Opening
Across two centuries, a racehorse’s shattered face and a missing painting pull lives into alignment. As Lexington’s glory crests and collapses in 1855, the 2019 storyline closes in on the truth—scientific, historical, and personal—forcing characters to reckon with power, memory, and what survival demands.
What Happens
Chapter 36: Jess, Smithsonian Museum Support Center, Maryland, 2019
Jess and Catherine, an equine vet, study the horse’s skull. Catherine rejects the idea of a blow or fall; the deformity reads as slow, organic damage. Severe dental disease becomes the prime suspect—an untreated abscess leading to erosive osteomyelitis that warps bone over time. She floats Strangles (Streptococcus equi equi) as one possibility and urges a CT scan and DNA workup. Jess, fully drawn into the horse’s story, agrees.
That evening, Jess hosts Catherine for dinner and impulsively invites Theo. The spicy Malaysian meal warms the room until Catherine recognizes Theo as a former Oxford polo star, which he shrugs off. The talk turns to equestrian art. Catherine criticizes a George Stubbs painting for bad anatomy; Theo counters that Stubbs often used grooms and jockeys to glorify horses—mirrors of the nobility. When Catherine says America must be less class-bound than England, Theo pushes back, noting the slaveholding class deemed enslaved people subhuman. Catherine replies, “not everything has to be about race, does it?” and Theo says, “Perhaps not, when you’re White,” bringing the night to an icy halt and sharpening the novel’s lens on Race, Slavery, and Systemic Racism. Theo leaves early, kisses Jess perfunctorily outside, and decides the relationship won’t last. Jess, stung and confused, cleans up as Catherine sighs about how “hard to say the right thing” it is, missing the point.
Chapter 37: Ten Broeck’s Jarret, Metairie, Louisiana, 1855
On the day of Lexington’s “Race Against Time,” Jarret Lewis studies the stripped, rock-hard track and worries it will lame the horse. Richard Ten Broeck dismisses him, more concerned about dirt on Jarret’s breeches. The flag drops. Lexington bolts into a blistering pace that no horse can sustain; his jockey, Gilpatrick, fights to rate him, and pacers can’t help. Even so, Lexington shatters the world record—four miles in 7:19.75. Afterward, Jarret finds both front shoes nearly off, proof of punishing courage.
The next morning, Gilpatrick corners Jarret: tell Ten Broeck the truth—Lexington is going blind. Jarret admits the horse’s sight has been failing, the spookiness and stumbles finally making sense, and suspects a hereditary cause. He refuses to tell Ten Broeck now, convinced the owner will race Lexington anyway and possibly destroy him. Jarret stakes everything on a plan: win the imminent rematch with Lecompte to cement Lexington’s stud value before blindness ends his career, then protect him. The choice embodies Freedom and Agency under slavery’s constraints and deepens The Human-Animal Bond.
The rematch swells into a national spectacle. Ten Broeck, confused by thin betting on Lecompte, consults the painter Thomas J. Scott, who reveals Lecompte has just suffered severe colic. In the race, Lexington toys with his rival; Lecompte’s spirit breaks, and he’s withdrawn after the first heat. Lexington wins the second heat by walkover, undisputed champion at last.
Chapter 38: Theo, Georgetown, Washington, DC, 2019
Theo wakes with regret about bailing on Jess. He replays a bad day: canceled plans with friends and a patronizing meeting with his thesis adviser, an African diaspora specialist who sneers at his new project—White artists painting Black subjects without caricature—as “niche” and “perverse.” Seeing he misdirected anger at dinner, Theo texts Jess to apologize and set weekend plans.
At the Library of Congress, he dives into 19th-century equine art. In Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, he finds a glowing description of a Scott painting of Lexington—led by his groom, “Black Jarret”—and the horse’s “dull, sightless eyes,” confirming blindness. The piece calls it Scott’s masterpiece, last seen in 1866 at a shuttered newspaper office. A modern Scott catalogue echoes the trail’s dead end: “Has not been found.” The discovery gives Theo a clear quest and animates the novel’s search for Hidden Histories and Erased Narratives.
Chapter 39: Ten Broeck’s Jarret, Metairie, Louisiana, 1855
More than a week after victory, Ten Broeck summons Jarret. He has known about the failing sight all along—spies watch his “assets.” He rages not at the blindness but the perceived betrayal. He denies Jarret’s bid to buy his freedom and then delivers the blow: “I have sold you.” Lexington, too, is gone—sold for a record $15,000 to Kentucky breeder Robert Alexander.
