by Joan Aiken
He’s a cove to keep well away from, she decided, and if we can find Aunt Ruth we must warn her that he’s out alooking for her and that Handsel kid.
After the tinker’s song, everybody felt sleepy and retired to bed. Since the small, stone refuge hut was fairly crammed already, with six people in it, Is and Arun piled themselves beds of bracken under the shelter of the great yew, and slept peacefully.
Some time in the small hours, Is woke up, and, needing to relieve herself, stole away to a private distance. Then, feeling alert and wakeful, she settled on a rock, among giant clumps of heather in a small clearing, and thought about Arun.
I sure do hope we find his Mum. If we don’t, he’s liable to go out of reach. He gets so low. What that tinker said about black Twites and white, that was mighty strange. But it’s so, no one can deny. And I’m feared Arun might slip on to the black side, just now, if things don’t go well for him . . .
His singing oughta help.
Best he don’t meet that Leader again.
Wrapped in these ponderings, Is had been sitting still as a stone, with her chin on her knees, for about half an hour, when she was petrified to hear two whispering voices which seemed to come from quite close at hand, beyond the clumps of heather.
“What kept you for so long?”
“I was delayed. Obliged to borrow a mount.” There was ill temper in the second voice.
“Too much delay. Far too much delay.” First voice was severe. “And last night was inexcusable. Why was the delivery delayed? What happened?”
“Trouble on the French side. A load of tusks held up south of Ostend. And two loads that went astray. Never turned up.”
“Deplorable inefficiency! In any case, word should have been sent across by the Merry Gentian.”
“The Gentian had been held up by a Revenue cutter.”
“Anything found?” First Voice demanded sharply.
“No, no. The men know their business better than that.”
“What about that woman? Any news of her?”
“Only false trails. The boy and girl seemed a likely clue, but it was a balk, and they slipped from my keeping . . . I shall come up with them again.”
“The boy and girl?” First Voice hissed the words, as if utterly confounded. “But I had them penned up tight – clapped under hatches – how could they have made their way out? It was impossible! What can you mean?”
“They did make their way out,” said Second Voice with a touch of contempt. “And furthermore . . . listen to this, my friend—”
An owl hooted. Is missed the next few words. Then something about “your sister” “when we are in the Azores”.
“Now,” said First Voice, “as to the next levy, and the payment—”
“But what about the children? The boy I can hold in the palm of my hand. As to the girl—”
The voices moved farther away, became indistinct. Is sat frozen, hardly breathing, for what seemed an infinitely long time. Then she heard the soft whinny of a horse, perhaps a quarter of a mile distant. That’s one of ’em gone off, she thought; but where’s t’other? I ain’t stirring from this spot till I’m dead sure he’s well clear.
First Voice must have been the Admiral – mustn’t he? Saying he had us clapped under hatches. That’s just what the old Admiral would say. But – in that case – the Admiral must be hand-in-hand with the Gentry. That sticks out like a man-o-war’s mast.
And the other one – Voice Number Two – must have been de la Twite. Saying he could hold the boy in the palm of his hand – humph!
What a pair, Is thought. They’re enough to turn your hair to cobwebs. The best thing Arun and I could do is get away from here, up to London maybe.
But then, what about Aunt Ruth? And the Handsel kid? And all the folk that live in awful fright? She thought of Mrs Boles’s husband, left with his hands clipped in an ash tree for the wolves to find. And the man she and Arun had seen stabbed, by the Tunnel entrance. And the Swannett boys. And Fenny Braeburn, taken from her family.
Something oughta be done about it all, she thought slowly and sleepily.
Then she toppled into a deep well of sleep, with her head pillowed on a tussock of heather. In her sleep she dreamed she saw the Admiral, riding on his Dupli-gyro, flying a kite in the sky on a long string. Only the kite was not a kite but a ship, the Merry Gentian, and it pulled the Admiral into the air, and he lost hold of the string and crashed into the sea . . .
