Silver in the Wood

by Emily Tesh

  “I’m not having it,” Silver said. “You’re my tenant. I’ll pay for the doctor. You must have a doctor. And be moved; this place isn’t fit for a wounded man. My God! What were those trigger-happy fools in the coppice doing? Did they take you for a thief?”

  He did not seem to expect an answer, which was just as well.

  “We’ll have you safe at Greenhollow Hall in no time,” he said, and this time his hand did reach Tobias’s shoulder, and held it firmly for a moment. “Within the hour, if I can manage it.”

  * * *

  When Tobias next woke, he was lying on a bed as soft as moss and as cool as fresh water, and the throb in his leg was a steady healing pounding, not the slow burn of infection and death. He knew at once that he would be well again.

  There was a breeze from an open window, blowing the smell of freshly cut grass into the little room, and Pearl was lying on the end of his bed with her paws stretched out, totally at her ease. Tobias tried to sit up and failed. When he turned his head, he was aware of an odd heaviness which confused him until he realised: they’d washed his hair and plaited it. No doubt someone had found him offensively untidy until then. The heart of Tobias’s untidiness wouldn’t be fixed by any washing. Already there were brackish stains on the bed linen.

  He did not recognise the room he was lying in, but then there was no reason he should; the Hall had been through a score of owners and at least two fires since Tobias had last set foot inside it. It was a plain room, but the kind of plain that had strength behind it: brick and plaster, high ceilings, heavy furniture. There was an ewer on a small table by the bed. Tobias was thirsty, but if he tried to reach for it now he’d just knock it down. Someone would come in by and by. No one got put in a bed like this in a room like this and then just left there.

  “Ah, Mr Finch,” said Silver when he came in, and he smiled. “I’m glad to see you looking well.”

  Tobias just looked at him.

  “Water?” said Silver. When Tobias nodded, Silver came and sat on the edge of the bed to pour him some and hold the cup for him while he drank. Tobias felt weak as a child. Some of that was his injury; the rest lay in how far he’d come from the wood. He could only feel a trace of it, out at the edges of the Hall’s gardens.

  “I’m afraid I’ve had to break our bargain,” Silver said.

  “What?”

  “To cut your rent,” said Silver. “I would have done it, very gladly, but I had a look through the Hall’s records and it’s a funny thing. You don’t seem to pay any.”

  Tobias said nothing.

  “The last mention of the woodland cottage is some four hundred years ago, in fact,” said Silver. “Can you believe that? It seems the Rafelas just forgot about the place. So I’m terribly sorry, but in order to explain your presence here to the doctor I’m afraid I’ve had to raise your rent. You pay it in service now.”

  Tobias still kept silent.

  “I don’t want you to think that I’m—that is, I’m not going to ask you any questions,” said Silver, “along the lines of what are you doing in my wood and so on.”

  Tobias snorted at that.

  “What? Oh, my wood. Yes, I know,” said Silver, “I’ve only been here a few months.”

  “It’s yours in the law all the same,” Tobias said.

  “And no doubt you know every nook of it and think the law can go hang itself,” Silver said. “Which is just as well, because, you see, if anyone asks, you’re my gamekeeper. I had to explain you somehow. ‘Wild man’ just wasn’t going to satisfy my mother.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She somehow knows everything,” said Silver, “and she writes the most horrible letters. I couldn’t risk her coming down in person. She’d tell me I had to make my employees cut their hair.”

  “Well,” said Tobias, “we wouldn’t want that.”

  “No indeed,” said Silver. He ducked his head and gave Tobias a small smile. “I don’t believe I could make you do it in any case. You are quite a lot bigger than I am.”

  “I’m a wounded man,” said Tobias.

  “You insult me. I wouldn’t bring scissors to bear on an invalid.”

  “Only way you’d have a chance,” said Tobias. He pictured it, Silver taking scissors to Tobias’s shaggy head. He’d have a hard time of it. Be better off with garden shears.

  Silver covered his face with his hands. “I know!” Then he peered between his fingers at Tobias. “Forgive me, I am a poor comforter for invalids. I should say: how are you feeling?”

