Heartsease

VI

It was glorious to be out of the fingering wind.

The cabin, an odd-shaped chamber with a tilting floor and walls which both curved and sloped, was beautifully warm and stuffy — warm from the round stove which crackled against the inner wall, stuffy from being lived in by three people. The witch lay in a corner, his feet down the slope of the floor, and watched them scramble down the ladder; the reflection of daylight from the open hatch made his eyes gleam bright as a robin’s. He looked thin, tired, ill — but not dying, not any longer.

“Welcome to the resistance movement,” he said in his strange voice, slow and spoken half through his nose. “What you got there, Tim? Another patient?”

Tim cooed happily and put his bundle on the floor, a wet, yellow, floppy pup, just big enough to have followed its mother with the pack but not big enough to fend for itself, nor to tilt off its patch of ice and drown. It snarled at them all and slashed at Tim’s hand; he

didn’t snatch it away but let the puppy chew at it with sharp little teeth until Lucy handed him a mutton bone. The puppy took it ungraciously into the darkest corner and settled down to a private growling match.

Otto laughed.

“What shall we call him?” he said. “If it is a him.”

“Davey,” said Margaret without thinking. The other two children looked at her, surprised.

“Means something to you?” said Otto. “Okay, fine. What happened outside? We heard the noises but we couldn’t figure them out. Leastways you won your battle.”

Jonathan told him what they had done in dry sentences, as though it had happened to someone else and was not very interesting anyway. Otto listened without a word and then lay silent, twitching his eyes from face to face.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “I reckoned I’d just been mighty lucky till now. I didn’t know we had a thinker pulling for us.”

“We can’t do it if we’re not lucky,” said Jonathan without emphasis.

“Yes,” burst in Margaret, “but we couldn’t have got anywhere without Jo. He’s made all the luck work

“The question is can we make the engines work,” said Jonathan.

“What’s she got?” said Otto.

“I think it must be diesel,” said Jonathan. “It’s very old; there’s a brass plate on the engine saying 1928. I can’t see anywhere for a furnace, or for storing coal; and there are feed-pipes which look right for oil and wrong for water, and a big oil tank behind here.”

He slapped the partition behind the stove. Otto whistled.

“Nineteen twenty-eight!” he said. “A genuine vintage tub, then. Isn’t there anything newer?”

“Yes,” said Jonathan, “the other tug, the one that’s not sunk I mean, looks much newer and much more complicated. But it’s in a mess, as though they were using it all the time just before the Changes came. But this one’s very tidy, with everything stowed away and covered up and tied down. I thought perhaps it was so old that they didn’t use it at all, but just kept it here, laid up. So they might have left it properly cared for, so that they'd be able to start it if they hadn’t tried for a long time.”

“Yeah,” said Otto, “that they might. And another thing — a primitive engine is a simple engine — unsophisticated, not much to go wrong, provided she isn’t all seized up. I’ll get Tim to lug me along for a look-see as soon as my rib’s mended, three more weeks maybe. And where’ll you sail us then, captain?”

“We’re in Gloucester Docks,” said Jonathan. “There’s a canal which goes down to the Bristol Channel. Margaret’s explored it. It’s about fifteen miles long, she thinks, and not many people live near it. The bridges over it open quite easily, though she didn’t try them all. There’s only one lock, out beyond the other docks at the far end. We thought we’d use the ponies to tow Heartsease right down there, and if anyone stopped us we could say it was a wicked machine and we wanted to get it away from our part of the canal — that would be a good argument in England now. And when we got there we could see if we could find enough fuel (or we could look for some here) and see if we can make the lock work. If we can we’ll try to start the engines and get out down the Bristol Channel, and if we can’t we’ll think of something else.”

“Sharpness,” said Otto. “That’s the name of the port at the far end; I remember it from my briefing. And another thing I remember — that the Bristol Channel’s just about the trickiest water in Europe. Tide goes belting in and out, six knots each way, and drops thirty foot in two hours; then the river’s nothing but mud flats and a bit of stream winding through the middle. We’ll need charts.”

“I’m hungry,” said Margaret.

“Right,” said Otto. “Food first, action after. What’s on the menu?”

“We’ve nigh on eaten all you brought last time, Master Jonathan,” said Lucy.

“We’ve brought enough for another three days, I hope,” said Margaret.

