by Amanda Dykes
And Mr. MacMannus kept away. I only ever saw him across the track, when I arrived in time to see them running the horses in practice heats, those daily rumbles that summoned me. I watched for years from the shadows, but slowly, over time, I found a spot at the fence, obscured slightly by a nearby tree, where I could drape my arms over the rail and taste the dust as the horses drove with all their might toward the finish line.
So much purpose, they had. I watched the singular, fire-hewn focus in their animal eyes. I could almost hear them, in the steady pounding of hoofbeats, drill the one truth into me that Maplehurst had taught me: Make a plan. With every disaster, make a plan. For every uncertainty, make a plan. The hoofbeats and the words drilled: Make a plan. Make a plan. Make a plan.
I didn’t have two pennies to rub together, or much educating in my brain, but I could at least be ready for anything.
“Matty!” Celia’s voice sailed up the hill behind me now. “Matty, wait!”
My feet urged me on but something inside slowed, and suddenly I was stuck in the middle of a tug-o’-war. “Yeah?”
I turned to watch her, her gait carrying a lilt with the way her left foot limped. Some folks thought it made her a spectacle. But I knew it gave music to her movements and matched something inside of her, the way she was always coming at things from an angle, seeing more than everyone else.
She was fast, too. We’d made sure of that, she and I, in case she ever had a run-in with the man who’d left more than a few scars on my back with his horsewhip. There’d been too many close calls already, though Mr. MacMannus hadn’t come anywhere near us since his first wife died a few years back and he’d brought a new wife home three months later.
The first Mrs. MacMannus had simply ignored us. The new Mrs. MacMannus liked to turn her nose up at us like we were vermin discovered in her mound of jewels, which by all appearances was a heap bigger than the Adirondacks. Apparently, she didn’t like to be reminded of her husband’s . . . well. Let’s just say I’d grown up pretty quickly after our mother died and learned fast what happened to a widowed caretaker’s wife trying to earn her keep by darning socks and trying not to lose the only home she’d known. The owner came around during the hours of four and five o’clock most days, that’s what happened.
I was born a year later, and then Celia. Everyone knew it to look at us; I had the blue of his eyes and Celia the gold of his hair. But he’d never acknowledge that, not in a million years. And word all over the manor was that the new lady of the house was already fashioning a nursery upstairs, in anticipation of the children she would give him. Heirs to Maplehurst.
And we continued up in the stable loft, happily living in our little wood-slatted, sun-shafted kingdom, and choosing not to hear the talk.
Celia drew up beside me now quick as a wink, her face pained.
“You okay?” I asked, forgetting the pounding river beneath us for a minute.
“No,” she said, her features drawing deeper. I stopped entirely, then.
She gave me a pleading look, her green eyes big.
“C’mon, Celia . . . we’re getting too old for that.” I was closing in on twenty—she was fourteen. We’d carried the roles of adults for more years than we could count. Still, I knew what she wanted. She’d ridden around on my back since she was six and I was eleven, whenever her leg gave her trouble. “Let’s just go home.”
She tipped her head in a silent plea.
I stooped, crouching so she could climb up.
“Gotcha!” she cried, pulling right on past me. A smile spread across her face as her feet pealed across the ground. “Race you!” She was a mystery. Sometimes acting eight—like right now—and sometimes spouting words that made her sound wiser than an eighty-year-old.
“No, you don’t,” I said, and ran to beat the band.
We both stopped at the rock wall, catching our breath and watching as the clouds dissipated into the sky.
“How much you want to bet it’s Poseidon?”
“We shouldn’t bet, Celia.”
“How much you want to bet the food on Maplehurst’s table is paid for by betting?”
I gave her a look. She knew as well as I did what a lost bet could do to a man, to his family. We’d seen it as much as we’d seen the sunrise, growing up at the stables and just a stone’s throw from Saratoga Springs Racetracks, where MacMannus thoroughbreds were often crowned with wreaths of roses.
