Heartsease

VIII

THERE was no mistaking it. The freshening northwester had cleared every trace of haze from the fawn and silver landscape.

“Bother,” said Jonathan. “It’s strange how you never expect other people to be as clever as you are yourself.” He spoke in an ordinary voice, but looking at him Margaret could see the hope and excitement fading in his eyes as the colors fade from a drying seashell.

“Oh, Jo,” she cried. “What are we going to do?”

“If we can’t think of anything else we’ll turn round, go back and hide again. Where’s that bull you told me about?”

“Bull?” whispered Margaret.

“Yes. You said you were chased by a tethered bull at Splatt Bridge.”

“We can’t see him from here, if he’s still where he was then. We might if we go further along the wood.”

“Wait a moment. Let’s watch them a little longer. It all depends whether they’ve seen us.”

Margaret’s heart was beginning to bounce with a new dread, the terror of her remembered nightmares. The palms of her hands were icy patches. To stop herself from thinking about the bull she screwed up her eyes and peered along the narrowing streak of water until the bridge seemed to dance and flicker. But between the flickerings, the tiny people appeared lounging and unexcited. There was a small flurry, and the litter tilted, but it was only a change of bearers.

“All right,” said Jonathan. “Let’s find your bull.”

The children crept along the edge of the leafless wood, away from the canal; it was difficult not to walk on tiptoe.

“There he is,” said Margaret.

Even at this distance the bull looked dangerous, tilted forward by the weight of his huge shoulders and bony head. The cruel horns were invisible, but Margaret knew their exact curve.

“No cows with him,” said Jonathan. “He’ll be in a real temper.”

“What are you going to do?” whispered Margaret.

“I don’t want to turn round and go back if we can help it,” said Jonathan. “Some people must have seen us pass, even if they couldn’t get out in time to try and stop us, so they’ll probably be hunting down the canal after us. And even if we do get through, they’ll probably stir up enough people to hunt us down in Gloucester. But if I can cut the bull’s tether and bait him towards the bridge, he’ll clear the men off for long enough for me to

open the locking-pieces, and then you could simply barge the bridge open. They haven’t brought horses. They won’t catch us after that.”

“You’ll have to borrow Scrub. Caesar would be hopeless at that sort of thing.”

“So would I. I’ll do it on foot.”

Margaret felt cold all over, a cold not from the bitter wind but spreading out from inside her. She knew Jonathan hadn’t a chance of beating the bull on foot, any more than she had a chance of managing Heartsease. The plan was the wrong way round.

“I’d rather do the bull,” she said. “I can ride Scrub. We'd both be better at our jobs that way. How do I cut the tether?”

Jonathan tilted his head sideways and looked at her until she turned away.

“It’s the only hope,” she said.

“Yes. It’s better odds. And if it goes wrong at least you’ve a chance to get away. We’ll try it like that. I found a carving knife in the ironmonger’s in Gloucester — I liked it because it was so sharp — and if you can slash at the rope when the bull has pulled it taut you should be able to cut it in one go. Heartsease will make a tremendous cloud of smoke when she starts again, and they’ll all be watching the canal after that. Then it will be six or seven minutes before I reach the bridge if I come down flat out. You’ll have to time it from that, because you don’t want to clear the bridge too early, or they’ll simply'dodge the bull and come back.”

“What about Lucy and Tim?”

“I’ll need Lucy to control the engine.”

“Couldn’t we cut a pole for Otto to do that with? Then Lucy and Tim and Caesar could come down after me, and get away if things go wrong. I’m going to ride down behind that long bank over there — it’s called the Tumps on the map — so that I can’t be seen from the bridge. If it all works, the men will be on the wrong side after the bridge is open, so we could wait for Lucy and Tim beyond it. If it doesn’t, they might be able to escape.”

“Um,” said Jonathan. “I’ll go and talk to them. And Otto. But I’ll need Lucy to help me start the engines, so she won’t be able to leave until you’re almost in position — they’ll be a long way behind you.”

“Never mind,” said Margaret. “At least it means Tim won’t try to stop me teasing the bull.”

Jonathan laughed.

“He doesn’t look as if he needed much teasing,” he said. “You move off while I show Lucy where to go. I’ll give you twenty minutes before I start up.”

“The knife,” said Margaret.

“Yes, of course.”

