“Clear!” he cried at last. “Sweet and clear! Peter, your farm’s clear of wickedness now, or my name’s not Davey Gordon.”
“The zany, was it?” cried one of the stonecutters.
“Sure as sure,” cackled Mr. Gordon. “And that sister of his, too, like enough.”
“She always had a sly look,” said another of the men. “Where’d they come from, anyone know?”
“Bristol,” called Margaret from the porch.
“Aye, so you told me before,” answered Mr. Gordon. “That’s where they’ll be heading then. Out and after them, boys.”
But it was a quarter of an hour before the men even left the farm, because they kept telling each other how right they were, and repeating old arguments as if they were new ones. Amid this manly furor no one spared a second to ask after Aunt Anne; and when they departed Uncle Peter went with them.
He left a hard day’s work behind for two children who’d been up most of the night—the cowshed to be mucked out, hay carried in, ponies to be tended, sheep to be seen to, hens to be fed and their eggs found, the two old sows to be fed too—besides all the most-used paths to be shoveled clear before the snow on them was trodden down to ice too hard to shift. Jonathan ran down to the stream and fetched the hired man to help with the heaviest work, so by the time Uncle Peter came back, bored with the useless hunt and angrily ashamed with himself for leaving the farm when there was so much to be done, most of the important jobs were finished. Aunt Anne stayed abed all day, and Margaret was staggering with tiredness when she carried the stewpot to the table for supper; but she opened another bottle of cordial for him (Aunt Anne rationed him to a bottle on Sundays) and he leaned back in his chair and belched and scowled at the roofbeams.
“Glad we didn’t catch ’em, sort of,” he said suddenly.
Margaret cleared away in a daze of exhaustion and went to bed. When she looked down from the top of the stairs he was still lolling there, his cheeks red in the firelight and mottled with anger and drink, and his shadow bouncing black across the far wall. He looked like a cruel old god waiting for a sacrifice.
Too tired to bother with lanterns or candles she felt her way into bed and dropped at once into that warm black ocean of sleep which waits for bodies strained to the edge of bearing, and slept too deep for dreams.
Next day Aunt Anne seemed worse. She lay under her coverlet with her knees tucked almost up to her chin, and all she said when anyone tiptoed in to offer her a mug of gruel or a boiled egg was “Leave me alone. Leave me alone.” Uncle Peter, after two attempts to comfort her (quite good attempts—worried, voice gentle), lost his temper with the unreasonableness of other folk and stumped off around the farm, furiously banging the milk pails together and when milking was done starting on the unnecessary job of re-stacking the timber pile and refusing to be helped. Margaret took him out a flagon of cider in midmorning (having poured half a bottle of cordial in first) but was otherwise far too busy with housework and cooking to pay attention to him or anyone else. Luckily Aunt Anne had done the baking two days ago, so there was bread enough for two days more, but even so there were hours of work to be done. When you have no machines, a household can only be kept sensible if certain jobs are done on certain days of the week, others on certain days of the month, others every day, and others fitted in according to season. Margaret usually hated housework; but now that Aunt Anne was moaning and rocking upstairs she was in charge, so she polished and scrubbed and swept with busy pleasure, humming old hymn tunes for hours on end.
It was only when she was laying the table for lunch that she realized that Jonathan was missing; she ran out to the paddock, and found that Caesar was missing too. Scrub trotted up for a gossip, but she could only spare him a few seconds before she ran back to clear the third place away, to pour the other half-bottle of cordial into Uncle Peter’s tankard so that he wouldn’t notice when she sploshed the cider in on top, and to think of a good lie. Luckily the stew smelted rich enough to tempt an angry, hungry man.
“Where’s that Jo?” he said at once when he saw the two places.
She ladled out the best bits of meat she could find and added three dumplings (Aunt Anne would frown and purse her lips when she found how lavish Margaret had been with the precious suet).
“I sent him down to Cousin Mary,” she said. “She’s got a bad leg and I didn’t know how she’d be making out this weather. I know Aunt Anne doesn’t speak with her, but I thought she’d rather we did something than that we didn’t.”
