Coromandel! (2 page)

A cock crowed in the village. The earth turned over; the moon swung. Jason caught his breath, for the gravestones stood so tall and white above the shadows. Again the cock crowed. From the close-woven night, from under the moon on the Plain, another answered it.

She peered at him with a kind of exasperated lovingness. He had a queer foreign smell, of hawthorn and dew and wild animals, and he came crashing in at her window two hours after he’d said. The line of his jaw was hard and dark, and he was tall for a farm boy; his face was long, his hair dark, and his eyes pale, pale grey, sometimes empty as a stone, sometimes flashing and shining. He had thin lips and a wide mouth that turned down at the corners, and ears set far back on his head, and a long neck and narrow nostrils. For the sake of a peculiar sparkle in his eyes she had left George Denning. Now she’d got Jason for her man, and they were almost betrothed, but she didn’t know what to make of him. She was wildly happy with him, and then for long periods vaguely ill at ease. She thought slowly, watching him: I’d like to be sure, one way or the other. Oh, I’d like to be sure, but with Jason will I ever be?

She settled on her side and stretched out her arms to him. ‘Come into the bed to me, Jason,’ she whispered. She heard her mother snoring downstairs and felt a little sleepy herself now. She wished he would come quickly to her and wake her up. Or that he would go to sleep in her bed, and then she could curl her arm over him and feel she knew where he really was, asleep, under her arm, in her care.

Jason stayed at the window, looking out. When she spoke he turned and said, ‘I thought to bring you a trout, Mary.’

She said, ‘You’ll get into trouble again, Jason, with your poaching.’ He’d hang on the gallows because he was wild and strange. They’d cast him out like a witch, and if they couldn’t do that they’d make him do something they could hang him for. He wasn’t like any of the rest of them. ‘Come to bed,’ she whispered.

Jason swung quickly, went to her, and knelt beside her bed. He put out his arms, caught her, and whispered, ‘Will you be happy with me, Mary?’

She didn’t know. That was the question she had just been asking herself. Would he be happy with her, or any woman? She didn’t know. After a time, when she lay with her head pressed against his shirt, she said again, ‘Come into bed.’ He slipped quickly under the blanket and made love to her.

Jason wished he knew whether this was good or bad, of sin or of heaven. He seldom looked forward to it or imagined it, but when her arms came up round his neck and her lips opened below his, then the little room began to disappear and the patched moonlight turned into wonders--not Romans in gold helmets, not the stone shapes on the Plain or the magically soughing grass; but, mounting from the grass, the laverock, wildly turning, the land bursting in great circles, wider below its little rapid wings; and the peewit, black and white, sweeping up with silent beats and crying aloud to her, ‘Come, come, Mary!’--to those places, to see those marvels--’come!’ But she only groaned with love and whispered his name.

He lay back on his arm, beside her. This time he’d seen the Golden Fleece. It was hung on a barn door in a steep valley. He could have described it to her, every golden curl of the wool, but the Fleece wasn’t so important as the waves of effort that had carried him up the valley, past many discoveries; and he couldn’t tell her about those because he didn’t know the words. It was like being a dog or a baby, looking and whining and knowing, but not having the words. Perhaps the Fleece was another of Parson’s jokes. He’d found out that it was Parson who had chosen his name, Jason, for him; and after he grew up Parson would sometimes ask him if he’d found the Golden Fleece yet. It might be a joke, but if it was, it had failed, because he had found the Fleece just now, and at other times, in other places. Suddenly he hated the Parson, and Sir Tristram Pennel, and Hugo Pennel, and everyone who knew words and writing, because he did not.

The clock struck three. He said, ‘Mary, when we are married shall we go away?’

She asked, ‘Where can we go?’ Then she said, ‘What do you want to go away for? We can have your room in the farm-house, and when Molly marries Ahab I’ll keep house for you and your father. Oh, but Molly’s never going to, Jason. She’ll keep that old Ahab waiting till crack of doom before she’ll leave you.’

Perhaps it was true, what she said. That would be another reason for going away. He repeated his question.

Mary whispered, ‘Where could we go to? There’s the Plain on the south, all the way to Salisbury. On the north there’s the downs. There isn’t a piece of free land in the vale between here and Pewsey, and that’s four miles.’

Jason said, ‘We could go to Aleppo.’

Mary did not speak. . . .

