The next day, alone in the quotidian and decidedly unromantic precincts of the frass-scented bug room, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Theo was nothing like the other men she’d fallen for. Previous lovers had been outdoorsy types with wilderness skills and few intellectual pretensions. At uni in Australia, there’d been the lumberjack turned eco warrior who spent half a year in the crown of a Eucalyptus regnans in Tasmania in order to stop his ex-employers from cutting it down. During her master’s, she had a brief fling with the Israeli captain of a Sea Shepherd catamaran on his way to harass whalers in the Faroes. And a year earlier, there’d been an Icelandic sniper on contract to the Smithsonian to protect scientists in the field. He’d gone off to Alaska to fire sedatives at polar bears if they threatened ichthyologists doing fish counts, and had decided to stay up there.

  She’d known from the get-go that relationships with global adventurers and committed activists weren’t likely to be enduring. It had suited her not to have to think long term. As she hummed her way distractedly around her lab, it became clear that for all her independent ways, she’d missed this feeling—the heightened senses, the slight sparkle of the air—even if it made it difficult to focus on the task at hand.

  But she did have work to do. Catherine would be waiting on the promised CT scans and she hadn’t even fully unpacked the horse’s skeleton yet. She put her palms flat on the bench on either side of the wrapped skull and tried to center her thoughts. Then she began to peel back the layers of foam. She was especially careful as she drew off the last layer, which contained a cottony cushion around the delicate nasal bones. They’d survived intact this long; she didn’t want to be the one to damage them.

  It was only when the skull was fully exposed that Jess noticed something wrong. The left lateral, the lacrimal bone, should have been a delicate crescent swooping underneath the scoop of the eye orbit. Instead, it was a raised, lumpy knuckle.

  Jess’s first thought was that the skull had been damaged in the mounting; that the armature supporting the skull on the spinal column might have accidentally been pushed through the lacrimal bone and then been plastered over to conceal the error. But on closer inspection she could see that wasn’t so. The marks from the armature attachment were in the correct relationship, the delicate, hand-forged brass screws typical of the nineteenth century placed exactly as they should be.

  It was the bone itself that was malformed. Something had happened to this horse when it was alive. Something dreadful.

  TEN BROECK’S JARRET

  Metairie, Louisiana

  1854

  Jarret watched all week as cloudbursts poured rain onto Metairie’s spongy track. Then, as if Richard Ten Broeck had command of the weather, the morning of the race dawned fair and cloudless. Ten Broeck had the very surface for his mudder, and a glorious spring day to tempt a big crowd to the track to watch him run.

  By race time, the sodden soil exhaled a warm mist that rose and billowed over the track. Through the milky haze flickered shifting facets of brilliant color: the ruby, garnet, sapphire, and topaz of the jockeys’ silks. Clouds of vapor blurred the horses into a single surge of heaving muscle as the outriders ponied the racehorses toward their positions at the starting line.

  Jarret felt his skin slick with moisture. Ten Broeck had given him an embroidered banyan coat to wear, and now nervous sweat and the damp air glued the cloth to his limbs. Gripping the reins of his own horse and Lexington’s both, he tried to shrug himself free of the constriction. He glanced at Meichon, who had been vomiting with nerves before mounting up for the race. The boy had sweated through his ruby silks, which now clung darkly to his birdlike bones, making him look blood drenched. Jarret stared up into the brilliant blue sky to clear away that ill-omened image. The other outriders were pulling back from their charges. Unable to delay any longer, he gave Meichon full control of the reins, uttered a final word of reassurance, and wheeled his horse away to join the other outriders on the far rail.

  As he drew close to the crowd, Jarret caught fumes of cognac and claret mingled with the aromas of ripe cheese and roasted fowl. Seeing the horses about to fall in line, spectators wrapped up the remains of their picnics and jostled each other for the best vantage points.

  Richard Ten Broeck didn’t seem at all troubled that only four states were represented at his great challenge. When Willa Viley posited that growing tensions over the slave issue had robbed them of any entrants from the northern states, Ten Broeck dismissed it. “Since when did a sportsman, north or south, let politics come between him and a purse? No, Willa. If they have not entered it is because they think they cannot win. And though it is not in my interest to bruit it about, I think they have seen the matter clearly.”

