She tried to sound bold about it, to convince herself, but she didn’t fool Comfrey. Yet he said something then that in a strange way gave her the strength she needed finally to leave Duncton:
‘What will we do w-w-while you’re gone?’
Oh, she smiled; oh, she loved Comfrey! While she was gone! While! Nomole, not even Mekkins, had ever had such faith in her as Comfrey. To tell Comfrey you would do something was as good as making a promise to the Stone, and so as a final affirmation of her faith in the decision to leave she said, ‘While I’m gone’—and how she relished the phrase!— ‘while I’m away, you will be healer in the system for me.’
Comfrey’s eyes opened wide in astonishment and he looked in puzzlement at his gentle, hesitant paws.
‘You know more about the healing herbs of the wood and how to use them than anymole Duncton has ever known,’ she said firmly, ‘and you knew Rose as I did, even though you were only a pup then. More important than this is that you have a faith in the Stone that runs very deep, and its power will always be with you, as it is already.’
‘Oh!’ said Comfrey, for if Rebecca said it then it must be true.
Rebecca would like to have left there and then but she rightly sensed that she was such an integral part of the system’s life that to leave without saying goodbye and trying to make others understand would be a betrayal of those who had given her love. So she said goodbye to each of them, saying again and again that she had faith in the Stone that she would be back, as they shook their heads and scuffed the ground with their paws.
Some were angry and bold enough to say, ‘But what about Bracken and that Boswell? They never came back, did they? Got taken by owls if you ask me. Just as…’ but not many dared finish the thought to her face.
‘And who’ll take your place?’ asked others tearfully.
‘Comfrey,’ she smiled.
‘Comfrey? She must be bloody daft,’ they swore among themselves when she had gone to talk with other moles.
Yet when, finally, she left, taking a route down near the marsh by way of the pastures, it was to Comfrey that they turned and asked ‘Will she come back?’ Will she?’
‘Yes, she will,’ said Comfrey firmly, ‘because she’s R-R-Rebecca and she will.’
‘And what about Bracken and Boswell?’ reminded the doubters, the angry ones who felt most betrayed. ‘They never came back.’
‘I d-d-don’t know about them. But she will.’
But when they had all gone back to their burrows and Comfrey was sure there wasn’t a single mole to see, he felt all the loss and loneliness he had been trying to control begin to overwhelm him and he ran back and forth in the Stone clearing, peering first at the Stone and then out from the edge of the clearing towards where she had gone. All he could do was say, ‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ to stop himself crying, until he couldn’t even think her name without crying and wishing she was there for him to run to.
The Stone watched over him, its power in him and its silence finally there as well. Until when his grief had played itself out, and he had slept, and he was ready to face the system as its healer, he found that he had the strength never to doubt, not for one single solitary lonely moment throughout the long moleyears that followed, that Rebecca would come back. He was just looking after things while she was gone.
Nothing more is known of Bracken’s and Boswell’s long journey between Uffington and Capel Garmon, which lies on the very threshold of the Siabod system itself, than has been recorded by Boswell himself. His account has left much technical information about the postplague state of the many systems the two moles passed through, but of the many long moleyears’ travel, and what happened during it, he scribed little and said less.
It is known that the two moles spent Longest Night at Caer Caradoc, a system near the Welsh Marches, after which, says Boswell’s account, ‘we were soon able to gain access to Offa’s Dyke, by which route Bracken of Duncton was able to find a rapid and safe approach for us to the forsaken system of Capel Garmon’.
This brief sentence, which covers a period of many moleyears, gives no hint of the hard winter conditions through which they had to travel, or of the intriguing question of why they made for Capel Garmon. Certainly Boswell regarded Capel Garmon, a miserable and insignificant place now but for its association with these two courageous moles, as a turning point on their journey. Perhaps the stones that now squat lifeless and grey in that dank place still retained some of the power they have now entirely lost.
But the true answer can only be found by a mole who has crouched among the squalid, bare moorlands of Capel Garmon and turned his snout to the west and contemplated the fact that his long journey northwards from the warmer south is over and he must now turn irrevocably west to the heights of worm-poor soils that are the grim prelude to the mass of Siabod itself.
