‘Look, my love,’ said Mekkins, desolate to see Rebecca so changed, ‘there’s nowhere else I can take you. Mandrake and Rune will be after you—they’ll want you killed. I know them. It’s a miracle you’re still alive as it is, though perhaps, at the time, that’s something even Mandrake couldn’t do. Not to you he couldn’t.’
At this second mention of his name Rebecca sobbed again and then fell into a torpor of desolation. But when Mekkins urged her on, she agreed, as if everything was hopeless and even resistance was futile. Mekkins saw then that she wanted to die.
They came at last to a far corner of the wood which edged the marsh and where the wind carried into the wood’s depths the eerie call of marshbirds unknown to mole—snipe, curlew and clamorous redshank—telling of the wet desolation all moles fear. It was a damp and dismal place where Mekkins finally stopped, by a dank and diseased-looking entrance, hung over with rotting wood. He peered into it and was about to call down, when an aged, frightened voice whispered out of its dead depths: ‘Disease! There is disease here! Disease and death!’
Rebecca shrank back, pleading with Mekkins to take her away, but he put a paw on hers and said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s not as bad as it sounds. She only says things like that to keep others away.’
He turned back to the entrance. ‘’Ere, Curlew! Don’t be so daft! It’s Mekkins… I’ve got a friend with me for you to meet.’
‘I have no friends here,’ the voice said again, ‘only the darkness of disease, only the dankness of the earth.’
Mekkins shrugged his shoulders and, with an encouraging pat on Rebecca’s shoulder, pushed her down the burrow ahead of him.
The tunnel was both dank and dark and it was a long time before she could make out clearly the appearance of the old female who, muttering and cursing, retreated before them. ‘Trouble is,’ whispered Mekkins, ‘she lives alone so much that she takes a while to get used to strangers. And she likes to put on a bit of an act at first. But she’s got a heart of gold and if she takes to you, she’ll see you right as rain.’
At last Rebecca could see her clearly and had she been anything less than near collapse, she might well have run away there and then.
Curlew was small and wasted, her whole body twisted subtly out of true by some past disease or abnormality; she had no fur on much of her face and what there was on her thin flanks was sparse and grey. Her front paws were almost translucent with weakness.
But her eyes! It was as if they had, temporarily, taken refuge in the wrong body, for they were bright and warm with kindness and compassion, beautiful with life, and Rebecca realised that the frightened voice that had come up to them really had been an act.
The moment Curlew saw Rebecca clearly, she came forward, though a little diffidently, and said, ‘My dear!’ in a voice of such compassion that Rebecca knew that she, too, had suffered in some terrible way and that she understood. Then Rebecca settled down, weary beyond words but feeling safer than she had for a very long time. She crouched down in the corner of Curlew’s little burrow, with its wet walls and miserable air, settled her snout between her paws, and simply closed her eyes.
‘This mole is Rebecca from Barrow Vale,’ said Mekkins. ‘And she needs help and protection. That’s why I’ve brought her here, Curlew, ’cos I reckon you’ll know how to get a bit of life back into her.’
Rebecca felt a gentle paw caressing her face and heard a gentler voice saying, as if from a great distance, ‘It’s all right, my dear, you’re safe now, quite safe.’ And then she fell asleep.
When Mekkins told Curlew the story of what had happened, she sighed to hear it, speaking of ‘the wickedness of it’ and the ‘dark shadows that curse Duncton’, looking at the sleeping Rebecca, the tears in her kind eyes running down her bald face.
She too had wanted a litter, but the disease that struck her down in her first summer so long before had for ever deprived her of the chance. No male would take her and the story in the Marsh End for a long time was that she had become simple as a result and been taken by an owl.
But this was not so—as Mekkins, in one of his explorations of the perimeter of the Marsh End when he was a youngster, found out. He came across her little system, burrowed in a ramshackle way in the soft wet soil, and for a long time got no response but ‘There’s disease here’ from her. Until, bit by bit, he cajoled his way into her tunnels and there found Curlew, who had had no contact with anymole for many years, preferring to hide her disfigurement in the isolated place she chose to live in. Unlike other moles who had seen her in the past, he showed no fear of her and treated her as he would any other mole. Then, over the years, he had seen her change, losing some of her shyness and finding more and more peace in her life and teaching him that a mole may live alone for many years and learn a great deal of wisdom and find much love in the small things about its tunnels.
