The Cuckoo Tree (4 page)

"Fire's going nice and sprackish now, sir," said Pelmett.
"And I've put the lame nag in the shippen with a bit o' feed, and reckon us'd better ride the other one back to the Manor, or ol' Mis'll be turble tiffy and bumblesome, axing where we've got to."

Plainly he was dying to get away.

"I will accompany you, my good fellows,
allegro vivace,
" the doctor said quickly. "Give the patient this draught, young lady, when he awakens, and another dose at morningtide. He should have light feedings—milk, eggs, white wine. No meat. I will return
domani
—tomorrow.
Addio!
To the re-see!"

"Hey! Where am I to find eggs and wine and so forth in this back end?" Dido called after him, but he did not hear, or did not choose to.

Dido suddenly found herself left alone with the sick man; the sound of hoofs died away outside and after that, strain her ears how she might, there was nothing to be heard at all, save a distant sighing of trees.

"This is a fubsy kind o' set-out," she said to herself. "Still, no use bawling over botched butter—have to make the best of it. I'd as soon not tangle overmuch wi' that old witch next door though. Only thing is, how are we going to get summat to eat? Oh, well, maybe old Lady Tegleaze'll send some soup and jelly—or cheese and apples—no use fretting ahead. Queer old cuss
she
is, too—all those rooms in that great workus of a place, and she has to send us to a ken that ain't much bigger than a chicken coop."

She made sure the Captain was sleeping peacefully, packed the hay tight under him, and straightened the
capes and carriage rugs over him. Next she brought in their valises, which would serve as tables or chairs, made up the fire, piled more hay in a corner for her own bed, and bolted the front and back doors of the cottage, which consisted of two ground-floor rooms with a loft above.

Lastly Dido pulled a packet from the front of her midshipman's shirt and carefully inspected it. It was addressed to the First Lord of the Admiralty and was covered in large red unbroken seals.

"All hunky-dory," she muttered to herself in satisfaction. "Likely enough it was
you
as whoever rummaged over the carriage was a-looking for—seeing as how nothing else was stole. But they didn't find you, and so long as we're in this neck o' the woods, or till I can lay hands on some trustable chap to take you to London, you stays right inside my shimmy shirt."

She replaced the packet, blew out the tapers, and curled up in her sweet-smelling nest.

About half an hour later she heard somebody cautiously try first the front, then the back door.

"Hilloo?" Dido called out. "Is that the baker's boy? One white, one brown, two pints o' dairy fresh
with
the top on, half o' rashers, and a dozen best pullets',
if
you please."

Dead silence greeted this request, and though Dido listened alertly for some time after, there was no further disturbance. Presently, satisfied, she fell asleep.

Early next morning, well before daybreak, Dido was wakened by the crowing of roosters near at hand. Beyond the roosters, plaintive in the dark, she could hear sheep
bleating—high and low, near and far—it sounded as if the hills were covered with an immense flock of sheep, full of unappeased longing for breakfast.

"And I could do with a peck myself," thought Dido, rolling off her flattened pile of hay. "Croopus, don't they half have it noisy in the country! Still, I reckon it's time for the Cap to take another dram o' physic. Hey, Cap'n Hughes!" she said softly. "How are you a-feeling today?"

His forehead was cool and his eyes, when they opened, recognized her.

"It's the young passenger—Miss Twite," he murmured. "I will escort her to London when I carry the Dispatch—Osbaldeston will continue in command until the end of my sick furlough. Ah, thank you, my dear—"

Obediently he swallowed down the draught which Dido had prepared for him and fell asleep at once. Satisfied that he was doing well, Dido blew up the embers of the fire and fed it with dry sticks. Now, how could she go out leaving the sick man secure from intrusion? There were bolts on both doors, and a lock on the front one, but no key.

"Nothing bigger than a cat could get in at the windows, so that's no worry," she decided. "Wonder if I could get out through the loft?"

Entry to this was through a trap door in the ceiling. She piled the cases one on another and from the top one was just able to spring up, grab the edge of the opening, and pull herself through like a squirrel.

Plainly the loft had been used in the past for housing pigeons. A number of miscellaneous oddments had also
been stored up here at one time or another and then forgotten; probing about cautiously in the half dark Dido found some pewter dishes, half a dozen clay pipes (broken), a stringless lute, a box of mildewy books, an iron candlestick, a three-legged stool, some earthenware crocks, and a hip bath.

