Opening
In these chapters, timelines braid together around a single image: a horse with four white feet. Martha Jackson edges toward a mystery that pries open old grief, while in the 1850s Jarret Lewis fights for dignity, grapples with loss, and readies Lexington for a race that will define legend. Meanwhile, Thomas J. Scott paints, loves, and records what history prefers to hide.
What Happens
Chapter 26: Martha Jackson, 1955
Martha returns to her New York apartment and finds her housekeeper, Annie, working on a Saturday. Annie, who has quietly taken on seven-day weeks with extra clients, explains she’s saving to send her brother Charlie to college to become a doctor. The admission lands hard on Martha, whose own life has been buffered by privilege; she offers Annie a loan.
Proud but practical, Annie refuses the money and proposes something else: her family owns an old horse painting, passed down for generations. Would Martha, a gallery owner, appraise it—maybe even help sell it—to cover tuition? Martha assumes it’s a sentimental amateur piece, yet she agrees to look, intrigued when Annie mentions she visits the gallery and follows the shows, even the challenging de Koonings. As Annie leaves, she adds the detail that hooks Martha: the horse in the painting has four white feet. She’s noticed Martha’s bedroom photographs and says the painted animal looks “just exactly like that one your mama’s riding.”
Chapter 27: Ten Broeck’s Jarret, 1853
At Metairie, Sallie Waters’s lifeless body is hauled away after her brutal match against Lexington. Jarret calms Lexington, murmuring that the filly was “ill used” by the men who exploited her. That night, a drunk but genial Scott shows up, presses race winnings into Jarret’s hand, and urges him to buy his freedom from Richard Ten Broeck. Jarret decides to wait until spring, when a bigger win could make Ten Broeck more receptive, a gamble rooted in Freedom and Agency.
Scott notices Jarret sounding out print, proud to point to his “Prog” byline in the racing news. Jarret already sees the erasures: newspapers omit Black horsemen, a living example of Hidden Histories and Erased Narratives. Using a model letter from a free Black man, he writes painstakingly to his father, Harry Lewis, and asks Mary Barr Clay to read the reply. Weeks later, Mary brings devastating news in her own hand: his father has died of “saffron fever.” Jarret absorbs the loss in solitude.
Chapter 28: Martha Jackson, 1955
Annie’s comment sends Martha’s mind to the three photos hanging in her bedroom: her mother, Cyrena, suspended mid-jump on Royal Eclipse, a gleaming bay with four white stockings. Martha remembers a childhood ordered around her mother’s ferocious competitive drive. She can ride, even excel, but her aim is never ribbons—it’s snatching a few minutes of undivided attention.
Memory darkens. On a rainy day hack, Royal Eclipse stumbles on wet asphalt; Cyrena turns to speak, laughs as she slips, and falls. Her head strikes the street. She dies instantly. The horse stands over her until help arrives. Martha’s father sells Royal Eclipse without telling her. After one final, joyless competition, Martha sells her own mount and leaves that world. Curled on her bed now, she understands how a simple observation—“I guess you like horses”—opens a well of grief she keeps sealed.
Chapter 29: Thomas J. Scott, 1854
In his journal, Scott records a return to New Orleans: Ten Broeck has commissioned another Lexington portrait, and Jarret carries himself with new assurance. The painting comes easily, in a flow that surprises Scott; Jarret’s approving smile lands like a benediction. The process becomes a meditation on Art, History, and Memory.
Scott’s deeper contentment lies with Julien, a refined Creole painter trained in Paris, the son of a wealthy Englishman and a woman of color. New Orleans’s labyrinthine social codes allow their discreet relationship and Julien’s status; in this space Scott feels the “brush of the wing of Eros.” Julien sharpens Scott’s classical technique, though he wants nothing to do with racetrack grime, leaving Scott alone to translate that world into journalism and paint.
Chapter 30: Ten Broeck’s Jarret, 1854
Captain Willa Viley arrives at Metairie and bristles at discovering an enslaved teenager has been training their champion instead of the famed Pryor. Ten Broeck smooths the moment with a lie about Lexington’s temperament and points to the horse’s gleaming condition. Viley tests Lexington himself with a punishing drill; the horse’s stamina and power leave him grinning.
