AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Learnt it from a poacher,” Tom said. “The fish go into a trance, like, when you tickle them.” He threw the flapping, gasping trout back into the stream. “It ain’t legal to take fish though, unless it’s your own stream. You shouldn’t be trying it.” He dried his arm on the grass and rolled down his shirtsleeve.
“I could never.” John’s admiration of his new acquaintance, already vast, swelled further. “Where did you meet a poacher?”
“Just rambling, on the way south from Bristol. Fella nearly took my head off with his club before he saw I weren’t the gamekeeper.”
John was fascinated by Tom’s life history. “That was before you met Lord Macklin.”
“Yep.” Tom turned onto his back and gazed up at the sky through the willow branches. “’Twas the very next day I came across young Geoffrey thinking he was hid in a hollow log and took him back home.”
“To Lord Macklin’s son’s house.”
“His nephew.”
“Right.” John was consumed with envy for Tom’s rootless life. It seemed to him an ideal existence, to have no last name with its weight of expectations, to wander wherever you liked. “Are you still thinking of moving on?” he asked. “Just walking off one day in whatever direction feels interesting?” He’d been transfixed by this idea ever since Tom had mentioned it.
“I expect I will,” replied Tom idly. His attention had been caught by a pair of dragonflies darting over the surface of the water. “Look at the way their wings go,” he said.
John gathered all his hope and courage. “Will you let me come with you?”
“Eh?” Tom turned his head to look at him.
“When you go. Run away. Or, it isn’t really. Running. When you walk off to see the world.” He clasped his hands, then quickly unclasped them. “I want to see all the snakes in the world. Particularly the spitting cobras!”
Tom sat up slowly, moving rather as he had when he captured the trout. He crossed his legs in the grass. “I’d just be rambling about in England,” he answered. “Mebbe Scotland. That’s right close, ain’t it? No cobras, though.”
“But you can go wherever you want!”
Tom shook his head. “I can go where my feet will take me. And where I’m allowed in. That ain’t everywhere, by any means.”
“No one can stop you though.”
“Sure they can. I’ve been chased off and barely missed beatings. I was nearly taken up and put in the workhouse once.” Tom held up a hand before John could protest again. “Also. Seems to me it must cost a deal of money to get over to where these cobras live.”
John slumped, his dreams of unfettered freedom dissolving.
“You’d need one of them scientific expeditions,” Tom continued. “I heard Lord Macklin talking about one of them.”
“You mean like James Cook? I’ve read the chronicles of his voyages. And there’s James Strange and the other fellows in the East India Company.”
“Yeah. Them.”
“I’dloveto organize a scientific expedition to catalog snakes in India.”
“Well there’s people that do that, eh?”
“Like the Royal Society, you mean?”
“Sure.” Tom nodded wisely. “You could ask them.”
“They want men with university degrees and fellowships and such.”
“Huh. Are there fellows studying snakes in them universities?”
John sat very still. With a smile, Tom let him be.
Four
Macklin’s company was soothing, Roger thought as they returned from a morning ride the following day. He seemed to sense when one wished to talk and when not. And his conversation was always sensible. Should he ever need advice, Macklin was the man, Roger concluded. Not that he did. He had no pressing problems.
