A Difficult Boy (14 page)

“It's naught to do with you, lad.” But Daniel's fingers tightened possessively around the lead rope, and the mare's head tilted toward him, closing Ethan off.

“Silas said I was s'posed to help, that's all.”

“Help me out of a job, you mean,” Daniel snapped.

“I don't want to take her away from you.” Even as he said it, Ethan realized it wasn't entirely true. There was nothing he'd like better than to have Ivy adore him the way she adored Daniel. But why couldn't they both take care of her?

Daniel's stride lengthened. “It's naught to do with what you or I or even Silas will be wanting. It's about himself getting the best use of us.”

Ethan bristled at the idea that he and Daniel were no more than rakes or hoes or shovels to Mr. Lyman. He stopped and folded his arms across his chest. “What if I say I don't want to do it?”

Daniel's lower lip curled as if it couldn't decide whether to turn up or down. “Lad, I wouldn't have you saying ‘won't' to Lyman.” He stroked Ivy's cheek. “Still, I'd not be minding if you could manage to be a bit slow about the learning, eh?” Daniel and Ivy started walking again, this time at a pace more suited to Ethan's legs.

“How did
you
learn?” Ethan asked.

Daniel's hand circled the mare's nose. “She and I—we come here the same day,” he said simply, his voice matter-of-fact and unbarbed. Daniel tugged at a bit of Ivy's forelock that had become trapped under the halter strap. He finger-combed the coarse hair and swept it to one side so it wouldn't hang in the mare's eyes.

For most people, that would have been the beginning of a story. For Daniel, it
was
the story. “So what happened?” Ethan asked when he realized the tale wouldn't come without his prompting.

“Well, we weren't neither of us glad to be there. We had that much in common, didn't we, lass?” Ivy's attention strayed to a vivid green patch of new grass. Daniel started to tug her head away, then relented and let her snag a mouthful of the sweet young growth.

“So that was your job, then, when you started? To take care of Ivy?”

“After a bit. Himself wanted Silas to tend to her, but Silas didn't want to be bothered. So he taught me how.”

“He didn't want her?” Ethan's voice rose in astonishment. How could anyone not thrill at the chance to tend Ivy?

“Silas thinks horses are foolish,” Daniel said.

“What?” Ethan realized that as they walked, he'd wandered across the invisible boundary that Daniel and Ivy had drawn around themselves. Daniel's hand eased on the lead rope, and Ivy stretched her neck across Daniel's body to give Ethan a quizzical inspection.

“Foolish,” Daniel repeated, “ain't they, lass?” He rubbed the mare's neck. “Just like Irishmen.”

The mare tossed her head and planted her feet, eyeing the shiny thing with suspicion and distaste.

“There, lass. It's only a peddler's cart,” Daniel said. “You seen 'em before.”

The cart was pulled off to one side, empty shafts angled to the ground. Tinware bright as silver was arrayed in the cart as temptingly as the wares in Mr. Lyman's store. Milk pans and tin kitchens and lanterns and teapots and coffee pots and mugs sparkled as if freshly polished.

Daniel led the mare up to the cart. “See?” he said. “T'ain't nothing to be fearing, is it, lass?” He walked the mare around the cart until her tail stopped swishing and her ears tipped forward. Once he'd calmed Ivy, Daniel glanced around the farrier's yard. He nodded at a bony gray gelding tethered alongside the shop. “Now there's a sorry excuse for a horse, eh, lad?” he asked.

The gelding looked as though someone had taken parts from several different horses, tossed them randomly together, and sewn them into a skin about a size and a half too big. The horse's enormous head hung from a short snaky neck that looked ready to collapse from the weight it had to bear. Knobby, stick-thin legs ended in dinner-plate-sized
hooves fringed with a luxuriant growth of long silvery hair. The horse's mulish ears flopped, his nostrils quivering with a soft humming that sounded very much like a snore.

“Yessir, I would have to say that is the absolutely most ugliest horse you boys will ever see, should you live to be a hundred and twenty-seven,” said a throaty voice behind the boys.

A man approached from the back of the farrier's shop. At least it mostly looked like a man, though Ethan thought there was something a bit trollish about him. He was barely Daniel's height, but wide enough in the girth that Ethan would have had trouble reaching around him. His once-black spencer had faded to bluish gray, and the short jacket was spotted with unidentifiable stains. His striped vest had trouble meeting around his middle. Ethan expected buttons to burst in all directions with the man's next breath. The man blinked slowly through his spectacles at the boys, his moss-green eyes reminding Ethan of a turtle's.

