I push Nell on. She doesn’t want to go. “You’ve done it a hundred times,” I say and give her a hard cut across the quarters with the whip. She leaps forward. The riverbed vanishes.
We’re buffeted from the stony floor, off the shelf, into deep water. Nell is lifted, taken, caught in cold brown current. She’s swept, we’re swept, like paper in the wind. My skirts are a heavy balloon in the insistent, downward suck. All around, little waves ripple, and cold water grasps my waist, arms, chest. The horse’s neck rears like a sea monster in front of me. Nell swims. Her muscles move like pistons. I float, cling to her straining neck. My foot drifts loose from the stirrup. The heavy skirt pulls—the river wants it. Water rises, skims my chin. Knotted, cold fingers loosen; I feel them go. Cold mouthfuls. I think, So this is what it’s like. A glimpse of Tom sliding off Matilda, face very pale, caught in an expression I don’t know.
Nell strikes the sandy bottom, finds her legs. She ploughs busily through the water, up, out, onto the bank, casting walls and waves of spray in all directions. I lie forward on her, hug her as she moves, solid, suddenly earthbound.
Tom says “hell” and wipes his face with his neckcloth. His fingers have a twitch in them. The cloth won’t go where he wants.
I come up beside them. Nell is iron-gray, wet. She leans in, nostrils wide, to adore Matilda. Matilda blinks; her hide shivers with pleasure under the scatter of cool drops. I throw my habit back over her quarters where it hangs, sopping.
“The bottom drops away. On the right,” Tom says.
“Yes,” I say, “it does.”
He reaches his unsteady hand to Nell’s neck. “Good girl,” he says. She pays him no mind, and her nose touches Matilda’s. “Check her legs,” he says and makes to get down.
“She’s all right,” I say.
We look at one another. It’s like the skin’s been stripped from both of us. I don’t know what to do, so I say, “Race’ll dry us off. If you remember the rules.”
He’s gone before I say rules; all that’s left is the pounding of hooves and trembling air between the trees. Nell shivers with longing, and I let her go.
She runs like a greyhound, flattens her Arabian ears, flattens herself over the land. The woods blur. As we come out of the copse, we pass Matilda. She’s straining at the bit, held back to a canter. Tom is twisted in the saddle, looking behind him. He doesn’t hear our approach on the soft woodland floor; he starts. We fly past him into open ground.
The moor, wide in the sunshine. Wind hits us like a breaker. Ahead, the tor spills out of the hill. The old wall curves toward it, cuts across the green. It’s been some time, but of course, I remember: the first boulder, shaped like an egg, is the winning post. No jumping the wall. No cutting across. Tom always wins. I am vague and blind, eyes streaming. Follow the long, hectic curve. Nell elongates beneath me, opens up her stride; clods of earth scatter and fly. My habit is blown out stiff behind us, solid in the wind. Emptied. Nothing left but my heart and the drum of hooves. When Nell sees Matilda’s long brown nose inching up beside her, she hoots. I’ve never heard a horse make this sound before. It’s impossible that we could go faster, but Nell’s gray neck snakes out, and she becomes a flat pattern of flying legs. Cold thrills run under my skin. A loose stone, a rabbit hole, an old nail, a dip in the ground—if she doubts for a moment, if she puts a foot wrong, we’ll break our necks. The egg shivers, thrums, a hundred feet ahead. The land rushes toward us at a gallop. Matilda is nowhere to be seen; golden lichen and gray rock flash by. Past the egg.
I pull Nell up, cheeks stinging. Her breath comes in hard explosions. She slows gradually, like someone waking from a dream. I stroke her hot neck, sticky under my palm. I tell her she’s wonderful. My ears ring in the sudden quiet; we’re wind blind.
Behind me, Tom says, “She had me off at the wall.” He’s leading Matilda with one hand; the other hangs limp, strange. Fine scratches cross his cheek. Black mud covers his side. Matilda pushes Tom with her face. He pushes her back with the awkward hand. This is all wrong. Tom never falls off.
“Serves you right,” I say at last. “Going over the wall’s cheating. Not in the game.”
“I didn’t.” He comes to lift me down, one hand limp, the other formal.
“No,” I tell him. I slither off, wet, awkward.
