Heartsease

IX

OTTO lay out on dock beside Scrub, as pale as plaster with his illness and long hiding from daylight. Tim knelt by him, bubbling worriedly — and Margaret thought that the paleness might also be pain, the pain of being heaved with ribs half-mended up a vertical iron ladder. But he smiled wickedly at her as she walked aft.

“Hi, Heroine of the Resistance,” he said. “I sure wish I’d taken a movie of you playing your bull, just to show the folks back home. You look like a girl back home, too, in that rig. Nice.”

Margaret felt herself flush, and glanced down at her primrose-yellow jersey and scarlet jeans. They made her feel like someone else.

“Pity your own folk can’t see you,” said Otto.

“Uncle Peter would whip me if he did,” said Margaret. “And strangers would throw things at me. Women mustn’t wear trousers — it’s wicked.”

“And what do you . . .” Otto began. “Hey! How do we know the Horse of the Resistance won’t step on me?” “He’s much too clever,” laughed Margaret. “Did it hurt a lot being carried up?”

“So-so,” he said, “but Tim . . . hold tight! He’s misjudged it!”

The tug swung suddenly, and then the whole length of it jarred as it thudded into the quay. Margaret was flung to the deck, almost putting her arm through the glass of the engine room roof. As she went down she saw Scrub prancing sideways towards Otto in a desperate attempt to keep upright; but when she rose he’d stopped, with his forelegs actually astride the sick man. Delicately he moved himself away.

“I told you he was clever,” said Margaret with a shudder.

“Sorry!” called Jonathan from the wheelhouse. “I made a mess of that. Is Lucy all right?”

“Fair enough,” answered Lucy, poking her head through the hatch. “I burned my arm on that engine of yours, but not enough to notice.”

“Margaret can put some cream on it,” said Jonathan. “In the first-aid bag in the cabin, Marge. But first, Lucy, can you get Tim to carry Otto ashore to look at the sluices?”

Tim thought it was an unwise move. Margaret was astonished by how much you could tell from the tone of his bubbling and the way he moved his head; now he was arguing that his patient had been under quite enough of a strain coming up from the engine room, and must rest before he attempted anything else. He began to back away as Lucy talked softly to him.

“Ah, come on, Tim my old pal,” said Otto suddenly. “I can stand it if you can.”

Tim stopped backing away and knelt beside him, making little worried noises.

“Ah, come on,” said Otto gently. “Jo’s been stoned, Marge has fought a mad bull, Lucy’s kept that engine going all morning — why can’t I earn my medal too?” Tim slithered an arm beneath his shoulders and another beneath his thighs and picked him up tenderly. He must have been very light with illness, as light as a dry bone. Margaret took Lucy below to dress her burn, which was a nasty patch of dead whiteness surrounded by angry red on the inside of her left forearm. There was aspirin too in the bag — Jonathan must have raided half the shops in Gloucester. Lucy grimaced as she chewed them up.

“D’you think I’m doing right, Miss Margaret?” said Lucy.

“How?”

“Taking Tim to America. Otto doesn’t think they can make him clever, not like you nor me, but they might find drugs for him which’d make him two parts well; and Otto’s uncle has a farm where we can live, he says. But what frights me is they might take Tim away and shut him up with a lot of other zanies — they wouldn’t do that, would they?”

“Not if Otto says they won’t. He owes you a lot — both of you.”

“Aye,” sighed Lucy. “But will they listen to him?”

“I wish I weren’t going,” said Margaret. “I wish none of this had ever happened. It’s awful knowing nothing can ever be smooth and easy again.”

Lucy grinned — not her usual secret smile but a real grin.

“I reckon we got no choice,” she said. “Neither you nor me. Master Jonathan blows us along like feathers in the breeze. Let’s look what he’s at now.”

Jonathan was down a deep hole in the quayside; the hole had a lid, which they’d opened, and Otto was propped on the rusting lip of iron which surrounded it.

“It’s hydraulic,” called Otto, “so there must be some kind of cylinder with a piston in it and a shaft. Then the shaft might thrust down on an arm and the other end of that might haul the sluice up. They’d be sure to have fixed it so you could haul it up by hand, in case the hydraulics failed. See anything?”

“I’ve got the main cylinder,” said Jonathan as matter-of-factly as if he were talking about laying the supper table. “But the rest of it’s not . . . oh, I see. How far would the sluice travel, do you think?”

“Four, five feet, I guess. Could be only two or three, if it’s broad enough.”

“That’s it, then. There’s two rings which’d take a hook, one to shut and one to open. I can’t begin to shift it, though.”

“Don’t try,” called Otto urgently. “Fetch out that block and tackle you looted from the garage. We’ll put a beam across.”

Jonathan popped out of the hole and began scampering to the tug. All he’d done since yesterday evening didn’t seem to have slowed him down at all.

“Come and help, Marge,” he called as he disappeared down the cabin hatch.

By the time she got there he was handing up a thing which didn’t look any use at all, made of two hooks and two pulley wheels and a great tangle of rusty chain. Margaret struggled with the heavy and awkward mess of metal back to where Otto lay, while Jonathan rabbited down into the engine room.

“Is there more of it?” she asked Otto.

“No, that’s all. It ought to do the trick — got a twenty-to-one ratio, justabout.”

“Then we’ve still got to find something strong to lift it — Scrub could pull, I suppose.”

