This was good-bye weather, the overcast sky allowing a gray light of such pathos that nothing on the earth could cast a shadow, as if the house and the stable and the oak trees under which they stood lacked the substance to paint their shapes upon the ground, this morning just another dream conjuration in an existence of eternal sleep.
Jane stood with Jessica to watch the sweet boy mount the Exmoor pony and take the reins. He was briefly awkward clambering astride Hannah but then confident in the saddle, helmeted against falls and saber-toothed tigers. He waved, and Jane waved, and he set off with Gavin, who was riding Samson, across the exercise yard and through an open gate in the ranch-style fence, onto one of the trails that wound through hills of chaparral greener after the seasonal rains than they would be most of the year.
The German shepherds accompanied the riders as far as the gate. But the dogs knew the limits of their license and returned to sit with the women under the shadeless trees, their tails sweeping two arcs of ground, clearing away the crisp oval leaves fallen from the live oaks.
“Where now?” Jess asked, her attention still on the receding figures.
“Better you don’t know.”
“Will we see you in a week or two?”
“Probably not.”
“You need money?”
“No.”
“Because we received the thirty thousand you mailed last week. We put it with the rest.”
“I took it from a guy with extreme desires. He liked totally submissive girls incapable of disobedience. He drew a gun on me and I wasn’t as submissive as he preferred.”
“You don’t need to explain anything to me. I know you aren’t out there robbing banks.”
“I wish it were that easy.”
Man and stallion with boy and pony came to the brow of a hill and poised atop it, like a still from a movie in the tradition of Shane, from an age of hope, when honor and a sense that right would always win suffused the land. Then under hoof, the crown of the hill became a farther slope, on which man and boy descended out of sight, as though they would ride beyond the Mountains of the Moon, all the way to Eldorado.