‘Where are we?’ asked Rebecca, who was quite lost.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Comfrey unconvincingly. ‘You take the lead, Rebecca, and I’ll follow for a change’ She turned one way, but he said, ‘N-n-no. Go that way.’
She did. The ground rose very slightly. She pressed on and then she ran straight into them. Not one, not two, not ten, but dozens of wood anemones, their green leaves perfect, their white and purple flowers half open and bespattered with shining raindroplets.
‘Oh, Comfrey!’ she said. ‘They’re growing just as they always did. Anemones! Did I ever tell you…?’
He nodded. Yes, she had. In Curlew’s burrow she had told him. And her love for these flowers had inspired him with a love for all flowers and herbs. Yes, he knew she loved them, and how much.
‘You knew they were here, didn’t you, Comfrey?’ she said, smiling gently at him.
‘No, I d-d-didn’t,’ he said, turning away because he hated to tell lies, even white ones. Then he added: ‘But I thought they’d come back. You know, after the f-fire.’
Rebecca looked at them, wandering among them and letting their intricate pointed leaves brush against her, springing back again on long delicate stalks as she went by. The flowers were still young, tight heads hanging down with the weakness of youth and many with their petals still to open. They had come back!
‘Where is this place?’ she asked, looking around at the wide circle of anemones with the stretching of burnt tree trunks and shrubs at its edge.
‘It’s Barrow Vale,’ said Comfrey.
‘Oh!’ she said.
‘Rebecca,’ whispered Comfrey, looking at the anemones with her, ‘you know that B-Bracken will come back, don’t you? He will, you know.’
Rebecca closed her eyes as a great wave of feeling, powerful and tearful, took her over.
‘Oh, Comfrey,’ she said, ‘Comfrey!’ He had bullied and fooled her into coming, to show her these flowers to remind her that just as they had survived the fire, so, somehow, Bracken would survive and come back. But what made her weep was that Comfrey had thought to do it, loving her enough to think of a way to make her see again something of the joy in Duncton Wood that once, so long ago, she had so often celebrated and to make her see that she would not always have to stand alone. But what made her weep even more was the thought that if Bracken did return, then surely he, too, would love her enough to sit down sometimes, as Comfrey must have done, to think of ways to cherish her. ‘Oh, Comfrey!’ she said again, going to him and nuzzling him close. As she did so, a wonderful look of strength came into Comfrey’s normally nervous face, for he had never, ever in his whole life, felt quite so proud.
‘Rebecca, you’re the best mole there is,’ he said, without the trace of a stutter.
Bracken woke late one morning, long after dawn, with a head as heavy as a clod of wet clay. He lay drowsily uncomfortable for a long time, waiting for the aches behind his eyes and snout to clear away and the real world of the chalky burrow to take over from the troubled place of half-remembered dreams into which he thought he had awoken.
So it was some time, and gradually, before the awareness that something was wrong in Uffington fully came to him. The silence in Boswell’s burrow was the first clue, a general feeling of abandonment the second.
He was up and into Boswell’s burrow in a second, but he knew in his heart before he got there that his friend had gone. He hurried into the communal tunnel outside, thinking that there might be a scribemole about, but it was empty of life or even a hint of it. At first Bracken was curious rather than alarmed, but his curiosity soon gave way to something more urgent as he went down the first tunnel to the bigger one it joined, where there had, until now, always been some sound of scribemole about. Not a thing stirred. Only the far-off wind that whistled and moaned in the higher-level tunnels of Uffington and which could sometimes be heard down in the Holy Burrows.
Bracken headed for the chamber that Boswell had originally taken him to, and from which tunnels led to the libraries (into which he had been) and the Holy Burrows (into which he had not). As he passed through the chalky tunnel, he had the absurd feeling that he would never again see another mole alive and all he could have for companionship was the echoing sound of his own pawsteps.
This illusion was quickly shattered, though not in a way that gave him much cheer. Ahead he heard a sound. He stopped, snouted about and ran forward, and two scribemoles, thin and bent, crossed the tunnel ahead of him, emerging from a small tunnel on one side and disappearing into one on the other, no more than a few molefeet from where he watched. They ignored him utterly, going past with snouts bowed and in a hushed and reverential way as if they had an appointment with Skeat himself.
