Among the moles who followed Bracken down, gleefully chanting ‘Barrow Vale’ and then ‘Bracken, Bracken,’ there was only one who stayed silent and yet who truly loved him. And that was Boswell, who followed limping behind, trying to keep up with them so that he could always keep Bracken in his sight.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Duncton Wood quickly settled down to summer and Bracken’s rule. There was some preliminary skirmishing with the remnants of the henchmoles, some of whom claimed that since Rune had not been killed and was nowhere to be found, there was no reason to think that he wasn’t coming back. But Bracken quickly put a stop to this with a coupled of swift and deadly fights against the toughest of the remaining henchmoles, which killed one and injured the other.
By the first week of July all was quiet and Bracken was in total command and the henchmoles were but a memory fading into the shadows from whence they had come, as Bracken’s days became taken up with the settlement of the usual disputes and wrangles that beset any system in the idle months of summer, when the only real interest lies in what territory the youngsters are winning for themselves.
The summer grew increasingly hot. Not the occasional heat of a couple of days that gives way rapidly to great lumbering cumulus clouds that sail across the face of the sun and remind moles to enjoy the sun while they may, but the heat that starts slowly and then simply stays, beating down day after day and making green leaves begin to look wan and desperate in its hazy stillness. The kind of heat that produces an endless palling stillness through which the sun seems almost to filter itself of good cheer, becoming instead faceless and impersonal. Rain, when it fell, was almost dry before it hit the ground, and by the third week of July it seemed to have been all used up.
Against this background, Bracken’s rule settled into routine. He gave advice and help when it was sought and visited the pastures, where Stonecrop had assumed control, agreeing that the Stone should be made accessible to any Pasture mole who wanted to visit it. Soon there was a feeling of lightness and relief in both systems and Bracken began to feel, with some justice, that in most respects Duncton Wood was a better place than it had been for many many moleyears.
Yet all was not well. As the molemonths passed into August, he began to change in ways that were imperceptible to himself. For one thing, it proved impossible to remain as accessible and friendly as he had initially been to everymole who came to see him.
Most moles seemed to want to set him apart, eager to respect him, and to listen with irritating seriousness to what he said. Others, even the biggest Westsiders, seemed afraid of him, and his initial attempts to put them at their ease gave way eventually to an unconscious contempt for them and a subtly growing idea that, yes, indeed, he must be a special mole and perhaps everything he said was interesting.
When he wanted things done, he began to find it easier to be tough and terse in issuing instructions than careful and polite. It was much less fuss, and anyway, as he grumbled to Boswell in an irritated rationalisation of his growing autocracy, the moles of Duncton liked to be led and have their minds made up for them.
It was easier, too, to have other moles do certain things for him—to listen to complaints, to advise on which issue Bracken would, or would not, prefer to make his own judgement about personally—and so a corpus of moles, many of them from Barrow Vale and a few from the Eastside, began to grow up who acted as a buffer between Bracken and everymole else.
There was nothing unusual or sinister about such a development—most systems have something like it at one time or another—but in Bracken it combined, unfortunately, with his own growing unspoken restlessness, whose causes he did not seek to know, since he was not even aware of the changes overtaking him.
He became irritable and sharp; some of his judgements were hasty and ill-advised. He stepped in on one territorial dispute, for example, up near the slopes between youngsters who should have been left to settle it themselves, and so caused resentment all round. Whole days would pass when he refused to talk to anymole, preferring to stay in his tunnels near Barrow Vale or wander over to the more deserted areas of the slopes.
The only mole who retained constant contact with him was Boswell, though even with Boswell Bracken was increasingly offhand and indifferent.
In Barrow Vale they began to call Bracken standoffish and superior, though his achievements in getting rid of Rune, in being the one to order the killing of Mandrake, and his now legendary crossing of the marsh were sufficient for nomole to doubt that he was their leader.
But soon there were other things to gossip about, like the continuing hot weather which, it was said (though nomole was sure by whom), was beginning to affect the worm supply on the pastures, and some of the Marshenders were saying that the marshes were smelling terrible and hadn’t been so bad in living memory, while everymole agreed that the heat and dryness was enough to make a mole thoroughly irritable, not to say fed up, wasn’t it?
But while other moles thought of other things, Boswell concerned himself about what lay at the root of the change in Bracken. He had been bleak witness to the terrible shock that crossed Bracken’s face when Rebecca left them in the clearing on Midsummer Night, since when, so far as he knew, the two had not met again. Now he could not help but notice that whereas Bracken had once talked often of Rebecca, especially on their journey from Nuneham, he never mentioned her name now, although sometimes, in the presence of one of the brighter younger females or up on the surface when a wind ran among the trees, he would see Bracken look about him sadly, his normal mask of cool command dropping for a while, as if there were something nearby he thought he had lost.
Boswell was too wise to raise this with Bracken directly, but if, as it sometimes did, the subject of healing came up, or some particular work Rebecca had been doing somewhere in the pastures or Duncton was mentioned, he would try to draw Bracken on to the subject, believing that talking might help. But it didn’t. Bracken did not seem to mind mention of her name, but he did not react to it except to utter some general comment such as, ‘The system is lucky to have a mole like Rebecca for its healer—in fact, it’s a miracle we’ve got a mole so good in succession to Rose,’ but there was something too studiously careful about these comments to convince or satisfy Boswell.
At the same time, Rebecca was rarely seen anywhere near Barrow Vale, a fact made far more of by Boswell and Mekkins, who discussed it together, than it was worth, since in her own time Rose had rarely bothered with Barrow Vale. When moles need healing the best place to do it, she used to say, is in the privacy of their burrows, not on public view in Barrow Vale.
Rebecca had stayed on the pastures in the tunnels she created for herself after Rose’s death, and little had changed: Comfrey still lived nearby, still strange and nervous, with a great love of herbs and plants and unwilling to let Rebecca go too far from him for too long: partly, perhaps, from his own insecurity, but also, though Boswell was never to guess it, because in his own way he protected Rebecca from despair. Sometimes he would travel off in search of new herbs, but he had a knack of making his path cross where Rebecca was— and seemed, too, to sense what herbs she needed, for often he would appear suddenly in some remote corner of one of the systems with the very herb she needed for some healing process. There was a great trust and peace between the two, and by virtue of his attachment to her Comfrey went unmolested wherever he wished in the systems, which allowed him to develop in time as wide a knowledge of where the medicinal plants of the two systems were as anymole had ever had.