Opening
Power brokers close in, a boy risks everything for a horse, and a painting in a modern lab quietly points the way back. These chapters pivot the novel from simmering tension to irreversible action, splitting Jarret from his home and renaming his colt Lexington while, in 2019, a forgotten canvas begins speaking across time.
What Happens
Chapter 16: Thomas J. Scott, 1853
From the studio of Thomas J. Scott, work stalls as he watches Jarret Lewis move in serene tandem with the colt Darley, a wordless fluency that embodies The Human-Animal Bond. Scott’s admiration curdles into guilt—he knows the horse will soon be taken from the boy who loves him.
At a dinner at The Meadows, Scott observes Richard Ten Broeck—urbane, polished, and implacable—pressing Dr. Warfield alongside his partner, Viley. Once the ladies retire, including the keenly attentive Mary Barr Clay, Ten Broeck makes his offer for Darley. Warfield refuses; years ago he gave the horse to his free Black trainer, Harry Lewis, in lieu of wages.
That admission is the trap sprung. Viley cites a Kentucky Association bylaw forbidding a “negro or mulatto” from entering a horse in a race. The men threaten to expose Warfield, risking scandal for him and violence and ruin for Harry—a blade of Race, Slavery, and Systemic Racism sharpened by law. Ten Broeck suavely reframes the “gift” as a leasehold, offers 2,500 if the colt wins the Great State Post Stakes, and secures the sale. As Scott withdraws, he catches Mary Barr at the door: she has heard everything.
Chapter 17: Warfield’s Jarret, 1853
At dawn, Mary Barr finds Jarret at the stables and warns him the men intend to force the sale. Stunned, Jarret confronts Harry, who—grim, protective—admits he hoped Darley’s winnings would buy his son’s freedom from Warfield. That hope is collapsing. The limits of Freedom and Agency harden around them.
Shattered and feeling abandoned, Jarret seizes on the echo of Scott’s offhand line—“The river’s not that far away”—and decides to flee with Darley for the Ohio. He hides grain in the racing saddle. Mary Barr returns, calls the river eighty miles distant, and hears his despair: “I might as well be dead, if this is how living gone be.” Moved, she hands him a forged pass in her grandfather’s name and stages a diversion—stumbling in the colts’ pasture and springing the gate. As grooms scramble, Jarret vaults Darley over the rail and gallops into uncertainty.
Chapter 18: Mary Barr Clay, 1853
Mary Barr reaches home in disarray and confesses to her father, Cassius Clay. An abolitionist who knows the world’s brutal terms, Clay grasps that Jarret now faces death as a horse thief and runaway. He and Mary ride out to intercept him, not to punish, but to save him.
At a wooded track they’re joined by Ten Broeck, who reveals he has been watching and already knows Mary Barr’s role. He proposes a calculated mercy: he will buy Jarret as well as the horse, place him with the famed trainer John Pryor at Metairie, and allow him to earn the money to buy his freedom. Clay, recognizing the iron grip of law and power, agrees to help persuade Jarret to turn back. “Slaves may not own property, so how in this world could it ever be his horse? ... That is the world as it is,” he tells Mary. Survival, for now, requires compromise.
Chapter 19: Theo, 2019
In Maryland, Theo brings his rescued curbside painting to the Smithsonian Museum Support Center. Conservator Jeremy Raines begins cleaning and dates the stretcher to the mid-1800s, then finds “Lexington” faintly penciled on the wood.
Jess, the Australian osteologist from the bike crash, walks in and freezes at the horse’s white markings: they match the historic racehorse whose skeleton she is rearticulating. The lab’s meticulous work—microscopes, solvents, bone fragments—threads the past to the present, the heartbeat of Art, History, and Memory. She tours Theo through the bug room where dermestid beetles strip specimens to bone, then back in conservation they uncover a signature: Thomas J. Scott, and four white feet that match her horse. Jess corrects the assumption about the penciled word: “Lexington” isn’t the place of origin—it’s the horse’s name.
