CHAPTER 55

THE INVISIBLE THREAD

Amos had walked towards the setting sun for so many days that the tinker’s pack he carried was no longer burdened with the jangling festoons of tinware and implements that it had been. He still had several knives and had kept one lidded canister in which to carry any milk that he might trade for along the way, but now the heaviest part of his burden was the knife-grinding wheel strapped to the back. Because he was getting stronger every day he walked, it was less of a weight to him than it had been, but on the steepest uphill portions of his journeyings he did still wonder about leaving it behind, or better, trading it.

There was still enough of the Templebanes’ upbringing left in him to make him see the folly in that, because however irksome a load it might be, making the straps of the pack itch and chafe at his shoulders, it was a source of regular food, and occasionally–amongst the more well-to-do cottagers whose cutlery he honed and cleaned–income.

Having begun his travels with no plan other than to keep moving away from London and the House of Templebane’s wide sphere of contacts, on the road he had developed an ambition. It seemed a lofty one to him, and all but unattainable without considerable hard work or cunning, but it was one of the characteristics–he felt–of a truly worthy ambition that it should be so.

What he wanted was a horse.

He had developed a frank envy for the confident characters who passed him on horseback, and he coveted both the speed of their passage across the landscape and the elevated viewpoint that they had of it from the high saddle. He had developed, in addition to stronger muscles and healthier lungs, a great hunger for the countryside, and a horse seemed like a good means of ranging farther and seeing more of it.

He had once overheard a distant connection of Templebane’s who had come to the city from the depths of the West Country talking in an almost indecipherable rural burr about what sounded like the “vreedoms of the New Varest”, and of how there were wild ponies there. Amos knew the New Forest was in the west and so perhaps that, he decided, was what drew him so strongly in that direction. Maybe he was on his way to enjoy that “vreedom” and catch a horse for himself.

It must be that, he thought as he lay on his back at dusk, swaddled and alone in the tinker’s blanket, looking up at the emerging immensity of stars overhead, because there was certainly something calling him westward: he felt it like a tug on an invisible thread which had been laced through his heartstrings.

How he knew it he did not know, but he was convinced that his destiny lay somewhere over the distant horizon, where the sun had set.