‘It’s frozen!’ Colin said. He stood, with the kettle in his hand, in front of the pump at the top of the garden, staring at it as if he could he get it to work with the force of his stare. ‘I didn’t know pumps could freeze. And my hands hurt now from the cold, I wish I had my gloves. What are we going to do if we can’t get water from the pump?’
‘We can melt snow,’ said Mary, who was picking up some more logs from under the silver birch tree in the corner of the Secret Garden. She wished she had brought them in last night, for these ones were not sheltered and had been covered in snow so now they were cold and wet. ‘Fill the kettle with snow and we’ll melt it on the fire.’
‘If you can get it going again. It looked pretty dead this morning. And we haven’t got many matches left.’
Indeed, thought Mary, it had been harder to light the fire yesterday morning than she had expected. When Martha did it, she only seemed to touch the flame to the kindling and the fire would blaze up. When Mary did it, it had taken most of the box of matches.
‘Of course I can get it going,’ she said crossly. She loved her cousin very much, but after a whole day and half spent with him without a respite she was finding his company increasingly irksome. He complained about everything! Though even Mary had to admit that this morning didn’t have quite the same magic that yesterday morning had brought. The snow was trampled and had lost its brightness and a sharp frost last night had frozen it into grey, glassy folds that were treacherously slippery underfoot. The sky above them was heavy and dark and the wind was biting.
‘Let’s get back inside and I’ll light the fire,’ she said.
As Colin had predicted, the fire was hard to light. She cleared away the ashes of yesterday’s fire and her hands were covered in ash and soot, and without the pump she wasn’t sure how she was going to get them properly clean again. She picked some tinder and kindling from her supply in the corner of the room and laid it in the centre of the fireplace. She put a match to it and the tinder blazed up, and soon the kindling had caught nicely.
‘There, you see? We’ll be warm in no time at all!’ she told Colin, but as she added the first of the sticks she had collected today she knew she had made a mistake. The wood was too wet. It steamed and sizzled in the heat from the kindling, but it didn’t catch, and soon the kindling had all burnt away and there was no fire. She tried again, but the same thing happened.
‘It’s not working. We’re going to freeze to death here,’ Colin grumbled.
‘Well, wrap yourself in a blanket if you’re cold. At least we’re not going to starve, because we’ve still got the bread Cook sent us, and there’s some of the pie left for our dinner.’
She used some of the snow to clean her hands as best as she could, but her nails were grimy with soot.
‘What would Miss Prosser say to these?’ she said, showing her nails to Colin. ‘You’ll never be a fine young lady with fingernails like that!’ She hoped he would laugh at her impression of Miss Prosser.
Colin didn’t laugh. He shook his head. ‘She’d be right,’ he said, grimly, as he opened the canvas bag and got out the bread. It had been fresh and delicious yesterday, today it was cold and stale, and the crusts were hard to eat. He chewed and chewed. ‘It’s better than nothing,’ he said. ‘Marginally better than nothing.’
‘After breakfast, why don’t we go into the garden and –’
‘I don’t want to go outside. It’s too cold and wet. It makes my chest wheeze.’
‘Then we could read?’ she suggested, gesturing towards the books on the table. There was his favourite, Treasure Island just waiting to be picked up.
‘The light in here isn’t bright enough. It makes my eyes ache.’
‘I have some playing cards. We could have a game of racing demons.’
‘My hands are too cold and sore. I wouldn’t be able to hold the cards.’ He pulled the blanket more tightly around himself.
‘Then what do you want to do?’ she snapped.
‘I want to go home.’
‘Well, we can’t. Imagine how much trouble we’ll be in. They’ll punish us.’
‘We’re going to be punished anyway, sooner or later. We’ll have to go back sometime.’
‘We can’t go back until your father comes home.’
‘And then he’ll punish us for running away. This was a bad idea, Mary, and I wish you’d never thought of it.’
‘So do I,’ she said, ‘but I did, and we’re here now. Two or three more days, that’s all. Just two or three more days, Colin.’
‘That’s two or three too many.’
‘You must be brave! Like in Treasure Island, remember, you wanted an adventure?’
‘This isn’t an adventure. It’s a disaster.’
Liz Taylorson 