Coromandel! by John Masters

in a snare.’ He took back the fox and slung it over his shoulder.
    Jane said, ‘I could never catch him. The keepers tried too. But you did it! I saw it! Well--’ She stood a moment, glancing from them in their moleskin breeches, with the smell of earth and night on them, to the black tall shadows and the shining windows of Pennel Manor. ‘I must go back.’
    She hurried across the field. Voy called gently, ‘Eh, Mistress Jane!’ He gave her the stick and the bell and the two rabbits.
    ‘Thank you,’ she said quickly, and turned again.
    When she had gone Jason said, ‘Do you think she’ll tell on us?’ She was nice, but when daylight came she would have to be Mistress Pennel again.
    He remembered that this night he had promised to go to Mary.
    Old Voy said, ‘Not she. You know, she thinks you’re the greatest man in the world now--except when she remembers that you’re only a farmer’s son.’
    ‘What do I care what she thinks?’ Jason said, but he knew he did care because of how nearly he had killed her. ‘That cut in her belly will smart soon, and then she’ll tell on us.’
    Voy said, ‘I knew a poet in London once--or was it Paris? He said to me--mind, he was drunk--but he said, “If you want to make a man your friend, allow him to do you a favour.” She’s seventeen. Come on away. Did you bring the forty shillings, lad?’
     
    It wasn’t many days before he saw her again. He was passing the Cross Keys, driving a bull calf his father had sold, when he saw her riding towards him on her horse. They came together slowly. He thought she was going to pretend she couldn’t see him, but when they came closer he saw that she was blushing furiously. As they passed he touched his forehead and said, ‘Good morning, Mistress Jane.’ The acknowledgment seemed to release her from her confusion. She stopped the horse, bent down, and muttered, ‘The rabbit pie was very good.’ She smiled down on him from the horse, then looked nervously about to see if anyone was watching, but the lane was empty. She looked beautiful and rich on the shining horse, and her white hand hung down, and he saw that it was trembling a little. The bull calf reached up its head to sniff the strange horse’s nose.
    Jason remembered that time, three years back, when her breasts were just growing, and she’d hung around him at the fair, and they could have been in love, only she was just a girl and a Pennel, and he was a young man and a Savage. In the interval he had forgotten that time, but he knew now, looking up at her, that she had not forgotten. She had nursed it close in her memory, and now she was a woman, and the secret they had shared in the Windline was not the only secret.
    He went forward to her on the horse, wondering, remembering the red scratch he had slit in her skin, and feeling her nervousness, and her eyes on his strong forearms. He took her hand, and kissed it. The hand pressed against his mouth and then pulled away as the horse started forward under the jerk of her thighs and heels, and the bull calf started back with a bellow of fright; but from thirty yards on she looked back at him and waved the hand that he had kissed.
     
    It was another day, and the wind blowing from the west, wet and soft in the steady procession of days. Gently it carried to Jason in his byre the thin wailing of the pipes and the thumping of the tabors and the shouts of the whirling dancers. He looked affectionately at the red cow, pulled her ear, and said, ‘Not this afternoon, will you, please?’ The cow stood restive, with her four legs spread and her flanks bulging in tight drum-circles, and looked at him.
    Jason went out and spoke quietly to the young man who was sitting on the wall and counting his thumbs. You had to speak quietly to Softy Turpin or he ran away. Jason said, ‘Softy, you’ll go into the byre now and stay there, won’t you?’
    ‘Yes, your grace, yes, yes, yes, I’ll go away,’ Softy said, pulling his long