Mending Horses Read online

  “The fella is who he claims, then,” Eldad said.

  “And no thief, either,” Mrs. Ainesworth added, a smug half-smile playing across her lips. She cut another strip of linen and went back to work on Chester’s right hand.

  “So it seems. But it doesn’t mean he can’t be a murderer,” Chester said.

  “That boy’s no more a murderer than I am,” Jonathan said. “I have a sense about him.”

  Chester raised an eyebrow. “So did Jacob Fairley.” He drew in a breath as his wife tightened the bandage around his finger a little too fiercely.

  “Do you really believe Mr. Fairley’s tales?” Mrs. Ainesworth’s voice was sharp-edged.

  Chester sighed. “It doesn’t matter what I believe. What matters is the truth and the law. In a couple of days, we’ll know whether there’s any truth to all this talk of murder.” Chester started to run his left hand through his unruly hair, then grimaced and thought better of it. “Then I’ll know what the law requires me to do. In the meantime, he might as well stay here.”

  “If you lock that boy up in some dark hole, you’ll have yourself a corpse or a lunatic come morning,” Jonathan said.

  Chester shook his head. “I should have been less worried about keeping him locked in and more worried about keeping everyone else locked out,” he said. “I’ll sit watch on the boy, just in case anyone tries to follow Jacob’s example.” He tried to lift his mug, but his bandaged fingers were too fat and slippery to hold it. “I only hope,” he said, staring glumly into his rum, “that tomorrow morning Jacob Fairley feels as bad as I know I will.”

  Jonathan yawned so wide his jaw popped. He looked enviously at the bed Mrs. Ainesworth had made up for Daniel, then at his own mattress, a well-worn tick flattened with long use, which Chester had dragged down from the attic and laid on the floor. His aching joints regretted the impulse that had prompted him to sit watch over Daniel.

  “You wouldn’t happen to mind changing places, would you, Dan’l?” Jonathan asked.

  The boy lay rigid on the bed, his eyes staring blindly at the ceiling. He’d barely reacted when Jonathan and Chester had carried him upstairs into the Ainesworths’ spare bedroom.

  “Dan’l?” Jonathan waved a hand in front of the boy’s face. “You wouldn’t happen to mind at least not looking quite so cadaveracious, would you?” No response. The peddler sighed and pulled the blanket up to the boy’s chin.

  A light footstep shuffled in the hallway, and the door creaked open. A pair of curious blue eyes stared up at him. “Billy! What the devil are you doing here?”

  “I heard Mr. Taylor say you was over here sitting watch on the murderer. So I come to see. Mrs. Constable told me you was in here.”

  “How’d you figure out how to get here?”

  “I seen Mr. Taylor coming home, so I just followed that same road he’d been on. When I saw Phizzy in the yard here, I knew it was the right house.” The blue eyes narrowed accusingly. “You didn’t walk him out proper or nothing.”

  “Poor Phiz, I have treated him some ungrateful.” Phizzy should have had a long cooling-out walk, some hot bran mash with molasses, and an apple. But all there’d been time for was a brief stroll around Chester’s yard before letting Phizzy join Chester’s horse in the little paddock, with a quick promise for better rewards in the morning.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Constable was in the yard rowing about who was to tend the horses,” Billy said. “She was fair cross with him. He done something to his hands, and she didn’t want him fouling them up, and he didn’t want her doing his work, and they were both telling the other to go inside and leave the horses to him . . . or her . . . only they all was mostly talking at once and all together. Then I come along and put things right.” Billy’s chest swelled with pride. “So Mr. Constable let me put Phizzy in his barn and put down some hay for him, too.”

  Jonathan was sure that Billy hadn’t taken over the situation quite that handily, but what the storytelling lacked in veracity and finesse, it made up for with enthusiasm. “It’s Mr. and Mrs. Ainesworth. And all three of you should’a been in your beds ’stead of messing around with horses this time of night.”

  “That’s what Mrs. Constable said, but she thanked me nicely for helping and gave me a grand piece of cake. See?” Billy tugged a handkerchief from a jacket pocket. A shower of crumbs dribbled to the floor. “I saved some for later.”

  “Well, you might as well stay.”

