The morning crowd had already settled in, but there was still a free table in the back, the little two-seater nestled just before a narrow hallway that ran past the restroom and ended in a storm door opening onto a tiny rear garden. It was the table usually relegated to tourists and newbies who didn’t know to get here by nine for a proper table with elbow room and without the constant motion of the floor rippling beneath as patrons walked to the restroom, but Jenny slipped into one of its narrow chairs with relief, thinking they might have been shut out altogether and have to find someplace else to work. Aidan stopped at the bar and leaned over it, caching up with the barista while he pulled shots for their lattes. They’d learned long ago that if you were pulling an all-day work session at the Bumblebee, you stayed away from the nervous system wrecking ball that was the brewed coffee, and tempered the espresso with plenty of milk and sugar.
By the time Aidan brought over the coffees, she’d gotten her laptop out of her bag and was looking at the project board Lana had built out. “I can’t believe how many pages I need to write for launch,” she sighed. “And this is before any articles. Which, of course, I need whatever comes out of today, plus…” Jenny frowned, peering at a new card that had appeared with her name on it. “A retired racehorse column? Where did this come from?”
“Oh, Lana was telling me about that yesterday,” Aidan said. “You’d already gone. She’s getting it sponsored by one of the big racehorse adoption agencies.”
“A weekly column? You’d think she’d tell me about it.” Jenny read through the requirements: an interview, at least three photos, up to one thousand words, and shook her head in disbelief. “This is not a small order.”
Aidan was plugging his camera into his own laptop. “I’ll get the photos for you if I can, but I don’t know… I’m going to have a lot on my plate with all of the other pieces she’s going to run daily. I wish we weren’t doing the wire stories and the regular race rundowns.”
“Yeah,” Jenny agreed. “I mean, I know why we are… we have to serve as broad an audience as possible. But it does feel pretty repetitive when other sites are already doing it. And it takes time away from writing for the equestrian audience.”
Aidan whistled. “You’ve got to see this filly.”
Jenny craned her neck to see his laptop screen. Cinnamon Sin filled the pixels with extraordinary charisma. She was a star, all right. “Wow,” Jenny said. “If only for that, today was a good investment.”
“Oh my god,” said a voice, and a young woman who had been on the way to the restroom stopped in her tracks. “That’s the most beautiful horse I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“Isn’t she?” Aidan asked, tickled. “I took this a few hours ago, at Belmont.”
“What’s a Belmont?” The woman looked interested. “I used to ride horses, back home in Ohio. I’d love to do it here.”
“Belmont Park?” Jenny asked, tension creasing her consonants. “The racetrack? Where the Belmont Stakes is held?”
“Oh, right. A racehorse.” The woman shrugged, her interest falling away. “I don’t really get into that. I like the jumpers, you know?”
Jenny sat very still as the woman filed past her and into the tiny restroom, trying to push down the speech that she longed to give every time someone acted as if horse racing wasn’t as good as every other horse sport. Aidan, oblivious to her tension, had gotten up and was showing the horse to the barista, who in turn called over some friends at another table. By the time the first woman came out of the restroom, shaking her hands dry—another problem with this table, Jenny remembered—the entire Bumblebee had gotten up to admire Aidan’s photos. Only the lone equestrian in the room went back to her work, showing no interest in the horses.
Jenny watched the woman for a few moments, feeling deflated, before turning back to her notes from the morning. She had to sort out how to turn their walk around the backside and visit with Tommy Vargas into a column about racetrack life, which was going to be an uphill battle considering all they’d done was look at horses going to and from the track, and watched half a dozen works. There wasn’t much she could say about Tommy’s shed-row besides what he’d given her about the filly. But, she reflected, her words weren’t going to get the clicks—at least, not in the first week that Full Stride was live. Her eyes rested on Aidan’s smiling face, his happy expression in the midst of this sweet little triumph. Just like he’d said, it was the visuals people wanted, and they’d come in droves to admire his photos.