In the morning, when Is woke, she found that it was already late. The other wayfaring inhabitants of the Cold Harbour had all gone their ways, except for the gypsy woman, who was thoughtfully and silently rubbing her feet with goose grease out of a little stone pot.
The first thing Is did was to pull out of her pocket the few coins and the scrap of paper that she had taken from the saucer in Penny’s barn. Now, in daylight, she could read words written on the paper in Penny’s clear script:
Dere Is – This is for you if you cum home
Is gulped. So Penny didn’t forget me, she thought. She left a message for me when she moved out.
Like Arun’s Mum did.
For the first time in many hours. Is remembered that other scrap of paper which had been tucked behind all the pictures in Arun’s little sleeping-closet in Cold Shoulder Road. On the front had been a verse by Arun, on the other side, in his Mum’s writing, the words Somewhere in the woods.
Well – we’re in the woods now.
But there’s an awful lot of woods.
Arun, who had still been fast asleep in his bracken nest when she returned to the clearing, woke up slowly and easily, yawning and smiling at Is. He looks more like a boy today, she thought, relieved; not near so much like a cat.
“Arun! You remember that bit o’ paper we found in your Mum’s house, with a song by you and a message from her? Have you still got it?”
“No, I lost it. Probably got scraped out of my pocket when we were crawling through the cave. Or I left it at Mrs Swannett’s house. Why?”
“I found this one from Penny. In our place back there.”
She passed him the slip of paper. “And there was a few pennies with it.” She chuckled. “I left one o’ them silver King Charles ones behind instead. That musta given old Domino Demiurge summat to puzzle over, if he found it.”
“Dunno as that was such a bright thing to do,” Arun remarked thoughtfully. “He’ll think that Penny or my Mum found it; that they know where King Charles’s treasure is. That’ll give him all the more reason for going after them.”
“Yes – that’s so,” admitted Is. “But then – he don’t know where they are.”
Should she tell Arun about the voices in the night?
The boy I can hold in the palm of my hand.
I’ll wait a while, she decided. He gives me the cold habdabs, that feller.
Arun turned over the slip of paper.
“Hey! Here’s one of my Mum’s little drawings.”
The picture was tiny, no bigger than a rose petal. Drawn in sharp black lines, it showed a ship with wings.
My dream! thought Is.
“A flying ship!” said Arun. He gazed at the sky as if seeing a vision there. “Wouldn’t that be just prime. Maybe they’ll have them one day, in a hundred years or so. Just think! You could fly from London to Blastburn in a couple of hours. And there’d be no need for a Channel Tunnel – you could just fly over from Dover to France. On a thing like the Admiral’s Dupli-gyro but with wings.”
The drawing had given other ideas to Is.
“Arun,” she said slowly. “I believe I’ve a notion where your Ma and Penny might be . . .”
“Where, then?”
“I’d rather not say aloud; it’s only a guess.”
But then she looked across the clearing at the only possible listener, and said, “Oh!” rather blankly. For the gypsy woman who had been leisurely rubbing her toes with goose grease had apparently finished the operation while they were feeding and watering the hors
es, had wrapped her shawl about her, and silently slipped away among the trees.
“Romany are unsociable folk,” said Arun.
“She seemed sociable enough last night.”
“So did the rest. But they all went off without saying goodbye.”
“Well, let’s get away from here. I wouldn’t above-half fancy sleeping in that ken,” said Is, staring at the enormous piece of rock that formed the roof of Cold Harbour. “Suppose it come down in the night and flattened ye?”
“Well, you’d never know, would you? I wonder how many tons it weighs?”
As was the custom, they gathered up a bit of firewood and fodder for the next wayfarers who might make use of the Cold Harbour, and then set off north-easterly. It was a mild, foggy spring day; the woods smelt fresh and sharp, of earth and primroses; the birds were twittering quietly, waiting for the sun to break through the gauzy vapour.
“So where are you taking us?” Arun asked Is, as they ambled at an easy pace among the trees.
“Womenswold. It ain’t above six or seven miles from Seagate, so we gotta go carefully. Then the horses oughta be able to find their own way home from there.”
