Rebecca did not respond.
‘Come on, love,’ he said suddenly, gruffly gentle, ‘you can’t stay here. Got to get you away…’ He quickly pulled her to her paws and, talking desperately fast so that her attention would not wander to the dead litter about her, he hurried her out of the burrow, down the tunnel, and up to the entrance. But when she got into the night air, she seemed to come round to understanding where she was and what had happened. She started to shiver violently and sob out words so shaken by her distress that it was a long time before he could make out what she wanted. ‘I c-c-can’t leave them there,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘I c-c-can’t.’
He was impatient with this, very conscious that the noise she was making might easily attract the attention of a mole like Rune, prone to skulk about at night, or even an owl. But hard though he tried, she would not leave. At last he said brutally, ‘Right! You’re on your own, then! I’m off…’ and off he went.
But not far. His heart wouldn’t let him. Instead, he crouched in the protective shadow of the root he had first hidden by and watched over her, thinking that she would soon come to her senses. But what he then witnessed was the ancient and instinctive ritual of a bereft mother.
She turned back down into the tunnel and after a long wait, in which he almost decided to leave her to her fate, she came back out into the night. She was carrying one of her dead young by the scruff of the neck, just as a mother carries a squalling pup. This one hung down limp and dead, and she laid it on the surface by the tunnel entrance. Then, one by one, she brought out the other four and laid them where the wind might touch them and the owls come and take them.
Then he watched as she crouched in the shadows by them, whispering words of love and sorrow, chanting the ancient songs of the bereft, whose words and sounds of loss have no need of being set down or learned, for they are written in the depths of every soul.
Then she crouched down with them to wait for the owls to come. But he was not going to wait for that and ran back over to her and said, ‘Come on, Rebecca, come on, love. There’s nothing more you can do. There’s nothing left to do.’
He became angry again and said: ‘If you don’t bloody well come now, then I really will push off. I’m only doing this for Mekkins. Come on!’ And, more or less dragged along by him, she went with him, shaking and sobbing to leave all she had left of her litter behind in the night, tiny and pathetic on the cold surface of the wood.
No record has been kept of how this unnamed henchmole succeeded in leading Rebecca down to the Marsh End and how he protected her from the Marshenders until Mekkins was found. But it is in such forgotten moles as he, as well as in those whose names are recorded in the books of Uffington, that the actions of truth and love fulfil themselves. So, nameless though he is, let him be remembered.
Mekkins took one look at Rebecca, out of whom all spirit of life had gone, and knew without being told what had happened, and what to do.
Half pushing, half carrying and constantly urging her, he took her towards the east side of the Marsh End, where the soil is dank and the vegetation heavy; a place in the wood where nomole goes and fallen wood rots unnoticed.
‘Where are you taking me?’ she whispered hopelessly, more than once.
‘Somewhere Mandrake and Rune will never find you, and where you’ll have time to find your strength again.’
‘I don’t want to be alone,’ she sobbed, ‘not here in this terrible place.’
‘It’s all right, Rebecca,’ he soothed her, ‘you won’t be. There’s a mole there will help you. She’s known trouble herself and will know what to do.’
But Rebecca became afraid again and refused for a while to go on.
‘Look, my love,’ said Mekkins, desolate to see Rebecca so changed, ‘there’s nowhere else I can take you. Mandrake and Rune will be after you—they’ll want you killed. I know them. It’s a miracle you’re still alive as it is, though perhaps, at the time, that’s something even Mandrake couldn’t do. Not to you he couldn’t.’
At this second mention of his name Rebecca sobbed again and then fell into a torpor of desolation. But when Mekkins urged her on, she agreed, as if everything was hopeless and even resistance was futile. Mekkins saw then that she wanted to die.
They came at last to a far corner of the wood which edged the marsh and where the wind carried into the wood’s depths the eerie call of marshbirds unknown to mole—snipe, curlew and clamorous redshank—telling of the wet desolation all moles fear. It was a damp and dismal place where Mekkins finally stopped, by a dank and diseased-looking entrance, hung over with rotting wood. He peered into it and was about to call down, when an aged, frightened voice whispered out of its dead depths: ‘Disease! There is disease here! Disease and death!’
Rebecca shrank back, pleading with Mekkins to take her away, but he put a paw on hers and said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s not as bad as it sounds. She only says things like that to keep others away.’
He turned back to the entrance. ‘’Ere, Curlew! Don’t be so daft! It’s Mekkins… I’ve got a friend with me for you to meet.’
‘I have no friends here,’ the voice said again, ‘only the darkness of disease, only the dankness of the earth.’
Mekkins shrugged his shoulders and, with an encouraging pat on Rebecca’s shoulder, pushed her down the burrow ahead of him.
The tunnel was both dank and dark and it was a long time before she could make out clearly the appearance of the old female who, muttering and cursing, retreated before them. ‘Trouble is,’ whispered Mekkins, ‘she lives alone so much that she takes a while to get used to strangers. And she likes to put on a bit of an act at first. But she’s got a heart of gold and if she takes to you, she’ll see you right as rain.’
At last Rebecca could see her clearly and had she been anything less than near collapse, she might well have run away there and then.
Curlew was small and wasted, her whole body twisted subtly out of true by some past disease or abnormality; she had no fur on much of her face and what there was on her thin flanks was sparse and grey. Her front paws were almost translucent with weakness.
But her eyes! It was as if they had, temporarily, taken refuge in the wrong body, for they were bright and warm with kindness and compassion, beautiful with life, and Rebecca realised that the frightened voice that had come up to them really had been an act.
The moment Curlew saw Rebecca clearly, she came forward, though a little diffidently, and said, ‘My dear!’ in a voice of such compassion that Rebecca knew that she, too, had suffered in some terrible way and that she understood. Then Rebecca settled down, weary beyond words but feeling safer than she had for a very long time. She crouched down in the corner of Curlew’s little burrow, with its wet walls and miserable air, settled her snout between her paws, and simply closed her eyes.
‘This mole is Rebecca from Barrow Vale,’ said Mekkins. ‘And she needs help and protection. That’s why I’ve brought her here, Curlew, ’cos I reckon you’ll know how to get a bit of life back into her.’
Rebecca felt a gentle paw caressing her face and heard a gentler voice saying, as if from a great distance, ‘It’s all right, my dear, you’re safe now, quite safe.’ And then she fell asleep.
When Mekkins told Curlew the story of what had happened, she sighed to hear it, speaking of ‘the wickedness of it’ and the ‘dark shadows that curse Duncton’, looking at the sleeping Rebecca, the tears in her kind eyes running down her bald face.
She too had wanted a litter, but the disease that struck her down in her first summer so long before had for ever deprived her of the chance. No male would take her and the story in the Marsh End for a long time was that she had become simple as a result and been taken by an owl.