Perhaps the most curious item of all was Sally’s pouch of horse bait, in case the Rolls was a flop and they had to trudge into the New Forest and steal ponies after all. The General had dug up a professional horse thief, a gypsy. He had been very old and smelly, and had smiled yellowly all the time, but he’d pulled out of pocket after pocket little orange cubes that smelt like celestial hay. He had whined horribly at the General for more money, but when he realized that he’d been given as much as he was going to get he had changed his personality completely, becoming easy and solemn, and had said that Sally was born to great good fortune.
They could see the banks of the estuary now, on both sides, a darker grayness between the steel-gray water and the blue-gray sky. The rich men’s yachts were all gone. There was a noise of hammering and a flaring of lights from Buckler’s Hard, as if the old shipyard were once again building oaken seagoers, in a hurry after two hundred years of idleness. The banks came closer. There were houses visible by the shapes of their roofs against the skyline, but few showed any lights in a land where once again men went to bed at dusk and rose at dawn. A dog howled and Geoffrey cringed a little in the darkness, sure that the animal spoke for the whole countryside, that somehow it had sensed them and their cargo, alien and modern; sure that they would land to meet a crowd of aroused villagers, bristling with staves and spears (like the soldier-men at Weymouth) who would chump them all into shapeless bloody fragments, like the jaws of some huge, mindless hound. But no dog answered; there was no calling of voices from dark house to dark house, no sudden scurrying of lanterns; the ketch whispered on through the darkness between the black, still woods on either side of the water.
After an endless time the two brothers held a lowvoiced talk with Mr. Raison, crept forward and brought the mainsail down with a faint clunking. They drifted along, barely moving, under the jib. Staring forward, Geoffrey saw the reach of water down which they were sailing darken in the distance, as if it were passing through the blackness under trees. Mr. Raison gave a low whistle and put the wheel over. The jib came down, flapping twice like a shot pheasant. The anchor hissed overboard (its chains had been replaced with nylon rope at Morlaix). They were there. The ketch lay in the center of the pool below the Abbey. The blacker patch of water had been land.
Sally pulled the trailing dinghy in by its painter and Geoffrey eased himself in, then stood, wobbling slightly, to receive stores, stowing canisters and bedding all around him until there were only three inches of freeboard left, and barely room for Basil to lower himself in and row them ashore. He really was an expert. He pulled with short, tidy strokes and caught the oars out of the water with a cupping twist of the wrists that made neither swirl nor splash. The only sound was that of a few drops from the oar tips.
They unloaded their cargo over a patch of bank slimy with the paddling of ducks, and Basil went back for more. Geoffrey sat on a drier patch higher up the bank and stared at the star-reflecting water. The ketch itself was invisible against trees.
Thank heavens, anyway, he hadn’t needed to make a wind for them. The breeze, which had been perfect, was now dying away to stillness, and soon there’d be an offshore wind to take the ketch out. But they’d a good four hours’ work to do before then, and four hours seemed nothing when you thought that before next nightfall Sally and he would, like as not, be dead. Funny to think of all those distinguished officers scampering across Europe, bullying underlings down the telephone, just in order to land a couple of kids in Hampshire to steal a motorcar, when the odds were that all three, the Rolls and Sally and himself, would finish up among the rusting rubbish at the bottom of a duck pond.
He began to worry again about Sally, though she’d been happy and excited on the way over. She’d hated France with its whizzing cars and jostling citizens. The only aspects of civilization she’d really enjoyed had been Coca-Cola and ice creams, and she’d got on best with the smelly old gypsy man. After he’d left she had filled every spare nook of her clothes with the orange horse bait, which she kept pulling out to sniff during their endless planning sessions.
Suppose that by some crazy fluke they brought if off and England became again the England he remembered, would Sally ever be happy? And then there was the General. At first Geoffrey had worshipped him, a magnificent manifestation of absolute will, whose orders you obeyed simply because he was giving them; but then he’d found himself puzzled by the great man’s actual motives: the readiness to slaughter a couple of kids on the off chance of pulling off a farfetched coup; the cheerful suggestion of blotting out half a happy county with missiles — did he really know what he was up to? Or was he like a mindless machine, pounding away towards some unthought-out purpose. Geoffrey had asked about the missiles, and what good it would do to obliterate the trouble without finding out the cause, and the General had just laughed his barking laugh and said “Shoot first, ask questions afterwards.”
You couldn’t blame him so much, thought Geoffrey, for not being very interested in how the children got back to France, supposing they ever did. Any plan so remote had to be vague, and the best they could hope for was to hide the Rolls near their target, nose around, drive home by a different road, buy or steal a boat and sail south once more. M. Pallieu had suggested that they might carry a homing pigeon, trained by another crony of his, but then they were disappointed to find that the crony’s pigeons could only find their way home from the south—that being how pigeons are trained: you take them a little way from their loft and let them fly home; then you take them further in the same direction; and further; and further. So the General vetoed the idea. Children, he seemed to think, make much more flexible and reliable messengers. And just as expendable.
They were taking the devil of a time about reloading the dinghy. Perhaps Sally was having second thoughts — be a good thing if she did, really. It was damned unfair blackmailing a kid to come on a business like this, and that went for himself, too. Why did it have to be them? Had the General honestly made an effort to find anyone else who was immune to the Effect, or had he just seized on their chance arrival as an opportunity to exercise his own self-justifying will? Serve the great man right if the Rolls turned out to have been burnt by angry peasants. In that case he was certainly not going to go loping off into the dark to steal ponies — and they’d hang you now for that, Sally said — Blast! The dry patch he was sitting on wasn't as dry as he’d thought, and the cold came through the seat of his trousers like a guilty conscience. He stood up and stared at the stars, then walked up on to the road.
When the dinghy came back he was exploring the potholes in the unrepaired tarmac and wondering whether they’d brought enough spare tires. Sally came up the bank to him.
“Sorry we’ve been so long,” she whispered. “We couldn’t get the ram and the wheelbarrow and us in all together. They’re going back for it now.”
Geoffrey slithered down to the water and found the wheelbarrow, which he hauled up to the road. By the time he’d brought the rest of the stores up the dinghy was back, with all three men in it.
“Thought I’d take her back, seeing as you were making the extra journey,” whispered Mr. Raison. “Don’t want some busybody coming along and spotting her. Remember I can’t get out if we have to leave after four a.m. I’ll skip off if you two aren’t back by then, Bas, and you’ll have to lay low all day. Try and get down to that broken staging just below Buckler’s Hard. I’ll look for you there about eleven, and if you aren’t there I’ll try and come up here, but it won’t be easy single-handed. Same the night after. Then I won’t try anymore, and you’ll have to steal a boat. OK?”