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going to give up anything. If they send me to prison I’ll kill them. If I can’t even think of going to Coromandel I’ll be a murderer instead.’ Molly said as softly, ‘God’s blood, I hate you, Jason. If you ever leave Wiltshire I’ll leave too. Do you hear me? I will! I will!’
    She slipped out. After a while Jason turned back to the map. Soon the moonlight crept across the corner of it, but he did not blow out the candle. A vixen yowled crazily for her dog under the Plain, and the hens mumbled and the cock blared and the bull struck his horn against his crib, but Jason had fallen asleep with his head on the map.
     
    The next evening he lay down, fully dressed, on his bed, pulled the blanket up to his chin, and was quiet, thinking, for nearly two hours. Then he got up, raised the loose floorboard, brought up a bag of silver, and counted out forty shillings by touch. The moon had not yet risen, and the night was astir outside the black casement. He wrapped the forty shillings in a cloth and tucked it into his jerkin. From the same hiding-place he got out his sling and tucked it through his belt. He had made it three years ago, and each leather thong was a yard long. Then he waited, crouching by the window, until the moon-glow reached out round the side of the byre and up from under the earth towards Pewsey. Then he slipped out of the window.
    He lifted some loose straw that lay against the outer wall of the byre and selected half a dozen round stones from the pile that had been hidden beneath, put them in his scrip, replaced the straw, and set off up the sloping field. It was another warm night, with a slight wind from the south-west, and the distorted moon low over Shrewford Down.
    Old Voy was waiting for him at the comer of the spinney where they had agreed to meet. Jason saw his hair like a patch of dirty snow under an oak, where the moonlight fell in sprinkled rain through the heavy leaves and the acorns glinted in a thousand tiny points of fire. He went up close and muttered, ‘Voy?’
    ‘Of course. Follow me. We’re going up to the Windline.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Master Hugo has put the head keeper on the other side of the spinney here. He’s there now. Hammond’s not well, but Hugo has dragged him out of bed and sent him over to Hangman’s Copse. Sale’s back, and he’s on the Avon, by the good pools below Pennel Church. Granger’s over between Hatchard’s and the Cross Keys. There’s no one on the Windline. I’ve left the kit up there. Come on.’
    ‘Is Hugo out as well?’
    ‘Yes, with Granger. The young cockerel means to catch someone tonight. But not Speranza Voy, not Old Voy, he won’t!’
    They worked south along the edge of a root field and over the sheep pastures on the edge of Shrewford Pennel village. Soon the towering elms of the Windline began to climb above the horizon of the distant Plain. It was a bank of trees, half a mile long and thirty yards wide, running down from the lip of the Plain into the vale below, and ending at the border of the Pennels’ home farm. After twenty minutes of quick and silent movement they came to the lower end and began to work up the hill under the trees. Jason knew now where they must be going. There was a big warren quite close ahead, out on the sheltered eastern side, at the edge of a sheep run.
    A few yards short of the warren Voy stopped and squatted at the base of an elm. Jason helped him pull pegs, nets, hollow spade, billhook, line, and muzzle cords into the open. The ferrets squeaked in their bag, which was hung in a bush to one side, and the air was feral with the acid smell of them.
    ‘Now, quick, lad,’ Voy said.
    Jason took a handful of nets and pegs and began covering every hole of the rabbit warren. He stretched the little nets tight and forced the pegs into the chalk with the heel of his hand.
    They wouldn’t send him to prison, to be shut in and given food like an animal. He slipped his hand round and felt the blade of the short