Pye went black in the face. She began, obstinately, to follow Ruth, who turned and gave her a long, clear look, then let herself nimbly down the rope-ladder. Pye opened her mouth wide, ready for a scream, and drew in a huge breath; but before she could let the scream out, Is whipped a thought into her mind.
“
Pye, listen
! Arun will hear, if you scream. He’ll hear you inside his head – all across the wood, he’ll hear you – the way you are hearing me now. And he’ll think you have gone back to being a baby again. ‘What a pity!’ he’ll think.”
Pye let her breath out very slowly, staring at Is.
“How can you tell that?” she asked in thought language. “Where is Arun now?”
Is shut her eyes and frowned, concentrating.
“I can see him in the main street in Seagate. He’s talking to a girl in a red dress – her name is Jen – and he’s asking her the way to the dentist’s house . . . Now he is walking to the edge of the town . . . Now he is knocking at the door.”
“Can you see Ruth too?” Pye demanded.
Is opened her eyes. “It’s no use, I can’t find Ruth that way. She doesn’t talk in thought-pictures as you and I and Arun can. And I can’t always do it with Arun. It’s very hard work. Like trying to remember something that happened a long, long time ago.”
“
Nothing
happened to Pye a long time ago!” shouted Pye in a passion. She sat down suddenly on the deck. Tears poured from her eyes like water over a weir. “Pye wants Ruth,” she sobbed. “Pye wants Arun. It’s bad without them.”
Penny shrugged. Is looked at Pye rather helplessly.
To her surprise, she suddenly felt sorry for the poor little being.
“Pye,” she said after a moment. “Ruth and Arun aren’t gone for good. You know that. They’ll come back.”
But will they? she wondered to herself. How can I promise that for sure? There’s nothing but danger in these parts.
Still, she forced her voice to be calm and reassuring. “Why don’t you pass the time till they come back, making something nice for them? A present? Then you’ll be working for them, and it’ll be as if they were here, because you are thinking about them. See what I mean?”
Pye stared at Is for a long time out of large, round, pale, tear-filled eyes.
“Make bread,” she said finally. “Pye can do that.”
Is looked enquiringly at Penny, who nodded.
“Yes, she can. Ruth taught her.”
“All right, then, Pye. Let’s go to the galley. You show me.”
At least mixing flour and water and yeast and thumping it will keep the kid out of mischief for a while, Is thought.
I wonder how Arun is getting on at the dentist?
“Yes, yes, indeed, my young sir, I can most readily furnish you with highly superior new teeth; there will be no difficulty whatsoever. They can be screwed to the stumps of those broken ones,” Mr Fishskin the dentist was telling Arun. His own wide smile revealed two shining rows of big, well-shaped white teeth which looked as if they had been designed as an advertisement for his work.
“How much will they cost?” Arun asked doubtfully, hoping that the money his cousin Penny had lent him (“Pay me back when you are rich,” she had said) would be sufficient.
“A trifle, a mere trifle,” the dentist replied airily. He looked remarkably like his cousin the Admiral, Arun thought; the same round, flat face and pale intent eyes, screened by thick spectacles. I don’t like him, not one bit, Arun decided. I wish he weren’t the only dentist for miles. But it’s true; if I don’t have those teeth mended, I shan’t be able to sing.
And at least Denzil Fishskin seemed to have accepted the story of the midshipman and the marlinspike readily enough.
“Now, just sit in this armchair, my lad, make yourself comfortable, lean back so; and now, we must clap this mask, which is soaked in ether and nitrous oxide, over your face,” went on the dentist, producing from a large basin a soft, thick, round white pad about the size of a soup-plate. “Lie well back – so – just imagine that you are lolling in your hammock in the midshipmen’s quarters and that your ship is becalmed in the balmy Bahamas . . .”
I don’t care for this
at all
, thought Arun, and that was the last thought that came into his head for some considerable time.
Is lined up a number of Penny’s dolls’-heads and painted red mouths and black eyes on them while, rather inattentively, she supervised Pye, who was thumping and pummelling a large, grey, loaf-sized mass of elastic dough, which was steadily growing grimier and grimier.
