Heartsease

III

MARGARET was full of sleep — as full as a ripe Victoria plum is of juice — but something was shaking her. Her dream turned it into a bear, and she was too heavy to run away, and she was opening her mouth to cry out for help when she was all at once awake. Not very awake; longing for the warm and private world of sleep again; but awake enough to know that it was Jonathan who was shaking her and the world was too dangerous to cry for help in. She tried to say “Go away” but the noise she made was a guggling grunt, a noise such as a bear might make while shaking a person.

“Oh, wake up, Marge,” whispered Jonathan impatiently.

“I’m asleep. Go away.”

“Never mind that. He wants to talk to us.”

“Who does? The witch?”

“His name’s Otto.”

“Oh, all right.”

She rolled on her back and with a strong spasm of will power forced herself to sit up while the frosty night sent fingers of gooseflesh down her shoulder blades. Jonathan, thinking ahead as usual, had gathered her clothes onto the table below the window, where she could just see by starlight which way round she was picking them up; but she didn't feel warm even when she was dressed, and stood shivering.

“Shall I go down and get you a coat?" he whispered.

“No,” said Margaret, remembering all the betraying creaks in the passage and on the stairs. “I’ll be all right. I suppose we're going out through your window. What time is it?”

“Nearly midnight. I took some thistles to bed to keep me awake. Put your cushions under your blankets to make it look as if you’re still in bed — Mother might look in — she often goes creeping round the house in the middle of the night. That'll do.”

Outside, the frost was deep and hard, the true chill of winter. The stars were thick and steady between the apple branches, the grass crisp under her feet; dead leaves which had been soggy that morning crackled when she trod on them; the air was peppery in her nostrils. It would be hunting weather tomorrow.

As they stepped into the heavy blackness of Tim's shed Jonathan caught her by the arm and stopped her.

“He's ill,” he whispered, “and Lucy says she thinks he’s getting worse. I've put a splint on his arm and I tried to strap up his ribs, but I don't know if it’s any use. He can’t move his legs at all. Perhaps he’ll die, and all we’ll have to do is bury him. But if he’s too ill to think and then he doesn't die we've got to know what we’re all going to do. We’d have settled it this morning without you, but Lucy said he was too tired after his washing; he took one of the last of his pills, which are for when something hurts too much, and they make him sleep for twelve hours. So he should be awake now.”

She couldn’t see at all, but let him guide her through the torn asbestos, between the bruising tractors and into the engine hut. Here there was a gentle gleam from the shrouded lantern, as faint as the light from the embers of a fire after the lamps are put out.

Lucy was asleep on a pile of straw in the corner, but twitched herself wide awake the moment they came in. Tim was already awake, bubbling quietly, watching them, sitting so close to the lantern that his shadow covered all the far wall. The witch — Otto — was awake too, his eyes quick amid the bruised face. His wounds looked even worse now that the blood and dirt had been washed away, because you could see how much he was really hurt.

“Welcome to Cell One of the British Resistance Movement,” he said in his croaking voice. “I’m Otto.”

“I’m Margaret.”

“Pleased to meet you. I got a fever coming on, and we should get things kind of sorted before. I could have tried earlier, but I figured you were some kind of trap. But Jo tells me I owe you my life, young lady. Such as it is.”

“It was Jonathan really,” said Margaret. “I wouldn’t have known what to do.”

“Well, thanks all the same. You reckon they’ll stone me all over again if they find me?”

“Yes,” said Jonathan.

“And what’ll they do to you?” said Otto.

Margaret and Jonathan glanced at each other, and then across at Lucy. She shook her head slightly, meaning that they mustn’t tell him, but his eyes were sharp and his mind quick with the coming fever. He understood their glances, plain as speaking.

“Kill you too?” he whispered. “Kids? What kind of folk are they, for God’s sake?”

“Not everywhere,” said Margaret quickly. “I mean I don’t think it’s the same all over England. I was wondering about that this morning. This village has gone specially sour, don’t you think, Jo?”

“I don’t know. I hope so, for the other villages’ sake.”

“They’re so bored,” said Margaret. “They haven’t anything to do except get drunk and be cruel.”

“It’s more than that,” said Jonathan slowly. “They’ve done so many awful things that they’ve got to believe they were right. The more they hurt and kill, the more they’re proving to themselves they’ve been doing God’s will all along. What do you think, Lucy?”

