The Grey Horse

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  Anraí blinked thoughtfully. “I believe that, if you’re half so good riding as being ridden. But I can scarcely afford Donncha.”

  “You needn’t pay me.”

  Anraí blinked again, this time squeezing his eyes shut. “I can scarcely feed Donncha. That’s how bad things are for me.”

  The brown eyes remained mild. “Well, you needn’t feed me either, as long as you’ve got grazing, and how could I say fairer than that? Anraí, I can make that red vandal behave himself for James Blondell.”

  “The priest told me,” said Anraí dryly. He sighed. “And what in return, my lad? Are you a devil, that you have a fancy for my soul? Or is it my lovely wife you covet.”

  Ruairí laughed in his nose and put a foolish hand through his hair. “I could scarcely do better than Áine, it’s true, but I doubt I have force of arms to tear her away from her old man. She’d hit me on the head first chance she had.

  “And I have no more interest in your soul, Anraí, than … than Donncha has. Less by far than Tadhg Ó Murchú who is in the kitchen drinking your whiskey now. What I need of you is the protection of your name and of your establishment.”

  The small man pulled himself up onto the pile of pillows. “The … the protection of my what?”

  “I must convince Seán Standún of the ships that I am a respectable man, so that he will give me his daughter. She is the woman for whose birth I have waited, with beauty and strength on her like that of my own mother. And she is distant kin to me. You have no others like her in Ireland today.”

  Anraí blinked, drawn out of his own pain by curiosity. “Eibhlín? She is a beauty, certainly, but strength …”

  Ruairí snorted. “She is a day-old chick. It’s black Máire I mean, who is great-minded and courageous and sound from head to foot. How can a man who knows value in horses not know that of women?”

  Anraí stared at the square face before him, and then through it, and into space. He sank back into the bed. “Go away, lad,” he said quietly. “You make me tired.”

  Donncha drove the priest home, leaving Ruairí standing at the door of the house. He waved his cap to them.

  The moon had risen by the time they began their sedate journey behind the dun cob, and it lit the rubbly road until the brightness made the eyes water. The stones that lay about in heaps were a lunar silver, but the dry winter heath drank all the light and gave nothing back.

  Donncha wanted very much to tell Father Ó Murchú that Ruairí was a púca: a horse fairy. His eyes were round and glassy with the moon and with this desire to impart information, and his lips were constantly parted to speak, but he said nothing at all.

  For horsemen are like gypsies: they may war among themselves lifelong, but they know the difference between one of their own and a man who is not a horseman by trade. He had shared whiskey with the creature. He had offered it the worst violence man can do to man (albeit ignorantly), and the fairy had laughed it off. There was a sort of debt there.

  Most certainly the priest could not approve of fairies. St. Patrick himself had been their enemy. Besides, Father Ó Murchú had been severely educated in Rome, and it was quite possible he did not see fairies or believe in them.

  Meanwhile, Tadhg Ó Murchú who had smelled Ruairí out as a man of lies, sat next to the silent Donncha and merely supposed him to be dozing. He had no fears for his own safety, this ride, not even with a sleeping driver, for the cob’s deliberate trot could not get them into danger very quickly.

  He prayed: for Anraí’s soul and for his body, for Áine, and for the boy in the army. He also begged help against his own abiding fault of distrust and wondered why he had accused that foolish, good-natured MacEibhir of lying to him.

  Donncha did doze off, and so did the priest. The cob continued on at his own speed toward Carraroe, and up from the shores of Cashla Bay moon-shining ponies came up to inquire of them, still trailing strands of sweetish seaweed from their mouths. These were mostly mares, swollen sided with spring’s babies, with weanlings like stick-legged bears beside them. In unison they nodded at the gig, their ample manes almost hiding their ears and eyes, and the neatly trimmed cob snorted his dismissal of those who neither sow nor reap.

  Tadhg Ó Murchú heard the ponies through his dreams: their hoof falls like rain and their thick nickering. He peered through slitted eyes at them, looking Chinese and inscrutable, and they blinked their big, brown mare eyes back at him. He began to drift off again, hugging his shawl and his crucifix against the late-night wind.

