The bell at midnight
Cinderkin now come out of the old shaft in packs and go for the bread in your pantries. The first blow on a door wakes the home, and someone has to run for the bell.
The nights in Ashwell were too easy. A Cinderkin came out of the old shaft every quarter of an hour, alone, and alone it was easy to club. The watch could take them one at a time all night and stay fit.
So now they come in packs. Up to four leave a shaft at once, a pack an hour from 22:00 till 04:00. Over a whole night that is no more Cinderkin than before, at most 28 from one shaft, but they arrive together. One watchman who meets four at once gets hurt before he has beaten them all. And they come hungry. To a pack, a home’s pantry counts as half as far as food in any other building, so they will walk twice as far for bread in a tent as for bread on a shelf.
The film is the night the first shaft in Ashwell is broken open. For it, every tent with a grown-up in it has four loaves of bread in its pantry. At 23:00 four Ashpaws come out side by side and set off together, the front ones stopping now and then so the last one keeps up. They cross the meadow toward the camp, and just before midnight they reach the tent of Bridget Pennington and her daughter May. There the pack splits, and they start on the door.
Until now the bell went only once a door was half broken, which was far too late. Now the very first blow wakes the home. May stays inside, sitting up instead of asleep, and she gets no rest back while she can see a Cinderkin from the tent. Bridget runs for the bell. It still hangs on the wagon by the fire, and she runs there at two and a half times her walking speed.
The bell does not ring by itself. Someone has to get there, and that matters: a house far from the bell raises the alarm later than one next to it. If Bridget were hurt or killed on the way, the next in line would go instead. She gets there, and at 00:05 the bell peals, four strikes every six seconds, loud enough to carry across the whole camp. It used to be a single strike. Every bell now has its own pitch, too, so a town’s bell always sounds the same.
Then Ashwell turns out. Every grown-up who is not hurt comes out of their tent and goes for the nearest Cinderkin with bare hands. It takes six blows to bring an Ashpaw down that way, and it goes quicker two at a time. Eleanor Poole and young Noah stay inside, as old people and kids do, and so does May.