“Nothing, if it buys you a little peace of mind,” May said.
Ambrose watched his brother visibly compose himself. “I’m not the only one making the decision about that,” he said in a controlled voice. “And besides, we don’t have room for twenty extra horses, darling.” He nodded at the paper and May reached over and turned the page for him.
Then her hand fluttered to her neck, where she fiddled with the necklace, looking sideways at Ambrose as if waiting for him to join the argument. If Ethan did buy all the horses in a show of atonement, the gesture would end up in the newspapers, and not just the society column. Ambrose thought such a public display, his brother buying up polo ponies at the country club, would look more Marie Antoinette than Robin Hood—a tone-deaf gesture. Though he supposed he understood May’s desire. Just yesterday there’d been an editorial in the paper calling the fire a slaughter and speculating that shortcuts had been taken in constructing the secondary mine shaft.
“I can’t stop thinking about them,” May said. “About those families.”
Ambrose felt the need to come to his brother’s defense, to his whole family’s defense, really. “I don’t mean to be cruel, but those men, they knew the risk.” When she didn’t look up, he added, “Their wives, their families did, too.”
“Not you,” she said to Ambrose, and then turned fully in her seat, edging him out of the conversation so she could face Ethan. “You can give the horses away,” she said. “Or we’ll give them back to the families they came from and donate the money where it belongs.”
“Do I have to keep on paying?” Ethan asked quietly, stopping both May and Ambrose for a moment. “There are better ways to go about helping.” He reached up and smoothly turned the page for himself.
“It’s dangerous work and they’re paid accordingly,” Ambrose said to May, wanting her to see reason.
She turned on him then. “They were trapped underground and burned alive. You’re telling me it’s possible to pay someone for that?”
“No one forced them to take the risk. It’s a calculation they made.” He hesitated before he added, “They probably went unconscious from the smoke before the fire reached them.” Though it sounded hard, Ambrose truly thought there was some consolation in the idea of the men not suffering.
“You sound just like your brother,” she said, getting up. “Your father will be so pleased.”
Ambrose had seen enough of the world now to know that men took all sorts of risks to make money, to survive. Ditch diggers in India, pearl divers in Japan, tanners, garbage haulers, and every sort of unsavory work, he’d seen it and understood it. Still, it didn’t mean he’d changed into his father, or Ethan for that matter.
“Sometimes those are the risks men are willing to take to see their children eat.”
“Or to see the owner’s son travel around the world, I suppose,” May said.
Stunned silence enveloped the table. Even the kitchen was quiet. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting—sisterly camaraderie, a joshing, easy sort of intimacy like he had with Loulou?
May rubbed the starched cuff on her shirt. “My comments were made from worry. I apologize,” she said from rote, as if she’d had outbursts before on this topic and had memorized an appeasing apology. She rose, her hobnail boots echoing across the hall and out the front door.
Ambrose’s head swam with her reverberating acerbity. Ethan managed to fold the last page of the newspaper closed. The egg yolk jiggled in its brown broth when Ambrose pushed back from the table and bolted into the gunroom. He made it to the bathroom just in time to be sick in the toilet.
*
After he’d composed himself, he returned to an empty breakfast table—no sign of Ethan, and a void left by May.
His stomach felt tender and a headache lingered on the edge of his vision. He’d never felt it more keenly, the desire to flee. Movement, to be going anywhere, calmed him, provided fresh air to blow out the cobwebs from his brain. He decided then that a walk was what he most needed.
His spirits rallied just a bit when he walked under the blackbuck hanging in his brother’s grand entrance. Here was evidence of adventuring, not of reading about it in newspapers, but of hunting in general for truth, for knowledge, for a way to live.
Once out the door and on the lawn, he took the small path lined with pea gravel to the edge of the tall hay fields.
The path now led to a tennis pavilion, blindingly white, in the distance. Plunked down, really, in the middle of working fields and the bordering woods. The pale ochre clay tennis court baked in the sun. Since when did either Ethan or May play tennis? The unnatural gaudiness of the thing made him suspect it was a gift from Israel, who considered exercise wholesome.
As Ambrose approached the little tennis Parthenon, he saw May sitting on an open ledge of the pavilion, in what would have been a window, pondering the open views. He thought he should apologize. He’d been making the reasonable argument, but she’d seen it as callous. He hazily thought she wouldn’t have done that before, would have given him the benefit of the doubt, wouldn’t have tried so hard to read malevolence into his words. He suspected she’d take offense at anything he said now, as if she were confirming the new slot he’d hold in her life. One booted foot dangled down and kicked out into space, the other stretched out along the length of the ledge.
She didn’t see him as he approached, and he found himself hurrying at the opportunity to talk to her privately. They hadn’t actually been alone since his return. There were always people around, always someone listening.
Her leg stopped kicking when she saw him, and he watched her eyeing exit routes from the pavilion, but then she must have realized there was no escaping him, unless she blatantly ran off.
“What’s wrong?” she called when he was near. “Were you sent after me?”
“Nothing. Get far?” he asked, knowing she hadn’t. Teasing had been his familiar shorthand with her when he’d left.
She looked at him sideways and said, “It was fine.” He’d need to find a new shorthand between them.
“I wanted to say,” he started, but found that somehow her mere presence had managed to turn the tables. She seemed in the right; he, the crass industrialist. “I don’t think it’s perfect,” he said. “I agree it was a tragedy.”
She kept her eyes on the view as she said, “I know you do.”
It was quiet, no breeze, a burning, cloudless sky and the sound of cicadas in the trees.