  Tobias thought about it. He could not say to Silver: like a thing uprooted, though he was. It was sure that without Silver and his gamekeeper story and the doctor he’d plainly paid for, Tobias would be dead. “Better,” he said in the end. “Could do with some more sleep.”

  Silver stood at once. “I won’t prevent it,” he said. “There’s a bell on the table. Ring it if you need anything, anything at all. I am eccentric, and all the servants have grown resigned to it. I may indulge my gamekeeper if I wish.”

  “Do you hunt?” said Tobias abruptly.

  Silver made a face. “Never. I haven’t the stomach for it. Don’t worry, I shan’t expect any actual gamekeeping from you.”

  Tobias nodded.

  “Sleep, sleep!” said Silver. “Sleep well. Don’t worry. I’ve managed everything.”

  Tobias slept. He only woke up a handful of times in the next week, usually when Silver came in to give him some water. Once Silver tried to give him laudanum. Tobias could smell the poppy. He roused enough to spit it out. “I didn’t want you to be in pain,” said Silver, confused and put out. “The doctor said . . .”

  “Hang the doctor,” growled Tobias.

  He was ashamed after for losing his temper. He always tried not to: it seemed to him that being a big fellow meant you had to keep a rein on yourself. But he was beginning to get restless, lying in a bed all day with nothing to do except wait for Silver to come in and take a look at him.

  “Sorry,” he said, next time Silver came to see him, the following morning.

  “What? Oh, the laudanum! No, no, I’m the one who should be sorry,” Silver said. “I should have asked you if you wanted it first. I hope there’s not some history, or . . .”

  The inquiry hung there. Tobias had known Silver was curious, had seen him bite his tongue on it half a dozen times. This was the first time the curiosity had made it to the surface. Tobias wasn’t going to encourage it. “None,” he said. “Just don’t like the stuff.” It was even true. “Shouldn’t have lost my temper. Fidgety, is all.”

  “Of course, of course, you’re bored,” said Silver. “That’s good news! It must mean you’re healing. Perhaps a book?”

  Tobias snorted.

  Silver looked embarrassed. “Oh, I thought—there’s a school in Hallerton, and these days—not that there’s anything wrong with—” He caught his breath. “If you have never had the opportunity to learn to read, Mr Finch,” he said, “I should be delighted to teach you.”

  “Had the opportunity,” said Tobias. “Just not the knack. Never got any good at it.” He took pity on Silver’s embarrassment. “Wouldn’t mind hearing some tales, though. You could read to me.”

  Silver went a little pink. “I’d be delighted,” he said.

  After that he turned up at Tobias’s sickbed every evening with a little leather-bound volume. He had a pleasant voice for listening to, one that went up and down soothingly. Tobias didn’t always pay attention to the words. It was nice to hear a human voice speaking, the rises and falls of it.

  * * *

  A week or so of that went by, and Tobias felt well enough to rise out of bed and stomp around, stare out the window towards the dark shades of the wood on the edge of the park. He couldn’t stay here much longer.

  “So what’re you doing at the Hall?” he asked Silver that night, interrupting the sweet up-and-down of his voice as he read through a book of folklore. It was all old village tales, country stories written down i
n stern professorial language, strange stuff. Silver jerked when Tobias interrupted. Come to think of it, Tobias hadn’t been doing much talking, these nights. Just listening, to the hills and valleys of Silver’s voice. Watching the candlelight on his curls. Wasn’t a surprise that Tobias had forgotten how to make conversation, but Silver must have been out of the habit of expecting it from him.

  “Well,” Silver said after he was done looking startled, and he laid the book down open on his lap. “This, if I’m honest. Though you mustn’t tell my mother.” The way Silver talked, his mother was little short of an ogress.

  “This?”

  “Folklore,” said Silver. “Studying—investigating. Of course I’m not a real scholar.” He said this as if Tobias might have challenged him on it. “But so much of our heritage is disappearing in this day and age. The costs of progress. I’m interested in preserving what I can.”

  “Get boys and girls from the village in the woods sometimes,” said Tobias. “Running about with nets. Catching butterflies.”

