“There’s a live pigeon inside,” said Roger. “Listen to it.”
“You’ve not got much time,” said the porter. “Cut the string there, and pull out the peg. All these small pigeon-baskets open the same way. Wait a minute. Best bring it beyond the roofing, so it gets a fair start in t’ open.”
“Let it go?” said Titty. “We’ll never catch it again.”
The porter laughed. “They’ve been sending one for me to fly for them every other day this last week. Name of Blackett, the folk sending ’em.”
“We’re going to stay with them,” said Titty.
“Pigeon’ll be there long before what you will.”
Roger had cut the string and pulled out the peg.
“I can see its eye,” he said.
They had walked nearly to the end of the platform, beyond the end of the station roof and were standing in the open air beside the engine.
“Let the door fall,” said the porter. “Hold up the basket … There she goes …”
The wicker door fell open. The shining bronze and grey head of the pigeon showed for a moment. Pink claws gripped the edge of the door. The basket was suddenly lighter, and Roger felt as if he himself had tossed the pigeon up into the air. It flew up above the roof, above the drifting white steam from the engine, and swung round in circles above the house tops, above the cricket ground, while the porter and Titty and Roger watched it. The engine-driver and the fireman leaned out from the footboard to see it too. Suddenly, when it was already no more than a circling grey speck, hard to see in the dazzling summer sky, the pigeon seemed to make up its mind and was off, north-west, straight into the sun, towards the blue hills of the lake country.
“I can still see it,” said Titty.
“I can’t,” said Roger. “Oh yes I can … No. It’s gone.”
“You’d better hurry back,” said the porter, and he nodded to the engine-driver, who nodded in return, as much as to promise not to start until they were in the train. The guard’s whistle blew just as they reached the carriage.
“Look here,” said Roger to Titty as secretly as he could. “Oughtn’t we to give the porter something?”
Titty was already digging in her purse.
“That’s all right,” said the porter. “You keep it for pigeon food.”
“But it’s not our pigeon,” said Titty.
“No matter,” said the porter, closed the door on them, and waved a friendly hand as the train pulled out.
“Thank you very much,” they shouted at him from the window.
“What was all the to do?” said the farmer’s wife, who had now counted all her parcels and was sitting in a corner of the carriage with her hands folded on her lap. “Pigeon to loose? Now my son down in t’ south, he’s a great one for pigeons. Starts flying ’em when they’re nobbut squeakers, he calls ’em. He flies ’em further and further, and before summer’s out he’s sending ’em up here to dad and me, and we loose ’em for him in t’ morning and they’ve flown all t’ length of England before dark.”
“Do you send messages by them?” asked Titty.
“Love from home,” said the farmer’s wife. “Aye. Dad’s put that on a scrap of paper and tied it in the ring on a pigeon’s leg before now.”
“I say,” said Roger. “That’s what Peggy meant when she wrote in her letter that they’d got something better than semaphore messages for this year.”
“Isn’t it a good thing we were able to come?” said Titty. “We might have had to wait at school.”
Roger leaned out of the window, with his eyes screwed up against the wind.
“I can’t see a sign of that pigeon,” he said.
“It went off at such a lick,” said Titty. “The train’ll never catch it up.”
“Far to fly?” asked the farmer’s wife.
“It’s a house called Beckfoot at the other side of the lake.”
“Mrs Blackett’s?”
“Do you know her?”
LETTING FLY
“Aye, and her daughters too, and her brother Mr Turner that’s for ever gallivanting off to foreign parts …”
“We know him too,” said Roger. “We call him …” And he stopped short. There was no point in giving away Captain Flint’s name to natives.
“You’ve been here before, likely,” said the farmer’s wife.
“Oh yes,” said Titty. “We always stay at Holly Howe … at least mother does … but Mrs Jackson’s got visitors for the next two weeks … Mrs Blackett’s having us till then because mother didn’t want Bridget to give us all whooping-cough.”
“We’ve come straight from school,” said Roger.
“Eh,” said the farmer’s wife. “I know all about you. You’ll be the young folk that were camping on the island down the lake two years since when Mr Turner had his houseboat broke into. And you were here again last winter when the lake was froze over. But I thought there was four of you …”
“Five, with Bridget,” said Titty. “John and Susan must be here already. It isn’t so far from their schools.”
“And weren’t you friends with the two at Mrs Dixon’s?”
“Dick and Dorothea Callum,” said Titty. “They won’t be here for ages yet, because their father has to correct examination papers.”
It had been a long day’s journey from the south, but the last few minutes of it were going like seconds. Already they were in the hill country where walls of loose stones divided field from field. Grey rocks showed through the withered grass. Grey and purple fells lifted to the skies. Titty and Roger hurried from side to side of the carriage, looking first out of one window and then out of another.
“Fair parched everything is,” said the farmer’s wife. “No rain for weeks and none coming, and no water in the becks. Folks are at their wits’ ends in some parts to keep their beasts alive.”
“Hullo!” said Roger. “There’s been a fire.”
“More’n one,” said the farmer’s wife.
The train was running through a cutting, the sides of which were black and burnt.
“Sparks from the engine?” said Roger.
“Aye,” said the farmer’s wife. “And where there’s no engines there’s visitors with motor-cars and matches and cigarettes and no more thought in their heads than a cheese has. It takes nobbut a spark to start a fire when all’s bone dry for the kindling. Eh, and here we are. Yon’s my farm …”
A farmhouse, not unlike Holly Howe, flashed into sight and was gone. The farmer’s wife jumped up and began collecting her parcels. The train came suddenly round a bend and began to slow up.
“There’s the lake!” Titty and Roger cried together.
Far below them, beyond the smoking chimneys of a village, glittering water stretched between the hills. The train was stopping for the last time.
“The platform’s on the other side,” said Roger.