“I told you he was clever,” said Margaret with a shudder.
“Sorry!” called Jonathan from the wheelhouse. “I made a mess of that. Is Lucy all right?”
“Fair enough,” answered Lucy, poking her head through the hatch. “I burned my arm on that engine of yours, but not enough to notice.”
“Margaret can put some cream on it,” said Jonathan. “In the first-aid bag in the cabin, Marge. But first, Lucy, can you get Tim to carry Otto ashore to look at the sluices?”
Tim thought it was an unwise move. Margaret was astonished by how much you could tell from the tone of his bubbling and the way he moved his head; now he was arguing that his patient had been under quite enough of a strain coming up from the engine room, and must rest before he attempted anything else. He began to back away as Lucy talked softly to him.
“Ah, come on, Tim my old pal,” said Otto suddenly. “I can stand it if you can.”
Tim stopped backing away and knelt beside him, making little worried noises.
“Ah, come on,” said Otto gently. “Jo’s been stoned, Marge has fought a mad bull, Lucy’s kept that engine going all morning — why can’t I earn my medal too?” Tim slithered an arm beneath his shoulders and another beneath his thighs and picked him up tenderly. He must have been very light with illness, as light as a dry bone. Margaret took Lucy below to dress her burn, which was a nasty patch of dead whiteness surrounded by angry red on the inside of her left forearm. There was aspirin too in the bag — Jonathan must have raided half the shops in Gloucester. Lucy grimaced as she chewed them up.
“D’you think I’m doing right, Miss Margaret?” said Lucy.
“How?”
“Taking Tim to America. Otto doesn’t think they can make him clever, not like you nor me, but they might find drugs for him which’d make him two parts well; and Otto’s uncle has a farm where we can live, he says. But what frights me is they might take Tim away and shut him up with a lot of other zanies — they wouldn’t do that, would they?”
“Not if Otto says they won’t. He owes you a lot — both of you.”
“Aye,” sighed Lucy. “But will they listen to him?”
“I wish I weren’t going,” said Margaret. “I wish none of this had ever happened. It’s awful knowing nothing can ever be smooth and easy again.”
Lucy grinned — not her usual secret smile but a real grin.
“I reckon we got no choice,” she said. “Neither you nor me. Master Jonathan blows us along like feathers in the breeze. Let’s look what he’s at now.”
Jonathan was down a deep hole in the quayside; the hole had a lid, which they’d opened, and Otto was propped on the rusting lip of iron which surrounded it.
“It’s hydraulic,” called Otto, “so there must be some kind of cylinder with a piston in it and a shaft. Then the shaft might thrust down on an arm and the other end of that might haul the sluice up. They’d be sure to have fixed it so you could haul it up by hand, in case the hydraulics failed. See anything?”
“I’ve got the main cylinder,” said Jonathan as matter-of-factly as if he were talking about laying the supper table. “But the rest of it’s not . . . oh, I see. How far would the sluice travel, do you think?”
“Four, five feet, I guess. Could be only two or three, if it’s broad enough.”
“That’s it, then. There’s two rings which’d take a hook, one to shut and one to open. I can’t begin to shift it, though.”
“Don’t try,” called Otto urgently. “Fetch out that block and tackle you looted from the garage. We’ll put a beam across.”
Jonathan popped out of the hole and began scampering to the tug. All he’d done since yesterday evening didn’t seem to have slowed him down at all.
“Come and help, Marge,” he called as he disappeared down the cabin hatch.
By the time she got there he was handing up a thing which didn’t look any use at all, made of two hooks and two pulley wheels and a great tangle of rusty chain. Margaret struggled with the heavy and awkward mess of metal back to where Otto lay, while Jonathan rabbited down into the engine room.
“Is there more of it?” she asked Otto.
“No, that’s all. It ought to do the trick — got a twenty-to-one ratio, justabout.”
“Then we’ve still got to find something strong to lift it — Scrub could pull, I suppose.”
“No need,” he said, grinning. “See where the chains run over that top wheel? That pulley’s double, and one side of it’s a mite smaller than the other, so when the pulley goes round the loop in the middle, that bit there which the other pulley hangs from, gets slowly bigger or smaller. But you’ve got to pull the chain outside the pulley a good yard to make the loop a couple of inches smaller, so you’re pulling about twenty times as hard. You can lift twenty times your own weight. Got it?” “No,” said Margaret.
“You’ll see,” said Otto. “What’s the gas for, Jo?” Jonathan was bending beneath the weight of two big cans, just the same shape and size as the one he’d used to scatter petrol over the stones the night the whole fearful adventure began.
“Gas?” he said, putting them down. “It’s petrol.
Marge, will you and Lucy take a can each up to where the timber piles are thickest; there’ll be men hunting us down from Purton soon. I saw a boat on the canal up there, so I think they’ll cross and come down the tow-path. Pull a lot of planks out across the path, spray the petrol about, stand back and throw a lit rag on to it. Take rags and matches. Then go and do the same thing on the road the other side of the sheds — there’s more timber beyond it, and if you can get it really blazing they’ll never get through. I may have to harness Scrub to the capstan to open the gates — d’you think he’ll do it for me if you aren’t back?”
“Oh, yes,” said Margaret. “How much have you got to do?”
“Shut the bottom sluice, open the top one, open the top gate when the water’s level—it’s only got about four foot to come up because the tide’s high in the basin — put Heartsease in the lock, shut the top gate, shut the top sluice, open the bottom one, let the water go down again, open the bottom gate and we’re out. Hurry up, though — I can’t move Heartsease without Lucy in the engine room.”
The girls trudged up beside the dock, straining sideways under the twenty-pound weight of the petrol cans. The wind bit at the backs of their necks and fingered icily through their clothes in spite of the exercise.
“Fine breeze for a bonfire,” whispered Lucy.
Margaret did most of the timber hauling, but she didn’t mind because Lucy seemed happy to handle the petrol. It was hard work, but quick once she’d found a stack of planks light enough for her to run out across the
quay in a single movement. At the back of the shed the road and railway ran side by side, making a forty-foot gap before the further sheds. The girls toiled away, one on each side of the road, hauling out planks to make a barrier of fire, until Margaret saw that they were going about the job in an un-Jonathan-like way.
“That’s enough,” she said. “We’ll never be able to pull out so much that there’s fire right across the road. But if the sheds really catch it’ll be too hot to get through.”
“Right,” said Lucy. “Shall I start this end, then? Wind’s going round a bit, I fancy. Ugh! Wicked stuff, this petrol. You stand back, Miss Margaret, while I see what I can do with it.”
She soaked several rags, scattered half of one can all over Margaret’s pile and the wood beside it in the stack, then the other half over her own. In the shelter of the stacks the harsh wind eddied, blowing the weird reek about them. Lucy tied a stone into a soaked rag so clumsily that Margaret was sure it would fall out. She lit it and threw.