“Stealing Slythe’s fish. What are you doing?”

There had been something so cheerful in his admission of poaching that she smiled. She liked his face. It was crossed by the odd reflections of the sunlight from rippling water. She saw that he had no rod or net. “You’re not fishing.”

“You’re calling me a liar!” He grinned at her. “We Lazenders don’t lie. At least, not much.”

A Lazender! That made everything more fitting somehow for this private place where she defied her father. Sir George Lazender was the Member of Parliament for the northern part of the county, a great landowner, a knight, and a man of whom her father had a low opinion. Sir George Lazender supported Parliament in its war against the King, but Matthew Slythe believed that support to be lukewarm. Sir George, Matthew Slythe believed, was a man too cautious in the great fight. There was worse. Sir George, it was rumored, would keep the bishops in a Protestant church, would keep the Book of Common Prayer for its services, and Matthew Slythe believed both to be the works of the Papist devil.

The young, red-headed man bowed clumsily in the stream. “Toby Lazender, nymph. Heir to Lazen Castle and stealer of fish.”

“You’re not stealing fish!” She was hugging her knees.

“I am!” He proved it by slinging a bag from his back and showing her a half dozen trout. Yet he had no fishing gear with him.

She smiled. “How?”

He told her. He waded to the bank, lay on the grass a few feet from her, and described how to catch fish with bare hands. It was, he said, a slow business. First he immersed his hands and forearms in the water and left them there until they had chilled to the temperature of the stream. Then, very slowly, he walked upstream still keeping his hands under the water. He explained that trout were lazy fish, lying in the thick weed and swimming only enough to hold their position against the water’s flow. He said she could creep into the weeds and, moving slow as thistledown, feel with spread fingers for the presence of a fish. He grinned at her. “You don’t feel the fish, at least not at first. You just feel the pressure of it.”

“The pressure?”

He nodded. “I don’t know. It’s just there. The water’s thicker.”

“And then?”

“You stroke.” He showed her how he worked his fingers back and forth, closing on the strange pressure until he could feel the fish’s belly. Because his fingers were as cold as the water, and because they moved with infinite slowness the fish suspected nothing. He told her how to stroke the fish, always stroking backward and always gently, until the hands knew precisely how the trout lay in the water. Then he pounced. The fish was jerked out of the weed, faster than it could twist away, and he would send it spinning to the bank. “Then you hit its head.” He grinned.