“That’s just about it,” said the soft voice from the corner.

“And what started it all?” said Otto.

“The Changes,” said Margaret and Jonathan together.

“Huh?”

“We aren’t allowed to talk about them,” said Margaret. “But everyone woke up feeling different. Everyone started hating machines. A lot of people went away, and the rest of us have gone back and back in time, until . . .”

“But why?” said Otto.

“I don’t think anybody knows,” said Jonathan.

The girls shook their heads. Tim bubbled. The witch was silent for half a minute.

“Let’s try a different tack,” he said. “You three don't think machines are wicked. Nor my friend Tim, neither.”

“Tim never did,” said Lucy.

“I did until four days ago/’ said Margaret. “But I hadn’t thought about them for ages. And I still don’t like them.”

“I do,” said Jonathan. “It happened in that very hot week we had during hay-making; I was lugging water out to the ponies and I suddenly felt, Why can’t we use the standpipe tap again?”

“Me too,” said Lucy, “only it was the stove. I was cleaning it, and I remembered electric cookers didn’t need cleaning — not every day, leastways.”

“But everyone’s afraid to say,” said Jonathan.

“It’s only worn off some people,” said Margaret. “All the men still seem to believe it.”

“Course they do,” whispered Lucy fiercely. “It means everyone’s got to do just what they says.”

“It might be something to do with children’s minds,” said Jonathan in a detached voice. “Not being so set in their ways of thinking.”

“Let it go,” said the witch restlessly. “You’d best just cart me someplace else and leave me to fend for myself.” The three children were silent, staring at him.

“We can’t,” said Jonathan at last.

“Why not? You got me here.”

“What about Tim?” said Jonathan.

“I don’t think he’d let us,” said Margaret.

“That he wouldn’t,” said Lucy.

They all looked to where Tim, scrawny and powerful, crouched amid the tousled straw. There was another long silence.

“Besides,” said Jonathan, almost in a whisper, “d’you think you’d ever sleep easy again afterwards, Marge?”

She shook her head. There was stretching silence again.

“Where do you come from?” said Jonathan at last. “America. The States.”

They looked at him blankly.

“Davy Crockett,” he said. “Cowboys. Injuns. Batman.”

Forgotten images stirred.

“Why did you come?” said Margaret. “You must have known it was dangerous.”

“They wanted to know what was happening in these parts,” said the witch. “I’m a spy. I had a little wireless, and I was in the woods up yonder reporting back to my command ship when your folk burst in on me.”

“Mr. Gordon smelled your wireless,” said Jonathan. “He’s like that with machines. You mean that this hasn’t happened to the whole world? Only England?”

“England, Scotland, Wales,” said the witch. “Not

Ireland. Well, then, if Tim won’t let you dump me somewhere, how are you going to keep me here?”

“I bring food for Tim,” said Lucy. “I can bring enough for you, easy as easy. You won’t be eating much, from the look of you.”

“I don’t like it,” he muttered, more to himself than to them.

“We’ll work out a story,” said Margaret, “something they’ll want to believe and that fits in with what they know.”

She told them about the cat and the rook.

“And I do have a broken arm,” muttered the witch when she’d finished. He was looking much iller now.

“Please, miss,” said Lucy, “he’s had enough of talking for now.”

“All right,” said Margaret, “we’ll go.”

She stood up, but Jonathan stayed where he was.

“What’re we going to do if we think it’s becoming too risky to keep him here?” he said. “We must have a plan.”

“Yes,” muttered the witch, “a plan. A man can plan. Can a man plan? Dan can plan, Anne. Nan can fan a pan, man. Dan . . . Dan . .

“He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” said Lucy. “My Dad went that way, sometimes, but it was drink did it to him. We shouldn’t have kept him talking so long. I’m worried for him, I am.”

“We’ll have to think of something without him,” said Jonathan. “Are you going to stay here all night, Lucy?”

“Aye,” she said.

“But will you be all right?" said Margaret fussily. “It doesn’t look very comfortable.”

Lucy looked at her slyly out of the corner of her eyes. “I’ve slept worse,” she said. “And it’s one less bed to make, isn’t it, miss?”

