The Changes Trilogy (19 page)

She herself remembered about central heating as she rushed the last piece of undressing, wriggled into her flannel nightdress and jumped into bed. Once the house had been warm enough for her to open her presents on Christmas morning, wearing only her pajamas. Why …

She sat bolt upright in bed, knowing that if she asked that sort of question aloud Uncle Peter and Mr. Gordon and the others would be stoning
her
for a witch. She shivered, but not with cold this time, and blew out her candle. At once the horrible business of the morning floated up through her mind—the jostling onlookers, and the cheering, and the straining shoulders of the men as they poised their stones for throwing. She tried to shut it out, twice two is four and four is eight and eight is sixteen and sixteen is thirty-two and thirty-two is sixty-four and sixty-four is, is a hundred and twenty-eight and … but each time she got stuck the pictures came flooding back. She heard Mr. Gordon cackle exultantly from the door as he left, and Uncle Peter's booming good-nights. Still she lay, afraid to shut her eyes, staring through the diamond-paned window to where Orion was just lifting over the crest of Cranham woods.

Something scratched at the door.

“Who is it?” she croaked.

“Me,” whispered Jonathan through the slight creak of the opening door. “I must oil that. Come and listen. Quietly.”

She put on her cloak and tiptoed onto the landing. Flickering light came up the stairs as the fire spurted. Jonathan caught her by her elbow in the darkness.

“Stop there,” he whispered. “The floor squeaks further on. You can hear from here.”

Aunt Anne and Uncle Peter were still in the kitchen, arguing. Uncle Peter's voice was nimbly with cider and not always clear, but Aunt Anne's had a hysterical edge which carried every syllable up to the listeners.

“I tell you I can't stand it any longer,” she was saying. “Everything that's happened is wicked, wicked! What harm had that poor man done us this morning, harm that you can prove, prove like you know that if you drop a stone it will fall? And forcing the children up there to see him die. I kept Jo back, and I'd do so again, but Marge is like a walking ghost. Oh, Pete, you must see, it can't be right to do that to children!”

“Rumble mumble Maisie nigh filled a bucket tonight when she was dry mumble rumble answer me that woman!”

“Oh, for God's sake, you know as well as I do that you've only just moved the cows down to the meadow pasture. They
always
make more milk the first couple of days there.”

“Rumble bang shout off you go before I take my cudgel to you!”

A gulping noise. Aunt Anne was really crying now.

“Wouldn't she help?” whispered Margaret.

“She's too near breaking as it is,” whispered Jonathan. “But Lucy will be useful.”

“Lucy! But she's …”

“You've never even thought about her, Marge. Just look what she's managed for Tim. And anyway, Tim's deep in it, so she'll
have
to help. Thank you for asking about the stocks. Bed now.”

This time Margaret found she could shut her eyes and there was a different picture in her mind: she'd reined Scrub up for a breather on the very top of the Beacon and looked northwest toward Wales. The limestone hill plunged at her feet toward the Vale; there lay the diminishing copses and farms, and beyond them the gray smudge which was the dead city of Gloucester, and beyond that, green so distant that it was almost the color of smoke—but through those far fields snaked the gleaming windings of the Severn toward, in the distant west (often you couldn't be sure whether what you were seeing was cloud or land or water, but today you could) the Bristol Channel. The sea.

Chapter 2

DOG PACK

The frosts came, and shriveled the last runner beans. Even at midday the air had a tang to it which meant that soon there would be real winter. Any wind made whirlpools of fallen leaves in odd corners.

It was three days before the witch spoke. To either of the children, that is—maybe he talked to Tim, but if so Tim couldn't tell them. And it was dangerous to go down much to the old tractor barn where the wicked machines stood.

“If you've got to go,” said Jonathan, “look as if you're making for Tim's shed. Carry something he might need-food or an old rag. Then sneak round the back of the barn. And once you're past Tim's shed walk on a fresh bit of grass each time, or you'll make a path and someone will spot it. You do realize we're stuck with a dangerous job, Marge?”

“Stuck?”

“Well, wouldn't you rather you'd never heard him? Rather someone else had? Then we could have rubbed along as we were.”

