Chapter Eight #2
“Prices they’re charging for a motor taxi ride around here?” Garner curled his lip. “No, thanks. They can keep their bloody internal combustion engines. For all I care, they can keep their bloody twentieth century, too.”
He was a big, untidy man with a scarred and weathered face, shrewd blue eyes, and a short temper covering for deeper sorrows, thickening in the waist and jowls now as he moved steadily into his sixties.
He’d shaved his head to preempt baldness a few years back, wore a grubby woolen cap over the resulting sheen.
In his youth, he’d been a fell runner and a pugilist of some local note.
When the Forest came and took his farm, he worked in re-clearance for a while, made a name for himself by slaughtering a Huldu scout with his bare hands.
Steady work as a woodsman followed, some successes that only added to his reputation, and it probably would have gone on that way if he hadn’t broken a leg in a deadfall somewhere beyond Tegg’s Nose.
Famously, Garner had dragged himself back alone, hand over hand, to civilization.
It took him two days, and the fracture was far from a clean break to begin with.
Now he walked with a heavy limp and took what work he could find—sometimes as a contract inquiry agent, sometimes as an adviser on local Forest conditions. Duncan had heard he was writing a book.
“You know they’re going to start banning horses in town sooner or later, don’t you? Already got letters to the editor in the Erlsley Evening News, bitching about dung in the streets. Just a matter of time, really.”
“Aye, well, until that happens, Mabel and I do well enough.”
“Sounds like you’re married to her. Is he married to you, Mabel?” Sidling up to the big brown mare, rubbing along the hard bony flat of her forehead. “Is he married to you, is he?”
“Stop that, tha clown!”
Mabel, to be fair, seemed to feel the same.
She rolled her eyes and nickered nervously.
Horses in general weren’t at their best around Duncan—perhaps they sensed something of the same thing Crammond’s girl did with her tinker’s sight.
Perhaps the stink of the Forest and the Huldu was on him, and no amount of time or bathing would wash it off.
Or maybe it was just that every horse he came near kicked his mind violently back to the shelled-out roads and churned mud at the Somme, the screaming of the pack and wagon horses as they lay shattered and dying, or thrashed about and tried to rise in the tangle of the traces and their own blown-out intestines.
He’d been on detail putting them out of their misery more than once.
It remained one of the most gut-wrenching things he’d ever had to do in uniform.
So perhaps Mabel, with some animal sense long ago blunted in humans, could feel the memories rise in him, and somehow make connection back to the death and pain of hundreds of thousands of her own kind.
He climbed aboard the buggy and let Garner cluck Mabel into motion. They tugged forward, rattled away from the station and into the streets of the town.
“Lot of luggage tha’ve got there,” Garner commented. “Planning on staying long?”
“Depends. You find out anything useful yet?”
“Not sure tha’d call it useful. But there’s summat strange about thy lass Irene Rush.
First of all, that job she had didn’t dry up like tha said.
Folk at Caulders were very happy with her, everyone I spoke to anyroad.
Makes sense; Grade C3 clerical workers don’t exactly grow on trees in these parts, and it seems she came highly recommended.
Lovely girl, delighted to have her, fitted right in—so on, so forth.
But when tha push any of them for detail, there’s nowt.
For a lass that made such a good impression, they don’t remember a whole lot about her. ”
Duncan frowned. It didn’t sound like the Irene Rush he’d met two days ago. She’d made quite an impression then.
“Paperwork?” he asked.
“Nowt I could get to see. Tha want to go back and grease a few palms, we might get further ahead. But I wouldn’t count thy chickens.”
“What about the house?”
“Seen it from the outside. It’s closed up right now, couldn’t find the landlord.”
“Talk to the neighbors?”
“No. By the time I got across to Dowgreave, it were late. Near dark. Villages round here, nobody likes to be out at that hour, and they mostly won’t answer the door either.”
“Welcome to Indian Country,” said Duncan sourly. “Christ, they got streetlamps around here, don’t they?”
“Aye, and the Forest less than a quarter mile away in most directions. Not sure if tha’ve noticed, lad, but we’re not in the big city anymore.”
“Seems not.”
Though, in fairness, attitudes to the hours of darkness weren’t much different in Erlsley, not least as you got toward the outskirts.