Outside the night air was cold as frozen iron. The moon was up now, putting out half the stars and making the shadows of the orchard trees crisscross the path, so black and hard that you lifted your feet for fear of stumbling over them.

“Jo,” said Margaret, “I . . .”

He caught her elbow in an urgent grip; he seemed to know just where she was in spite of the dark. He put his mouth so close to her ear that she could feel the warm droplets condensing in her hair, like a cow’s breath.

“Not out here,” he whispered. “Sounds are funny at night. Inside.”

She went up the ivy first, letting him push her feet into toeholds to save the noise of scrabbling among the hard leaves. She was shivering as she crawled along the wall and in through the window; by the time she was sitting on the edge of his bed, cold was all she could think about. Jonathan came into the room as quietly as a hunting owl, shut the window, opened his big chest (no creak — he must have oiled the hinges) and brought out a couple of thick furs. They wrapped the softness round themselves, hair side inside, and sat together on the rim of the mattress, as close as roosting hens, trying to feel warm by recalling what warmth had once been like.

“What were you going to say, Marge?” he whispered.

“I went right into Gloucester today. A pack of wild dogs chased me, but that wasn’t it. Jo, there are real boats in the town; there’s a sort of harbor in the middle of it, with a big canal full of water. If we could get him into one of those and make it go, we might be able to get him away.”

“Sailing boats?”

“No, tugs. They sit a funny way in the water as if they were made for pulling things. Do you remember, we used to have a jigsaw puzzle?”

“I had a toy tug. I used to play with it in my bath, but the water always got into the batteries.”

“Will these have batteries?”

“Don’t be a ninny. They’ll have proper engines, diesel I should think. If there’s a harbor, there should be big tanks with diesel oil in them; perhaps Otto will know how to make it go — he’s an engineer, he told us while we were washing him. Lucy’s marvelous; she doesn’t seem to mind anything.”

“One of them’s sunk, Jo, but the other two look all right.”

“It’s been five years, Marge. Engines get rusty, specially sitting down in the water like that. I don’t know if you could take a canal boat out to sea — you’d have to be very lucky with the weather.”

“But it wasn’t that sort of canal, Jo. It was big — twenty yards across, and there were proper ships there, sea ships.”

“Oh. Where did the canal lead, then? Out into the Severn?”

“I don’t know, but not where I saw, about two miles out of Gloucester. Why do you think it’s still full of water? It’s much higher than the river.”

“They probably built it so that streams keep it filled up. The river wiggles all over the place and goes up and down with the tide and it’s full of sandbanks too, I expect. It’d be useful to have a straight canal going out to sea, which you could rely on to have the same amount of water in it always. There’d have to be a lock at the ends, of course.”

“What’s a lock?”

“Two gates to keep the water from running away when a canal goes downhill or out to sea. You can make the water between them go up and down so that you can get a barge through.”

“There were two gates — three gates — at one end, but I don’t see how they’d work.”

“I’ve explained it badly. I’ll draw you a picture tomorrow. But even if the tugs don’t actually go they might be a good place to hide the witch in.”

“Provided the dogs don’t swim out. They were horrible, Jo.”

“Poor Marge. I’ll ask him what he thinks tomorrow. Bed now.”

But next morning, while Margaret was ladling porridge into the bowls Lucy held for her, the girls’ eyes met. Lucy gave a tiny shake of the head, a tiny turndown of the corners of the mouth, before she moved away; so Margaret knew that the witch must be worse. It was a funny feeling, being part of a plot, sharing perilous secrets with somebody you never really thought of as a proper person, only a rather useless and lazy servant.

But it was exciting too, especially being able to speak a language they both understood but which Uncle Peter and Aunt Anne didn’t even see or hear being spoken.

After breakfast she helped Lucy clear and wash up and then make all the beds, a job she especially hated. Uncle Peter had hired a man to clear the undergrowth in Low Wood and tie all the salable sticks into bundles of bean poles and switches; this meant that he had to go and work alongside the man, partly from pride and partly to be certain he got every last groat of his money’s worth out of him. And that meant that poor Jo had to muck out the milking byre after the first milking and take the fourteen cows down to pasture, and then do all the farmyard jobs which Uncle Peter would usually have done. It was mid-morning before any of them was free. They couldn’t all slink down to the barn, and Margaret was the least likely to be missed.

