Mending Horses Read online

  Jonathan and Billy led Phizzy to the wagon shed and backed the wagon in. They’d just finished unhitching the gelding when a long shadow loomed in the doorway and a gruff voice boomed, “There’d better not be any tin left in that thing.”

  Jonathan spun around to greet the tall, gray-haired man. “Eldad! Ain’t you a sight!” He gave his cousin’s husband a strong handshake and a hearty thump on the back. “So what’s this Sophie said about you chasing down some hullabaloo in town?”

  “Chasing down a lot of gossip, is more like it.” Eldad’s hooked nose wrinkled with his scowl. “Seems Jacob Fairley caught himself a thief and a murderer.”

  “A murderer in Chauncey? Now that does beat all.” Jonathan returned to Phizzy, looping the gelding’s reins through an iron ring while Billy fetched his halter.

  Eldad leaned his long frame against the doorjamb and watched the two work. “The story is he came out bold as brass, looking to get his horse shod. But Jake said he could tell it was stolen, just from the looks of this fella. Foreign, I guess, and shifty-eyed.”

  Jonathan paused in the middle of trading bridle for halter. “The fella or the horse?”

  “The fella.”

  “Oh. You seen him yourself?”

  “I couldn’t get in. The whole town must have been crammed into Chester’s parlor and yard. By the time I got there, a snake couldn’t have slipped in the door.”

  “So where’s this foreign murderer from?” Jonathan gathered up bridle and harness, then gave them to Billy to store in the back of the wagon.

  “Seems he worked for some fella up in Massachusetts. Killed the whole family—slit their throats while they were in their beds, stole their goods and took off. Some say he—” Eldad cast a glance toward Billy and lowered his voice. “Some say he assaulted the mother and daughters before he—” Eldad ran his thumb across his throat.

  “Funny I ain’t heard nothing about it. You know how folks love talking murder with a peddler.” Jonathan gestured for Billy to take Phizzy out to a little pen next to the barn. The men leaned on the fence and watched the gelding shake himself all over, then crumple into the grass with a contented sigh. In a moment, all four enormous hooves were waving in the air as the horse erased the harness marks and sweat stains in the grass.

  Eldad slipped a pair of segars out of his breast pocket and lit one for himself and one for Jonathan. “He had a valise full of banknotes and forged papers, they say.”

  Jonathan puffed thoughtfully on his segar. “What’s to become of him?”

  “He’s down to Chester Ainesworth’s right now, until Chester can sort the truth out. He’s locked up for safekeeping in that shed that Chester has tacked onto his barn. Chester and the J.P. said there wasn’t anything to base a charge on, but folks were getting so ugly, Chester didn’t dare let him go.”

  Jonathan shook his head. “Chester Ainesworth,” he murmured. “Never struck me as sharp enough to make a constable.”

  “He’s not so dull as some think. He sent Jake Fairley’s apprentice off to Farmington to get the truth.” Eldad chuckled. “On Jake’s horse, yet.”

  “Well, there’s a good afternoon’s work done, eh, Jacob?” The bench scraped raggedly against the tavern floor as Ezra Stokes sat down across from the blacksmith.

  “You call that done?” Jacob drained his glass and banged it on the table. He nodded at the tavern-keeper for a refill.

  Abner came around the bar with a fresh bottle of rum. Jacob hoped somebody besides Abner was keeping track of the bottles. He was sure he wasn’t drinking nearly as fast as the others hunkered along the two corner tables, and he was damned if he’d see Abner spread the cost evenly all the way ’round.

  Come to think of it, somebody should have been treating him. Hadn’t he been sharp enough to spy out the foreigner for what he really was? Hadn’t he sounded the alarm? And hadn’t he stayed, alone and unarmed but for his hammer and tongs, keeping the murderer distracted until help arrived? Who knew how many lives he’d saved?

  But Chester Ainesworth would bungle it all with his dimwitted caution. “The man’s too big a fool to be constable,” Jacob said. He wrapped a meaty fist around his glass and took a long swallow, letting the rum’s hot spiciness flood his veins and clear his head.

