Читать книгу The Doomington Wanderer - Louis Golding - Страница 6

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When Sailor Mason first clapped eyes on Black Tom, a shiver ran through him, like a collector in a junk-shop who claps eyes on a priceless ivory he has been hunting for all his life. Those bullock-like shoulders, those fists like elephants’ feet, those thighs like stumps of trees. When he first saw him in action, his eyes almost filled with tears, like a devotee of the ballet who for the first time sees the supreme ballerina of the age rising on her toes.

Startlingly clear, he heard in that same moment his own words brought back on the wind to him again: “I’ll make him the master of Jem Belcher himself!” And then a subtler voice, and still his own, whispered within his skull: “But not too fast, my hearty, not too fast!” He sat down against the trunk of a tree and closed his eyes. He opened them again. He had his plan in the palm of his hand, clear as a pebble.