The witch was very ill, she could see at once; flushed and tossing, his eyes shut and his breath very fast and shallow. The splint on his arm was still tight in its place, but she didn’t like to think about his ribs as he fidgeted his shoulders from side to side. Tim knelt at his good elbow, gazing into his face and bubbling very quietly; when the witch’s feverish thrashings threw the blankets aside Tim waited for the first faint beginning of a shiver and then drew them back over him as gently as snow falling on pasture. The moment the gray lips moved, Tim was holding a little beaker to them and carefully tipping a few drops into the dry cranny. There was nothing Margaret could do which Tim couldn’t do better, so she sat down with her back against the engine, taking care to arrange a piece of sack behind her so that the rusty iron shouldn’t leave its betraying orange streaks down her shoulders.

The witch fidgeted and muttered. Tim babied him, eased water into the tense mouth, bubbled and cooed. When Margaret had been watching for nearly half an hour in the dim light and was just deciding to leave, the witch sighed suddenly and deeply and the tenseness went out of his body. His head lay back on the straw, with his mouth open in a sloping O, like a chicken with the gapes. But this time Tim didn’t pour any water into it; instead he watched for several minutes, at first with intense concern but gradually relaxing. At last he turned to Margaret, bubbled briefly and shambled out. She was in charge now.

Nothing happened in the first twenty minutes of her watch. The witch slept unmoving. The harsh lines of action relaxed into weakness until she could see how young he really was. Twenty? Twenty-one? She wondered how many times this had all happened before — the soldier, hunted and wounded, hopeless, lying feverish on dirty straw in some secret place while the yellow lamp burned slowly away. Hundreds of times, after hundreds of battles. But this time . . .

Then the lamp burned blue for a second, recovered, reeked with black fumes and went out.

Margaret sat in the dark, not knowing what to do. She could go up to the house and refill the lamp, or just get a new one; but it would be a funny thing to be seen doing in mid-morning. And it would mean leaving him alone. And if she stumbled and made a noise in the dark she might wake him and sleep was better than medicine, Aunt Anne always said. She stayed where she was; it was quiet and warm and dark, and after the panics of yesterday and the busy-ness of the night she was as tired as a babe at dusk.

Voices woke her. Her legs were numb and creaking with the pain of long stillness, but she dursn’t move because one of the voices was Mr. Gordon’s.

“I smell summat,” he grumbled.

“Smell, Davey,” said Uncle Peter’s voice.

“Arrgh, not smelling with my nose —in my heart I smell it. There’s wickedness about, Peter.”

“Ah, ’tis nobbut those old engines in the big barn. There’s a whole herd of ’em in there, Davey, but they’re dead, dead.”

“Mebbe you’re right,” said Mr. Gordon after a pause. “Mebbe you’re not. That zany of yourn, Peter, what do you reckon to him?”

“Tim?” said Uncle Peter. Margaret could hear the lilt of surprise in his voice. “He’s not in his right wits, but he’s as strong as an ox.”

“Mebbe, mebbe,” said Mr. Gordon. “He’ll bear watching, Peter. They’re proper cunning, witches are. I wouldn’t put it past ’em.”

“Making out to be a zany, you mean,” said Uncle Peter, still surprised. “But Tim’s been with us these four years, and I've seen no sign of it. And why, Davey, I told you about the milk, didn’t I — how much Maisie gave after we stoned t’other witch up in the stocks? But if Tim was one . . .”

“Your Missus don’t reckon ’twas more than a change of pasture as made the cattle give so well,” said Mr. Gordon sharply.

“Don’t you listen to what Anne says,” said Uncle Peter with a growl. Mr. Gordon began to cluck. Very slowly, with a rustling like a cow browsing through long grass, they moved away up the orchard. It was minutes before she dared to shift a leg and endure the agonies of pins and needles. Just as the witch was stirring again there came the sound of someone moving quietly through the main barn; the door of the hut rasped as the rusty hinges moved.

“Why are you in the dark?” said Jonathan’s voice, very low.

“The lamp went out,” whispered Margaret.

“There’s another one,” he said. “You should have lit it from the old one before it went out. I’ll run up to the house and fetch a new light.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Be careful, Jo — Mr. Gordon’s been nosing round outside.”

