The Elfin Ship (44 page)

It all made a great deal of sense to Jonathan, and to the other rafters as well, although all of them were sad to part company with the jolly linkmen for the third time in as many weeks. But part they did, after two very important things were accomplished, one of which concerned the bright idea Jonathan had come up with at the mention of the Squire’s marble bag.

Although Mayor Bastable’s hat looked dapper, or something like that, on the Squire, it was, after all, Mayor Bastable’s hat. Jonathan, therefore, decided to effect a trade. So after the invitation to winter in Twombly Town was extended and politely refused, he hauled out the marbles bag recovered from the goblin at Stooton Slough and traded Squire Myrkle straight across for the hat.

‘Marbles!’ shouted the Squire, overwhelmed.

‘The very same,’ said Jonathan, ‘that Mr Blump gave you in Seaside.’

‘Good old Blump,’ said the Squire kindly. ‘Blump, Blump, Blump. He gave the Squire a bag of marbles once, much like this. Very like it.’

‘This very bag,’ said Bufo helpfully.

‘But it was stolen by rascals,’ said the Squire, ‘after we crossed at Snopes’ Ferry. I thrashed the little goblins from one side of the river to another. Beat them silly. Took this hat from them too.’

‘So you did, Squire!’ shouted Bufo approvingly. ‘It was an astonishing sight, gentlemen: the Squire with his truncheon defending the ferry. They set fire to Snopes’ farm and ran off his pigs, but they were a sorry-looking crowd when the Squire reined in on Behemoth there.’ He pointed to the Squire’s pony – a pony considerably larger than its fellows and so deserving, likely, to be called Behemoth. ‘There were forty of ’em,’ Bufo continued, ‘but four hundred wouldn’t have slowed down the Squire.’

‘Well it might have
slowed him down,’
put in Stick-a-bush, who had a look on his face which seemed to imply that Bufo were laying it on thick.

‘Not a bit,’ said Bufo. ‘The filthy things were on him in a trice, yowling and making their ridiculous noises, but the Squire laid about him and scattered the whole pack from there atop Behemoth. Smote the things – that’s what he did. Smote them mightily, right down the river road, past Snopes’ farm and off the end of the dock onto the ferry. Then he smote ’em into the river!’

‘Hooray!’ cried Dooly, overwhelmed.

‘Smote, smote, smote from the boat!’ said the Squire, a poet himself in a sense.

‘But they stole his marbles bag, the blighters,’ said Yellow Hat.

‘And we found it again down toward Stooton,’ said Dooly. ‘I smote a few myself with a frying pan.’

‘The Cheeseman gives me a new bag,’ said the Squire, still not having fully understood the complicated turn of events. ‘When the Squire calls for a cheese, Mr Bing has it. When it’s marbles he wants, why there’s Mr Bing.’ The Squire stuck out his hand so Jonathan could shake it. When Jonathan took it, the Squire waved their clasped hands around thrice in a circle and said, cryptically, ‘Windmill, windmill, windmill,’ before letting go.

‘That’s one of Blump’s gags,’ explained Yellow Hat.

‘I thought so,’ said Jonathan.

The Squire peeked into the bag, then closed it up quick, not wanting to engender any marble rivers. He squinted up at the rafters. ‘Why, Mr Bing, did the elf put a couch on his front stoop?’

Jonathan guessed that the answer had to do with certain scientific principles, quite possibly with rigor mortis, but he couldn’t for the life of him see how. ‘I haven’t any idea,’ he said.

‘So the Squire can sit about on spring evenings,’ said the Squire, laughing heartily thereafter. The rest of the party laughed too, Dooly most of all. It seemed to be a far more sensible gag to Dooly than the rigor mortis joke had seemed. Stick-a-bush, on the other hand, didn’t laugh quite so heartily but seemed puzzled by the thing, or else not given over quite so much to politeness as the others.

