The Changes Trilogy (30 page)

There was a wild light in his eyes, as though he had drunk some drug, when all he had found was an expensive tool chest full of shiny wrenches and firm pliers.

When all their treasures were stowed away they said good-bye to Otto, jumped ashore and pushed the tug out along the channel through the ice with a scaffold plank Margaret had found. No dogs barked as they rode away. It was too late to visit Cousin Mary; in fact it was drawing toward dusk when the ponies plodded down the last slope toward the farm, Scrub sulky because he hadn't been far enough and Caesar sulky because he'd been anywhere at all.

That night Margaret had the second of her nightmares about the bull at Splatt Bridge. Two nights later she had the same dream again; again the bull was pelting toward her; again Scrub vanished from beneath her; again she was waist-high in clinging grass, unable to turn or run or cry for help; again she woke with a slamming heart and lay sweating in the dark, telling herself it was only a dream. And the same a few nights later; and twice next week; and so on, for six weeks, while the frost locked hill and vale in its iron grasp.

No more snow fell, but even the sun at noon had no strength to melt what already lay. Where the earth was bare it boomed when you struck it with a stick, as though the whole round world were your drum. Christmas came with carols and trooping into the tomb-cold church to hear a long service in Latin (the parson was sober this year) and cooking big slabs of meat and bread in case the revelers felt hungry while they were shouting in the farmyard (you couldn't call it singing); all the men's faces were cider-purple in the feast-day firelight, but surly and ashamed next morning.

Aunt Anne slowly recovered, and began to eat a little and smile a little, especially when Jonathan was in the room. Mr. Gordon visited them several times, but seemed more like a bent old gossip than a dangerous slayer of witches.

Every third day the children took it in turns to ride down to the docks. They had no need to think of an excuse now, because Cousin Mary's leg was worse and she had taken to her bed. She and Aunt Anne forgave each other the silver teapot, and began to exchange long weepy letters on scraps of hoarded paper, chatting over the adventures of their own girlhood, and the children carried them to and fro. Uncle Peter worked hard and said little. He slept in the kitchen, preferring it to Aunt Anne's sickroom.

Heartsease
froze hard into the ice again, twelve feet from the quay. Jonathan found a ladder and raided the ironmonger's for nails, so that when Margaret next rode down she found a bridge between shore and ship which a human could clamber across but a dog couldn't. The pack could have crossed the ice again, of course, but never came—they were scared of the docks now, and no wonder.

But Jonathan had hit trouble in the business of clearing the towpath down to Hempsted Bridge. Not one gate, but several, blocked it, where different industrial estates had sealed off their own territories. He toiled away steadily with looted crowbars and hacksaws and blot cutters. He also found two or three inlets of water on that side: they would have to get enough way on
Heartsease
to let her drift past while they led Scrub around the edge.

In the middle of January, Margaret found that Otto had been moved into the engine room. Reluctantly she climbed down iron rungs into a chilly chamber whose whole center was occupied by a great gray mass of iron, bulging into ponderous cylinders, flowering with taps and dials. Otto's bed was in the narrow gangway which ran all around it. There was a much smaller engine outside the gangway on either side.

“Did you ever see anything like it?” he said. “It's so primitive it ought to be made of flint. A Dutch diesel, my pop would have called it—they used to have tractors like it when he was a kid. See those things on top of the cylinders that look like blowlamps? You light 'em up and let 'em blow onto the cylinder heads; then you get the auxiliary going—that's this motor here; we won't need the other one, it's only electric—and pump up the air bottles, over yonder. Then, when the cylinder heads are good and hot, you turn on the fuel, give her a blast of compressed air from the bottles and she's going. Got it?”

“No,” said Margaret. “It's not the sort of thing I understand. But
will
it go?”

“Tim's turned her over for me, and the parts all move. So far so good, that's the best you can say. But I can't see why she shouldn't.”

“Have you told Jo?”

“Uh-huh,” said Otto. “He's fallen in love with her, I reckon.”

“You won't let him touch it, will you?” said Margaret urgently. “Not until we're ready to go?”

“Why so?”