“Anyway,” I said, “it’s not Poseidon.”
“How can you tell?”
I could no sooner have explained it than I could explain my own pulse. “Listen.”
And we did. To the thrumming, pounding beat. “It’s Gulliver. That’s a horse that was born to run.”
And I was born for this, I thought once again. For the smell of the hay, the slick of the mud on a fresh-rained track, the click of the starting gates harnessing oceans of strength. For that single moment, when the gate flies open to the crack of the pistol—and life, life, life beats into the ground. Going somewhere.
And I knew—I could stay right here, watching all this “going somewhere,” for the rest of my life.
But knowing something doesn’t make it true.
We arrived at Maplehurst’s practice track out of breath. I’d been right—it was Gulliver rounding the bend, his jockey feeling the curves of the track, leaning into them. Gulliver’s hooves pounding while the sounds of birds singing, a saw working, and hammers hammering all struck up a background chorus. A crew of men were building a new grandstand for the MacMannuses’ upcoming private race. “The social event of the season,” Mrs. MacMannus had been saying for months now.
It was just five days away, and the track was in a flurry with preparations. Gardeners, groomers, builders, jockeys, guests who’d arrived days early to stroll the estate with their parasols and canes. New uniforms for the entire staff, both house and stable, were another innovation of Mrs. MacMannus. Her idea of garbing the staff in a way that made them look like accessories to the track she was attempting to elevate to the status of the Waldorf.
Celia and I hadn’t received ours yet, but she’d hear no complaints from me on the matter.
The evening before, she’d hosted a fancy dance for her guests at the big house. I’d seen from our windows, looking up into theirs. The glow of all those lights, Mrs. MacMannus fluttering a silk fan with the vengeance of a thousand flies, a string quartet playing.
A pang had struck my chest, then. Nothing to do with wanting inside. The farther away, the better, in my view. But as those couples danced around, my hands suddenly felt very . . . empty. The thought struck me, unbidden—what would it be like to have someone lace their fingers into mine?
Ridiculous thought. I shook it off immediately, filling my hands instead with Gulliver’s reins for a midnight ride out in the pastures. It had been a good ride. Maybe I’d do it again tonight.
As we arrived back at the stable, I climbed the stairs in jovial spirits for the first time in days, Celia on my heels, chattering about making a loaf of bread for supper. Just as I was ready to turn the dented doorknob to let her step in ahead of me, I froze. I knew that smell.
Blueberry buckle.
Either this was consolation for the past days of Mrs. MacMannus’s flurries . . . or something bad was about to happen.
I had my answer when I saw Mrs. Bluet sitting at our wobbly table, eyes rimmed in red.
“What is it?” I rushed in past my deadpan words, spoken in cold dread. “Are you alright?” She didn’t seem to know what to say. I felt the Flame rising up in me, ready to defend her if someone had dared to hurt her. Mrs. Bluet had once cautioned me about the Flame when I’d chased down the pack of kids who had raided her garden for strawberries when I was twelve years old.
“That burning justice is a gift, Matthew Petticrew. But you be sure and save it for where it’s needed. Some battles aren’t battles after all.”
I stood ready to fight this battle for her, if needed.
“There�
��s no easy way to say this, young Matthew.” She had always called me that, and the name took on a gleam in her eye the year I turned twelve and overtook her height in spades. “You’re—you’re to leave here. The two of you.” Her voice caught.
My jaw twitched. Anger flared. I tamped it down. This was not Mrs. Bluet’s fault. “Who . . . who wants us to leave?”
“Well, that’s just it, my loves.” She put on a smile. “They say the new groom—Hector—will be needing these living quarters.”
“He has living quarters.”
“Yes, and Mrs. MacMannus is bringing in a new caretaker who’ll be needing those.”
Hector was to have our home. A caretaker—whose role I had been filling for years now, with no compensation or dedicated living quarters—was coming. Taking Mother’s old house.