  Billy stared down into Daniel’s face. “He don’t look over much like a murderer to me.”

  “And how the devil would you know what a murderer looks like?” Jonathan asked.

  “Well, there was Mr. Brundidge, the foreman at the mill, who hit his wife with a—”

  Jonathan raised a hand. “I don’t want to know.”

  “He was big and fierce-looking, not all pale and weakish like that one. He’s . . .” Billy took a closer look at Daniel’s face. “Mr. S., I think we seen him before somewhere, haven’t we?”

  “Last July when we were up in Massachusetts. He’s Irish, like you.”

  “Irish, bah,” Billy said. “I remember him now. Couldn’t speak Gaelic no better’n a pig. What’s wrong with him, anyway? Would he be having some kind of a fit or something?” A grubby finger reached out to poke Daniel’s face.

  Jonathan lunged forward and grabbed Billy’s wrist. “Good God, what do you want to do a damn fool thing like that for?”

  “I just wanted to see—”

  Jonathan tugged Billy away from the bed. “What I want to see is you going to bed.” He nodded toward the tick on the floor. “You can have that.” Every aching joint cursed him for yielding even that small bit of comfort.

  “But where will you be sleeping?”

  “I got to sit up and watch. Make sure he don’t start any trouble.” As if that was a worry. Jonathan pushed two chairs together, sitting in one and propping his feet on the other. He stuffed his coat under his backside for a cushion. “Think he’d care for a lulla—” Jonathan started to joke, then planted his feet back on the floor and snapped his fingers. “You want to make yourself useful, Billy, why don’t you sing one of them Irish songs of yours? Something pretty that don’t have anything sad in it. Something that’ll ease him some.”

  Billy’s song filled the room with strange, half-magical words. For the first time since Jonathan had found him, Daniel moved of his own will. He turned his head toward the song, though his eyes were still wide and blank. After a time, he pressed his eyelids shut and his body softened. As Jonathan blew out the candle, Daniel’s cheeks glimmered with moisture.

  Daniel was in the secret place he’d created inside himself after the fire had taken his home and family, when waking had meant fierce pain outside and worse pain inside; when fevered nightmares had alternated with the blistering sensation that phantom claws peeled the skin from his arms and shoulders and shredded the muscles beneath. Then he’d drifted in a green mist. The mist had set him down as gently as one might set an egg in a bed of straw, then faded away. He saw grass, hills, trees so green he could taste their cool freshness like spring water on his tongue, could feel the green softness between his bare toes. The green sparkled in golden sunlight, and the fire along his skin was only the wind or the sun, and there was no more pain inside, for Ma and Da and Michael were right there with him.

  The first time he’d woken from his green secret place, he’d screamed at Mrs. Nye and Dr. Corey for dragging him back, for though the pain on the outside might leave him, the pain on the inside never would.

  As he’d healed, he’d taught himself to summon the place at will, finding with each visit a new facet to explore. Sometimes he’d meet heroes like Cúchulainn and Brian Boru, or faeries and silkies and such, come to life from Da’s stories. After Daniel tamed Ivy—or rather, Ivy tamed him—she was there too, always waiting for him, always his.

  His mother was singing. Her copper hair cascaded loose about her shoulders, her eyes bright and unshadowed. Da was there, too, whis
tling the same tune as Ma, though her voice and his whistling had never been so melodious before.

  Then Daniel was riding Ivy, and though they galloped far and away across the soft green grass, the song never faded from his ears.

  For a long time Daniel drifted between the green place and the black, trying not to get trapped in the tunnel of bright white pain that connected the two. Eventually, the tunnel fell away, resolving into walls and floor.

  “Dan’l? Dan’l? Son?” A calloused hand tested his forehead.

  Staring back at him was a pair of green eyes, heavy-lidded like a wise old turtle’s, in a jowly round face—exactly the face he’d been seeking. He’d found them, then: the peddler and his boy, for wasn’t that the yellow-haired lad peering over the peddler’s shoulder? But what had come between the seeking and the finding? “Sir?” He rubbed his eyes and started to sit up. “I’ve had such a dream.” A torch-lit clearing, men shouting, horses churning up the ground. His own stomach turning inside out until it could turn no more. And . . . snow? He ran a hand across his throat, felt the raw skin there, saw the bruises on his wrists. “Oh, God. ’Tweren’t a dream, then.”

