“You’ve been putting things to right,” said Jacky, opening his knife and trying the blade with a finger.
“Were you sleeping here?” asked Dorothea.
“Nay,” said Jacky. “Not I. I’ve cows to milk morning and evening.”
“It’s a lovely house,” said Dorothea.
“Aye, it’s a good spot,” said Jacky. “See here. If you come up as far as t’bridge and I see you, I’ll show you how to guddle trout for your suppers. Our farm’s just above the bridge.”
“We can’t come today,” said Dick, thinking of Scarab.
“Tomorrow likely,” said Jacky. He took another look all round the hut. “I’ll be seeing you in t’morning. It’s a snug spot and you’re welcome to it for me. You’ll put they stones back in t’wall after. We don’t want all folks wi’ their nebs in my cupboard.”
“Well, it’s jolly decent of you not to mind,” said Dick.
“Nay, you’re welcome,” said Jacky, and he went off with the empty milk bottle.
A moment later he came back. “You don’t know nowt about milk,” he said. “You don’t want to keep it where you did. You come along wi’ me.”
They followed him out of the hut. He went straight to the beck, to the pool they had already discovered. On the far side of the pool was a patch of pale green moss. A large flat stone was lying on the moss. Jacky lifted it, and showed them a deep hole scooped in the moss beneath it. “Yon’s where I put my bottle o’tea in hot weather like this,” he said. “You put your milk in there and it won’t turn. Butter too. You’ll be right enough now. So long …” And this time, satisfied that his house was going to be properly used, he went off down the path and did not turn back.
“I ought to have seen that that stone couldn’t have been lying on the moss unless someone had put it there,” said Dick to Dorothea.
“We’ve got to have breakfast anyway,” said Dorothea as if she were thinking of something else.
They ate their cornflakes with the fresh milk that Jacky had been taking from the cow while they were still in their hammocks. The eggs, boiled for five minutes, thanks to Jacky’s visit, were not as bullet-like as those that had been boiled for more than ten, thanks to the woodpecker. They drank their tea. They ate bread and marmalade. They tried Jacky’s nuts. Some were very good, though others had dried up inside their shells. Somehow, the hut did not seem as much theirs as it had been. Jacky had been there first, and had done the thing better than they could hope to do it, living on trout and rabbits and having his own store of nuts like any squirrel.
“All the nicest houses have been lived in for hundreds of years,” said Dorothea suddenly.
“That boy was a sort of Pict, too,” said Dick. “It sounded as if nobody knew he’d been there.”
“They didn’t at Beckfoot anyhow,” said Dorothea. “Or Nancy would have said when she brought us up here. She thought there’d been nobody since the woodcutters. He’s a better Pict than we are. But I say, that’s another person now who knows where we are, besides Cook and the postman and Timothy and the doctor.”
“I wonder how he does catch trout.”
“Dick,” said Dorothea. “We haven’t really begun to know how to be Picts.”
“We’re going to learn,” said Dick.
CHAPTER XII
A SIGNAL FROM THE LAWN
TWO o’clock sharp.
Dick and Dorothea, after a Pictish morning exploring the wood, had had an early dinner, had skirted round above Beckfoot while they knew the Great Aunt must be safely lunching, and, complete with telescope and the book on how to sail, were lurking in the rock and heather at the top of the ridge of the Beckfoot promontory.
There was no one in the garden. They looked cautiously down on the big Beckfoot lawn, half of it level where once upon a time people had played lawn tennis or croquet, and half of it sloping gently to the river. They could see part of the house, with the rose trellis up which they had seen Nancy climb to her bedroom window. Much of the house was hidden by trees. Beyond the lawn was a coppice, behind which lay Octopus Lagoon and the secret harbour for their boat. Beyond the coppice they could follow the winding line of the river. They could see where the bridge must be and in the woods below Kanchenjunga the white speck of the farm where their morning visitor milked the cows. They could see the great peak of Kanchenjunga where they had visited Slater Bob in the underground workings of long ago miners, and far away the fells where last summer they prospected for gold and found the copper for which Timothy had been looking. To the right, and close beneath them, they looked down on the river and the roof of the Beckfoot boathouse.
