The Picts & the Martyrs. Arthur Ransome
Читать онлайн книгу.
read steadily on about the theory of sailing till he heard Dorothea again. “Much better go to bed. There’s all tomorrow.”
He looked round and saw Dorothea looking down over the edge of her hammock.
“I say. You got in jolly quietly.”
“It was easier than I thought. Dick, I do believe it’s going to be all right.”
“Why shouldn’t it be?” said Dick.
Five minutes later he too had worked himself into his hammock, had put his torch and his spectacles in a safe place on the top of the beam above his head, had folded his rugs over himself and was trying to find a soft place in his knapsack.
“It’s rather like being a caterpillar,” Dorothea heard him say.
“What?”
“Lying in a hammock. Really it would be better to be a caterpillar, because they’ve got joints all the way along.”
Dorothea, lying in her hammock, very tired and already half asleep, was feeling much better about things. They had had their first meal. They had gone to bed. The Great Aunt had not found out about them and come raging up to bring them back to Beckfoot. No other Pict had come to turn them from his home. They had only to go on like that and all would be well. It was Dick and not Dorothea who thought of a new danger ahead.
He had been lying there, thinking of Scarab and of all they had planned to do. Suddenly he started up.
“Dot. We’ve forgotten something. Timothy’s coming tomorrow to take us to the mine. As soon as he comes to Beckfoot he’ll ask where we are.”
“Nancy’s sure to have thought of that,” said Dorothea.
“Listen. Listen,” said Dick a moment later. “There’s that tawny owl again.”
“I heard it.” Dorothea’s voice was muffled by the rug she had pulled over her head. The owl, heard from the hut in the wood, was nothing like so friendly and holiday a sound as it had been when heard from the spare room at Beckfoot. And the thought of Timothy, though she had told Dick that Nancy would have remembered about him, kept her lying awake long after Dick had gone rather uncomfortably to sleep. If Timothy was going to walk into Beckfoot and blurt out the whole secret first thing in the morning, it would have been better, far better, if they had never turned into Picts.
CHAPTER VII
SECONDHAND NEWS
DOROTHEA WAS waked by the squawk of a cock pheasant in the wood. There was a feeling of stiffness in her back. Her bed seemed to have sagged in the middle. She opened her eyes and saw that the high ceiling of the spare room had dropped and turned into a dark oak beam. And the skull and crossbones from the head of her bed had gone. And what had happened to the wallpaper? No. There was the skull and crossbones, fastened against a stone wall. She remembered where she was and looked out past her feet through a great hole in the wall to green leaves and the trunks of trees. That tinkling noise was water dripping down into one of the little pools of the beck.
She remembered everything now. The Great Aunt of whom everybody was so much afraid was sleeping in that spare-room bed where she herself had slept the night before. Life at Beckfoot was going on without herself or Dick. It was as if they had slipped through a hole in the floor. They had fallen out of that life into another, in which, for the first time, she, Dorothea, had a house of her own. Nobody was going to say, “Buck up, Dot. Breakfast’s nearly ready.” If there was going to be any breakfast, she ought to be getting it now. She looked across at the other hammock. Dick was still asleep. Getting down was not going to be too easy. She pulled loose the edges of the rugs that she had tucked in under herself, swung her legs over the side, felt for the chair and kicked it over, held firmly to the hammock, kicked again, let herself slide and found herself standing on the earthen floor.
She put on her sandshoes, took soap, toothbrush, towel and kettle, opened the door and went out into the morning sunshine. There was that pheasant again. And now a new noise, the tap, tap of a hammer on a tree-trunk. For a moment Dorothea stood still, listening, half thinking that there might be someone working in the wood. Then she remembered that she had heard that noise before, last summer, in the woods below High Topps, and Dick had told her what it was. A woodpecker. No. There was nobody about. She and Dick were the only people in the world. And Dick was asleep. She had the world to herself.
She filled the kettle at the pool in the beck, washed her face and hands and cleaned her teeth. She thought of a new name for a story. “Ten Thousand Years Ago … a Romance of the Past,” by Dorothea Callum. No. No. With breakfast to get, this was no time to think of stories. She gave her face a last towelling, took the plates and mugs and spoons from under the waterfall and set off back to the hut to light the fire. As she came out into the clearing she saw a wisp of blue smoke above the huge old chimney. The smoke thickened and climbed straight up in the still air. And there was Dick, in his pyjamas, coming out to look for her.
“Hullo, Dot. Why didn’t you wake me?”
“I’ve only been to wash and fill the kettle. I say, you’d better wash, too, and get dressed. What have you been doing to your face?”
“I started the fire with some of the sticks that hadn’t burnt away last night. Some of them were almost charcoal. And then I went and rubbed my eyes by mistake.”
“Here’s the soap and towel. Get your toothbrush. Take your clothes with you.”
“All right. I only used one match for the fire. Dry bark makes splendid stuff to start it.”
“Good. Hurry up and get dressed and I’ll have breakfast ready by the time you come back.”
Dorothea put the kettle on, dressed in two minutes and was laying plates and mugs on the sugar case that was the Picts’ table before she remembered that they had used the last of the milk the night before. That meant no cornflakes and milk as usual. And no tea. “Oh bother,” thought Dorothea.
“I ought to have kept some from yesterday and kept it in a cool place.” Housekeeping was not as simple as people thought who had other people to do it.
Dick came back dressed, looking a different colour with the charcoal washed from his face and hands.
“No milk,” said Dorothea. “Not till one of them comes. I expect they’ll bring it.”
“Let’s be all ready before they come,” said Dick. “They may want us to do something about stopping Timothy. If they go out in the boat and we go along the road … ”
“Oh, I say,” said Dorothea. “I’d forgotten Timothy. We won’t wait for milk. We’ll be all right with cocoa. It says on the tin it’s cocoa, sugar and milk all in one. It only needs hot water. And we can have eggs and bread and butter and there’s a pot of marmalade.”
“There’s all that apple pie,” said Dick. “We can eat it out of the dish and it won’t be so sticky to wash up.”
The woodpecker spoilt the eggs for them. Dorothea had put them in the saucepan of boiling water and pushed it in at the side of the fire. She was hard at work stirring the cocoa first in one mug and then in the other and Dick was timing the egg-boiling with his watch, when he heard that tap, tap, close outside the hut. “A minute and a half gone,” he said. “I’m sure that’s a woodpecker … Two minutes … ” He moved quietly, watch in hand, to the doorway. The tapping seemed to come from a tree behind the hut … Dorothea added more water and went on stirring, wondering if breakfast was over at Beckfoot and how soon one or other or perhaps both the martyrs would escape and come racing up through the wood. “It must be four minutes now,” she thought, and was not at all sure whether Susan boiled eggs for four minutes or for three. “Dick,” she called. There was no answer. She went out and could not see him. “Dick!”
“He’s