“Yes, I saw him. They’ve gone up to the pub, the Seven Stars. I won’t be long.”

The witch looked no better when the light came, despite his little sleep. Margaret tried to dribble a sip of water between his parted lips as she’d seen Tim doing, but made a mess of the job and spilled half of it down the stubble on his chin. Then she told Jonathan what she’d heard.

“We’ll shift Otto as soon as we can, down to those tugs of yours in Gloucester Docks,” said Jonathan. “No one goes there, and it’s halfway home for him. If only

we can last out till the snow comes we can take him down on the logging sledge.”

“That’ll be at least a month.”

“I know. Will you tell Lucy or shall I? About Tim?” “Tim?”

“What you told me Mr. Gordon said. They like the feel of killing now, that lot — smashing up rooks won’t keep them happy for long. They want a real person, human, but somebody who doesn’t matter to anyone.” “Except Lucy,” said Margaret.

“They wouldn’t think she counted. And even if Otto wasn’t here, if he was really dead, they’d come and search and find Tim’s treasures and stone him for that.” “Jo, oughtn’t you to come and see the tugs?”

“Father’ll want me on the farm too much.”

“Couldn’t you sprain an arm or something — something that didn’t stop you riding?”

“I suppose so. I ought to have a look at that canal too. I want to know how it gets out into the sea.”

“Well, we’ve got a month,” said Margaret. “We’ll just have to be careful. I’ll go and tell Lucy. Do you think Tim understands about being secret?”

“Sure of it — he’s more like a wild animal than a person in some ways. I’ve noticed he never comes straight down here nowadays.”

“How wrong in his mind do you think he really is,

Jo?”

“What do you mean?”

“If he were in a country with proper doctors, like there used to be when we were small, do you think they could make him all right?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps. We’ll ask Otto when he gets better.”

They sat in the yellow gloom for several minutes. All the bright outside world seemed more dangerous than this secret cave with the sick man in it; but when Tim came back they got up wordlessly and left.

Margaret found Lucy putting away a big basket of late-picked apples on the racks in the apple loft. She did it very badly, not looking to see whether any of them were bruised, and sometimes even shoving them so roughly into place that they were sure to get new bruises. Margaret started to tell her off, checked herself in mid-nag and said, “I’m sorry. Let me do it.”

Lucy stepped away from the basket with her secret smile and Margaret’s irritation bubbled inside her like milk coming up to boil over. With a wrench of will she stopped herself saying anything and began to stack the apples on the slats, gentling them into place so that none of them touched each other but no space was wasted. It was a soothing job; after she’d done the first row she told Lucy what she’d overheard Mr. Gordon saying about Tim. She finished her story just when the basket was empty, so she turned it over and sat on it. Lucy settled opposite, onto an old crate, biting away at a hangnail.

“Aye,” she said at last, “that’s just about Mus’ Gordon’s way. What did Master Jonathan say?”

“He said I was to tell you.”

“He didn’t have a plan then, miss?”

“He thought we should try and move the witch down to Gloucester — I saw some boats in the harbor where he could hide — as soon as the first snows come and we can use the sledge. Perhaps Tim could go with him.”

“That’ll be a month, maybe.”

“Yes, at least.”

“But will the old men stay happy till then, without another creature to smash up, miss?”

“I don’t know. I think we might be able to invent one or two things to keep them busy.”

“Maybe.”

“Lucy . .

“Yes, miss.”

“I was talking to Jonathan about Tim. If he had proper doctors, like there were before the Changes, do you think they would be able to put him right in his mind?”

“That’s why they took him away, miss. They put him in a special school, they called it. They said it was probably too late, but it was worth trying. Then, when the Changes came, my Mum and Dad took the babies to France — there were two of ’em, a boy and a girl. They wanted to take me, too, but the Changes were a lovely reason for not having to bother with Tim no more, so they was going to leave him behind. It wasn’t right, I thought, so I run away and found him and took him away. Sick with worry they teachers was, half of them gone and no electrics no more and no food coming and a herd of idiot boys to care for — they was glad to see the back of one of ’em. So we traveled about a bit and then we come up here.”

“I’ve often wondered,” said Margaret. “Thank you for telling me.”

“Yes, miss.”

“But if we managed to get the witch away to America, you wouldn’t mind Tim going with him?”