Ten Broeck explains what Jarret has forfeited: he had planned to take American horses to England; upon landing, Jarret would have been a free man. Because of Jarret’s secrecy, that door slams shut. Instead, Jarret will go back to Kentucky with Lexington under Alexander’s ownership. Grief and shock wash over him, but relief that he won’t be separated from the horse steadies him. Scott will accompany them west, sketchbook ready.
Chapter 40: Jess, Smithsonian Museum Support Center, Maryland, 2019
Catherine calls Jess from London with the CT results. The horse’s facial collapse stems from chronic craniofacial infection—erosive osteomyelitis—likely from a dental abscess. Damage to the optic nerve blinds one eye, then sympathetic ophthalmia takes the other. Science has caught up to the bones.
Catherine argues the blindness proves a “blessing in disguise.” Her reading on Ten Broeck shows he later sails to England with racehorses, basks in celebrity, then loses everything and dies in poverty. Lecompte—the horse Ten Broeck takes instead of Lexington—dies shortly after the crossing. Had Lexington stayed a racehorse, he likely would have met the same fate. Instead, he lives out his days in Kentucky as a prized stud, with a far gentler routine than modern stallions endure. Jess’s findings lock into Theo’s archival trail: diagnosis and history, converging.
Character Development
These chapters pivot characters from pursuit to reckoning: secrets surface, ambitions curdle, and loyalties harden into life choices.
- Jarret Lewis: Risks everything to protect Lexington’s future, choosing concealment to secure a stud career. His agency backfires, shattering his path to freedom, yet his relief at remaining with the horse reveals unwavering devotion.
- Theo: A polished exterior masks academic precarity and accumulated racial fatigue. His sharp response to Catherine’s remark and his adviser’s condescension clarifies his stakes; the discovery of the lost Scott painting gives him purpose.
- Jess: Emerges as a methodical investigator whose empathy powers her science. The fight with Theo forces her to face race and history within her own relationship.
- Richard Ten Broeck: Shows absolute power and cold calculation—spies, sales, and punitive control. The reader learns his ascent will end in ruin, adding irony to his swagger.
- Thomas J. Scott: Moves from observer to participant, threading art into the horse’s and Jarret’s evolving story.
Themes & Symbols
The novel braids past and present to map a continuum of racial power. In the 1850s, the brutal clarity of ownership is undeniable: Ten Broeck controls bodies, futures, and freedoms, weaponizing manumission as reward and punishment. In 2019, racism recurs as dismissal, microaggression, and gatekeeping: Theo’s adviser devalues his project; Catherine’s “not everything has to be about race” denies lived reality. The juxtaposition exposes how structures mutate but endure.
Hidden histories power the plot. Theo’s archival chase for the Scott masterpiece and Jess’s forensic reading of bone both restore what’s been erased—the groom’s name, the horse’s suffering, the truth of blindness. Art and science function as twin instruments of recovery, transforming fragments into testimony.
Finally, the human–animal bond becomes a moral compass. Jarret’s choices prioritize Lexington’s safety over his own freedom, redefining heroism within a system designed to crush it. That bond, steady and sacrificial, resists dehumanization.
Key Quotes
“Not everything has to be about race, does it?”
Catherine’s line crystallizes colorblind defensiveness. It shifts the burden of comfort onto Theo and underscores how denial maintains inequity in polite spaces.
“Perhaps not, when you’re White.”
Theo reframes the exchange, exposing positional privilege. The cool delivery doubles as boundary-setting and a measure of accumulated exhaustion.
“I have sold you.”
Ten Broeck reduces Jarret’s life to a transaction, the bluntest articulation of slavery’s violence. The line ends one storyline of aspiration and begins another grounded in endurance.
“Dull, sightless eyes.”
The period description of Lexington confirms blindness textually and symbolically: a champion moving forward without sight mirrors a history that survives despite erasure.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This stretch marks a fulcrum. Lexington’s racing saga closes in triumph, but Jarret’s dream of freedom collapses, shifting the historical arc from spectacle to survival. In the present, Jess’s diagnosis and Theo’s archival find snap together: the bones verify the archives; the archives restore the person erased from the picture. The personal rift between Jess and Theo compels the story to examine how America’s racial past scripts the present.
Form mirrors meaning. Parallel investigations—scientific and art-historical—reconstruct a whole from fragments, while dramatic irony (the reader knowing Ten Broeck’s fall and Lexington’s fate) reframes power as temporary and remembrance as work.