Chapter 20: Ten Broeck’s Jarret, 1853
Jarret travels down the Mississippi on a steamboat with Ten Broeck and Darley—now renamed Lexington, a word Jarret refuses in his heart. In Natchez-Under-the-Hill’s tumult, Ten Broeck takes him to barber William Johnson, a prosperous free Black man, a glimpse of another possible life. But they hear troubling news: John Pryor is jealous of his authority and takes no apprentices.
At Colonel Bingaman’s vast plantation, Fatherland, Pryor appears small, sunburned, and cruel. He bars Jarret from the horse, strikes Lexington when he rears, and dumps Jarret into farm labor. After a stint in the smithy, Jarret is driven into the cotton fields, swallowed by the regime of quotas, switches, and humiliation. The days scour him raw. He begins to see with new clarity the lives of those who have known nothing but this, and he resolves to endure—“a shedding” of boyhood and the start of a harder self. The chapter lifts the veil on Hidden Histories and Erased Narratives: a gifted horseman reduced to a nameless hand, his story almost written out of the record.
Character Development
The section forces characters to reveal who they are under pressure: love turns into action, pragmatism into power plays, and curiosity into connection across centuries.
- Jarret Lewis: From devoted, soft-spoken horseman to desperate fugitive to brutalized field hand, he loses name, status, and horse—then gains a fierce empathy and a vow to survive and reclaim himself.
- Mary Barr Clay: She shifts from eavesdropping granddaughter to co-conspirator, forging papers and staging distractions, then grappling with the limits of what moral action can accomplish under unjust laws.
- Richard Ten Broeck: A tactician who weaponizes law and reputation, he purchases not only the horse but Jarret, protecting his investment under the guise of benevolence.
- Thomas J. Scott: An observer paralyzed by conscience, he witnesses power coerce truth into “leasehold” and records a bond he cannot prevent from being broken.
- Theo and Jess: Their tentative rapport becomes a partnership—art, science, and shared obsession aligning to resurrect a story the archive has thinned to bone.
Themes & Symbols
Legal codes and social customs intertwine to codify injustice: the racetrack bylaw and the transaction that follows are a chilling primer in how systems enforce hierarchy and make moral choices appear impossible. Within that machinery, Jarret’s flight and sale map the rise and collapse of personal agency, while Mary Barr’s forged pass and Clay’s hard-eyed realism show the narrow channels where power can be bent, if not broken.
The horse binds the timelines. Jarret and Darley’s intuitive link drives every decision, and its violent severance marks the nadir of Jarret’s arc. In 2019, the canvas and the skeleton together transform a prized horse back into a portal for human memory, demonstrating how art and science collaborate to surface what history tried to erase. Renaming—Darley to Lexington—becomes a symbol of ownership, mythmaking, and control over narrative.
Key Quotes
“The river’s not that far away.”
Scott’s careless remark becomes the seed of Jarret’s plan, showing how stray words can catalyze irrevocable action. It also frames the river as both geography and threshold: a line between bondage and the possibility of self-determination.
“I might as well be dead, if this is how living gone be.”
Jarret voices the calculus of risk under slavery: life without agency is no life at all. The line crystallizes his transformation from obedient handler to someone willing to stake everything for love and freedom.
“Slaves may not own property, so how in this world could it ever be his horse? ... That is the world as it is.”
Cassius Clay captures the cruel logic of the law—its ability to nullify affection, merit, and truth. The statement forces Mary Barr, and the reader, to confront complicity and the limits of moral action within a corrupt system.
“Lexington” is not the location but the name of the horse.
Jess’s correction flips the modern inquiry from guesswork to recognition. A penciled word becomes a key, turning the painting from anonymous object into testimony and knitting the timelines together.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters mark a hinge in the narrative: the coerced sale and renaming of Darley to Lexington set Jarret on a path away from home and toward brutality, even as the 2019 storyline identifies the painting that will help restore his erased role in the horse’s history. Power deploys law to extract value; love risks itself to resist; art and science begin piecing together what violence and profit tried to silence.
The storylines now braid into a single pursuit. The painting and the skeleton become twin artifacts guiding a search for truth—one that insists the record is incomplete without the hands that trained, fed, and loved the horse whose name endured.