Coromandel! (5 page)

A few yards short of the warren Voy stopped and squatted at the base of an elm. Jason helped him pull pegs, nets, hollow spade, billhook, line, and muzzle cords into the open. The ferrets squeaked in their bag, which was hung in a bush to one side, and the air was feral with the acid smell of them.

‘Now, quick, lad,’ Voy said.

Jason took a handful of nets and pegs and began covering every hole of the rabbit warren. He stretched the little nets tight and forced the pegs into the chalk with the heel of his hand.

They wouldn’t send him to prison, to be shut in and given food like an animal. He slipped his hand round and felt the blade of the short knife at the back of his belt.

When he had finished, he and Voy looked carefully over the whole warren, found three holes they had missed, and netted them. Voy brought the ferret bag and opened the mouth a couple of inches. A long, quivering nose poked out and sniffed the air, then the head followed, and the little pink eyes glittered.

‘He’s a white ‘un,’ Jason whispered.

‘All the French ones are white,’ Voy whispered. ‘Careful of him, he’s sharp with his teeth.’ He grabbed the ferret by the back of the neck, slipped it under one corner of a net, and replaced the peg. The ferret turned its long body round and round in the mouth of the hole and stuck its nose through the meshes of the net, trying to get back. Voy flicked its nose with his finger, and it turned round again, a furred snake, slow-moving, the pink eyes burning in the moonlight, and went slowly out of sight under the ground.

‘Stand the other side now, and quick, Jason!’

Jason waited, crouching like a runner in the edge of the tree shadow, watching the moonlit hummocks of the rabbits’ home. The supple murderer was down there now, sneaking on, half blind, his teeth gleaming and his eyes like coals glowing in the black tunnel. Oh, the blood of Jesus, to be a rabbit down there with the burning eyes at the end of the tunnel, to thump the ground with your legs, jerk them down, and turn and run, crazy mad with fear, the strong waves of the ferret stench rolling with you, and the eyes and teeth snaking on and on and on behind you, earth crumbling over you, in front of you, to burst out at full jump into the poured moonbeams, into the net, kicking the net, all silent.

He shook his head. He was a man. He’d like to pull off the nets and go home, but it was always the same. Times, when he’d set a running noose on his father’s land and left it out at night, he’d lie on the bed and could not sleep until he managed to wrench his thoughts away from the moon-bathed hedge and the dead shape of fur, stinking of fear and cold as it died.

He heard the thump-thump deep under the earth. A long minute passed, and a rabbit dashed out of a burrow into a net. Jason threw himself on it, all thought gone, hauled it out by the back legs, ran his fingers down its jerking neck, felt the place, squeezed, and bent. He dropped the rabbit, reset the net, dived on another. Voy darted from side to side, and the white bellies of the dead rabbits gathered in the moonlight.

After ten minutes no more rabbits came out. Nor did the ferret. ‘He’s sucking,’ Voy said. ‘Get the line.’

Jason walked into the trees. The ferret had killed inside the warren and was gorging itself deep underground. Now they must line another ferret, send it after the first, measure how much cord it dragged after it, and then dig down for them both. He wanted to get it over quickly so that they could go down into the copse below and knock a few pheasants off their roosts with his sling. Sometimes the birds perched so low you could grab them by the legs and pull them down. Voy would have sulphur matches to burn, which made them giddy.

Searching about in the trees for the ferret line, Jason found he had come to the wrong place. There was nothing here but a big stick leaning against the bole of an elm. He took it curiously in hand as he walked across to the other tree, thumping it on the ground and thinking it must be Voy’s--and clang, a low shape bounded out of the earth at his feet, snapped the cudgel from his hand, and fell back with a groan. The cudgel stood there, upright of itself beside him, and his wrist ached, and he was biting his lips to keep down the fierce yell of fear.

Voy hurried over. ‘What was that? What? Whose staff is that? Don’t move.’ He knelt and peered at the earth. He said softly, ‘A man trap, it is. I’ve heard of them--in Prussia, not in England. Oh, the whoreson pigs!’

The cold sweat burst out on Jason’s forehead. Tremblingly he took hold of the thick cudgel and pulled. It came free with a small creak, for the serrated teeth of the trap had bitten through all but a sliver of the wood.

Voy said, ‘You didn’t have a stick? Not mine, either. Don’t get excited, Jason. They won’t have a man here as well as a trap. Besides, they don’t have any more men. But walk carefully. Where did you find that stick?’

