Unknown: Heartsease

PETER DICKINSON

An Atlantic Monthly Press BookbostonLittle, Brown and Company toronto

PREFACE

THIS is a story about an England where everyone thinks machines are wicked. The time is now, or soon; but you have to imagine that five years before the story starts people suddenly turned against tractors and buses and central heating and nuclear reactors and electric razors. Anybody who tried to use a machine was called a witch, and stoned or burned or drowned.

If you want to know why this happened, and how it ended, you will have to read The Weather monger. But, so as not to puzzle people who haven’t read that book and don’t want to, I’ve left out some of the things in it which don’t matter in this book (such as the weather-making and the Necromancer).

The countryside is the West Cotswolds, between Gloucester and Bristol. The only change I have made is to put a smaller village where Painswick really is, with about seven hundred people living there, including Margaret and Lucy and Jonathan. Otherwise everything is just as you would find it if you went there: the hills have the same shape; the rivers and roads wind as I've described them; and the Severn tide can rise, or fall, thirty feet in two hours.

P.D.

Painswick, Gloucester

I

It was the last of the soft days of autumn. As dusk fell, you could feel the frosts coming, a smell of steel in the air.

If it hadn’t been so nearly dark Margaret would have gone the long way round; but she was tired and Scrub was even tireder, his head drooping, his mane clotted with sweat, his hooves not making their proper clip-clop, but muddling the sound with a scrapy noise because he wasn’t lifting them up properly. Even so she began to lead him the long way, without thinking about it. It was only the clank of a milking bucket from Fatchet’s byre reminded her that Uncle Peter would be finished milking soon; if she came back after he’d sat down in his rocking chair in the farm kitchen and begun to drink his evening’s cider from the big blue-and-white mug, he’d beat her with his belt until she was sore for days.

She turned back and led the pony down Tibbins

Lane, towards the stocks where the dead witch lay under the new heap of stones.

She started to sing a carol, “The Holly and the Ivy,” but found her voice wouldn’t rise above a mumble, and even that noise dried in her mouth before she was halfway down the lane. She tried again and managed a whole verse at a bare whisper, and then the muscles in her throat turned the words into no sound at all. She would have run if she’d been alone, but Scrub was past anything except his dragging walk. Clip, scrape, clop went his hooves on the old tarmac, clip, scrape, clop. She could see the heap of stones now, lying against the Rectory wall as though they’d just been tipped from a cart — not brought in baskets and barrows by a hundred villagers for throwing.

All at once she thought of Jonathan; just like him to be helping Aunt Anne with the baking that morning, so that he hadn’t been made to go and watch the stoning. He’d laugh at her, his sharp snorting laugh, if she told him she’d ridden so far to get away from this heap of stones that now she had to come back right past it. Jonathan always thought things out before he did them. Come on, Margaret, it’s only a heap of stones and what’s left of a foreign witch. Come on.

As she passed the neat pile the stones groaned.

Margaret dropped the reins and ran. Forty yards on, where the walls narrowed into an alleyway between two cottages, she waited, panting, for Scrub. He clopped down in the near dark and nuzzled against her shoulder, but nothing else moved in the dusk behind him.

Uncle Peter was still whistling shrilly at his milking

stool when she led the pony past the byre towards the little paddock which he shared with poor neglected Caesar. Jonathan was waiting for her, leaning against the pillar of the log-store, his little pointed face just like a gnome’s under his shaggy black hair.

“What’s wrong, Marge?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“Is it to do with the witch? You didn’t watch, did you?”

“No, of course not.”

“But it is, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Jo, it was ... I had to come back down Tib-bins Lane because I was so late, and when I passed him he groaned. I thought witches died, just like anybody else.”

Jonathan tilted his head over the other way, still watching her with his bright, strange eyes — like a bird deciding whether to come for the crumbs you are holding in the palm of your hand.

“You’re not making this up, are you, Marge?”

“No, of course not!”

“All right. Now listen. I’ll take Scrub out and put his harness away. You —”

“But why?”

“Listen! You go and offer to carry one of Father’s buckets in — he won’t let you, but it’ll tell him you’re home. Go and say hello to Mother, then go upstairs noisily and quietly into my room. Climb out along the shed roof and jump down into the old hay. I’ll meet you there.”

“But why, Jo?”

“Because he’s still alive, of course. We’ve got to get him out. Tim’ll help us, but we’ll need you too.”

“Jo, you’ll

“Yes, I’ll take care of your precious Scrub. Go slowly, Marge. Talk slowly. Try and sound just tired, and nothing else.”

She gave him the reins, started to walk towards the byre door, turned back to shout to him to see that there was enough water in the trough, realized that it would be dangerous to shout (dangerous now, in a house which was safe this morning) and walked on.

Uncle Peter was milking Florence, so he must be almost finished. There were two full buckets by the door, so he’d be middling pleased — last week he hadn’t managed to fill even two most days.

“Can I carry one of these in for you, Uncle Peter?”

He grunted but didn’t look up. “You leave ’em be,” he said. “Too heavy for a slip like you, Marge. Where you been all day, then?”

“Riding.”

“Long ride. Didn’t you fancy what we did to that foreigner this morning?”

Margaret said nothing.

“Ach, don’t you be feared to tell me. You’re a good lass, Marge, and I wouldn’t have you hardhearted, but you must understand that it’s necessary. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, the Book says. Look now, I took nigh on half a bucket out of Maisie, who was dry as an old carrot till this very day, when she should by all rights have been flowing with milk like the land of Canaan — what was that but witchcraft?”

“I suppose you’re right, Uncle Peter.”

“Course I am, girl. You go in now. You’ll have forgot all about it by tomorrow/’

Aunt Anne was in the kitchen, which had been the living room before the Changes came. She was rocking her chair an inch to and fro in front of the bread-oven, staring at nothing, her face drawn down into deep lines as though she wanted to cry but couldn’t. Margaret said hello but she didn’t answer, so it seemed best to go thumpingly up the stairs, tiptoe into Jonathan’s room, wriggle out through his window and crawl down the edge of the shed where the tiles were less likely to break.

The hay was last year’s, gray with mustiness, but thick enough to break a clumsy jump. She picked herself up and moved into the shadow of a stack of bean poles which Uncle Peter had leaned against the shed wall. It really was night now, with a half-moon coming and going behind slow-moving clouds, and the air chill for waiting in; but before she began to feel cold inside herself she heard a low bubbling sound which meant that Tim was coming up the path from his hut in the orchard. The moon edged out as he reached the shed, and she saw that he was carrying a sheep hurdle under one arm and a full sack on his other shoulder. Jonathan was with him.