“Not one single human being,” said Dorothea.
“They may have gone to the boathouse before we got here,” said Dick. He looked back over the lake. “They haven’t taken her out already or we could see her.”
“It’s only just two o’clock,” said Dorothea. “We were here before she said. Look here, Dick, I’d better have another look at the sailing book. You must know it by heart.”
“I very nearly do,” said Dick. “But I’ll probably forget it when we’re really in Scarab. The thing you’d better read is the bit about sailing against the wind. There isn’t going to be much of it. Nearly a calm. Just look.”
Half a mile away on the other side of the lake a yacht with a big white sail was ghosting along in glassy water, hardly stirring the reflection that she made.
“Good,” said Dorothea. “We don’t want a lot for the first time.”
“We want some,” said Dick. “It’s awful steering when there isn’t any wind.”
“We can row,” said Dorothea. “All that matters is to have her safe here.”
“Timothy may want me tomorrow,” said Dick. “There may be no time for practice before we have to use her in a hurry.”
He handed over the book and Dorothea did her best to put her mind to it, though it was not her sort of book and, no matter how she tried, her mind kept slipping off from the diagrams that showed just how the wind blowing on a sail made the boat move forward. She was all the time seeing pictures instead of the diagrams, pictures of Nancy hammering at the piano, pictures of the Great Aunt sitting listening, very upright in a chair, with her lips primmed together. Down there, the house was silent, but in Dorothea’s head bits of dialogue kept breaking through the sailing book’s explanations … The Great Aunt telling Nancy how many hours a day she used to practise when she was a girl, and Nancy bottling up her shivering timbers and barbecued billygoats and saying “Yes, Aunt Maria” and “No, Aunt Maria” in the right places.
Dick took off and cleaned his spectacles. It was no good getting in a dither, but he could not help it. Two o’clock sharp, Nancy had said in her note. If they were starting now they would only just have time to get across to Rio, take Scarab from her builders, hoist sail and have the shortest of short trials before Nancy and Peggy would have to leave them and be bolting home to drawing-room tea. And they were not starting now. Minute after minute was passing. Minute after minute was being simply wasted. Dorothea had the sailing book which would perhaps have helped him not to worry, but it was a good thing that she was trying to read it. Nancy and Peggy would be watching while they tried the new boat and he knew very well that Dot was not as clear about the theory of sailing as she might be. Dick took a last desperate glance at the deserted lawn, and then, wriggling backwards down the ridge, so that he could stand up and still be out of sight from the house, plunged into natural history. One of the things he had set himself to find these holidays was a Fox Moth caterpillar. Heather, he knew, was where to find it. Heather was all about him, and he worked slowly to and fro searching clump after clump, trying hard to think of caterpillars and to forget how the minutes were slipping by. He could not forget and he had no luck in his search. He decided that Fox Moth caterpillars were probably only to be found on higher ground. He was sitting, looking out over the lake, watching yachts that were hardly moving, and a steamer that left a trail of smoke hangin
g above the water like a whitish slug, when he heard a very slight noise somewhere above him. He looked round and saw Dorothea beckoning to him.
Dorothea put a finger to her lips. She was still lying where he had left her, on the top of the ridge. Dick climbed quickly.
‘It’s the Great Aunt herself,” whispered Dorothea, and Dick wormed himself back to his old place and looked cautiously down into the Beckfoot garden between two clumps of heather.
Nancy was there, and Peggy, both in their white frocks. They were listening to an old lady who seemed to be showing them something on the lawn, pointing this way and that with a blue parasol.
“Oh, Gosh!” groaned Dick. “They’ll never even try to start while she’s there.”
“I wonder if they know we’ve come,” whispered Dorothea.
“Shall I signal while she’s got her back to us?”