  “That’s exactly it,” said Silver, breaking out in a big grin. “I’m catching butterflies. In any case, Greenhollow Wood has a fascinating set of local legends swirling around it. The Wild Man story is a case in point. I spoke to your attacker, by the way. Charlie Bondee, woodsman. He feels quite the fool and is desperate to apologise. When he saw you there in the night, he really did believe the spirit of the wood had come to assault the village.”

  “Did he now,” said Tobias, smiling. The smile was as much for Silver’s butterfly-catching grin as it was for the woodsman with the pistol. Poor Charlie Bondee.

  “You must admit, Mr Finch,” said Silver, “you are an alarming-looking fellow.”

  The way he said it, and the look he gave Tobias with it, was flirting. Flirting! At least Tobias recognised it this time. Funny thing, to be flirted with by a pretty young fellow who wore expensive coats. Made Tobias feel young again, and at the same time very, very old.

  He didn’t answer because he had no answer for it. Instead he smiled, and shook his head, and Silver took it as gracefully as if he had never been looking at Tobias’s hair and hands and shoulders in the first place. “Perhaps you’d like to know more about the Wild Man of Greenhollow Wood?” he said. “You never know; you might meet him someday. You are living in his domain, after all.”

  “Go on, then,” said Tobias, and Silver leaned forward in his chair as he began to tell the local stories he’d been researching. He had a funny way of talking when he hadn’t the book to keep him on track: he kept cutting himself off to explain things, theorise, and remark about similar stories he’d heard elsewhere. “The Wild or Green Man figure comes up over and over in this part of the country,” he said at one point, “and is obviously the modern interpretation of one of the so-called ‘old gods,’ a tutelary spirit or woodland demigod. I think the myth is separate from—although similar to—to the myths of the Fairy King, because regardless of the Wild Man’s particular interpretation—whether aggressive or generous, a savage enemy of civilisation or its protector—he never has a court and is always fundamentally alone: a primitive figure, not from a different civilisation but from before civilisation existed at all. Whereas the Fairy King—”

  It was a lot of nonsense. No such thing as a fairy king, so far as Tobias knew, and by now he’d probably have come across one if there was one to find. Fairies he had met, and chased off usually; even more than dryads, they were better off far away from humans, and humans far from them. But the nonsense made it easier for Tobias to be amused by the whole thing: lying in a soft white bed, with his wood too far away, listening to old wives’ tales of himself.

  * * *

  Before long the boredom of the white room and the soft bed was more than Tobias could bear. He didn’t like the feeling of being trapped. In his wood, he could step out of the cottage any time of the day or night and tramp away under the trees, down as far as the boundary stones of Hallerton or all the way out east to the boggy wetland there.

  One morning he got himself up and went out into the house.

  At first he limped along lost, turning corners and trying shiny brass doorknobs without any idea what was behind them. He leaned on the walls when he had to give his bad leg a rest. They were high and strong and brick-and-mortar, more human than Tobias was used to. But he came through a double set of doors and out into a big room with a stone fireplace, and then he knew the place, of course. This was the heart of the Hall.

  They’d put a new roof on it. Tobias tipped his head back to look at it. He’d used to knock his head on the doorframes, walking this way. Hadn’t happened once this morning.

  A young woman at work on the flagstones with a scrubbing brush and a bucket of soapy water gave him a nervous look. Tobias nodded gravely at her and stomped carefully away through the doors on the far side of the room.

  It was still the library. It looked a little different. Dark polished shelves shone in the light from the big glass windows. There were scores, no, hundreds of books arrayed along them. In the middle of the room was a table, the same dark-shining fine-grained timber that Tobias didn’t recognise—so nothing that had ever grown in his wood—with maps and journals and a dozen heavy tomes spread on it.

  Silver was up a ladder. “Mr Finch!” he cried from overhead. He scrambled down and jumped the last few rungs. No coat on him this morning, and pale eyes full of light when he smiled. “I’m so glad to see you up and about,” he said. “What can I do for you?” He frowned. “Sit, sit down. I’m sure you shouldn’t walk too far on that leg just yet.”

