Chapter Twenty-One #2
Duncan’s mother makes a small, hopeless noise. He thinks he hears footfalls across the room. He hears his father’s voice soften, can hope he’s gone to her, put a kind hand on her shoulder or held her cheek…
Julia, listen. It’s only a few months until he’s gone. And you’ll weep from lack of him then, you know you will. Make the effort, woman. If you want back on the laudanum, I’ll allow it, provided Elsie keeps a check on dosage with you every day—
She sniffs. I don’t need laudanum.
But it helped last time, did it not?
Did it? Something despairing in her voice now, something broken. He hears her keening, down at the lower limits of his hearing. He’s gone. My bonnie lad, he’s gone again.
She tries, though. All through that spring and summer until the school year at Cadogan’s begins and Finlay takes him in the trap to the train, she does her best. But her embraces are conditional, braced and wary, her voice will often falter when she talks to him, and a shadow crosses her face as often as not whenever he enters a room.
Cadogan’s, when he gets there, for all its casual, boyish brutalities and dour, cold-water discipline, comes as a relief. A relief he can feel in every fiber of his being.
It’s an arena he knows only too well how to fight in.
—
Duncan gave it until sunset before he set out.
In part, it was simple prudence. Faces are harder to see in the gloom, harder still to recall.
And Maltby Ferry was his easiest way home—at best, there’d be a late bus back to Erlsley; at worst he could get a bed for the night in the village.
The ferry itself could be hailed from the Forest side until eight o’clock, he knew, but he preferred not to take the last crossing, where he’d likely be either the solitary passenger or one among a very nervous few—in either case noticed, maybe conversed with, certainly remembered.
If he timed it right, though, he’d get to the river at dusk, just in time for the press of passengers hurrying home before real darkness fell.
He might even be able to surreptitiously squeeze them for some details on what happened the night he was shot.
That was part of it.
But alongside the bare logistics, some other part of him simply wanted to stay in the clearing, camp there in the Forest, build a fire and stare into the flames and the warmth, let the stars wheel up in the sky overhead, the tree canopies sough and shift in the wind, the mortal world beyond bustle and scurry without him as it wished…
Well.
Fading aura from the skogsra, most likely. Tree sprites were known to trail a musk about with them when they stepped into mortal time, a heady mix of glamour and resonance that might haunt a clearing or a grove—or a man—for some time after they departed.
He shook it off.
He dug a knitted cap out of his pack and put it on to cover his wound. Refastened and shouldered the pack, thrust the McCulloch into its sheath across his back. He took one last look around the clearing in the failing light, then set his back to it and headed out.
The tree sprite hadn’t shown up to say farewell.
Either she was watching, mischievous, from afar, or she’d gone once more beyond the veil, stepped sated off the frenetic cocaine-rush conveyor belt of human timescales, bedded instead back into the glacial flow of Forest time, dozily dreaming an early spring.
The changeling tagged along at his side until the tree line. It held the rag doll pinched up under its arm for safekeeping. Duncan paused a few steps into the meadow, turned back to face the diminutive form.
“Mebhuranon,” he said, for what it was worth. “The one who made you. Her name is Mebhuranon. She is…ancient. Very wise.”
“Mebhuranon.”
“That’s right. Maybe…” He gestured vaguely. “Maybe she can do something for you.”
The changeling looked unblinkingly back at him across the gloaming. He hunched against the weight of the pack, a kind of shrug.
“Aye, well. Just a thought.”
He turned to go, but its voice stopped him. His voice. The perfect copy again, from the day they rode the tram together, and he ran it out of Erlsley to the tree line. The day he held on to it, saved it from burning itself on the metal trim of the seats.
“Just watch yourself.” It nodded out at the meadow, the open sky overhead, the ferry and the human settlement beyond. “You can get hurt.”
Wordless, he nodded.
Turned and walked on into the open fields.
When he looked back from halfway down to the ferry crossing, the changeling had already faded into the gathering dark.
—
He crossed the river in the company of a half dozen taciturn smoke-smelling men whose business on the Forest side looked to be either game or maybe mushroom gathering and herbs.
Braces of rabbit slung around necks, a decent-sized roe on a burly shoulder, canvas bags and army-issue packs.
One father-and-son team had a small wooden barrow, piled high with carcasses.
Every man there was armed with either shotgun or rifle, or both.
Most wore obvious iron talismans around their necks, and some wore crude mail vests.
Outside of nods and clipped pleasantries, none of them had anything much to say to each other as they waited.
The ferry puttered in. The motorman drove the vessel neatly against the landing stage, held it there with casual skill over tiller and engine, while his partner urged the passengers to hurry and get aboard.
Both men glanced nervously up toward the tree line, over and over again, throughout the clambering, and as soon as the last passenger was on, the motorman let his boat drift out into the flow again with evident relief.