Tom says, “You smell like an old woman’s wig.” Lilies.
We tether the horses to a small twisted rowan tree that grows from the side of the hill and go up. We find a patch of high shade in the tumble of stone and sit. I spread my skirts wide to dry, an expanse of wet serge. On the rock pile below, an adder emerges from a shaded crevice. It coils itself decidedly, silently, in the sunshine. Around us, the land is blue and green and purple. Clouds pass. Somewhere in the warm distance, sheep make complaints.
“I didn’t do it to shame him,” Tom says suddenly. “Dropped you. Saw you fall. He’s worse, Iris. These days.”
“I was all right.” I am belligerent for form’s sake. I try not to think of the strange gray man who took my father’s place. I try not to think of how he reached for me and called me by my mother’s name. “I was angry,” I say. “Not because of Father. Or yes. In part… Are you going away, Tom? Are you going somewhere?”
He says, “No, are you?” The words are light, pattering.
I take the wrist lying at his side, bend it slowly back. He shouts, sits up. The adder vanishes into the dark like water poured from a pitcher. The wrist is swollen, pink beneath the brown of his arm. The bones feel too far away beneath the skin.
I fumble beneath my wet skirt.
“Knife,” I tell him.
He eases it from his pocket, puts it in my hand. The crack of tearing cotton.
“You’ll have a job to explain it,” he says.
“Tear my things all the time.”
When I have three long strips of petticoat, I take his wrist, bind it tight and smooth. He bears it, shivering. I give him back his knife, his wrist.
“You’re going away,” I say. “Don’t lie.” His eyes are on Matilda, below. She rubs her poll against the rowan bark. I say, “I heard you and Shakes yesterday.”
“What’s that?” he asks and turns to me. The lines of his face are strange and thoughtful. His cheekbone beaded, smeared with blood.
“That Papa gave you money.” The words are fragments in my mouth.
His good fingers drum the granite. They stroke the wet, dark line of my skirt where it lies. He rubs the hem between finger and thumb. “This bugger,” he says, “nearly killed you.”
“It was my mother’s,” I say. “Are you going to the war, Tom?”
“Where,” he asks, “do I go if not there? What do I do? Going to be your groom forever, am I?” He pulls his cap off. Lies back on the rock, face to the sky, eyes closed. In the bright day, his face is thin, white, absent. An old bruise the color of plum jam spreads over his forehead, disappears into the eye socket. Another, older than that, yellowing beneath it. The hand that clasps the cap to his chest is swollen, the knuckles rich purple, soft black.
“Been fighting,” I say. “What have you been at, Tom? Fighting, drinking”—and then, inspired—“chasing girls.”
His look is very blue. “What of it?” he asks. “What do you care about it?”
“You’re not much good,” I say. “At fighting. From the looks of you.”
“No, not much,” he says. “Have to get better. When I go.”
“Don’t, then,” I say, but he goes on.
“I wanted to say, anyway.” His hand quivers on the granite. “That I should’ve known and not taken you out that night. I should’ve known you were ill. So, sorry.” Having discharged his duty, he nods and turns away, passing his hand across his eyes. His white wrist is linen-bound, unbearable. I think of how I made him ride behind me through Dartmeet. I recall what I said to him after the cave, years ago. My
voice shrill through the fever. Too old to play with the stable boy. Something, some feeling, rises in me like water.
“I’ve treated you like a servant,” I say. I find the word, which is unfamiliar, exotic. “That was unforgivable.”
“No,” he says. “Hardly.” He puts his head in his hands. “Chasing girls,” he says, high-pitched. It’s a fair imitation. “Shakes’d die.” His eyelids are large, dark-lashed, so white they’re nearly blue. Gleam of teeth through his fingers. He’s still angry.
“And I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry that your father died. I should have told you that much sooner.”
He shakes like a dog that’s been told to stay. In his neck the blood courses, the tendons move delicately. Too close to the surface, too easily reached. He’s flesh, bone, breath, all held together with wishful thinking. I cannot stop imagining him bloody, blown apart.
I touch his cheekbone, and beneath it, the elegant hollow that curves to his mouth. His breath is warm on my fingers.
He winces. “What are you doing?” he asks.