  “’Fraid not,” the peddler said. Daniel heard the clink and slosh of liquid being poured. Something nudged his elbow. “Here, son, this’ll settle you some.”

  Daniel took a sip. He coughed as the rum burned his throat, and he shivered at the pictures forming in his mind. The same calloused hands offering a flask. The smell of melting tar thick and heavy in the air. Feathers swirling around him like drifting snow. He clutched the glass with white knuckles. “I—I fancy I’m in your debt, sir.” Each word felt like a throat full of brambles.

  The peddler shook his head. “I’ve only put your trouble off a while, not sent it packing. Do you understand what all this is about? Who that is?” He nodded over his shoulder at a man with dark hair, weary eyes, and bandaged hands.

  Daniel nodded. A great lump gathered in his throat, and a greater one in his chest. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, sucked in a noisy breath, and sat up straighter, facing the peddler and the constable. A muscle in his cheek twitched with the effort of holding himself together.

  “They’re dead, aren’t they? Dead, and it’s me own fault.” With bleak eyes, he stared past the two men, as if he might see the Lymans’ ghosts staring back at him from the shadows. The peddler’s lad gaped in wide-eyed fascination. Mr. Stocking invented an errand and dismissed his lad, but Daniel was sure the boy would be back with his ear pressed to the door.

  Daniel reached for the rum to fortify himself for his confession. The constable pulled it away and gave him a glass of water instead. “So,” the constable began, “you’re saying you actually did kill somebody?”

  Daniel gulped down some water, then shook his head. “But I might as well have. It was on me own account that Silas defied his da. That must’a been what sent Lyman on such a tear.”

  “You’ve lost us, son.” Mr. Stocking rummaged in his pockets, pulled out a grubby little notebook and a stub of a pencil. “Why don’t you start at the beginning of this tangle, and I’ll clerk for Mr. Ainesworth here.”

  The beginning. And where exactly would that be? The day he’d fetched young Ethan Root to serve his bond at Lyman’s? Or maybe six years earlier, with the fire that killed Da and Ma and Michael and left Daniel bound to George Lyman? Or maybe the day he and Ma had stepped off the boat to join Da in America? No, it had all started before he’d been born: the day Da had kissed Ma good-bye and left to seek his fortunes in a new land. That was when it had begun. But surely they didn’t want to hear all that, did they?

  Mr. Stocking seemed to sense how Daniel’s thoughts whirled, for the peddler gave him an encouraging show of horsey teeth and said, “The most recent beginning. The one that got you here.”

  He’d never had to string so many words together at one go before. He started with the paper he and Ethan had found in Lyman’s desk: the paper that proved Lyman had cheated Daniel out of his father’s bit of land and the ashes of his tiny house. He told how Lyman’s son Silas had learned of the paper, and how it had turned Silas against his father. He told how Silas and Ethan and Lizzie had uncovered the rest of Lyman’s thefts, and how Silas had been torn between wanting to make things right and fearing that exposing his father would turn the rest of the family homeless—not just Silas, but his three little sisters and baby brother.

  “So he bought your silence,” the constable concluded.

  “After a fashion, aye. Silas said he’d pay folk back somehow, but he couldn’t send his da off to prison, not with all them little ones to care for. Anyway, I got Ivy, and I got me own bond and Ethan’s canceled, and that was fair enough for me. But it gave Lyman a turn, having Silas stand against him like that. That must’a set him off—that, and fearing Silas might change his mind.”

  “Set him off?” the constable repeated.

  “It maybe ate at him so that he went mad with it, and then . . .” Daniel shuddered. “It must’a broke him, don’t you see? That’s why he killed them.”

  “And you—you saw him do it?”

  “Sweet Jesus, no. I never heard naught of it ’til the day I come here, when the blacksmith said they was all killed and me to blame for it. It’s true, only not the way he meant it.”

  “So this Mr. Lyman and his family were all alive when you left Farmington?” the constable said slowly, more as a statement than a question.

  “I swear on me da’s soul they were. I know it’s hard to believe, but—”

  “No, not really,” the constable said. “As a matter of fact, it doesn’t surprise me a bit.”