"Some o' these'll come in useful," she decided. "Now, what's out back?"

A couple of tiles had been removed from the roof to make an entrance for the pigeons. Putting her face to the hole, Dido looked out and in the growing dawn light saw that a neglected, weed-grown farmyard lay behind the row of cottages. With great care she removed another tile, enlarging the hole enough to stick her head through, and looked sideways. A big rainwater barrel could be seen to her right, just below the edge of the roof.

"Guess if I could get on to that I could climb down from it," Dido thought, measuring its height with her eye. She began taking more tiles from the hole, slipping each carefully off its pair of wooden pegs and laying it on the floor, until there was a gap large enough to climb through. Once a tile escaped her and slid down, landing with a crash on the cobbles below, but nobody appeared to have heard. When the hole was big enough she squeezed through and went down the roof on fingers and toes until she was above the big wooden cask. Prodding it first, to make sure the top would take her weight, she scrambled on to it. A broken wooden hand barrow leaned against the wall below.

"That'll do for climbing back," she thought with satisfaction, and jumped nimbly to the ground. Hardly had she done so when she heard footsteps; an old man carrying two buckets on a yoke across his shoulders walked around the corner of the cottages and across the yard away from Dido. He had not seen her but his dog, following a few yards behind, did, and gave one sharp formal wuff. The old man turned himself around—he could not turn just his head because of the yoke.

"What be fidgeting ee, Toby?" he said.

The dog barked again.

"Why, dag me, 'tis a boy. No it bean't, it be a liddle maid. Where be you from so early, darter?"

"Are you Mr. Firkin?" Dido asked. "Lady Tegleaze said you'd help me."

"Owd Tom Firkin I be, and this yer's my dog Toby."

"What kind of a dog's that? I've never seen one like him before."

Toby was a grayish sandy color, as big as a sheep, and so extremely shaggy that it was hard to tell which way he was facing.

"Old-fashioned ship dog ee be," Mr. Firkin said.

"Old-fashioned! He looks like something out o' the ark."

"Ah, he be a wunnerful clever dog wi' the ship; we ne'er loses one at lambing time."

While he was speaking Mr. Firkin continued on his way and Dido followed into a cowshed where a brindled cow stood waiting to be milked. Mr. Firkin hung his yoke over a wooden partition, took off the buckets, and sat down to milk on a three-legged wooden stool like the one in the
loft, leaning his head against the cow's side. He wore a battered hard felt hat, painted gray, with a pheasant's feather in it, and a sort of jerkin and apron made of sacking over velveteen breeches and leather boots. He had a long bushy white beard, which at the moment was inconveniencing him very much; it stuck out and got in the way of the milk flow and if he pushed it to one side with his elbow it dangled into the pail.

"You want a bit o' string for that, mister," said Dido. She had one in her pocket, with which she tied the beard, doubled up in a neat bunch.

"Nay! That's nim," he said admiringly. "I can tell ee must be a trig liddle maid. Why don't ee feed my chickens while I tend to owd Clover here, then us'll git our breakfasses."

He showed her where the hens were shut up at night "for fear o' foxy owd Mus' Reynolds" and gave her a round tin pan with a wooden handle.

"Chickens' grub be in the posnet yonder."

Outside the cottage at the far end of the row from Mrs. Lubbage's, Dido saw a kind of caldron on legs, which proved to be full of potato peelings. Under Mr. Firkin's directions, she mixed these with a measure of corn. Then she opened the fowl-house door, letting loose a knee-deep flood of brown, white, and speckled poultry into the yard, and fed them by flinging out handfuls of the mixture until they were all busily pecking and the pan was empty. Meanwhile Mr. Firkin had finished milking and carried the two full pails back to his cottage.

Dido followed and found him there carefully wringing
his beard into one of the pails.

"Now then, what's all this nabble about ol' Lady Tegleaze?" he said, putting a pan of water to boil over the fire. While he cut slices off a loaf and a side of bacon and laid them in a skillet, Dido told him about the accident: how Captain Hughes, wounded in the Chinese wars, had been coming home on sick leave, when his ship the
Thrush
had become involved in another battle, against the French this time, and had captured a French frigate.

"And we was taking a Dispatch to London about it all when this roust-up had to happen."

Mr. Firkin was deeply interested in her tale.

"Yon sick Cap'n's lying with a busted leg in the empty cottage? Eh, I'll take him a posset; that'll furbish him up."

