He had three more sketches, one of them quite good, by the time he returned to the others. Tobias had found thread and needle in Maud’s belongings and was sewing something or other. If you dropped Tobias on a desert island in the middle of the ocean, Silver reflected, you would come back six months later to find he’d built a neat cottage out of driftwood and supplied it with curtains and bed linen woven entirely from—coconut hair, or something. There was no end to the man’s quiet industriousness.
“Should we carry on?” Silver said.
“Let her rest,” said Tobias, not looking up.
It was the first thing he’d said in a while. When he spoke his voice was always deeper and softer than one expected, his accent always a little startling in its oddness. Silver startled at it now. He had not realised Maud was asleep. But she was, curled up with Tobias’s coat over her.
“You’re a thing apart,” Tobias went on, and now he did look up, “and I’m a tough old pack mule. But she’s only a mortal girl, and it was close on dawn when we went over that cliff.”
“Mr Finch,” said Silver, “perhaps—now we have a moment—we should clear the air a little.”
“There’s naught to clear.”
“I only wanted to say—”
“You’re sorry?” Tobias said.
Yes, of course, was on the tip of Silver’s tongue, terribly sorry; I very much regret—I can only apologise—
Tobias’s eyes were hazel-green and serious. Silver stumbled over the lies. He wasn’t sorry, not in the least, only—
“You’re sorry you got caught,” Tobias concluded, correctly. His mouth was very slightly turned down. Silver felt a sliver of unfamiliar shame. But Tobias shook his head. “No need to make a fuss. Done is done. There.” He’d been sewing up a seam in the canvas pack. “Jammed full of books and bottles,” he added, with another headshake, this one amused.
Silver stood where he was, reaching without hope for words. Tobias had always liked to hear him talk. There had to be, somewhere, a combination of words both true and effective. There had to be something he could say that was both I loved you, I love you, doesn’t that damned well matter? and also So what if I lied, so what if I was selfish—what is love if not selfish—so what if I needed you—I still need you—and really, really, Mr Finch, shouldn’t you be the one who’s sorry? Aren’t you the one who left me?
Two years ago
September brought the year’s turning, and Silver’s summer kingdom came crashing down.
He’d been awake with the dawn as he always was, and he’d left Tobias sleeping. Crab apples were swelling on the boughs of the crooked tree near the wood’s boundary; Silver plucked one and bit into it. It was very sour, a month or so away from ripe. Silver dropped the bitten apple into the pocket of Tobias’s tweed jacket, which he’d stolen off the back of the chair in their bedroom, and went looking for Bramble. He had not seen her in some time, and it worried him slightly.
It took a surprisingly long time to find her. Normally Silver knew everything in his wood the moment he wanted to, but today its tangled pathways resisted him. “Is everything quite all right?” he asked politely when he finally located the dryad sitting on the banks of the Haller Brook. Water splashed over her long brown feet. She was curled over on herself like a small wooden statue, when at this season he would have expected her to be caught up in the Wood’s jubilant fruiting, not yet quietening for the winter.
She showed him her pointed teeth. It was not a smile. “Bramble?” Silver said. “What’s the matter?”
“Wickedness,” said Bramble.
“Where?” Silver said. He had felt no stirring in his domain. “Tell me—I’ll put Tobias to it. He’ll be glad of the work.”
The dryad shook her head slowly. It was a human gesture. She had a surprising number of those. “You are just like the other one,” she said, “really.”
Silver was truly offended once he realised what she meant. “In what way,” he said, “could I possibly be compared to a criminal, a failure, a monster like Rafela? I am a scholar and a gentleman, and you are just a—a woodland creature, frankly. I don’t know what makes you think you are entitled to pass judgment on me. Whatever it is, you are very much mistaken. What has even brought this on? Who have you been talking to?”
“Not talking,” the dryad said. Her eyes gleamed with that odd light they got sometimes. “Thinking.”
“It’s not your business to think,” Silver said.
Bramble hissed at him, and then she stood up with an abrupt splash, wrapped herself in the half-light and damp smell of the September morning, and was gone.
“Well,” said Silver, “that was uncalled for.”
He trudged back towards the Hall feeling disturbed and not a little upset, and found Tobias waiting for him.
He had a letter from Silver’s mother. He’d asked the housekeeper to read it to him. He said this quietly and calmly; and just as quietly and calmly, he added, “She took on an old troll alone. Smashed her hip.”
“I— Oh,” said Silver. “Is—she all right?”
“Well enough,” Tobias said.
“My dear—”
“Don’t you my dear me,” said Tobias, just as quiet, just as calm. He was a big man; he was a gentle man. He didn’t get angry. Silver had never seen him angry. “She wrote to me for help, and I never knew about it. Don’t you lie. I’ll head to town on the next stage.”
“I— Of course,” Silver said. “Of course. You must be very worried. I’m very worried. She’s my mother, you know. I’ll come with you, of course, I’ll—”
“You’ll do as you please and be damned to you,” Tobias said, in that same calm tone, and he shook his head hard, and he rubbed his hand over his eyes and let out a great shuddering sigh, and added, “There’s no help for it. Never was anything but a fool, but shame on me all the same.”
“Tobias, I’m—”
Tobias looked down at Silver’s hand on his arm, and shook it off with one sharp movement. “You’re as bad as Fay,” he said. And then immediately, “No, I shouldn’t say that, there’s none as bad as Fay. But bad’s bad enough; and I’m old enough to know better.”
“It was one little lie!” Silver burst out. “Yes, very well, I confess—I omitted to mention—because I enjoy your company, because I wanted you with me—”
“You ever seen a bridge troll?”
Silver said nothing.
“Didn’t think so,” Tobias said. He scrubbed his hand over his eyes again, turning away. “Well, you’re a pretty fellow, and a clever one,” he said, “and I’m a fool as I said; but your mother was good to me when I would as soon have died, and I find I’d rather have her good opinion than yours, Mr Silver.”
He took almost nothing with him. Silver had lavished him with gifts of good clothes and little luxuries ordered from town; Tobias left them all as if he had never even noticed them to begin with.
After he was gone Silver went back to the ground-floor room where he had slept more often, lately, than he had slept in the master bedroom. The bed was neatly made. There was an ewer of water on the bedside table. Silver took the unripe crab apple out of his pocket and threw it onto the bare floorboards. He had been making some effort to be circumspect about some things, within the house, but to hell with it. Henry Silver was only a mask after all; time to drop it. He was the Wood. He didn’t need a housekeeper, or a cook, or whatever it was the rest of them did, Silver hardly knew. Let them all go back to Hallerton or High Lockham and forget he’d ever been here. He scowled at the little apple sitting sad and lopsided in front of the fireplace and made an abrupt one-handed twisting gesture.