  He ushered Tobias into a high-backed chair before Tobias could object. It was big enough to take all Tobias’s bulk without a creak. Silver smiled at him and said, “I take it the fidgets were too much for you?”

  “You’re working,” said Tobias.

  “I’m always happy to have company. Especially if it’s a captive audience,” Silver said.

  He meant it, too. Tobias leaned back in the chair, which was near as comfortable as the soft bed, and watched him dart around his polished bookshelves, pulling down this book and that one. He talked to Tobias the whole time, explaining what he was doing though Tobias barely recognised the things he knew, the dryads and nightwalkers and places of power, in Silver’s cheery brookwater babble. He only spoke once, to ask about the timber.

  “Oh—mahogany—I think?” said Silver. “It’s the done thing.” He looked around as if he was only just seeing it. “It is rather lovely, I suppose.”

  “Aye,” said Tobias.

  Silver went back to his flicking through books and chattering. Seemed a funny sort of way to do work to Tobias, but Silver looked pleased with himself. “Greenhollow was an important site,” he said, “there’s no doubt about that in my mind at all. The old gods mattered here. Now tracing the exact preoccupations of a preliterate society is tricky, of course, but the landscape itself bears witness, so if you look at the maps—”

  He had four or five spread across the table. Tobias levered himself to his feet and let Silver take his arm to point at them. It took him a moment to make sense of them, but once he saw the picture he didn’t need Silver to say “—and this is eighteenth-century, and this is sixteenth, and this is a reconstruction based on what records we have from the twelfth—”

  Tobias nodded. He knew the shape of his own wood.

  “You can see the typical disregard for spelling conventions, of course,” Silver said. “Cartographers have settled on Greenhollow in the present day, but it’s just as often spelled hallow right up to the turn of the century, sometimes one word and sometimes two. One assumes the pronunciation changed over time.”

  “I can see that, can I?” Tobias said.

  Silver blushed, but then he glanced up at Tobias with a little grin. Liked his work, this one. “Well,” he said, “you’ll have to take my word for it.”

  Tobias said nothing, just raised his brows.

  “Now this,” Silver said, unrolling another paper, �
��is my own work.”

  Tobias frowned down at it. “That the wood?” he said.

  It was. It was absolutely the wood. The shape of it fit cleanly into Tobias’s mind. But there was no sign of the village, only a mark of a crossed circle where the shrine ought to be. The Hall was missing as well, the green mass of the wood spreading freely over the land where it would be and off towards the edge of the map. It rolled away in every direction, even up over the hills and angling fingers out into the wetland. “When’s that, then?” he said.

  “At least three thousand years ago,” said Silver. “Maybe more. There are known barrows here and here”—pointing to neat crosses drawn amongst the hills—“and more in this direction, if you see. The course of Haller Brook has changed substantially, of course, so some of this is really a guess. But this is the primaeval forest. The modern Greenhollow is only a remnant of a sacred space that was much, much greater. I call it the Hallow Wood.”

  Tobias nodded slowly as he looked down at it. “Suppose that makes sense,” he said. He nearly reached out to touch, but Silver’s map was fine work on fine paper, and he didn’t trust his own rough hands.

  Silver looked up from the map to Tobias’s face and smiled at whatever he saw. “Do you think so?” he said, all warm pleasure. “I’m glad.”

  * * *

  Tobias went back to his cottage a few days later. Silver wrung his hands about it, but now Tobias could walk, he couldn’t linger. He needed to be back under the old oak, and Bramble would be worrying.

  “I will be visiting,” said Silver. “The doctor said you had to rest, Mr Finch, and I mean to see that his orders are followed.”

  “Don’t plan to go out adventuring,” said Tobias, honestly. The wood could take care of itself a little while. “Just want to be in my own bed.”

  Silver gave him a walking stick, and Tobias set off in the morning and walked across the Hall’s pretty gardens towards the dark blot of the trees. Every step he took closer to the forest made him feel stronger: by the time he could make out the blackberry tangles at the wood’s edge, he barely needed the walking stick at all. Bramble was waiting for him, sunlit eyes unblinking as she curled among her thorns. “I’m here, my dear,” said Tobias, and crossed into the shadow of the trees.