“Your humble and obedient servant, Jonathan Stocking.” He fastened a wayward button on the flap of his broadfalls and tugged his vest down to cover the gap between vest bottom and trouser top. “That's my cart and that's my horse.” At his gesture, the vest rode up, exposing a white band of shirt across his middle. He tugged the vest down again and buttoned his jacket closed over it.

The gelding rumbled an affectionate greeting to Mr. Stocking. The peddler thumped the horse's hide from neck to shoulder, raising a trail of dust clouds. Eyes half closed, the gelding leaned into the thumps, his ears twitching to attention. “And a damn ugly beast you are, ain't you, Phizzy?”

The peddler's voice had an odd slant to it, words gliding lazily into one another, not at all like the clipped nasal tones of Ethan's neighbors. It reminded Ethan of a southern revival preacher who'd visited Farmington a few years ago. Mr. Stocking
was older than the usual run of peddlers who passed through town. Gray tinged the stray wisps of hair poking out from his tasseled knitted hat, and his cheeks prickled with a smattering of silvery stubble mixed in with the brown.

Mr. Stocking squinted one eye at Ivy. “Now
that
, my boys—” He waved a hand at the mare. She flung her head up and snorted. “That,” Mr. Stocking continued, “is a horse.”

Stepping away from the gelding, Mr. Stocking scraped the ground with one foot and began to recite: “ ‘He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men.' ” The little man pulled himself up to his full height and threw back his head contemptuously. “ ‘He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted. . . . He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he' ”—Mr. Stocking cupped a hand to his ear, alert to an imaginary noise—“ ‘that it is the sound of the trumpet. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha!' ” Mr. Stocking's hand flew up in a wild gesture, his jubilant “Ha, ha!” sending Ethan jumping back two full steps. Ivy's head bobbed, and her throat gurgled in something that sounded like a chuckle. Mr. Stocking's nostrils flared wide. He turned his head this way and that like a questing hound. “ ‘And he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.' ”

It was a fine speech, although Ethan couldn't help wondering how anybody, whether horse or human, could smell thunder and shouting.

Daniel's eyes narrowed under the shade of his cap. “
He's
a mare.”

Mr. Stocking took an affronted step away from Ivy and peered down at her nether regions. “Ah, so she is, so she is. Well, I fancy she could do her share of pawing in the valleys if she had a mind to, eh, son?”

Ivy cast a placid eye on Mr. Stocking. To Ethan, she looked
like the last horse in the world—except perhaps for Mr. Stocking's gelding—to be pawing in valleys and laughing at trumpets.

“What is that—Shakespeare?” Daniel asked.

“Scripture, son, Scripture. Job. A man I'm well acquainted with, in spirit, if not in fact. ‘I will not change my horse with any that treads but on four pasterns. When I bestride him'—er, her, in this case—” He raised an eyebrow toward Ivy. “ ‘When I bestride
her
, I soar, I am a hawk; she trots the air; the earth sings when she touches it; the basest horn of her hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes. She's of the color of the nutmeg. And of the heat of the ginger. She is pure air and fire. She is indeed a horse, and all other jades you may call beasts.' ” He bowed toward Ivy with a flourish of his hat. “ ‘Indeed, my lord, it is a most absolute and excellent horse.' ”

The skin on Ethan's arms and neck prickled. It was just exactly as Daniel and Ivy had looked racing across the field last week. Daniel's eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. Then he caught Ethan staring at him and clapped his jaw shut and fussed with Ivy's halter. Ivy arched her dainty neck as if preening at the words.

Mr. Stocking cleared his throat, tugged vest and spencer down, and tweaked his cuffs. “
That
, my boys, is Shakespeare, and the next best thing to Scripture for divine inspiration. A man who has those two books has a library in his keeping.” Mr. Stocking's reptilian glance swept Ivy from nose to tail. “So, is this fine beast yours?”

Daniel's mouth hardened into a sneer. “Oh, aye. And I got a dozen more back to home just like her or better. I feed 'em on naught but Seville oranges and Scotch cake and raspberry cordial.”