He poured milk into another pan (not from the pail into which he had wrung his beard, Dido was relieved to notice), warmed it, added sugar, eggs, and a golden fluid from a leather bottle.

"What's yon, mister?"

"Dandelion wine, darter."

The posset was yellow and frothy and smelt wonderful—like a whole field of dandelions. Dido ran back along the yard, clambered by means of the wheelbarrow on to the cask and so to the roof, through the pigeon hole, down through the loft entrance, and was able to unbolt the cottage's front door just as Mr. Firkin arrived.

Captain Hughes was stirring again, more wakeful this time, and very glad of the posset.

"Puts me in mind of the Chinese lily soup we used to get
in Poohoo province," he said. It soon made him drowsy, and he slept again.

"D'you think he looks all right, mister, or d'you reckon he's feverish?" Dido asked Mr. Firkin.

"Nay, I'm bline, darter, I can't see him! Mis' Lubbage'll be the one to tell ee how he'm faring."

"
Blind? You
are?" Dido was astonished. The old man's eyes were so bright, and he was so deft in everything he did, that it seemed as if he could see better than most.

"Blinded forty year agone, struck by lightning sitting under a snottygog tree on Barlton Down. Turble fierce thunderstorms we had when I were a lad."

"How ever did you know I was a girl?" Dido asked, thinking back.

"Why, my dog Toby told me, surelye! There hain't much as my dog Toby can't tell me." The shaggy Toby wagged his tail knowledgeably and thrust his head under his master's arm.

Dido was somewhat dashed to realize that she would still have to apply to Mrs. Lubbage for sick nursing.

"Anyhows, you don't want to rouse her yet awhile or she'll be sidy," Mr. Firkin said. "She be a late lier, owd Mis' Lubbage. Come ee back and eat a rasher o' my bacon, cardenly."

Since she would be next door and within earshot of the Captain, Dido accepted.

Mr. Firkin's bacon was delicious, and so was his homemade bread-and-butter, and so was his tea "that thunderin' strong ye could trot a mouldywarp on it." After breakfast
Dido washed up for him, peeled potatoes for his dinner, and swept out his kitchen, which was the same size as that of Mrs. Lubbage but exquisitely neat. Then she chopped some firewood because Mr. Firkin told her that was the one job he was sure to make a boffle of. His woodshed contained a large untidy pile of dry boughs and a small neat pile of kindling already chopped to the right size. Dido wondered who had done it.

"Mr. Firkin," she said, "if I wanted to get a letter taken to London, who'd I best ask? Is there a regular mail coach as goes by this way?"

"Once every two days Jem Hoadley takes mail so far as Petworth."

"Is he reliable? What happens to it there?"

"Nay, he's a bit shravey, Jem is; times folks's letters has gone no-one-wheres. And if the mail does get to Petworth, I dunnasay what comes to it there."

Dido resolved not to trust Captain Hughes's Dispatch to the shravey Jem until she had tried him out.

"D'you think Mrs. Lubbage'll be stirring by now? Maybe I'd best go and see her or she'll be offended?"

"Ah, she'm a taffety one," he agreed. "There's some as dassn't go anigh her, 'case she puts a mischief on 'em. Some reckons she's a wise 'ooman, others say she's downright a witch."

"What do you reckon, mister?"

"I ain't afeered o' the owd skaddle, however skrow she be. But then I wears mouldywarpses' toeses; she can't mischief
me.
" He pulled out and showed Dido two moles'
claws on a leather bootlace around his neck. "Powerful good agin the toothache they be and against the powers o' dark too. Tell ee what, darter, I'll give ee a pair; then ee 'on't come to no harm."

He picked another pair of feet from a wooden box full of very strong-smelling tobacco and threaded them on a string; Dido slung them around her neck and tucked them out of sight along with Captain Hughes's Dispatch.

Mr. Firkin and Toby then set off up the smooth steep grassy slope of the hill behind Dog kennel Cottages—which he had told her was called Barlton Down—to look after the sheep; Dido walked along to Mrs. Lubbage's cottage. Outside the door she paused with her hand upraised to knock. She could hear voices inside—or rather, one voice, very angry. It was Mrs. Lubbage.

"Show your face down here again between sunup and moonup and I'll give ee such a dose of hazel oil, ye 'on't be able to set down for a week. Hear what I say? Maybe that'll teach ee!"