And we were to leave.
“Where will we go?” Celia spoke for the first time, her eyes round. She had made this place a palace, fashioning curtains and couches from castoffs.
“Now, there’s a piece of good news. Mr. MacMannus has found you both good positions. At a hospital for you, Celia,” she said brightly. “In the city. With a boardinghouse for young women just next door. And as a groom at the stable of Harvard University for you, Matthew.”
Celia hung her head. “We won’t be together,” she said quietly.
“We will,” I said. “We’ll find a way.”
A silent word hung heavy over us all, and it was Celia who had courage to speak it. “When?”
Mrs. Bluet hung her head and wiped her eyes. “Today.”
And it was done. Maplehurst, for all its imperfections, had been our whole world for our whole lives . . . and it was closed to us now.
We packed what little we had and were on trains headed in separate directions that very afternoon. As we left Maplehurst for the last time, I cast one last look at it. There, in a window on the third-story landing of the great stair, and hawk-like as ever, was Mr. MacMannus.
I could have been mistaken, but at a distance, he appeared to hang his head . . . and then he vanished. Walked away from his gabled window, away from us. A cloak of remorse about him.
It would be the only gift I was ever to receive from my father. I used to wonder what it would be like to have a father who would fight for you. Not the sort that would attack or ignore you. I imagined the Rough Riders, whose courage and daring I read of in my youth. Theodore Roosevelt, and the kid who rode with him all those years ago—Jasper Truett, who embodied courage. What would it have been to have a father like that?
But that was not for me to know. What I did have, in this moment, was the realization that perhaps, all along, he had been watching us from a distance. He had seen that a hospital would make Celia thrive, her caring spirit meant for such a place. And whether he knew it or not, that arrangement he made for me at Harvard—it was to change my life forever.
3
Mira
1914
Forest of Argonne, France
The sun awoke as a kaleidoscope, pouring in the window of our small kitchen. It was old fabric that made it so, hanging there in front of the glass in colorful strips sewn together. Today, I imagined they were once a part of a beautiful lady’s ball gown. I had read many times of balls in the book of fairy tales on Grand-père’s shelf.
We did not have such balls here, but why should we not? It would be nice to meet people, or at least to see them. They might like to have a ball among the trees. When I was younger, I always lingered on the same tale in those same pages: the tale of a girl and the road. She left home to discover great treasure, and what adventure awaited her on her journey! I used to pretend, as I went about my chores, that I was the girl on that journey. Pursuing great treasure. Perhaps someday, I would find it.
Grand-père teased me back then, so often was my nose glued into that volume with its blue spine and gold letters. Volume II, it said, and I asked him once if there were others. I loved his smile when he answered. Yes, a whole set of them, from when he himself was a boy. And he’d read them to my own Papa when he was just a small thing toddling about. “Where are they now?” I had asked once. He had grown a little sad, then. “I could not bring them when we came here, Mireilles. But I can tell you the tales they held.” And so he had. Stories of matchsticks, mermaids, cinder girls, and poison fruit.
My thoughts still full of balls and fine dresses, I slipped out the door into the morning air to milk Antoinette and bring in fresh blackberries. I set the berries aside for Papa, for tradition stood that whoever had slept upon the floor the night before got the berries. Papa and Grand-père squabbled every night over who would get the lone bed downstairs and who would sleep on the floor in our little chalet. I had the bed in the loft room above, always, because they would not take any argument on that matter.
Papa always insisted Grand-père take the bed, saying, “What son on God’s earth would force his father to sleep on the floor?” Grand-père always fought back, claiming his son was “getting old, older than the dirt of the woods, and must take the bed.” If what he said was true, then it meant he himself was getting older, too, but he ignored that. It was the same every night, a grumpy lullaby. Their own fond way of expressing their care for each other, squabbling as Papa knelt by the hearth and pulled out his matchbox and filled our home with warmth and light.