‘There,’ Jason said, ‘against that tree.’ His heart still hammered, and his lips twitched. Oh, the pigs, the devils! He walked round the tree, his hands out, into the black shadow there where a bush grew close to the trunk. His side brushed into something soft, and a breath of exhaled air touched his face. He whipped round, seeing nothing--but already imagining the keeper’s grinning, triumphant anger and, behind it, the dank prison walls.

‘Keeper!’ he muttered, and stabbed down with his knife. The shape screamed and turned under his blow. Miss. He hit out with his fist, and Voy was with him, trying to hold back his knife hand; but the time had come, and he ripped the knife up where the stomach ought to be, in and up, underhand. Thick cloth tore, and the blade sprang up. Missed again. Why didn’t the knave step forward and fight? He steadied himself to kill, and the dark shape slowly fell out of the shadow, fell through the clinging arms of the bush, and fell, thumping, to the ground.

Long hair spread out on the earth there, light red, rippling and stirring in the ground wind. Her face was pale, and her eyes were closed and her arms bent beside her. Her stomacher was ripped apart, and a thin scarlet line threaded up the centre of her belly and stained the torn edges of her shift.

Voy said, ‘Mistress Jane Pennel--the daughter.’

‘Have I killed her?’

He had never wanted to kill Jane Pennel. He had known her all her life, though never so well as he had known Hugo, of course. Everyone knew her. She rode about on a little cob and was friendly with the wives of farmers and labourers, but she looked down her nose even while she tried to be pleasant, and people said she was over-proud for a maid of seventeen.

Now he’d killed her, and she’d never ride the lanes again. She was dead, and he was a murderer, her blood on his knife. The worms would eat that white belly before long, before the red cow calved, and the worms were himself, because he had killed her. It was he who crawled in the earth to devour her, and she used to play the spinet and know how to read from books. Jason turned away and retched dreadfully to cast up the worms of death in his throat, but they would not leave him. He must go, run through the night, across the Plain, take ship, go.

His retching came to an end. He had talked to himself of killing, but now he had done it, and it was more terrible than any of his dreams.

Yet there was something else, a distant, growing spark of light in the tomb. Everything had conspired together to keep him here--the farm, his father’s age, Molly, Mary. Now it would be the other way. The hands that had held him would push him away. The voices that had said, ‘Stay,’ would now shout, ‘Go.’

His mouth drooped open as the spark grew, became a lamp of gold, and he realized the approaching shape of freedom.

Old Voy said, ‘She’s not dead. You scratched her pretty skin for her. She’s fainted from fright and a knock on the head.’ Jason’s knees trembled under him. He wasn’t a murderer, and he wasn’t free. He looked down at her, his lips working. She was a thin girl, and her breasts were small and round and high. He was glad he hadn’t killed her. The door to Coromandel would open some other way for him. He didn’t have to buy the key with the life of this rich girl.

‘We can’t go away and leave her,’ Voy said. ‘She saw us. She’ll say we attacked her and then ravished her.’

He knelt beside the girl, set light to a sulphur match, and waved it back and forth under her nose. After a moment she stirred, then sat up, then looked down and around, then grabbed the sides of her stomacher and joined them over her nakedness. She whispered, ‘Are--are you going to kill me?’ ‘Kill you, Mistress Jane? Of course not,’ Voy said in a soapy voice. He was supporting her shoulders with his arm.

‘I don’t know why we shouldn’t,’ Jason snarled, suddenly remembering. ‘Setting that devilish trap and then standing over it to see a man lose his leg.’

‘If you do you’ll hang for it, Jason Savage,’ she said with a burst of spirit. ‘Hugo says you’ll hang someday.’

‘Why all this talk of hanging?’ Old Voy said. ‘We were on our way back from Pewsey Fair, and we found you lying in the wood. What were you doing here? This is no place for a maid at night, and alone. There isn’t a man with you, is there?’ he finished, suddenly suspicious.

‘My brother told me to come here, in case,’ she said. ‘There was no one else. He gave me a bell to ring if a poacher got caught in the trap. And--and you were poaching. I saw you.’ Her voice shook.

‘Why, that was very cruel of your brother,’ Voy said, looking more intently at her. ‘Real poachers might have done you a mischief, bell or no bell, when they saw one of their friends with his leg off and blood everywhere and him screaming and bits of broken white bone splintered in his boots.’