They went back to the boat. Lucy was sitting on the bulwark with her head in her hands; Tim was tickling Davey’s stomach on the foredeck. Jonathan scampered aboard while Margaret looked over Scrub’s harness and tightened the girth a notch. He came back with a knife which was almost like a scimitar, with a knobby bone handle made from the antler of a deer; she tried it with her thumb and found that it had the almost feathery touch of properly sharpened steel. Too scared to speak,

she nodded to her cousin, raised her hand to Lucy and led Scrub away under the trees.

After a hundred yards they worked through a broken fence into an overgrown lane, with another small wood on their left; beyond that she turned south, still screened by trees, parallel with the canal but four hundred yards nearer the great river. At the far corner of the wood she found she could see neither Splatt Bridge nor the bull, so, hoping that meant that none of her enemies could see her either, she mounted and cantered on over the plashy turf. Scrub was still moving easily, his hoofs squirting water sideways at every pace as he picked the firmest going between the dark green clumps of quill grass that grew where the ground was at its most spongy. Two furlongs, and their path was barred by a wide drainage ditch, steep-banked, the water in it flowing sluggishly towards the Severn. Scrub stretched his pace, gathered himself for the leap and swept across. Now they were riding along the far side of the Tumps.

This was a long, winding embankment, old and grassy, built (presumably) to stop the Severn from flooding in across Frampton long before the canal was dug. The map showed that it dipped sharply in towards Splatt Bridge. They reached the place far sooner than she wanted, but she dismounted at once and whispered to Scrub to stay where he was and taste the local grass. Then she wriggled to the top of the bank.

The bridge was three hundred yards away, straight ahead but half hidden by the patchy saplings of a neglected hedge. Much nearer, more to her right, stood the enemy of her dreams. The bull was already dis-

turbed in his furious wits by the crowd on the bridge, and had strained to the limit of his tether in the hope of wreaking his anger and frustration on them. The best thing would be to snake through the grass and cut his tether while he fumed at Mr. Gordon and his cronies. Surely he wouldn’t notice if she came from straight behind. There was plenty of time.

But she couldn’t do it. To be caught there, helpless, too slow to escape the charging monster . . . She lay and sweated and swore at herself, but her limbs wouldn’t take her over the bank.

Suddenly a savage cackling and hooting rose from the bridge. Through the bare branches of the hedge she could see arms pointing upstream. She looked that way herself. Clear above the distant wood rose a foul cloud of murk, that could have come only from some wicked engine.

She ran back to Scrub, mounted and trotted him along the bank until she thought they were opposite where the bull was tethered; then she nudged her heel into his ribs and he swept up over the bank, and down the far side. She’d been hoping to catch the bull while he was straining towards the shouting voices; but he must have heard the drub of hoofs, for his head was already turned towards her and even as Scrub was changing feet to take the downward slope the horns lowered and the whole mass of beef and bone was flowing towards her as fast as cloud-shadow in a north wind. She could see from the circle of trampled grass how far his tether reached; she was safe outside it, but

she could never cut the rope unless she took Scrub inside it.

Scrub saw the coming enemy and half-shied away, but she forced his head round and touched his ribs again to tell him that she knew what she was up to. When the bull was so close that she could see the big eyes raging and the froth of fury round the nostrils, she jerked sideways at the precise moment in Scrub’s stride which would whisk him to the right, and as the bull belted past she leaned forward to slash at the tautening rope.

The first slash missed completely, and the second made no more than a white nick in the gray hemp; then the enemy had turned.

The bull was dreadfully quick on his feet, considering how much he weighed; he seemed to flick his mass round and be flowing towards her before she had really balanced herself back into the saddle. But Scrub was still moving towards the center of the trampled circle, and even before she asked him he accelerated into a gallop. She knew he didn’t like this game at all.

But he turned when she told him, out on the unchurned grass, and they tried again. It was a question of swaying out round the charge of the bull, allowing for the extra width of the sweep of his awful horns, and then at once swaying in to come closer to the rope than they had before. And this time she would have to lean backwards, away from the pommel and stirrups of the sidesaddle. But Scrub’s pace was all wrong, and she knew this before they reached the circle, so she took him wide out of range with several yards to spare. They halted on the far side of the circle and prepared for

another pass. In the stillness between the two bouts of action she heard the men’s voices again, deeper and more menacing than before. She glanced up the canal and saw the black funnel about three hundred yards away. It would have to be this time.

