The Picts & the Martyrs. Arthur Ransome

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      “When I slipped out they were sitting in the drawing-room,” said Cook. “Good thing I dusted that piano. Miss Turner run her finger over it first thing.”

      They went down with her as far as the road. Somehow, old Cook, stumbling down that rocky path and grumbling at the branches that met across it, made Dorothea feel that they were not yet altogether out of touch with Beckfoot.

      By the gap into the road they stopped, and waited there while Cook hurried away in the dusk.

      “Listen,” said Dick suddenly.

      In the quiet evening they could hear the faint tinkling of the Beckfoot piano.

      “Let’s go a bit nearer,” said Dorothea. “If they’re all in there it’s quite safe.”

      They tiptoed along the road and waited opposite the house. The noise of the piano came clearly through the trees.

      “That’s the third time she’s got stuck,” whispered Dorothea. “It must be awful for the one who isn’t playing, just sitting there and watching the Great Aunt’s face.”

      “There she goes again,” said Dick.

      “It isn’t Nancy’s sort of tune,” said Dorothea. “She’s quite all right with one finger doing that pirate song of Captain Flint’s.”

      “Let’s go home,” said Dick suddenly. “I want to have another go at the sailing book. Scarab’s going to be ready the day after to-morrow.”

      They tiptoed away round the bend in the road and began to climb once more up into the wood. Dorothea felt suddenly very much alone. Dick was there, of course, but, with his mind on the new boat, or on birds, or on cutting up wood in a scientific way, he did not seem to realize that they were going to sleep in a hut in the wood with nobody in it but themselves, a hut with holes in its roof and no glass in its window. Dorothea did not know which was worse, to think of it as a hut in which for perhaps twenty years no one had lived, or to think of it as a house from which in the middle of the night they might be turned out by the rightful owner coming home. It was not at all like sleeping in a tent in camp with other friendly tents close by.

      The first call of an owl sounded in the valley.

      “There’s that tawny owl again,” said Dick. “I heard him last night, but I’m not putting him down on my list till I’ve seen him.”

      Of course it was all right, thought Dorothea. The ghostly wood all round them was only full of natural history. And Dick knew all about that. All the same … “Alone in the Forest” by Dorothea Callum. She started violently as a couple of woodpigeons clattered out of the branches of a tree close to the path.

      “Roosting already,” said Dick.

      Back in the hut, Dick lit the hurricane lantern and took his sailing book from the shelf over the fireplace. Dorothea divided the rugs and laid them in the hammocks. There were three for each of them.

      “There aren’t any pillows,” she said.

      “Knapsacks,” said Dick. “With clothes in them.”

      Dorothea shut the door and put more wood on the fire. “We’d better be too hot than too cold the first night. And with no glass the window’s open anyway.” The sticks flamed up and shadows flickered over the walls except for the square gap where there should have been glass. Through it she could see the dim shapes of trees and a patch of sky on which were the first stars. Dick was already sitting on the three-legged stool, reading as much by firelight as by the light of the lantern.

      “Let’s put the light out and go to bed,” said Dorothea.

      “Just one chapter,” said Dick.

      He 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 СКАЧАТЬ