  Now he left Viley to entertain the former president in the grandeur of the stands, and moved with his usual composure through the throng, accepting greetings from the diverse crowd. Whatever happened on the track, he was already a winner on the gate receipts alone. Twenty thousand souls had descended on the racetrack, paying a dollar each for the privilege. Even as the first heat was about to start, stalled carriages still jammed the shell road, an unbroken line of them, stretching back for a mile or more. Inside the gates, young men—and some few women—scrambled into the treetops to secure a view.

  As he made his way closer to the rail, Ten Broeck rehearsed the race in his mind. Three of the four entrants—Lexington, Lecompte, and Arrow—were sons of Boston, and this contest would prove which was superior. Ten Broeck had sold Arrow to Duncan Kenner, a sugar baron in Ascension Parish, since gelding hadn’t settled the horse’s foul temper. A nagging concern was the jockey whom Kenner had purchased to ride Arrow. Ten Broeck had been reading with some pleasure an article in the Spirit of the Times, detailing how the potential size of the purse offered for his Great State Post Stakes had pushed up the asking price for good thoroughbreds. But at the end of the list of horses that had recently changed hands for elevated prices, the newspaper mentioned in an aside that human property, such as “the Jockey Abe,” had also seen some inflation. The paper reported that Adam Bingaman, Ten Broeck’s good friend, had sold Abe Hawkins to Kenner for twenty-three hundred dollars.

  Ten Broeck read this report with some chagrin. His tenuously held scruples about the slave economy did not stop him from briefly musing whether he should have himself bid for Abe Hawkins. The boy was known as the Black Prince for his ebony skin, and now he had fetched a princely ransom. Ten Broeck thought uneasily of previous races when he had watched Abe ride with nerve in come-from-behind victories, and other times when he had pushed and jostled for pole position with brutal recklessness. The young French boy Meichon would be no match for Abe if it came to such a contest.

  Highlander, the four-year-old champion from Alabama, also had a tough and canny jockey, a White New Yorker, Gilbert Watson Patrick, which perhaps explained the heavy betting that had made him the favorite.

  But Ten Broeck saw his chief danger in the Mississippi entrant, Lecompte, unbeaten in five starts and owned by a gentleman Ten Broeck ardently disliked, General Thomas Jefferson Wells, a planter in Rapides Parish. Wells resented Ten Broeck’s swift rise in New Orleans racing society and let it be known that he considered him a parvenu, if not a blackleg. Lecompte had outstanding endurance and a blazing first burst of speed. He posed a triple threat, having more experience and being arguably out of the better mare, Reel, who had seven consecutive wins before retiring to become a broodmare. The third factor was Wells’s esteemed Black trainer, Hark. An elderly man with long experience, he had risen through the brutalities of the slave system to have full command of Wells’s extensive racing and breeding operation.

  Now, as the horses jostled and strutted near the track, Ten Broeck gazed out and noted that Abe had dismissed his outrider. He had steered Arrow back from the fray, waiting till the last moment to bring him forward, leaning on the horse’s neck as if in some kind of confidential parlay. Ten Broeck supposed it was Abe’s way of containing the horse’s notorious temper.

  If only he had known that Bingaman was of a mind to sell the boy! Still, twenty-three hundred dollars. For a jockey who could be thrown and trampled and lose all value in a second’s mischance. Once crippled, not only the investment wiped out, but then the burden of his upkeep. Better to pay a freeman, like little Meichon, whose mischance could only harm one’s purse in the event, not the evermore. Perhaps, speaking of free men, he should have paid the higher fee and secured the services of Gil Patrick, whose long experience could match Abe’s innate skill . . .

  It was unlike Ten Broeck to waste so much time second-guessing his decisions. He was vexed with himself. He shrugged and shook off all thoughts of things that could not now be changed. He would put his faith in his own judgment. He had the best horse; he was sure of it. The rest would follow.