The girl said, ‘Don’t! Oh, I was frightened.’ She burst into tears, and her long hair, dishevelled and dirty and stuck with leaves, shook on her shoulders. ‘I didn’t want to do it. I hate that trap. Hugo made me. He said it would be exciting, but it was lonely and terrible.’

Jason said, ‘Cheer up, Mistress Jane. No one’s been hurt, and we’ll look after you.’ He gave her his hand and pulled her to her feet. He’d danced the Harvest Ring with her once three years ago, and although she was only fourteen then they had almost won the prize. Proud she was, but she thawed out of that when something excited her. She’d asked him that time to take her out plover shooting when next he went with his bow and arrow to the Plain. But when the time came and he’d gone round to Pennel Manor for her, she’d come to the door and flushed and made an excuse--remembered who she was, perhaps, or been reminded by her father.

She looked at him now, almost ready to smile, and Old Voy said, ‘Of course you were frightened, and it’s your brother’s fault. He had no right to send you out here.’

She said, ‘Hugo’s bad sometimes.’

‘And you’ve not seen any poachers at all,’ Old Voy continued. ‘You set off the trap by mistake with your stick--here you are--and then you went back to bed.’

The girl eyed them surreptitiously, in turn. Her green eyes were large and rather prominent, like her father’s.

Voy said pleadingly, ‘That was the way of it, Mistress Jane, wasn’t it?’

Jason saw that she was looking at him. She wanted him to plead too. He had so nearly killed her. She had so nearly set him in Coromandel. He said gently, ‘We were poaching, Mistress Jane--rabbits. Here.’ He picked up two rabbits and gave them into her hands.

She said, ‘I like rabbit pie. I’ll say I got them out of my snares, though really I never catch any. I’ve set two up here. Look.’

She led him to the edge of the warren and showed him two running nooses of wire attached to sticks set firmly into the earth. Jason said, ‘You’ll never catch a rabbit there. That’s a vole run.’ He pulled up the sticks and pushed them in again a few paces to the right, where several rabbit runs led into the Windline. ‘I’m sorry I cut you,’ he said as he stood up. ‘I thought you were a keeper. Doesn’t it hurt?’

‘A little, now,’ she said. ‘I’ll put some salve on it when I get home. Isn’t it wonderful out here at night? Father and Hugo never let me go out to see. How did you kill those rabbits just now? I got so excited while the ferret was in that I almost forgot to be afraid.’

In the shadow of the wood behind them Old Voy was gathering up his belongings. Jason looked at the girl with surprise. She was really interested. She could read, and had rich clothes and a great manor house and a big garden of flowers, but she liked to set snares for rabbits, and obviously she wished she knew more about the wild animals of wood and field. He showed her how to kill a rabbit, and she said, ‘Hugo hits them on the back of the head with his hand, but I never seem to be able to hit hard enough. Take me home now, please--and don’t you ever dare to poach on the Pennel land again, or I’ll have to tell my father.’ She stood away from him, clasping her stomacher. Jason thought: She’s remembered again, and just when she was having a good time.

He said curtly, ‘ ‘Tis only your father, of all the squires, who calls it poaching.’

They walked down the Windline, one behind another. Jane went slowly down ahead of the two men, holding up her wide skirt to keep the hem off the ground. They passed by fields lying still under the bell of the sky, and cottages asleep under their thatches, and heard no sound except their own.

When they came near Pennel Manor and could see its twisted chimneys ahead, Voy took the girl’s arm and pointed. There was a small rabbit warren here, and Jason saw that the rabbits were out at play in the moonlight. For a moment the three stood close together, watching the rabbits hop and skip and the young ones roll together in their games. Fifty yards away, across a narrow pasture, a thick hedge bordered the stables and chicken runs at the back of the manor house.

Suddenly,
thump-thump
, a rabbit struck the ground with its hind legs. Everywhere the white tails scuttered up and darted down the holes. In five seconds the field was empty. Jane Pennel drew in her breath to speak, but Jason put his hand across her mouth, and Old Voy leaned tensely forward. A tender breeze blew, from the manor house towards them.

A red dog fox came to the edge of the cover twenty paces to their right and stood a moment, silent there, in the spotted moonshade. Jane Pennel had not seen it and still peered straight ahead. Gently Jason took her neck--it was soft and downy and thin in his hands--and gently turned it so that she saw the fox. Now from the fowl house just inside the Pennels’ hedge they heard the subdued clucks and indignant murmurs of the hens stirring in their places.