Chapter Ten
By two o’clock, Jenny and Aidan had burned through three lattes, a bottle of sparkling water and a sandwich apiece, and their eyes were burning from staring at their laptops. Jenny cracked her knuckles, winced, and then massaged them instead. Her hands ached from typing, but she thought she had a post for the backside blog. Aidan looked over his screen at her and winked.
“I think it’s time to call it a day on the old Bumblebee,” he said. “I’m going to take a walk and then finish up at home later. I can only stare at photos for so long.”
“I have to find an off-track Thoroughbred to profile,” Jenny sighed. “I still can’t believe Lana just assigned me an extra article, without even asking me.”
“She’s probably going to be a tougher boss than we expected.” Aidan closed his laptop. “With that father of hers as a role model. Jimmy Farnsworth, millionaire daddy. He didn’t get that way by being nice.”
Jenny nodded wearily. “I hope she doesn’t think she’s going to make her first million off our backs. Oh, look.” She opened a new email. “Here, she wants me to email a friend in Connecticut who adopted a Thoroughbred and is showing him in hunter schooling shows. Well, that’s fine, I guess. Not exactly the Olympics.”
“You would prefer the Olympics?”
“It would have better clicks,” Jenny pointed out. “Why would someone click on a story about a lady with an ex-racehorse in her backyard? Everyone in the horse business knows someone like that. They’ll scroll right past this. Which makes it a waste of my time. I can’t write things no one is going to read.”
“So what are you going to do?” Aidan was packing up his laptop. “Post on social looking for a subject?”
“I’m going to look around,” Jenny said, leaning back in her chair. She tilted back the last few drops of her latte, tasting the sugar crystals crowded at the bottom. They hit her tongue with a delicious kick. “I’m going to see what’s out there.”
Jenny only knew about Camelot Stables through newspaper articles. Luckily, that was enough. A New York Times article from the archives revealed its location in Midtown West, surprisingly close to their future office, and within a few minutes of stepping off the A train at Fifty-Seventh Street, she was standing in front of a brick tenement that smelled of hay and manure, with a sharp tang of ammonia for good measure. There was sudsy water pooled in the gutter, and an open garage door that took up the ground floor revealed several carriages and a ramp that led upstairs, disappearing into the hidden layers of the structure. There was no sign, and no one around to ask, but it was pretty obvious this was one of Manhattan’s infamous carriage horse stables.
There was no obvious next step, but Jenny knew being a reporter sometimes called for a lot of waiting, and so she took out her phone, leaned against the cool bricks of the tenement wall, and got down to the business of waiting around.
She was engrossed in a Twitter thread about the origin of chocolate-chip cookies when the sound of hooves on pavement made her look up from her phone. A big gray horse, pulling a white open-top carriage, was advancing down the street. The driver hopped down in front of the stable’s driveway and walked to the horse’s head, eyeballing Jenny as he took the reins below the bit.
“Hi,” Jenny said, pocketing her phone. “I was wondering if you could help me?”
The man spoke with an accent, maybe Italian? Jenny wasn’t good with accents. “What is it you need?” His face was wary.
“Your horse is lovely,” Jenny bega
n. “I love seeing horses around the city.” The man’s face relaxed a little, as he realized she wasn’t a picketer who was about to throw a tomato at him or make a video of herself calling him an animal abuser. “I write about horses and I want to do a story about ex-racehorses doing interesting jobs. Are there any in this barn?”
“Any ex-racehorses?”
“Yes, but are there Thoroughbreds, specifically? I write about Thoroughbreds. I know Standardbreds are more natural carriage horses but—” Jenny realized she was babbling and shut her mouth.
“I think there’s one.” The driver led the horse past her, into the building, and started unbuckling the bridle. He was going to unhitch right in front of her, and she wished she could help him—but she had no idea how harness worked, and she’d probably unbuckle things which shouldn’t be touched, the way a helpful boyfriend always seemed to go straight for the cheekpieces of a bridle until they learned that only the noseband and throat-latch were in play on a daily basis. It was a little embarrassing to be confronted with an equine task that she couldn’t participate in, so she hung back by the doorway, hoping he’d offer to help her once his horse was unhitched.