Margaret didn't know what she'd rather, so she hadn't said anything. Next time she went to the barn she carried a knuckle of mutton with a bit of meat still on it, and actually walked into Tim's shed as if she was going to leave it for him. She looked around at the stinking heaps of straw, with the late-autumn flies hazing about in the dimness, and wondered how she'd never thought about the way Tim lived, any more than she thought about the cows who came squelching through the miry gates to milking. She'd thought far more about Scrub than Tim.

Ashamed, she looked around the dank lean-to to find something she could do now, at once, to make the zany more comfortable. There was nothing, but in her search she saw a triangular hole in the corrugated iron which formed the back of the shed. And on the other side of the hole was the wheel of a wicked machine, a … a … a
tractor
. Of course, this shed was propped against the back of the barn, and if the hole were larger she could slip through to where the witch lay, and there'd be no danger of leaving a track through the rank grasses below the barn.

She tugged at the ragged edge of metal, and the whole sheet gave and fell out on top of her. It left a hole just like a door. Inside were the derelict machines and the little brick hut in the corner. And inside that were the rusting engine, Tim, and the witch. He looked a little better, but not enough; it was difficult to tell because of the deceiving yellow light from the lantern and because his face was still livid and puffy with bruising. Tim squatted in his corner of the shed, watching her as suspiciously as a bitch watches you when you come to inspect her puppies. Margaret took the bone to him, then knelt beside the witch. She'd brought a corner of fresh bread spread with cream cheese; she broke bits off and popped them into the smashed mouth whenever it opened—it was like feeding a nestling sparrow, except that nestlings are greedy. It took him a long time to chew each piece, and longer still to swallow.

“Looks to me as if he could do with a wash,” said a soft voice.

Chill with terror Margaret swung around. Lucy was standing in the doorway, her hands on her hips, her face more foreign than ever—elfish, almost—in the faint light of the lantern. She wasn't looking at Margaret, but down at the wounded witch.

“Yeah,” he said with a rasping sigh, “water would be good.”

“But how are we going to get it here without anyone …” She stopped. In the panicky silence she could hear Tim gnawing a morsel of mutton out from a cranny of bone. She stood up, trying to seem (and feel) like a mistress talking to a servant.

“Lucy,” she said hotly, “if you tell anyone …”

But Lucy was smiling, and Margaret could think of no threats that would mean anything.

“It's I could be menacing you, Miss Margaret, and not t'other way about. But I'll help you for Tim's sake. I mind him sitting by my bed when I had the measles, afore they took him away, just bubbling, but he made me feel better nor any of the medicines they gave me. He'd have been a doctor, Tim would, supposing he'd been in his right mind.”

“Doctor?”

“Leech, then, but a proper un. I'll be fetching hot water. Fruit's what he needs, miss, not that pappy bread.”

“What shall I do? Can I help?”

Lucy looked at her again—not her secret, half-mocking glance, but something new, considering, only a little suspicious.

“Aye,” she said at last, “mebbe you could. We'll make as if we're mucking out Tim's shed, which I should a done weeks back. The Master's in Low Pasture, and your aunt's too fazed to notice what we do. So I'll go and set the big kettle on the stove, and you could mebbe fork all that straw out of Tim's shed and set light to it. Mind you don't burn his treasures—you'll find 'em under a bit of planking in the back corner.”

She slipped out, silent as a stoat. Margaret had to run and scramble over the tow-bars in the dark barn to call after her in a straining whisper, “I'll come and help you with the kettle, Lucy.”

Lucy turned, black in the bright rectangular gap where the iron sheet had been, nodded in silence and flitted away.

There was a hayfork by the midden above the orchard. Margaret scrattled the straw in the shed together—it was cleaner than she'd thought, just musty with damp from the bare earth beneath; and really there were no more flies under the low roof than there were in any other shed on the farm. The plank in the corner she left where it was, after inquisitively lifting it to see what Tim's “treasures” were: a broken orange Dinky-toy earth-shifter; a plastic water pistol; the shiny top of a soda siphon; a child's watch which could never tell the time because the knob at the side only made the big and little hands move around the dial together. As she put the plank back Margaret was astonished that she should know what they all were—four days ago they would have been meaningless, except that she'd have known they were wicked.

