Red, the large man who cares for the horses, steps in front of her, blocking my view.

“Something we can do for you?” he says in a deep, cautious voice. Then he adds, “Sir.” The pause is long enough to turn it from a term of respect into something that borders on threatening.

My knees give a little wobble, though I know I’m not in any real danger. I’m a white man in Virginia, and a black man can’t lay a hand on me, provoked or not, without going to the gallows. And I guess that’s the problem. And I can understand it, sure enough. We wouldn’t take kindly to an English landlord coming into an Irish wedding because he liked the music.

“It was a lovely tune,” I say, backing away.

When I’m a good ways off and can’t be seen, I hear the fiddling start up again. Quieter. Restrained. But with an anguished longing. Every tired, lonely, homesick thing I’m feeling is woven into that tune, and I stop, hidden beyond the brow of the hill, to listen.

Chapter 14

Sarah

I’m digging in the kitchen garden in the afternoon heat, pacing my hoe to the rhythmic strike of the blacksmith’s hammer, steady like a heartbeat, when Missus comes out. She’s hardly said two words to me since I been here, except through Maple.

“Well, look at this, Sarah. The garden is positively flourishing under your tutelage.”

I don’t know what she’s trying to say, but she’s smiling, so I say, “Yes, ma’am.”

“And I’m very pleased that Thomas is so fond of you.”

After sleeping on his floor and tending to every squeak he makes in the night, he’s taken to following me around half the day. “Yes, ma’am,” I say.

It’s too hot for what early May should be, and she pulls out a fan and flaps it in short, jerky spurts. “Your master and I think it’s time for him to get back on a horse.”

I brush the dirt from my hands as she talks. Even I know it’s her daddy whose got them bothered about it. At the supper table last night, he wouldn’t stop talking about how a boy can’t be allowed to be scared of a horse, and how if he don’t get back on he’ll spend his life fearing everything he should be mastering.

“And we’ve decided,” says Missus, “that since he enjoys spending time with you, you’re exactly the right one to help with that.”

“Me, ma’am? I can’t ride no horse.”

She waves her fan at me to hush me up. “For now, just take him up to the paddock and get him comfortable with them again.”

These fool people never stop coming up with fool ideas. How am I supposed to get him comfortable with horses when I don’t know the first thing about it? I’m liable to get the boy kicked in the head. “Maybe Red would be—”

“No, no. Not Red. You.” They don’t want him fearing what he should be mastering, and he’s afraid of Red. “I’ll send him out to you. You can finish that later,” she says, nodding at my hoe. Turning her back, she marches herself up to the house, and a minute later Master Thomas comes out. He takes my hand and off we go.