Unknown - Heartsease

“Yes, but there’s a locked gate across it, so it was a good thing we didn’t try it. It would be faster than going through Hempsted, if I can break the gate open. I didn’t see your dogs, but I heard them; if they smell Lucy and the others it’s going to be much more dangerous visiting the dock.”

“But couldn’t we tow them further along the canal, down to the bit beyond Hempsted? No one lives there or goes there.”

“I can’t start the engines, supposing they’ll go, until Otto’s well enough to show me how, and once they’re started they’ll bring people swarming round. When we do go, we’ll have to get down the canal and out to sea all in one rush.”

“If you can break that gate, Scrub could tow them for a few miles: that’d be enough.”

“You and your Scrub! Could he really?”

“Oh, yes, I think so. You’re so busy thinking about machines that you never remember what animals can do.”

“Well, you think about them enough for both of us.” “Not so loud, Jo!”

“It’s all right — it’d look funny if we spent all our time whispering to each other. Next time we can both get away I’ll climb out the night before and hide that old horsecollar in the empty house at the top of Edge Lane. We mustn’t be seen taking it.”

But that wasn’t for a full week. Aunt Anne’s mind-sickness left her, but a strange fever followed it which made all her joints ache whenever she moved, so she lay drear-faced in bed or else tried to get up and do her duty as a farmer’s wife with such obvious pain that

Margaret couldn’t possibly leave her to cope. Twice Uncle Peter had to carry her up to her bed. Then he asked around the village for somebody to take Lucy’s place and found a cousin of Mr. Gordon’s who’d been living over in Slad Valley. Her name was Rosie, and she was a bustling, ginger-haired, sharp-voiced woman of thirty, chubby as a pig and with sharp piggy eyes which watched you all the time. Margaret and Jonathan agreed it was like having an enemy spy actually in the house, but at least her presence gave them the chance to get away for a whole day. Jonathan had been to the boat again, alone, in the meanwhile, but they both knew that the food on Heartsease must be getting low now.

They picked up the hidden horsecollar and rode down to the canal, Caesar still absurdly astonished at the amount of exercise he was suddenly expected to take after years of slouching about unwanted in the paddock. It had snowed several times since their midnight journey, so the world was starched white except for the scribbled black lines of walls and hedges and the larger blobs where the copses stood; the colors of the famished hedgerow birds showed as sharp as they do in a painting. It had frozen most nights, too, and the surface of the snow was as crisp as cake icing but gave with a cracking noise when the hooves broke through to the softer stuff beneath. (This wasn’t the cloying snow which would stick and cake inside the horseshoes, so there was no need to lard the ponies’ feet.) The lane was hardly used this weather, but an old man waved at them from where he was chopping up the doors and staircase of an empty and isolated cottage to carry home for firewood.

“Seasonable weather we’ll have for Christmas, then,” he called.

“Yes,” they shouted together.

“I’d forgotten about Christmas,” muttered Margaret as they took the next slope. “It’s going to make things much harder.”

“Easier, I’d say,” said Jonathan cheerfully. “With all those folk coming and going, no one will notice whether we’re there or not.”

“They’ll notice if there’s nothing to eat, so unless your mother gets better I’ll have to be there.”

“Won’t Rosie . . .”

“If I leave her to do all the work she’ll start asking people where on earth I can have got to — innocent, but meaning. You know.”

“Um. Yes. We can’t risk that, seeing whose cousin she is, too. And another thing, when we’ve shifted Heartsease we’d better go and call on Cousin Mary. Messages get sent at Christmas, and if we keep using her as an excuse and never go there, someone might hear tell of it.”

“Besides,” said Margaret, “she seemed terribly lonely when I did see her.”

In front of the inn at Edge stood a group of men with short boar-spears in their hands, and rangy dogs rubbing against their legs. They waved, like the old man down the lane, but their minds were busy with the coming hunt and the ponies padded by as unnoticed as a small cloud. The runner-lines of a few sledges showed on the big road, but when they dipped into the lane the snow was untrodden — the Vale had little cause to visit the hills, nor the hills the Vale. As they twisted between the tall, ragged hedges Margaret glimpsed vistas of the flat reaches below, dim with snow, all white patches like a barely started watercolor. It looked very different from her earlier visits.

But when they were really down off the hills it felt just the same. As soon as the lane leveled out they came across a bent old woman gathering sticks out of the hedgerow. She glanced piercingly at them as they passed, but gave them no greeting. There was a black cat sitting on her shoulder. She looked like a proper witch.

She was the only soul they saw for the rest of the journey (not many, even of the queer Vale folk, cared to live so close to the city). When they crossed the swing bridge Jonathan reined Caesar to a willing halt and gazed up and down the mottled surface where the snow had fallen and frozen on the listless water. It looked a wicked surface, cold enough to kill and too weak to bear.

“I’m a ninny,” he said. “I should have known it would be like this. We can’t tow her out till it thaws — for weeks, months, even.”

“Wasn’t it frozen when you came down on Tuesday?”

“There were bits of ice on it, but it was mostly water. I think the river must have risen high enough to flood over the top gates — that would have broken up the first lot of ice.”

“What shall we do, then?”

“Go and see them, tell them to look out for the dogs, see how Otto is, give them the food. Then go and visit Cousin Mary.”

The path by the canal was flat and easy, but long before they came to the dock area it was barred by a tall fence of corrugated iron. Jonathan led the way up the embankment, through a gap in a hedge and into the tangled garden of one of the deserted houses between Hempsted and Gloucester. Beyond the level crossing he pushed at a gate on the right of the road, picked his way between neat stacks of concrete drainage pipes and back to the canal. They were just below the docks.

“I found this way last time,” he said. “There she is.”

He pointed along the widening basin. The tug lay in its private ice floe right in the center of the dock, with a hawser dipping under the ice at prow and stern and a dinghy nestling against her quarter.

“It’ll be easier from the other quay,” said Jonathan. “We’ll find a cord and throw it out so that they can pull the food sack across the ice — that hawser’s shorter. Over this bridge is best.”

“I can’t see anyone on her,” said Margaret.

“Too cold. They’ll be keeping snug down below.” They moved in complete silence up the quayside and round an arm of frozen water which stretched south from the main dock until they reached the place where the hawser was tied — a chilly and narrow stretch of quay under a bleak cliff of warehouse. Margaret peered nervously into the cavernous blackness between its open doors, and then squinted upwards to where, eighty feet above her, the hoisting hook still dangled from the black girder that jutted out above the topmost door.

“Ahoy!” called Jonathan.

He was answered by a clamor of baying from the other side of the dock. There was a swirl of movement along the far quay, a shapeless brown and orange and black and dun weltering which spilled over the edge and became the dog pack hurling across the ice towards them.