“Anyway,” said Jonathan, “the warehouse is absolutely full of tins.”

“Given you can find a can opener,” said Otto.

The shape of that forgotten tool was suddenly sharp in Margaret’s mind, like an image out of a lost dream.

“I’ll look for an ironmonger’s,” said Jonathan, “after I’ve burgled the offices for charts.”

While they ate the firm cheese and crisp-crusted bread (one thing about Rosie, she baked better than anyone

else in the village) they talked a little and thought a lot. Margaret was dismayed to find that they were less than halfway through their job; the most dangerous part was still to come. And she alone knew how huge and immovable "seeming were the steel gates down at Sharpness. She distracted herself from her worries by watching Tim coax the puppy into trusting him, so gentle, so patient that it was difficult to remember that he hadn’t all his wits. The puppy was quite wild, but with generations of man-trust bred into it; savagery and hunger and fear fought with these older instincts, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. At last there came a moment when it took a fragment of bacon from Tim’s hand without snatching and running away, then stayed where it was to let him rub the back of its skull with his rough, dirty fingers.

She looked round the cabin and saw that the others had been watching just as intently as she had, as though the fall of kingdoms depended on Tim’s winning.

“He’s not so hungry now,” explained Jonathan with his dry laugh.

“Tim, you’re marvelous,” said Margaret.

“Why do you want to name him after Mr. Gordon then, Miss Margaret?” said Lucy, soft and suspicious as of old.

“I don’t know,” said Margaret. “Mr. Gordon’s a bit like that, I suppose, savage and doing what he does because something in him makes him. But I thought it might be lucky too, I don’t know how.”

“Who’s Mr. Gordon?” said Otto.

It was not comfortable to explain, because if Mr.

Gordon had not lived in the village Otto might never have been stoned. Even so, they found themselves trying to make as good a case as they could for the terrible old man, partly for the honor of the village but partly for reasons they couldn’t put a name to.

Otto’s good hand kept fingering the puckered tissues which were left after the healing of his smashed cheek.

“To think of you kids living with all this and staying like you have,” he said when they’d finished.

“It’s Aunt Anne, more than anything,” explained Margaret.

“And that’s true,” whispered Lucy.

Jonathan didn’t speak, but got up and climbed the ladder into the square of daylight. Margaret went with him and found that the tug had now drifted a few feet away from the quay. For the first time she really looked at Heartsease by daylight — a dirty old boat, black where it wasn’t rusty, about seventy feet long; the bulwarks curved out from the uptilted prow about knee high, and became shallower as they reached the rounded stern; the cabin was at the fore-end, its roof barely a foot above deck level; then a narrow strip of deck beneath which lay the fuel tank; then the wheelhouse, which was really just a windowed shed much too tall and wide for the proportions of the boat. Behind that stood the big funnel, with its silly little hat brim running round it just below the top — she could still see the lines of color which showed which shipping firm the tug had belonged to. The funnel rose from the top of a low, flat roof, along whose side ran tiny rectangular windows, which could only allow the skimpiest ration of light through to whatever was below. The engine room. Under there must lie the iron monster which Jonathan was going to try to wake; it was the monster’s weight which set the tug so much down by the stern, making it (even at rest) seem to tilt with an inward energy as though it were crouched to tackle huge seas. And last of all came an open area of deck rounded off by the curve of the bulwarks at the stern. This was what Margaret had been looking for — a place where she could tether Scrub when the time came.

Jonathan had opened the engine-room hatch and was kneeling beside it, craning down into the gap, his trousers taut over his rump, his whole body as tense as a terrier at a rat hole. Margaret nudged his ribs with her shoe and he stood up frowning.

“Too difficult for me,” he said. “At least, I’m sure I could understand it if Otto would teach me. If you’ll show Lucy where the tins are I’ll look for charts and a tin opener.”

“Don’t you think Tim had better go with you, just in case?”

Jonathan agreed, and scuttled down into the engine room. He came back with a massive wrench, almost the shape of a caveman’s club. Margaret explained to Lucy, who frowned and stood biting her thumb in the cabin. It was difficult for her: danger for Jonathan meant danger for Tim; but they would never get away if Jonathan went into danger alone and was caught by the dogs; and Tim couldn’t decide for himself, so . . .

