Unknown - Heartsease

“Get down and crawl!” yelled Otto from the ground. “It’s okay down here! Crawl to the boat!”

Margaret dropped. He was right. Under the rushing clouds there was a narrow seam of air which could still be breathed, if she chose her moment. In it she could see Jonathan already crawlings towards the lock, and Lucy crouching low and trying to drag Tim down. The zany bent at last, then dropped on all fours and immediately scampered with a rapid baboon-like run towards Otto. Otto spoke to him, but Margaret couldn’t hear what he said.

She never saw how Tim carried him to the boat, either, for suddenly an eddy of air pushed all the smoke aside so that she could see Scrub, mad with terror of burning, wallowing at the end of his rope. At once she was on her feet. For several seconds Scrub didn’t know her and she could do nothing but hold his bridle and dodge the flailing hooves. Then, as she crooned meaninglessly to him, like Tim talking to a sick beast, he found a tiny island of trust in his mind, steadied and stood still. Before the smoke overwhelmed them again she managed to back him to a point where she could loose him from the traces, her fingers moving so fast among the straps and buckles that she didn’t have to tell them what to do. As the horrible smoke swept over them she took hold of the bridle and forced Scrub’s head down towards the cobbles; bending double she scuttered towards the lock. He saw the patch of calm and smokeless air below him and skipped delicately down to the deck, where he stood snorting and shivering.

“Ship’s crew mustered!” cried Otto. “Horse and all! We’re away!”

The big engine boomed. The water churned in the lock and the quay slid backwards. Then they were out in the wide acre of the tidal basin, with the smoke streaming past a foot or two above their heads. Only the far gates now, and they’d escaped.

But the gates were shut. For the first time Margaret saw Otto look worried.

“Tide must have started to ebb and sucked ’em in,” he said. “They were open quarter of an hour back, weren’t they, Marge?”

“Couldn’t we pull them open?” called Jonathan from the wheelhouse. “If we got a hawser up there quickly.” “Worth a go,” said Otto.

“I’ll take it up,” said Margaret. “It’ll take longer if you do it, Jo. Lucy, make Tim look after Scrub, or he’ll think I’m leaving him.”

It was an awkward six-foot scramble, up a rusty projection which supported a screw-topped bar; the heavy hawser tugged at her belt. She had to lie flat on her face on the catwalk at the top of the gate to fasten the hawser to a stanchion below her — the rails on either side of the catwalk didn’t look strong enough. Panting, she backed off the top of the gate onto the quay, trying to work out how much the tide had fallen since the gates had closed — barely a couple of inches, she thought. She watched anxiously as the slack of the hawser rose dripping from the basin, became a shallow curve, became a stiff line. Jonathan put his signal lever over and the water under the stern erupted into boiling foam. The bows came up. The rope groaned. The gate moved an inch, three inches, and Margaret could see the creased lines at the gap where the water hunched and poured through. Then everything altered as the gate swung past the pressure line. Heartsease backed off with a jerk like a rearing pony and the gate swung fully open with the basin water tearing through. The hawser snapped like wool, but with a deep twang, as the tug reached the end of its tether; but Margaret had already grasped the spare length of hawser which she’d left beyond the place she’d tied it (Jonathan’s suggestion, of course) and before the gate could swing shut she’d taken three turns round a bollard on the shore.

The fierce haul of the engine dragged the tug out towards the middle of the basin before Jonathan could halt it and make for the gap again. He headed slowly in, anxious not to spoil his victory at the last minute by charging into the wall or the other gate. The smoke was thinner here, but still rushing past in choking and tear-producing swirls. As Margaret crouched under it, waiting, she heard a hoarse cry. She hopped round, still crouching, and saw a big man galloping towards her through the murk with an ax swung up over his shoulder. He was thirty yards off, but he’d seen her — it was her he was coming for. She scrambled through the two sets of railings on top of the gate, hung for an instant to a stanchion as she leaned out and tensed herself, then leaped for the nearing bows of Heartsease. The world reeled and hurtled, and the bulwarks slammed into her knees and she was turning head over heels on the rough iron of the deck. Her ear must have hit something, for it was singing as she started to heave herself up. The ax clanged onto the iron two feet in front of her face, bounced and rocketed overboard. The man was trying to follow it, but Heartsease was through the gap before he could disentangle himself from the double railings. He stood and shook his fist, gigantic amid the smoke. Margaret, her head still ringing, walked aft.

“I saw him coming before you did,” said Jonathan through the broken window. “Tell you later — Otto says I must shave this breakwater close as I can.”

They were racing along beside a strange structure of huge beams, all green with seaweed, which stretched out into the estuary. There was another on the far side of the harbor entrance, curving away upriver, and between the two breakwaters the river surface was level and easy; but out beyond them Margaret could see the full Severn tide foaming seawards. She thought Jonathan had misjudged his course, that they were going to ram one of the enormous beams right on the corner, but it whisked by barely a yard from the bulwarks. She wanted to lean out and touch it — the last morsel of England, maybe, that she would ever feel — but it was too far for safety.

Then the whole boat heeled sideways for an instant as the racing waters gripped it, before Jonathan turned the bow downstream and they were moving towards Ireland with the combined speed of a six-knot tide and a ten-knot engine. Margaret looked aft to where the stream-

ing pother of smoke was marked at the actual places where the wood was burning by the orange glow of house-high flames. Just as she was thinking how fast they were moving away from that hideous arena she saw Scrub skitter sideways as the boat lurched in the tide-race. He almost went overboard. She ran back to him, staggering along the gangway, took his bridle and tried to gentle and calm him while he found his sea legs. Soon he was standing much more steadily, his legs splayed out and braced, so she tied his reins to a shackle just aft of the engine room roof and poured out a little hill of corn for him to nose at.

That made her realize how hungry she was. She walked forward to where Otto lay on the raised bit of deck in front of the wheelhouse; he had his chart spread out beside him, and Tim had propped him on a rolled tarpaulin so that he could watch the far shore and try to pick out the landmarks which would steer them down the twisting and treacherous channel.

“When’s dinner?” she said.

“Just about as soon as you’ve got it ready, Marge. You’re cook, because Lucy can’t leave the engine and Jo and I must get this hulk ten miles downriver before the tide goes out. This is some cranky bit of water, and I don’t like the feel of the wind, neither.”

Margaret looked at the sky. Now that they were out from under the pother of smoke she could see that it had indeed changed. All morning it had seemed like a neutral gray roof over the bleak flats — it had been the wind that hurt, but the sky had seemed harmless. Now, to the northeast, it had darkened like a bruise. The wind must