No more snow fell, but even the sun at noon had no strength to melt what already lay. Where the earth was bare it boomed when you struck it with a stick, as though the whole round world were your drum. Christmas came with carols and trooping into the tomb-cold church to hear a long service in Latin (Parson was sober this year) and cooking big slabs of meat and bread in case the revelers felt hungry while they were shouting in the farmyard (you couldn’t call it singing) ; all the men’s faces were cider-purple in the feast-day firelight, but surly and ashamed next morning.
Aunt Anne slowly recovered, and began to eat a little
and smile a little, especially when Jonathan was in the room. Mr. Gordon visited them several times, but seemed more like a bent old gossip than a dangerous slayer of witches.
Every third day the children took it in turns to ride down to the docks. They had no need to think of an excuse now, because Cousin Mary’s leg was worse and she had taken to her bed. She and Aunt Anne forgave each other the silver teapot, and began to exchange long weepy letters on scraps of hoarded paper, chatting over the adventures of their own girlhood, and the children carried them to and fro. Uncle Peter worked hard and said little. He slept in the kitchen, preferring it to Aunt Anne’s sickroom.
Heartsease froze hard into the ice again, twelve feet from the quay. Jonathan found a ladder and raided the ironmonger’s for nails, so that when Margaret next rode down she found a bridge between shore and ship which a human could clamber across but a dog couldn’t. The pack could have crossed the ice again, of course, but never came — they were scared of the docks now, and no wonder.
But Jonathan had hit trouble in the business of clearing the towpath down to Hempsted Bridge. Not one gate, but several, blocked it, where different industrial estates had sealed off their own territories. He toiled away steadily with looted crowbars and hacksaws and blot-cutters. He also found two or three inlets of water on that side: they would have to get enough way on Heartsease to let her drift past while they led Scrub round the edge.
In the middle of January Margaret found that Otto had been moved into the engine room. Reluctantly she climbed down iron rungs into a chilly chamber whose whole center was occupied by a great gray mass of iron, bulging into ponderous cylinders, flowering with taps and dials. Otto’s bed was in the narrow gangway which ran all round it. There was a much smaller engine outside the gangway on either side.
“Did you ever see anything like it?” he said. “It’s so primitive it ought to be made of flint. A Dutch diesel, my Pop would have called it — they used to have tractors like it when he was a kid. See those things atop of the cylinders that look like blowlamps? You light ’em up and let ’em blow onto the cylinder heads; then you get the auxiliary going—that’s this motor here; we won’t need the other one, it’s only electric — and pump up the air bottles, over yonder. Then, when the cylinder heads are good and hot, you turn on the fuel, give her a blast of compressed air from the bottles and she’s going. Got it?”
“No,” said Margaret. “It’s not the sort of thing I understand. But will it go?”
“Tim’s turned her over for me, and the parts all move. So far so good, that’s the best you can say. But I can’t see why she shouldn’t.”
“Have you told Jo?”
“Uh-huh,” said Otto. “He’s fallen in love with her, I reckon.”
“You won’t let him touch it, will you?” said Margaret urgently. “Not until we’re ready to go?”
“Why so?”
“Otherwise he’ll get himself all covered with rust and oil and begin to smell of machines. And even if he doesn’t actually smell, Mr. Gordon will nose him out.” “This Mr. Gordon,” said Otto, “I’m beginning to think he’s a bit of a baddie. If he was a cowboy he’d wear a black hat.”
“It isn’t like that,” said Margaret. “Nobody’s like that. It’s all caused by things which happened long ago, long ago, and probably no one noticed when they happened. I don’t even know if he was always a cripple — I must ask Uncle Peter.”
Otto stared at her for a long time. Then he said, “Forget it — I was only joking.”
“I’m sorry,” said Margaret. “I didn’t understand. We aren’t used to jokes in our world.”
“Okay,” said Otto, “I’ll keep your Jonathan away, best I can, but his fingers are itching.”
“I’ll talk to him. Is there a lot to do to the engine?” “Injectors to be cleaned is the main thing,” said Otto. “That’s them on top. Lucy can do it, if she can show Tim how to loosen ’em off.”
Lucy gave a funny little bubble of laughter over in her corner.
“When I go to heaven,” she said, “there won’t be no cleaning. I spent four years cleaning the farmhouse, and then I’m cleaning Otto, and now I’m going to clean a hulking great lump of iron.”
“Sweetie,” said Otto, “if we get home I’ll see to it that the United States Government buys you a dishwasher, three clothes washers and eighteen floor polishers.”
“I should like that,” said Lucy.
That night Margaret gave Jonathan a long, whispered sermon about staying away from machines. He made a comic disappointed face, but nodded. Then, after his next visit, he crept into the kitchen reeking of a heady, oily smell. Luckily Uncle Peter was out, tending a sick heifer. Margaret took Jonathan’s clothes and poked them one by one into the back of the fire, which roared strangely as it bit into them; and she made Jonathan take a proper, all-over bath in front of the hearth. They had just tilted the water out down the pantry drain when there was a rattle at the bolted door — Rosie, back from calling on her cousin. She sniffed sharply round the kitchen the moment she was in.
“Funny kind of whiff in here,” she said.
“I fell in a bog,” said Jonathan.
“Fool of a boy,” said Rosie. “Give me your clothes and I’ll put ’em to soak.”
“I’ve burned them,” said Margaret. “They smelled awful — I think there must have been something wicked in the bog.”
“Nice to be rich folk,” said Rosie sharply. “Some might say wasteful.”
“I’ll ask Mr. Gordon, shall I?” said Margaret. “He’d know if I was right.”
“Maybe,” said Rosie, and went sniffing upstairs. Jonathan winked at Margaret from his swathing towels, but she was shivering with the nearness of the escape. Later, when they went out to water the ponies, he explained that he had checked the fuel on Heartsease and there was plenty of diesel oil but not enough kerosene for the blowlamps on top of the cylinders; he’d found some drums of the stuff in a shed, but the one he tried to roll outside had been so rusted through that it split and spilled all over him. Margaret tried to scold him, but already he was talking excitedly about something called the bilge, which he’d shown Tim how to empty; the point was that the tug had hardly leaked at all.
Next time Margaret visited the docks Lucy was sitting with a piece of dirty machinery in her lap, swabbing at it with a white, smelly liquid, the same that Jonathan
had reeked of — kerosene. Margaret ran up the ladder again, fearful that the stink of the stuff would get into her hair. Tim was on deck, carefully cleaning his way round with a brush; the puppy, Davey, crouched watchfully beside him and as soon as he had gathered a little mound of rustflakes and dirt would leap on it with a happy wuff and scatter it round the deck. Luckily Tim enjoyed the game too, and seemed prepared to go on all day, sweeping and then seeing his work undone. But between games (perhaps while Davey was snoozing) the tug had become cleaner; the windows of the wheelhouse had been wiped, too, and the bigger flakes of peeling paint removed. But to set against this tidiness there was a nasty little pyramid of used cans on the ice under the bows — Lucy’s style.