He let the prow come about, gunned the engine, and sent them forging back toward the lights on the other side.
The last man aboard, still not seated, stumbled and nearly fell against Duncan with the turn.
The rabbits slung around his neck swung with the motion.
A shotgun hacked down to flintlock pistol dimensions slipped out of his belt, clunked on the bilge timbers at his feet.
He cursed and braced himself on Duncan’s shoulder.
“Sorry, mate,” he muttered. “Bloody water babies still not got their nerve back from the other night.”
“Last night?” Duncan shrouded his accent, pushed it eastward, went cut-glass English City. He showed as little interest as he thought he could reasonably get away with. “What happened last night?”
“Nah, not last night.” The man stooped to retrieve his hand cannon, got himself seated on the bench in front of Duncan. “Couple of nights ago, would have been, let’s see, Thursday. Three nights ago. Lot of bother, there was. Something to do with the Hidden Folk. Had the army out and everything.”
Duncan grimaced. So it was Sunday. Somewhere with the skogsra, he’d lost three days.
“What—was there shooting?” he asked casually. “Did you see it?”
“Heard it, right enough.” Stuffing the hacked-down shotgun back into his belt. “Everyone in the bloody village did. And we all saw them swing into the square that evening. Three army lorries and a closed tourer. Special maneuvers, they said. Then we heard the shooting, later that night.”
“Anyone hurt?”
The man shrugged. “Dunno. If they were, the army cleared ’em away after. Tell you what, though. Bloke I know who loads barrels up at the Turk’s Head swears blind he saw them taking away a little girl, had her in the back of one of the lorries. Says she couldn’t have been more than five or six.”
Duncan held down his reaction, not sure whether to feel relief or rage.
“Wasn’t drunk, was he?”
The other man chuckled. “Well, wouldn’t rule it out. So—you not from these parts?”
“Edinburgh. John Craigart.” Duncan offered his hand. “Craigart and Sons—purveyors of fine herbal remedies and tisanes. We’re on North Bank Street, if you ever get up that way.”
“Not likely, the way things are these days.” The other man shook his hand.
“Sammy Hodges. Used to be a poacher, back when that was something you didn’t talk about.
Now I’m a—let’s see—game procurement agent.
” He beamed. “All of a sudden everybody loves me. Not a pub this end of the Pennines where they’ll let me buy me own drinks. ”
Duncan nodded. It was a common reversal. The Forest took vast swaths of livestock pasture in the Unbinding—haphazardly, but in large volume. It forced the extension of wartime rationing even further, and the unspoken assumption was that, any day now, even more grazing land might go the same way.
You had to get your meat from somewhere.
“Got a girl here in Maltby, too. Real looker. Bed for the night anytime.” Hodges winked at him. “You know how it is.”
Duncan pulled a rueful face. “Not really. Herbs and roots don’t bring out the same passion as meat, I’m afraid. Just hoping I make the last bus to Erlsley. I’ve a hotel booking there.”
The ferry swung out broadside as they drew in toward the other bank. Someone hailed them from the landing stage. Hodges settled his belt and hand cannon more securely, preparing to disembark with evident relish.
“Last bus for Erlsley?” He grinned. “You’ll be lucky. Left an hour ago, mate. Sunday service. You won’t be getting back tonight—not unless you’ve the money for a bloody long taxi ride.”
“Any chance this Turk’s Head has rooms, then?”
Hodges shrugged, still grinning. “Don’t ask me, never checked. Never needed to, know what I mean?”
—
The Turk’s Head did, in fact, have rooms to spare.
Cramped and somehow drafty, despite having only one window, and that the size of a pocket handkerchief.
Duncan got settled, then went out into the street to a call box he’d seen on the corner.
He checked his Mappin & Webb, dialed the operator, got put through to Erlsley Bird Cabs.
The phone rang and rang. No reply.
Duncan grimaced, hung up. Thought about it. Niamh’s tiny under-eaves flat up on Spender Street had no phone, and he knew of no other way to contact her.
Trying to ignore the gathering leaden weight in the pit of his stomach, he dug out his notebook. Found Garner’s number in Macclesfield and asked the operator to connect him there instead.
The phone rang and rang. And rang.
Like some tiny, tinny rendering of the doomed, manic church bell in Miller’s Frith—but this time tolling only for him. He felt himself toppling ponderously into the endless sound…
“Sir, there doesn’t seem to be anyone there to answer.” The operator, diplomatic and quite chirpy for the time of night. It snapped him back to awareness. “Can I help you with another number?”
He felt his grip tighten with bruising force on the black Bakelite of the receiver at his ear.
“No, thank you,” he said evenly. “It’s something I’ll have to handle myself.”
He hung up the receiver as if it were mined to explode.