Uncle Peter chewed at a big gobbet of meat until his mouth was empty enough for speech, if only just.
“We’d all be happier if we hadn’t any relations,” he growled. “None at all.”
Margaret tried to sound shocked, because that was obviously what he wanted.
“What a horrid thing to say—why, you wouldn’t have any of us!”
He laughed, pleasedly.
“Aye, maybe,” he said, “but a man ought to be able to choose.”
He scooped up another huge spoonful of stew, which gave Margaret time to think what she was going to say next.
“But then you wouldn’t have anybody who had to stick by you. You’d only have friends and … and people like Mr. Gordon.”
He munched slowly, thinking in his turn.
“Right you are,” he said. “But mark you, I didn’t choose him neither. He chose me. And what I say is …”
Between mouthfuls he told Margaret more about the village than he’d told her in years. Mr. Gordon was right, but he had too much power and influence for a man in his station, and that had maybe turned his head a trifle. It was squire’s fault, and parson’s. Squire was a ninny and parson was a drunkard. The whole village was sick. But you couldn’t fight Davey Gordon and his gang, because nobody else would dare stand up for you. It was better to belong with them, and then at least you knew where you were. And, certainly, Davey had an uncanny nose for witchcraft of all kinds, and it was better to live in a sick village than one riddled with witches. And mark you, Marge girl, witch hunting was good sport—better than cockfighting.
When he’d finished his harangue Margaret fetched him bread and cheese and went upstairs to see whether she could do anything for Aunt Anne. She was asleep at last, straightened out like a proper person. Margaret slipped out and settled down to a long afternoon of housewifery. She was feeding the eager hens in the early dusk when Jonathan came back, riding Caesar, who looked bewildered by the distance he’d suddenly been taken, as if he’d never realized that the world was so large.
“How’s Mum?” said Jonathan in a low voice.
“Better, I think; anyway she’s asleep and lying properly. I told your father you’d gone to see whether Cousin Mary was all right.”
“Good idea. Our lot are, anyway. Lucy’s found a little row-boat and tethered the tug right across the dock so that she can’t drift about—she’s a clever girl, given the chance. And she and Tim got Otto down into the cabin, where there’s a stove, so they won’t freeze. I took them enough food for three days, I hope.”
“Did you try the footpath?”
“Yes, but there’s a locked gate across it, so it was a good thing we didn’t try it. It would be faster than going through Hempsted, if I can break the gate open. I didn’t see your dogs, but I heard them; if they smell Lucy and the others it’s going to be much more dangerous visiting the dock.”
“But couldn’t we tow them further along the canal, down to the bit beyond Hempsted? No one lives there or goes there.”
“I can’t start the engines, supposing they’ll go, until Otto’s well enough to show me how, and once they’re started they’ll bring people swarming round. When we do go, we’ll have to get down the canal and out to sea all in one rush.”
“If you can break that gate, Scrub could tow them for a few miles: that’d be enough.”
“You and your Scrub! Could he really?”
“Oh, yes, I think so. You’re so busy thinking about machines that you
never remember what animals can do.”
“Well, you think about them enough for both of us.”
“Not so loud, Jo!”
“It’s all right—it’d look funny if we spent all our time whispering to each other. Next time we can both get away I’ll climb out the night before and hide that old horsecollar in the empty house at the top of Edge Lane. We mustn’t be seen taking it.”
But that wasn’t for a full week. Aunt Anne’s mind-sickness left her, but a strange fever followed it which made all her joints ache whenever she moved, so she lay drear-faced in bed or else tried to get up and do her duty as a farmer’s wife with such obvious pain that Margaret couldn’t possibly leave her to cope. Twice Uncle Peter had to carry her up to her bed. Then he asked around the village for somebody to take Lucy’s place and found a cousin of Mr. Gordon’s who’d been living over in Slad Valley. Her name was Rosie, and she was a bustling, ginger-haired, sharp-voiced woman of thirty, chubby as a pig and with sharp piggy eyes which watched you all the time. Margaret and Jonathan agreed it was like having an enemy spy actually in the house, but at least her presence gave them the chance to get away for a whole day. Jonathan had been to the boat again, alone, in the meanwhile, but they both knew that the food on Heartsease must be getting low now.