She sighed, shook herself and tried to explain to Tim that he was to go with Jonathan to stop him from being hurt. At last he grasped the idea that something was dangerous, and took the big wrench. Jonathan led him off. Every few yards he brandished the wrench and snarled right and left.

“Do you think he’d actually hit a dog if he had to?” said Margaret.

“I dunno,” whispered Lucy, “but he’d surely fright ’em.”

She gazed after the hulking back with just the same smile as a mother’s who watches her pudgy toddler playing some private game. Margaret had never liked her so much.

The ponies had become fretful in their strange dark stall, all rustling with rats, but it seemed safe enough to lead them out and tether them on the quay. On the first floor of the warehouse Margaret found a sack which seemed not to have gone musty, so she tilted a double helping of corn into the fold of her skirt, carried it down and spread it in two piles on the snow. The ponies sniffed it, then gobbled greedily at it.

By the time the girls had carried their third load of tins aboard, Jonathan and Tim were back, both too laden with looted goods to fight off a single hungry terrier. Luckily they hadn’t even met that. They had charts and tide tables, books for Otto, a tin opener and knives and forks. Jonathan dumped his load on the deck and opened a blue metal case.

“Look, Marge,” he said. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

There was a wild light in his eyes, as though he had drunk some drug, when all he had found was an expensive tool chest full of shiny spanners and firm pliers.

When all their treasures were stowed away they said good-bye to Otto, jumped ashore and pushed the tug out along the channel through the ice with a scaffold plank Margaret had found. No dogs barked as they rode away. It was too late to visit Cousin Mary; in fact it was drawing towards dusk when the ponies plodded down the last slope towards the farm, Scrub sulky because he hadn’t been far enough and Caesar sulky because he’d been anywhere at all.

That night Margaret had the second of her nightmares about the bull at Splatt Bridge. Two nights later she had the same dream again; again the bull was pelting towards her; again Scrub vanished from beneath her; again she was waist-high in clinging grass, unable to turn or run or cry for help; again she woke with a slamming heart and lay sweating in the dark, telling herself it was only a dream. And the same a few nights later; and twice next week; and so on, for six weeks, while the frost locked hill and vale in its iron grasp.

No more snow fell, but even the sun at noon had no strength to melt what already lay. Where the earth was bare it boomed when you struck it with a stick, as though the whole round world were your drum. Christmas came with carols and trooping into the tomb-cold church to hear a long service in Latin (Parson was sober this year) and cooking big slabs of meat and bread in case the revelers felt hungry while they were shouting in the farmyard (you couldn’t call it singing) ; all the men’s faces were cider-purple in the feast-day firelight, but surly and ashamed next morning.

Aunt Anne slowly recovered, and began to eat a little

and smile a little, especially when Jonathan was in the room. Mr. Gordon visited them several times, but seemed more like a bent old gossip than a dangerous slayer of witches.

Every third day the children took it in turns to ride down to the docks. They had no need to think of an excuse now, because Cousin Mary’s leg was worse and she had taken to her bed. She and Aunt Anne forgave each other the silver teapot, and began to exchange long weepy letters on scraps of hoarded paper, chatting over the adventures of their own girlhood, and the children carried them to and fro. Uncle Peter worked hard and said little. He slept in the kitchen, preferring it to Aunt Anne’s sickroom.

Heartsease froze hard into the ice again, twelve feet from the quay. Jonathan found a ladder and raided the ironmonger’s for nails, so that when Margaret next rode down she found a bridge between shore and ship which a human could clamber across but a dog couldn’t. The pack could have crossed the ice again, of course, but never came — they were scared of the docks now, and no wonder.

But Jonathan had hit trouble in the business of clearing the towpath down to Hempsted Bridge. Not one gate, but several, blocked it, where different industrial estates had sealed off their own territories. He toiled away steadily with looted crowbars and hacksaws and blot-cutters. He also found two or three inlets of water on that side: they would have to get enough way on Heartsease to let her drift past while they led Scrub round the edge.

In the middle of January Margaret found that Otto had been moved into the engine room. Reluctantly she climbed down iron rungs into a chilly chamber whose whole center was occupied by a great gray mass of iron, bulging into ponderous cylinders, flowering with taps and dials. Otto’s bed was in the narrow gangway which ran all round it. There was a much smaller engine outside the gangway on either side.

