Mending Horses Read online

  Mending

  Horses

  M. P. BARKER

  Holiday House / New York

  Copyright © 2014 by M. P. Barker

  All Rights Reserved

  HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. www.holidayhouse.com

  ISBN 978-0-8234-3155-7 (ebook)w

  ISBN 978-0-8234-3156-4 (ebook)r

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Barker, M. P. (Michele P.), 1960-

  Mending horses / by M. P. Barker. – First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: Free and on his own, Daniel Linnehan is nearly sixteen in 1839 when he joins Jonathan Stocking and Billy, a girl hiding from her abusive father, in peddling goods in New England.

  ISBN 978-0-8234-2948-6 (hardcover)

  [1. Peddlars – Fiction. 2. Child abuse – Fiction. 3. Irish Americans – Fiction. 4. Sex role – Fiction. 5. Prejudices – Fiction. 6. Orphans – Fiction. 7. New England – History – 1775-1865 – Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B250525Men 2014

  [Fic] – dc23

  2013019208

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Joseph A. Plourde, who shared his love of books, Gil Barons, who shared his love of horses, and Ellen Levine, who shared her wisdom

  Acknowledgments

  Mending Horses came into this world with a host of assistants. It was conceived in Julia Starzyk’s Oak and Stone writing group (which included, along with Julia, Anna C. Bowling, Melva Michaelian, Beth Clifford, Lise Hicks, Mary Jane Eustace, Maureen Kellman, Bill Lang, Melinda McQuade, Lauretta St. George-Sorel, Beryl Salinger-Schmitt, and Peggy Tudryn). It received prenatal care from the River Valley Writers (Carol Munro, Paula Bernal, Judy Ebeling, Ruth Ehrenberg, Judy Gibson, Carole Guthrie, Barbara Hand, Ruth Kenler, Ronnie Lieb, Mia Nolan, Mickey Shrair, Sydney Torrey, and Lucy Mueller Young). My Wednesday-night support group, Anna C. Bowling, Melva Michaelian, and Carol Munro, midwived the manuscript and kept me going with comments, critiques, and well-timed whip-cracking, while Carol assisted immensely with editing early drafts of the manuscript.

  Many, many thanks to the Highlights Whole Novel Workshop for Historical Fiction, taught by Ellen Levine and Liza Ketchum, two fabulous instructors and gracious ladies. Ellen helped me turn the second half of the book from an amorphous pile of random scenes into something coherent, and brainstormed with me to find an ending. Her help and enthusiastic support were invaluable. Thanks, also, to my fellow workshop participants for encouragement and sympathy.

  Thanks to Ted and Annie Deppe and Suzanne Strempek Shea, instructors at the Curlew Writing Conference in Howth, Ireland, which took the book through draft three (or was that four?). And thanks, also, to my fellow participants.

  More thanks to Suzanne for her Bay Path College writing workshop, which brought me to draft five (or was that six?). And many thanks to the ladies from that workshop who’ve continued to meet and have helped through final edits: Sarah Chadwick, Kathleen Garvey, Bernadette Duncan Harrison, Beth Kenney, Melva Michaelian, and Marianne Power.

  Thanks to my good friend Jessica Holland, who helped me chop a good thirty or so pages from draft seven (or was that eight?).

  Thanks to Storrowton Village Director Dennis Picard, historian extraordinaire, who reviewed the manuscript for historical accuracy. Any anachronisms that remain are in spite of him, not because of him.

  Thanks to Denise Farmosa, who allowed me to observe her working with a horse she was rehabilitating, and who read through the manuscript for equestrian errors. (Because I wanted the story to take place over the course of three months, the time Daniel takes to retrain the horses had to be somewhat compressed—not too implausibly, I hope!) Again, any mistakes that remain are mine alone.

  Thanks to my former agent, William Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates, Inc., who took a chance on Daniel in my first book; may he enjoy a long and happy retirement. And thanks to my new agent, Marie Lamba of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency, for her enthusiastic support. Thanks to my editor, Julie Amper, for loving this story as much as I do, and to Holiday House Editor-in-Chief Mary Cash, for allowing Daniel to embark on another adventure.

  A huge thank-you to Terry Ariano, former curator of the Museum of the Early American Circus in Somers, New York, for putting up with my repeated visits and showing me all sorts of nifty circus records and memorabilia. And thanks to Margaret Humberston, Head of the Library and Archives at the Springfield History Museums, for helping me track down local history details.