“Don’t you have to leave it to rise, now?” Is suggested after a while.
“Soon,” panted Pye, bashing away as if she had the Leader of the Silent Sect laid out on her pastry-board. “Bread wants banging real hard, Ruth says.”
She pounded on.
When Arun’s thoughts next began to reassemble themselves inside his head, he realised, first, that he was desperately thirsty, second, that his mouth felt horribly sore and uncomfortable. He was dizzy, too, and his surroundings seemed to be whirling round him so rapidly that it was safer – just for the moment, anyway – to keep his eyes shut.
But the worry that had gripped him from the moment when Pye broke his teeth was still with him, and now worse than ever. Would he be able to sing properly with these great bulky fangs stuck in his jaw? He explored the new teeth nervously with his tongue. They took up a huge amount of room in his mouth. They seemed as large as tombstones.
Not far away, he could hear quiet voices talking. Absorbed in his worry, he paid them no heed.
“I shall need some more mammoth tusks next time the troop come this way. I am now down to my last . . . And a jug or two of Barbados rum would not come amiss . . . I can use it on the rougher type of customer . . .”
“It was ill-advised and thoughtless of the men to despatch that group. It may lead to undesirable attention from the authorities in London. An individual here or there, yes; a whole group, decidedly no.”
“London is a long way from here. And a new reign has begun. Government will be in disorder. Meanwhile the local people were becoming restive . . . murmurs . . . this will bring them to heel.”
Never mind about the murmurs and the mammoth tusks, thought Arun muzzily.
Mammoth tusks, though. Who was talking about mammoth tusks not so long ago? But never mind, never mind, never mind about
that
. The important, the terribly important question is, will I be able to sing?
There seemed only one way to find out.
Arun opened his mouth wide and sang out, suddenly, at the full pitch of his lungs:
“Heel and toe,
high and low
hold her tightly
swing her lightly
and sing, everybody, sing
!
”
That’s
all right then, he thought in deep satisfaction. The new teeth haven’t spoiled my singing. Improved it, if anything.
A stunned silence had fallen.
Then a voice said, “But . . . good god, that was the boy. That’s the boy – that’s the
Twite
boy, the one who gave me the slip in the wood . . . Here, let’s have a look at him.”
Oh, croopus, thought Arun. I know that voice.
With an effort, he hoisted up his eyelids and found that he was staring straight into the large grey-blue eyes of Dominic de la Twite.
“Denzil, I must trouble you for another helping of ether and nitrous oxide,” announced the voice of the Leader, after a moment. “Pass me that swab, will you, my dear fellow?”
Arun sank down again, into a white and whirling fog.
Chapter Seven
“C
AN YOU SEE ARUN NOW
? O
R HEAR HIM
?”
PYE
asked, still vigorously pounding away at her dough.
“No. Not just now.”
Is most certainly was not going to tell Pye that she had, in fact, received a very queer, worrying impression which had slipped into her mind following a few jerky notes of a song. The song was sung loudly, almost bawled, as if Arun were trying to prove something to himself. But then had followed a confused vision of Arun tipping head first into a deep well smoking with white foggy vapours.
“
Arun! Where are you? What’s happening
?” She poured out the thought-call, with all her energy, over and over. But not a sound, not a sign came back.
And it was becoming a long time since Ruth had gone off to the farm. Two hours? Three? A
worryingly
long time.
“
Now
put bread on top of stove to rise. Now we wait,” Pye said importantly.
How quick she learns, Is thought. This morning she’d have said, “Pye wait.” She’s crammed half her growing into one day.
“What I do while bread rises?” Pye demanded.
“Umn. Could you make up a song?”
“A song?” Pye looked utterly taken aback.
“Why not? A song for Arun to sing when he comes back with his mended teeth. Old Dominic de la Twite hates songs, somebody said. A song to annoy Twite.”
“What about?”
Is remembered how Twite had stopped the chaise and made Will Fobbing wipe the chalked letters off walls and fences, how angry he had been.
“About mothers and kids.”
Pye frowned. Is could not tell whether the frown came from perplexity, or because she disliked the subject. However she went off to a corner and curled up, apparently deep in thought. Figgin curled up beside her.
