Power!”
“We can’t do that, Jeff. We’re getting too old to turn pirate,” Martha said.
“I felt the power coming back to me, just as when I was a young man,” Pitt said, looking at no one.
“Standing there with my bow, I suddenly knew I could kill a man again. Gor… It’s a miracle…”
They looked at him without understanding.
Greybeard said, “Let’s be practical. We could not manage this ship. Nor could we get it out of the Sea of Barks.”
“Martha’s right,” Charley said. “We’ve no moral right to pinch their boat, scoundrels though they may be.”
Jingadangelow straightened himself up and adjusted his toga. “If you’ve all finished arguing, kindly leave my cabin. I must remind you that this room is private and sacred. There will be no more trouble, I can assure you of that.”
As they left, Martha saw a wild dark eye regarding them through a rent in the curtain over the far window.
When Hagbourne appeared late that afternoon, it emerged not out of the mist but from curtains of heavy rain, for the morning mist had been dispersed by a wind that brought showers with it. They died away as the steamer was secured along a stone quay, and the line of the Berkshire Downs rose behind the small town.
The town Jingadangelow called his base appeared almost deserted. Only three ancient men were there to greet the steamer and help tie it up. The disembarkation that followed lent some life to the dreary scene.
Greybeard’s party detached their own boats warily from the steamer’s crew. Jingadangelow did not give the appearance of a fighting man. What they did not expect was the appearance of Becky, who came up as they were loading their belongings into the dinghy.
She set her head on one side and pointed her sharp nose up at Greybeard.
“The Master sent me to speak with you. He says you owe him some labour for the privilege of the tow he gave you.”
“We’d have done his work if he hadn’t attacked Greybeard,” Charley said. “That was attempted murder, that was. Those that worship false gods shall be damned for ever, Becky, so you better watch it.”
“You keep your tongue to yourself, Charley Samuels, afore you speak like that to a priestess of the Second Generation. I didn’t come to talk to you anyhow.” She turned her back pointedly on him and said to Greybeard, “The Master always carries true forgiveness in his heart. He bears you no malice, and would like to give you shelter for the night. There is a place he has empty that you could use. It’s his offer, not mine, or I wouldn’t be making it. To think you struggled with him, laying hand on his person, you did!”
“We don’t want his hospitality,” Martha said firmly. Greybeard turned to her and took her hands, and said over his shoulder to Becky, “Tell your Master we will be glad to accept the offer of shelter for the night. And see that we get someone with a civil tongue to take us to it.”
As she shuffled back up the gangplank, Greybeard said urgently to Martha, “We can’t just leave without finding out more about that young girl of Jingadangelow’s, where she comes from and what’s going to happen to her. The night looks stormy in any case. We are surely in no danger, and will be glad of dry billets.
Let’s bide here.”
Martha arched what would, in a different lifetime, have been her eyebrows. “I admit I don’t understand the interest that untrustworthy rascal holds for you. The attractions of that girl, Chammoy, are altogether more obvious.”
“Don’t be a silly little woman,” he said gently.
“We will do as you wish.”
A flush spread from his face over the dome of his head. “Chammoy has no effect on me,” he said, and turned to instruct Pitt about the baggage.
The quarters that Jingadangelow offered them proved to be good. Hagbourne was an untidy ruin of drab twentieth-century houses, many of them council-built; but at one end of the town, in a section Jingadangelow had chosen for the use of himself and his disciples, were buildings and houses in an older, less anaemic tradition. Over the area, vegetation grew thick. Most of the rest of the place was besieged by plants, elder, dock, willow herb, sorrel, nettle, and the ubiquitous brambles. Beyond the town, the growth was of a different nature. The sheep that once cropped short the grass of the downland had long ago disappeared.