Aleppo had a rich and spicy smell. He didn’t know where he had first heard the name. It was white and gold there, and hot. The desert wheeled up to the window of a house--his house, his window. He saw the window and a woman’s dark eye at the lattice as he rode in on a camel from the desert. A hundred bells tinkled, and a thousand horsemen cantered in the dust behind him. No one knew he had gold, frankincense, myrrh, and spikenard in one saddlebag, and turquoise, onyx, alabaster, jade, ruby, emerald, and a grain of mustard seed in the other. His diamond sabre jerked at his side, or at the camel’s flank, in a scabbard. What size was a camel, what colour? Ivory, perhaps. His ship lay in the harbour, and he had only to fight through the crowd to it, and swim out. The girl would wait till he came back. He would come back in another ship, the pennant streaming out from the stern and St George’s Cross flying high.

‘Where’s Aleppo?’ Mary said.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Jason, how can we go there if you don’t know where it is? It’s time you went home. You’ll be tired, and your apples aren’t in yet, are they?’

‘Apples?’ he repeated vaguely. Why didn’t she see that Aleppo was a place you didn’t have to know about? He had thrown his jerkin off somewhere, and now he tripped over her clothes before he came to it.

‘Shhhh!’ she said. ‘Father will hear you.’

‘Not with your mother snoring so loud.’ At the casement he turned back suddenly and kissed her on the hand, though she held up her lips for him. She was so happy with him sometimes that he was sure he’d better marry her. He didn’t think he’d be the same person after that, but perhaps she’d like him better for the change. He said, ‘I’ll come again, night after next, early.’

She began to say something, but he was on the ivy and away.

The trout were not moving under the bridge, and he did not stop there. He walked quickly along the footpath, crossed a field, bore left, and cut up towards the shoulder of hill that separated the village of Shrewford Pennel from his father’s farm. It was late. Lying with Mary made the moment splendid, but for a time afterward there was never anything in his head but facts. On this journey back, the Romans had gone, and the shadows were only sleeping cows, and the smells were just of grass and dung.

At the crest of the rise he saw the light thatch of the farm below, less than half a mile away. He had begun to hurry down to it when three men jumped out on him from the shadow of the hedge.

He rolled silently to his back under the weight of them and lashed out with fists and shoes. Three! The Pennels only had four gamekeepers, and, of the four, Hammond was in bed with colic and Sale had gone to Amesbury. His fist jabbed into one of the men’s stomachs, and he heard a gasp. Another muttered, ‘Young polecat! Stand away, Tim.’ A heavy stick whirred down and thudded into the side of his head.

He lay quiet for a moment after the darkness went away. His head hurt, and before he said anything he wanted to know who the third man was. He listened to their voices above him. The third man was Hugo Pennel, the squire’s son. He heard Hugo ask, ‘Who is it?’--so he could not have been hovering for long out of his senses. One of the others answered, ‘ ‘Tis young Jason Savage, master. We’ve caught him before.’

Hugo asked, ‘Has he got any game on him?’

Jason stood up unsteadily, and the keepers jumped to grab his arms. He said, ‘I haven’t been poaching, Master Hugo.’

‘What are you doing here, then?’

Hugo was a tall young man, and even in this light you could see his clothes were richer than any of theirs. They all spoke the same broad Wiltshire--knight’s son, gamekeepers, and yeoman boy. Hugo was twenty-two. When he was fifteen his father had sent him up to London to be a page at the king’s court.

He repeated his question. Jason did not answer.

‘You’ve been poaching, Jason,’ Hugo said threateningly.

‘No, I haven’t,’ Jason said.

‘You have!’

Hugo wasn’t a bad young gentleman. He used to be obscene-minded and a little cruel when they were boys together, but they’d had good fun birds’-nesting and snaring rabbits and talking of ships and girls and the king. Perhaps Hugo would like to forget all that now. Hugo wanted him to answer, but he wouldn’t. It was none of Hugo’s business.

‘He’s been poaching, master,’ the head gamekeeper said. ‘He has a trout or a pheasant or a couple of rabbits hidden down there where he can get ‘em tomorrow.’

‘Have you?’

‘No.’

‘We’d better give him a taste of stick, master,’ the head keeper said. ‘He’s going to live here all his life. He’d better learn now not to It’s no use to kick, Jason.’

‘I’m not going to live here all my life!’ Jason cried, suddenly stung to furious, impotent tears.

The keeper laughed curtly and twisted his arm. With that pain Jason got himself under control. He saw that Hugo didn’t want to beat him. Perhaps Hugo was afraid he’d make a complaint to the sheriff. But the keeper meant to see that it was done.