Lucy started on another nail, one that looked as if it had had as much chewing as it could stand.

“No telling, miss. He’s happy here, now. If doctors could put him right in his mind, I’d like that. But if they can’t, what then? A great big prison of a house, full of other zanies, that’s most likely. He’s someone here, Miss, part of a family, even if he does sleep on straw. And now he’s got Otto to fend for . . .”

“Oh dear,” said Margaret. “But Mr. Gordon’s got his eye on him for his next stoning.”

“Aye,” said Lucy. “But if it were only that I’d just take him away. We’d find another farm where they can use a maidservant and a strong lad. But it’s no use talking of it — I couldn’t part him from Otto now. It’d break his heart.”

“Poor Tim.”

“Don’t you go fretting for him, miss. You fret for your Auntie.”

“I know,” said Margaret. “Lucy, if you hear anything . . . anything dangerous, you’ll let Jonathan or me know quickly, won’t you?”

“Yes, miss.”

She stood up, carelessly dusting her bottom, and slipped down the ladder. Margaret dropped the empty basket for her to catch and then followed.

The witch lay on his straw, too ill to make plans with, for four whole weeks. Sometimes he could talk sense, but very feebly. Twice they thought he was really better now; four or five times they thought he was dying. It was a hideous age of waiting.

But at least they didn’t have to invent diversions for Mr. Gordon and his cronies, because two great excitements came to the village unasked. The first was a visit from the Lord of the Manor, a great Earl who lived far up to the north, beyond Tewkesbury, but who had a habit of rushing round his domains attended by a great crowd of chaplains and clerks and falconers and kennel-men and grooms and leeches and verderers and landless gentlemen who had no job except to hang around, swell their master’s retinue, and hope to be of service. Two of these clattered into the village three days after the midnight conference and rummaged round the houses looking for rooms where the small army could sleep. The Squire had to move out of his house into the Dower House to make room for the great Earl. It was like ripples in a pond all through the village, everyone being jostled into discomfort either to make space for one of the newcomers or for a villager whose bed had been commandeered. So Lucy had to make herself a bed on the floor of her little attic so that Margaret could sleep in her bed, so that Margaret’s room could be occupied by a gentleman-groom, who slept in Margaret’s bed, and a stableboy who slept on the floor. The stableboy normally would have slept in a room about the stables where his precious horses were housed, but the stables at the farm were really the cowshed, and had no room above them. Space had to be cleared to milk the cows in the hay barn.

Lucy slept down in the witch’s hut, in fact, but she had to have a bed in the house in case questions were asked.

The gentleman-groom was a shy boy, and the stable-boy was a garrulous old man. The gentleman-groom had to be up at the Squire’s house before dawn and didn’t get back till after supper, but the stableboy had little to do except groom and exercise the rangy great horses and tell his endless stories. Margaret found herself spending all day in the stables, leaning against a silky flank and smelling its leathery sweat, while the stableboy talked about horses long dead, about the winners of the Cheltenham Gold Cup thirty years before (all the great Earl’s retinue rode what once had been steeplechasers or hunters). Sometimes his stories went further back, right into misty legends. He talked about Charles the Second staking the worth of half a county at Newmarket, about Dick Turpin’s gallop to York, about Richard the Hunchback yelling for a fresh horse at Bosworth Field.

It didn’t have to be racing: anything to do with the noble animals whose service had shaped his life was worth telling. One morning he sat on an upturned bucket and told her about the endurance of horses, about chargers which had fallen dead rather than ease from the gallop their masters had asked of them.

“I’m sure Scrub wouldn’t do that,” said Margaret.

“Neither he would,” said the stableboy, “but he’s a pony. Ponies ain’t merely small horses — they’re a different breed. More sense, they got. If ever you need to cross forty mile in a hurry, Missie, you take a horse. But four hundred mile, and you’ll be better off with a pony.

They’ll go an they’ll go, but when they’re beat they’ll stop.”

“But there must be lots with mixed blood,” said Margaret.