  “Ainesworth?” Tom Shelby said. “He’s only doing his job, I s’pose.” Shelby’s eyes looked dull and confused, like an ox who’d been told to gee and haw at the same time.

  Strange, Jacob thought, how drink made some men duller and other men more lively. As for himself, a good dose of rum made everything come sharper. “Chester’s too busy fussing about warrants and papers to remember that his job is to keep us safe.” A dozen men’s heads bobbed up and down over their glasses in agreement.

  Shelby shrugged. “The fellow’s locked up. We should be safe enough.”

  Jacob hawked and spat on the floor. “Chester’s shed wouldn’t hold a goose. That killer will be out and slitting our throats while Chester’s waiting for his ‘inquiry’ to come back.” What galled even more was Jacob would be without an apprentice or a horse for the better part of the week. Jacob still wasn’t sure how the constable had wheedled him into it. Now Walter and Jacob’s horse were off on a fool’s errand, and not one word said about who was to pay for the use of Jacob’s apprentice and gelding. Nor had there been any mention of a reward for the man who’d identified and cornered the murderer.

  “We can set a guard on him,” Shelby said. The nods followed up and down the bench.

  “And who’s to guard the guard to keep his throat from being cut?” Jacob loosened his cravat. Suddenly, the blasted thing seemed to be choking him. Damnation, the room was getting hot. Where was that bottle? Empty. He waved Abner over for another.

  “What the hell do we need a constable for, if we got to be guarding his prisoners for him?” Ezra responded with a sarcastic sneer.

  “Well, boys,” Jacob said, “if Chester can’t do his job, we’ll just have to do it for him.”

  Chapter Four

  “You still have your fiddle, don’t you, Jonny?” Sophie asked. All through the afternoon, she’d been looking forward to two things: an evening of Jonny’s music, and a chance to interrogate Jonny about the boy he’d brought with him.

  “I figured we wouldn’t get a meal free and clear out of you.” Jonny nudged his companion. “Billy, go fetch—” The boy disappeared before Jonny could finish his sentence.

  Sophie hooked her arm around her cousin’s elbow and led him into the parlor. “Now, cousin,” she began, her voice treacle-sweet. “Who is that boy, and where did you find him?”

  “Why, the angels sent him.” Jonny patted Sophie’s cheek. “A gift from heaven.”

  Eldad struck a lucifer and lit a candle. “An outcast from the other place is more like it.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you’d heard him sing,” Jonny said as the boy reappeared in the doorway, holding Jonny’s fiddle case.

  Sophie settled herself on the sofa while Jonny rosined his bow and tuned the fiddle. She always marveled at where, between chin and shoulder, Jonny found a spot to place the instrument. Even as a boy he hadn’t had much neck to speak of, and even less chin. The ratio of neck to chin to jowls hadn’t improved as he’d reached adulthood. But somehow the fiddle found a place to nestle while Jonny plucked the strings, then gently massaged them with the bow, transforming their discordant squeal to a contented hum. After tuning, he conferred with the boy, who stood to attention just clear of Jonny’s elbow. “A song of Ireland,” Jonny announced.

  Sophie didn’t know a soul who could make a fiddle laugh or sing or weep the way Jonny could. He could make a tune crawl inside her, familiar as her own heartbeat. Tonight Jonny’s fiddle whispered like the wind behind a ship’s sails. Even though the boy’s words were gibberish to Sophie, they painted a picture in her head of a mist-shrouded island full of green meadows, jewel-bright flowers, and golden-fruited trees. She tasted the sweetness of the fruit, smelled the perfumed air,
and her heart ached because something in the boy’s song told her the place was as lost as Paradise.

  Foolish woman, she told herself. It’s only a song. But she couldn’t pull herself away from it. As the last notes faded, she fumbled in her pocket for her handkerchief and dabbed discreetly at her eyes, hoping Eldad wouldn’t notice.

  Her husband coughed and blew his nose. “A bit smoky in here, isn’t it, dear?” he said gently. “Better trim those candles.” He rose quickly and turned away from her.

  Jonny and the boy struck up a livelier tune next, full of trills and runs. It was the first time Sophie truly understood what it meant to sing like a bird. She’d heard other singers who could embroider a song more elaborately, but this boy sang as if he’d been hatched with the song inside him. If the first song had been shrouded in mist and melancholy, this one was all joy and light, driving the shadows from the darkest corners of the heart.