“It will be all right,” I say. “But if you leave,” I hear myself say then, “it’ll not be right with me again, ever.” I can’t find the words to tell him how awful it would be: how my heart would lie dead in my chest like a stone…
Tom puts my hand away from his face. “Get off,” he says. “You daft?” He is blank with dislike.
“Sorry,” I say. “I mean—”
“Barely a word to me for a year. Now this. Last thing you said to me was to leave you alone, that time, do you remember? Alone. I suppose that’s what it is—you’re too much alone, d’you see? That’s all. Who do you know? No one. Only me. He keeps you all alone out here, Iris. It’s not right. Makes you strange. Poor kid.”
It’s like a rapid series of blows to the face. I feel the wind behind each one. Colors are blurred with salt.
“Oh, now,” he says lightly. “Oh, come off it.”
Things are happening very fast, or too slowly. I press my eyes hard into my hands. Lights bloom and contract against my lids. Sunlight smarts on my steaming cheeks.
I wait. I wait until the needling stops in my eyes and the breath doesn’t hitch in my throat. I wait.
When I’m calm, I look up. Tom’s back is to me. It is rigid, expressive. I slap him hard. The flesh rings through his thin shirt.
He shouts, “Owyoubugger.”
“Look at me,” I say. “I’ve something to say.”
His shoulders drop. His entire being slumps. “Iris,” he says to his knees.
“Go on,” I say.
He looks up. Before he can speak, I feint another slap at his face, light and fast. He shouts, rocks back, eyes wide. My fingertips graze his chin.
He holds his hand to his cheek and stares. “Funny, I don’t think,” he says. But it is. He is aghast; he should be clutching pearls at his neck. After a moment, he laughs too, his high, rattling laugh.
“Do you know,” I ask, “why I kept away from you?” And I tell him. About the bargain. About the Villarcas. About her. Tom listens intently. The air and the sun seem to cleanse the words. The world changes as I speak. The fear goes out of it.
When I’m finished, he says, “My dad told me something like it, you know, very like all that, before he died.” His mouth narrows, a bitter line. “Those old men. Ghosts and curses and so on. Just an old-fashioned way of saying they didn’t get on. It’s all nonsense, you know that, don’t you, Iris?”
“I do, really,” I say.
“He must be lonely,” says Tom.
I am shaking, released. I guessed right the first time, after all, on that day in the graveyard. She is just Papa’s fear. That I will leave him alone.
We sit. We watch the warm, humming land. I look at him: the line of his nose, his jaw. Memory drifts through, in no order. Feet in shallow streams. Long days and the taste of grass. Snow, shining horsehide. The pain of the tooth I lost in that tumble, the dungy stable yard, the pink ragged gap under my tongue. His eyebrow, the line of a swallow against the sky. He held the foal’s head that summer. Its dark eyes, his careful hands. How violently, how ferociously, he willed it to live. So much of my waking life has been spent in this way, being quiet with Tom.
“I meant it all,” I say to him. “What I said. I’ll never be all right without you.” I’m not afraid. He turns a grim blue eye on me. Actually, I am afraid. A feather floats through my chest. It sidles, drifts, settles.
Tom is suddenly white and awful. “Bugger,” he says. He takes two handfuls of damp serge habit and unfolds them gently. He spreads the hem wide and pulls hard.
Stone skids under me. My shoulder meets his collarbone with a thump. I say, “Watch it.”
He says, “Sorry.”
Close to, he’s strange. His eyelashes dark feathers. The vast shifting geometry of his face, the pink cavern of his ear. Breath in my hair, wind in long grass. The tiny sounds of his skin. Baffling, disconnected glimpses. Eyes opaque like panic.
I draw a finger along the dark swell of his brow. “It’s all right,” I say.
His hands unfold; they make a flower in the small of my back. His breath fills my head like the ocean. We’re alive. The sky’s larger than it has ever been.
• • •
“I’ll come,” Tom says.
“No,” I say. “He’s to hear it from me.” The light’s lazy on the drive. The scent of cut grass. Rawblood is long and quiet in the afternoon.
“You’re a state,” Tom says.