By now Scrub seemed to know what was wanted of him. As the eight hoofs rushed the two animals together he swayed sideways at the last moment in a violent jerk, and then in again. Margaret couldn’t tell whether she’d controlled him into this perfect movement, or whether he’d done it on his own, but there was the rope, taut as a bowstring, beside her knees. She stabbed the knife under it and hacked upwards. The rope broke and the bull was free.

She flashed a glance over her shoulder; the bull had already turned and was coming at her again. Something about the way he held his head told her that he too knew that the rules of the game had changed. Now all that mattered was which of the two animals was faster. And where was the best gap in the ruined hedge.

There was no time to think. She saw a wide hole in the bushes a little to her left, just behind the bridge, so she nudged Scrub towards it. The men were making such a clamor now that she couldn’t hear the hoofbeats of the bull. As she came through the gap she saw that her moment was exactly ripe: the men were on the bridge still, all their attention towards the tug which was booming down towards them with a solid wave under its bows; two of them had arrows ready, tense on the pulled strings; the rest had spears and billhooks.

Above them all Mr. Gordon crouched in his swaying litter, his face purple, his fist raised to the bleak sky.

Margaret gave a shrieking yell, and two heads turned.

A mouth dropped open, an arm clutched at the elbow of one of the bowmen. More heads turned, and the color of the faces changed. Then, like reeds moving in a gust of wind, the whole group of bodies altered their stance — no longer straining towards the tug, but jostling in panic flight away from the bull. As Margaret reached the white railing that funneled in to the bridge, a halfgap opened in the crowd. She leaned over Scrub’s neck, yelled again, and drove him through it. His shoulder slammed into the back of one of the litter-bearers and she saw the crazy structure begin to topple, and heard, above all the clamor, a wild, croaking scream. Then she was over the bridge and wrenching him round to wait beside the canal while the rout of men fled down the lane and the bull thundered behind them.

She rushed Scrub back onto the bridge and leaped down by the crank. The wreck of the litter hung half over the railings and something was flopping in the water below her, but she hadn’t time to look. She snapped the locks up and began to turn the handle. The bull was snorting in the middle of the lane while the men struggled through hedges. One man lay still in the middle of the road, and the legs of another wriggled in a thorny gap. She cranked on, and suddenly found that the handle would turn no more. The bridge was open, and pat on time Heartsease came churning through.

“Look out!” yelled Jonathan from the wheelhouse, pointing up the road.

She looked over her shoulder. The bull had turned. Beyond it two men with spears hesitated by gaps in the hedges. The bull snorted, shook its head, lowered its horns and was surging back towards her; and the men behind it were coming in her direction too.

“I’ll wait for you,” shouted Jonathan. Margaret swung onto Scrub’s back and skipped him from the end of the bridge onto the little path that ran up beyond the deserted cottage where the bridge-keeper had lived. Forty yards further up, Heartsease was edging in to the bank, and by the time they reached it, was almost still; without orders Scrub picked his way over the bulwark and stood quivering where Caesar had been. Margaret slipped down and caressed the taut neck while the engine renewed its heavy boom and the smoke rose, puff-puff-puff, from the ridiculous funnel.

When Scrub had stopped quivering she walked along to the wheelhouse.

“Father was there,” said Jonathan.

“I didn’t see him.”

“I think he got away all right.”

“There was one man lying in the lane, but his trousers were the wrong color. And somebody fell into the water, I think.”

“That was Mr. Gordon — I saw him topple. I wish Father hadn’t come.”

“Perhaps he was going to try and do what he could for us if we were caught.”

“I hope so.”

“How long must we wait for Tim and Lucy?”

“I’ll pull in here. Marge, you were quite right — I

couldn’t have managed that, not possibly. Now I want to go and tell Otto what happened. Just watch the bridge, in case they get across while I’m below.”

Splatt Bridge was half a mile astern now, looking almost as small as it had when they had first peered over the bank at the other end of the straight. Margaret tied the hawser to a sapling on the bank and then led Scrub ashore; the pony moved off a few yards and began to browse among the withered grasses, looking for blades with sap in them; then he found a small pool and drank. The bleak wind, scouring the fens and hissing through leafless thickets, seemed to be made of something harder than ordinary air, and colder too. Margaret crouched in the shelter of the wheelhouse and watched the men on the bridge.