  Now he was dreaming, for an arrangement of lights and shadows at the side of the road became the face of Ruairí MacEibhir, and the fellow looked at him and nod-nod-nodded his head, like the little mares. The priest shivered, and the dream figure laughed with moon-white teeth and impossible eyes. Ó Murchú sat bolt upright, and it was not a man at all but a white horse, neat and burly, standing head and shoulders above the pony mares. Its flanks glistened with sweat. It was nodding.

  They were at An Sruthán already. There, down the little pier, An Dreoilín, one of Standún’s Galway hookers, rested creaking against its moorings. There were voices calling and answering. Father Ó Murchú listened carefully, and one of them was a woman’s voice: the voice he had been expecting. It was Máire, Standún’s eldest daughter, bringing tea to the men, as she did often before the day’s fishing. It was gossiped that she did so hoping to win some cold sailor’s heart, and that she came before dawn so that her sister’s looks would not cast her in total shade. But that was not true, Ó Murchú knew, for he knew Máire well. Besides, Eibhlín never came down to the boats, if she could help it.

  The priest yawned, feeling the tears turn cold as they leaked from his eyes down over his outsized cheekbones. When he wiped them away the horse and all the ponies were gone.

  James Blondell walked into his wife’s sitting room and tossed the newspaper onto the table next to her. She glanced up in irritation. “That print gets all over my canvas, James.”

  He picked it up again and looked at his grey-smudged hand. He turned a circuit of the little room, examining all the furniture, and at last, sighing, sat himself down and dropped the folded paper onto his own lap.

  Hermione Blondell had a gold-rimmed lorgnètte that she used to help her focus on her embroidery. James had often thought a simple pince nez would be more useful, freeing her left hand to steady the frame as she drove the needle. She had the proper nose for a pince nez, with a little shelf extending almost horizontally out between her eyes. Indeed it was servant’s gossip (which Blondell never admitted overhearing) that it was this nose that impaired Hennione Blondell’s near sight.

  It was the true Delagardie nose, identical to her father’s. James Blondell knew how to value that nose, as he did the extravagances of his chestnut stallion, and he never suggested the pince nez. He was a little sorry that Tobias, their only child, did not seem likely to develop the nose.

  She was still working on the sunflowers: four of them, almost life-sized, in various shades of gold and green. Her stitches were astonishingly tiny and regular, and Blondell was surprised how realistic an effect they were producing. The tiny skeins of silk on the table did not look natural in color at all.

  Not for the first time he noticed how close the pattern of Hermie’s stitchery was to the wallpaper, which was also sunflowers. The wing chair on which she sat was mustard in tone, and Blondell’s heavier armchair, a brassy green. The immortelles and the pampas plumes had been tinted daffodil color. The aspect of the room was south and, on bright days, tended to give off a glare oppressive to the senses.

  In County Galway, however, that was no great drawback.

  “I hear old Raftery the trainer has had a bit of a stroke. Or a heart attack or something.”

  Hennione glanced at her husband without moving her head. “Did you find that in the Galway Intelligencer, dear?”

  He lifted the paper in his lap and dropped it again. “No, of course not. Beebs told me.”

  Her very delica
te mouth curled tolerantly.

  The paper rose and fell again as Blondell stared out the window onto clouds. “I wonder if I should in conscience take Imperator home again.”

  “Why ‘in conscience,’ James? Is there …” Hermione drove her needle into the canvas, which made a popping sound almost like rain. She turned her glasses to him. “I did not know that Raftery had the horse. Why on earth, when we have our own staff …”

  The clouds were moving very fast. Blondell felt a sick impatience with this winter. “Kelly is kept busy enough.”

  “Oh, James, talk good English, with me at least.”

  Between one moment and the next, Blondell’s palms went sweaty. He looked in from the window to his hands, which were now dangerously grimy from newsprint. “‘Busy enough’ is good English,” he said reasonably. “If I had said ‘busy galore,’ that would be different. And three grooms and a coachman can’t be expected to keep a stallion like that in line as well as a stable full of carriage horses, my hacks, the farm horses in winter, your mare, and Toby’s pony.”