“No need,” he said, grinning. “See where the chains run over that top wheel? That pulley’s double, and one side of it’s a mite smaller than the other, so when the pulley goes round the loop in the middle, that bit there which the other pulley hangs from, gets slowly bigger or smaller. But you’ve got to pull the chain outside the pulley a good yard to make the loop a couple of inches smaller, so you’re pulling about twenty times as hard. You can lift twenty times your own weight. Got it?” “No,” said Margaret.

“You’ll see,” said Otto. “What’s the gas for, Jo?” Jonathan was bending beneath the weight of two big cans, just the same shape and size as the one he’d used to scatter petrol over the stones the night the whole fearful adventure began.

“Gas?” he said, putting them down. “It’s petrol.

Marge, will you and Lucy take a can each up to where the timber piles are thickest; there’ll be men hunting us down from Purton soon. I saw a boat on the canal up there, so I think they’ll cross and come down the tow-path. Pull a lot of planks out across the path, spray the petrol about, stand back and throw a lit rag on to it. Take rags and matches. Then go and do the same thing on the road the other side of the sheds — there’s more timber beyond it, and if you can get it really blazing they’ll never get through. I may have to harness Scrub to the capstan to open the gates — d’you think he’ll do it for me if you aren’t back?”

“Oh, yes,” said Margaret. “How much have you got to do?”

“Shut the bottom sluice, open the top one, open the top gate when the water’s level—it’s only got about four foot to come up because the tide’s high in the basin — put Heartsease in the lock, shut the top gate, shut the top sluice, open the bottom one, let the water go down again, open the bottom gate and we’re out. Hurry up, though — I can’t move Heartsease without Lucy in the engine room.”

The girls trudged up beside the dock, straining sideways under the twenty-pound weight of the petrol cans. The wind bit at the backs of their necks and fingered icily through their clothes in spite of the exercise.

“Fine breeze for a bonfire,” whispered Lucy.

Margaret did most of the timber hauling, but she didn’t mind because Lucy seemed happy to handle the petrol. It was hard work, but quick once she’d found a stack of planks light enough for her to run out across the

quay in a single movement. At the back of the shed the road and railway ran side by side, making a forty-foot gap before the further sheds. The girls toiled away, one on each side of the road, hauling out planks to make a barrier of fire, until Margaret saw that they were going about the job in an un-Jonathan-like way.

“That’s enough,” she said. “We’ll never be able to pull out so much that there’s fire right across the road. But if the sheds really catch it’ll be too hot to get through.”

“Right,” said Lucy. “Shall I start this end, then? Wind’s going round a bit, I fancy. Ugh! Wicked stuff, this petrol. You stand back, Miss Margaret, while I see what I can do with it.”

She soaked several rags, scattered half of one can all over Margaret’s pile and the wood beside it in the stack, then the other half over her own. In the shelter of the stacks the harsh wind eddied, blowing the weird reek about them. Lucy tied a stone into a soaked rag so clumsily that Margaret was sure it would fall out. She lit it and threw.

Half a second’s hesitation, and with a bellowing sigh the spread petrol exploded. In ten seconds the pile was blazing like a hay-rick, huge sparks spiraling upwards in the draft. One of these must have fallen into the second pile, for it exploded while Lucy was still tying another stone into a rag. Margaret picked up the other can and ran between the stacked planks to the quayside. Already they could hear the coarse roar of fire eating into the piled hills of old pine, dry with five summers, sheltered by the shed roofs from five winters. By the dock Lucy

splashed the petrol about as though she were watering a greenhouse. The wind, still shifting round towards the northeast, smothered them with an eddy of smoke from the first fire, and in the gap that followed it Margaret thought she saw through her choking tears a movement far up the canal — a troop of men marching down the towpath; but the same booming whoosh of fire blotted out land and water.

The flames at the far end of the shed were already higher than the roof. Smoke piled skywards like a storm cloud. Timber stacks which they hadn’t even touched were alight in a dozen places. Heat poured towards them on the wind, like a flatiron held close to the cheek. They ran back to the lock. The gates at the top were open.

“I thought I saw men coming down the towpath,” gasped Margaret.

“Me too,” said Lucy. “Nigh on a score of them.”

“They won’t get through that lot,” said Jonathan, nodding towards the inferno of the timber yard. “Lucy, will you go and be engineer while we get her into the lock? Marge, as soon as she’s in will you make Scrub haul on that capstan-bar to close the gate? Otto and Tim might as well wait here.”

As the tug nosed through the narrow gap left by the single gate being opened, Margaret studied her next job. The capstan was really a large iron cogwheel in a hole in the ground, protected by an iron lid which Jonathan had opened; below it lay inexplicable machinery; from the cog a stout wooden bar about seven feet long stuck out sideways, shaped so that it rose

just clear of the rim of the hole. Scrub was harnessed on awkwardly short traces to the end of this pole: if he pulled hard enough, the cog would turn.

Margaret patted his neck and said, “Come on, boy.” He hated horsecollars but was sensible enough to know that he had to endure them sometimes, so he leaned into the collar, hesitated when he found that the weight behind him was more than he was used to, then flung himself forward. With tiny, labored steps he moved over the cobbles; the moment the gate began to move, its slow momentum made the strain less; Margaret led him round and round, talking to him, telling him how strong and clever he was, but looking all the time over her shoulder to make sure they were pulling at right angles to the capstan-bar.

