it has planned for me.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
SEAN
That evening, as the last light is fading, I do as my father used to and strike off across the fields to the beach that faces west. As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there’s something below it, I won’t know it. But that’s part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn’t the ocean that killed my father, in the end.
The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I’m perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me. Everything about me is exactly the same as it was five hundred years ago, when Thisby priests would stand in the frigid, dark sea and give themselves over to the island.
I try to make the inside of me as still as the outside. I have no more care than one of the gulls circling above me, thinking only of how to survive this moment and then the next.
I whisper to the sea three times. Once I ask that Corr will be meek and good, so they’ll have no reason to use the bells and magic that he so despises.
But twice I whisper for him to be despicable, so that they’ll beg for me to come back.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
PUCK
The island’s mad.
Because I rode Dove back from Hastoway the evening before, I give her the morning off and tell her to eat some expensive hay. I give her a bit of the grain, too — not too much, because she’ll just get ill on it — and leave her behind to go watch the training and take notes. I don’t have any more November cakes and we weren’t home to bake anything, so I have to settle for a pocketful of stale biscuits.
It doesn’t take me long to realize that Thisby has completely changed now that the festival is done and the storm has passed. Aside from the stray shingles and branches, it looks as if the wind brought people and tents. The road from Skarmouth clear on to the cliffs is lined with tents and tables of every sort. Where I’d helped Dory Maud set up her booth is now a city of booths, all populated by locals trying to seduce tourists with their stuff. Some of them are the vendors who Brian Carroll and I saw while making our way through the festival. But some of them are new: the booth selling riders’ colors, the hasty and incredibly tacky paintings of the race favorites, the mats to sit on to watch the race from the cliffs without getting your backside wet.