They were bending at the rails, and at first Margaret thought they were trying to fathom the workings of the crank; but they moved, and she saw they were busy with something in the water.

A hoof clopped on stone; peeking round the wheel-house she saw Lucy leading Caesar out of the meadow on their left, with Tim walking beside her.

“Did you kill him?” said Lucy, her voice almost a whisper.

“Who?”

“Mr. Gordon. I saw him fall in.”

“Ah, please God no!” cried Margaret. Lucy smiled at her — the same smile as she sometimes watched Tim with.

“Aye,” she said. “Best dead, but not when one of us has to be killing him. Shall we be sailing on now?”

“As soon as possible, I think,” said Margaret.

But nothing would make Caesar go aboard the tug again, not though Scrub stepped daintily on and off a dozen times. After Jonathan had tugged and bullied, after Margaret had flattered and coaxed, they decided to leave him.

“Perhaps he’ll follow us,” said Jonathan.

“Perhaps,” said Margaret. “Anyway the winter’s over, and he’ll be all right. Nothing the weather can do can hurt a pony — that’s what the old stableboy told me.”

“Only four more bridges,” said Jonathan with a slight change of voice which made Margaret realize that he’d only been pretending to worry about Caesar to keep her happy — left to himself he’d have abandoned his pony long before.

“One of them’s in Purton,” said Margaret, “and there’s people living there.”

“Two on the map,” said Jonathan.

“I only remember one.”

“Well, you’d best get right ahead and scout. It’s four miles yet, and round a bend. If we have to, we’ll stop the engine and let Scrub tow us through.”

“Do you think they’d allow us to open the bridges if we told them our story?”

“Let’s hope.”

Heartsease, as if in triumph over the battle of Splatt Bridge, spouted her largest and nastiest plume of smoke when she restarted. Scrub cantered easily down the tow-path, quite rested from his battle with the bull. The first gate moved like the others, but the second, in the middle of a huge emptiness with only the white spire of

Slimbridge Church to notch the horizon, was stuck. In the end Jonathan had to ram it open, backing Heartsease off and charging a dozen times with fenders over the bow before something in the structure gave way with a sharp crack. Then Tim and she together just managed to wind the opening section round so that the tug could go through. It seemed too much work to shut it again, so Jonathan ferried them across to the towpath.

“I didn’t enjoy that at all,” he said. “Purton’s about two miles on now. You get well ahead and see what’s best, and I’ll wait half a mile out until you come back — if I’ve got the contours right there’s a little hill which will screen us.”

So there was a long, easy canter, dead level, with Scrub’s hooves knocking out the rhythm of rapid travel. The estuary gleamed wide on her right, at about halftide — so if it was ebbing they’d have a dangerously long nine hours to wait before high tide, and if it was flooding they’d have a bare three. Three seemed nothing like enough to be sure of finding out how the lock worked, but quite long enough for angry men to come swarming after them.

Scrub suddenly became bored with hurrying when they were almost at the last bend and slowed to a shambling walk, so Margaret dismounted and led him along the towpath. She’d have liked to have left him to rest and browse while she went on alone to explore, but she hadn’t quite the courage to go among dangerous strangers without her means of escape — Scrub could gallop faster than the angriest man in England could run. The first bridge was open, which was why she

hadn’t remembered it, but the second was shut. Worse still, a fishing rod was lashed to the further railings, its float motionless on the gray water, and that meant that someone must be watching the bridge. But at least the locking-bar on her end was open. She led Scrub across, peering over hedges on either side of the street.

He was in the garden of the first house on the right, a fat lump of a man lying almost on his back in a cane chair, wrapped in blankets and coats against the bitter wind. A straw hat covered most of his face, so that Margaret couldn’t tell whether he was watching the float through a gap in his fence, or listening for the bell at the end of the rod, or sleeping.

“Good morning,” she called — softly, so as not to break his precious sleep, if he was asleep.

The hat was brushed back by a mottled hand, and an angry blue eye peered at her from above a purple cheekbone, but he said nothing.

“You’re a long way from your rod,” said Margaret cheerfully.

“Three seconds,” the man grunted, and shoved his hat forward.

Margaret felt sick. He was much too big and much too close — it took forty seconds to open a bridge, even if it moved easily. She walked back over the bridge but stopped close by the handle.

