The tramp gesticulated fiercely and then pointed—to heaven? No, to the hill. “Beware!” he hissed, and then a garble of sounds that Silver after a moment interpreted as “The old Abbot likes fresh meat like you!”
“Thank you,” he said. Of course, the ruined abbey. For no reason except sheer physical laziness Silver had been avoiding the steep road, half of it a stairway, leading up the hill. But he must have wandered through every other byway Rothport could offer by now; and where else to find a vampire but in a Gothic ruin?
“Beware!” cried the tramp again.
“Don’t worry about it, there’s a good fellow,” said Silver, and reached for his purse only to remember that he didn’t carry one any more. “I shall be most careful, I assure you.”
He disentangled his sleeve from the ancient’s trembling grasp, smiled at him, smiled too over his head at the tall form of Tobias, who hovered only a few yards off, plainly on the point of intervening. When Tobias did not smile back Silver looked away. In the puddle of light where he had been standing, he saw, tough dandelions had split the cobblestones and were poking their heads up towards the scatterings of April rain which hissed through the pool of lamplight. There would be yellow flowers in the morning.
Tobias was looking at the dandelions too. No, he wasn’t. He was looking at the beggar, thoughtfully, and after a moment he went over to the man and took him gently by the arm and handed him a coin from his purse.
“All right,” Silver said briskly, mostly to himself, and set off for Rothling Abbey.
* * *
In daylight, and on a warm summer’s day, the ruins of Rothling Abbey might have been a pleasure to visit: one could bring a picnic, exclaim over the view, and possibly attempt some watercolours. On a clear and moonlit autumn night, assuming one had wrapped up warmly first, the spot might still have offered some delight to those who enjoyed shivering at a ghostly ambiance.
On that damp and overcast April evening, after puffing up the last of the hill in increasing misery, Silver heartily wished he’d never heard of the place. He would have liked nothing more than to be in a bed. A soft and warm bed, with clean sheets and a minimum of woodland adornment: so not his bedroom at Greenhollow Hall, where half the furniture was doing its best to take root. In fact Silver could not think where his ideal bed might be; only that wherever it was, he very much wanted to be in it, either asleep or in the company of—some person who was not Tobias Finch; some other person, a charming and well-read individual who found Henry Silver both interesting and impressive.
Tobias had reached the top ahead of him. He had passed Silver on the way up, his long strides eating up the steep hill as comfortably as if he were wandering through a meadow. He was not even breathing hard, but he had taken his coat off and laid it over the top of a nearby crumbled half-wall. When Silver forced his gaze up to meet his eyes—must the man be so large—Tobias gave him a silent, professional nod. Loops stitched on his belt held three sharpened wooden stakes.
Silver shuddered. Here was the other reason he disliked this sort of thing. He almost pitied the vampire.
Maud Lindhurst, he reminded himself, and he held the picture of the flowers she might wear in her hair so firmly in his thoughts that sprays of blossom began to uncurl themselves on the creepers which were anchored to the crumbling abbey walls, ghostly pale pink in the wavering moonlight.
The ruin was bigger than it had looked from the bottom of the hill. Silver took a deep breath, straightened his back, lifted his chin—the better to attract a bloodsucker—and set off towards the tumbledown cloisters. He felt a faint prickling discomfort as he advanced: for the first time in two years, his sense of the life and power of the Hallow Wood receded from him. It had been a very long time since trees had grown on this wind-blasted headland.
Something moved serpent-quick in the shadows.
“Silver!” Tobias roared behind him.
Silver startled, glanced both ways, and then flinched away from a sudden cloud of dust which a cold wind seemed to blow directly into his face. Even as he breathed it in he thought, I should have held my breath; then darkness rose around him, and he knew nothing for a time.
* * *
Silver woke up lying on some very cold stones. For a baffled moment he thought time had run away with him altogether and he was once again sprawling on the floor of his own great hall at Greenhollow.
Then he smelled the musty air and felt the prickling discomfort which told him his wood was much further away than he was used to. He said, out loud, “Damn.”
Nothing answered him. Tobias? What had become of Tobias? It was pitch-dark in here. Was this the vampire’s lair? “Mr Finch!” Silver called out, and then, remembering, “Miss Lindhurst!”
Nothing. Silver struggled to his feet, reached out blindly with both hands, and discovered the room was a tiny dark cell. His hands touched an iron ring overhead—a trapdoor?—and his breathing quickened. Underground. He was underground. He gave the iron ring a hard tug and then attempted a shove. Neither had any effect.
Although he did not like to dwell on the matter, Silver was not fond of the dark, nor yet of confinement. He had been buried alive once. It did not live in his waking memory, but in dreams sometimes he still felt the cracking and churning of the earth, the twitching helplessness of the withered husk that Rafela had made of him, the force of strong roots pushing him down.
Damn, damn, damn.
Silver gritted his teeth and reached for the nearest things he could find. There was wild grass and heather, a scattering of gorse, and a tiny handful of determined survivors from what had once been a monks’ garden. None of these things were the Wood; they did not know him, they did not answer to his demands.
“Oh God,” Silver said. He could crack stone; he could overturn earth. He knew he could. Bramble had demolished half his house, by God. There was no need to panic. “Mr Finch!” he called out again anyway. But Tobias had seen it, he had shouted a warning, he had not been fast enough to save Silver from this imprisonment. Maybe it had killed him. Silver’s mouth was dry; his hands shook. It was easy to forget how dangerous the monsters of legend could be. His indomitable mother walked with a limp now.
If it had killed Tobias, would Silver’s mother come for him? She would. Silver, with shameful relief, knew that she always would.
And if it had killed Tobias, what would it make of Adela Silver?
“Shall I come back?” inquired a voice above him, interrupting these bleak thoughts.
The trapdoor was open. A slim figure was crouched over it, with the planks braced on her shoulder.
“Unless you’d rather stay down there,” she said. “I suppose I should apologise.” She didn’t. “Come on, then, unless you’d rather sit around groaning.”
* * *
The hand that helped Silver scramble out of the tiny cell was strong for all its softness. The room he emerged into was another cellar, no less dark in principle, but a merry glow came from a portable paraffin stove and tall golden stands held arrays of candles in the four stone corners. Silver blinked at the candlesticks. They had a distinct ecclesiastical air. He turned to the stranger.
“Miss Lindhurst?” he said.
“Maud,” said the girl briskly. “Who the hell are you?”
Silver blinked. The only woman he had ever known to curse was his mother, and even that was very rare.