They picked up the hidden horsecollar and rode down to the canal, Caesar still absurdly astonished at the amount of exercise he was suddenly expected to take after years of slouching about unwanted in the paddock. It had snowed several times since their midnight journey, so the world was starched white except for the scribbled black lines of walls and hedges and the larger blobs where the copses stood; the colors of the famished hedgerow birds showed as sharp as they do in a painting. It had frozen most nights, too, and the surface of the snow was as crisp as cake icing but gave with a cracking noise when the hooves broke through to the softer stuff beneath. (This wasn’t the cloying snow which would stick and cake inside the horseshoes, so there was no need to lard the ponies’ feet.) The lane was hardly used this weather, but an old man waved at them from where he was chopping up the doors and staircase of an empty and isolated cottage to carry home for firewood.
“Seasonable weather we’ll have for Christmas, then,” he called.
“Yes,” they shouted together.
“I’d forgotten about Christmas,” muttered Margaret as they took the next slope. “It’s going to make things much harder.”
“Easier, I’d say,” said Jonathan cheerfully. “With all those folk coming and going, no one will notice whether we’re there or not.”
“They’ll notice if there’s nothing to eat, so unless your mother gets better I’ll have to be there.”
“Won’t Rosie …”
“If I leave her to do all the work she’ll start asking people where on earth I can have got to—innocent, but meaning. You know.”
“Um. Yes. We can’t risk that, seeing whose cousin she is, too. And another thing, when we’ve shifted Heartsease we’d better go and call on Cousin Mary. Messages get sent at Christmas, and if we keep using her as an excuse and never go there, someone might hear tell of it.”
“Besides,” said Margaret, “she seemed terribly lonely when I did see her.”
In front of the inn at Edge stood a group of men with short boar-spears in their hands, and rangy dogs rubbing against their legs. They waved, like the old man down the lane, but their minds were busy with the coming hunt and the ponies padded by as unnoticed as a small cloud. The runner-lines of a few sledges showed on the big road, but when they dipped into the lane the snow was untrodden—the Vale had little cause to visit the hills, nor the hills the Vale. As they twisted between the tall, ragged hedges Margaret glimpsed vistas of the flat reaches below, dim with snow, all white patches like a barely started watercolor. It looked very different from her earlier visits.
But when they were really down off the hills it felt just the same. As soon as the lane leveled out they came across a bent old woman gathering sticks out of the hedgerow. She glanced piercingly at them as they passed, but gave them no greeting. There was a black cat sitting on her shoulder. She looked like a proper witch.
She was the only soul they saw for the rest of the journey (not many, even of the queer Vale folk, cared to live so close to the city). When they crossed the swing bridge Jonathan reined Caesar to a willing halt and gazed up and down the mottled surface where the snow had fallen and frozen on the listless water. It looked a wicked surface, cold enough to kill and too weak to bear.
“I’m stupid,” he said. “I should have known it would be like this. We can’t tow her out till it thaws—for weeks, months, even.”
“Wasn’t it frozen when you came down on Tuesday?”
“There were bits of ice on it, but it was mostly water. I think the river must have risen high enough to flood over the top gates—that would have broken up the first lot of ice.”
“What shall we do, then?”
“Go and see them, tell them to look out for the dogs, see how Otto is, give them the food. Then go and visit Cousin Mary.”
The path by the canal was flat and easy, but long before they came to the dock area it was barred by a tall fence of corrugated iron. Jonathan led the way up the embankment, through a gap in a hedge and into the tangled garden of one of the deserted houses between Hempsted and Gloucester. Beyond the level crossing he pushed at a gate on the right of the road, picked his way between neat stacks of concrete drainage pipes and back to the canal. They were just below the docks.