“Aye,” he said, “but there’s blood and there’s blood. Now I’ll tell you summat. In the Armada, fifteen hundred eighty-eight, they Spaniards came to conquer England with a mortal great army, only they had to come in ships seeing the Lord has set us on an island, and Sir Francis Drake he harried ’em and worried ’em until they sheered off and ran right round the north of Scotland and back to Spain thataway. Only the Lord sent fearsome storms that year, and half of ’em sank, and one of the ships as sank had a parcel of Arab horses on her, and one of them horses broke free as the ship went down, and he swam and he swam through the hollerin’ waves till he come to a rocky beach where he dragged hisself ashore, and that was Cornwall. And to this day, missie, the wild ponies in Cornwall have a streak of Arab in them plain to see.”

“I didn’t know horses could swim like that,” said Margaret.

The stableboy ran a mottled hand along roan ribs, caressing the faintly shivering hide.

“It’s the buoyancy,” he said. “They got these mortal great lungs in ’em for galloping, so they float high. Swim with a grown man astride ’em, they will, always provide he leans well forward and don’t let hisself slip off over the withers — they keeps their shoulders up and let their hinder end tilt down, y’see. If ever you want to swim with a horse, you hold on to the tail of it, or the saddle.”

“But the waves,” said Margaret.

“They holds their head that high the waves don’t bother ’em,” said the stableboy. “Mark you, they gets frighted if they’re not used to it, but I’d sooner be a horse nor a man in a rough sea. We haven’t the buoyancy, nor the balance neither. Too much in the leg, we got, and only two legs at that. Now another thing, missie . .

And he was off again on his endless catalogues of the ways in which the horse excelled all other species, including Man.

Margaret was sorry when he left, swept off in the storm of the great Earl’s progress. But at least Mr. Gordon and his cronies had been kept active and interested for eight days and would have enough to talk about over their cider mugs for a week besides.

The other excitement didn’t happen in the village at all. Just when the witch-hunters were tired of gossip over the great Earl’s visit and were beginning to sniff the wintry air for new sport, a messenger came over from Stonehouse to say that two children had seen a bear in the woods. Nobody had ever been on a bear-hunt, but all the men seemed to know exactly what to do. Wicked short spears were improvised and ground to deadly sharpness; Mr. Lyon the Smith forged several pounds of extra heavy arrowheads, to penetrate a tough hide at short range; the best dogs were chosen and starved. Then all the men moved out in a great troop to hunt the bear.

Mr. Gordon insisted on going too, maintaining that the bear must be a witch who had changed his shape but couldn't change back till the new moon, or had simply forgotten the spell. Even his drinking companions privately thought it more likely to be a survivor from the old Bristol zoo, but they didn’t care to say so. Instead they built a litter and took turns to carry it; he rode at the head of the mob, hunched in his swaying chair, cackling to his bearers.

The whole of the village changed when they had left. Tensions eased; Aunt Anne smiled sometimes and began to look a little pink; the bursts of gossip you could hear up the street were on a different note — the pitch of women’s voices; and it was quieter, so that between-whiles the only noise was the knock of the hired man’s billhook cutting into an elder stump down in Low Wood.

With Uncle Peter gone, Jonathan was busy all day on the farm, but Margaret stole a satchel of food next evening and asked Lucy to creep up and wake her an hour before dawn. The stars were still sharp in the sky when she set off to explore the canal, and Scrub’s breath made crisp little cloudlets in the frosty air. The stars were sharp in the sky again when she got back to find Aunt Anne waiting with a lantern in the porch. Margaret reckoned she’d done over forty miles. After supper Aunt Anne went out to visit a sick neighbor, so the children pulled their chairs up round the red embers of the fire; but in a minute Lucy slid off hers and sat right in under the chimneypiece, her cheeks scarlet with the close heat and every little spurt of flame sending elvish shadows across her face. Jonathan sat out in the gloom, quite silent but twitching like a dreaming hound. Margaret told them what she had found.

“I didn’t start from the docks, Jo, because we can ride along that bit when we’re taking food down to Lucy — besides, I didn’t know how far I’d have to go the other way along the canal. It’s miles and miles, and just the same all the way — just the canal and the path beside it. Except that at first it runs between banks and you can’t see anything on either side, and later it’s up above the rest of the country. It doesn’t go up and down, of course, only the fields round it do. The towpath is easy to ride on, except for one bad stretch a little way down. There are lots of bridges — I counted them on the way back but I lost count — it’s about fifteen, and some of them are open already . . .”