  And last, but not least, thank you to my husband, Joe, for putting up with me and providing me with chocolate.

  I finish this thanks with trepidation, hoping I haven’t left anybody out. If I have, please accept my abject apologies!

  Chapter One

  Wednesday, August 28, 1839, Chauncey, Connecticut

  “Mark my words, Walter,” Jacob Fairley said to his apprentice. “That horse is stole, and some evil done to get her, too.”

  The blacksmith jutted his chin at the handsome chestnut mare walking toward his shop. She moved so smoothly that a less observant smith might not have noticed the slight hitch in her gait. But Jacob Fairley had an eye for horses—an eye for people, too. A less observant man might have paid little attention to the red-haired boy leading the mare: a scrawny, half-grown fellow with a spotty complexion and enormous ears. But Jacob knew that the boy’s bottle-green jacket, black cravat, and boots were much too new and fine for him. Bare feet, tattered broadfalls, and a patched-at-the-elbows shirt would have suited him better. The horse suited him even less than the clothes. Certainly neither horse nor clothes belonged to him.

  “Stole?” Walter’s swallow bounced his Adam’s apple into a fat lump. “What—what do we do?”

  Jacob laid a finger alongside his nose. “We wait, boy. We watch and wait.”

  The strange boy led the mare into the blacksmith’s yard. He nodded to Jacob and Walter and lifted his cap. “Good day, sir. May I?” He gestured toward the trough.

  Jacob nodded back.

  The mare slurped the water, the boy pulling her head away when she drank too greedily. “Slow, lass, slow,” he murmured.

  “That’s a fine horse you got there, boy,” Jacob said. “Your father must’a paid a pretty penny for her.”

  The stranger gave Jacob a narrow look with his gray-green eyes, then shifted his glance away. He fidgeted with a buckle on the bridle. “She’s me—my master’s.”

  “He must regard you highly, putting you in charge of a horse like that.”

  “Oh, well. It’s only fer—for an errand. But her shoe’s come loose, see?” He lifted the mare’s right front hoof. “Can you mend it?”

  “If you got cash money to pay. I don’t give credit to strangers.”

  “Aye—yes. I can pay. I don’t want her lamed. My master’ll thrash me something fierce if I bring her back lame.”

  Jacob doubted the boy planned to return to his master. A closer look at the boy confirmed his judgment. While the horse was impeccably groomed, the boy’s clothes were rumpled, as if he’d slept out of doors. His hands were grimy, and his face was smudged with dirt and the sparse beard of a fair-haired boy who’d only just begun to shave.

  The boy tethered the mare to the hitching post and unfastened her tack. Jacob nudged Walter. He tilted his chin toward the bulging valises. “He don’t have that load packed for no errand,” he whispered. “Help him put them bags someplace where you can have a look inside.” Louder, he said, “Give the fella a hand, Walter.”

  Walter took the saddle from the stranger and hung it over one of the rails of the ox sling. The stranger shrugged out of his coat, folded it carefully, and laid it across the saddle. He did the same with the vest. He then
unbuckled one bag and pulled out a brush and a halter, leaving the flap laid back. Walter rummaged through the open bag when the stranger turned his back to trade bridle for halter and brush the saddle marks from the mare’s hide. The stranger talked softly to the horse as he worked, grooming her with sure, rhythmic strokes. It was a pity the boy was a thief. For all his mean looks and shifty eyes, he did have a way with a horse.

  “I’ll just get my tools so’s I can fix that shoe,” Jacob said. He jerked his chin toward Walter, signaling the apprentice to join him in the shop. “Well, boy, what did you find?”

  “Just like you said, Mr. Fairley. New goods. Clothes and things, all like they was just from the tailor or the store. Money, too. I heard it jingle in the bag. Stole, just like you said.”

  Jacob nodded grimly and selected a hammer.

  “And—and another thing,” Walter continued. “Did you hear him talking to that horse, sir?” His voice squeaked a little with excitement. “Strange words. Foreign-sounding.”

  Foreign. That settled it. “Walt, you run and fetch Constable Ainesworth. Tell him we got a thief here. And who knows but he might be a murderer as well.”

  “What town is this?” Daniel Linnehan asked the blacksmith.