“I found this way last time,” he said. “There she is.”
He pointed along the widening basin. The tug lay in its private ice floe right in the center of the dock, with a hawser dipping under the ice at prow and stern and a dinghy nestling against her quarter.
“It’ll be easier from the other quay,” said Jonathan. “We’ll find a cord and throw it out so that they can pull the food sack across the ice—that hawser’s shorter. Over this bridge is best.”
“I can’t see anyone on her,” said Margaret.
“Too cold. They’ll be keeping snug down below.”
They moved in complete silence up the quayside and around an arm of frozen water which stretched south from the main dock until they reached the place where the hawser was tied—a chilly and narrow stretch of quay under a bleak cliff of warehouse. Margaret peered nervously into the cavernous blackness between its open doors, and then squinted upward to where, eighty feet above her, the hoisting hook still dangled from the black girder that jutted out above the topmost door.
“Ahoy!” called Jonathan.
He was answered by a clamor of baying from the other side of the dock. There was a swirl of movement along the far quay, a shapeless brown and orange and black and dun weltering which spilled over the edge and became the dog pack hurling across the ice toward them.
“In here!” shouted Jonathan, using the impetus of Caesar’s bucking to run him under the arch into the warehouse. Scrub followed, dragging Margaret.
“Door!” he shouted. She let go of the bridle and wrenched at her leaf of the big doors. It stuck, gave, rasped, and swung around into the arch. She could see the foremost dogs already on this side of the tug, coming in long bounds, heads thrown back and sideways, jaws gaping. Then Jonathan’s door slammed against hers and they were in total dark.
“Sorry,” he said, “mine was bolted.”
He fiddled with the bottom of the doors while Margaret tensed her back against them and the baying and yapping rose in a spume of noise outside. The dark turned to grayness as her eyes learned to use the light from two grimed windows set high in the furthest wall. She could see the ponies now, standing quite still as though the dark were real night—just the way parrots go quiet when a cloth is thrown over their cage.
“I think that’ll hold it,” said Jonathan. “Hang on, there’s a hook here too. That’s better. Let’s go up and see if we can see anything from above. If there isn’t another way out we’re in a mess.�
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The steps to the floor above were more of a broad ladder than a staircase. They found another long room, piled high with sacks of grain which had rotted and spilled their contents across the small railway that ran along the middle of the space from the doors overlooking the dock. The air smelled of mustiness and fermentation, sweet and bad.
“Let’s go higher,” said Jonathan. “They’ll get excited again if we open these doors, but they mayn’t notice if we go right to the top.”
Each floor had the same layout, with the double doors at the end and the railway down the middle between the stacked goods. Different kinds of goods had been stored at different levels; on the second floor the trolley that ran on the rails had been left half unloaded, with two crates of canned pineapples still on it and a ledger loose on the floor. The very top floor was used for the most miscellaneous items—there was even a bronze statue of a soldier in one corner, swathed in the ropes that had been used to handle the crates on the hoist; beside him lay several truck axles. The roof had gone in a couple of places and patches of snow lay on the floor, but this meant it was much lighter; and when Jonathan pulled the double doors open it felt like sunrise. The girder arm of the hoist stuck out rigid above them, the big hook dangling halfway along. It was a gulping drop to the quay below. Out on the ice the dog pack were sniffing round Heartsease in an absentminded but menacing way. Jonathan leaned against his side of the doorway, quite unaffected by the chilling drop, and teased the back of his skull.
“We need a bomb,” he said.
“Oh, surely they wouldn’t store them here,” said Margaret. “The army would have …”
He grinned across at her and she stopped talking.
“What’s on that trolley?” he asked.
This one hadn’t been unloaded at all. It was covered with small wooden boxes, no larger than shoeboxes, whose labels, still faintly legible, were addressed to the Gloucester Echo.
Margaret tried to pick one up but found she couldn’t move it.
The Changes Trilogy Page 21