She picked the driest straw she could see from her heap, twisted it together and took it back into the hut where the witch lay. Tim began to croak with alarm when she opened the lantern to poke it into the flame, so she carried the lantern out into the shed, lit her wisp of straw there and thrust it into the heap. After she'd put the lantern back she stood for several minutes leaning on her fork and watching the yellow stems shrivel into black threads which wriggled as the fire ate into the innards of the pile. Her cheeks were sharp with heat when she began to walk up through the orchard toward the house.

Lucy was in the kitchen, struggling to carry the steaming kettle single-handed. Aunt Anne sat on one side of the stove in an upright chair and Mr. Gordon sat in the rocking chair between the stove and the fire, rocking and clucking. Neither of them looked as though they would pay any more attention to the comings and goings of children than they did to the tortoiseshell butterfly which pattered against the windowpane.

“Can I help you with that, Lucy?” said Margaret.

“If you please, Miss Margaret,” said Lucy. “I thought I'd best clean out Tim's shed afore winter sets in.”

Margaret picked up a cloth and gripped one handle of the kettle with it. But it wasn't a kettle, she thought. A kettle was a small shiny thing with a cord going in at the back. You didn't put it on the stove, but it got hot from inside because the cord was … was electric. This big pan they were edging out through the door, very carefully so that the hot water wouldn't slop over, was a … a … preserving pan. She looked excitedly at Lucy's down-bent face.

“I say, Lucy, I've just remembered …”

“Careful, Miss Margaret, or you'll be spilling it all, and then we'll have our work wasted.”

The interruption was soft and easy, but the glance from under the little lace cap was as fierce as a branding iron. Margaret suddenly saw what a comfortable time she'd had of it since the Changes—Scrub to break and ride and care for, a share of housework, only the occasional belting from Uncle Peter to be afraid of. Wary, of course, but never till now Lucy's cowering softness, like the stillness of a mouse when a hawk crosses the sky above it. Not even Jonathan's dangerous adventuring.

Those times were over, since they'd rescued the witch. She would have to cower and adventure with the others. This was what Jonathan had meant about being stuck.

They could never have cleaned the witch without Tim. At first, while Lucy dabbed at the spoiled face, bristly with beard between the scabs, he squatted beside the bedding and watched with the soft glance of a clever spaniel. But as soon as they tried to lift their patient and undress him Tim pushed gently between them and ran his arm under the limp shoulders, lifting the body this way and that while the girls eased the torn and blood-clotted rags off.

“We'd best be burning most of this too,” said Lucy. “D'you think you could find some old clothes of the Master's, Miss Margaret—nothing that he'll miss, mind?”

“I'll try,” said Margaret. “Jo was right—he is wearing some kind of armor.”

“Yeah,” said the witch faintly. “Bulletproof, but not rock-proof. I figure I got two or three busted ribs, and a busted arm, and I don't seem to move my legs like I used to. You some sort of resistance movement, huh?”

“Resistance?” said Margaret.

“I guessed …” said the witch, and paused. “Oh, forget it, you're only kids, anyway. Who knows I'm here?”

“Me and Jonathan and Lucy and Tim,” said Margaret. “I heard you groaning under the stones and I told Jonathan and we got Tim to help us bring you down here. Uncle Peter would kill you if he knew, though.”

“Us too, mebbe,” said Lucy, so softly that Margaret only just caught the words. Then she added in a brisker voice, “Which is your bad arm, mister?”

“Left. Roll me over on my right side and you can unzip my armor.”

They had to show Tim what they wanted, and he turned the witch over as gently as a shepherd handling a lamb. The man's legs flopped uncontrolledly, not seeming to move properly with him, like a puppet's. Then the zip puzzled them for a few seconds, but they both remembered in the same instant and reached out to pull the tag down.

“You'd best be looking for them clothes, Miss Margaret,” chided Lucy. “If we let him chill off, he'll catch his death, surely.”