  As he moved through the crowd, it became apparent that the betting had become feverish. Stakes were various: Women wagered their kid gloves, their lace handkerchiefs. Men, their guns, their cash, or their cotton crops. As Ten Broeck made his way to the fence to watch the start, a punter with whom he was unacquainted grasped him by the sleeve. “A plantation will change hands today,” the man confided. Ten Broeck gently detached the man’s fingers from his coat with a gloved hand. “Oh, more than one, sir, I assure you of it,” he said, and swept on to claim his favored vantage point beside the rails as the clock ticked on toward the 3:30 starting time.

  The drum tapped the start. There was a second’s delay as spectators grasped that the race was on, then a cheer went up. It was a base, animal roar that began on the fence and rippled backward, gaining in volume. Even the genteel ladies in the high stands opened their delicate throats and pierced the sky with their soprano squealing.

  Lexington sprang into the lead, with Arrow coming up second and the other two horses bunched together neck and neck behind. For one minute, two—minutes that stretched like rubber, pulled outside the normal human experience of time—they held that formation.

  At the mile mark, beyond, still they held. Then, on the far turn, Lecompte’s jockey, John, urged his mount to make a dash. The horse came up, nosing past Arrow. Abe and John turned toward each other, exchanging furious glances. Abe rose up, seeming to float out of his stirrups, and plied his whip.

  There’s your mistake, Jarret thought.

  A horse like Arrow, lashed bloody too often in attempts to tame his temper, would be hardened to the whip and resent it. Sure enough, the horse immediately stopped giving. He dropped back, despite Abe’s continued urging. For a few moments, it was a three-horse race. Then Highlander began to falter. Gil Patrick tried, but couldn’t rouse him.

  John moved Lecompte into the gap and drew level with Lexington. Jarret watched the two horses—the rich red chestnut and the bronze-sheened bay, so different in their style of going. Where Lexington stretched out, Lecompte rose up, gathering himself in high, arched strides. He was a bigger horse than Lexington and he seemed to expand even more as he ran. They plunged forward, nose by nose. But then, almost imperceptibly, Lecompte slipped back. Inch by inch, the bigger horse gave ground, leaving Lexington once again in the lead by a neck.

  “He’s just feeling you, that’s all,” Jarret murmured. “Don’t fall for it, Henri.” He worried that young Meichon might conclude that Lecompte had done his dash and, aiming to save energy for the second heat, ease Lexington too early. “Don’t fall for it, Henri.” Jarret was speaking the words aloud now, crying them fruitlessly into the general cacophony. “Don’t fall for it, Henri! Don’t you be fooled.”

  The horses plowed into the fourth mile, and still Lexington held a narrow lead. Spouts of soupy mud flew up from the plunging hooves, splattering the spectators who thronged the rails.

  Jarret began to entertain a hope that Lecompte truly lacked the wherewithal for a further challenge. Then, as they came around the turn and into the straightaway, Jarret stared hard at John’s mud-encrusted hands, positioned oddly on the reins. John was holding Lecompte, even while seeming to unpracticed eyes to be urging him. Canny and patient into the home stretch, John held Lecompte back till the last possible instant. Then he let him go, releasing the winning burst of speed this son of Boston was known for. He came up in a hail of flying clods to hold level with Lexington. Jarret stopped breathing.

  But Lexington eyed his rival and decided he wasn’t to be challenged. Like a machine, he changed gears. One length, two. Even as he flew past the post, a clear winner, Lexington was still surging away. In the stands, the Kentucky contingent screamed their approval. Their horse won by three lengths, ending Lecompte’s undefeated streak.

  Highlander finished in qualifying range and could try for redemption in the second heat. Arrow, beyond the distance post, was disqualified. He would not run again that day. Abe Hawkins wore a grimace of disgust as he left the track. He was not used to losing, much less being distanced.

  Jarret rode out to Meichon, who was trembling with fatigue. He signaled the other grooms to come assist the young jockey from the saddle. He took Lexington’s reins. “Don’t be standing around to take compliments,” he told Meichon. “We ain’t won yet. You got to do this whole thing again in one short hour. Go rest now.”

  Jarret walked Lexington, listening to the crowd as the noise level rose with the free flow of champagne. Desperate punters cried out new odds, avid for someone, anyone, to take their bets on the wondrous stallion from Kentucky. Soon, the money was $100 to $50, Lexington against the field.