A gold tooth winked from the corner of Mr. Stocking's
mouth when he smiled. “Ah, I suspected as much when I heard you speak. You're an exiled Irish prince, then.”

Daniel tugged at his frock. “Oh, aye, and these must be me royal robes, then, eh?” Ethan wondered that the acid in his voice didn't burn the peddler.

But Mr. Stocking's grin only widened, exposing yellowing teeth, square like a horse's. “Well, I imagine you only dress like this so's not to make folks uncomfortable in your exalted presence.”

Daniel pressed his lips together, an angry blush scalding his cheeks.

Mr. Stocking's nose jutted forward. “Now, son, I'm not mocking you. I'm only listening to your horse.”

Daniel stepped back, sheltering under Ivy's chin. He nudged his head against her neck. “Even a horse could tell you I ain't nothing and ain't never going to be.”

Mr. Stocking's gaze traveled slowly from Daniel's cap to his toes and back, then wandered to the mare's face before finally settling back on Daniel. “Indeed, son, you
ain't
nothing,” he said. It was curious, Ethan thought, how his emphasis on the one word changed the whole sentence. “What you
are
, I couldn't rightwise say, but that horse knows, don't she?”

“It ain't no prince, anyways.”

One of Mr. Stocking's eyebrows settled on the rim of his spectacles. “Well, there's princes and there's princes, ain't there?”

Daniel scowled, his eyes challenging the peddler's stare. Daniel blinked first. Then he snorted. “What you're saying is every man's home is his castle, and every man's a king to his dog, eh? Well, sir, I got no home nor dog nor horse to call me own, and ain't likely to, so you needn't be wasting any of your peddler's flatteries on me. I got no money to be buying your wooden nutmegs with.”

The folds of Mr. Stocking's eyelids gathered as he turned his
turtle-gaze onto Ethan. “There's courtesy for you. I take your brother for a prince and he takes me for a thief.”

Daniel drew in a sharp breath, as if the peddler's words had stung, though Mr. Stocking's voice had been jovial.

“You want to find your thieves, son,” Mr. Stocking continued, “you look to your storekeepers. Now you might—
might
, mind you—find a peddler dealing in the odd wooden nutmeg, though I've never seen such things myself. But a storekeeper'll steal the teeth out of your mouth and sell 'em back to you for ivory shirt studs quicker'n you can blink. And if you did, he might steal the blink, too.”

Daniel's chin lowered, but not much. “I can't debate you there.”

“Mr. Lyman—our master, that is—he's a storekeeper,” Ethan explained.

“Aye, and he got no love for peddlers, neither,” Daniel added, his voice prickly. “I'd not be crossing his path, if I was you.”

Mr. Stocking pulled a brown ropy twist of tobacco from his pocket. He cut a plug off and slipped it into his mouth. “Sounds like you got no love for him, neither, son.” A brown dribble trickled out of the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. “A hard man, your Mr. Lyman?”

Daniel shrugged. “You might say that.”

“Why not hire yourself to another, then?”

“I can't.” Daniel smoothed Ivy's mane. “I'm bound.”

Mr. Hemenway emerged from his shop, wiping a sooty forearm across his sooty bald head.

The peddler tilted his head toward the farrier. “Now just to show a peddler can play you fair, I'll step aside for a real horse.”

Daniel squinted and tilted his head. “You were here first.
We ain't in no hurry.”

Mr. Stocking bowed as elegantly as a man of his stature and girth could. “Go ahead, son. Phizzy and I will have a visit with your brother while yon smith works.”

“He ain't me brother no more'n I'm an Irish prince.” Daniel's voice had a peculiar rasp to it, and he turned sharply away.

Mr. Stocking made a thoughtful “humphing” noise as Daniel led the mare over to the farrier. The peddler turned his head and spat a long brown stream that arced over the trough and splatted into the dirt beyond. “Now, I've seen some peculiar boys in my day, son, but that is one of the peculiarest,” he said.

“He was awful rude,” Ethan admitted. “But you shouldn't' a teased him 'bout being a prince.”

Mr. Stocking watched Daniel discuss terms with Mr. Hemenway. The boy's grubby brown cap and the big farrier's shiny soot-streaked scalp bent together over Silas's little brown account book. Ivy's nose kept light but constant contact with Daniel, whose hand strayed now and then to her neck or cheek. “I'd say your brother looks to be as hard a servant as your Mr. Lyman is a master.”