“Johnny Fortune?”
“Best jockey in the States.” His blue-gray eyes glint like war medals. “He’s like a bird on a fence. You can’t topple him. Father isn’t happy about it—why play when you can work?—but it’s Mama’s race.”
Mr. Payne is grooming Merritt to take over his mills, but Merritt has always been more interested in pleasure than paper. “Well, good luck with that. I must be on my—”
“I hear you’re wrangling my little sister these days.”
I brace myself.
“Where is she?” He glances around him with mock concern. “There are no silken divans here on which to rest her mollycoddled posterior.”
“Paying her respects.”
“I see. To whom?”
“Friends.” Dearly departed ones. I cringe as the net closes over me.
“Wonderful. If she were visiting enemies, I fear that would take all month.”
I cough. It is no secret that Caroline is the sort of girl many like but few love. Merritt’s grin stretches, while I scrape around for a lie.
He wiggles his fingers. “Jo, I don’t wish to vex you. Women’s pettifogs are the least of my concerns right now.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighs. “Father wants me to settle down, gain some respectability, work, of all things. I’m supposed to be at the mills. And my bride, Jane Bentley of Boston, is a bore who insists on staying through the horse race, which means I must ferry her around everywhere. It isn’t fair. I am only twenty-one, and still have many”—his eyes widen a fraction—“wrong turns left to make.” Even as a lad, Merritt was always a rake, catching the neighborhood girls by their pigtails and kissing their cheeks. “If only she had your spunk. You haven’t forgotten Chattahoochee?”
My cheeks warm. When I was eleven and Merritt fifteen, he’d gotten it into his head that he would catch dinner. His father had taken him fishing at the Chattahoochee River the week before, but the only thing Merritt had caught was a cold. After he failed to return by late day, Mrs. Payne sent me to look for him.
I found him throwing rocks into a pool at the base of a waterfall. He was drenched. “Forgot to bring hooks.”
A trout leaped off the top of the fall. In fact, there were so many trout, the water was a writhing, silvery mass.
“There are other ways to catch a fish.”
“I’ve tried,” he lamented. “They’re too slippery.”
Sweet Potato bugles out a neigh, startling me from my thoughts.
Merritt pushes back the round top of his gambler-style hat, exposing squirrel-brown hair shot with gold. “I was doing it all wrong. Trying to catch a fish with my hands was like trying to wrestle a greased hog. You showed me how to catch it only long enough to sling it onto the riverbank. We caught five.” He chuckles.
“That’s Old Gin’s trick, sir. The fish just need redirection.”
“No ‘sir.’ It’s just ‘Merritt’ between friends.” Sea-blue eyes travel around my face.
He got me fired. I have never known the Payne heir to be wicked in the way men with money can be, but a maid cannot be too cautious around her master.
“Well, good day, sirs.” Sweet Potato carries us off. When I glance back around, Merritt, still watching, gives me a bow.
Twelve
Dear Miss Sweetie,
My husband chews with his mouth open, despite my asking him to close it for over sixteen years. He tells me that he will close it only if I will stop slurping my soup. But slurping is the best way I know to avoid burnt lips. Please advise before we kill each other.
Most sincerely,
Still Slurping
Dear Still Slurping,
Stir your soup for two minutes before attempting to consume it and not only will you avoid burnt lips, but you will be spared regular updates on the state of your husband’s mastication. Since one does not eat soup year-round, you’d make out like a bandit by accepting your husband’s proposal.
Yours truly,
Miss Sweetie
* * *
—
I wait a quarter of an hour at the water trough, and Caroline still doesn’t appear. Perhaps she didn’t hear the bell chime from the chapel at Our Lord’s Cemetery. Or perhaps she did hear, but simply does not care to be on time. Or perhaps she was kidnapped by a band of kangaroos, and a ransom note will be punched through the door shortly.
I steer Sweet Potato back toward the cemetery.
Sounds and smells always feel amplified when one walks through a graveyard. It would seem that Death, having visited each of these souls already, has no more business here. But the Chinese believe death simply moves a soul to an ancestral state of existence, and that the dead cause mischief if not properly appeased. So there could be plenty of trouble to be found among these tombstones, and I should watch my step.
The stony angels of the Innocenti vault implore me to relieve them with their pupil-less eyes. Frederick and Thief are still tucked in the wooded area behind the vault, minding their own business. Poor spoony Salt, with no idea that her beloved is dipping his pen in the neighboring inkwell.
Assured that Caroline has not been kidnapped by kangaroos, I’m about to steer Sweet Potato back to the water trough but stop when I hear a voice coming from the vault. “She’s warming to the idea of Thief. But you won’t be paying much attention to the race anyway, with Miss Saltworth to distract you.”
Thief throws back his head, his black mane splashing like a wave. The horse has good bone structure and a well-muscled back end, but does he have the kind of ruthlessness required to cross the finish line?
“She means nothing to me.” I expect Mr. Q to have a velvety baritone, but his voice has the soft tenor of a snake charmer, the kind of voice that could coax the gray out of the clouds. “Her father will be moving them to New York soon, and of course she will understand that I cannot go. We shall tell your parents then.”
The words are chased by amorous murmurings, and I hastily exit before my ears start to burn.
* * *
—
FRIDAY NIGHT JUST after five o’clock, Mrs. Payne gives me three dollars, which I secure in the waist pocket of my russet dress. Old Gin must stay the weekend at the Payne Estate. Noemi bundles a wedge of cheese and crackers in a handkerchief for me to carry to Old Gin, who neglected to come by for lunch. “This cheese will fatten him up for sure.”
I bundle myself into my cloak, then hike to the stables.