Coromandel! Read Online Free PDF Page B

up close to the house. It was late afternoon, and the windows were open. When Jason climbed into the apple tree nearest the door and began to unload the heavy branches, his father saw him through the window, but Sir Tristram had his back turned. Jason admired the squire’s red silk doublet and the white cloth showing through, and went on picking apples.
    Soon his father called him. ‘Jason, come in here. Squire wants to talk to you.’
    Jason winked with bravado at Molly’s anxious face and went into the house. He pulled his forelock to Sir Tristram, who regarded him sternly and said, ‘Hugo tells me he caught you poaching last night, Jason.’
    ‘I wasn’t poaching,’ Jason said.
    ‘Come, now, don’t lie to me.’ Sir Tristram’s long face reddened.
    ‘I wasn’t poaching, and I’m not a liar,’ Jason shouted suddenly, the heat whirling up in his neck and a cold hollow forming in his stomach. A sword--if he had a sword he’d be entitled to whip it out and demand satisfaction. His hands shook, and his fists clenched and unclenched.
    Sir Tristram, taken quite aback, stammered, ‘Y-you weren’t--why, eh, what--?’ and his father said sharply, ‘Don’t shout at Squire!’
    Sir Tristram got up, the tip of his scabbard clanking on the stone floor. He said, ‘You’re going to the bad, Jason. You’ll finish on the gallows.’
    Jason said angrily, ‘I was not poaching.’
    ‘What were you doing out at three in the morning, then?’ Sir Tristram asked. ‘Stealing?’
    Jason held on to himself with a huge effort and did not speak. The squire’s face hardened. He said, ‘Go on out, then, to your work, Jason. You have become a liar as well as a poacher and a gypsy. You will have to mend your ways in the future. If you attack my keepers again, you’ll go to prison.’
    Jason turned and went out and walked blindly through the orchard. Hedge. Apples. Milk the cows.
    He opened the gate, let the cows into the byre, and roped them in their stalls. He went back to the kitchen and picked up the earthenware jugs from the corner. Molly was there, lighting the fire for supper. She glanced at him silently, and her eyelashes were wet, but Sir Tristram’s voice still snapped through the house from where he sat on his great horse outside the front door, talking to their father.
    Jason went into the byre, jerked the milking-stool into position with his foot, and dug his head into Daisy’s flank. Daisy moved over and flicked her dung-smeared tail across his face.
     
    He lay quiet in his bed until all the sounds of the farm were stilled and the doors bolted and his father’s footsteps had creaked up the stairs. The ceiling was whitewashed, and the beams ran like thick iron bars across it. The moon would not be up for another hour and a half. Tomorrow night, rabbits in the spinney with Old Voy’s French ferrets. A couple of nights later, and he’d take the big trout under the Avon bridge. He used to tell himself that he would stop poaching when he was married, but now he knew that he would not. They could only beat him.
    But it was a poor man’s right to take trout and rabbits. All the other squires allowed it, or at least didn’t do anything to prevent it. Why not go poaching with a few of the young men, and, when the Pennel keepers tried to stop them, fight?
    Because the young men wouldn’t go with him, that’s why. They grumbled at Sir Tristram’s selfishness, but they obeyed.
    The Pennels meant to send him to prison. He’d never let them take him. He’d use his knife and run away and join the murderers and sheep-stealers who lived on the Plain. He’d be sorry for Mary and sad for Molly, but he couldn’t help it. He’d do it rather than be locked up.
    They had no right to disbelieve him. They had no right to tell him he was going to be here all his life, because then his dreams, being impossible of coming true, would be like a mad-man’s. If he was really to be here until he died he could not, even in his