Mekkins fell back before her assault, unable to strike Rebecca, even though he was bigger and more powerful and could almost have killed her with one blow. Instead, he warded off her blows, or dodged the wilder ones, until her rage was spent and she was stooped and sobbing before him.
‘So much killing in the system,’ she cried. ‘He hates everymole and every living thing. I tried… to show him how much I loved him, but he can’t hear me…’ She sighed deeply and looked out into the evening.
Then, to Mekkins’ amazement, for he was just beginning to think he felt the depths of her sudden grief, she laughed in a tearful way: ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘this mole Bracken’s not dead. He couldn’t be, you see. He couldn’t be.’
She turned to Mekkins inquisitorially and said, ‘Did you see him dead?’ And Mekkins, who could not keep up with Rebecca’s changes of mood or understand them, had to admit that he hadn’t. But then, how could you see if a mole who had gone over a cliff was dead?
‘No, no,’ said Rebecca, ‘he’s not dead. Or if he is, he’s not.’
With this mysterious comment Rebecca fell silent, and Mekkins fell to thinking that the Duncton system was going mad.
‘Bloody ’ell,’ he thought to himself, ‘I’m going mad.’
He told himself this because he felt a peculiar sense of escape coming over him that his commonsense character could do nothing at all to hold back. It was as if after weeks of misery his body could again feel the space and trees about him, and his paws feel the firm soil he loved so much. And just as Rebecca had asked ‘Who is he?’ of Bracken, he now found himself asking ‘Who is she?’ of Rebecca.
For, faced by Rebecca’s absolute conviction that Bracken was alive, Mekkins found himself delightfully able to believe that this impossibility was, in fact, true. At the same time, in the space of this short conversation, Mekkins had shed, like last year’s winter, whatever loyalty to Mandrake he might have had left. Duncton Wood could go and jump over the cliff as far as he was concerned. He was a Marshender first, foremost and for ever, and that was all he wanted to be.
‘Maybe you’re right after all,’ he said finally, getting up and playfully pushing her with his shoulder. Rebecca laughed with him and the July evening was warm again, the insects hurrying and busy with their life.
‘Take care, Mekkins,’ she called after him as he left her for the Marsh End, as if she knew he had changed and made a decision about himself that would cause him trouble if he was to honour it. Mekkins found in going that he hated to leave her.
The end of July and the beginning of August turned out to be a time of delicious chatter and idleness. The females who had littered in spring were well clear of their young, who had gone off to find their own burrows and tunnels, while the males had lost their aggressiveness. Moles rarely came right to the centre of Rebecca’s system, as Mekkins had done, but out on its periphery, or on the edge of other moles’ systems, Rebecca spent a lot of time with them, talking and learning new lore of the wood.
Her springtime fascination with plants continued and she was especially interested in what the older females had to say about how herbs could heal all kinds of ills and aches, if only a mole knew how to use them. Again and again the name that cropped up was Rose the Healer’s, who was said, though nomole was certain, to live on the pastures! This was always whispered in a hush and gave Rose a special air of mystery that resulted in Rebecca regarding her with a great deal of awe.
‘What’s she like?’ Rebecca would ask, but nomole seemed to express him- or herself the same way about her.
‘She’m the most understanding creature I do know,’ one would say.
‘Commonsensical—that’s the word I’d use,’ another would pronounce.
‘Rose? Ah, well, Rebecca, if you want to know Rose, you get her to tell you a story. She’s good at that.’
Rose appeared to possess, for each mole that talked to her, the one characteristic they liked in another mole best of all. Rebecca wanted to meet her for lots of reasons, but most of all because of what she might be able to tell her about herbs.
However, Rose’s appearances and disappearances were as mysterious and unpredictable as everything else about her. You didn’t arrange to meet Rose—she just appeared.
It was at the beginning of August that Rebecca heard a snatch of an old rhyme that so intrigued her that she decided to make another herbal journey down towards the Marsh End. The snippet she heard was this:
When white stars have shone,
When their petals have gone,
Then pick thy ramson.
‘Ramson’ was the old word for wild garlic and everymole knew how good that was in times of trouble. Hearing that it grew in the darker and moister parts of the Marsh End, she was at first put off trying to find it, but then one old female claimed to have seen it in a bit of a damp patch over where the Marsh End butted on to the pastures and so, hoping to avoid the dark places she did not like by keeping to the wood’s edge, Rebecca set off one dawn to find it.
But it was more than just the desire to find ramson that drove her out of the safety of her burrow. She had felt ill at ease for several days, unhappy, uncertain—as if there was something that needed seeing to just around the corner, but she didn’t know what. She had kept looking over her shoulder. It nagged at her and made her restless, so the journey to find the ramson was a good means of giving way to her restlessness. There had been a shower sometime in the night, and as the morning warmed, the wood’s floor grew steamy, while droplets of rain fell off the bramble and ivy where Rebecca had to take to the surface.
Quite what ‘white stars’ referred to, she wasn’t sure, but the rest seemed to make sense. ‘You’ll know the place by the perfume, if you can call it that,’ she was told, and she spent a happy morning sniffing her way along the pasture edge, seeking out a ‘perfume’ that wasn’t quite a perfume.
Lower and lower down the hill she went, among the long summer grasses and bracken, and stopping with delight by a stray wild honeysuckle that entwined itself among a stand of brambles. Scent after scent came to her—nettles, oak bark, ants, cow dung, the most delicate aroma of fungi, but nothing that smelt like the way ramson sounded.
Still, it was a nice day and that part of the wood felt safe, provided you didn’t stray too far beyond the cover of the trees. By midmorning she was sleepy and dozed off in a warm, dry old burrow she found.
She awoke in a delicious summertime reverie, when each thought comes crystal clear but leisurely. She was aware of birdsong around her and the gentle buzz of flies and bees along the edge of the wood. The thought she was thinking was how curious it was that some parts of the wood seemed safer than others, carrying in their every plant and creature a greater sense of peace and calm. She had mentioned this feeling to other moles before now, but they looked puzzled and didn’t seem to understand what she was talking about.
Still, on a day like this, what did it matter what other moles thought? Indeed, it didn’t even matter much that she couldn’t find the wild garlic, because there were plenty of other things to experience.
She listened to a blackbird hopping impatiently about the wood’s floor, turning over this and that in search of grubs; she came upon a dusty little ants’ nest and, as once before, tried licking up one or two. They tasted horrible and she spat them out again.