“Lame?” she said, as if she was talking to a baby. “Oh, you are a big ninny — let me have a look. Why, it’s only a tiny pebble. There, that’s better, isn’t it?”

Scrub was not a good actor; anyone actually watching could have seen how puzzled he was to have a perfectly

sound hoof lifted up, peered into, poked at and put down again. While she was kneeling Margaret flipped the locking piece of the bridge over, and as she rose she gave the handle a single turn, trusting the fidgeting hooves to drown the noise, to see whether it would move at all. It did, and at the far end she could see the crack in the film of dried mud which showed where the join had begun to part. Then she mounted and rode slowly up the canal and told Jonathan what she had seen and done.

“Three seconds is useless,” he said. “We’ll have to lure him away. Are there a lot of other people in the village?”

“I didn’t see any, but I think there must be — all the gardens are dug and weeded.”

“Probably they’re having dinner. If you rode back in a frenzy and said there was something wicked coming down the canal but you could only see it properly from the other bridge, he’d run up there and you’d have time to get that bridge open. If you time it right, you could point to the smoke.”

“I’ll try,” said Margaret, though she didn’t feel from the look of the fat fisher’s eye that he would be an easy man to lie to. She cantered back reining Scrub in every few paces and then letting him go again so that he would seem properly fretful when they reached the village. She rehearsed cries — was “Help!” a better beginning or “Please . . .”?

No need. The rod was there, but the fat man was gone from his garden.

She jumped down and started to wind frenziedly at the handle. The end of the bridge had moved a yard when there was a shout behind her and something flicked past her ear, banged on the railing and dropped into the water; she looked round — he was behind the fence, his hand raised to throw another stone. She gave a meaningless shout and, still cranking, pointed with her free hand to the space between rooftops where the familiar black puffs rose before they were scattered by the wind. He wheeled round, stared, ran to the far hedge, stared again, and bellowed. Windows in the village opened with bangs or squeaks.

“Oi, you girl, you lay off!” he shouted. “We’ll catch un here!”

Nearly far enough. Margaret cranked on. Pain blazed into her left shoulder. She gave the handle five more turns, dodged sideways and heard the splash of a stone, turned thrice more and ran to where Scrub waited out on the arm of the swinging bridge. Her shoulder was still fiery with pain when she twisted up into the saddle and urged him forward. A stone grazed his quarters and rapped her heel. Startled, he gathered himself and sprang straight out over the waiting water. There was a roaring splash, freezing water blinding her eyes, burning her nostrils, panic. But she’d remembered to lean right forward, and kept her seat as Scrub’s body tilted into its swimming posture. The roaring died, though the deadly cold remained, and they were swimming slantways towards the far bank with Scrub’s head and her own head and shoulders rising above the water but the rest of them covered from the old man’s stones.

Then she heard shouts behind, and a tinkle of breaking glass. They’d stopped throwing at her.

She looked back up the canal and saw half a dozen men bending and flinging as Heartsease surged round the curve, but they were too lost in the rage and drama of action to think of crowding onto the open bridge, from which they could have boarded as the tug went past. She was still watching the fight when something tickled her neck — a blade of grass. Scrub had reached

the bank, but it was too steep for him to climb. She scrambled soddenly up, and with her weight off him he managed it. But she knew she would die of cold in ten minutes unless she could find something dry to wear.

Jonathan must have known it too, for he was already slowing the tug as he came abreast of her.

“Dry clothes in the cabin!” he shouted through a smashed window, his face streaming with blood.

“Are you all right?” she called back, in the accents of a fussing mum.

“Only bits of glass. Doesn’t hurt. Get aboard.”

The stove was still going in the cabin, and the close air warm as a drying cupboard. Margaret stripped and rummaged through a big cardboard box full of clothing. Jonathan must have raided a department store for Lucy. She dried herself on a blanket and then put on a vest, two pairs of jeans and two thick jerseys — it didn’t seem the time for the tempting little frocks. Then she started to hang out her own sodden clothes to dry over the stove, but there wasn’t room, so she took them all off the line again and rolled them into a tight bundle tied with her belt. She took the blanket up to rub down Scrub.

They were already far down the last arm of the canal, where it ran tight against the river with only a thirty-yard-wide embankment to separate its listless waters from the rushing tides of the Severn. Only when the pony was nearly dry did she remember about Jonathan’s face.

