Coromandel! by John Masters Read Free Book Online Page A

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