  “Chauncey,” the man replied. He bent to take a closer look at Ivy’s hoof.

  “We’re here, lass,” Daniel murmured to the chestnut mare. After blundering around the hills of northwestern Connecticut for several days, at last he’d reached the town where the peddler Jonathan Stocking had claimed to have kin, a cousin who supplied the little man with the tinware that he carried in his wagon. If the fellow wasn’t in town now, he no doubt would be soon, at least if Daniel recalled their last conversation aright. He’d no idea, though, exactly what he’d say to the man, if the fellow even remembered him.

  As he’d done a hundred times since leaving Farmington, he felt his pocket in vain for the wooden horse Da had made for him so many years ago. He’d always touched it for luck or turned to it for comfort the way Ma had turned to her rosary. As he’d done a hundred times, he regretted giving it away as a parting gift to his young friend Ethan.

  It was foolish to feel so. He’d no need of toy horses and childish superstitions. He was a free man now, a man of property, no longer a bound boy indentured to work off his father’s debts to George Lyman. He had a pocketbook full of papers proclaiming his freedom and his right to all the goods in his possession. Including Ivy.

  Especially Ivy. He touched his forehead to the mare’s and rubbed her cheek as the blacksmith prized out the nails and removed her loose shoe.

  He’d never dared hope to own the mare whose ears flicked to catch his every word, whose heart beat with the same pulse as his own. The only thing he’d wanted more than Ivy had been his freedom, which by all rights should have taken him five more years to earn. But now, two months shy of his seventeenth birthday, he had both freedom and Ivy. He should have felt . . . should have felt . . .

  A crow let out a raucous cry and soared up from the field of Indian corn across the road from the smithy. The bird swooped and dived and rose again, laughing with its harsh voice, cutting through the air as if it owned it. Aye, he should have felt like that: noisy and glorious and exultant. It should have been a grand feeling in his breast, not a lost one.

  He’d never imagined freedom would feel this way, that he’d be hesitant to meet a blacksmith’s eye, that a simple business transaction would tie a knot in his throat. He’d thought he’d never be afraid again. But he was still the same boy inside, uncertain, wary of the next taunt or blow.

  It was a relief to know that he’d soon see a familiar face. Maybe that was what had drawn him to seek the peddler. Even though Daniel had seen him only twice, the little man had known things about Daniel that he hadn’t known himself. He’d known how it was with Ivy, and how Ethan would become his friend, even though Daniel hadn’t thought he needed one.

  The last time he’d seen the peddler, the fellow had a boy with him, a boy who spoke Da’s language and sang Ma’s songs. Back then, it had hurt to hear those words, those songs coming from that boy’s lips. But now he thought it might feel good.

  Walter slipped out of the blacksmith shop and cut around to the road. He glanced back. The foreign boy was bent over Mr. Fairley, watching him work. Walter shivered, seeing how easy it would be for the foreigner to take Mr. Fairley unawares, just like he must’ve taken the real owner of that horse.

  But Mr. Fairley wasn’t unawares. He’d been clever enough to see through the stranger’s lies and was more than a match for the stranger in wits and strength. Hadn’t Walter himself felt the weight of Mr. Fairley’s striking arm when he’d dawdled about a chore the way he was dawdling now?

  “Run and fetch Constable Ainesworth,” Mr. Fairley had told him, not stand and think. So run he did.

  Tilda Fowler took a wet shirt from the laundry basket and shook it out smartly. The sleeves made a sharp snapping noise as they grabbed at the air. She jabbed a clothes-peg in each end of the hem and stooped for another garment.

  “Mama, look! There’s Walter Sackett running up the road like the devil’s chasing him.”

  “Sally, tend your chores and don’t be dithering about the blacksmith’s boy,” Tilda scolded her daughter. Lately Sally had nothing in her head but boys, boys, boys. Just the same, Tilda tugged the clothesline down below her nose and peeked over the laundry toward the road.

  Walter Sackett looked like a plucked chicken when he ran, all flapping elbows and flailing legs and pimply skin. He caught his toe on a rut and sprawled face-first in the dirt. Tilda ducked under the shirts, headed out to the road, and hauled the boy to his feet.

  “What’s your hurry, boy? You set Mr. Fairley’s shop afire?”