His left eye was glued shut with drying blood, and his lip swollen to a blue bubble, but he hummed to himself as he stood at the large wheel, twitching it occasionally

to keep the tug dead in the center of the canal. The main cut in his forehead had stopped flowing, and he said nothing while Margaret sponged and dabbed. She found he wasn’t as injured as he’d looked, and the moment she stopped worrying about him she felt the pain nagging again at her own shoulder. He must have noticed the sudden tightening of her movements.

“Did he hit you?” he said. “He looked too close to miss.”

At once she was ashamed.

“Only one stone,” she said. “It just hurts when I think about it.”

“You’ve got us through twice now,” he said. “I was an idiot second time; and an idiot to let Caesar go, too. He could have towed us through.”

“I don’t think they’d have allowed us to open the bridge anyway.”

“I didn’t think about towing till too late — you get in a mood when you’re just going to blind through, and you don’t want to stop to think. They’re right about machines, somehow — Mr. Gordon and his lot, I mean. Machines eat your mind up until you think they’re the answer to everything. I noticed it that morning when you stopped Mr. Gordon hypnotizing Mother; all I could think of was some sort of contrivance, and there wasn’t one.”

“Lucy says I killed Mr. Gordon,” said Margaret.

“No you didn’t!” said Jonathan hotly. “I saw his litter keel over and tip him in, and I didn’t see him climb out. But if he’s dead, he killed himself. Something like this was going to happen, for sure. He’d have pushed somebody too far — somebody like Father with a mind of his own — and they’d have gone for him with a billhook.” “Yes,” said Margaret. “But it was me.”

She stared through the shattered windows at the wide, drear landscape. It was so different from the hills because, though you could see just as much of the scurrying and steely sky, you couldn’t see more than a few furlongs of earth. The land lay so flat that distances lost meaning —even the mile-wide Severn on their right looked only a grim band of water between the muddy band of bank in the foreground and the reddish band of cliffs beyond. And the hills of home, the true hills, the Cotswolds, might just as well have been clouds on the left horizon, so unreachable seemed the distance to them.

“Lord, that’s a big tower!” said Jonathan. He pointed ahead to where the warehouse at Sharpness soared out of the flatness, less than a mile away.

“High tide just under three hours,” he added. “Otto worked it out from old tide tables — it’s time we got him on deck. Could you ask Lucy to persuade Tim? And there’s a dustpan and brush in the cabin, if you felt like getting rid of this broken glass.”

Scrub was standing in the oval of space behind the engine room roof, watching with mild boredom as the bank slid past. Margaret knelt at the engine room hatch; the torrid air, blasting through the small opening, smelled of wicked things: burned fuel, reeking oil and metal fierce with friction. Each cylinder stamped out its separate thud above the clanging and hissing. Otto lay in his corner, watching Lucy and the signal dial. She stood by the control lever and watched it too, frowning. Tim slept in the middle of the racket, crouched in a gangway like a drowsing ape, with Davey asleep in his arms. Margaret hated the idea of going down, so she yelled and yelled again. Lucy glanced up. The oily face smiled, and said something, and an oily hand gestured at the dial. Margaret nodded, beckoned and pointed forward. Lucy shrugged and left her post.

“Sorry,” said Margaret as her head poked out of the hatch. “Jo wants Tim to bring Otto on deck.”

Lucy nodded and stared across the choppy estuary. “Shouldn’t fancy living in these parts,” she said. “I’ll wake Tim.”

Margaret found the dustpan and brush and swept out the wheelhouse. When she threw the last splinters overboard she saw that they’d finished with hedges and fields and were moving between sidings and timber yards; and Heartsease was going much more slowly too.

“Are the bridges the same as the others?” called Jonathan. “One’s got a railway on it. You’ll have to land and open them.”

“There’s one high one, but I don’t remember the other,” said Margaret.

“Funny. . . . Anyway, there’s the high one — we can get under that. And there’s the other, and it’s open. Lord, that is a big tower!”

The huge, windowless column of concrete on the south side of the dock came nearer and nearer. The canal widened as it curved. Round the corner lay the big ship which had so astonished Margaret; Heartsease seemed like a dinghy beside it. Then, right across the

water, ran a low, dark line with a frill of railing above it in one place. The line was the quay at the bottom of the docks, and the frill was the guardrails for the narrow footpath on top of the lock gates. It was here the canal ended — and their escape too, if they couldn’t find how to open the lock gates.