Where is Claire?

Bettina came over and wriggled between Mirabelle and the gondola wall. The others paid no notice as their dispute became more heated. They were all shouting, or in the case of Gerhardt, muttering while bailing.

“Why don’t we do what we did before?” Gerhardt said. “Let a little gas out and tighten the net. If it doesn’t unstick us you can go back to yelling at each other then.”

“What if we get unstuck and plunge off the top of a waterfall without enough gas to pull us up?” Mirabelle asked.

“What if we just sit here until we die of old age?” Adolphus sneered.

“Why don’t we push you overboard and see how far to the waterfall?” Annabelle leaned forward, but whatever act of unsisterly violence may have tempted her, Gerhardt interrupted her.

“Claire? What do you think we should do?”

His answer was the rushing of the river and the scraping of the hull.

Adolphus and the twins spun away from their argument and scanned the tiny gondola. Claire was not there.

“By golly!” Adolphus ran over to the Count’s cupboard and found it empty. “The Count has escaped!”

“The emergency hatchet is gone,” Mirabelle said.

“Where is all the line the Count was tied with?” said Annabelle.

“Claire gone,” said Bettina.

“Yes, love, we know.”

“The Count has absconded with her!” Adolphus ground his fist into his palm. “Now we’ll have to loose the balloons to pursue him.”

Bettina sighed, and pointed to the gondola door. It was ajar, held open by the missing line, which was tied to an interior hasp and trailing into the river.

“Claire gone on rope.”

“And the Count?” Adolphus asked.

“Gone not on rope.”

“Good Lord! The fellow just jumped?”

“Ran away.” Bettina nodded.

“Before or after Claire?” Annabelle asked.

“Before. Claire need his rope.”

“She’s abandoned ship!” Adolphus declared.

“If she’s still tied to the ship I don’t think she’s abandoned it,” said Gerhardt.

“What is she up to?” Mirabelle sounded cross.

“I wish she’d tell anyone!” Annabelle said.

The children looked at each other, but no one had an answer.

“Well,” Mirabelle said at last, “now we can’t get unstuck without running her down. Let’s work on Gerhardt’s calculation. That way we’ll know how long we can wait for her. We can always pull her back in if we have to.”

“There’s a hasp just outside the door. Let’s tie her line to the outside and get this door shut before we all drown.”

Adolphus was not keen on mathematics, so he took over the bailing while the others worked. Bettina folded paper boats to float across the gondola floor as the water rose. The water sloshed around their ankles, and Annabelle kept an anxious eye on the yeti, watching to see that its nose was above the water.

“The line is tight,” Adolphus announced. “She’s either at the end of it or coming back against the current.”

“I wish she’d hurry,” Mirabelle said. “We’re all going to have to abandon ship soon, and I’d like to know what we’re going to use to float that yeti out of here. We can’t just leave it to drown.”

“I’d worry about us if I were you,” Adolphus said.

“We can follow Claire’s line if we have to,” his brother said, “but I don’t know what we can do for the yeti.”

The water still rose, sloshing over the ears of the unconscious creature. The children were all bailing now; calculation and observation both showing that their little craft, no matter how air-worthy, would not protect them from the watery deep.

“Dash it, where’s Claire?” Adolphus burst out. “And why has she taken the axe? We should be cutting this old heap apart for a barge!”

“You know,” Annabelle said, reluctant to acknowledge her brother’s point, “if we all sat on the roof and could somehow cut away the rest of the ship…”

“We’d lose the engines,” Mirabelle said. “We’d have no way to steer.”

“We could bring ballast, and fly her like a hot air balloon flies!”

Gerhardt shook his head, recognizing the gleam in his brother’s eye that had brought trouble upon him so many times before. “Let’s not do anything hasty. Let’s just prop up the yeti’s head and wait for Claire.”

He and Bettina gathered their discarded winter coats and capes and muffs, struggled to raise the massive animal’s head, and shoved them underneath. As they worked, their older siblings discussed various schemes for breaking up the ship, comparing the various dangers presented by each new idea.

The water rose.

.

.

This story began with On Grandmothers. The previous episode was Airships Float? and the next is Drowning.