CHAPTER 43

A CHAIN BROKEN

Amos Templebane, London-born and London-bred, thrived on his new life in the countryside. The open spaces were like his dreams but bigger and wider and–when he lay on his back and looked up at the sky–deeper. In London there was always a wall somewhere close, and beyond the walls, people. And where there were people there was noise–not just the sound of talking or shouting, there was the incessant sound of their thoughts. Most of the time he could fade them into the background of his mind, and though he’d got better and better at it as he got older, the noise from other people’s heads was always there even if it was a very quiet but constant sound, like the hiss of fire in the grate or the wind in the trees. And the noise meant that he was never alone.

In the country there were fields and hills and woods, and Amos felt bathed in greenness and silence. He walked the less travelled ways, the drover’s paths and the sheep tracks, keeping clear of the turnpikes and the high roads. When the food in the tinker’s pack ran out, he found his way to a farm and was given more provisions in exchange for sharpening all the knives and trading a pair of tin canisters.

The only time he walked the high road was on the first day, and he stopped when he came to a crossroads and was faced with the choice of going home to London in the south, or turning east or west. The road west was the least frequented, and he took it. At the time he could not have explained why he did so, but as he walked the countryside and felt himself getting stronger he knew it was because all that waited for him in the south was more of the life he had been trapped in, whereas the other directions offered the hope of freedom. They also contained no Templebanes.

Something had broken inside Amos. At first he thought it was because he had run away, because he had killed the murderous tinker, because he now bore the mark of Cain. He sat for several nights over lonely fires looking at the flames and thinking about this after long footsore days on the road. And then he took the tinker’s sharp knife, his “snickersnee” and threw it into a weedy dewpond and walked away.

He had decided that what had broken was not anything good, not something he should feel guilty about, nothing to be mourned, regretted or lamented: what had broken, as cleanly and suddenly as the strap which had once held the Templebanes’ “Mute but Intelligent” label around his neck, was a chain. He was no longer a prisoner manacled to his past. He did not belong to anyone but himself. He was free and answerable only to the future. And whatever it held, he swore he would never be chained or imprisoned again.