A Place Called Freedom - Ken Follett [48]
Lizzie shivered without her cloak, but she felt warm inside. “Walk fast and don’t pause to rest,” she said. “If you stop before daybreak you’ll die.” She wondered where he would go, and what he would do with the rest of his life.
He nodded, then held out his hand. She shook it, but to her surprise he raised her hand to his white lips and kissed it. Then he walked away.
“Good luck,” she said quietly.
Mack’s boots crunched the ice on the puddles in the road as he strode down the glen in the moonlight, but his body warmed quickly under Lizzie Hallim’s fur cloak. Apart from his footsteps, the only sound was the rushing of the river that ran alongside the track. But his spirit was singing the song of freedom.
As he got farther from the castle he began to see the curious and even funny side of his encounter with Miss Hallim. There was she, in an embroidered dress and silk shoes and a hairdo that must have taken two maids half an hour to arrange, and he had come swimming across the river as naked as the day he was born. She must have had a shock!
Last Sunday at church she had acted like a typical arrogant Scottish aristocrat, purblind and self-satisfied. But she had had the guts to take up Mack’s challenge and go down the pit. And tonight she had saved his life twice—once by pulling him out of the water, and again by giving him her cloak. She was a remarkable woman. She had pressed her body against his to warm him, then had knelt and dried him with her petticoat: was there another lady in Scotland who would have done that for a coal miner? He remembered her falling into his arms in the pit, and he recalled how her breast had felt, heavy and soft in his hand. He was sorry to think he might never see her again. He hoped she, too, would find a way to escape from this little place. Her sense of adventure deserved wider horizons.
A group of hinds, grazing beside the road under cover of darkness, scampered away when he approached, like a herd of ghosts; then he was all alone. He was very weary. “Going the round” had taken more out of him than he had imagined. It seemed a human body could not recover from that in a couple of days. Swimming the river should have been easy, but the encounter with the floating tree had exhausted him all over again. His head still hurt where the branch had hit him.
Happily he did not have far to go tonight. He would walk only to Craigie, a pit village six miles down the glen. There he would take refuge in the home of his mother’s brother, Uncle Eb, and rest until tomorrow. He would sleep easily knowing the Jamissons were not intending to pursue him.
In the morning he would fill his belly with porridge and ham and set out for Edinburgh. Once there he would leave on the first ship that would hire him, no matter where it was going—any destination from Newcastle to Peking would serve his purpose.
He smiled at his own bravado. He had never ventured farther than the market town of Coats, twenty miles away—he had not even been to Edinburgh—but he was telling himself he was willing to go to exotic destinations as if he knew what those places were like.
As he strode along the rutted mud track he began to feel solemn about his journey. He was leaving the only home he had ever known, the place where he had been born and his parents had died. He was leaving Esther, his friend and ally, although he hoped to rescue her from Heugh before too long. He was leaving Annie, the cousin who had taught him how to kiss and how to play her body like a musical instrument.
But he had always known this would happen. As long as he could remember he had dreamed of escape. He had envied the peddler, Davey Patch, and longed for that kind of freedom. Now he had it.
Now he had it. He was filled with elation as he thought of what he had done. He had got away.
He did not know what tomorrow would bring. There might be poverty and suffering and danger. But it would not be another day down the pit, another day of slavery, another day of being the property of Sir George Jamisson. Tomorrow he would be his own man.
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