Coromandel! Read Online Free PDF

remembered where it lay in relation to the bloodstain.
    It was written in fine wavy black writing, but bigger than any of the other words, all along the land inside the blue line where there was a ship with a high stern. He couldn’t see any flag on her. Perhaps the mapmaker hadn’t painted one in. Perhaps ships did not fly flags on the Coromandel coast. Tom Devitt said ships always flew flags, but Tom had never been to Coromandel--at least, he had never mentioned it.
    He could ask Tom about Coromandel and how long it took to get there. No, he couldn’t, because the map was a secret.
    He must ask Voy about the bloodstain.
    He must learn to read.
    Here was the place where the hills stood all around and the men were galloping on small horses under the mountain Meru.
    To get there he’d have to cross the sea at least as far as to America. The sea was to the south, beyond the Plain, beyond Salisbury’s tall spire. Men went to sea and came back like Tom Devitt, with funny clothes and funny words, or a wooden leg.
    The sea was cold blue and ended in a pit with big grey birds circling and crying over it. He’d seen the seagulls driven even here in hard winters, their cry like babies left out on the Plain, the birds standing in the fields when the icicles hung from the thorn bushes and the mud crackled under the cart--wheels and the oxen breathed steam in the shafts.
    ‘Jason!’
    He scrambled to his feet, quickly folding the map away and picking up his bill.
    ‘What have you got there?’
    ‘Nothing, Molly.’
    He wanted to show her the map, perhaps tonight, but not here in the field. Molly changed so much. By day, when the sun shone, she could be very like Mary. At night in the house, best of all when the south wind blew from the Plain and the rain hissed in the thatch, she was like another piece of himself, a piece that was lost from him when they were apart; then they huddled together in his narrow bed and told stories of ghosts and made up pictures in words about the men and women who had raised Shrewford Ring long ago and set up the three stones.
    Molly said, ‘It is something, liar!’
    He said, ‘It’s a map. I’ll show it to you tonight.’
    Molly said, ‘A map! I saw Old Voy up here. So did Father. He’s going to give you trouble. You know what he thinks of Voy.’
    Jason knew. His father thought the same as Parson and Squire Pennel and all the other steady people. Old Voy was good for nothing. His real name was Potts, and he came from somewhere east, almost to London. Voy himself had let that out when he got drunk in the Cross Keys one day, but he drew his rusty gentleman’s sword if you mentioned it, and insisted his name was Don Speranza Voy--a Spanish nobleman’s bastard. Voy lived like a gypsy, and told lies and poached, and slept out winter and summer, and sold charms to lovesick milkmaids. In the summer Voy lit bonfires on the edge of the Plain and sat round them with tinkers and poets and actors. He was supposed to be a confidant of the robbers on the Plain.
    And had Voy really ever visited foreign places? Or had he talked to so many people that he could pretend he had? Jason shied away from that persistent thought. He had paid forty shillings for the map, and Coromandel was a magic word, like a spell.
    ‘Look at that hedge,’ Molly said in exasperation. ‘What have you been doing? What’s that going to be like when it grows across the tree next year? Here.’ She seized the billhook from him and began to cut and slash, mending his mistakes. He stood watching her and wondered whose head she wished she were cutting off--his, or Ahab Stiles’.
    When she had finished they walked down together to the farm and began to gather apples. The orchard stretched up to the front of the house, and he saw a fine big horse tethered there near the wall.
    ‘Squire’s here,’ he said.
    ‘It will be about you that he’s come,’ Molly muttered. ‘Are you sure you weren’t poaching last night?’
    They worked