At last Otto gave a shout, and she eased the pony off and untied the rope from the capstan. Jonathan was already down the sluice hole, hauling at a clacking chain which ran over the double pulley. Margaret leaned over and saw the lower hook gradually inching upwards, but she still didn’t understand how it worked.

“Strong hoss,” said Otto, as she led Scrub towards the lower capstan.

“I don’t know if he can do two more,” said Margaret. “It’s a horrid strain, and he always gets bored with that sort of thing rather quickly.”

“Only one more, I hope,” said Otto. “The gates out into the river, on the other side of the basin, they float open as the tide comes in. They’re open now, see?”

And they were, too. That made the escape seem easier. Jonathan scurried past with his chains and pulleys, and Tim followed with the squat baulk of timber from which the pulleys were to hang. Davey came last of all, grabbing frivolously at Tim’s heels. The flames gnawed into the timber with a noise like surf among reefs, and a rattling crackle told them that another stack had caught. In the shifting wind long orange tongues of fire flowed clean across the dock, reflected dully by the dull water. Jonathan worked his magic with the block and tackle and the lower sluice. Heartsease disappeared down into the lock, until only the top half of the funnel, the windows of the wheelhouse and a few feet of stubby mast were showing. Then she stopped — the lock water w^Tas level with the basin.

But this time Scrub couldn’t move the capstan, for all Margaret’s praise and coaxing. Lucy came up from the engine room to watch; then Jonathan said “Rest him a moment” and ran across the quay to a low office building, on whose side were arranged three shaped pieces of wood, each on its separate pair of hooks. He came back with them and fitted their square ends into the holes in the top of the capstan: they were the other capstan-bars, by which the locks had been worked before the Changes if ever the power failed. He led Tim up to one bar, and showed him how to push. He and Lucy strained their backs against the other two, and Margaret led Scrub forward, watching the group round the capstan over her shoulder. Nothing moved.

“Come on, Tim,” gasped Jonathan. “Push, Tim. Push hard. Like this.”

Tim gazed at him, slack-jawed, bubbling. Then he leaned his broad shoulders against the bar and heaved, and they all fell to the ground together as the capstan turned. Jonathan was on his feet in a moment, but Lucy lay where she was, rubbing her head and looking sulkily across to where Otto lay laughing on the quayside.

“It’s all right for some/’ she hissed, but Otto only laughed the more, while Scrub and Margaret circled slowly round, easing the gate open.

On the other side of the dock a petrol dump exploded like a bomb. Then the wind shifted right round to the true northeast and they were all coughing and weeping in the reeking smoke, dodging desperately towards what looked like clear patches but were only thinner areas of smoke where you still couldn’t breathe, and then another onset of fume and darkness rushed down and overwhelmed them. In the middle of it all Scrub, still harnessed to the capstan, panicked. He pranced about the quay trying to rush away from the choking enemy and always being halted with a tearing jerk at the end of the short rope. He was too crazed to notice where his hoofs were landing.

“Get down and crawl!” yelled Otto from the ground. “It’s okay down here! Crawl to the boat!”

Margaret dropped. He was right. Under the rushing clouds there was a narrow seam of air which could still be breathed, if she chose her moment. In it she could see Jonathan already crawlings towards the lock, and Lucy crouching low and trying to drag Tim down. The zany bent at last, then dropped on all fours and immediately scampered with a rapid baboon-like run towards Otto. Otto spoke to him, but Margaret couldn’t hear what he said.

She never saw how Tim carried him to the boat, either, for suddenly an eddy of air pushed all the smoke aside so that she could see Scrub, mad with terror of burning, wallowing at the end of his rope. At once she was on her feet. For several seconds Scrub didn’t know her and she could do nothing but hold his bridle and dodge the flailing hooves. Then, as she crooned meaninglessly to him, like Tim talking to a sick beast, he found a tiny island of trust in his mind, steadied and stood still. Before the smoke overwhelmed them again she managed to back him to a point where she could loose him from the traces, her fingers moving so fast among the straps and buckles that she didn’t have to tell them what to do. As the horrible smoke swept over them she took hold of the bridle and forced Scrub’s head down towards the cobbles; bending double she scuttered towards the lock. He saw the patch of calm and smokeless air below him and skipped delicately down to the deck, where he stood snorting and shivering.

“Ship’s crew mustered!” cried Otto. “Horse and all! We’re away!”

The big engine boomed. The water churned in the lock and the quay slid backwards. Then they were out in the wide acre of the tidal basin, with the smoke streaming past a foot or two above their heads. Only the far gates now, and they’d escaped.

But the gates were shut. For the first time Margaret saw Otto look worried.

“Tide must have started to ebb and sucked ’em in,” he said. “They were open quarter of an hour back, weren’t they, Marge?”

“Couldn’t we pull them open?” called Jonathan from the wheelhouse. “If we got a hawser up there quickly.” “Worth a go,” said Otto.

“I’ll take it up,” said Margaret. “It’ll take longer if you do it, Jo. Lucy, make Tim look after Scrub, or he’ll think I’m leaving him.”