“No. No. If they saw, she’d know in a second and turn round to see what they were looking at … I say. She’s sent Nancy on a message.”
Nancy went off at a run round the corner of the house. The Great Aunt stayed on the lawn talking to Peggy.
“She ought to be lying down already,” said Dick.
They heard a door slam somewhere behind the house. Then they heard a whirring noise. Then they saw Nancy coming back to the lawn, dragging something behind her.
“Mowing machine,” said Dick. “Oh I say, she can’t be going to make them mow the lawn now.”
“They’re all going back to the house,” whispered Dorothea.
The mowing machine stood alone in the middle of the lawn. Nancy, Peggy and the Great Aunt were on the path under the windows of the house. Then Nancy and Peggy went in.
“If she doesn’t go in herself, they’ll never risk going to the boathouse,” said Dick.
But the Great Aunt stood there waiting. Nancy and Peggy came out carrying a long garden chair between them. They set this up, and the watchers could see that the Great Aunt was showing them just where she wished it to be. They went in again. Nancy brought out a little table; Peggy, a book and a basket.
“What’s that green stuff in the basket?” whispered Dorothea.
“Green wool, I think,” said Dick after a careful look through the telescope.
“It’s her knitting.”
“They’ll be free now,” said Dick.
“If only they could get her properly settled,” whispered Dorothea not very hopefully.
LOOK-OUT POST ON THE RIDGE
“It’ll be all right if even one of them gets away,” whispered Dick.
But, after the Great Aunt was comfortably in her chair, with the table where she wanted it, at her elbow, and her knitting on her knees, she still seemed to have something to say to her nieces. Peggy ran off and came back with a small chair. They saw her sit down. They saw her open the book.
“Peggy’s being made to read aloud,” gasped Dorothea. “And Nancy …”
Nancy was walking across the lawn to the mowing machine. Just for half a moment Dick thought that perhaps she was going to the boathouse. But she took hold of the handles of the mowing machine and gave it a sharp push, so that the blades spun.
“She’s going to cut the grass,” whispered Dorothea. “And there’s miles of it.”
“Pretty shaggy,” said Dick.
“She’s going to mow the whole lawn,” said Dorothea. “Look, she’s going to start at the river and work up.”
Nancy, dragging the mower behind her, had left the level part of the lawn and was crossing the long slope to the edge of the river. Just for one moment they saw her glance up at the ridge where the watchers were lurking. She never looked up again. Suddenly she turned and began to push the lawn mower instead of pulling it. They could hear the whirring blades.
“She hasn’t begun cutting,” said Dick. “She’s got the blades off the ground … Now she’s beginning.” Cut grass suddenly began to fountain from the spinning blades into the big green box on the front of the machine.
“Why isn’t she doing it in straight lines?” Dick whispered.
“She must be furious at being made to do it at all,” whispered Dorothea.
Nancy, instead of mowing in straight lines seemed to be running the lawn mower aimlessly about. She ran it round in a big curve, then straight for a few yards, then back the way she had come, then round again in a complete circle. …
Suddenly they understood.
“She’s writing,” gasped Dorothea.
Under the very eyes of the Great Aunt, Nancy was writing them a message. The Great Aunt, from where she sat by the house, could not have read it even if she had been looking. But the Picts, lurking behind rock and heather on the top of the ridge, were looking straight down on the lawn instead of across it. They could read it easily, a message written in the broad trail of the lawn mower that left a different green behind it from that of the long, uncut grass. Four letters Nancy wrote. Two short words. A melancholy message. But there it was, plainly written on the lawn.
NO GO
And Nancy, a virtuous martyr as before, was driving the machine in a straight line from one side of the lawn to the other as if she had never thought of doing anything else.
“It means they can’t come at all,” said Dorothea.
“And we can’t go and get Scarab without them.”
They lay watching Nancy steadily at work, pushing the mower to and fro until she had covered the ground where her message had been written. In front of the house Peggy was reading aloud and the Great Aunt’s fingers were flickering about her knitting.
