The child jumps up and claps his hands. “You’re riding. You’re riding. Now me.”

“You’d make a fine horse woman,” the blacksmith says, quiet in my ear.

Between the moving horse between my legs and the blacksmith against my back, and the sweltering heat, I’m starting to feel light-headed.

He swings his leg over and hops down from behind me.

“Place your hands atop my shoulders,” he says.

When I do, he reaches up to my hips and pulls me off, landing me just in front of him. I wobble a little, winded and breathless, and he rights me.

“Thank you, Mister Taylor,” I say.

He shakes his head. “Please, call me Henry.”

“My turn,” Master Thomas shouts. He runs over to the mounting block and can’t stand still for waiting.

The blacksmith lets go of my waist and leads the horse back over to the block. When they’re both settled on its gray back, the blacksmith takes the young master twice around the paddock before saying he’s got to get back to work. They dismount and he leads the horse out of the gate and down the hill for shoeing.

It don’t take Master Thomas but a minute to remember the peach cobbler and he’s dragging me down the hill. “Mother said,” he keeps saying.

When I tell him I ain’t never made a cobbler before, he marches me right over to blind Bessie’s cabin.

“You need to show her what to do,” he tells her.

She’s at her wheel, spinning, seeing all she needs to with her hands. Her husband, Ben, has taken ill and lies stretched out on the bed, air rattling through his chest.

“Now, why do you think you deserve a treat?” she asks him.

“Mother said I could,” he says. “I rode a horse today.”

“Well, ain’t that something. You weren’t scared?”

“Course not, right Sarah?” he says, looking over to me. “Sarah wasn’t either. She rode it too.”

Bessie’s eyebrows shoot up halfway to her forehead. “Sarah rode a horse?”

“With the blacksmith,” he says.

I try to shush him with a finger to my lips that she can’t see.

“But you did,” he says.

Bessie’s mouth pulls down. “That man been sniffing around you?”

“He was getting a horse for shoeing,” I explain. “And Master Thomas wouldn’t go if I didn’t do it first.”

Bessie gropes her way over to me and puts her hand to my face. “This here’s a good place. You don’t got to take no foolishness here. If Master knows about someone trying to carry on his funny business, he’ll put a stop to it.”

I shake my head. “It weren’t like that. He was trying to do a kindness. I rode and then the boy rode. That’s all.”

She pats my cheek and turns to Master Thomas. “Well, if you really rode that horse today, you best lead old Bessie to the kitchen house so I can teach Sarah how to make the best peach cobbler in Virginia.”