Cold Shoulder Road

by Joan Aiken

  How quick she learns, Is thought. This morning she’d have said, “Pye wait.” She’s crammed half her growing into one day.

  “What I do while bread rises?” Pye demanded.

  “Umn. Could you make up a song?”

  “A song?” Pye looked utterly taken aback.

  “Why not? A song for Arun to sing when he comes back with his mended teeth. Old Dominic de la Twite hates songs, somebody said. A song to annoy Twite.”

  “What about?”

  Is remembered how Twite had stopped the chaise and made Will Fobbing wipe the chalked letters off walls and fences, how angry he had been.

  “About mothers and kids.”

  Pye frowned. Is could not tell whether the frown came from perplexity, or because she disliked the subject. However she went off to a corner and curled up, apparently deep in thought. Figgin curled up beside her.

  Is walked along the deck to where Penny was washing a bundle of sheep’s wool gathered from briars, in a pail of water laboriously hauled up on a rope.

  “Pen,” said Is quietly, “ain’t it a longish time for Ruth to be gone? You think there’s summat real bad wrong with Mrs Lee? Does Ruth often put in such a long spell at the farm?”

  “No,” Pen answered in the same low tone. “It’s not like her to stay away from Pye so long. Tell you the truth, I’m bothered.”

  “Best one of us go down to the farm, then? See what’s up?”

  “Humph,” said Penny. “Which of us?”

  “You’ve known Pye longer. She’s used to you. Maybe you should stay here? We don’t want her kicking up one of her tantrums.”

  “Ay,” said Penny, “but you managed her pretty well just now. You can get through to her in that creepy thought-talk that you and Arun are so fly with. I think you’d better stay with her, Is. And you’ve been overseeing the bread, after all.” She gave her dry sniff of laughter. “Hope it don’t give us all the galleygripes.”

  I just hope we’re all here to eat it, thought is. She said, “All ruggy, then. You go to the farm, Pen. But hurry back! It’s like ‘Fly Away Peter, Fly Away Paul’. I know Arun can’t be looked for yet awhile, but I wish—”

  “Wish what?”

  “Never mind. Reckon I just got the habdabs for some reason.”

  “I got ’em, too. I’ll go to the farm. But pull up the ladder when I’m down.”

  “You can lay your sweet life I will!”

  “Where Penny going?”

  At the sound of the ladder being dropped among the branches, Pye came bundling up on deck.

  “To the farm, to find why Ruth’s so long.”

  “Pye go too!”

  But Is countered this instant response by a firm argument: “You got to put your bread in the oven and be there to take it out.”

  Luckily the dough, though still very grey, had risen in the most encouraging manner; it was laid on a large broken shovel and slid into the oven to bake.

  “Have you made up a song yet?” Is asked.

  Pye nodded. But she said, “You write down,” and fetched Is a bit of chalk and a slate which Ruth had salvaged from the ship’s schoolmaster’s supplies.

  “Go on then, I’m ready.”

  Pye then astonished Is. She recited in a loud clear drone, all on one note:

  “Mums, kids, hold together, hen to chick, cub to bear

  learn, pay heed, each to other

  sow to piglet, foal to mare.”

  “My word, Pye, why, that’s prime! You’re as good as Arun!”

  Pye looked proud. Her pale eyes could not change but a faint hint of smile rumpled her pale cheek.

  “Arun make tune,” she said. “When he come.”

  “Yes. He’ll put a tune to it, easy as fall off a brick,” said Is, and clenched her hands, because for some reason they were shaking. She added, “Why don’t you think of some more words to add on? There’s ‘fin and feather’, ‘paw and claw’—”

  “Think some more,” agreed Pye, and retired to her corner.

  It seemed, however, that she was having trouble with the next verse of her song, for she sank into a long silence from which Is roused her eventually by saying, “Bread smells good, Pye. Don’t you reckon it’s time it came out?”

  Pye nodded, and stumped off to the oven.

  They had just wrapped a piece of sail-canvas around the hot shovel handle and withdrawn a large, well-shaped loaf (only slightly too brown) when Is heard Penny’s whistle, and hurried off to let down the ladder.

  To her dismay, Penny was alone.

  “Where’s Ruth?” Is hissed, the moment that Penny was on the ladder.

