Read Online Circling the Sun by Paula McLain - Free Book Online Page A

done,” he said from the stable door. He seemed to know that even the dusty tip of his boot in the loose box would lessen what I’d carried off without him. “You brought him to life. I suppose he’s yours now.”
    “Mine?” I’d never owned anything or thought I should—happily grooming, handling, feeding, and worrying over my father’s animals for years. But somehow this miraculous animal belonged to me: a bit of grace I hadn’t even known I was desperate for.
    When Pegasus and I finished our run, we made for home the long way, around the northern perimeter of the valley where it furled out in an unbroken sweep. A neighbour had recently snapped up the adjoining parcel, and I saw signs of him now. Newly set fence posts stood as straight as matchsticks where there’d been only open land and unmarred emptiness. I traced the line they made and soon reached the farmer, hatless and barrel-chested, with a spool of wire over his shoulder. He was stringing it with a hammer and claw and staples, the muscles of his arms going taut as he drew the wire hard against the post and secured it. He didn’t stop working until Pegasus and I stood five feet from him. Then he smiled up at me, his collar dark with fresh perspiration. “You’re trampling my pasture.”
    I knew he was joking—there was no pasture yet, or much of anything finished—but I could tell it
would
all be marvellous one day. You could see it in the way he’d set the posts so well. “I can’t believe your house is up,” I said. He’d made it look more suited for town than the bush, with a shingle roof instead of thatch and real glass at the windows.
    “It’s nothing like your father’s place.” He’d already guessed who I was then. Shielding his eyes with the back of his arm, he squinted up at me. “I met him years ago, when I was laid up near here with the Madras volunteers.”
    “You were wounded?”
    “Dysentery, actually. My whole troop had it. Loads of men died.”
    “That sounds awful.”
    “It was.” The smallest hint of a Scottish brogue rolled from behind his tongue. “But there were a few pleasures. One day some of us went off hunting down in the Rongai Valley, and you were there. A good-looking native boy was with you, too, and you were both crack shots.” He smiled, flashing neat square teeth. “You don’t remember me.”
    I scanned his face—the squared-off jaw and strong chin and cornflower-blue eyes—looking for something familiar. “Sorry,” I finally admitted. “There were so many soldiers around then.”
    “You’ve grown up.”
    “Daddy says I might never stop growing. I passed him a while ago.”
    He smiled and continued to look up at me in a way that made me wonder if there was something else I was meant to say or do. I couldn’t imagine what. All I knew of men beyond farm life and work were the warm, confusing thoughts I sometimes had late at night now, about being touched or taken, thoughts that could make my cheeks hot even when I was alone in my hut.
    “Well, it’s nice to see you again.” He reached for his spool of wire without moving his eyes from mine.
    “Good luck,” I told him, and then nudged Pegasus away, glad to be leaving him there with his fence posts, to be turning for home with the sun at my back.
    —
    “I met our new neighbour,” I said at dinner that night, sawing at a slab of Thomsons’-gazelle steak with the tip of my knife.
    “Purves,” my father said. “He’s done a lot with that land.”
    “This is the ex-captain you were telling me about, Charles?” Emma asked from her end of the table. “He’s a good-looking fellow. I saw him in town.”
    “He’s a hard worker, I’ll say that.”
    “What did you think of him, Beryl?”
    I shrugged. “He’s all right, I suppose.”
    “It wouldn’t kill you to make more of an effort socially,” she said. “Do you know
anyone
your age?”
    “My age? He has to be thirty.”
    “Farm life is going to harden you, you know. You think