“Let’s try a different tack,” he said. “You three don't think machines are wicked. Nor my friend Tim, neither.”
“Tim never did,” said Lucy.
“I did until four days ago/’ said Margaret. “But I hadn’t thought about them for ages. And I still don’t like them.”
“I do,” said Jonathan. “It happened in that very hot week we had during hay-making; I was lugging water out to the ponies and I suddenly felt, Why can’t we use the standpipe tap again?”
“Me too,” said Lucy, “only it was the stove. I was cleaning it, and I remembered electric cookers didn’t need cleaning — not every day, leastways.”
“But everyone’s afraid to say,” said Jonathan.
“It’s only worn off some people,” said Margaret. “All the men still seem to believe it.”
“Course they do,” whispered Lucy fiercely. “It means everyone’s got to do just what they says.”
“It might be something to do with children’s minds,” said Jonathan in a detached voice. “Not being so set in their ways of thinking.”
“Let it go,” said the witch restlessly. “You’d best just cart me someplace else and leave me to fend for myself.” The three children were silent, staring at him.
“We can’t,” said Jonathan at last.
“Why not? You got me here.”
“What about Tim?” said Jonathan.
“I don’t think he’d let us,” said Margaret.
“That he wouldn’t,” said Lucy.
They all looked to where Tim, scrawny and powerful, crouched amid the tousled straw. There was another long silence.
“Besides,” said Jonathan, almost in a whisper, “d’you think you’d ever sleep easy again afterwards, Marge?”
She shook her head. There was stretching silence again.
“Where do you come from?” said Jonathan at last. “America. The States.”
They looked at him blankly.
“Davy Crockett,” he said. “Cowboys. Injuns. Batman.”
Forgotten images stirred.
“Why did you come?” said Margaret. “You must have known it was dangerous.”
“They wanted to know what was happening in these parts,” said the witch. “I’m a spy. I had a little wireless, and I was in the woods up yonder reporting back to my command ship when your folk burst in on me.”
“Mr. Gordon smelled your wireless,” said Jonathan. “He’s like that with machines. You mean that this hasn’t happened to the whole world? Only England?”
“England, Scotland, Wales,” said the witch. “Not
Ireland. Well, then, if Tim won’t let you dump me somewhere, how are you going to keep me here?”
“I bring food for Tim,” said Lucy. “I can bring enough for you, easy as easy. You won’t be eating much, from the look of you.”
“I don’t like it,” he muttered, more to himself than to them.
“We’ll work out a story,” said Margaret, “something they’ll want to believe and that fits in with what they know.”
She told them about the cat and the rook.
“And I do have a broken arm,” muttered the witch when she’d finished. He was looking much iller now.
“Please, miss,” said Lucy, “he’s had enough of talking for now.”
“All right,” said Margaret, “we’ll go.”
She stood up, but Jonathan stayed where he was.
“What’re we going to do if we think it’s becoming too risky to keep him here?” he said. “We must have a plan.”
“Yes,” muttered the witch, “a plan. A man can plan. Can a man plan? Dan can plan, Anne. Nan can fan a pan, man. Dan . . . Dan . .
“He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” said Lucy. “My Dad went that way, sometimes, but it was drink did it to him. We shouldn’t have kept him talking so long. I’m worried for him, I am.”
“We’ll have to think of something without him,” said Jonathan. “Are you going to stay here all night, Lucy?”
“Aye,” she said.
“But will you be all right?" said Margaret fussily. “It doesn’t look very comfortable.”
Lucy looked at her slyly out of the corner of her eyes. “I’ve slept worse,” she said. “And it’s one less bed to make, isn’t it, miss?”
Outside the night air was cold as frozen iron. The moon was up now, putting out half the stars and making the shadows of the orchard trees crisscross the path, so black and hard that you lifted your feet for fear of stumbling over them.
“Jo,” said Margaret, “I . . .”
He caught her elbow in an urgent grip; he seemed to know just where she was in spite of the dark. He put his mouth so close to her ear that she could feel the warm droplets condensing in her hair, like a cow’s breath.
“Not out here,” he whispered. “Sounds are funny at night. Inside.”
She went up the ivy first, letting him push her feet into toeholds to save the noise of scrabbling among the hard leaves. She was shivering as she crawled along the wall and in through the window; by the time she was sitting on the edge of his bed, cold was all she could think about. Jonathan came into the room as quietly as a hunting owl, shut the window, opened his big chest (no creak — he must have oiled the hinges) and brought out a couple of thick furs. They wrapped the softness round themselves, hair side inside, and sat together on the rim of the mattress, as close as roosting hens, trying to feel warm by recalling what warmth had once been like.
“What were you going to say, Marge?” he whispered.
“I went right into Gloucester today. A pack of wild dogs chased me, but that wasn’t it. Jo, there are real boats in the town; there’s a sort of harbor in the middle of it, with a big canal full of water. If we could get him into one of those and make it go, we might be able to get him away.”
“Sailing boats?”
“No, tugs. They sit a funny way in the water as if they were made for pulling things. Do you remember, we used to have a jigsaw puzzle?”
“I had a toy tug. I used to play with it in my bath, but the water always got into the batteries.”
“Will these have batteries?”
“Don’t be a ninny. They’ll have proper engines, diesel I should think. If there’s a harbor, there should be big tanks with diesel oil in them; perhaps Otto will know how to make it go — he’s an engineer, he told us while we were washing him. Lucy’s marvelous; she doesn’t seem to mind anything.”
“One of them’s sunk, Jo, but the other two look all right.”
“It’s been five years, Marge. Engines get rusty, specially sitting down in the water like that. I don’t know if you could take a canal boat out to sea — you’d have to be very lucky with the weather.”
“But it wasn’t that sort of canal, Jo. It was big — twenty yards across, and there were proper ships there, sea ships.”
“Oh. Where did the canal lead, then? Out into the Severn?”
“I don’t know, but not where I saw, about two miles out of Gloucester. Why do you think it’s still full of water? It’s much higher than the river.”
“They probably built it so that streams keep it filled up. The river wiggles all over the place and goes up and down with the tide and it’s full of sandbanks too, I expect. It’d be useful to have a straight canal going out to sea, which you could rely on to have the same amount of water in it always. There’d have to be a lock at the ends, of course.”
“What’s a lock?”
“Two gates to keep the water from running away when a canal goes downhill or out to sea. You can make the water between them go up and down so that you can get a barge through.”
“There were two gates — three gates — at one end, but I don’t see how they’d work.”
“I’ve explained it badly. I’ll draw you a picture tomorrow. But even if the tugs don’t actually go they might be a good place to hide the witch in.”
“Provided the dogs don’t swim out. They were horrible, Jo.”
“Poor Marge. I’ll ask him what he thinks tomorrow. Bed now.”