The Picts & the Martyrs. Arthur Ransome

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 gone. But I saw him all right. Great Spotted. Black and white with a red patch.” Dick slipped his watch back into the breast pocket of his shirt and pulled out his notebook.

      “But the eggs,” said Dorothea.

      He looked at his watch again. “I can’t remember where the minute hand was when we started. I’m awfully sorry.”

      She darted back into the hut and took the eggs out with a spoon. “I expect they’re ready now,” she said.

      The eggs when opened were as hard as bullets.

      “Perhaps even four minutes is too much,” said Dorothea.

      “They may have been in much more than that.”

      “They make an awful mess when they’re runny.”

      “These aren’t runny, anyway,” said Dick.

      “Hard-boiled,” said Dorothea.

      “Steel-boiled,” said Dick. “My fault, watching the woodpecker.”

      They washed the eggs and bread and butter down with the cocoa, but were glad to get to the last course (the Beckfoot apple pie. It had been baked in a deep oval dish, with an egg-cup upside down in the middle of it to keep the pastry from sagging down. Yesterday, in the Beckfoot dining-room, the Great Aunt had opened it carefully with a knife, and served small slices from it for Nancy, Peggy and herself. Dick and Dorothea, with the pie-dish between them, set to work at opposite sides of the neat three-cornered hole she had left. They could have finished it, but kept a little for dinner in the middle of the day.

      “It’s just the thing after eggs and cocoa,” said Dorothea. “Cool and wet and not sticky at all.”

      They washed up by the beck, with a kettleful of hot water that made things much easier. They rolled up their rugs, unslung the hammocks and hung them against the wall. They decided to put no more wood on the fire and to light it again in the evening. Every now and then they listened for footsteps coming up through the wood.

      “I wonder why they don’t come,” said Dick.

      “Perhaps they have breakfast later with the Great Aunt here.”

      “It’ll be too late to do anything about Timothy now.”

      Dick sawed and broke up a lot more of the firewood they had cleared out of the hut. Dorothea made a neat pile of them at the side of the fireplace. There was no sign of either of the martyrs from Beckfoot.

      “It’s a good thing we didn’t wait for the milk,” said Dick.

      “Let’s go down and wait for them at the bottom of the wood,” said Dorothea.

      They had left the coppice and were going cautiously down through the larches when they heard a rattle. A man got heavily off his bicycle СКАЧАТЬ