“Otherwise he'll get himself all covered with rust and oil and begin to smell of machines. And even if he doesn't actually
smell
, Mr. Gordon will nose him out.”

“This Mr. Gordon,” said Otto, “I'm beginning to think he's a bit of a baddie. If he was a cowboy he'd wear a black hat.”

“It isn't like that,” said Margaret. “Nobody's like that. It's all caused by things which happened long ago, long ago, and probably no one noticed when they happened. I don't even know if he was always a cripple—I must ask Uncle Peter.”

Otto stared at her for a long time. Then he said, “Forget it—I was only joking.”

“I'm sorry,” said Margaret. “I didn't understand. We aren't used to jokes in our world.”

“Okay,” said Otto, “I'll keep your Jonathan away, best I can, but his fingers are itching.”

“I'll talk to him. Is there a lot to do to the engine?”

“Injectors to be cleaned is the main thing,” said Otto. “That's them on top. Lucy can do it, if she can show Tim how to loosen 'em off.”

Lucy gave a funny little bubble of laughter over in her corner.

“When I go to heaven,” she said, “there won't be no cleaning. I spent four years cleaning the farmhouse, and then I'm cleaning Otto, and now I'm going to clean a hulking great lump of iron.”

“Sweetie,” said Otto, “if we get home I'll see to it that the United States government buys you a dishwasher, three clothes washers and eighteen floor polishers.”

“I should like that,” said Lucy.

That night Margaret gave Jonathan a long, whispered sermon about staying away from machines. He made a comic disappointed face, but nodded. Then, after his next visit, he crept into the kitchen reeking of a heady, oily smell. Luckily Uncle Peter was out, tending a sick heifer. Margaret took Jonathan's clothes and poked them one by one into the back of the fire, which roared strangely as it bit into them; and she made Jonathan take a proper, all-over bath in front of the hearth. They had just tilted the water out down the pantry drain when there was a rattle at the bolted door—Rosie, back from calling on her cousin. She sniffed sharply around the kitchen the moment she was in.

“Funny kind of whiff in here,” she said.

“I fell in a bog,” said Jonathan.

“Fool of a boy,” said Rosie. “Give me your clothes and I'll put 'em to soak.”

“I've burned them,” said Margaret. “They smelled awful—I think there must have been something wicked in the bog.”

“Nice to be rich folk,” said Rosie sharply. “Some might say wasteful.”

“I'll ask Mr. Gordon, shall I?” said Margaret. “He'd know if I was right.”

“Maybe,” said Rosie, and went sniffing upstairs.

Jonathan winked at Margaret from his swathing towels, but she was shivering with the nearness of the escape. Later, when they went out to water the ponies, he explained that he had checked the fuel on
Heartsease
and there was plenty of diesel oil but not enough kerosene for the blowlamps on top of the cylinders; he'd found some drums of the stuff in a shed, but the one he tried to roll outside had been so rusted through that it split and spilled all over him. Margaret tried to scold him, but already he was talking excitedly about something called the bilge, which he'd shown Tim how to empty; the point was that the tug had hardly leaked at all.

Next time Margaret visited the docks Lucy was sitting with a piece of dirty machinery in her lap, swabbing at it with a clear, smelly liquid, the same that Jonathan had reeked of—kerosene. Margaret ran up the ladder again, fearful that the stink of the stuff would get into her hair. Tim was on deck, carefully cleaning his way around with a brush; the puppy, Davey, crouched watchfully beside him and as soon as he had gathered a little mound of rustflakes and dirt would leap on it with a happy wuff and scatter it around the deck. Luckily Tim enjoyed the game too, and seemed prepared to go on all day, sweeping and then seeing his work undone. But between games (perhaps while Davey was snoozing) the tug had become cleaner; the windows of the wheelhouse had been wiped, too, and the bigger flakes of peeling paint removed. But to set against this tidiness there was a nasty little pyramid of used cans on the ice under the bows—Lucy's style.

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 toward 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 hooves 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 tow-path 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 egg.

“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' chandlers. 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.

Chapter 7

ENGINES

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.

“I'll 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.”