  Chapter Eight

  Walter Sackett wasn’t in nearly as much of a hurry to return to Chauncey as he’d been to leave. His sense of duty and hope for reward had kept him urging the beast north, but the appeal of his mission had worn thin as quickly as the flesh on his buttocks had. The fastest gait Mr. Fairley’s nag could muster was neither trot nor gallop, but combined the worst elements of both with the speed of neither. It had taken only an hour of his backside slamming against the saddle for Walter to regret volunteering. In between pulping Walter’s behind, the horse had tried to toss him head over heels, wrench his arms out of their sockets, knock his head against overhanging branches, and scrape his legs against tree trunks and stone walls. Walter had arrived in Farmington feeling bleak, battered, and bruised.

  He’d found George Lyman’s house only to learn that every single Lyman was safe inside it, not a one of them with so much as a stubbed toe. The younger Mr. Lyman had chuckled over Constable Ainesworth’s letter and called out every member of the household to meet Walter and prove their survival. He’d then taken Walter to Farmington’s constable and justice of the peace to have them confirm the family’s continued existence and the foreigner’s legal right to the red mare and all the goods she carried. The sack of provisions, and even the bottle of excellent cider that the Lymans’ plump, pretty dairymaid had given Walter for the journey home, had been poor compensation for his disappointment.

  Still, the foreigner could yet have been a murderer. All Walter had discovered in Farmington was that the fellow hadn’t murdered any Lymans. But after interrogating just about every shopkeeper, miller, farmer, and dairymaid, and after reading every handbill, broadside, and newspaper he could find from Farmington back to Chauncey, Walter had gleaned no information about recent murders that he could attribute to the red-haired stranger.

  On the final morning of his journey, Walter traveled the least-trodden paths of Chauncey to reach the constable’s house. He knew he’d become the town’s laughingstock, but humiliation was the least of his worries. That foreigner wasn’t likely to see much humor in having been detained for the better part of a week. Were Walter in the stranger’s place, he’d thrash the cause of his misfortune into a bloody pulp.

  It was close on noon when Walter reached the constable’s house. He slid from the accursed horse’s back and, rehearsing his tale in
his head, knocked at the door. But all he’d planned to say dissolved to mush when the door opened and Walter looked into the sitting room. There at the constable’s table, with the constable’s very own wife serving him a slice of meat pie, was that red-haired, shifty-eyed foreigner.

  The dew-soaked grass chilled Daniel’s bare feet. Patches of morning mist settled in the hollows, giving the pasture an eerie, dreamlike quality. A pulse moved through the earth and up through his body. It quickened and grew from a vibration to a sound, drumming in his ears. He turned toward it, arms outstretched to greet the mare. She whinnied and reared, inches from running him down, then bounded circles around him, kicking up her heels like an unbroken filly. Daniel lunged toward her, sent her whirling away, then backed off and let her chase after him. He skipped aside and let her pass, retreated and let her lead the game. He spun himself dizzy, feinting one way and another in a wild dance. Her hooves beat the rhythm and birdsongs served as the chorus for the teasing game of catch-me-if-you-can that was their morning ritual.

  Closer and closer she circled him, near enough to touch. He caught a handful of coarse mane, and in a moment was on her back, hugging her with legs and arms, laying his face along her neck and breathing in the sweet, dusty smell of her. He settled into her canter, the rhythm of her body easing his soul, reassuring him that she was safely his.

  He rode until the sun burned the dew from the grass, and the rumbles in his stomach and Ivy’s drove them toward the constable’s house for morning chores and breakfast. He walked her to cool her down, heat rising from her body in steamy wisps.

  Releasing her into the barnyard, he groaned when the first thing she did was roll in the dust, grunting happily as she ground the dirt into her sweaty hide. “Don’t be doing that, love,” he said, though he laughed as she rose and shook herself, showering him in dust, sweat, and slobber. Her lips quested against his pockets for a treat. Her breath warmed his fingers, her muzzle velvet soft against his calloused palm. With the other hand he stirred up the dirt that clouded her neck. “You look a fright. We can’t be having that.” She pressed her nose against his chest and made a rumbling noise that vibrated deep into his heart.