“The Devil has taken his own!” he cried.
“Off to bed with you, children,” said Aunt Anne, with a sudden echo of the brisk command she used to own before she became so silent. “I’ll clear, thank you, Lucy.”
Lucy curtsied and said good night in her soft voice and slipped up the stairs. Margaret kissed her aunt on the cheek, bobbed to her uncle and went too. Jonathan came last, and above the noise of his shoes on the bare stairs Margaret could hear Mr. Gordon and Uncle Peter settling down to excited talk over the meaning of the magical fire. As she undressed she sawr how extraordinary it was that they shouldn’t even think of petrol — they’d been grown men before the Changes. Then she remembered that she’d only found the picture of the seaside in a dark cranny at the back of her mind — a place which she knew she was supposed to keep shut, without ever having been told so. And Jonathan was a funny boy, treating the adventure so calmly, knowing just what to do all the time, thinking things out all the time behind his ugly little cat-face. He must have remembered about petrol and machines long ago, if he’d been exploring in the barn enough to know his way through it in the pitch dark.
She herself remembered about central heating as she rushed the last piece of undressing, wriggled into her flannel nightdress and jumped into bed. Once the house had been warm enough for her to open her presents on Christmas morning, wearing only her pajamas. Why . . .
She sat bolt upright in bed, knowing that if she asked that sort of question aloud Uncle Peter and Mr. Gordon and the others would be stoning her for a witch. She shivered, but not with cold this time, and blew out her candle. At once the horrible business of the morning floated up through her mind — the jostling onlookers, and the cheering, and the straining shoulders of the men as they poised their stones for throwing. She tried to shut it out, twice two is four and four is eight and eight is sixteen and sixteen is thirty-two and thirty-two is sixty-four and sixty-four is, is a hundred and twenty-eight and . . . but each time she got stuck the pictures came flooding back. She heard Mr. Gordon cackle exultantly from the door as he left, and Uncle Peter’s booming good nights. Still she lay, afraid to shut her eyes, staring through the diamond-paned window to where Orion was just lifting over the crest of Cranham woods.
Something scratched at the door.
“Who is it?” she croaked.
“Me," whispered Jonathan through the slight creak of the opening door. “I must oil that. Come and listen. Quietly.”
She put on her cloak and tiptoed onto the landing. Flickering light came up the stairs as the fire spurted. Jonathan caught her by her elbow in the darkness.
“Stop there,” he whispered. “The floor squeaks further on. You can hear from here.”
Aunt Anne and Uncle Peter were still in the kitchen, arguing. Uncle Peter’s voice was rumbly with cider and not always clear, but Aunt Anne’s had a hysterical edge which carried every syllable up to the listeners.
“I tell you I can’t stand it any longer,” she was saying. “Everything that’s happened is wicked, wicked! What harm had that poor man done us this morning, harm that you can prove, prove like you know that if you drop a stone it will fall? And forcing the children up there to see him die. I kept Jo back, and I’d do so again, but Marge is like a walking ghost. Oh, Pete, you must see, it can’t be right to do that to children!”
“Rumble mumble Maisie nigh filled a bucket tonight when she was dry mumble rumble answer me that woman!”
“Oh, for God’s sake, you know as well as I do that you’ve only just moved the cows down to the meadow pasture. They always make more milk the first couple of days there.”
“Rumble bang shout off you go before I take my cudgel to you!”
A gulping noise. Aunt Anne was really crying now.
“Wouldn’t she help?” whispered Margaret.
“She’s too near breaking as it is,” whispered Jonathan. “But Lucy will be useful.”
“Lucy! But she’s . .
“You’ve never even thought about her, Marge. Just look what she’s managed for Tim. And anyway, Tim’s deep in it, so she’ll have to help. Thank you for asking about the stocks. Bed now.”
This time Margaret found she could shut her eyes and there was a different picture in her mind: she’d reined Scrub up for a breather on the very top of the Beacon and looked northwest towards Wales. The limestone hill plunged at her feet towards the Vale; there lay the diminishing copses and farms, and beyond them the gray smudge which was the dead city of Gloucester, and beyond that, green so distant that it was almost the color of smoke — but through those far fields snaked the gleaming windings of the Severn towards, in the distant west (often you couldn’t be sure whether what you were seeing was cloud or land or water, but today you could) the Bristol Channel. The sea.
THE frosts came, and shriveled the last runner beans. Even at midday the air had a tang to it which meant that soon there would be real winter. Any wind made whirlpools of fallen leaves in odd corners.
It was three days before the witch spoke. To either of the children, that is — maybe he talked to Tim, but if so Tim couldn’t tell them. And it was dangerous to go down much to the old tractor barn where the wicked machines stood.
“If you’ve got to go,” said Jonathan, “look as if you’re making for Tim’s shed. Carry something he might need — food or an old rag. Then sneak round the back of the barn. And once you’re past Tim’s shed walk on a fresh bit of grass each time, or you’ll make a path and someone will spot it. You do realize we’re stuck with a dangerous job, Marge?”
“Stuck?”
“Well, wouldn’t you rather you’d never heard him?
Rather someone else had? Then we could have rubbed along as we were.”
Margaret didn’t know what she’d rather, so she hadn’t said anything. Next time she went to the barn she carried a knuckle of mutton with a bit of meat still on it, and actually walked into Tim’s shed as if she was going to leave it for him. She looked round at the stinking heaps of straw, with the late-autumn flies hazing about in the dimness, and wondered how she’d never thought about the way Tim lived, any more than she thought about the cows who came squelching through the miry gates to milking. She’d thought far more about Scrub than Tim.
Ashamed, she looked round the dank lean-to to find something she could do now, at once, to make the zany more comfortable. There was nothing, but in her search she saw a triangular hole in the corrugated asbestos which formed the back of the shed. And on the other side of the hole was the wheel of a wicked machine, a ... a ... a tractor. Of course, this shed was propped against the back of the barn, and if the hole were larger she could slip through to where the witch lay, and there’d be no danger of leaving a track through the rank grasses below the barn.
She tugged at the ragged edge of asbestos, and the whole sheet gave and fell out on top of her. It left a hole just like a door. Inside were the derelict machines and the little brick hut in the corner. And inside that were the rusting engine, Tim, and the witch. He looked a little better, but not enough; it was difficult to tell because of the deceiving yellow light from the lantern and because his face was still livid and puffy with bruising. Tim squatted in his corner of the shed, watching her as suspiciously as a bitch watches you when you come to inspect her puppies. Margaret took the bone to him, then knelt beside the witch. She’d brought a corner of fresh bread spread with cream cheese; she broke bits off and popped them into the smashed mouth whenever it opened — it was like feeding a nestling sparrow, except that nestlings are greedy. It took him a long time to chew each piece, and longer still to swallow.