The landlord, his family, and the ferryman were gone, where, heaven knew. Impatiently for a moment the small agitated figure on the foreshore waited, and then abruptly turned away.
With quick steps she hastened on to the short broad 'hard' that jutted out into the river. Great posts of wood, rotting under the pressure of time and sea, held the banked earth together, except in one corner where the mass had crumbled and a gap showed plain between the surface, beaten down by generations of trampling feet, and the decaying pillars at which the tide sucked and gurgled.
The river being in flood it occurred to Ann for one moment to swim it, but she knew the treacherous mud banks on the farther side that the night concealed. She would be trapped for certain in the slimy ooze.
The ferry lay there in the starlight but Ann knew that her slender arms would never be able to cope with the great heavy pole, or steer the ancient barge safely to the other side; once she got out into the stream she would be swept seaward by the tide.
In desperate haste she began to scan the other boats for one that might be suitable. Most of them were inaccessible, being moored out in the river. Yachts and motor launches rocked gently in the tide, lonely and forgotten now in the stress of terrible events, but kept there for the week enders who, in happier times, forgot their business worries during the hours they sailed, or chugged gently, down river, along the coast, and up the reaches of the Orwell or the Stour. A dinghy swung at the stern of all the larger boats but not one of them was within Ann's reach.
She stamped with impatience at the thought that in such a place there must be something in which she could get over if only she could find it, and hurriedly retraced her steps to the landward end of the hard. Her eye lit on a battered rowing boat half sunk in the mud. She paused by it a moment and hastened on, its planks were rotting even if she could prise it from its sticky bed. Then on a shelving beach of pebbles above the mud she saw a dinghy, queerly lopsided but lying high and dry. Next moment she had seized the painter and was dragging it towards the water. Her sense of flying time, upon every moment of which Kenyon's life might hang, lent her added strength, and with a superhuman effort she managed to get it launched.
The sculls had been left beneath the thwarts, and the boat was hardly rocking in the water before she had them out and in the crutches. With a sharp left handed stroke, she swung the nose towards the opposite shore, and then with all the weight of her strong shoulders pulled towards it.
Five minutes later she had shipped her sculls and was scrambling out into the ooze that fringed the farther bank. It sucked and plopped as she struggled through it but she was on to the coarse grass a minute after landing, leaving the dinghy to drift out on the tide.
With renewed courage she ploughed her way up the rising ground and over the thick heather. The brief respite on the hard and the use of different muscles in rowing had eased her legs and rested her feet a little. The river too had been her principal anxiety, now she had succeeded in crossing it the remainder of the journey depended only upon sheer dogged endurance.
At last, with infinite thankfulness she struck a road and, leaving the uneven ground, turned north along it for half a mile until she came to a cross roads that she recognised. There she turned left but with a sinking heart, for she knew that she had barely accomplished half her journey, and that a solid seven mile tramp still lay before her.
It seemed hours and hours since she had left Shingle Street and her head was burning with fatigue. As she trudged on she became half delirious and began to sing, strange breathless snatches of half forgotten tunes, hymns, choruses and nursery songs that she had learnt in Orford when she was a little girl.
She broke off suddenly, impelled from sheer fatigue to sit down and rest by the wayside. Slipping to her knees, she leaned against a bank and lay there for a few moments panting heavily, while she tasted the supreme pleasure of relaxing all her limbs. Instantly a great drowsiness came over her, with a little flicker her heavy eyelids closed, and the great weight of sleep bringing relief to her utter weariness, pressed down upon her.
That would have been the end of her pilgrimage had not a sudden picture blazed in her half conscious brain. Kenyon, with the burning brand pressed against his chest! She started up with a muffled scream, those devils were going to hang him no, he was to be shot tomorrow today when the light came in the morning. Wide awake again now she struggled to her feet, and pressed on down the road, running a few paces and then dropping back into a staggering walk.
She wondered vaguely how much farther she had to go and, knowing the country well, she would easily have recognised any bend or turning in the daylight; but now that she could only see hedged fields on one side of her and heath on the other, her brain would no longer take in the significance of the gradients and dark coppices. At last another cross road loomed up out of the darkness, and the place was unmistakable even in her weariness. It was a little north of Brightwell and on one corner of it stood a signpost, but she did not trouble to peer at it for she knew its legend; it read, 5 miles to Ipswich.
Five and a quarter miles still to go. She felt that she would never be able to do it. Her feet were aching, galled and blistered about the heels. The road seemed to waver in front of her, closing up then broadening out before her with a horrible sickening motion. She swayed as she walked, lurching from one side of the road to the other, and failed to see the faces of the starving prowlers who peered at her from the hedgerows every now and then. Furtive, soundless, they watched her pass and then slipped back into the shadows for she carried nothing, not even the smallest packet that might contain food, and seemed to be as destitute as themselves.
It was not until he was actually upon her that she saw the man who sprang from the roadside and seized her arm.
What could have urged him to attack her is past conjecture. She obviously had no food about her and even less of beauty. Her dark hair hung in matted locks; her face was puffed and swollen. The mud of the Deben clung about her feet and blackened her arms up to the elbows; smears of it disfigured her face where she had sought to wipe away the perspiration and her mouth hung open in an ugly contour, but as she swung terrified to face him she saw that his eyes were glowing bright in the darkness with the horrible glare of insanity.
She screamed and with a sudden access of strength wrenched her arm free, then slogged him again and again with her clenched fist in the face. For a second he stood there, a look of stupid amazement in his eyes, his arms dangling foolishly, then he tripped and fell backwards in the roadway.
Ann screamed again and, forgetful of her weariness, ran and ran until she was clear of the hedgerows and out once more upon the open heath. There she collapsed and fell into a ditch, lying sobbing for several moments.
Rocking from side to side, moaning a little from acute bodily distress and terrified that she might fall asleep, she began to massage the aching muscles in her legs, then recognising a cottage opposite suddenly realised that she could now be no more than three miles from her goal.
As she got on her feet something rustled in the bushes at her rear, only a stoat or rabbit perhaps but, terrified by her recent experience, she dashed off down the road.
She was drunk now, drunk with terror and fatigue, but somehow she staggered on, every thought blotted out from her exhausted brain but that they meant to burn Kenyon unless she could reach Ipswich in time.
Suddenly she realised that she was no longer walking through open country. Houses were upon either side. Her mind cleared for a space, and she shook her head violently from side to side. Then as she looked round she knew that she could not be dreaming. The electric tramwires were overhead.