  Daniel opened his eyes. It was no different from having them closed, except that with them shut, the darkness was something he made himself, and naught to be fearing. With his eyes open, the darkness was a separate entity surrounding him, stifling him. He shook himself like a horse shaking off flies.

  He wasn’t a child anymore, to fear being shut up in the dark. But sure, he’d acted like a child this afternoon, paralyzed and tongue-tied with fear. Like an idiot child, he’d collapsed and let himself be led away and locked up, unable to say a word in his own defense. He’d not even thought of the peddler, the very man he’d come to Chauncey to find. The peddler was surely clever enough to help Daniel prove his innocence, providing the man could be found. The constable had seemed willing to listen, if Daniel had but the wit to speak. In the morning, he’d keep his wits about him. He’d tell the constable his story and ask him about the peddler. Until then, there was naught to do but sleep, or at least try to.

  He curled up in a corner of the shed and tried to retreat to the secret place he’d created inside himself, where all was quiet and green and safe. In his secret place, Ma and Da and Michael were alive and waiting for him. There, he could ride Ivy forever. But the secret place was harder to summon when it was close and dark. Instead, all the dark places of his life would spring at him, and Ma and Da and Michael and Ivy were forever gone.

  The ship’s berth was like the box they’d put Grand-da in when they put him in the ground. Dark and damp, but without the clean smell of earth. The ship’s motion set his stomach jumping. He cried because he didn’t like being sick to his stomach. Mama was sick, too, retching into a bucket.

  It was all wrong. Mama was supposed to take care of him when he was sick. She wasn’t meant to be sick herself. Water—she kept asking for water. There was water somewhere on the boat, but where? The old lady in the next berth would know. He crept to the edge of his berth and reached into the next one. The old lady’s arm was stiff and cold.

  A light began to glow next to him, as if someone had kindled a fire in the old lady’s berth. Only the fire was the weird, cold, silvery-blue of moonlight, not the mellow gold of flame. Instead of a narrow box, the old lady’s berth went on and on and on. Instead of an old lady, there was a young man with blond hair and staring blue eyes. The wrist under Daniel’s hand was no longer bony and fragile, but strong and muscular.

  “Silas?” Daniel whispered. But Silas shouldn’t have been on the boat. Daniel’s younger dream-self hadn’t met him yet.

  Next to Silas was another man: Lyman. Then a woman, three girls, a baby. Beyond them more girls, boys, men, women, so that the row of bodies stretched into infinity.

  Silas sat up, his head wobbling on his neck like a broken doll’s. A gash ran across his throat, the blood seeping down his shirt front. One by one, the men, women, and children beyond him began to sit, exposing a row of torn throats and empty, staring eyes. One by one, each figure touched a finger to its bloody throat, then pointed the dripping finger at Daniel.

  Daniel tried to release Silas’s wrist, but his hand stuck fast.

  “I never! I swear, I never!” Daniel gasped. He ran a hand across his own throat. He’d already removed his cravat and unbuttoned his collar, but the choking feeling wouldn’t go away. His other hand closed around something smooth and hard. Idiot. It was only an ear of maize, probably left behind from last year’s grinding. He ran his thumb along the bead-hard kernels and forced the nightmares away to the corners of the shed, where they hovered and waited.

  He twisted both hands around the ear of corn and tried to breathe evenly. Hadn’t Ma warned him that wishing someone ill would only come back to him? He couldn’t deny he’d wished Lyman and his wife dead. No matter how he’d tried to smother his curses, eventually the black moods would win out, and he’d damn Mr. and Mrs. Lyman in his heart, fancy all the ways he wished them hurt, wished them killed. Now he had his wish, and it turned his stomach.

  But he’d no quarrel with Silas. Nor with the children. Even without closing his eyes he could see them, throats laid open like hogs at butchering time. No, he’d never wanted that.

  He rubbed his face. It was so damned hot in here. God, he was suffocating, as if somebody had put a blanket over his face.

