Black August (42 page)

A voice hailed her out of the darkness. With swift fear, no longer for herself, but that she might be held up or stopped altogether, she burst into a fresh spurt and ran again as fast as her short sturdy legs could carry her.

The houses of Alderton came into sight and she checked, approaching them at a quick cautious walk, fearful that she might be set upon, but her alarm had no foundation; the village was silent, ghost-like and untenanted, for all its inhabitants were
congregated on the beach at Shingle Street tearing lumps of fresh roast horse between their teeth.

Two more miles yet to the ferry and even that was only a little over a third of the distance she had to cover. If she was ever to reach Ipswich she must conserve her strength so she moderated her pace and settled down into a steady dogged trudge.

Another mile and the road sloped upward toward the hills that held the Deben to its banks. The pebbled surface, rarely used except for motor traffic in the summer, was rough and tiring to her feet. Grass grew on either side, creeping towards the centre of the track, so Ann abandoned the road for the grass and found it better going. At length she breasted the rise and, stumbling slightly, slithered down the steep descent, the broad bosom of the river plain before her in the starlight.

There lay the ferry, an old broad-bottom punt, and on the right the tall bleak house, an inn where trippers came in the summer-time, filling the small tea garden with their noise and clamour. Now it was silent, dark, apparently unoccupied.

Panting a little she regained her breath and shouted. There was no reply. Again she called, then, desperate, picked up a pebble from the road and flung it at one of the first-floor windows. The glass splintered under the impact, and the pieces tinkled to the unseen floor with a melancholy sound, then silence descended on the little cove once more.

The landlord, his family, and the ferryman were gone, where, heaven knew. Impatiently for a moment the small agitated figure on the foreshore waited, and then abruptly turned away.

With quick steps she hastened on to the short broad ‘hard' that jutted out into the river. Great posts of wood, rotting under the pressure of time and sea, held the banked earth together, except in one corner where the mass had crumbled and a gap showed plain between the surface, beaten down by generations of trampling feet, and the decaying pillars at which the tide sucked and gurgled.

The river being in flood it occurred to Ann for one moment to swim it, but she knew the treacherous mud banks on the farther side that the night concealed. She would be trapped for certain in the slimy ooze.

The ferry lay there in the starlight but Ann knew that her slender arms would never be able to cope with the great heavy
pole, or steer the ancient barge safely to the other side; once she got out into the stream she would be swept seaward by the tide.

In desperate haste she began to scan the other boats for one that might be suitable. Most of them were inaccessible, being moored out in the river. Yachts and motor-launches rocked gently in the tide, lonely and forgotten now in the stress of terrible events, but kept there for the weekenders who, in happier times, forgot their business worries during the hours they sailed, or chugged gently, down-river, along the coast, and up the reaches of the Orwell or the Stour. A dinghy swung at the stern of all the larger boats but not one of them was within Ann's reach.

She stamped with impatience at the thought that in such a place there must be something in which she could get over if only she could find it, and hurriedly retraced her steps to the landward end of the hard. Her eye lit on a battered rowing boat half sunk in the mud. She paused by it a moment and hastened on, its planks were rotting even if she could prise it from its sticky bed. Then on a shelving beach of pebbles above the mud she saw a dingy, lopsided but lying high and dry. Next moment she had seized the painter and was dragging it towards the water. Her sense of flying time, upon every moment of which Kenyon's life might hang, lent her added strength, and with a superhuman effort she managed to get it launched.

The sculls had been left beneath the thwarts, and the boat was hardly rocking in the water before she had them out and in the crutches. With a sharp left-handed stroke, she swung the nose towards the opposite shore, and then with all the weight of her strong shoulders pulled towards it.

Five minutes later she had shipped her sculls and was scrambling out into the ooze that fringed the farther bank, It sucked and plopped as she struggled through it but she was on to the course grass a minute after landing, leaving the dinghy to drift out on the tide.

