Mending Horses (15 page)

A crescent moon smiled over the frolic. Coats and cravats were shed, collars unbuttoned, sleeves rolled. Curls that had been coiled spring-tight at sunset now drooped in limp tendrils, and braids escaped from their pins and ribbons. Crisply starched ruffles and cuffs and bows wilted, and so, at last, did the dancers.

“Finish it out, will you, Jonny?” the flutist said.

“All right, one more then.” He flexed his fingers and adjusted his fiddle. When he glanced at the rest of the musicians to see
who wanted to choose the tune, the other four sat down as one. They cradled their instruments as if they were children needing to be rocked to sleep, and they nodded for him to begin. Alone.

“Oh, so it's like that, huh, boys? Leaving the old man to finish up?” He couldn't help feeling flattered that they'd left him the stage.

He chose “Oft in the Stilly Night,” a sweet and wistful tune that would make the ladies sigh and nestle closer to their beaux and make the old folk shed a tear. It would have been better with Billy to sing it. She could wring the feeling out of it without turning it maudlin. Well, maybe tomorrow she'd forgive him for bringing Daniel along. Or the next day. He lifted his bow, lingering over the opening notes. He played it as a waltz, drawing the melody out with no flourishes or ornaments, letting the tune play the fiddle rather than the other way 'round.

Oft in the stilly night
,

Ere slumber's chain has bound me
,

Shyly at first, some of the ladies hummed along, putting in a word or two as they remembered. One by one, the voices came together, drew confidence from each other as a glance, a smile, a touch, traveled from friend to friend, girl to boy, husband to wife.

Fond mem'ry brings the light

Of other days around me
. . .

By the chorus, they were singing together, bound by the chain of the song into one hushed voice, a sigh on the night breeze. The first fallen leaves of autumn drifted across the beaten earth of the barnyard, fluttering among the ladies' skirts. The chorus came around again, and a single, sweet, solitary voice rose above the rest, holding the melody as tenderly as a robin's egg.

He lingered on the final note, letting it fade slowly, the ghost of it still on the air after he'd lifted his bow. Then he released his breath and opened his eyes.

Billy stood in front of him, her face solemn under the shadow of her cap. He wanted to ask if it was her voice he'd heard, but it felt like sacrilege to speak just now. Her blue eyes held him, more serious and older than she'd ever looked before. With an abrupt gesture, she snatched away his bow and shoved something into his hand, then disappeared into the shadows. The object was hard and cold and fringed with dead leaves.

“Well, I'll be damned,” he said, looking down at the ear of corn, every kernel as red and precious as a ruby.

“I danced last night, Ivy,” Daniel whispered as he buckled the mare's bridle. “Me, lass. Imagine that.” Clumsily, stupidly, but he had danced. He rubbed the fingers of one hand together, still feeling the shock of touching and being touched, and not a one of the dancers shrinking from him. His arm on a girl's waist, her eyes meeting his, and him not needing to look away. Had it really been him doing all that?

Everything was different today, clearer, sweeter: the slant of sunlight, the breeze on his cheek, even the feel of Ivy beneath him, warm and soft with her winter coat starting to come in. He swore he could count every hair that tickled his bare ankles, every pebble in the road, could even see the ants scurrying away from the mare's hooves.

A little way down the road, a girl ran out of a house and waved them down, pushing her bonnet back to reveal a long, narrow, freckle-spattered face. Somebody who could not have been him slid from Ivy's back and stepped forward to talk to her.

“Sarah,” he said, and with the one word the new Daniel slipped away and the old one rushed back into his head, reminding him that he should have tipped his hat and said
Good morning
, should have done anything else than just say her name as though he had a right to.

But she smiled and blushed a little. She'd been making butter; an ivory smear of cream soiled her apron, and two long greasy streaks darkened the cloth where she'd held the churn between her knees. “Did you come to work for Papa again?” she asked.

“N-No. I—we have to move along.” He gestured at the peddler's wagon behind him. Billy sat beside the peddler, trying to fasten a red ear of corn to the wagon.

“Oh. When I saw you coming, I hoped—I mean, I thought—” She fidgeted with her apron and looked across the road at the potato field that he'd dug yesterday. “Well.” The silence hung for a moment, then Sarah turned her head as if she'd just remembered something. “Mama needs some milk pans,” she called out to Mr. Stocking. “If you go around to the side—”

While Mr. Stocking drove into the barnyard, Sarah and Daniel stayed at the gate, not quite looking at each other, but not quite looking away, either.

Sarah spoke first. “It was fun last night, wasn't it?”

“Aye—yes. Grand. Thank you,” he said, forcing the
you
to come out full and round. “It was kind of you to teach me.” His eyes fixed on her hands as something safe to look at: her freckled fingers, her short, ragged nails, her chapped skin. “Teach me to dance, I mean.”

She picked at a bit of dried food stuck to her apron. “I had a lovely time,” she said. Her feet were bare, like his, her toes curling in the dust on the other side of the cart track from his. “Is this your horse?” she asked.

He nodded. It was easier to look at the lass's face while she was studying Ivy. The straw-colored hair that had been so elaborately arranged last night was now a single braid coiled at the nape of her neck. Wispy strands escaped and trapped the light in a haze of gold at her neck and temples, softening her angular face. She was all sharp except for her eyes, gold-flecked ginger and cinnamon, crinkling with delight under pale lashes and brows.