Eventually he led the horse clear of the carriage and walked him back out on the sidewalk. He picked up a trailer tie that was hanging from a ring on the wall, and snapped it to the horse’s halter. “Billy!” he bellowed suddenly, making Jenny jump. “Horse!”
A door in the wall opened and a small Latino man came out, stuffing his phone in his back pocket. “I got him,” Billy assured the driver. “You’re good.”
“Okay.” The driver watched Billy pick up a hose and start spraying the horse down. Then he looked at Jenny. “You can come with me,” he said. “Janice is upstairs this time of day.”
She followed the driver through the door Billy had emerged from (it looked like a staff break room, with a table and chairs and television and fridge) and up a flight of stairs. They emerged onto a strange scene, or strange at least to Jenny’s eyes: a narrow barn aisle, lined with stalls on either side, afternoon light pouring in from the south-facing windows. A few horses looked through their bars at them, idly chewing hay while they contemplated the newcomers. Most were heavy horses, Belgians or Percherons, but one head at the end was fine-boned and slim. That, Jenny knew, was the Thoroughbred.
“Janice!” the driver called. “You up here?”
A human head appeared alongside the Thoroughbred’s. Her dark red hair matched the coat of the horse next to her. “Hello, Ricky! What’s happening?”
“You remember you said having a Thoroughbred would get you press, right? Here she is.” Ricky pointed at Jenny, who smiled nervously.
“Are you nice press or rude press?” Janice asked, making no move to leave her horse’s stall. “Be truthful.”
“Nice press,” Jenny said firmly. “I write for a new website, Full Stride, and I’m doing a weekly column about retired racehorses. I thought it would be fun to find a carriage horse.”
“Well, now,” Janice said, coming out of the stall. The horse tried to follow her and she pushed him back with a gentle hand on his nose. “You’ve come to the right woman.”
“That was… a little scary,” Jenny said about an hour later, clinging to the edge of the carriage’s box.
“No worse than driving a car,” Janice said cheerfully, letting the reins swing loose over Cherry’s back as he walked up the rutted park drive. “Better, actually. The cabbies are afraid to hit a horse, but they’ll cheerfully ram into another car if they think they can get away with it. But let me guess—you don’t drive.”
“I’ve never driven in the city,” Jenny admitted. She relaxed, letting herself touch the seat back for the first time since they’d turned onto Sixth Avenue and started trotting north towards Central Park. It was only five blocks to the calm of the park drives, but Jenny hadn’t been ready for the onslaught of afternoon traffic from her vulnerable post high above Cherry’s hindquarters. The only thing that kept her planted in the seat was the nonchalance with which both Janice and Cherry navigated the city streets, allowing traffic to flow around them, stopping for red lights, and waving to kids on the sidewalks (well, Janice waved, anyway).
“I drive here every day,” Janice sighed. “From Jersey. If anyone ever told you that you could make enough driving a carriage to live in the city, they were lying.”
No one had ever told Jenny this, but, she reflected, she may not have been talking to the right people.
“So you drive Cherry up here every day, and then…”
“We usually wait on the line for a fare, and then we take them around the park. I give the full tour. Some history. Some stories I made up. Some television spots. I’ll take you up to Cherry Hill, show you where Mr. Big proposed to Carrie. That’s always a hit.” Janice pointed to the whimsical Gothic spires of the Dairy as Cherry jogged past. “That’s the Dairy, where little kids used to go with their nannies to get milk. Now they get soda from the hot dog cart. Much healthier in the olden days, right?”
