The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater [6]
Thomas Gratton watches soundlessly as Beech hands off the bucket to me and begins to indelicately butcher the corpse. It doesn’t seem like there should be an artful way to butcher a cow, but there is, and this is not it. For several long moments, I watch Beech carve jagged lines, grunting to himself all the while — I think he may be trying to hum. I am mesmerized by the utter unawareness of the entire process, the childlike pleasure Beech takes in a job ill done. Thomas Gratton and I catch each other’s eye.
“He learned his butchering from his mother, not me,” Thomas Gratton tells me. I don’t quite smile, but he seems gratified by my response anyway.
“If you don’t like how I do it,” Beech says, not looking up from his work, “I’d rather be at the pub, and this knife fits in your hand, too.”
Thomas Gratton makes a mighty sound that comes from somewhere between his nostrils and the top of his mouth; it is a sound that, to me, effectively proves the etymology of Beech’s grunts. He turns away from Beech and looks at the red-tiled roof of one of the buildings flanking the courtyard. “So I expect you’ll be riding in the race this year,” he says.
Beech doesn’t respond, because of course his father is speaking to me. I reply, “I expect so.”
Thomas Gratton doesn’t answer right away, just continues gazing at the evening sun lighting the roof tiles to brilliant orange-red. Eventually, he says, “Yes, I expect that’s what Malvern asks of you, then.”
I have worked in the Malvern Yard since I was ten, and some people say that I got the job out of pity, but those people are wrong. The Malverns’ livelihood and their name are under the roof of their stable — they export sport horses to the mainland — and they won’t have anything compromising that, far less something as humanitarian as pity. I’ve been with the Malverns long enough to know that the Grattons do not care for them, and I know that Thomas Gratton wants me to say something that will allow him to better despise Benjamin Malvern. So I allow a long pause to diffuse the weight of his question, and then I say, with a rattle of the bucket handle, “If it’s all right, I’ll settle the account for this later this week.”
Thomas Gratton laughs softly. “You are the oldest nineteen I’ve ever met, Sean Kendrick.”
I don’t reply, because he is probably right. He tells me to settle the account this Friday as usual, and Beech gives me a parting grunt as I leave the courtyard with the blood.
I need to be thinking about bringing the ponies in from the pasture and adjusting the thoroughbreds’ feed and how I will keep my little flat above the stable warm tonight, but I am thinking of the news Thomas Gratton brought. I am here on firm ground, but part of me is already down on the beach, and my own blood is singing I’m so, so alive.
CHAPTER THREE
PUCK
That night, Gabe breaks the only rule we have.
I am unambitious with dinner, because we don’t have anything other than dried beans, and I’m sick of beans. I make an apple cake and feel rather virtuous about it. Finn is annoying me by spending the afternoon in the yard tinkering with an ancient, broken chain saw that he claims someone gave him but that he probably pulled out of someone’s rubbish because it had gears. I’m cross because I’m inside by myself, which makes me feel like I ought to be tidying, and I don’t want to tidy. I slam around a lot of drawers and cupboards while sort of messing over the eternally full sink, but Finn doesn’t hear me or pretends not to.
Finally, before the sun completely vanishes over the high ground in the west, I throw open the side door and stand