Bufo, after they’d all had ample time to appreciate the Squire’s anecdote, cleared his throat and was overcome by a look of inspiration and poetics. ‘Gump and I have a bit of a poem,’ he said, ‘which, given the occasion, you might find suitable.’

‘Here, here!’ cried the Professor with enthusiasm.

‘By all means,’ said Jonathan, learning for the first time Yellow Hat’s actual name.

And so Bufo and Yellow Hat, or Gump as it were, launched into their poem, each of them reciting every other verse:

‘You’ve gone and boggered up the last verse,’ said Gump. ‘You’ve tossed your filthy mig-weed into it and ruined it!’

‘Nonsense!’ cried the Professor before Bufo had a chance to protest. ‘It was capital – beginning to end. Couldn’t have been better.’ Following the Professor’s enthusiastic response, there was relatively thunderous applause. The Professor repeated that he thought that the poem was astonishingly good and said that he and Jonathan and Dooly would carry it back to Twombly Town to spread the tale of the Squire’s heroics.

They shook hands, finally, and said a few goodbyes, and the three rafters promised to come downriver on a visit fairly soon. With that, the linkmen were off, down along the river road toward the Elfin Highlands and linkman territory.

Jonathan, Dooly, and the Professor set about pitching brush off the deck, and Ahab did his part too, wandering about and looking things over as if glad to be on the river once more. By ten o’clock or so they were poling the raft out of the mouth of Hinkle Creek, and Jonathan and Dooly set to pedaling while the Professor manned the tiller. None of them had had satisfactory sleep over the past forty hours or so, but the promise of home and the excitement of victory served to overcome any tiredness and to rather buoy them up and push them along.

They pedaled off and on all that day and most of the next until, in the afternoon, a good wind blew up, cold as a smelt, and they dropped the sails and made good time in the direction of home. They were all, by that time, bundled in jackets and blankets, and they had the coffee pot going out on deck along with a number of hot potatoes to take the chill off a person.

‘I wish I’d been a bit more help there at the tower,’ said Jonathan when all of them were gathered below the tiller canopy, munching steaming potatoes.

‘You and I both,’ said the Professor. ‘But Escargot’s plan, if it was a plan, worked surprisingly well, and you and I played our part in it.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Jonathan. ‘When he rushed off after Dooly, though, I thought we were in for it. I thought we’d end up with fins and beaks and traded to a bunjo man for string beans or something.’

‘That was a powerful mean looking skelington,’ said Dooly, mispronouncing the word. ‘I thought he meant to eat me.’

‘He ate the Squire’s turkey leg,’ said Jonathan. ‘Or at least one of them did. I don’t think it agreed with him. Seemed to be hard on his teeth.’

‘Well I just ran for it,’ Dooly continued. ‘I didn’t even think. Grandpa said it was a reaction. I lit out down the road and ran into a bunch of goblins coming up out of the swamp. There was a mess of ’em, all coming along like sixty. And mean! Let me say. And behind ’em waving this big club was old Mr Gosset, just wild! It was a sight. Strike me for a lubber if it weren’t.’

‘Strike me for a lubber?’ asked Jonathan.

‘That’s what Grandpa would have said, him going for a pirate and all. Anyway, I sat in the bush, shaking like crazy, and here comes Grandpa, whispering my name. I, of course, cries out, and he says that I’m to stay in the bush and leave the fighting alone – that it weren’t safe up at the tower. He said you’d fetch me after it was over.

‘Well I hung around for a few minutes and there was a powerful lot of shouting and all. It seemed like Mr Gosset was giving them goblins a lesson. Then who comes up the path but the Squire and Stick-a-bush and all, and my don’t the Squire look grand. He was ready! So I jump out and nearly scare the daylights out of ’em, and the five of us and Mr Gosset, we cleaned them goblins up. Then that ape come up out of nowhere and whacked Mr Gosset, and the Squire said he’d get the ape, and he did. That’s what happened to me. That’s it in a nut.’

‘Well we were all glad to see you,’ said Jonathan. ‘I was never so happy to see anyone as I was to see you and the Squire and all. It would have gone bad for us otherwise.’

