‘Bracken!’ She smiled, seeing at once his confusion and disappointment. And seeing, too, how much thinner he had become—just as he had been when they met for the very first time. Did he know how wild his fur looked, or how lost his eyes? Did he know how nervous and ill at ease he was?
‘It’s Boswell, isn’t it?’ she asked. He nodded and took her down into the burrow where he crouched uneasily as she examined Boswell’s wound. She asked Bracken questions about it, but less for the information they gave her (she got that from touching poor Boswell) than in the hope that they might put Bracken at his ease. But it was no good, and the hostility she sensed to her touching ‘his’ Boswell finally made her ask him gently to leave her alone with Boswell ‘so that I can talk to him as a healer must and for no other reason than that’.
‘Oh,’ she sighed as Bracken left, miserably. ‘Oh, my love!’ She was so tired and there was nothing, nothing in the world, that she desired more at that moment than Bracken’s trusting touch and caress in her fur so that she could know that he was there with her, in love and silence. As she turned to Boswell she scolded herself for thinking, as Rose had done before her so many times, that she wished there were a mole who would one day reach out and touch her and let her rest.
Later, moleyears later, Boswell would say that his days of illness on Siabod were the days when he learned most about physical suffering. For a mole born with such a disadvantage as a withered paw, it was a remarkable thing that by the Stone’s grace he so rarely suffered assault or direct physical hardship.
He knew, as Bracken did not, how important his contact with Rebecca was in those long days and nights. She stayed by him constantly (as close to him as Rose had once been to Bracken in the Ancient System), whispering her healing words and letting him find again, in the security of her warmth, the spirit and strength he had lost when Gelert wounded him so deeply.
Yet Boswell was a healer, too, and as he gained in strength, his own acceptance of her great love of life, which most moles found so hard to face, helped her through her final days before her litter came. Not many males, certainly very, very few scribemoles, have ever been so close to a female with litter as Boswell was in those strange healing days.
For Rebecca herself, the only hardship was Bracken’s uneasy companionship to them both: he made another burrow for himself nearby and unstintingly found them food and whatever herbs he could that might be of help. When the weather grew colder, as it did two days after her arrival, he reburrowed the tunnels to insulate Boswell’s burrow better.
But there was an air of distrust about Bracken’s contact with Rebecca which put an impassable barrier between them so that, although both ached for an expression of love, neither knew how it could be given. The fact that she was with litter made him angry and turned and twisted in his mind and put a barrier of suspicion and jealousy before his eyes.
The time came when Rebecca made a burrow of her own and began gathering what nesting material she could from the sparse vegetation that grew by the stream where they lived. She did not want to litter there, for there was something grim and desolate about Siabod, but she did not trust herself to move back down through Cwmoer, even with Bracken’s help, and anyway, Boswell was still weak.
The weather turned colder and a bitter wind blew and began to put a layer of verglas on the rocks near their tunnels so that they became slippery and unsafe for even the steadiest talon. The matgrass snapped and crackled in the cold, darkness fell swiftly, the sun seemed lost for ever, and the snow that had fallen the night before they had first come up Cwmoer, having half melted with the rain, had now permanently frozen on the rocks where it had stayed or lay dry and shiny among the tussocks of grass. Late spring in Siabod seemed to bring harsher weather than the cruellest winter in Duncton.
Now that Rebecca was living and spending more time in her own burrow, Bracken talked to Boswell more and found he was beginning to recover fast. As ever, Boswell was aware of, and upset by, his friend’s distrust of Rebecca. Could they never see that the love they had was as strong as the sunshine? Why was Bracken such a fool, and Rebecca, who knew so much, unable to make Bracken see their love?
‘Look after her, Bracken, because she needs your help, you know. I sometimes think you don’t know how much she loves you…’
Bracken shrugged. ‘She’s more concerned with the litter of hers than anything else,’ he said, betraying his real feelings. ‘But, of course, I’ll do what I can. But a nesting female doesn’t want males hanging about, everymole knows that. They like to get on with it themselves.’