“It’s no good stopping,” said Dick. “We’d better go away. That’s what she meant to tell us. We’d better go and have a look at the harbour.”
“All right,” said Dorothea.
“Wasted day,” said Dick grimly, as they climbed back into the road after coming silently down from their look-out post above the garden.
“It’s much worse for them,” said Dorothea.
“It’s a wasted day for all of us. A whole wasted day. It means we can’t get Scarab till tomorrow, and there’s all that work to do for Captain Flint and Timothy may be sending a pigeon any minute to say he’s ready for me to come to the houseboat and help.”
“It’s much worse than that,” said Dorothea. “Why didn’t the doctor tell her to go properly to bed. If he just told her to take a rest, she may go and lie in a chair every afternoon and keep them busy all the time.”
CHAPTER XIII
TICKLING TROUT
THERE was nothing they could do to the harbour until they had a boat to berth in it. They stood for a few moments looking at the narrow lane of clear water through the reeds. By now, if only things had not gone wrong, they would have had their ship.
“Listen,” said Dorothea.
Faintly, from the other side of the coppice, they could hear the whirr of the mowing machine on the Beckfoot lawn. Whirrr … rrrrr. On and on, and then a change of note, almost a scream, as Nancy came to the edge of the lawn, gave an extra hard push, and sent the blades spinning with no grass to cut.
“It wants oil,” said Dick.
“It’s like listening to the prisoners working a treadmill,” said Dorothea.
“They don’t have treadmills nowadays,” said Dick.
“Well, listen to it,” said Dorothea.
And then, while Dick was looking for caterpillars on the under sides of the willow leaves, she began her favourite game, trying to think herself into the minds and skins of other people.
“Of course you can’t really blame her,” she said suddenly.
“Who?”
“The Great Aunt. She didn’t know they were meaning to take us across to fetch Scarab. If she had …”
“Everything would be even worse,” said Dick.
“I know. I know. But I’m just trying to be her for a minute. You see, not knowing, she can’t be doing it on purpose. She’s thinking they’ve got nothing to do, and she’s thinking of Mrs Blackett coming back and finding the lawn
all nicely cut in spite of Captain Flint not being here to do it.”
“It was a bit shaggy,” Dick admitted.
“She’s thinking of how they ought to be brought up, and killing two birds with one stone … I’m sure that book she’s making Peggy read must be one of their holiday tasks. She’s wanting them to get it done. Like eating bread and butter first instead of starting on cake. She’s thinking … You know the funny thing about people is they always think they’re doing right.”
Dick became interested from another point of view. “Like natural history,” he said. “There’s no good in hating wasps because they sting. What matters is to understand how they do it. It works both ways. When you understand you don’t mind it so much even if it’s you who gets stung. Like that mosquito. I forgot how beastly he was when I was watching him and saw him uncurl his proboscis and shove it in and start sucking blood up out of the back of my hand … Of course, it was scratchy afterwards just the same.”
“I know,” said Dorothea. “She thinks she’s doing good. It’s no good blaming her, but it doesn’t stop things being beastly for them. Did you hear? The mowing stopped for a minute, and now it’s started again. She must have sent Peggy to tell Nancy to come and read, and now it’s Peggy’s turn at the treadmill. And we can’t do anything to help. Let’s go further away where we can’t hear it.”
They left the harbour and the trees, skirted round the reedy shore of the lagoon, and walked along the river bank. They startled a water rat and watched it swim across, push upstream close under the further bank and disappear into a hole. Dick had a kingfisher to add to the list in his pocket book. They saw or thought they saw several trout. Here, where it flowed between the meadows, the river was smooth and deep enough for a boat. It was silent, but, as they followed it towards the bridge where the road crossed it, they began to hear it, tumbling and rushing over the shallows and rocks above the bridge, just as they had heard it last summer when camped beside it in Mrs Tyson’s orchard.