I fell asleep to that grumpy lullaby smiling, for I knew what I would find each morning: Papa gone early in the morning, while Grand-père snored upon the bed until the sun awoke him. “Let him sleep, Mira,” he had told me once. “He has earned it. Your grand-père has led a remarkable life.”
When I returned from the milking, the man with the remarkable life was wide awake, sitting at our small table.
I told Grand-père of my theory about the curtain.
“A fine lady’s skirts, is it?” he said in between spoonfuls of boiled oats. He ate them slowly, for they must stretch. He would not leave our land of trees for the journey to market for another two weeks yet, and we must have more walnuts and carvings to trade by then. Perhaps his oats would work magic, like Jacques’s magic beans, and make my idea true. I plunked two berries in his oatmeal, a bribe.
Grand-père’s forehead wrinkled, but his eyes twinkled. “You might say that. It would not be untrue, ma petit cheval.” He called me this, always. Little horse. It was silly, I knew, now that I was fifteen and did not know if I fit in the land of fairy tales or in the land of true ball gowns. I supposed my life, odd-shaped as it was, just fit where it fit—which was right here in the Forest of Argonne. A tight and funny fit, like one of Papa’s wooden puzzle pieces, its curves and gaps just so, never to be bound for another place.
I smiled, remembering how I used to give the toothiest grin I could to live up to the name petit cheval. He would lift my chin to gently close my mouth, tug my braids, and say, “You have all the majesty of such a creature, and all the strength too, hiding inside of you. But none of the bad smell. Most of the time.”
It was not the name that stopped me now, but his words. “It would not be untrue.” Never had he said such a thing to one of my stories of the colorful curtain.
I spun my way through feeding the chickens and wringing the laundry and pinning it up to dry, moving to the steady beat of Grand-père’s ax falling upon firewood behind the chalet. This was their way—Grand-père chopped the wood, Papa laid the fires, inviting me to help him kindle and grow the flame. When it was time to bank the coals or stir them up, he would grip the old fire poker and make three rotations, raking it through the coals in circles. The three of us made a complete fire; the three of us made a whole life.
Grand-père’s words from earlier set my fingers to the nimble work until they seem to tap out the song of them. It would not be untrue. Was it truly a lady’s dress, once upon a time? I thought of the village we sometimes traveled to, and of the dance I had seen in the street there one evening. There had been a musette player, letting his arms push his accordion in and out and releasing ma
gical music into the air as his fingers pranced over white and black keys.
If I tried hard, now, I could hear it. Reaching to the village with my memory, gathering that song into the woods, through my veins, out through my feet. I remembered how the couples had danced—men in caps bowing to girls in their cleanest frocks, and how the girls would reach out and take the offered hand. I opened my fingers, but no hand was there to hold. Perhaps one day . . .
But one day might very well not come. This I knew, and so I must soar on that music and hold fast the knowledge that the music was alive and the dance so real, partner or no.
When I reached up on my toes to unclip a sun-dappled bedsheet from the line, a shadow fell upon it from the other side.
“Papa!”
He smiled that quiet smile of his and bowed. I blushed to have been caught humming again. He would know I had been daydreaming. Perhaps he would even see what I was imagining, with the fine ladies and gentlemen dancing among the trees of this wild wood. He knew me so and had guessed my thoughts many times.
“May I have this dance?” He bowed, holding out a hand. I blushed—feeling again the heat of being caught at such a girlish imagining, when I knew I should be thinking on serious things, real things, the things of a young lady. For I was nearer that than I was a child. But what did a young lady think on? I did not know.
I laughed, and he folded my hand into his. It was not as small as it once was in his blistered one, but it felt just as safe. I curtsied and hid my smile as he drew me into his embrace and swayed me this way and that. He smelled of spiced tree sap, and his hands were rough but strong and kind. His satchel flapped against my leg, empty.