I am. My skirts are drenched again and heavy with mud. On the way back, Tom pulled me onto Matilda midriver. We let Nell make her own way. I sat before him all the way home, his heart against my back.
I put my tongue out, throw Nell’s reins at him. The soaked skirt is heavy on my arm. The front door screeches, but no one comes. I creep through the sunlit rooms. Across the great hall, where the sun lies in warm bars on the flags, down the west corridor, where it falls in great diamonds across the floor and walls. At the door of my father’s study, I pause.
What to say? What has been decided? Marriage, I suppose, though we haven’t spoken of it. All I know is that there is no time. No time before Tom goes, so it must be now. I wait for the doubt to catch up with me. It doesn’t come. I am warmed from within. The tor, the sunlight. I carry it before me in my mind’s eye. I have broken our bargain, but he will forgive me. My father has wanted my happiness, always.
The study door opens with a noise like a knife in the back. The room’s hot, suffocating. Stink of old sweat. The dark paneling is raked with scars as if by claws. Screws of paper litter the floor. Something small and dark scurries under a bookcase. A book flung facedown in the bare grate. Shakes doesn’t clean in here. This is Papa’s place.
My father is dreaming. Half propped at the desk, glazed eyes under heavy lids. Leather wallet open on the shining walnut, the hint of shining metal within. His face is absent, but his long, graceful hands are busy. The bunched-up shirtsleeve, the tourniquet. The needle, gleaming and ready.
I whirl, about to go. This is most dreadful; this is a thing I must never do: watch while Papa uses his pouch.
My wet skirts make a grand sweeping noise across the floor.
“Iris?” His voice, slow and muddy. Slack-tongued.
“I am going, Papa. I am so sorry. Very sorry—” I hear myself, high, rabbiting. A nervous child.
I stop with my hand on the doorknob. I think of the long years of solitude, the years of the disease. Those nights I feared I might not see the end of—that death would swoop down soft and take me up, unknowing. The long days of loneliness. The shame, the guilt, deep-rooted. I am a pariah, infected. The tales of ghosts, of deaths and curses… I am an ignorant oddity, riddled with freaks. Nearly a grown woman, but I can’t put my hair up. And all so that Papa wouldn’t be troubled with people. So that he could take his
morphine in peace. Suddenly, I’m not sorry at all.
“Tell me, Papa,” I say. “If I had not been interested in medicine and found out that horror autotoxicus was a lie, would you have ever told me any different? Though when the disease was no longer any good, you came up with her… Reasons that I can never leave you. Diseases, ghosts: you liar, Papa. You’d have me forever a child.” His eyes, dark and steady on mine. “Do you know, I even convinced myself that I had seen her? I had a very high fever… I was so afraid. I have been afraid all my life. Enough.”
I go to where he’s slumped. I pluck the hypodermic needle from his nerveless hand. He reaches, vaguely, and I put it behind my back. “This is all you care about,” I say. “I have long accepted it. I have looked up to you. I had hoped to be like you. Those were childish hopes. You are not to be emulated. You are a coward who’d have me shun the world as you do. You kept me here alone, under glass like a microscopic slide.
“You made Tom a groom, threatened me with diseases and ghosts, hoping to end our friendship. You nearly succeeded… And then you tried to send him away. But, Papa, there are some things you cannot control. I have come to tell you that we are to be married.”
He says, in a thick, dreamy voice, “I see.”
“Good,” I say. “I hope that you will give me your blessing.”
He sighs. “I see,” he says again. “Her.” He looks up. Something empty and dead is using his eyes.
He stands. Is Papa so tall? A stench comes off his body.
“Papa…” I waste no more words. Because that is not my father.
The great walnut desk topples with a crash. I leap back and say no, but he’s fast. His fingers are around my neck; they press stars up into my eyes. He squeezes my throat with one hand, with powerful ease. Pain. Whirling white. Cracking like little bones breaking… His grip’s too low to break the hyoid, but I’m suffocating. Something like a rock smashes into my cheekbone; he hits me with a great, closed fist. Things burst, and then there’s singing, singing in my ears, in my skull. The room blurs and fades. We’re deep in a cloud. Sound is muffled, far away. Through the misty streaks, he reaches behind me, for the needle. As he does, his grip loosens, just a little.
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