Respect grows into partnership. Viley and Jarret devise an innovative regimen: over four-mile runs, Lexington chases a relay of fresh milers to build speed, grit, and competitive fire. In a marquee test against the country’s fastest miler, Little Flea, Lexington crushes the field. Ten Broeck fans the hype for the Great State Post Stakes into a national spectacle. Another letter arrives from Mary Barr Clay: her family will join the throngs heading to New Orleans for the race.
Character Development
Loss, ambition, and art redefine the players here: grief strips them to essentials, while work—on canvas, on track, in memory—rebuilds what remains.
- Jarret Lewis: Endures his father’s death and turns more resolutely toward mastery and strategy. His literacy opens doors and delivers pain; his quiet authority with Lexington is finally recognized by Viley.
- Martha Jackson: The cool gallerist’s composure cracks, revealing a daughter shaped by a mother’s passion and a single catastrophic afternoon. Annie’s painting threatens to reconnect Martha to what she fled.
- Thomas J. Scott: Moves beyond the image of a drifting turf journalist. Through Julien, he embraces discipline, desire, and humility, refining his craft and confronting the private life history will not record.
- Annie: Proud, tireless, and clear-eyed, she catalyzes the modern mystery and reframes value—art not as luxury, but as lifeline for family and future.
Themes & Symbols
Power structures and intimacy collide across eras. Jarret’s calculated patience with Ten Broeck and Viley embodies Freedom and Agency under constraint: he bargains for possibility within bondage, translating knowledge into leverage. His letter-writing underscores how precarity narrows even the routes of love and news. Scott’s private journal and relationship with Julien reveal parallel negotiations, where desire and art flourish in the margins.
The book exposes how stories vanish and who benefits when they do. Hidden Histories and Erased Narratives surface in turf columns that name white owners and horses but erase Black hands, and in a family painting safeguarded by Annie as counter-archive. Martha’s photographs—perfect, airborne, invulnerable—freeze an ideal her life cannot sustain, mirroring how public histories polish triumphs and omit the price paid.
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Race, Slavery, and Systemic Racism: Viley’s initial outrage at Jarret training Lexington and the cold, transactional talk around enslaved people’s lives contrast with New Orleans’s layered, unequal hierarchies that grant Julien a conditional mobility.
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The Human-Animal Bond: Jarret’s tenderness with Lexington and Royal Eclipse’s vigil over Cyrena’s body reveal interspecies loyalty, set against Sallie Waters’s commodified suffering.
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Symbol: The Photographs of Cyrena: Images of flight and grace double as mementos mori—beauty suspended just before the fall—capturing Martha’s ambivalence toward a past that thrills and wounds.
Key Quotes
“Ill used.” Jarret’s phrase for Sallie Waters’s fate distills his ethic: horses are partners, not tools. The words also indict the men and markets that turn speed into suffering, sharpening the moral lens for Lexington’s coming glory.
“Prog.” Scott’s byline thrills him, but for Jarret it marks the machinery of omission—print that celebrates horses and white owners while rendering Black expertise invisible. The one word becomes a lesson in how credit circulates.
“Saffron fever.” The clinical cause of Harry Lewis’s death lands like a hammer. The stark phrase, read aloud by Mary Barr Clay, shows literacy as double-edged: a path to connection that also delivers unsoftened grief.
“Four white feet, just exactly like that one your mama’s riding.” Annie’s observation stitches timelines together. It foreshadows the painting’s identity and pries open Martha’s sealed memories, turning a casual detail into the hinge of the modern plot.
“The brush of the wing of Eros.” Scott’s metaphor names a secret joy that refines his art. Desire becomes technique, and the private life that cannot be publicly archived still alters what the public will see on canvas.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters lock the timelines into orbit around a single object—the horse painting—and deepen the emotional stakes driving both plots. Annie’s proposal promises to connect Martha’s guarded present to a buried past, while Jarret’s loss and rising authority ready the historical thread for the high drama of the Great State Post Stakes.
The section also lays groundwork for the novel’s investigative arc. The painting becomes the material bridge that will eventually draw Jess and Theo toward Martha’s history and Jarret’s world. As the training intensifies and the crowds converge on New Orleans, personal grief, public spectacle, and the record of who gets remembered collide—setting up the race not only as a contest of speed, but as a reckoning with memory itself.