'Mad Meg's been here,' I said. 'She picks up empty tins and rubbish along the roads and strings them on bits of cord. She likes shiny things. She's rather like a magpie.'
A pie plate, a rusty Bovril tin, a bit of silver from a radiator shell, and a bent soup spoon, like some grotesque Gothic fishing lure, twisted slowly this way and that in the sun.
Rupert shook his head and turned his attention back to the choke and the throttle. As we reached the peak of Gibbet Hill, the motor emitted a most frightful bang, and with a sucking gurgle, died. The van jerked to a halt as Rupert threw on the hand brake.
I could see by the deep lines on his face that he was nearly exhausted. He pounded at the steering wheel with his fists.
'Don't say it,' Nialla said. 'We have company.'
I thought for a moment she was referring to me, but her finger was pointing through the windscreen to the side of the lane, where a dark, grimy face peered out at us from the depths of a hedgerow.
'It's Mad Meg,' I said. 'She lives in there somewhere--somewhere in the wood.'
As Meg came scuttling alongside the van, I felt Nialla shrink back.
'Don't worry, she's really quite harmless.'
Meg, in a tattered outfit of rusty black bombazine, looked like a vulture that had been sucked up by a tornado and spat back out. A red glass cherry bobbed cheerfully from a wire on her black flowerpot hat.
'Ay, harmless,' Meg said, conversationally, at the open window. ''Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.' Hello, Flavia.'
'These are my friends, Meg--Rupert and Nialla.'
In view of the fact that we were crammed together cheek-by-jowl in the Austin, I thought it would be all right to call Rupert by his Christian name.
Meg took her time staring at Nialla. She reached out a filthy finger and touched Nialla's lipstick. Nialla cringed slightly, but covered it nicely with a tiny counterfeit sneeze.
'It's Tangee,' she said brightly. 'Theatrical Red. Changes color when you put it on. Here, give it a try.'
It was a magnificent job of acting, and I had to give her top marks for the way in which she disguised her fear with an open and cheery manner.
I had to shift a bit so that she could fish in her pocket for the lipstick. As she held it out, Meg's filthy fingers snapped the golden tube from her hand. Without taking her eyes from Nialla's face, Meg painted a broad swathe of the stuff across her chapped and dirty lips, pressing them together as if she were drinking from a straw.
'Lovely!' Nialla said. 'Gorgeous!'
Again she reached into her pocket and extracted an enamel powder compact, an exquisite thing of flame orange cloisonne, shaped like a butterfly. She flipped it open to reveal the little round mirror in the lid, and after a quick glance at herself, handed it over to Meg.
'Here, have a look.'
In a flash, Meg had seized the compact and was scrutinizing herself in the glass, turning her head animatedly from side to side. Satisfied with what she saw, she rewarded us with a broad grin that revealed the black gaps left by several missing teeth.
'Lovely!' she muttered. 'Smashing!' And she shoved the orange butterfly into her pocket.
'Here!--' Rupert made a grab for it, and Meg drew back, startled, as if noticing him for the first time. Her smile vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.
'I know you,' she said darkly, her eyes fixed on his goatee. 'You're the Devil, you are. Aye, that's what's gone and happened--the Devil's come back to Gibbet Wood.'
And with that, she stepped backwards into the hedgerow and was gone.
Rupert climbed awkwardly out of the van and slammed the door.
'Rupert--' Nialla called out. But rather than going into the bushes after Meg, as I thought he would, Rupert walked a short distance up the road, looked round a bit, and then came slowly back, his feet stirring up the dust.
'It's only a gentle slope, and we're no more than a stone's throw from the top,' he reported. 'If we can push her up as far as that old chestnut, we can coast down the far side. Might even start her up again. Like to steer, Flavia?'
Although I had spent hours sitting in Harriet's old Phantom II in our coach house, it had been always for purposes of reflection or escape. I had never actually been in control of a moving motorcar. Although the idea was not unattractive at first, I quickly realized that I had no real desire to find myself hurtling out of control down the east side of Gibbet Hill, and coming to grief among the scenery.
'No,' I said. 'Perhaps Nialla--'
'Nialla doesn't like to drive,' he snapped.
I knew at once that I had put my foot in it, so to speak. By suggesting that Nialla steer, I was at the same time suggesting that Rupert get off his backside and push--withered leg and all.
'What I meant,' I said, 'was that you're probably the only one of us who can get the motor started again.'
It was the oldest trick in the book: Appeal to his manly vanity, and I was proud to have thought of it.
'Right,' he said, clambering back into the driving seat.
Nialla scrambled out, and I behind her. Any thoughts I might have had about the wisdom of someone in her
