‘Will he come back one day?’ was the question always asked, and most often greeted with a shake of the head and a statement like ‘These things happened many moleyears ago now, before last Longest Night, and what happened to Bracken and Boswell lies with the Stone.’
Many stories linked Rebecca’s name to Bracken and some even said that stuttering Comfrey was the result of their great love and supposed mating and was the cause of Mandrake’s anger with Rebecca. As the molemonths of summer passed by into moleyears, the name of Mandrake became darker and blacker than it had ever been during his lifetime, and many moles refused even to talk of him. As for Rune, whose evil ran deeper than Mandrake’s ever had, the moles were strangely silent about him, as if disease attached itself to anymole who even mentioned his name. When it was spoken (and what mole doesn’t like from time to time to flirt with evil?), it was in hushes and in secret, and told in garbled form amongst siblings who thought themselves daring and who gasped at the wickedness of it all. Rune and his henchmoles had been routed by Bracken and Stonecrop, and Rune had been forced to flee far away, where he died of the plague. Rune, it was said, did ‘things’ to other moles, and made other moles do them as well, though what ‘things’ were was never specified.
Rebecca heard these stories but never involved herself with them, refusing to be drawn on to the subject of Bracken or Mandrake or any other mole, except that sometimes she would tell tales of Rose the Healer, whom some still remembered, and would often make youngsters and adults alike laugh with her fond memories of Mekkins, the Marshender who had more courage than anymole she knew.
The Old Wood was never visited now by the Duncton moles; its tunnels were believed to be dangerous because of the many moles who had died there of the plague and whose bodies were incarcerated there for ever in the debris of the fire. But in fact, as Comfrey alone knew well, the wood was not as devastated as it had first seemed to be. True, all the shrubs had been killed by the fire, and many of the smaller trees like holly and hazel as well, while some of the oaks, particularly in the centre of the wood where the fire was the strongest, had suffered total destruction of their crown canopies and so would die slowly for want of the means to take life from the sun and air.
But by the end of June, some tree life had returned to the stricken wood as well as a great deal of plant life. Some of the smaller trees had sent up suckers from their roots, like the aspen and, curiously, a couple of old and previously neardead elm trees, while many of the oaks that had looked dead from ground level because their roots and lower trunk and branches had seemed so charred had withstood the fire well, and their higher branches were putting on leaf and beginning to cast a little shade when the sun showed up over the derelict wood floor.
At the same time plant life, which Duncton had never seen before in such profusion because the wood was normally too dark to sustain it by Midsummer, began to blossom and grow among the ashes of the fire. Even in some of the most fire-wasted areas, creeping thistles, their tubers untouched by the fire, sent prickly green shoots up through the black, dead litter; in many areas, great banks of rosebay willowherb shoots were forming, their pink flowers not yet out but their thick stems and long, narrow leaves already giving a magnificent swaying life to the very areas where the fire had been thickest.
Other plants began to rejoice in the new freedom for growth they found, like the evergreen alkanet, whose luminescent tight blue flowers nestled among thick, hairy leaves that towered above a mole like Comfrey, casting shade for the occasional rabbit that came in off the pastures. Down by the marshes there were unaccustomed paths of swaying green watercress, and in the stretches of the wood where the spring rains had turned the wood ash into mud, yellow and pink comfrey had taken root, bigger than that which grew on drier, higher ground and a place for bees to buzz and saunter. Birdsong returned to the wood, though mainly from nesting birds in the less burnt east side, though the beating of wood-pigeon wings and the scurry of magpies was heard more clearly among the sparser trees.
The greens in the wood were lusher, too, because of persistent rains; so rich, indeed, that they seemed almost to bleed out into the sky, shining with life among the occasional horse chestnuts and furtive hawthorn on the wood’s edge.