“Did you ever see anything like it?” he said. “It’s so primitive it ought to be made of flint. A Dutch diesel, my Pop would have called it — they used to have tractors like it when he was a kid. See those things atop of the cylinders that look like blowlamps? You light ’em up and let ’em blow onto the cylinder heads; then you get the auxiliary going—that’s this motor here; we won’t need the other one, it’s only electric — and pump up the air bottles, over yonder. Then, when the cylinder heads are good and hot, you turn on the fuel, give her a blast of compressed air from the bottles and she’s going. Got it?”

“No,” said Margaret. “It’s not the sort of thing I understand. But will it go?”

“Tim’s turned her over for me, and the parts all move. So far so good, that’s the best you can say. But I can’t see why she shouldn’t.”

“Have you told Jo?”

“Uh-huh,” said Otto. “He’s fallen in love with her, I reckon.”

“You won’t let him touch it, will you?” said Margaret urgently. “Not until we’re ready to go?”

“Why so?”

“Otherwise he’ll get himself all covered with rust and oil and begin to smell of machines. And even if he doesn’t actually smell, Mr. Gordon will nose him out.” “This Mr. Gordon,” said Otto, “I’m beginning to think he’s a bit of a baddie. If he was a cowboy he’d wear a black hat.”

“It isn’t like that,” said Margaret. “Nobody’s like that. It’s all caused by things which happened long ago, long ago, and probably no one noticed when they happened. I don’t even know if he was always a cripple — I must ask Uncle Peter.”

Otto stared at her for a long time. Then he said, “Forget it — I was only joking.”

“I’m sorry,” said Margaret. “I didn’t understand. We aren’t used to jokes in our world.”

“Okay,” said Otto, “I’ll keep your Jonathan away, best I can, but his fingers are itching.”

“I’ll talk to him. Is there a lot to do to the engine?” “Injectors to be cleaned is the main thing,” said Otto. “That’s them on top. Lucy can do it, if she can show Tim how to loosen ’em off.”

Lucy gave a funny little bubble of laughter over in her corner.

“When I go to heaven,” she said, “there won’t be no cleaning. I spent four years cleaning the farmhouse, and then I’m cleaning Otto, and now I’m going to clean a hulking great lump of iron.”

“Sweetie,” said Otto, “if we get home I’ll see to it that the United States Government buys you a dishwasher, three clothes washers and eighteen floor polishers.”

“I should like that,” said Lucy.

That night Margaret gave Jonathan a long, whispered sermon about staying away from machines. He made a comic disappointed face, but nodded. Then, after his next visit, he crept into the kitchen reeking of a heady, oily smell. Luckily Uncle Peter was out, tending a sick heifer. Margaret took Jonathan’s clothes and poked them one by one into the back of the fire, which roared strangely as it bit into them; and she made Jonathan take a proper, all-over bath in front of the hearth. They had just tilted the water out down the pantry drain when there was a rattle at the bolted door — Rosie, back from calling on her cousin. She sniffed sharply round the kitchen the moment she was in.

“Funny kind of whiff in here,” she said.

“I fell in a bog,” said Jonathan.

“Fool of a boy,” said Rosie. “Give me your clothes and I’ll put ’em to soak.”

“I’ve burned them,” said Margaret. “They smelled awful — I think there must have been something wicked in the bog.”

“Nice to be rich folk,” said Rosie sharply. “Some might say wasteful.”

“I’ll ask Mr. Gordon, shall I?” said Margaret. “He’d know if I was right.”

“Maybe,” said Rosie, and went sniffing upstairs. Jonathan winked at Margaret from his swathing towels, but she was shivering with the nearness of the escape. Later, when they went out to water the ponies, he explained that he had checked the fuel on Heartsease and there was plenty of diesel oil but not enough kerosene for the blowlamps on top of the cylinders; he’d found some drums of the stuff in a shed, but the one he tried to roll outside had been so rusted through that it split and spilled all over him. Margaret tried to scold him, but already he was talking excitedly about something called the bilge, which he’d shown Tim how to empty; the point was that the tug had hardly leaked at all.