“Open?” said Jonathan.

“Yes. It’s like this: half the bridge is made of stone which juts out into the canal and doesn’t move, but the other half’s iron, all in one piece, and there’s a big handle which you can turn — you have to unlock it at each end first with a piece of iron which you flip over — and when you turn it the whole iron part of the bridge swings round, very slowly though, until it’s right out of the way and you can get a boat through. It’s a funny feeling — you’re moving tons and tons of iron, but it’s all so balanced that it moves quite easily. There’s a little cottage by each bridge where the people used to live who opened the bridges for the boats, but they’re all empty now. Otherwise there aren’t a lot of houses by the canal, except for a little village near the end. I got chased by a bull before that.”

“Rather you than me,” whispered Lucy. Jonathan laughed.

“It wasn’t funny,” said Margaret, “it was horrid. There’s a place where you come out of woods and the canal goes for two miles straight as a plank, but the river’s suddenly quite close, across the fields on the right. There’s a bridge in the middle of the straight piece — it’s called Splatt Bridge, it says; all the bridges have their names on them — and when I got there I thought I’d ride off across the fields and look at the river. I’ve never seen it close, and I was tired of the canal. The fields were all flat and empty, and I wasn’t bothering when I came round a broken piece of hedge quite close to the canal, and it was there, black, bigger than any of the bulls in the village, not making any noise, rushing at us. Scrub saw it before I did, and he got us away, but only just. It was tethered on a long rope through a ring on its nose. It looked mad as Mr. Gordon, Jo, furious, it wanted to kill us, and it came so fast, like a . . . like a . . .”

“Train,” said Jonathan. Margaret shook her head.

“I still can’t think like that,” she said. “I didn’t like opening that bridge, Jo. Not because somebody might catch me, but just for what it was.”

“Poor Marge,” said Jonathan cheerfully. “Still, you got away from the bull. What happened then?”

“Then there’s a strange bit, with the river getting nearer and nearer until there’s only a thin strip of land between it and the canal; and everything’s flat and bleak and full of gulls and the air smells salty and Wales is only just over 011 the other side, low red cliffs with trees on them. It’s funny being able to see so far when you’re right down in the bottom like that, and the river gets wider and wider all the time — it’s really the sea, I suppose. And then you get to a place where you’re riding between sheds, and there are old railway lines, and huge piles of old timber, some of it in the open and some of it under roofs, and one enormous tower without any windows, much bigger than the tower of the Cathedral, and a place like the docks at Gloucester but with a big ship — a really big one, I couldn’t believe it. And then you come to another lock; at least I think it’s a lock but it’s far bigger than the Gloucester one and the gates are made of steel or iron. And beyond that the water’s much lower, inside an enormous pool with sloping sides and places for tying ships to, and another gate at the far end, and beyond that there are two enormous wooden arms curving out into the river, and it’s as wild as the end of the world/’

“How deep is the canal?” said Jonathan.

“About twelve feet. I measured it with a pole I found, from two of the bridges. And I couldn’t see anywhere where it looked reedy and silted. There’s a place about halfway along where a stream runs into it, which could help keep it full. How does a lock work?”

Jonathan took a twig and scratched in the film of gray ashes which covered the hearthstone.

“It’s like this,” he said. “The water in the canal is higher than the water in the pool, so it pushes the top gates shut. If you want to get a boat out, you push the bottom gates shut, and then you open special sluices to let the water in the canal run into the lock. The new water holds the bottom gates shut, and the water in the lock rises until it’s the same level as the water in the canal and you can open the top gates. You sail into the lock and shut them again, and then you shut the top sluices and open the bottom ones and the water runs out of the lock until it’s the same level as the water in the pool, and you can open the bottom gates.”

Lucy came round and stared at the scrawled lines.

“I don’t know how they think of such things,” she said at last.

“I see,” said Margaret. “At least I sort of see. Oh, Jo, can’t we find a big sailing boat and not try to make any beastly engines go?”

“No,” said Jonathan. “It would have to be a very big one to go to sea in winter, and all the sailing boats which are big enough will have men on them, using them and looking after them. Besides, we’d never be strong enough to manage the sails, even with Tim’s help, and we wouldn’t know how, either. But if Otto can show us how to start one of the tugs, then we’ve got a real chance.”