With renewed courage she ploughed her way up the rising ground and over the thick heather. The brief respite on the hard and the use of different muscles in rowing had eased her legs and rested her feet a little. The river too had been her principal anxiety, now she had succeeded in crossing it the remainder of
the journey depended only upon sheer dogged endurance.

At last, with infinite thankfulness she struck a road and, leaving the uneven ground, turned north along it for half a mile until she came to a cross-roads that she recognised. There she turned left but with a sinking heart, for she knew that she had barely accomplished half her journey, and that a solid seven mile tramp still lay before her.

It seemed hours and hours since she had left Shingle Street and her head was burning with fatigue. As she trudged on she became half-delirious and began to sing, strange breathless snatches of half-forgotten tunes, hymns, choruses and nursery songs, that she had learnt in Orford when she was a little girl.

She broke off suddenly, impelled from sheer fatigue to sit down and rest by the wayside. Slipping to her knees, she leaned against a bank and lay there for a few moments panting heavily, while she tasted the supreme pleasure of relaxing all her limbs. Instantly a great drowsiness came over her, with a little flicker her heavy eyelids closed, and the great weight of sleep bringing relief to her utter weariness, pressed down upon her.

That would have been the end of her pilgrimage had not a sudden picture blazed in her half-conscious brain. Kenyon, with the burning brand pressed against his chest! She started up with a muffled scream, those devils were going to hang him—no, he was to be shot tomorrow—today—when the light came in the morning. Wide awake again now she struggled to her feet, and pressed on down the road, running a few paces and then dropping back into a staggering walk.

She wondered vaguely how much farther she had to go and, knowing the country well, she would easily have recognised any bend or turning in the daylight; but now that she could only see hedged fields on one side of her and heath on the other, her brain would no longer take in the significance of gradients and dark coppices. At last another cross-road loomed up out of the darkness, and the place was unmistakable even in her weariness. It was a little north of Brightwell and on one corner of it stood a signpost, but she did not trouble to peer at it for she knew its legend; it read, 5¼ miles to Ipswich.

Five and a quarter miles still to go. She felt that she would never be able to do it. Her feet were aching, galled and blistered about the heels. The road seemed to waver in front of her, closing up then broadening out before her with a horrible sickening
motion. She swayed as she walked, lurching from one side of the road to the other, and failed to see the faces of the starving prowlers who peered at her from the hedgerows every now and then. Furtive, soundless, they watched her pass and then slipped back into the shadows for she carried nothing, not even the smallest packet that might contain food, and seemed to be as destitute as themselves.

It was not until he was actually upon her that she saw the man who sprang from the roadside and seized her arm.

What could have urged him to attack her is past conjecture. She obviously had no food about her and even less of beauty. Her dark hair hung in matted locks; her face was puffed and swollen. The mud of the Deben clung about her feet and blackened her arms up to the elbows; smears of it disfigured her face where she had sought to wipe away the perspiration and her mouth hung open in an ugly contour, but as she swung terrified to face him she saw that his eyes were glowing bright in the darkness with the horrible glare of insanity.

She screamed and with a sudden access of strength wrenched her arm free, then slogged him again and again with her clenched fist in the face. For a second he stood there, a look of stupid amazement in his eyes, his arms dangling foolishly, then he tripped and fell backwards in the roadway.

Ann screamed again and, forgetful of her weariness, ran and ran until she was clear of the hedgerows and out once more upon the open heath. There she collapsed and fell into a ditch, lying sobbing for several moments.

Rocking from side to side, moaning a little from acute bodily distress and terrified that she might fall asleep, she began to massage the aching muscles in her legs, then recognising a cottage opposite suddenly realised that she could now be no more than three miles from her goal.

As she got on her feet something rustled in the bushes at her rear, only a stoat or rabbit perhaps but, terrified by her recent experience, she dashed off down the road.

She was drunk now, drunk with terror and fatigue, but somehow she staggered on, every thought blotted out from her exhausted brain but that they meant to burn Kenyon unless she could reach Ipswich in time.

Suddenly she realised that she was no longer walking through open country. Houses were upon either side. Her mind cleared
for a space, and she shook her head violently from side to side. Then as she looked round she knew that she could not be dreaming. The electric tramwires were overhead.

