Unknown - Heartsease

“Do you think he’d actually hit a dog if he had to?” said Margaret.

“I dunno,” whispered Lucy, “but he’d surely fright ’em.”

She gazed after the hulking back with just the same smile as a mother’s who watches her pudgy toddler playing some private game. Margaret had never liked her so much.

The ponies had become fretful in their strange dark stall, all rustling with rats, but it seemed safe enough to lead them out and tether them on the quay. On the first floor of the warehouse Margaret found a sack which seemed not to have gone musty, so she tilted a double helping of corn into the fold of her skirt, carried it down and spread it in two piles on the snow. The ponies sniffed it, then gobbled greedily at it.

By the time the girls had carried their third load of tins aboard, Jonathan and Tim were back, both too laden with looted goods to fight off a single hungry terrier. Luckily they hadn’t even met that. They had charts and tide tables, books for Otto, a tin opener and knives and forks. Jonathan dumped his load on the deck and opened a blue metal case.

“Look, Marge,” he said. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

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 spanners 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 towards dusk when the ponies plodded down the last slope towards 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 towards 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 (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 round 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 round 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 atop 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 round the kitchen the moment she was in.