It was an awkward six-foot scramble, up a rusty projection which supported a screw-topped bar; the heavy hawser tugged at her belt. She had to lie flat on her face on the catwalk at the top of the gate to fasten the hawser to a stanchion below her — the rails on either side of the catwalk didn’t look strong enough. Panting, she backed off the top of the gate onto the quay, trying to work out how much the tide had fallen since the gates had closed — barely a couple of inches, she thought. She watched anxiously as the slack of the hawser rose dripping from the basin, became a shallow curve, became a stiff line. Jonathan put his signal lever over and the water under the stern erupted into boiling foam. The bows came up. The rope groaned. The gate moved an inch, three inches, and Margaret could see the creased lines at the gap where the water hunched and poured through. Then everything altered as the gate swung past the pressure line. Heartsease backed off with a jerk like a rearing pony and the gate swung fully open with the basin water tearing through. The hawser snapped like wool, but with a deep twang, as the tug reached the end of its tether; but Margaret had already grasped the spare length of hawser which she’d left beyond the place she’d tied it (Jonathan’s suggestion, of course) and before the gate could swing shut she’d taken three turns round a bollard on the shore.

The fierce haul of the engine dragged the tug out towards the middle of the basin before Jonathan could halt it and make for the gap again. He headed slowly in, anxious not to spoil his victory at the last minute by charging into the wall or the other gate. The smoke was thinner here, but still rushing past in choking and tear-producing swirls. As Margaret crouched under it, waiting, she heard a hoarse cry. She hopped round, still crouching, and saw a big man galloping towards her through the murk with an ax swung up over his shoulder. He was thirty yards off, but he’d seen her — it was her he was coming for. She scrambled through the two sets of railings on top of the gate, hung for an instant to a stanchion as she leaned out and tensed herself, then leaped for the nearing bows of Heartsease. The world reeled and hurtled, and the bulwarks slammed into her knees and she was turning head over heels on the rough iron of the deck. Her ear must have hit something, for it was singing as she started to heave herself up. The ax clanged onto the iron two feet in front of her face, bounced and rocketed overboard. The man was trying to follow it, but Heartsease was through the gap before he could disentangle himself from the double railings. He stood and shook his fist, gigantic amid the smoke. Margaret, her head still ringing, walked aft.

“I saw him coming before you did,” said Jonathan through the broken window. “Tell you later — Otto says I must shave this breakwater close as I can.”

They were racing along beside a strange structure of huge beams, all green with seaweed, which stretched out into the estuary. There was another on the far side of the harbor entrance, curving away upriver, and between the two breakwaters the river surface was level and easy; but out beyond them Margaret could see the full Severn tide foaming seawards. She thought Jonathan had misjudged his course, that they were going to ram one of the enormous beams right on the corner, but it whisked by barely a yard from the bulwarks. She wanted to lean out and touch it — the last morsel of England, maybe, that she would ever feel — but it was too far for safety.

Then the whole boat heeled sideways for an instant as the racing waters gripped it, before Jonathan turned the bow downstream and they were moving towards Ireland with the combined speed of a six-knot tide and a ten-knot engine. Margaret looked aft to where the stream-

ing pother of smoke was marked at the actual places where the wood was burning by the orange glow of house-high flames. Just as she was thinking how fast they were moving away from that hideous arena she saw Scrub skitter sideways as the boat lurched in the tide-race. He almost went overboard. She ran back to him, staggering along the gangway, took his bridle and tried to gentle and calm him while he found his sea legs. Soon he was standing much more steadily, his legs splayed out and braced, so she tied his reins to a shackle just aft of the engine room roof and poured out a little hill of corn for him to nose at.

That made her realize how hungry she was. She walked forward to where Otto lay on the raised bit of deck in front of the wheelhouse; he had his chart spread out beside him, and Tim had propped him on a rolled tarpaulin so that he could watch the far shore and try to pick out the landmarks which would steer them down the twisting and treacherous channel.

“When’s dinner?” she said.

“Just about as soon as you’ve got it ready, Marge. You’re cook, because Lucy can’t leave the engine and Jo and I must get this hulk ten miles downriver before the tide goes out. This is some cranky bit of water, and I don’t like the feel of the wind, neither.”

Margaret looked at the sky. Now that they were out from under the pother of smoke she could see that it had indeed changed. All morning it had seemed like a neutral gray roof over the bleak flats — it had been the wind that hurt, but the sky had seemed harmless. Now, to the northeast, it had darkened like a bruise. The wind must

have risen, too, for it seemed no less and they were moving with it at fifteen knots. The waves, even in these narrow waters, seemed to be growing bigger. She looked anxiously aft to where Scrub was feeding in snatches as the deck bucketed beneath him.

“Easy!” shouted Otto. “There’s Berkeley — three points right, Jo, to round Black Rock. If you can spot the line of the current, steer a mite outside it on the way out, then inside it on the way in.”

“I can see two buoys still there,” called Jonathan.

“Lift me up, Marge,” said Otto. “Manage? Fine. Outside both of ’em, Jo, then sharp back inshore. Marge, food!”