“She's lovely,” the girl said. “May I?” She reached a tentative hand toward Ivy's nose.

“Here. She likes this.” Not knowing what possessed him, he took her hand and put it on the mare's ear, showing her where Ivy liked to be scratched. The lass stood between them, her hair so close to his face that he felt it like a sunbeam on his cheek. Ivy leaned into their touch and let out a blissful grunt. When Sarah
laughed, Daniel felt like one of Mr. Stocking's fiddle-strings, plucked and quivering with music.

“You're so lucky,” Sarah said. “I wish we had a horse.”

“Sarah!” a shrill voice called. “That butter isn't going to churn itself!”

Just like that, the musical feeling was gone. Sarah drifted away from him, lingered in the grass beside the road. “I have to go.”

As the peddler's wagon rumbled out of the yard, Sarah disappeared into the house. With a sigh, Daniel collected Ivy's reins. Already the feel of Sarah's hand in his seemed like something he'd imagined.

“Daniel!”

He turned to see Sarah running back out of the house.

“Here.” She thrust a little paper-wrapped bundle into his hand. “Some gingerbread for your breakfast.” The musty, sour scent of cattle and milk tickled his nose as she came closer, her breath moist against his cheek. And then she was away before he realized that he'd been kissed.

They were barely out of sight of the lass's house before Billy began taunting, “Daniel has a swee-eet-heart! Daniel has a swee-eet-heart!”

Did he now? Surely one kiss and a bit of gingerbread didn't make a sweetheart, especially when he'd likely never see her again. But the thought that he could have a sweetheart, maybe not this lass, but some girl, well, that was something. Billy's taunts wrapped around him like a blanket, making him feel oddly warm and content.

Liam's shanty was clean and freshly whitewashed, with herbs strewn across the floor and table, the smells of new paint and crushed tansy and mint and lavender overlying the odors of sickness and decay. The two boxes on the floor looked too small to contain the lads whose laughter and foolishness had once filled the room to bursting. Liam knelt next to the rough wooden boxes and set his fingertips along the edge of one lid to open it.

Augusta gripped his shoulder. “Don't. You don't want to remember them like that.” Her eyes glittered with moisture. Who had she lost, that she was remembering now?

Somebody—who could it have been but her?—had found the lads' playthings and laid them on the coffins among the herbs: the crudely carved wooden animals he'd made for them, pocketknives, toy soldiers, a Jacob's ladder—the last few stolen. He picked up the Jacob's ladder and let its wooden panels click-clatter down, a harsh echo in the silent room.

“Thieving as magpies they were,” he said. “You s'pose it'll be counted against them?”

“I'm a whore, Liam,” she said harshly. “What would I know about such things?”

He flinched at her tone and looked up to see her staring out the window, not really looking outside at all, but seeing something deep within. She collected herself with a little shiver and turned to give him a weary smile. “If it were up to me, there'd be no children in hell,” she added softly.

He bowed his head and tried to pray for the lads and for Nuala, but he hardly knew what point there was in praying
when all the fevered prayers he'd made during the lads' sickness had been rejected, when what he really wanted to pray for was the impossible. He'd thought he'd cried himself dry when he'd been begging for their lives. But he had barely started. He felt as though he'd kneel there trembling and weeping until his own heart stopped.

Gradually, he became aware that someone was stroking his hair. He let himself collapse into Augusta's arms, let her rock him like a child. Then he realized that she, too, was crying. Although he was sure she wept for some hidden loss of her own, somehow it was a comfort to know that there were the two of them grieving together.

Daniel caught himself whistling as he rode Ivy toward the tavern. He'd been worried at first that he'd be a burden on the peddler, but with the harvest season someone always needed help to bring in potatoes or corn or apples. There'd been barely a day that he hadn't earned his own board and lodging and some besides.

This traveling life was grand, indeed. True, Billy still refused to be civil to him, but it was enough for now that the cloud between her and the peddler had passed. She and Mr. Stocking made a fine pair with their jokes and stories, even if most of the stories were probably lies. Then there was their music; it had been worth throwing his lot in with them if only for the chance to hear them.

Sometimes he felt as though he were perched at the top of a tall tree. He was eager and dizzy and fearful all at once, knowing that a mere gust of wind could send him tumbling back down.

Aye, it was grand to be a free man with cash money in his pocket, knowing that all he needed was his work to prove himself—as long as he kept his mouth shut. The thought toppled him out of his imaginary tree with a very real shudder from his tail-bone to his skull. He still had to guard his words to keep the Irish out of his voice. Folk liked the Irish well enough when it was a pretty child like Billy singing a pretty song, but a laborer was another matter entirely. How free would he be now, if not for Mr. Stocking? He didn't feel like whistling anymore by the time he saw the peddler and Billy sitting on a bench outside the tavern, their heads bent over Billy's primer.

“Profitable day, Dan'l?” Mr. Stocking asked, glancing up from the book.

“A dollar.” He slid from Ivy's back and reached in his pocket. “And you?” He counted out his share of the room and board.