The Professor agreed and said it must have been a close one. Then they all agreed that the Squire was a continual amazement and was ‘one of the lads’.

‘I’m dashed if I can understand why you could see and hear the whole affair and I couldn’t, though, Jonathan,’ said the Professor. ‘It could quite possibly have something to do with atmospheric pressures. The fog, you know, presses in at the lobes of the ear and roundabout the forebrain and has a direct effect on sound and vision.’

‘I didn’t know that, actually,’ said Jonathan. ‘That’s fascinating.’

‘It’s my theory,’ the Professor continued, ‘that due to my slightly advanced age, such pressures had the effect of closing off certain vital humors and that such stoppage resulted in my total incapacitation.’

‘You’re probably right, Professor,’ said Jonathan, ‘although I don’t know anything about humors and pressures and such. It could be, though, that I was the exception to the rule. I’m certain, in fact, that when Dooly pulled the last of the four coins out of my pouch, I missed a good bit, and then came back around when the coins were returned. If I had to guess I’d say it was elf magic that got in the way.’

‘Magic again,’ said the Professor. ‘That’s too easy. A man of science doesn’t trot out magic to explain odd phenomena.’

‘But you can’t deny the coins work,’ said Jonathan, ‘or that the watch stops things short.’

‘Not at all,’ said the Professor. ‘But I firmly believe that if we pried the back off this watch, we’d see a thing or two that made admirable sense.’ The Professor opened his pocketknife as if to have a go at the back of the watch.

‘Professor!’ Jonathan shouted, flabbergasted at the very idea of such meddling.

The Professor laughed and put the knife away. ‘As you say, Jonathan,’ he said. ‘You’re the captain of this vessel. If it’s magic that makes things go round, then that’s fine with me.’ He studied the watch for a few moments, turning it over in his hand. ‘I wonder if there’s any reference to this sort of thing in
Limpus?’
he said finally, and ducked into the cabin for a minute before emerging with one of the ponderous
Tomes of Limpus
in which he was quickly lost.

After that, they sailed upriver until long after dark, and moored the raft well out into the river to take no chance of shenanigans. After all, the Dwarf had fled but there was no telling what sort of pranks he was still capable of playing. Jonathan was fairly sure they could deal with his fog and his dancing skeletons and such. If worse came to worst, the Professor had the pocketwatch and could take a turn at freezing the Dwarf or his ape or any of his other odd minions. Still, they decided they’d all sleep more soundly with a hundred feet of river water stretching away to either side of the raft.

And sleep soundly they did. None of them, including Ahab, awoke before ten the following morning. Jonathan started to hop out of his bunk when it struck him that it was what you might call desperately cold. His breath was as visible in that morning air as steam from the smokestack of a train, and the warmth developed sleeping under a feather comforter all night evaporated almost immediately. He pulled on two pairs of socks which, wisely, he’d left under the covers all night, and a sweater and a jacket, both of which seemed frightfully cold. As soon as he abandoned his bunk and set about building a fire in the stove, Ahab climbed in and buried himself beneath the blankets, peering out at Jonathan with a relatively satisfied look in his eye.

After coffee and breakfast had geared them up a bit and given them heart, they went out into the crisp morning. There was a gray sky overhead and it seemed a safe bet that it was working itself into the mood for a good snow.

An inch of ice crusted the low spots on the deck, and the seats in front of the paddlewheel were covered with frost. The idea of sitting there on the cold seat and pedaling the raft upriver wasn’t too attractive, but there wasn’t much choice – there was no wind to speak of, only a little ear-numbing breeze from up the valley.

So Jonathan and Dooly put canvas cushions down on the seats, and although they were still cold as codfish, it was better than sitting on frosted wood. It turned out that pedaling was just the ticket, however. After ten minutes or so Jonathan peeled off his jacket and pushed up the sleeves on his sweater and began to feel bad for the Professor huddled there shivering at the tiller.