  Penny finished the climb without replying, pulled up the ladder behind her, and made it fast. Her face was paper-white and the freckles stood out like currants in dough.

  “She never went to the farm.”

  “Pen! What happened to her?”

  “They never sent us any message. There was naught wrong with Mrs Lee. That note was a fake.”

  “Somebody musta grabbed her. I knew it,” said Is. “I had a feeling—”

  “And there’s worse.” Penny’s voice was low and hoarse. She went on in a mutter: “There’s a place in the wood called Birketland.”

  “I know it. I’ve been there.”

  “An old gal lived there in a cottage, Mrs Dryhurst. The kids from Seagate used to go there sometimes of a night, for what they called their Talkfestesses—”

  “So?” Is asked with a dry throat as Penny came to a halt.

  “Where’s Pye all this while?”

  “Gloating over her bread. Pye’s all right. What happened at Birketland?”

  “All burned up. House, trees, the copse . . . and, and people, too.” Penny stared at Is in horror. “Liza from the farm went there with milk at daybreak and she said there’s naught but a big burned patch – and – and some feet and hands.”

  “No!” whispered Is in horror. “Not . . . not Ruth?”

  “No. This musta been last night, Liza said. It was the old woman, Mrs Dryhurst and some young ’uns from Seagate. And a paper was stuck on a tree. It said, ‘These were unfriends of the Merry Gentry’.”

  “But they had nothing to do with the Merry Gentry.”

  “Maybe not,” said Penny. “But something like that sure puts a fear in anybody else who might think of crying rope on the Gentry. And, Is, I’ll tell you a thing that puts me in a quake – as I came back here from the farm – and I can tell you, I came mighty mousey, not on any path, but keeping in the thick bushes—”

  “Well?”

  “—Well, I was waiting to cross the turnpike road, hid in a clump of holly, and who should ride by but the Admiral Fishskin, his own self, on that two-wheeled scooter-shay of his. He had a big red kite slung over his shoulder and he was smiling away to himself like the cat that’s swallowed a cock-robin.”

  Is shivered at the picture Penny had called up.

  “What’s he doing in these parts? Folkestone’s where he lives. He’s got to be part of it all, that old Admiral, no question. I don’t like his being so close.”

  “No,” said Penny gloomily, “we gotta shift from here.”

  “From the ship?”

  Penny nodded.

  “But what about R-Ruth? What about Arun? When they . . . when he comes back?”

  “We better leave a message. Like we done for you. Mrs Nefertiti said the same. Said we’d best flit. Somebody – whoever shot that arrow – knows we’re here. ‘Sides, having us here makes a risk for them at the farm.”

  Is sighed. She could see this was true.

  “Maybe we should go right away – go up to London? See somebody . . . the King, like? Tell one of those high-up fellers about the horrible goings-on here.”

  “The King? I don’t reckon much to kings,” said Penny with a curl of her lip.

  “No, but, Pen, he’s a cove we know – that Simon feller, used to be Duke of Battersea. Not a bad cove.”

  “Oh, him.” Penny’s tone expressed ev
en more doubt. “I got to know him when he lodged with Mum and Dad in Rose Alley – I doubt he’d not be much use. Didn’t have two fardens to rub together in those days. Anyhow, we couldn’t go off to London now, not without any notion of what’s come to Ruth. Or Arun – we gotta wait for him.”

  “No. That’s true. We couldn’t go. What did Mrs Nefertiti say?”

  “She said a queer thing. Two queer things. She said, ‘Rest your head on a cold pillow’. And then she said, ‘Remember the tortoise.’”

  “Tortoise?”

  “Well I did have a tortoise once – when I was Pye’s age. Aunt Tinty – you’d not remember her, she used to have a vegetable stall at Covent Garden. And she found a tortoise amongst the greenstuff and she gave it to me. Diggory, I called him. But he wandered off . . .”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Blest if I know,” said Penny crossly.

  “But ‘Rest your head on a cold pillow’. Now, that does make sense,” Is went on, considering. “I reckon the old gal must mean Cold Harbour. How about we up-sticks, do a moonlight, and hike off there tonight? Cold Harbour ain’t so far. Matter o’ four hours’ walking.”