  “No, ma’am.” He bounced on the balls of his feet as though he needed to find an outhouse quick. “It’s robbers—a robber, I mean—I got to get Mr. Ainesworth.”

  “Someone robbed Mr. Fairley?” Tilda asked.

  “No, ma’am. Not yet, I mean, that is—”

  Tilda grabbed Walter’s shoulders and gave him a little shake. “Spit it out, boy. What do you mean?”

  The boy stopped bouncing. “There’s this fella came to the shop—a foreign fella, all slicked up in new clothes on a fancy horse and valises full of goods”—he bent close to Tilda’s ear and lowered his voice—“all stolen. He tried to make out like they was his, but Mr. Fairley, he knew, but he didn’t let on, just so’s this foreigner wouldn’t get suspicious and bolt. He’s keeping this fella busy down at the shop while I fetch the constable.”

  “Who’d he rob?” Sally asked.

  “His master,” Walter said before Tilda could scold Sally back to her chores. “Robbed him and murdered him, most likely. Prob’ly lying in the woods with his throat slit from ear to ear.”

  “Oh!” Sally gasped, her eyes saucer-wide, her hands clasped tight at her breast.

  Tilda wasn’t sure which disturbed her more: the idea of a robber and possibly a murderer at the blacksmith’s, or the way Walter Sackett’s eyes latched on to Sally’s clasped hands. Or rather, what was beneath them.

  “Well,” Tilda said, rubbing her hands on her apron, “we’d best not keep you. Run along and fetch the constable.”

  The boy ran down the road as if the dust cloud at his heels pursued him. “Sally, get inside,” Tilda said. She turned toward her daughter, but Sally was already gone, not toward the house, but across the east pasture and halfway to the Wolcotts’ place.

  “. . . and there was still blood on his hands.” Sally gasped, breathless.

  Beulah Wolcott squealed with terror. At least Sally guessed it was terror, though in truth, it might have only been envy that Sally had gotten a juicy story before she did.

  “. . . and his horse’s feet were red with it,” Sally continued. “Trampled him down after he was dead, you see, so nobody would recognize the body.”

  “What body?” Beulah’s papa poked his head out of the barn doorway. />
  “The dead man’s. The one this foreigner killed,” Sally said.

  “What foreigner?”

  “The one down at the blacksmith’s.”

  There was a clatter of tools, and Mr. Wolcott came out of the barn with an ax in his hand. “There’s been a killing down to Jake Fairley’s?”

  “Oh, no, sir.” But Sally’s heart doubled its pace. It would be exciting if there was a killing, something to talk about for weeks and weeks. “But there is a killer. He killed his master and who knows how many others, and Mr. Fairley is keeping him there, waiting for Walter to fetch the constable.”

  “A foreigner, you say?”

  “Oh, yes. Speaks nothing but gibberish. Probably a Papist on top of it.”

  Mr. Wolcott hefted his ax. “And Jake all alone with him? Good God!”

  The excited flutter in Sally’s heart landed in her stomach and turned into a lump of granite. Mr. Wolcott was a slight, even-tempered man. Sally couldn’t see him standing against a murderer. Another lump of granite lodged in Sally’s throat as Mr. Wolcott kissed the top of Beulah’s head. “Tell your mother I’m going to Mr. Fairley’s. But don’t tell her why,” he said. His fingers brushed his daughter’s cheek, as if he feared he might not see her again.

  Beulah’s chin quivered as her father walked away. “What do we do?” Beulah’s whisper rose to a mousy squeak.

  To the west, Sally saw Mr. Gilbert and his sons digging potatoes. To the south, Mr. Finch gathered windfall apples. When Sally turned back to her friend, Beulah met her eyes and nodded. “We have to hurry.”

  “Killed them all, and they never had a chance, and now Papa’s gone to help catch him.” Beulah’s voice faded into a series of hiccuping sobs.

  Seth Gilbert gave the girl his handkerchief. Poor thing, practically in hysterics, and no wonder, too. “There, dear. We’ll go, won’t we?” He wondered if there was time to go home for his musket. The only weapons he and his sons, Levi and Noah, had to hand were their shovels and pocketknives, but there was safety in numbers, and with Jacob Fairley and Enos Wolcott, they’d be five—no, four. Best to go now and not waste any time. He frowned at Noah, his youngest. “You’re not coming,” Seth said abruptly.