Duncan was being an arse, and he knew it.
Thorns snagged in his head—Ellie Furlough’s sleeping bouts, Niamh’s breathing, the whole wide fucking tortured world beyond.
He wanted to kill something with his bare hands.
“I guess we’d better go over there right away,” he said, attempting a softer tone. “Before it gets dark all over again.”
“Hold thy horses. Let’s get thee installed at the Mare first. And tha can stand me a pint on account.”
The White Mare Inn was much as he remembered it from the year before—low ceilings beamed in oak, rough plastered walls and small, heavy framed windows, the pervasive but not unpleasant smell of recently spilled ale.
The landlady, a gaunt war widow whose name Duncan had managed to forget all over again, was building a fire in the lounge bar as they arrived.
She had her eldest son run Duncan’s bags up to his room, then went behind the bar to get their drinks.
True to his word, Garner ordered a pint of some obscure local brew.
Duncan settled for Whyte & Mackay and water.
They took a table in the comfy gloom of a corner, clinked glasses, and drank.
Garner sank a good opening portion of his ale in one swallow, came up for air with a sigh of satisfaction that somehow made Duncan envy him.
They sat in silence for a while.
“Tha like this one, then,” Garner rumbled finally.
“Sorry?”
“The widow Rush. She’s got thee, eh?”
Duncan gave him a hard stare. “She’s paid me.”
“Aye, I’m sure that’s it.”
“You think I’d go to the Forest for what, for fun? To impress a woman?”
Garner sank a little deeper into his chair. He sipped at his ale, squinted at Duncan, as if seeing him clearly in the gloom of the bar was hard. “Never have been very sure why tha go, lad, truth be told. Most men in this trade, I can read. Not thee.”
Duncan shrugged. “It’s a living. It’s no worse than the war.”
“Well, I’ll have to take thy word for that.” Even when the draft rolled around in ’16, Garner’s farm exempted him from service. He never saw combat, never put on a uniform. “But there’s something burning in thee, lad. I smell it plain as day, but I’m damned if I know what it is.”
“You’re telling me there’s nothing burning in you? Christ, man, they took your farm. They take our fucking children.” Duncan saw the flinch in the other man’s eyes, jumped hurriedly on. “Garner, you were doing this stuff even before the Forest came. Before anyone else believed in it.”
“Oh, plenty of us believed. Plenty of us always have. It weren’t all steam trains and iron bridges and Royal Societies back then, despite what they prattle.
Brunel and Darwin and Davy and the like, the great, grand leap of British science and engineering, propelling the empire into the modern age.
That’s a Crystal Palace fairy tale Kipling and his ilk liked to write poems about.
It’s pure propaganda, lad. Outside the cities?
We’ve always known the Huldu were there. ”
“Aye—and you went to war with them.”
Garner snorted. “War? I went into Macclesfield Forest twice—once to get my own son back, and once again nearly ten years later for a friend. Hardly call that going to war.”
“Maybe you should have. Maybe if you’d taken the fight to them more often, they’d have thought twice about bringing it to us.”
“They did think twice.” Leaning in, earnest. “Lad, back then the Fae were careful, they were penned up in the last few bits of woodland we’d left them, hiding from all our iron, shrunk to myths and old wives’ tales.
This changeling thing didn’t happen all the time like it does now.
It were occasional then, once or twice every ten or twelve year.
We’d no need to go to war with them, as tha put it.
We went to war with each other instead, and look what we did.
We touched off a horror that’s shattered our whole grip on the world.
The Huldu didn’t do this to us—we did it to ourselves. ”
Duncan studied the depths of his whisky. “I know a Guards colonel who’d give you an argument about that.”
“The powers that be will always lie to thee, lad. Never forget that. They lied to get everyone into uniform and slaughtered under German guns. Tha think they won’t lie again to get our young men charging into t’ Forest by divisions and dying there, or coming out screaming insane?
Dulce et decorum est, same as it bloody ever was. ”
It was a fair analysis, and to be sure, Garner had reason enough for his bitterness. But, as always, cries of injustice from men who weren’t actually there tended to sour Duncan’s blood a little.
He knocked back his drink, gestured at Garner with the empty glass. “Come on, finish that up. Let’s go see this house.”