Salt pats Caroline’s hand. “Oh, don’t be cross with me, Caroline.”
Well, that is a horse saddled backward. If Salt knew how Miss P was minding her Q, she wouldn’t be simpering like that. The chores seem to fly by while I fantasize about my alter ego as a columnist for the Focus. When it’s time for our ride, Caroline sets off at a fast clip for Our Lord’s Cemetery, and I hardly notice until she is out of sight. Entertaining one’s lover’s sweetheart must build up a powerful thirst.
Sweet Potato carries the distinguished yet enigmatic advice columnist off for a romp of her own.
Six Paces Meadow got its name from a duel gone wrong, when one of the duelists turned at six paces instead of ten and shot off his opponent’s top story. It is said that the ghost of the wronged still haunts this lot, which is why Old Gin liked to bring the “honored sons and daughters” of the stable here—we mostly had the field to ourselves. Old Gin reassured me that a ghost without its head could not see, hear, or smell, so the chances of bumping into it were slim.
“What about the ghost of the head?” I asked, but he didn’t have an answer for that.
We clear a grove of trees and an abandoned hansom cab, which hasn’t moved in the years since Old Gin used it to boost me onto the horses. “Don’t be afraid,” he assured me once I got topside. “I am right here beside you, though you might not always see me.” The memories forged in this field were sweet and tinged with summer gold.
Thickets of bright sassafras and old man’s beard have crept into the meadow, and even clusters of young trees. When I began my women’s cycles, the only thing Old Gin said about it was that all meadows, after an awkward stretch as a thicket, eventually ripen into beautiful forests. That left me more confused than ever. There were bits about being a mother even Old Gin couldn’t replace.
Sweet Potato whinnies. She’s been to this playground before, but not with me. Old Gin hadn’t started to break her yet when Mrs. Payne dismissed me.
“For my next article, perhaps I will write about what to do if you’re in love with someone else’s man. I’ll call it, ‘Why Buy the Pig If the Sausage Is Free?’” I laugh wickedly, and I swear Sweet Potato snorts. “Or maybe I’ll write about the blacklisting of milliner’s assistants. ‘Watch Your Hat.’” Sweet Potato paws at the ground, probably bored. “All right, enough about me. Show me your legs.” With a good tap of my heels, I cry, “Giddap!”
Sweet Potato answers with a neigh like a trumpet, surging forward so fast, I leave my breath behind. A thousand pounds of muscle and bone stretch and collect under me.
“Wahooo!” I bump along like a feather in a top hat, just trying to hang on.
Moments later, I find my rhythm, and the ride goes easier for both of us. We weave through dense strawberry bush, skirting wet slicks as smoothly as a hawk dancing through air currents. The meadow transforms into ribbons of green and yellow streaking past me, and the air plasters my smile to my face.
A shriek splits the air. From out of nowhere, another horse powers up beside us, a bay with a distinctive wedge-shaped head. I nearly tumble off my seat when I recognize the rider as none other than Caroline’s brother, Merritt. He snaps a riding crop. “Giddap! C’mon, Jo, to the hansom!”
Mischief dangles from his smile like a feather from a cat’s mouth, and the good looks that hail from his mother’s side tie my stomach into complicated knots. Of all the people to catch me in a lark, why Merritt Payne?
While I wrestle with my memories, the bay, who must be Merritt’s new Arabian, bursts away like a squall. Sweet Potato charges after him. My thighs burn as I struggle to hang on. Hooves thunder across the meadow, scaring the blackbirds off their bug hunts.
I lean as far forward as my legs will allow, standing slightly with my bum bouncing along the saddle as we try to catch up. I should be running in the other direction, but Merritt has already seen me. I will need to assure myself that he will not tell his mother. The Arabian’s ears flick, monitoring us with his keen hearing. As we close in, he surges another length ahead, the cheeky tassel of his tail taunting us.
The heat of battle lights my skin on fire. “You’re not going to let that frisky wedge-head sass us, are you?” I dig my heels in deeper, and Sweet Potato lunges, closing the distance once again. “Thatta girl!”
But then a mud slick flashes twenty yards ahead, and we veer to avoid it, losing ground. As we fall behind, the stallion slows, too, ears flicking. Horses are like people. Some work better under pressure. The more hat orders we got at the millinery, the faster I worked, unlike, for example, Lizzie, who crawled at the same snail’s pace regardless of whether it rained or shined.
We clear the slick and then charge ahead, the hansom in clear view only a furlong away. As we approach, the stallion—now two lengths away—ups his tempo again.
I crouch low over Sweet Potato’s neck. My hat blows away in the heat of battle, and my hair streams behind me like a black banner. “Come on, Sweetie, dig in!” I yell, bracing myself for the final few yards.
We push and grunt, heaving forward as if there were a knife coming down on our back. But Merritt lays on his crop, and the Arabian cruises across the line.
“Thatta boy!” Merritt cries, throwing up his hat.
My breath comes in gulps, and I lean over Sweet Potato’s neck as she slows her speed, her tongue tipped out one side of her mouth. Merritt sidles up to us, his oval face one gloating grin as the Arabian dances and skitters under him. In the four years since I saw him last, the Payne heir has puffed out his piecrust, as Noemi might say. His coat no longer sags upon a too-slim frame; the gray wool skims his muscled shoulders. The mustache that was only a smear at seventeen is now pointed and trim, accenting his upper lip like the hands of a handsome grandfather clock stuck at three forty-five.
He hooks one leg upon his saddle. “It wasn’t a fair fight,” he says in that animated tone he uses for everything, even something so mundane as “looks like rain.” “Girls just don’t have enough coal in the box. Still, pretty legs like those would fetch a pretty sum, if Old Gin ever wants to sell.”
“Yes, sir,” I reply, even though Old Gin would sooner sell his own pretty legs than Sweet Potato’s. Perhaps I can tell Merritt Caroline sent me on an errand . . . in the middle of a haunted meadow . . .
“This is Ameer.” The Arabian stands a hand taller than Sweet Potato, with a cresty neck and hind legs like birch trunks. Tossing his head, he puffs and struts the way males do when they know the females are watching. Sweet Potato, who is not in season, pulls the heads off a clump of daisies. “His name means ‘chief,’ and he’s faster than a hat in a hurricane. Those other horses will be eating his dust.”
“He’s on the roster?”
“Yes, ma’am. Even got Johnny Fortune to ride him.”