“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 come, 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 around his domains attended by a great crowd of chaplains and clerks and falconers and kennelmen 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 around 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 above 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 stableboy 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 betweenwhiles 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 around 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 around 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—you have to unlock the bridge at each end first with a piece of iron which you flip over—and when you turn the handle the whole iron part of the bridge swings around, 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 around 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 on 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 enormou
s 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 around 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.”
Chapter 4
FIRST SNOW
The men came back on the third day, arguing among themselves all the way up the winding hill. Nine villages, it seemed, had gathered for the hunt, and all their eager sportsmen had so hallooed and trampled through the flaming beech groves that the dogs had never had a chance to smell anything except man-sweat. Mr. Lyon had broken an ankle, though; and several small animals had been slaughtered, including five foxes; and Mr. Gordon and his cronies had spent the whole of the second day digging out a badgers’ set and killing the snarling inmates as they uncovered them. Mr. Gordon’s litter still swayed high above the procession as they tramped wearily up by the churchyard, and in his hand he waved a stick with the gaping head of a badger spiked on its end.
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