Outlawed(49)

But as soon as I saw Lark, I felt exposed, as though anyone who saw me would be able to tell what I was thinking. He carried himself with more confidence than I remembered; what I had taken for unease in Fiddleback seemed now more like caution, as he held his body still while the shy horse licked his hand. When he turned to face me, I turned away as if I didn’t see him, and turned back only when Henry joined him and News greeted them both, clapping them on their backs and shaking their hands.

“Should we find somewhere we can talk?” News asked.

Henry shook his head.

“Look around you,” he said. I did—I saw children chasing each other and jostling to pet the ponies; women in sensible bonnets or colorful fascinators haggling and flirting, laughing and whispering, a few selling cheap glass beaded jewelry right off their own plump arms; and men in Sunday suits and dungarees and buckskins and every combination thereof, measuring the horses’ backs and scrutinizing their hooves, waving notes and bags of coin in the air, arguing, shoving each other both in jest and in provocation, and generally conducting what seemed to be a combination of business, friendship, and war.

“I guarantee you one in ten men here right now is a horse thief, and one in twenty women. There’s no place safer for us to talk; we blend right in.”

We strolled down the line of horse stalls, Henry and News in front, Lark and I in the rear.

“Tomorrow is Mothering Monday,” Henry said. “Everybody will be feasting and drinking and carrying on. We wait till the party’s in full swing, then we find an unattended wagon, hitch up our horses, and ride off with it.”

“What do we do about the sheriff’s posse?” News asked. “Surely they’ll be on patrol.”

“Of course,” said Henry, “but I’ve been to this Market before. At least in my experience, the men in the posse like to take a drink on Mothering Monday as much as anyone. And since everyone will be dressed up, they’ll be all turned around—odds are they won’t know we aren’t the ones who drove the wagon in on Good Friday in the first place. Lark and Adam will look like fine, upstanding young merchants, don’t you think? Especially in their Monday best.”

We looped back around to the costume stalls.

“I saw a pink housedress here with your name on it,” Henry said to News, pointing to the cheapest of the stalls, where a hand-lettered sign advertised a dress and hat together for a bargain price of five silver liberties.

“Please,” said News, fingering a parrot-green ensemble. “You know pink isn’t my color.”

I selected a blue dress with small white polka dots. It was pretty, like something I might have worn in Fairchild, and it made me think of dances before I was married, when Ulla and Susie and I would stand against the wall looking at boys and then looking away until they came up to ask us to dance.

News took one look at it and put it back on the rack, picking out instead an ugly yellow one printed with huge pink roses, plus some garish red greasepaint.

“You’re not supposed to look pretty,” she whispered as Henry and Lark browsed a nearby rack. “You’re supposed to look ridiculous.”

The woman who took our money and wrapped our purchases in brown paper was very striking, with large green eyes and a determined jut to her chin. She kept her eyes locked on News’s face as she counted out our change, a gaze I thought was rude until I understood its meaning.

“Will I see you at the dance tomorrow?” News asked as she pocketed the coins.

“You’ll see me,” the woman said.

“Tomorrow, then,” said News, tipping the brim of her hat.

Henry smiled as we left the stall, shaking his head.

“Swift work as always,” he said to News.

“Just being friendly,” News replied.

Our path next led us back to the tent, where a man was beginning to address the crowd. News and Henry took up a position behind a tentpole festooned with ribbon; I had to look around it in order to see. The man who spoke was short and slight, with a round, bald head and horn-rimmed glasses, but he had a loud, confident voice and a way of moving around the stage that made him seem to occupy a space bigger than his physical form.

“Now some foals are strong and hardy and others are weak and sickly,” the preacher said. “Some grow up fast and sure-footed, and others are slow and clumsy, barely good for pulling a plow. Some weather every season and others succumb to fever their very first winter.”

“Come on,” said Henry to News, his voice softer now. “Let’s go get a drink. They’re selling double whiskeys for five coppers over by the Babies’ Tears.”

News shook her head. “You go if you want,” she said. “I want to hear this.”

“Any good rancher knows that nine times out of ten, a strong horse comes from strong stock,” the preacher said. “A weak horse comes from weak stock. That’s just the way it is.

“And we know that human beings are the same way. A fertile woman usually comes from a big family. A mother with a cleft lip or a clubfoot, like as not, will have children with the same ailment.”

The man’s words were familiar to me, but I struggled to place them.

“Now,” he went on, “I have something to show you that I believe will drive home my point.”

A pleasant-faced young woman in a yellow dress and bonnet led onto the stage two goats, a brown nanny goat with short hair and a shaggy black billy goat with a long beard. Both were plump and vigorous, tugging on their leads, making the woman giggle as she tried to contain them.