Is walked along the deck to where Penny was washing a bundle of sheep’s wool gathered from briars, in a pail of water laboriously hauled up on a rope.
“Pen,” said Is quietly, “ain’t it a longish time for Ruth to be gone? You think there’s summat real bad wrong with Mrs Lee? Does Ruth often put in such a long spell at the farm?”
“No,” Pen answered in the same low tone. “It’s not like her to stay away from Pye so long. Tell you the truth, I’m bothered.”
“Best one of us go down to the farm, then? See what’s up?”
“Humph,” said Penny. “Which of us?”
“You’ve known Pye longer. She’s used to you. Maybe you should stay here? We don’t want her kicking up one of her tantrums.”
“Ay,” said Penny, “but you managed her pretty well just now. You can get through to her in that creepy thought-talk that you and Arun are so fly with. I think you’d better stay with her, Is. And you’ve been overseeing the bread, after all.” She gave her dry sniff of laughter. “Hope it don’t give us all the galleygripes.”
I just hope we’re all here to
eat
it, thought is. She said, “All ruggy, then. You go to the farm, Pen. But hurry back! It’s like ‘Fly Away Peter, Fly Away Paul’. I know Arun can’t be looked for yet awhile, but I wish—”
“Wish what?”
“Never mind. Reckon I just got the habdabs for some reason.”
“I got ’em, too. I’ll go to the farm. But pull up the ladder when I’m down.”
“You can lay your sweet life I will!”
“Where Penny going?”
At the sound of the ladder being dropped among the branches, Pye came bundling up on deck.
“To the farm, to find why Ruth’s so long.”
“Pye go too!”
But Is countered this instant response by a firm argument: “You got to put your bread in the oven and be there to take it out.”
Luckily the dough, though still very grey, had risen in the most encouraging manner; it was laid on a large broken shovel and slid into the oven to bake.
“Have you made up a song yet?” Is asked.
Pye nodded. But she said, “You write down,” and fetched Is a bit of chalk and a slate which Ruth had salvaged from the ship’s schoolmaster’s supplies.
“Go on then, I’m ready.”
Pye then astonished Is. She recited in a loud clear drone, all on one note:
“Mums, kids, hold together, hen to chick, cub to bear
learn, pay heed, each to other
sow to piglet, foal to mare.”
“My word, Pye, why, that’s
prime
! You’re as good as Arun!”
Pye looked proud. Her pale eyes could not change but a faint hint of smile rumpled her pale cheek.
“Arun make tune,” she said. “When he come.”
“Yes. He’ll put a tune to it, easy as fall off a brick,” said Is, and clenched her hands, because for some reason they were shaking. She added, “Why don’t you think of some more words to add on? There’s ‘fin and feather’, ‘paw and claw’—”
“Think some more,” agreed Pye, and retired to her corner.
It seemed, however, that she was having trouble with the next verse of her song, for she sank into a long silence from which Is roused her eventually by saying, “Bread smells good, Pye. Don’t you reckon it’s time it came out?”
Pye nodded, and stumped off to the oven.
They had just wrapped a piece of sail-canvas around the hot shovel handle and withdrawn a large, well-shaped loaf (only slightly too brown) when Is heard Penny’s whistle, and hurried off to let down the ladder.
To her dismay, Penny was alone.
“Where’s Ruth?”
Is hissed, the moment that Penny was on the ladder.
Penny finished the climb without replying, pulled up the ladder behind her, and made it fast. Her face was paper-white and the freckles stood out like currants in dough.
“She never
went
to the farm.”
“Pen! What happened to her?”
“They never sent us any message. There was naught wrong with Mrs Lee. That note was a fake.”
“Somebody musta grabbed her. I knew it,” said Is. “I had a feeling—”
“And there’s worse.” Penny’s voice was low and hoarse. She went on in a mutter: “There’s a place in the wood called Birketland.”
“I know it. I’ve been there.”
“An old gal lived there in a cottage, Mrs Dryhurst. The kids from Seagate used to go there sometimes of a night, for what they called their Talkfestesses—”
“So?” Is asked with a dry throat as Penny came to a halt.