But the gates were shut. For the first time Margaret saw Otto look worried.
“Tide must have started to ebb and sucked ’em in,” he said. “They were open quarter of an hour back, weren’t they, Marge?”
“Couldn’t we pull them open?” called Jonathan from the wheelhouse. “If we got a hawser up there quickly.” “Worth a go,” said Otto.
“I’ll take it up,” said Margaret. “It’ll take longer if you do it, Jo. Lucy, make Tim look after Scrub, or he’ll think I’m leaving him.”
It was an awkward six-foot scramble, up a rusty projection which supported a screw-topped bar; the heavy hawser tugged at her belt. She had to lie flat on her face on the catwalk at the top of the gate to fasten the hawser to a stanchion below her — the rails on either side of the catwalk didn’t look strong enough. Panting, she backed off the top of the gate onto the quay, trying to work out how much the tide had fallen since the gates had closed — barely a couple of inches, she thought. She watched anxiously as the slack of the hawser rose dripping from the basin, became a shallow curve, became a stiff line. Jonathan put his signal lever over and the water under the stern erupted into boiling foam. The bows came up. The rope groaned. The gate moved an inch, three inches, and Margaret could see the creased lines at the gap where the water hunched and poured through. Then everything altered as the gate swung past the pressure line. Heartsease backed off with a jerk like a rearing pony and the gate swung fully open with the basin water tearing through. The hawser snapped like wool, but with a deep twang, as the tug reached the end of its tether; but Margaret had already grasped the spare length of hawser which she’d left beyond the place she’d tied it (Jonathan’s suggestion, of course) and before the gate could swing shut she’d taken three turns round a bollard on the shore.
The fierce haul of the engine dragged the tug out towards the middle of the basin before Jonathan could halt it and make for the gap again. He headed slowly in, anxious not to spoil his victory at the last minute by charging into the wall or the other gate. The smoke was thinner here, but still rushing past in choking and tear-producing swirls. As Margaret crouched under it, waiting, she heard a hoarse cry. She hopped round, still crouching, and saw a big man galloping towards her through the murk with an ax swung up over his shoulder. He was thirty yards off, but he’d seen her — it was her he was coming for. She scrambled through the two sets of railings on top of the gate, hung for an instant to a stanchion as she leaned out and tensed herself, then leaped for the nearing bows of Heartsease. The world reeled and hurtled, and the bulwarks slammed into her knees and she was turning head over heels on the rough iron of the deck. Her ear must have hit something, for it was singing as she started to heave herself up. The ax clanged onto the iron two feet in front of her face, bounced and rocketed overboard. The man was trying to follow it, but Heartsease was through the gap before he could disentangle himself from the double railings. He stood and shook his fist, gigantic amid the smoke. Margaret, her head still ringing, walked aft.
“I saw him coming before you did,” said Jonathan through the broken window. “Tell you later — Otto says I must shave this breakwater close as I can.”
They were racing along beside a strange structure of huge beams, all green with seaweed, which stretched out into the estuary. There was another on the far side of the harbor entrance, curving away upriver, and between the two breakwaters the river surface was level and easy; but out beyond them Margaret could see the full Severn tide foaming seawards. She thought Jonathan had misjudged his course, that they were going to ram one of the enormous beams right on the corner, but it whisked by barely a yard from the bulwarks. She wanted to lean out and touch it — the last morsel of England, maybe, that she would ever feel — but it was too far for safety.
Then the whole boat heeled sideways for an instant as the racing waters gripped it, before Jonathan turned the bow downstream and they were moving towards Ireland with the combined speed of a six-knot tide and a ten-knot engine. Margaret looked aft to where the stream-
ing pother of smoke was marked at the actual places where the wood was burning by the orange glow of house-high flames. Just as she was thinking how fast they were moving away from that hideous arena she saw Scrub skitter sideways as the boat lurched in the tide-race. He almost went overboard. She ran back to him, staggering along the gangway, took his bridle and tried to gentle and calm him while he found his sea legs. Soon he was standing much more steadily, his legs splayed out and braced, so she tied his reins to a shackle just aft of the engine room roof and poured out a little hill of corn for him to nose at.
That made her realize how hungry she was. She walked forward to where Otto lay on the raised bit of deck in front of the wheelhouse; he had his chart spread out beside him, and Tim had propped him on a rolled tarpaulin so that he could watch the far shore and try to pick out the landmarks which would steer them down the twisting and treacherous channel.
“When’s dinner?” she said.
“Just about as soon as you’ve got it ready, Marge. You’re cook, because Lucy can’t leave the engine and Jo and I must get this hulk ten miles downriver before the tide goes out. This is some cranky bit of water, and I don’t like the feel of the wind, neither.”
Margaret looked at the sky. Now that they were out from under the pother of smoke she could see that it had indeed changed. All morning it had seemed like a neutral gray roof over the bleak flats — it had been the wind that hurt, but the sky had seemed harmless. Now, to the northeast, it had darkened like a bruise. The wind must
have risen, too, for it seemed no less and they were moving with it at fifteen knots. The waves, even in these narrow waters, seemed to be growing bigger. She looked anxiously aft to where Scrub was feeding in snatches as the deck bucketed beneath him.
“Easy!” shouted Otto. “There’s Berkeley — three points right, Jo, to round Black Rock. If you can spot the line of the current, steer a mite outside it on the way out, then inside it on the way in.”
“I can see two buoys still there,” called Jonathan.
“Lift me up, Marge,” said Otto. “Manage? Fine. Outside both of ’em, Jo, then sharp back inshore. Marge, food!”
She opened tins in the cabin and spooned chilly messes of stew into the plastic mugs which Jonathan had stolen — but the spoons were elegant, stainless steel with black handles, marked “made in Sweden.” The crew took their helpings without a word, and began at once to eat with one hand while they did their work with the other —except Tim, who fed himself and Davey with alternate spoonfuls. It would have been a horrid meal if they hadn’t all been hungry enough to eat anything. She found a bucket for Scrub and half filled it with the nasty water of the canal from one of the big oil drums; she had to hold it up under his nose while he drank, because the boat was fidgeting too much in the churning tide for it to stand safe on the deck. When she’d finished she looked around again and saw that Jonathan had steered them right out to the far shore of the estuary, and they were now heading back towards England under the gigantic tracery of the Severn Bridge. The blackness
from the north was covering half the sky and there were feathers of snow in the wind. Tim had come on deck and was trying to coax Otto below, but Otto just grinned at him and shook his head, so Tim clambered down into the cabin and returned with a great bundle of blankets which he spread round his patient; Otto allowed himself to be babied, but all the time he was watching the shore and glancing down at his flapping chart.