  The door rattled. Daniel flung himself toward the back of the shed, heart racing. He couldn’t shake his conviction he was to blame for the Lymans’ deaths, as sure as if he’d slaughtered them himself. And now the constable had come to make him answer for it.

  He shook his head. It was more than likely the constable had come to take him to the privy so he wouldn’t foul the shed. He calmed himself by recalling his hopes for the peddler’s aid and the constable’s fairness. He began to shape the words to tell the constable his story.

  The door rattled again, and the bolt clicked free. Daniel turned toward the sound. He saw the lantern for only a moment before they knocked him to the floor.

  Chapter Five

  “An uneasy mind makes for an uneasy stomach.”

  Or was that “An uneasy stomach makes for an uneasy mind?” “Damn it all,” Jonathan muttered to himself. He took another puff on his segar and let the smoke out slowly, as though he expected the smoke to shape itself into the proper words, silvery and soft-edged against the black velvet sky.

  The air had a bit of a chill to it, making Jonathan walk a little faster along the road. He’d never held with those who believed that inhaling the night air was a sure invitation to a consumptive death. There was nothing like a brisk evening walk to settle the stomach, and nothing like a good segar to clear the head.

  But tonight Jonathan had walked a fair piece and found himself no more easy in mind or stomach than when he’d left the house. The uneasy stomach had a ready explanation: too much of Sophie’s fine cooking and too much of Eldad’s fine wine and brandy. A man could get accustomed to fine things if he wasn’t careful, and then where would he be? Unable to fend for himself on the road. Unable to make his way alone in the world.

  Alone.

  Why did that word all of a sudden send a shiver down his spine? He’d been more than content with his own company—well, his own and Phizzy’s—for how many years now?

  “Getting soft in your old age, Jonny boy?” he grumbled. “You got what you wanted, ain’t you?” The bee that he’d placed in Sophie’s bonnet was likely buzzing around in there as she slept. Jonathan had seen the yearning in her eyes the moment Billy had started to sing. As for Billy, well, Billy had liked Sophie’s cooking and marveled over her clean white sheets and feather mattress. Liking Sophie would come soon enough. Yes, Sophie would win the child over and then that bee would have a whole hive full of honey for Sophie, Eldad, and Billy.

  Damn it all, though, Jonathan would miss the music. He’d never known a body so hungry for song as Billy. The most leaden tune could pour into those ears, and it would come out of that mouth sounding like gold. And there was nothing like a good song to make folks more willing to part with their money and buy a tray or pan or teapot they didn’t need. Folks had been happy to pay for the singing and fiddling alon
e, and never you mind about the tinware. He and Billy had gotten so they just needed to look at each other to start out on the same song. Yes, he’d miss the music, all right.

  Still, it’d be better all around if the child stayed with Sophie. Having Billy just made Jonathan lazy. He’d grown too accustomed to having help to set up the wares, to feed and harness Phizzy. And Phizzy was getting too damn used to being spoiled and fussed over.

  As he finished his segar, Jonathan noticed a pair of lights bobbing in the distance and picked out a group of men stumbling across a pasture. Drunk, he guessed, and holding each other up as they made their way home. You get to depending on somebody, Jonny, and you’ll be just like that, unable to stand on your own two feet.

  Besides, too much companionship made a man prideful. He was already growing puffed up from having somebody around who listened to his stories and believed more than half of them, somebody who laughed at his jokes, even the stale ones. It was a powerful temptation to vanity when somebody watched everything you did and copied your ways as if there were nothing finer in the world than to be just like you.

  He shuddered to think of anybody looking to him as a model. What kind of sorry life could he offer a child? He’d spent most of his life wandering around as aimlessly as . . . as . . . well, as that bunch of drunkards. One of them fell, and the others set upon him with kicks and blows.

  “There’s companionship for you,” Jonathan muttered, crushing the stub of his segar under his heel. Give a man enough drink, and he’d turn on the very mother that bore him.

  As the fallen man’s companions yanked him to his feet, Jonathan noticed that he seemed to have no arms, or at least seemed unable to move them. There was something peculiar about his head, too. It looked more like an understuffed pillow than a proper head. The armless man lurched into step, like an unwilling calf tied by the neck and led to market.