Next time Margaret visited the docks Lucy was sitting with a piece of dirty machinery in her lap, swabbing at it with a white, smelly liquid, the same that Jonathan

had reeked of — kerosene. Margaret ran up the ladder again, fearful that the stink of the stuff would get into her hair. Tim was on deck, carefully cleaning his way round with a brush; the puppy, Davey, crouched watchfully beside him and as soon as he had gathered a little mound of rustflakes and dirt would leap on it with a happy wuff and scatter it round the deck. Luckily Tim enjoyed the game too, and seemed prepared to go on all day, sweeping and then seeing his work undone. But between games (perhaps while Davey was snoozing) the tug had become cleaner; the windows of the wheelhouse had been wiped, too, and the bigger flakes of peeling paint removed. But to set against this tidiness there was a nasty little pyramid of used cans on the ice under the bows — Lucy’s style.

Margaret knew that she herself would have carried them out of sight, but she couldn’t any longer despise Lucy for not doing things her way. And if she wasn’t going to nag there was nothing for her to do, so she called her good-byes down the hatch and was answered by two preoccupied mumbles, Lucy busy with her cleaning and Otto with his charts and tide tables. Scrub had never learned to approve of the docks and walked off briskly the moment she was mounted.

Cousin Mary was much worse, too poorly even to write; she raised her fat hulk onto an elbow to give Margaret a few word-of-mouth messages to Aunt Anne, but almost at once sank back sweating with pain. Even having someone in the room obviously tired her. Margaret left quickly.

They were trotting up the lane towards the main road

when Scrub suddenly faltered into a limping walk. Margaret jumped down and saw that he was shifting his off foreleg in obvious distress; when she lifted the hoof she found a ball of snow packed like iron inside it, which it took her several minutes to pry out. The other three hoofs were nearly as bad. She straightened when she had cleared them and looked at the landscape with new eyes: the ash by the lane was dripping its own private rainfall onto the pocked snow beneath; the wind smelled of the warm sea and not of the icy hills; there was a tinkling in the ditch beneath the crust of snow. The whole Vale was thawing, thawing fast.

She had to clear Scrub’s hooves twice more before they reached the first house in Edge, where a tiny woman lent her enough lard to smear into them to stop the gluey snow from sticking.

Jonathan was so fidgety with excitement that evening that Rosie kept looking at him with the sour glance of someone who is being kept out of a secret. Margaret knew what he was thinking: He had only two more gates across the towpath to demolish. In a few days the canal, too, would be clear, and they could tow the tug down, by stages, to Sharpness and work out how the lock gates functioned and watch the pattern of the tides. He chattered about it next morning when they were picking up the eggs, their whispers safe from inquisitive ears amid the scuttling and clucking of disturbed hens.

“Jo,” she said in a pause, “I don’t want to come with you.”

He looked up with a puckered stare from groping under the nesting box where Millicent always hid her eggs.

“Why not?”

“I’m frightened. Not of the journey, or what people will do if they catch us. I’m frightened of that too, of course, but it’s different. I’ll help you get away, but then I want to come back here.”

He stood up and sighed.

“You can’t,” he said. “Mr. Gordon — all of them — will know you were in it. Think what they’ll do then. You’ll have made fools of them.”

She stared at the straw until it grew misty; then she shook her head to clear the half-started tears. Jonathan bent to search for Millicent’s hidden treasure again.

“We’ll find room for Scrub,” he said without looking at her.

It seemed a long week before it was her turn to ride down again. The farmyard became mushy, the fields squelched, the ditches gushed and the millstream at the bottom roared with melting snow. A slight frost most nights slowed the thaw up, but when at last she headed Scrub down into the Vale the only snow lay in wavering strips along the northern side of walls and hedges. She dismounted at the bridge and prodded the ice with a stick; there was an inch of water above it, and it gave way when she pushed — it would be gone next day. On Heartsease the engine was fitted together again and Otto was reading Oliver Twist. Lucy was cooking on the cabin stove, hemmed in by the piles of tools and rope and tackle and oddments which Jonathan had been looting from deserted ironmongers’ and ships’ chan-

dlers. Tim was exercising Davey on the quayside. There was nothing for her to do again, except to warn them to be ready for the slow, three-day tow to Sharpness. Already they all seemed to have settled into such a routine of danger that she was hardly worried by the thought of that stretch of the adventure: it all ought to be quite straightforward, she thought. They could simply pick their time.

But when she rode into Hempsted there was a funeral cart at Cousin Mary’s door. Their excuse for visiting the Vale was gone.