Coromandel! by John Masters Read Free Book Online

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