  Henri Meichon, washed down and clad in fresh silks, seemed somewhat restored and a good deal calmer when Jarret ponied him out for the start of the second heat. Jarret was glad of it; he hadn’t liked the gray cast to the boy’s skin after his earlier win. Jarret thought of Henri as a promising colt broken too early, ridden too hard. It puzzled him that Ten Broeck, with so much at stake, put his faith in this unseasoned boy. But he pushed these feelings down and arranged his face for Henri so that all he would see there as he gave him the reins was confidence.

  As Jarret pulled back from the starting line, he cast an appraising eye over the other horses. As he expected, Lecompte had cooled out well; unfortunately, so had Highlander. Speed and bottom, Jarret thought. The essential qualities of the four-mile horse. All three of these horses had them.

  The tiny field made a clean start. Lexington got off first and took the rail. On the first turn, Gil Patrick urged Highlander to run around Lexington and take the track. John brought Lecompte up then and challenged Highlander for the lead, pushing Lexington back to third place.

  “He won’t like that one bit,” Jarret muttered. Finishing the first mile, Lecompte was running easily, well clear of Lexington, but Highlander began to labor. Gil Patrick couldn’t do anything, and the horse dropped back. It was once again a two-horse race as they entered the third mile. Lecompte began to draw away. Lexington seemed unable to match his speed. Soon, Lecompte was a full eight lengths in front. Lexington was, suddenly, frighteningly far behind.

  “Don’t give up now, Henri. Lexington won’t. Don’t you doubt him. Just don’t,” Jarret pleaded, his voice lost in the roar coming now from every throat on the course. Worse, Jarret saw a sudden lightning bolt of yellow—the Highlander jockey’s silks—streaking up on the rail. Gil Patrick, emboldened, had found some reserve in Highlander and was driving his horse to take Lexington’s second place.

  “Here he comes—do you see him?” he cried pointlessly. The Alabama horse came up level with Lexington’s hindquarters, then his withers, then his throat latch. They were paired now, as if yoked together. They plunged on, slapping through the mud, neck and neck. For an instant Highlander pushed a nose ahead.

  And that, apparently, was too much for Lexington’s competitive heart. He broke away from Highlander and lunged ahead. Meichon plied his crop and asked Lexington in earnest. They drew level with Lecompte and swung for home, galloping with not a hair between them.

  Then, as if there had been no doubt that this had always been his intention, Lexington put forth a further burst of speed and drew away. In that final furlong, the spectators’ cries gained volume, rising as the horse advanced. In the Ladies’ Pavilion, women from the Kentucky contingent, heedless of decorum, stood up on their chairs and screamed with unbridled joy. One length in front, then two. The cries pitched to a roar as Lexington passed under the wire and won by four lengths.

  When Jarret caught up to Lexington to lead the winner through the thronging admirers, he noticed that the horse’s face remained entirely unspattered, his white blaze gleaming as though he’d never left his stable. “How’d you do that, with the other one in front of you just ’bout the whole way?”

  Lexington paraded up to be admired by Millard Fillmore as Ten Broeck accepted plaudits on the horse and on the event itself, which a general consensus declared the best day of racing in the city’s history. Because of the heavy track, the times had been unremarkable—over eight minutes in each heat—but everyone concurred that the slower times did not capture the excitement of the races, with the excellent and closely matched horses and the uncertainty of the victory in the final heat. Even the composed Ten Broeck allowed himself a broad smile, which was the equivalent of another man’s raucous laughter.

  Just when Jarret was thinking that Lexington had had enough of crowds and attention, Ten Broeck nodded to him. “Cool him down, take him to his stall, and in the morning we’ll have his shoes off and put him out to pasture for the rest of the spring season. Viley and I think he’ll be better off for the big fall contests if he has a few months’ rest. Meanwhile, you, young man, can have your pick: a fifty-dollar purse, a month to go visiting, or a tutor at your disposal for daily schooling. No need to decide now. We’ll talk tomorrow.” He gave a small smile. “But do not expect me early.”