Margaret knew that she herself would have carried them out of sight, but she couldn’t any longer despise Lucy for not doing things her way. And if she wasn’t going to nag there was nothing for her to do, so she called her good-byes down the hatch and was answered by two preoccupied mumbles, Lucy busy with her cleaning and Otto with his charts and tide tables. Scrub had never learned to approve of the docks and walked off briskly the moment she was mounted.
Cousin Mary was much worse, too poorly even to write; she raised her fat hulk onto an elbow to give Margaret a few word-of-mouth messages to Aunt Anne, but almost at once sank back sweating with pain. Even having someone in the room obviously tired her. Margaret left quickly.
They were trotting up the lane towards the main road
when Scrub suddenly faltered into a limping walk. Margaret jumped down and saw that he was shifting his off foreleg in obvious distress; when she lifted the hoof she found a ball of snow packed like iron inside it, which it took her several minutes to pry out. The other three hoofs were nearly as bad. She straightened when she had cleared them and looked at the landscape with new eyes: the ash by the lane was dripping its own private rainfall onto the pocked snow beneath; the wind smelled of the warm sea and not of the icy hills; there was a tinkling in the ditch beneath the crust of snow. The whole Vale was thawing, thawing fast.
She had to clear Scrub’s hooves twice more before they reached the first house in Edge, where a tiny woman lent her enough lard to smear into them to stop the gluey snow from sticking.
Jonathan was so fidgety with excitement that evening that Rosie kept looking at him with the sour glance of someone who is being kept out of a secret. Margaret knew what he was thinking: He had only two more gates across the towpath to demolish. In a few days the canal, too, would be clear, and they could tow the tug down, by stages, to Sharpness and work out how the lock gates functioned and watch the pattern of the tides. He chattered about it next morning when they were picking up the eggs, their whispers safe from inquisitive ears amid the scuttling and clucking of disturbed hens.
“Jo,” she said in a pause, “I don’t want to come with you.”
He looked up with a puckered stare from groping under the nesting box where Millicent always hid her eggs.
“Why not?”
“I’m frightened. Not of the journey, or what people will do if they catch us. I’m frightened of that too, of course, but it’s different. I’ll help you get away, but then I want to come back here.”
He stood up and sighed.
“You can’t,” he said. “Mr. Gordon — all of them — will know you were in it. Think what they’ll do then. You’ll have made fools of them.”
She stared at the straw until it grew misty; then she shook her head to clear the half-started tears. Jonathan bent to search for Millicent’s hidden treasure again.
“We’ll find room for Scrub,” he said without looking at her.
It seemed a long week before it was her turn to ride down again. The farmyard became mushy, the fields squelched, the ditches gushed and the millstream at the bottom roared with melting snow. A slight frost most nights slowed the thaw up, but when at last she headed Scrub down into the Vale the only snow lay in wavering strips along the northern side of walls and hedges. She dismounted at the bridge and prodded the ice with a stick; there was an inch of water above it, and it gave way when she pushed — it would be gone next day. On Heartsease the engine was fitted together again and Otto was reading Oliver Twist. Lucy was cooking on the cabin stove, hemmed in by the piles of tools and rope and tackle and oddments which Jonathan had been looting from deserted ironmongers’ and ships’ chan-
dlers. Tim was exercising Davey on the quayside. There was nothing for her to do again, except to warn them to be ready for the slow, three-day tow to Sharpness. Already they all seemed to have settled into such a routine of danger that she was hardly worried by the thought of that stretch of the adventure: it all ought to be quite straightforward, she thought. They could simply pick their time.
But when she rode into Hempsted there was a funeral cart at Cousin Mary’s door. Their excuse for visiting the Vale was gone.
VII
JONATHAN thought for almost a minute, biting the back of his knuckle while his breath steamed in the early moonlight. Then he picked up his side of the big bucket and helped her edge it through the paddock gate and tilt the water into the trough.
“Til ride down tomorrow night,” he said, “and warn them to get ready. Then we can both go down two nights after that and start the towing in the dark. We’ll be halfway to Sharpness before they even miss us, and they’ll never guess which way we’ve gone.”
“We must say good-bye to Aunt Anne somehow,” said Margaret.
“I’ll write her a letter. I’ll do it tomorrow so that I don’t have to do it at the last minute, and I’ll hide it in my room. Cheer up, Marge, she’ll feel better when we’ve gone because she’ll stop worrying about us. That’s why she’s been so ill, knowing what’d happen to us if we’re found.”
“But she doesn’t know what we’re doing,” said Margaret.
“She knows we’re doing something, though.”
Margaret remembered the haggard face, and the bony hands that had banged her to and fro in bed.
“Yes,” she said.
He was in his room all next afternoon, toiling away (Margaret knew) at his half-taught, baby-big handwriting. He would tell Aunt Anne everything, too, because she had a right to know the truth, a right to know the real reasons why he had to go. Margaret went to bed feeling guilty in the awareness that he was keeping himself awake so that when the house was still he could climb out and ride the tiring journey down to their companions; but she was quickly asleep. Perhaps she stirred and frowned when the board outside on the landing creaked as someone trod on it in the darkness, or perhaps the stirring and frowning were caused by the first waves of terror as she began on the old, horrible dream about the bull.
But this time the dream never finished. Instead she was wide awake, staring at darkness, heart slamming, because something out of the real world had woken her — a shouting and stamping on the stairs, three hammering paces on the landing, and the door of her room opening like a thunderclap. Uncle Peter towered there, a lantern in one hand and in the other several sheets of paper, all different sizes.
“What’s this? What’s this?” he bellowed and shoved the papers under her nose. She put out a hand to take them, though she knew quite well what they were, but
he snatched them away. His face was so tense with rage that she could have counted the different muscles of his cheeks. Rosie hovered in the doorway behind him.
“What’s what?” quavered Margaret — no matter how scared she sounded, because she would have been scared even if she’d known nothing.
“A letter!” he shouted. “A letter to your Aunt! Jo wrote it. Says he rescued that witch and he’s going to get him away from Gloucester Docks in a filthy wicked boat! What d’you know about it, my girl?”
“Where did you find it?” asked Margaret in a wobbly voice.
“Rosie brought it to me,” he growled. Rosie’s acid tones took over.
“I was leaning on my sill,” she said, “looking out at the night, when I saw Master Jonathan ride away into the dark of the lane. So I puzzled what he might be about, and went along to his room to see if there was nothing there to tell, and sure enough I found this letter, so I took it to the master. No more than my duty, was it?”