She opened tins in the cabin and spooned chilly messes of stew into the plastic mugs which Jonathan had stolen — but the spoons were elegant, stainless steel with black handles, marked “made in Sweden.” The crew took their helpings without a word, and began at once to eat with one hand while they did their work with the other —except Tim, who fed himself and Davey with alternate spoonfuls. It would have been a horrid meal if they hadn’t all been hungry enough to eat anything. She found a bucket for Scrub and half filled it with the nasty water of the canal from one of the big oil drums; she had to hold it up under his nose while he drank, because the boat was fidgeting too much in the churning tide for it to stand safe on the deck. When she’d finished she looked around again and saw that Jonathan had steered them right out to the far shore of the estuary, and they were now heading back towards England under the gigantic tracery of the Severn Bridge. The blackness

from the north was covering half the sky and there were feathers of snow in the wind. Tim had come on deck and was trying to coax Otto below, but Otto just grinned at him and shook his head, so Tim clambered down into the cabin and returned with a great bundle of blankets which he spread round his patient; Otto allowed himself to be babied, but all the time he was watching the shore and glancing down at his flapping chart.

As Margaret was collecting the empty mugs the first real wave came washing along the scuppers, knee-deep and foaming. She had just time to fling herself up to the stretch of higher deck between the wheelhouse and the engine room roof as it ran sucking past; she lay panting on the tilted iron. As she rose Jonathan opened the wheelhouse door with a hand behind his back.

“Shut the engine room hatch as you go past,” he shouted, still peering forward. “And for the Lord’s sake hang on tight. I can’t turn to pick you up in this.”

He shut the door before she could tell him how cross she was at his having swept them all into this stupid adventure, so she clawed aft, holding onto anything holdable. The engine room was the same oil-smelling, clamorous hole, but now she couldn’t really hear how noisy it was because the wind and the waves were making such a hissing and smashing that anywhere out of their power seemed quiet. She shouted down to Lucy that she was closing the hatch. Lucy must have heard her voice but not the actual words, because she looked up inquiringly. Margaret made signals; the tired face nodded; Margaret shut her in.

Scrub must have fallen once — there was a slight bleeding from his knee — but he was on his feet now, legs spread wider than ever. The waves rinsed down the scuppers and out of the ports on either side, sometimes washing right over his hooves as he braced himself on the reeling deck. No human can know what a horse really thinks. They have a memory, certainly, for a hunter will often find his way home unerringly across country which he hasn’t seen for a year or more; but their idea of before and after must be different from ours, weaker, less useful; now is what matters. And now, for Scrub, was a rusty, clanging platform which reeled from side to side, and beyond it dangerous frothing water, such as never ran in any river a horse could drink from; no turf, no trees, no stables, only a senseless whirling universe which he couldn’t escape from because he was tied to a shackle in the middle of the deck. He was on the edge of madness when Margaret stroked his desperate neck and spoke to him.

She stood there for almost an hour, watching the storming estuary and the muddle of charging clouds, and trying to guess which way the deck would next cant, so that she could help him prepare for the new posture. Snow whirled and stung. Sometimes she could barely see fifty yards from the boat, but then there would come a space between squalls, and land loomed in sight on their left, less than half a mile away, wheeling backwards. The waves were not ordered; they came at Heartsease in all shapes and from all directions, with none of the ranked inevitability of mid-ocean — the only inevitable

thing was that they became steadily larger. And the sky became blacker. It would soon be night.

But there was still a long stretch of this rough ocean to cover, and poor Scrub was still burdened with all his harness, including the heavy horsecollar and the ponderous sidesaddle — no point in either of them any longer. She loosed the reins from the shackle and, talking to steady him all the time, lifted the collar over his head and laid it down on the deck.

A roar like cannon split their closed world, and a single bolt of lightning turned boat and sea and sky into a blinding whiteness which printed itself on her retinas through closed eyelids. Scrub shied towards the bulwarks, and at the same moment the tug (Jonathan must have been startled enough to let the wheel go) swung sideways onto the waves. One big hill of water heaved across the deck and smothered her, bashing her into knobs and surfaces of iron until it pinned her to the bulwark and poured away. She lay and gasped for an instant, then wrenched herself onto hands and knees to see what had become of Scrub.

He was overboard.

She cried aloud, as she saw his neck and shoulders spear up above a wave, slip into a trough and rise again. He was trying to follow the boat, to follow her.

“Stop! Stop!” she yelled, but already the shape of the water under the stern was different as Jonathan backed perilously up into the following seas. But there was no hope of hauling the pony aboard, not even with Tim to help, no way for him to reach the deck with his forelegs

and heave himself into safety. Her mind was made up, certain, before she could think. She ran to the forehatch, opened it and scrambled down. Her own clothes — the only ones it would be safe to wear — were still in the sodden bundle she had made after the swim in the canal. She picked them up and climbed out.

Otto had made a tent round his charts with his blankets, but he poked his head out like a tortoise.

“What gives?” he said.

“Scrub’s fallen in,” said Margaret.

“Horse overboard, hey? Let him go, Marge — he’ll swim ashore. He’ll be all right, honey.”

“I’m going too,” said Margaret.

“You can’t!” That was Jonathan, shouting through the broken glass of the wheelhouse. Margaret would have stopped to put her tongue out at him if she hadn’t been afraid that he might decide to order full speed ahead and steam away, leaving Scrub to toil on, toil on and drown. She raced along the wallowing deck to where the pony’s head bobbed level with the bulwarks, stepped up, balanced for an instant on the narrow barrier and then slid herself down across the brown shoulders into the bitter sea, the bundle of clothes hung from her right hand across the saddle.

