Duncton Wood by William Horwood Read Free Book Online Page B

brothers when Mandrake was not about (he preferred to keep her separate when he was there), usually leading them in the games they played, for she had a good imagination and could always think of something to do.
    As yet she had none of the grace of her mother, Sarah, every movement betraying an anxiousness to please Mandrake, even when he was not there. It unsettled her, too, that other moles’ approach to her was unpredictable, because of who she was: some were overly nice to her, thinking it might pay dividends with Mandrake. Others, especially the females, were inclined to be bitchy, making remarks about “certain moles who think a lot of themselves and have it easy.” Or, as one of them put it to a friend in Barrow Vale, loud enough for Rebecca to hear: “She’s got all the worst qualities of both of them: stuck up as her mother and as heavy-pawed as Mandrake.”
    Faced by such comments, Rebecca at first cried and hid herself away, taking minor tunnels to avoid meeting adult moles if she went out. But as February advanced she grew brasher, though no less sensitive, and would walk boldly past the gossips, affecting total indifference to them.
    But toward the third week of February, everything began to change as the earliest spring began and there was much less of the chatter and idleness that characterized the winter years. Rebecca began to go out onto the surface more, cheered by the growing lightness of the spring days.
    From her very first venturing onto the surface, she loved the smell and color of trees and plants. At first it had been the acorns cracking down to the ground, the rustle of the last falling leaves, autumn fruit and the surprise of bright holly berries thrown in a red huddle by an entrance after a storm.
    As February advanced, the slow growth of shoots and new leaves enthralled her, and she would run up into the wood day after day sniffing the cold air, to see what new delights she could find. One day it was the yellow delicacy of winter aconite rising among sodden leaves and stem bottoms as pale as the spring sunlight. Another day she crouched for hours before a cluster of snowdrops, their white petals dancing in the cold wind, the black leafless branches of a great oak hanging starkly above them.
    Then she was amazed at the speed with which shoots of dog’s mercury rose up into the spring Ught, but quickly learned to take paths avoiding them because of their rank smell. If she had to go through a patch of them, she would run and hold her breath as she did so, emerging gasping and laughing, often with a brother or two in tow.
    As spring advanced, she found the flowers grew more scented and would bring them, wild and sweet-smelling, down to a place near the entrance to the home burrow so that their scent met anymole who entered. Her mother would tell her the names, and Rebecca would repeat them over and over, mingling them into verses with names of other flowers Sarah told her about, but which were not yet in bloom.
    Adults got quite used to young Rebecca dancing with her brothers, singing flower songs, leading them in a game of her own invention, whose verse might run:
     
Vervain and yellowflag
Feverfew and Rue;
Some for my mother
Plenty left for you.
     
    And they would tumble about laughing, mock-fighting and rolling on the wood’s floor.
    Now Mandrake found it harder to control her. It was not that she, Rebecca, was disobedient in any way, but her spirit was and that seemed something neither of them could control. It was almost as if her life, and love of it, thrived on his malevolence. Not that, for a moment, she ever enjoyed annoying him or being the subject of his anger. But each time he knocked her down, sometimes literally, up she would get to run off somewhere and, despite every good intention on her part, do something else that displeased him.
    “You’re not to play so roughly with your brother,” he would say, but she would.
    “It’s dangerous up on the surface now by the edge of