After a pause the keeper said, ‘If he can poach, master, all of them will. The law’s not strong enough.’

‘Beat him, then,’ Hugo said; and angrily: ‘It’s your own fault, Jason.’

But the head keeper meant to fix it in the young master’s heart that he was a squire’s son, and grown up now. He gave Hugo the cudgel and said, ‘We’ll hold him. Lay on hard, master.’

Jason faced Hugo, and the yellow moon sank into the Plain. The wind got up. Jason’s eyes bulged, and he struggled round to keep his face to Hugo, but the men were too strong for him. They forced his head into the fork of one’s thighs and pulled down his breeches.

The stick droned and struck harder as Hugo gathered vengeful anger that Jason should have forced him to do this. After a dozen blows Hugo threw the stick away, panting. He gasped. ‘There! Now run and complain--but you’ll get the same next time. Do you understand?’

Jason felt cold trickles of blood running down the backs of his legs. He hauled up his breeches and fastened them. The blood wouldn’t show through. His sister Molly would wash them for him later. He’d have to tell her. She’d be thrilled and horrified and angry, and would blame him and be sorry for him all at once. There wasn’t anybody he could talk to the way he could talk to Molly.

He didn’t answer Master Hugo Pennel, but turned and walked on the way he had been going, while the three stared at his back.

‘Don’t you forget what the young master said,’ the head keeper called after him, and he heard the other man say, ‘He’s a bad one, master, a real bad one.’

His buttocks began to ache and burn so that he ground his teeth together to stop himself from moaning. In the pain, though, the power to get away came back to him, and, even as he walked down the long slope he was gone. The afterglow of the moon arched up from behind the bare hill, and it was the light from the Golden Fleece--or the brilliance from camp-fires glaring in the desert outside Aleppo, or a cave of Indian jewels. It was not Hugo and the keepers who had beaten him, but nobler, stranger enemies.

He stopped and struck his palms together and whispered, ‘Speranza Voy!’ God’s wounds, it was Voy they’d been after--Old Voy, the poacher, the strange talker, the seller of nostrums and teller of stories. The fools had been hiding up there on the edge of the Plain to catch Old Voy, but they’d caught him instead, because Voy was too smart for them.

He began to laugh. His window was on the ground floor, and he climbed in through it.

The boat rocked on the sea, and the spar where he lay cut hard into his buttocks. He clung on with one hand and shaded his eyes with the other. The low land lay like a bar of gold, and thin trees waved over the white and blue line of the shore. The boat lurched; the spar swung him on a long arc, far out over the waves.

‘Wake up, wake up! Jason, can’t you hear the cows? Father will be angry.’

He slipped out from under the blanket and stood, yawning, on the rushes. The light was grey, and a cow was mooing on the other side of the thorn hedge. A chilly wind blew in through the window, and he felt tired. He remembered last night and--went for his clothes, but Molly was quicker and had his breeches in her hand, holding them out to him. Then she saw, and cried, ‘Blood! Turn round, Jason.’

He didn’t want to explain just now. He said, ‘Give them to me,’ and grabbed the breeches from her hand and put them on. He met her eyes, defying her to be angry with him. She was his twin, a tall girl with his thinness of body and neck and nostrils; but a woman’s lips and a woman’s eyes, darker grey than his; and small, tight breasts.

‘Who did that?’ she asked.

‘Gamekeepers.’

‘Were you poaching?’

‘No.’

She said, ‘I’ll kill them! They have no right to hurt you.’ He pulled on his jerkin, looking down to avoid the blazing heat of her eyes.

She turned on him. ‘It’s your fault too. Why do you go creeping about in the middle of the night? Why don’t you take Mary into the woods on Sunday afternoons the way everyone else does? Is she so hot under her shift, for you to go there every other night? You treat her as if she’s a king’s whore and you a--a prince, a knight! She wishes she was safe back with George Denning, I can tell you!’

He didn’t speak because it was no good answering Molly when she was in this mood. He kissed her, letting his lips cling for a moment to her ear, and went out.

He let the cows into the byre and began to milk. ‘Get over, Daisy,’ he muttered, and butted his head into the cow’s flank. She moved comfortably over for him. Her side was warm, and the dew steaming off her made a sweet smell in the byre. The milk spurted ringing into the jug, with rhythm like music, like the handbells of the young men at bell practice. ‘Sweet Daisy.’ He nuzzled his head against her, turning it round and rubbing her with his hair. She champed loudly on the hay in the stall. Through the low window at the back of the byre, when he raised his head, he saw the sun rising.