  “Ah,” Penny agreed thoughtfully. “That ain’t a bad notion. Arun or Ruth’d surely think of that place. If they come back and find us gone.”

  Neither Is nor Penny could bear to suggest that Ruth might never come back.

  How can we find her, how? wondered Is, and, my eye, Pye’s liable to cut up rough.

  “How come Pye’s so quiet all this time?” Penny said, as if catching her thought. “It ain’t like her not to come bustling.”

  The reason for this, they soon found, was that Pye had not been able to resist sampling the new loaf of hot bread. About one-third of it had been nibbled away, and Pye was lolling against a pile of sail-canvas in a sleepy stupor.

  “She’ll never walk to Cold Harbour in that state,” said Is. “We’ll have to carry her in a sling.”

  “And she’ll be a fair old weight with all that pannam inside her.”

  They rigged up a carrying-sling with ropes and canvas, and each packed a small sack as well, of food and needments.

  “Shame Ruth took the beads. We should ha’ guessed – for who could have known about them?”

  Is privately hoped that, if as seemed probable, Ruth had been snatched by an enemy, she might use the necklace as a bargaining counter. But it was a faint hope.

  “Where’s Figgin? Figs, Figs, Puss, Puss?”

  But he was not to be found.

  “He’s got sense enough,” sighed Penny. “He’ll follow in his own time. Pity about all those dolls of mine.” She looked at her orderly shelves. “Still – I can always make more. Come on – I’ve a powerful feeling it don’t do to dawdle about.”

  “Me, too.” Is wriggled her neck as if at any moment an arrow might hurtle through the branches and lodge between her shoulders.

  But she took time to find a piece of paper and make a drawing of three big stones and a fourth lying across their tops. This she folded and poked it right into the middle of Pye’s nibbled loaf, and left it on the galley table.

  “Right? Let’s be off.”

  Neither of them had the heart to eat any of the loaf. Food just then would have choked them.

  They had to let Pye down in her hammock; she was fast asleep, sucking her thumb, bloated with bread. Then, slinging her between them – and Penny was right, Pye was no featherweight – they set off, as quietly as possible, between the trees, not following any path, but going south-west, keeping the setting sun on their right-hand quarter.

  They passed through close-set patches of dense wood, climbed over ridges, crossed valleys, waded through brooks. When they came to an open patch of heath land, they circled carefully round it, keeping under cover.

  Pye woke up as the light began to dim, and grumbled. “Where we going? Where Ruth? Where Arun?”

  She wriggled about until they had to put her down; then she wept and grizzled. “Want Ruth! Want Figgin!”

  “So do we!” said Penny crossly. “And Arun, too. Wanting’s not the same as having.”

  “Why we here?” whined Pye. “Pye don’t like this place.”

  It was a bad sign, thought Is, that she had gone back to saying ‘Pye’ instead of ‘I’. In a minute she might begin to scream, and that would be very bad indeed. The spot where they had set her down to rest was in a grove of yew trees, old and dark and close-set. But they grew on the edge of a broad expanse of bare moorland, with grassy patches, low-growing stretches of heather, and a wide bridle-way that ran across the centre, past a smooth bare rock. The trackway was well-used; three or four times, while Is, Pen and Pye had been cautiously skirting round the open area, they had seen horsemen or carriages or light farm vehicles pass along the track. It ran only a bowshot from where they were hiding; if Pye screamed she would certainly be heard. Is flogged her mind to remember one of Arun’s songs, about whales and snails, which he had sung at Cold Harbour, and poured it hastily into Pye’s mind. She had the tune more or less right, but some of the words arrived back to front.

  “That’s silly,” said Pye peevishly. But she calmed down and seemed less likely to start screaming.

  “You make a better one yourself, then,” said Is.

  Penny hissed, “Quiet, both of you!” and grabbed Is by the arm. Her fingers dug in like iron pegs. With her other hand she pointed back along the track.

  They shrank deeper into the shelter of the yew grove.

  Far away down the grassy ride the Admiral could be seen, briskly spinning along on his two-wheeled runabout. And behind him was another man, wearing a black hood, riding a bay horse; the horse seemed extremely nervous of the Admiral’s riding-machine and kept its distance. But the two men were clearly together; when the Admiral reached the flat rock in the middle of the heath, he slowed down, alighted, and laid his machine on the ground. His companion also dismounted and tossed the reins over the horse’s head.