Janice talked nonstop as they wound through the park, and Jenny held up her phone discreetly, recording everything. She was starting to wish she had a podcast instead of an article to write, because the clip-clopping of Cherry’s hooves beneath the patter of Janice’s practiced Central Park spiel was incredibly pleasing. Maybe someday. She’d save the audio file, just in case. Then, Janice said something that startled her.
“I’m sorry, did you say he gets five weeks of vacation?”
“That’s right,” Janice said. She reined Cherry back as the carriage in front of them slowed to a halt, and sighed. “We’re not allowed to stop here, but people want pictures, so we always do. Half the time some cop yells at me and it’s like, what can I do? Run over the carriage in front of me? Anyway, yeah, five weeks vacation, city law. Cherry goes upstate. Twenty acres of green grass. He goes next week. I don’t work out here in midsummer, too damn hot. Half the days you can’t take them out. City says no carriages when the temperature’s ninety.”
“And where did Cherry race? How did you get him?”
“Oh, Cherry’s a New Yorker. He ran at Aqueduct.” The horse ahead of them moved on, and Cherry walked after their carriage without being prompted. They rumbled across the bridge by Bethesda Terrace, where children were splashing in the fountain, the graceful angel at its center gazing listlessly over their heads. “Then he showed up at a place I knew in Queens. They wanted him for a lesson horse, lots of kids out there, but he had a chip in his knee. No one had the cash but I needed a horse. I’d just retired my old guy, a Standardbred. So, I paid for his surgery and his stall rest, and then I taught him to drive, and here we are. Been three years. He’s been a doll. He loves the city. Always watching the people go by. You spend four years at the racetrack, it’s hard to settle down to life at a boarding stable. He spends half the time upstate looking over the fence at the road, watching the cars go by. The owner says he lives for Saturday when all the little kids come for riding lessons. This horse is a born New Yorker.”
The carriage in front of them creaked up a turn-off from the park road, and Cherry followed. It was clearly their usual route; Jenny suspected the reins were just there in case of emergency. Cherry handled the road, Janice handled the spiel. They were a team.
“The place in Queens,” Jenny began. “It’s a lesson barn? A boarding barn?”
“Kinda,” Janice said. “If a neighborhood kid wants to learn to ride a horse, that’s where they go. If someone needs a place for a horse fast, they help out. Lotta ex-racehorses move through there. I wouldn’t say they advertise it, though.”
“Oh, gotcha.” This sounded like another one of New York’s myriad underground operations, and she would guess she didn’t know Janice well enough to keep asking questions about it.
“So, this is Cherry Hill,” Janice announced. Ahead there was a sparkling fountain, surrounded by a circular drive. Another carriage horse was already there, drinking from the fountain’s clear pool, and w
hile they were still approaching, two NYPD officers rode up and let their horses get a drink as well. Cherry walked right up to the fountain, his hooves ringing on the pavement around it, and ducked his head for a drink. “They’re technically not allowed to drink here, but this was originally built as a water trough and our horses appreciate history.” Janice snorted at her joke, and Cherry snorted as he got water up his nose.
Jenny parted from Janice and Cherry at the hack line, where the teams lined up to wait for tourists, or the occasional New Yorker on a date. As she started away, waving goodbye, she noticed Janice taking a bag of carrots out of the carriage, and Cherry watching with pricked ears. “He’s spoiled,” Janice admitted. “But they all are.” And as Jenny walked down the carriage line, she saw that Janice was right—nearly every horse’s bucket had a bag of carrots leaning against it, and drivers were quick to put them in the hands of interested passersby, instructing them on how to feed the horses treats. Their impact on the carrot industry alone must be huge, she thought, smiling as a little girl held out a trembling hand and a black Percheron woofed down the carrot she’d been offering.
Jenny checked her phone—four o’clock, just enough time to get on a train and get a seat before the afternoon crush began. She ran down the steps at the Fifth Avenue subway station, noticing, for the first time, the tile mosaic art of a tall horse decorating the station wall.
Chapter Eleven
The office furniture arrived the same day the site was slated to go live.
Lana was furious.
The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel Page 11