“Womenswold?”
“You were asleep when we passed it yesterday . . . It’s only a guess.”
“And if the guess is wrong?”
“Oh, well,” she said sighing, “then us’ll have to think again . . . Arun, why ever don’t you earn your living singing at fairs? You could do right well.”
“But I can’t always sing.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes nothing comes out. As if I’m plugged up.”
Maybe you’re unplugged now, thought Is, but she kept the hope to herself.
They took a roundabout course, keeping away from large tracks. Is wished to avoid any possible chance of coming across Dominic de la Twite.
“For he’s sure to have battered his way outa the barn in the end,” said Is, without mentioning what she had heard in the night. “I dare say Penny’ll be sore when she comes back to find her door broke, but what else could I do? It was the only way to get you clear of that cove. He’d put a regular spell on ye.”
“I can’t remember a single thing that happened yesterday,” said Arun. “After Micah Swannett took me to see that man on the shingle bank. It was like being hit on the head by a loaded sock. The rest of the day is just a blur.”
They stopped for a drink and a midday rest in a little clearing among birch trees where a spring bubbled out of a steep rock-face, and a tiny thatched cottage huddled against the side of the bank. Chickens pecked about the grass, ducks swam on the brook, and an old woman, coming out of the cottage, offered them a boiled egg apiece if they would chop some logs for her.
“And I wish ye’d wipe those letters off for me,” she said, pointing up to a smooth part of the rock where the letters M A K had been scrawled in charcoal. “Sometimes the Merry Gentry come through the forest this way, on their night rides, and it’d be as much as the thatch on my roof was worth to have them see that, if the moon shone that way. They’re mighty touchy, the Gentry, with anyone as slights or crosses ’em. And ’tis too high for me to reach.”
Is climbed on Arun’s shoulders and removed the offending letters with a birch broom.
“Who put it there, Missus?” she asked. “And what does it mean?”
“How should I know who writ it? There was a party o’ girls and chillun in the ’oods one day, it mighta been them. Girls gets up to foolish tricks, times. What’s it mean? Mothers And Kids, I heard one of ’em say. Mothers and kids. But what have I got to do with mothers and kids? ’Tis long since mine went off in the world. Here’s your eggs, now eat ’em up quick, for ’tis time I called in my chicken; there’s worse things than wolves and foxes in the forest at night.”
“What’s this place called, Missus?” Is asked, as they left the old lady shooing her ducks inside a wooden coop.
“Why, Birketland . . .”
Dusk was falling as they approached Womenswold. They made a circuitous approach, crossing the Roman road farther south, and then working back from a north-easterly direction. The little village – no more than two farms, some outbuildings, and a bridge over a brook – was three-quarters surrounded by forest. The grove that Is remembered lay a mile or so west of the houses. There were about a dozen trees, oaks and chestnuts, all equally huge, grouped together on a knoll.
The mist had begun to thicken again, as dusk fell, so that the bulky shape which was lodged in the middle of the central tree could hardly be distinguished until they were right underneath it.
They had taken the precaution of leaving their horses tethered a quarter of a mile off, and going the last part of the way on foot, very quietly, hand in hand, Is with a finger at her lips.
“Well I am blest!” observed Arun in thought-speech, looking up through the boughs. “A whole genuine naval frigate, guns and all, lodged up there, snug as a hen in a nesting box. I reckon even the First Lord of the Admiralty couldn’t fetch it out of there.”
“No, he surely couldn’t,” agreed Is. “But what d’you bet there’s somebody a-lodging up in there? And who d’you bet it is?”
He had no need to answer. And she herself had no further possible doubt, for a furious “Morow!” snapped the silence, a small form, hard as a bullet, butted against her leg, and a frightfully sharp set of teeth gouged into her calf.
“Figgin! My cat Figgin! My cat!”
But Figgin was extremely angry, and had no intention of stopping for a friendly exchange with his long-lost mistress. He growled and spat at her, and scurried up the trunk of the chestnut tree into the obscurity above.
