Chapter 20
NICK
The woods were unsettled today. He could always tell. He felt it stirring beneath his skin, trailing through his hair, and winding itself around him from the moment he woke from what little sleep he got.
Sally said the woods had always reached out to those who needed them. And Nick needed them more than ever.
Alex had been lying on the floor at the foot of the stairs, just like Sally had been. That image was etched into his mind. He’d thought… God, for that horrific moment he’d thought she was dead too. And that it was all his fault.
Because it was all his fault. He had never been good enough. He had promised Patricia he’d try. But how?
He shook himself. He couldn’t get lost in those feelings today.
He had Maeve with him. He couldn’t leave her in the house alone, and he needed to be alert while she accompanied him.
She had already slipped off, back indoors when he was working at the front of the house.
He’d fished her out of more than one supposedly locked room since Patricia had left her with him.
Maeve could vanish in the blink of an eye, and he was beginning to suspect that she knew the ins and outs of Wildewood Hall even better than he did.
Servants’ stairs, attics, all the secret places, including the unsafe bits.
She slept on the camp bed in his room and even that didn’t help.
He needed to keep an eye on her. As well as everything else.
Maeve clung to his hand as they walked deeper into the woods, and she chatted away to him, telling him about something she’d made for Alex, and how the house didn’t want her there.
That was what he was afraid of.
‘You weren’t bothering her, were you?’ he asked.
‘I never bother people, Daddy. I’m a joy.’
He stopped in his tracks and looked down at her.
‘Who told you that, munchkin?’
Maeve smiled back up at him with blissful self-confidence. ‘Granny.’
He breathed out slowly, forcing his racing heart to calm. Patricia. That made sense. Patricia had said it to Maeve. She had probably said it to Sally when Sally was a child.
Because Sally had always said that, laughing, whenever he called her out on something. It was frivolous, a joke between the two of them.
Don’t be silly, mo stór. I’m a joy.
Later on Theo had joined in on it as well.
And God help him, they were. Just like Maeve. His joy.
Well, they had to be to contrast with him. The most miserable man in the world, Theo would always say with that trademark grin. Theo could always make him smile.
‘What were you doing today, pet? If not pestering Alex? You wandered off while I was working in the gardens.’
‘I picked flowers while you were there,’ she protested. Yes, there had been some rather gorgeous cosmos in flower which had been decimated. ‘And then I played a game of hide and seek.’ She sighed. ‘But then Cecil was cranky. So I came to find you.’
Cranky Cecil… Nick didn’t want to dwell on that either.
Maeve’s fancies, Patricia would say with a gentle smile. Let her be a child, Nick. It all goes by so fast. Blink and you’ll miss it. And you already miss too much.
‘I’m glad you came to find me,’ he told her.
He squeezed Maeve’s hand and then hefted her up in his arms, settling her on his shoulders. She squealed with delight and stretched her hands out to thread her fingers through the leaves hanging over the path.
The laughter ran through the woods, high and bright and full of joy. Birdsong answered. Just birdsong, he told himself.
‘It’s beautiful here, Daddy,’ Maeve said.
And it was, when she was here.
‘It is, but remember the rules.’
‘I remember, I remember! Don’t come in here without you. Don’t stray from the path. Don’t talk to strangers or play their games. Don’t come in here after dark.’
‘Good girl,’ he murmured and all around him the wild murmured as well.
He wanted to believe the woods would never harm her. Not his Maeve. Not when he felt the way he did about her. He really wanted to believe that.
But the woods were wild. And she was so small.
‘Let’s go back to the house,’ he told her.
‘But we’re not finished.’
He glanced up at her. She had her hands tangled in his hair, her blue eyes fixed on something through the trees.
‘What do you mean, mo stórín?’
‘Look,’ she said, and pointed off through the trees. For a moment he saw nothing, and then the hare moved. It was little more than the flick of an ear, the blink of an eye. It was not there and then it was there, a pale golden brown, with amber eyes, watching him all too knowingly.
And behind it, a figure in green. Something made of leaves and twigs and moss. A trick of the light…
‘Who’s that, Daddy?’ Maeve asked.
Nick stopped, his body like stone, his eyes filling with tears he couldn’t let escape.
He clung to Maeve now. Even up on his shoulders, holding onto him as he held onto her, he couldn’t shake the feeling that at any second he might lose her.
That she might wriggle free and be snatched away by the woods, vanish into their depths never to be found.
The wild woods closed around them both, whispering, sighing, murmuring.
‘Just an old friend,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry about him. Let’s go back, Maeve. It’s getting late and Granny will be here to pick you up soon.’
‘But – oh, he’s gone.’ She sounded so disappointed and Nick finally managed to breathe a sigh of relief. ‘Is it like the house?’ she asked.
‘A little bit,’ he said warily. How much could he tell her safely? He tried to treat it all like a game, but it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. ‘But remember the cellar?’
He felt her tense suddenly and wished he’d never brought that up. ‘Yes.’ Her voice was suddenly small, the word little more than the s at the end.
‘We don’t go down there, do we?’
Maeve shook her head. ‘Are the woods like that?’ she asked, a tremble in her voice. She sounded like he had just broken her heart with that revelation.
If only that was all, he thought. But he couldn’t tell her. No more than he could tell Alex. Not yet.
He prayed that somehow there would never be a need.
‘Yes,’ he said. Knowing it was only a half truth. Heaven knew, the house was bad but, if the mood took them, parts of the woods were so much worse.