This was Ipswich, but the suburbs seemed interminable and her feet like leaden weights as she dragged them one after the other. There were lights ahead and she groped on towards them but, when she was only a few yards from the barrier which they illuminated, all strength seemed to leave her and, pitching forward on her face, she lay gently moaning in the gutter.

A man came forward and, stooping, gripped her by the arm. He shook her roughly and pulled her to her feet.

‘You can't stay here,' he said sharply, ‘you must go back where you came from unless you live in the town.'

‘Communists,' muttered Ann, ‘they're going to burn them.'

‘Eh! what's that?' he questioned with a quick glance. ‘Where have you come from?'

‘Shingle Street,' she flung at him with a desperate effort. ‘They'll be burnt alive unless you take me to the Town Hall.'

‘All right, pull yourself together, it isn't far.'

Ann remembered nothing of the last part of her journey. Her mind was blank until she stood, supported by the man who had found her and another, before a bald man at a desk in a bare, ill-lighted room.

He pressed her for her story, but her memory and even her power of speech had almost gone. ‘Communists, Mutineers, they'll burn them alive if you don't send help, Shingle Street' Shingle Street,' was all that she would mutter over and over again.

Limp and utterly exhausted she sagged upon the arms of the two men until at a gesture from their superior they led her to a chair, where she flopped inert, her head lolling forward on her chest.

‘Send for the Colonel,' said the bald man, and with infinite overwhelming relief Ann knew that her task was accomplished. She dozed for a moment, but just as she was going off again the thought of time flashed into her mind once more. How long had she been, and could the rescuing force reach Shingle Street before dawn.

Jerking up her head, she gazed round the room, and through dull eyes saw the face of a big white clock. Yes, she had done it, the black hands stood at a quarter to four. She had taken
only three hours and a quarter to do that terrible journey.

She smiled then, wanly but happily; with horses or bicycles they would easily get to Shingle Street before six.

Next moment the door opposite to her opened, the bald man stood up deferentially at his desk, the others came to attention and a khaki figure entered. He stood there staring into her face for a second and then he stepped forward.

‘Well I never! if it ain't little big eyes turned up again!' and she found herself staring into the blotched unhealthy face of Private—now Communist Colonel—Brisket.

For the moment Ann's state of collapse saved her. Utterly overwhelmed by the appearance of Brisket and all that his new authority portended, after the continual stresses which she had sustained in the last thirty hours—she fainted.

Despite her forlorn and bedraggled appearance he still regarded her with a lecherous stare from one small hot eye; the other, which she had injured three weeks before, remained hidden under a black shade.

Take 'er away,' he said suddenly, ‘over to the 'otel opposite an' give 'er a bed in one of the guarded rooms. She's an old frien' of mine, is big eyes, an' I'll enjoy a little talk with 'er ter-morrer—'op to it.'

The other men jumped to obey his order and Ann was carried out, across the square and up the stairs of a small commercial hotel which had been taken over by the Ipswich Soviet. They pushed open the door of a small bedroom, flung her on the bed, and left her, locking the door behind them.

She moaned a little and came out of her faint, but hardly regained consciousness; the room was dark, her muscles at last relaxed and almost instantly she fell into a deep, dreamless slumber.

‘Wake up,' shouted a voice, ‘wake up, will you,' and feeling her shoulder violently shaken she groaned, then opened her eyes to stare round the strange room lit by the afternoon sunshine.

Momentarily she remained dazed, then the details of her desperate but useless venture came back to her.

‘You're wanted,' said the man who had woken her, ‘come on now.'

With an effort she slid off the bed. Every bone in her body seemed to be racked with shooting pains, her throat was dry and parched, her head splitting. As she caught sight of herself in the mirror of the cheap dressing-table, she gave a little gasp.
Her clothes were torn and mud-stained, her hair a matted tangle, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen. Picking up a towel from the washstand she dipped it in the water jug and began to dab her face but the man pulled it away from her.