“Home, boy,” she said, and he immediately turned away from the unclimbable hull. Margaret gripped the saddle as hard as she could, twisted in the water and raised her left arm to wave; she thought she saw an answering wave through the misted glass of the wheel-house before she allowed herself to slide down into the sea, clasped the pommel of the saddle with her left hand and trailed her legs out behind to offer the least resistance to the water while at the same time it carried as much of her weight as possible.

Scrub swam steadily, his feet kicking below the impulse of the waves, his head arched high like a sea serpent’s. Margaret could do nothing but trust him; she was in a blind world where she could sometimes see a few feet of the wrinkled upslope of a disappearing wave, sometimes snatch a full breath, but mostly was hard put to it to keep her eyes open and the burning salty water out of her nose and throat. The only constant thing was the sturdy beat of the legs moving against her ribs, the slippery leather of the saddle and the roughness of the living hide. Once, looking back from the top of a wave, she caught a glimpse of Heartsease, end on to her: she thought Jonathan had decided to come and pick her up, though she knew he wouldn’t attempt anything so impossible — it wasn’t his style. But next time she saw them the tug was bow on to the weather and tide, still almost level with her. Tim was holding Otto up so that he could watch the shore — Jonathan must have circled perilously upstream so as to be certain that she had come safe to land. At that moment Scrub’s swimming motion hesitated, stopped, and he rose six inches out of the water. The waves were lower here, and Scrub had been moving with them, but now they began to stream past. He must be standing on firm land.

She heaved herself onto his back, to lessen the resistance to the hurrying torrent; the shore seemed very close, and the tug, when she looked back, far away. She raised her hand and waved. Otto and Tim waved back. She felt a sudden choking pang that she had not said even this remote kind of good-bye to Lucy.

As Scrub battled shorewards Heartsease began to wheel side on to the tide again. There was something about the smell of the storm that made her believe it was ending, though the clouds seemed no less dark — but perhaps that was the real night. Up in the wind the water in her clothes chilled and chilled; a cold like death felt its way towards her bones.

Scrub had to swim across two narrow channels before at last they were really riding out of the waves to the true shore, with water streaming from her thighs and calves and her whole body shuddering like a twanged wire. On the pebbly beach, under low cliffs, she wrung the water out of the clothes in her bundle, stripped and changed. She hid the jeans and jerseys in a cranny between two boulders, then piled pebbles into the gap until no shred of cloth could be seen. Her ears were singing and her head lolling from side to side when she led Scrub up a steep little path to the coarse sea turf above the reach of any tide. The hill sloped up and up, but she knew from the way he hung his head that he too was near the last morsel of his strength, so she led him dizzily on. Halfway up the seemingly endless slope she had to stop and be sick. Perhaps it was just the salt water she had swallowed; or perhaps she was really ill.

There was a path. It must go somewhere, so she followed it right-handed, looking a bare yard in front of her feet but still stumbling every few paces. Round the shoulder of the hill the path dipped and they came out of the full blast of the wind, so she stopped and looked about her.

It was almost night, true night. They had climbed far above the deadly waters which stretched away on her right into dimness. There lay Wales, invisible in storm and dusk; ahead, though, a fault split the level clouds and a thin streak of gold evening sky showed through it, the last light of day gleaming off the water. Into this gold gleam on the sea crawled a black fleck, dirty as cinders; above it, just visible, rose its indomitable signal, puff-puff-puff. She waved again, though no one could possibly see her, then stumbled on along the path.

THE path started to climb again, curving through the dusk, then dipped; it was hard to see now that night was turning all colors to different shades of dark gray. She kept falling, and Scrub waited while she picked herself up. She tried to mount him once, but was too weak to pull her own weight up to the sodden saddle. She kept her eyes on the ground, only aware of the few feet of bristly turf round the dimming path. She could no longer feel anything, even the cold, but she knew that if they didn’t come to warmth and shelter soon she would die.

A gate blocked the path. Cattle snorted and fidgeted in the darkness down the slope. The voice of a hen tickled the night. She looked up at these homelike sounds and saw, not twenty yards away, the orange square of a lit window. The gate led into a farmyard. She fumbled at the chain with unfeeling fingers.

A tied dog lunged yelping at her the moment she had it open, but she edged round the limit of its reach, trying to think of a story. A door opened and a man’s voice shouted, “Quiet, you! Who’s there?” The dog slipped back to its kennel, duty done, and Margaret reeled towards the black figure outlined against firelight and lantern-light.

“We fell in the river,” she gasped, clinging to Scrub’s neck to hold herself from falling.

“Martin!” he shouted. “Horse to see to!”

A boy, younger than she, ran out and took Scrub confidently by the reins. The man grunted and caught her by the elbow as she melted towards the paving. Then she was lifted and carried into warmth and light, and the lovely smells she knew so well — curing bacon and fresh bread and a stew on the hob and woodsmoke and old leather and cider.

“Cold as a side of beef,” said the man’s voice, “and dripping wet.”

“She’ll have pneumony on her, likely,” said the soft voice of a woman.

“What’d we best do?” said the man. “She’s nobbut a girl.”

“Put her in my chair,” said the woman, “and fetch me two blankets and some towels. You can go and help Martin while I strip her off and dry her. I shan’t be ten minutes.”

“Aye,” said the man. “Horse’ll need a good rubbing down, given it’s as drenched as she is.”