  “They’re going to fly a kite?” breathed Is. “Why the plague do that, in the middle of nowhere? What a rare rum business!”

  But this was certainly what the two men had come to do. They walked at first, then ran, back and forth along the bridle-way, tossing up the kite, which was scarlet, five-sided. At last a strong south-easterly breeze, which had risen as the sun declined, snatched and carried the kite up into the pale twilight sky.

  As it sailed higher, the kite caught and shimmered in the last rays of the descending sun. Something had been attached to its tail, a small packet, and there seemed to be a hook on the tail also.

  “Oooooo!” breathed Pye, full of wonder, watching as it climbed.

  “Hush! Don’t make a sound!”

  “Mysterious set-out, though . . . ain’t it?” whispered Is. “D’you reckon the old boy’s sending messages to the moon?”

  “I’d not trust him to do anything so sensible. More likely dropping lighted matches on a neighbour’s hop-field.”

  The kite had now caught a layer of high-level wind, and was hurrying northwards, far away, no larger than a scarlet speck in the sky, over the black outline of the forest beyond the heath. The Admiral paid out more and more line.

  “He musta had a ball of twine the size of a millstone!”

  At last the kite began to descend. The two men made no attempt to haul it in; seemingly their plan was to let it drop into the wood.

  “Blest if I understand,” muttered Penny. “Wouldn’t you think they’d want to reel it in? Not lose it?”

  But plainly the men’s intention was quite otherwise. Calmly abandoning the line, the Admiral climbed back on to his runabout and pedalled away southwards at a rapid pace; his companion gave him a short start and then followed at a canter. They had been in motion only a few minutes when a dull boom was heard, massively loud, a long way off to the north, at the point where the kite had last been seen. A brilliant V-shaped flash suddenly split the black outline of the forest. Flights of rooks
and starlings shot up into the air, clattering and chattering. Then there was silence again.

  “What did I say?” muttered Penny. “He did drop a lit match on someone’s hop-garden. Let’s just hope it wasn’t on Womenswold.”

  “Oh, Pen!” Is clapped a hand over her mouth in horror.

  A few minutes later it seemed as if something – some very large thing – went hurtling past overhead. They felt the wind of its passage. And, shortly afterwards, they heard a tremendous thumping crash to the south of them.

  Again, flocks of birds flew upwards in loud-voiced dismay.

  “Now what?” Penny and Is stared at one another in the dusk.

  Pye began to whimper. “Don’t like. Pye scared!”

  “Hold your hush,” Penny said dourly. “We ain’t so sparkish ourselves. But let’s hope it was just a thunderbolt. They don’t often come in pairs.”

  “We can’t be so very far from Cold Harbour now,” said Is, when they judged it safe to go on. They had watched the Admiral and his companion turn eastwards and disappear over the curve of the moor. Bearing steadily south-west, Is and Penny soon came to a spot that Is recognised, where – how many days ago now? – she had overheard that cryptic small-hours conversation about the Gentian.

  “Now, it is just down this slope—”

  But Is stopped short in total consternation.

  The whole neighbourhood around Cold Harbour had been completely transformed. Shredded timber, snapped wood, crushed branches, scraps of rope, of metal, of canvas; glass, tools, weapons, chains, broken china, guns, even cannon-balls, were strewn as thickly as autumn leaves over the ground.

  And – even more unbelievable – the three huge sarsen stones of the Cold Harbour refuge had been hurled outwards, knocked flat; hurled by the battered, almost unrecognisable object which had come to rest on top of them.

  It was the frigate. It was the Throstle.

  Chapter Eight

  WHEN ARUN NEXT THOUGHT OF SINGING AND had a try, he found it much more difficult: his tongue had swelled up, all his teeth ached, and his head did, too. Also he was miserably thirsty, and yet his throat felt much too sore to make swallowing possible.

  He found, after thinking about it for a while, that he was lying on his back. With a strong effort, he rolled over on to his side, and looked ahead. He could see very little. He seemed to be lying in a large, high, dimly lit place with nothing in it. In the distance he could hear faint, shrill cries which after a minute or two he identified as the voices of gulls; also, not far off, the sound of waves washing on the shore.