Rebecca’s occasional coldness to him in March upset him dreadfully. It happened in various ways, and always unexpectedly, as she slid away into a world of her own, no longer willing to make the effort to open herself to his stuttering and stumbling conversation.
‘Hello, R-Rebecca!’ he would say, putting a plant, or part of one, by her burrow entrance.
‘That’s nice,’ she would smile, her eyes drifting away from him and with none of the usual questions and laughter that he loved so much. Then silence, which would make him uneasy, and he would stumble over himself trying to fill it. His thin face would crease with the effort of trying to find something to say which would lift the impersonal smile from her face, which he felt to be in some way his own fault.
‘I’ve b-b-been a long way in the last few d-d-days,’ he might say.
‘Have you?’ Rebecca would respond dispassionately.
‘Y-yes, all the way d-down to the m-marsh.’
Smiles. No questions. No encouragement.
‘It was in-in-interesting,’ he might add weakly.
He would try for a bit longer, but was no good at it, and when Rebecca was like that, his whole world seemed to grow dark and he wanted to escape.
Sometimes Rebecca would say she was sorry and it wasn’t his fault. At other times she would let him go without saying a word, feeling a numbness within herself and unable to do anything but, eventually, weep. Or she would do busy things around her burrow, losing herself in rearranging it or cleaning out already clean tunnels.
Sometimes he would stay quietly with her when she wept and hear the things she said, and could have said in the hearing of no other mole in Duncton, about how she had no strength to serve them all and how they came all the time and they needed her help and how she ought to have the strength to give it if she was to honour Rose’s memory. She would weep and even scream sometimes. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ And he would listen to her, too slow in his speech to say anything, light only dawning in him very slowly that sometimes she needed a mole to run to, as he ran to her and the others did. It was then, too, that he wished there was a mole like Mekkins had been, whom she could rely on and lean against sometimes. He wished he was like that and not, as it seemed to him, so weak. Still, he could go to the Stone, which he did, and pray that perhaps the Stone would let Bracken come back so he could help Rebecca.
It was after one of these dispiriting times in March that Comfrey went to the Stone and crouched there, racking his brains about the way he could help. Several days later, Rebecca noticed that not a single mole had visited her, which was odd. She had never been left so blissfully and peacefully alone before. She began to worry about them, and after fretting for a whole day, went down to see what was apaw.
The first mole she met, a female, looked surprised, even alarmed, saying, ‘Oh! Rebecca!’ and scampering away.
The second, a male well known for his habit of finding things wrong with himself when everything was all right really, because he needed Rebecca to tend to him once in a while, said a strange thing when he saw her. ‘Hullo, Rebecca! I’m just fine. Nothing troubling me at all… no, not a single thing!’ he added with a merry, unnatural laugh.
She finally got the truth out of an old female who was genuinely unwell and whose distress she could sense before she even entered her burrow. It seemed that Comfrey had gone around the tunnels virtually ordering all moles to stay away from Rebecca ‘b-b-because she needs a rest’. If anymole needed her desperately they must go to him on the slopes and he would do what he could for them without disturbing Rebecca. Which was an odd thing, because if there was one thing Comfrey didn’t like, it was being disturbed in his own herb-laden burrow.
She went down to the slopes herself to see him and scolded him for what he had done—but very half-heartedly because, in truth, she could hardly remember anymole doing anything so kindly for her benefit and she loved him for the care he had taken and the love he had shown.
But her low spirits persisted as March progressed, increased, rather than lifted by the exciting arrival of the first litters in the ancient tunnels for many generations. Most of the females had mated and the first litters, although a little late, began to arrive towards the end of the month.
The excitement! The rushing! The chatter in the great old tunnels! The hurried, whispered thanks to the Stone! But at the end of the day, Rebecca, the loveliest mole in the system, the most beautiful, the one who so desired to cherish and nurture a litter of her own, remained mateless and litterless. The truth was that she might well have accepted one of the males in the system had they not all been so afraid of her, and in awe of her healing power. But none dared step forward and she thought wistfully of Cairn, of moles like Bracken and Mekkins, and, yes, even of Mandrake. She wished that the shadow of a male such as they had been would cross the entrance to her tunnels. But then she told herself that perhaps it wasn’t just a mate she wanted, and she dared to think it was Bracken alone she needed, whom she loved and who she feared might never return. She let herself weep for him, her face fur contorted with her sense of loss and despair and with the weakness, as she thought of it, of feeling such things. She looked out towards the west and trembled to think that he would never come back.
Comfrey saw this side of her as well and wished there was some comfort he could bring her, however slight.
It was in the second week of April, with the weather still changeable and cold, that he tried once more to help.
He arrived at her tunnels and said, ‘Let’s go for a w-w-walk.’
He ignored her reluctance, her distance, her coldness and her wish to be alone, and almost literally dragged her out.
‘Come on, Rebecca! You used to love going and l-l-looking at things. Well, let’s g-g-go and see if we can find spring.’
The weather could hardly have been less springlike, being cold and damp, with the great leafless beech branches swishing around irritably in a fretful wind. Rebecca was even more reluctant to go when Comfrey began heading off down the slopes towards what the moles in the Ancient System now called, ironically enough, the Old Wood. She had not been back since the fire and found she had a real fear of going there. It was all right for Comfrey; he was hardly old enough to remember it as it had once been—the Westside, the Marsh End, Barrow Vale—and could not feel the loss now that it was all gone.
But he went off so quickly that she had to follow, if only to stop him, and then she found she was twisting and turning down the slopes behind him, her eyes softening as she settled happily into being led, and she remembered how Bracken had led her once down the slopes, almost on this self-same route. Why! How big Comfrey was now compared with the weakling he had once been! He was thin and nervous, but he moved with a certain assurance through the wood. It was good being led by him. At the same time, there was an unusual air of secrecy, or suppressed excitement, about him that intrigued her. Comfrey was a strange mole!
The slopes were covered in sludgy leaf litter—mostly beech but with a few rotted oak leaves from the previous autumn and fresher ones that had blown up here from the few oaks still standing after the fire—all in the narrow zone at the bottom of the slope where both sets of trees grew uncomfortably together.