Margaret heard a door close, and flickered her eyelids up to catch a picture of flecked green eyes in a large red face with a straggle of gray hair around it. She tried to say thank-you, but her lips wouldn’t move.

“There, there,” said the woman, “we’ll soon have you to rights, my dear. Warm and dry and sleeping like the angels.”

Then there was darkness.

Voices swam in the dark, and pictures which shifted into each other before they could really mean anything. Uncle Peter snorted in his chair by the fire, and the bull snorted towards her over the mashed turf, and Mr. Gordon raised his blackthorn stick and cried, “The Devil has taken his own!” Then they were all on the sledge, including Aunt Anne, racing along the hissing snow in glorious freedom, but the snow had melted and Tim was trying to haul the sledge through a plowed field, only now it was a capstan and the rope broke like a strand of wool and Uncle Peter, swinging his ax, galloped at her out of the smoke and she leaped for the tug but it wasn’t there and she was falling, falling, falling.

There were many dreams like that, sometimes with the dogs hurtling after her, sometimes with seas of petrol reeking over her, sometimes Mr. Gordon rocking and clucking till she forgot the lifesaving lie and blurted out the truth. But at last she woke to a strange ceiling with a black beam straight above her head, motes dancing in the sunlight, limed walls. A large woman in a gray dress sat by her bed, knitting placidly but looking very serious. Her eyes were the color of plovers’ eggs, and flecked with the same brown spots. She spoke as soon as Margaret opened her eyes.

“Don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know. You talked enough — more than enough — in your fever.” “Oh,” whispered Margaret.

“Four days you’ve been lying here,” said the woman, “and talking I don’t know what wickedness.”

“No,” said Margaret. “It wasn’t like that, it really wasn’t. Please, I’d like to tell you. You look as though you’d understand.”

The needles clicked to the end of the row and the woman put them down.

“Tell me one thing first,” she said, “before I decide to listen. Do you believe, right in the honest heart of you, that you’ve done God’s will?”

“I’ve not thought of it that way,” said Margaret. “But yes, I suppose so. Once we’d begun we couldn’t have done anything else. It would have been wrong to stop.” “If you believe that,” said the woman, “really and truly, I’ll hear you out. Don’t you tire yourself, mind.”

So Margaret told her story while the needles rattled and the fat fingers fluttered and the motes drifted and shafts of sunlight edged across the room. All the words she needed came to her just when she wanted them. She never changed her voice, but let the story roll out in a steady whisper, even and simple, like water sliding into a millrace. All the time she watched the woman’s face, which never changed by the smallest wrinkle or the least movement of the mouth corners, up or down. When the story was ended she shut her eyes and tried to sink back into the darkness which had been her home for four days.

“Aye,” said the woman, “it’s wicked water, the

Severn. No, I don’t see what else you could have done, my dear. Thank you for telling me. My men are out sowing — that’s my husband and my son — and we won’t tell them what you and I know. They wouldn’t understand the rights and wrongs of it like we do, being women. My name’s Sarah Dore, and you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.”

“Oh, you are kind,” said Margaret. “But really I must go and tell Aunt Anne what’s happened to Jonathan.” “Maybe you must,” said Mrs. Dore, “but not till you’re well inside yourself. Two days you were that nigh death I fairly gave you up.”

“How’s Scrub?” said Margaret.

“Right as rain. My Martin’s got a way with horses, so he’s pulling a cart up in Long Collins.”

Margaret smiled.

“He won’t like that ” she said and fell asleep again, a silky, dreamless, healing sleep that lasted until she woke to the hungry smell of frying bacon. She got out of bed, found a dressinggown on the chair where Mrs. Dore had sat and, holding weakly to walls and banisters, traced the smell down to the kitchen, where the Dores greeted her as though she’d belonged in that family ever since she could crawl. She stayed with them eighteen days, and at last rode off after trying to say thank-you in a hundred different ways, none of which seemed nearly enough. Indeed, the day before she left Martin brought up from the beach a gull with a broken wing, which he set before bandaging the bird into a fruit basket so that it could not harm itself with its struggles. Margaret looked into its desperate wild eye and tried to tell it that it was safe here.

The gale had blown the winter away, and weald and wold were singing with early spring. Really singing — innumerable birds practicing their full melody among the still-bare branches of every hedge. As she crossed the smooth upland behind the Dores’ farm she saw a dazzling blink of black and white, gone before she could see the true shape of it, but she was sure it was wheat-ears. And then there were curlews, playing in the. steady southwest wind. The color of the woods had changed — beeches russet with the swelling of their tight little leaf-buds, birch-tops purple as a plum. And the larches were a real red with their tasseled flowers, and the sticky buds of chestnuts glistened when the sun came out from behind the lolloping fat clouds which rode up off the Atlantic.

But, more than anything, every breath she took was full of the odor of new growth, a smell as strong as hyacinths. In winter there are no smells, or very few and sour — woodsmoke and reeking dung heaps and the sharp odors man makes with his toil. But there comes a morning when the wind is right and the sun has real pith in it, and then all the sappy smells of growth are sucked out of the earth, like mists from a marsh, and the winds spread them abroad, streaming on the breeze with a thrilling honey-sweetness which even high summer — the summer of bees nosing into lime-blossom — cannot equal.