  Her eye, through the lens, was first huge and then missing as she waved the lorgnette. “Toby never uses that pony. Why didn’t you keep the stallion in Wicklow with your hunters?”

  Blondell took a measured breath. “Because he’s to stand here, that’s why. It’s in Galway we need a shot of quality in the young stock. Wicklow has no problems that way. Besides, I can hire Raftery cheaper than board a horse without training back east.”

  The golden thread made a ripping sound as it pulled taut in the canvas. “Yes, certainly. And you also have an excuse to sit down in his kitchen in your shirt-sleeves, drink poitín, and talk like a native.”

  “Hermie!” Blondell’s mouth hung open in outrage for two seconds. “What am I, if not a native? I was born in this county. In this house!” He stamped his foot on the Aubusson floral carpet.

  Hermione Blondell winced and leaned back into her chair. She was not a large woman, and her hands appeared frail. “You know what I mean, James. Playing the Irish. You love to do it. Tobias told me about your social afternoon with Henry Raftery and his wife. Ham and potatoes, wasn’t it? Do you want him to grow up talking Gaelic in the barns, too?”

  “I’d be very happy—“ Blondell almost shouted ”—as long as he can also talk English in the drawing rooms, and there’s no fear he’ll fail at that! Toby is Irish, as I am Irish. You didn’t seem to mind it when you married me!” Aggrievedly he added “You said the accent was pleasant to your ear.”

  She shrank further away from him, but there was no timidity in her reply. “In reasonable doses, it is, James. It’s just that out here in the mud, with no society closer than Galway from autumn to spring …” She drove home the needle.

  Blondell stood and bunched the paper in his sweaty hands. “I’m sorry, Hermie. I know. I’m sorry.” He walked out of the room, still saying it.

  Chapter Five

  Máire Standún, or The Queen of Heaven Rides

  Spring crawled out of the cracks between the rocks, too small for a man to notice. It was no taller than the narcissi in Áine NíAnluain’s poor, horse-abused border garden, no wider than a spear of grass. It consisted of hard buds on the fruit trees and furry buds on the willow. It destroyed the heavy coats of the horses, leaving them harsh and staring. Diseaselike holes appeared in the raiment of the stable’s one cow as she rubbed against the trees of the pasture, and birds fought over the pads of red hair that she left behind.

  The season was as yet an uneasiness, marked by tiny flowers. It was not yet comfortable. It had not yet touched the sky.

  Tobias Blondell, who was eleven, wandered the muddy edges of the roads near his house, soiling his black American-leather boots. Tobias was sorely beleaguered by tutors—three of them—and by the expectations of his father.

  Mr. Blondell had very much wanted a sporting sort of son, with his own square physique, preferably with the Delagardie nose. He had gotten Tobias, with Hermione’s neuresthenic build and a round, resentful face with hardly a nose at all. Tobias had no enthusiasm for sport, and indeed few enthusiasms at all. He was afraid of horses.

  Today, a Tuesday of fast-moving cumulus clouds, Toby had gotten away. It was because of Mr. Chubb’s septic throat, which Mrs. Blondell suspected to be contagious. Toby was still dressed for indoor work, for he had been afraid that in the time it took him to change, his father might have shown up and thought of some useful and strenuous activity to replace the lesson hour. His shirt was now damp with his effort to avoid this, and the wind stuck it against his narrow back. As he scrambled, his eyes on the gross imperfections of the road, he conjugated Latin verbs backward, from plural to singular and from third person to first, in an effort to further hex his sick tutor.

  It was three miles into Carraroe, and his mother would not be happy if she found out he had been there, alone and on lesson time. She would think he was taking after his father. Given that circumstance, Toby had no choice but to drift toward the town.

  Along the side of the road were scattered the two-window cottages lived in by the natives. The small stone buildings were set seemingly at random in their walled fields, pointing at various degrees of the compass and paying no attention to the road. Most of the roofs were of slate, and even these showed injuries where the wind had torn through. Sea pink bloomed under the stones and the air rang with the play of children in the yards of beaten earth.