Chapter Five
FIRST OF ALL THEY HAD AN ARGUMENT ABOUT the horses.
“Why don’t we just set ’em free,” argued Is. “They’ll wander their own way home. Everybody round here will know they come from the King’s Head at Seagate. They’ll take no harm. After all, we didn’t hire ’em.”
But Arun said that the Merry Gentry might steal the horses, and why should poor Tom the landlord be the loser. “I’ll take them back tomorrow,” he said. “For tonight they can bide where they are, tethered under the oaks; there’s plenty of pasturage.”
From above, a voice hailed them. It was high and weary, rather sarcastic; it was a voice which, at many desponding moments in the past year, Is had been afraid that she would never hear again.
“Well, you two! Are you coming up? Or are you going to stand parleying there all night?”
Now they noticed that a rope-ladder had been let down. For the lowest branches of the huge chestnut tree were well out of reach.
“I’ll go first,” said Is. She had spent a great part of her life in trees, and felt comfortably at home in them. She shot up the ladder as nimbly as a squirrel, until she arrived at where the boughs began. Here it was necessary to push one’s way through a kind of thicket, for the ship, when hurled by the gale into the midst of the tree, had smashed and torn a great many branches. These had not fallen to the ground, but jammed criss-cross among the framework of the tree, so that the frigate was gripped in a regular cage of branches, some alive, some dead, pointing in every possible direction. They helped very much to screen the hull from view, besides making it most unlikely that it could ever be removed from the tree.
Is found that the last part of the climb entailed pushing through a mass of twigs and dead leaves which still clung doggedly on to the parent branches.
“Well – stranger!” said Penny, receiving her sister over the ship’s rail with a tight, cross hug. “It took you long enough to come up with me!”
“Blame it, Pen! Hold hard! I only found your message last night! We come as quick as we was able. Before that we’d took a wrong cast; went to Seagate, looking for Arun’s Mum there . . . This here’s Arun, Penny,” she added, as he came over the rail.
Penelope gave Arun a scrutinising, cousinly nod. “Y’Mum’s been worrying herself threadbare about you,�
� was all she tartly said. He gave her an equally cool stare, and saw a skinny, freckled, fair-haired woman who looked as if she’d stand no nonsense from anybody. But – “Welcome aboard the Throstle,” she added in a more friendly tone. “She makes a right handy nest for us fly-by-nights, don’t she? And I reckon we can use a feller like you aboard; you make up songs, don’t you?”
“Is my Mum really here?” asked Arun, looking about him.
Penelope had brought a horn lantern. She picked it up and threw a dim light over their surroundings.
The quarterdeck of the frigate Throstle was about twenty-one feet long, very narrow, and the space along it even more reduced by some guns on one side and various ring-bolts on the other. The ship’s masts and rigging had been smashed and battered by its arrival in the chestnut tree, and hung in a tangle overhead, still further obstructing passage along the deck. But somebody had painstakingly sawed through branches and spars, and coiled up ropes, clearing paths through the jungle. Along one of these paths two people now made their way.
Two people.
“Who’s that?” growled Arun to Is in thought-speech, and she answered, also without making a sound, “Had you forgotten? Why, it’s the Handsel Child.”
Ruth Twite was not so tall as Penny, but was very thin, so that she seemed tall. Her straight iron-grey hair was drawn back into a big loose knot at the nape of her neck. Her pale face seemed to be all made up out of triangles – thought Is – deep three-cornered eye-sockets, a pointed chin that stuck out, deep lines from her nose to the corners of her mouth. Is could see why people in Folkestone had taken her for a witch. She did look like one. The child who clung on to her hand was vaguely familiar. After a moment or two Is remembered why. It was the same child – boy or girl? – who had loitered around the street market in Folkestone, who had exchanged broom-twigs for fish.
Arun and his mother stood looking at one another without speaking.
That’s rum, thought Is. But then she remembered that, of course, they never had been allowed to talk to one another.