It was through such a world as this that Margaret rode home, with Scrub dancing and happy beneath her and all her blood and all her mind well again. (To be fair, Scrub was probably mostly happy not to be pulling the Dores’ cart.) She had to fetch a wide circle round Bristol, which seemed an even bigger city than Gloucester, and ask her way north many times; but all the people she spoke to were full of the kindliness of the season and answered her like friends. That night she slept in an isolated barn beside a beech-hanger, north of Chipping Sodbury. The air turned cold but she snuggled deeper into the tickling hay and made herself a nest of warmth where she dozed until the dawn birds began their clatter of small talk again.

It was another dew-fresh day, chilly but soft, with scarfs of mist floating in the valleys. The sun, an hour after it was up, became strong enough to strike caressingly through her coat, and the wind was less than yesterday’s and herding fewer clouds. She had started so early that she was hungry enough for another meal by mid-morning. As she settled to eat it in the nook of a south-facing dry-stone wall she saw, almost at her feet on the strip of last year’s plowland, a tuft of wildflowers: yellow and white, marked out with strong brown-purple lines which made each flower a quaint cat face. Wild pansies, heartsease. They must have been the very first of all the year.

She reached out to pick them so that she could carry home with her a token of that grimy but heroic tug, then drew her hand back and left them growing. All the time she munched the good farmbread and the orange cheese, she kept looking at them, so frail and delicate, but fluttering undamaged above the stony tilth.

It was dinnertime in the village when she came to Low Wood. She had worked her way round by well-known paths so as to be able to come to the farm without passing another house. Now she tied Scrub to a wild cherry, just big enough for the hired man not to have felled it, in the hollow of a little quarry where he couldn’t be seen from the road. She tried to tackle her problem Jonathan-style, so she used a knot which Scrub would be able to loose with a jerk or two — just in case she was trapped by vengeful villagers. The safest thing would be to creep up and hide until she could talk to Aunt Anne alone.

Primroses fringed the quarry, and celandine sparkled in the wood. She walked up the eight-acre, keeping well in under the hedge; then stole through the orchard. There seemed to be no sound of life in the whole village, though most of the chimneys showed a faint plume of smoke; no men called, no bridles clinked. She tiptoed along the flagged path at the edge of the yard and peeped carefully through the kitchen window.

They had finished their meal but were still sitting at the table — not in their own chairs at either end but side by side on the bench where the children used to sit. Aunt Anne’s hand lay out across the white deal, and Uncle Peter’s huge fist covered it. Their faces were shaped with hard lines, like those a stone-carver’s chisel makes when he is roughing out a figure for a tombstone. They both looked as though they had lost everything they had ever loved.

Margaret changed her mind about hiding; she stepped across to the door, lifted the latch and went in.

They looked up at her with a single jerk of both heads and sat staring.

“May I come back, please?” she said.

“Where’s Jo?” said Uncle Peter. His voice was a coughing whisper.

“Safe in Ireland, I think. There was a storm, and Scrub and I were washed overboard, but we climbed a hill and I saw the boat going on into what looked like calmer water; and it was still going properly, too. He’ll come back, Aunt Anne, I’m sure he will — as soon as the Changes are over, and that can’t be long now.”

“Please God,” said Aunt Anne faintly. Margaret now saw that the whole of Uncle Peter’s other side was hidden by a yellow sling.

“What have you done to your arm?” she said.

He gave an odd little chuckle.

“What’ve you done, you mean, lass. Your friend the bull broke it after he’d knocked Davey Gordon into the water and drowned him. But it’s mending up nicely enough. I went down with them to see what I could do for you, supposing you got caught in your craziness. Leastways I think I did.”

“That’s what I told Jo,” said Margaret. “Where’s Rosie?”

“Sent her packing,” said Uncle Peter triumphantly. “What call had she to go nosing among my son’s belongings in the middle of the night, eh?”

“Did he tell you why we did it?” said Margaret.

“He tried,” said Aunt Anne with a tiny smile, the first that Margaret could remember for months. “But he’s a

poor hand at explaining himself, at least on paper. You must tell us over supper.”

“You know,” interrupted Uncle Peter, “I needn’t have troubled myself to traipse down there getting my arm broken. I might as well have stayed at home milking for all the help you needed of me, you and Jo.”

He sounded really pleased with the idea — proud of them, almost.

“Thank you for coming home,” said Aunt Anne. “We need you, Pete and I.”

“Shall I be able to stay?” said Margaret. “I could dye my hair and pretend to be the new servant-girl, I thought.”

“No need, no need,” said Uncle Peter.

“The village is different now, isn’t it, Pete?” said Aunt Anne.

“It is that,” he answered. “All different since Davey died. Not that you can lay it against him, honest — he just brought out of us what was in us. Oh, he piped the tune all right, but we’d no call to dance to it if we hadn’t the lust in us. But never mind that: winter’s gone now, and the season of idleness. Spring’s on us, and that means hard work and easy hearts. What could a man ask more, hard work and an easy heart?”

“I saw some heartsease in a field above Dursley,” said Margaret.

“That’s very early,” said Aunt Anne. “It’s always been my favorite flower, with its funny face. Like Jo, I used to think.”

“Oh,” said Margaret, surprised at the reason —sur-

prised too that she hadn’t thought of the likeness. “I nearly picked them to bring you, but it seemed best to leave them growing.”

“I’m glad you did,” said Aunt Anne.