  The irregular houses seemed perfectly natural to Toby. The ten-minute-long gusts of rain, immediately followed by sun, were only to be expected. It was also natural and to be expected that Tobias Blondell should be walking alone, while eight boys in filthy homespun played hurley by the side of the road, sparing him only sidelong, sullen glances. They were not of his kind. Neither were the boys in Dorset, his cousins, of his kind. Indeed, Toby was not sure there were any of his kind on the face of the earth.

  Footsteps advanced on him from behind. He slouched further off the road and examined his stick with great attention, but he was greeted anyway.

  “Good morning to you, Master Blondell,” said John Stanton in English. The boat owner was a fair man, thin faced and dressed in tweeds, as though (thought Toby) he were a gentleman. Toby had doubts.

  He had his two daughters with him: the one that looked like him and the one that did not. Eibhlín, the pretty blonde girl, gave him a smile, a giggle, and a slantwise look that Toby was five years too young to appreciate. “Good morning, Mr. Stanton,” he answered very politely, his shoulders hunched up to his ears. “Good morning, ladies.”

  “Answer the lad,” said Standún to his daughters. “Don’t stand there like barefoot cailins without English.”

  “Good morning, Master Blondell,” said Eibhlín.

  The dark girl who did not look like her father gave Toby a slow, measuring stare. “You’re going to catch it for ruining those fine boots, Toby.” There was nothing chiding in her tone, and her black eyes held only a dry amusement. “Is the game you’re playing worth it, I wonder?”

  Toby was rather surprised to find himself not offended. “I’m only taking a walk into town, Miss Máire. My Latin tutor’s got an infected throat.”

  “And it’s none of your business anyway, Mary,” added Stanton, who was clearly displeased. “He would afford his father no satisfaction if he walked around dressed like a spailpin.”

  Although Toby Blondell was exquisitely aware of his position in the community, he could not bear to hear it stated this way. He winced, and Máire Standún saw it. They shared a single black, resentful glance, and then Máire walked on ahead.

  The air was balmy and seemed to bear her up. Her nose was filled with the sweetness of wild hyacinth. Her skirt of red wool was too warm.

  “You make a very bad impression in front of the gentry,” said her father, when his long legs had caught up with her.

  “The gentry?” She answered slowly, as was her habit, and in Irish. “You mean that little boy?”

  “Mr. Blondell’s
boy. Who will be squire himself one day.”

  “Good for him.” Máire yawned in the heat. “What’s it to me? If I’m nice to him, will he marry me when he grows up?”

  Her father snorted. “Marriage is a thing you ought to think about, for a change. I don’t want to be supporting you when you turn thirty!”

  Her glance at her father’s face was black and blank. “Do you suggest I rob the Blondell’s cradle? Go on with you, Father! Toby Blondell is not going to look for an overage, oversized Gael woman to wife. Besides which”—and she tossed her hair back—“Eibhlín thinks of marriage enough for both of us.”

  “That’s enough!” said her father.

  The blonde girl recoiled. “And if I do, it’s because there’s some prospect of marriage before me! Perhaps I may pick and choose, while some …”

  “Enough out of you also, my dear.”

  Máire turned slowly to her sister, with the force of a mountain moving. “You don’t pick as much as collect, Eibhlín. And what you call choosing I call advertising, and people do not advertise unless they have something to sell.”

  Standún stopped dead and stared at his oldest daughter in shock.

  Eibhlín crossed her arms in her black shawl and took a step backward, away from her sister’s anger. “Ask her what she does with the priest at evenings, Father. There’s only so many children’s evenings or surplices to mend, and the woman who tends the rectory is known to be both deaf and blind. As God’s my witness, she’s not interested in marriage because she cannot marry the man she has caught!”

  In another instant Eibhlín was cupping her hand around her split lip, while the air still rang with the sound of Máire’s backhand blow. The dark girl still held in her left hand a handkerchief holding six hen’s eggs, and she gazed blankly down at it, as though disbelieving they were unbroken.