Wildoak: Chapters 23–37

But just as she was clearing away the stationery, she accidentally knocked over the inkwell. Ink spilled across the desk and splashed onto the envelope.

The expression on his face faltered.

Snow leopards live in remote parts of China and Mongolia, not villages in Cornwall.

He's a wild tabby from old Timbrill's farm. Tabbys are beautiful. They can have all sorts of unusual markings, spots and stripes, and I don't doubt he looks a bit like a leopard.

As the afternoon waned, he limped slowly toward the stream.

Rumpus turned and hobbled back beneath the cover of the trees as quickly as he could.

She had short curly gray hair and ruddy cheeks.

She turned away and pretended to be interested in the old postcards while the woman pulled out a sheet of perforated stamps from a drawer.

She laid out a meal for Rumpus, although this time it was chicken, and not much of it. Fred's supply of frozen meat was dwindling, and she was worried he might notice.

She was no longer separate from the forest. She was part of it. And in that instant, she understood something—not in the way that words carry messages, but in the way that instincts carry feeling and intuition carries meaning.

She coaxed him up and led him slowly back to the hollow.

The girl’s scent. Soft. Something else too. Acrid. Faint, but unmistakable. Machines maybe.

A copy of The Forager’s Guide to Medicinal Plants lay open on the kitchen table.

The snails were now permanently housed above Fred’s spice rack and surveyed the kitchen with placid curiosity.

“Plan-tago lan-ce-o-lata,” she read out, "a species of flowering plant in the plantain family...ribwort, narrowleaf, ribleaf, and lamb's tongue...okay...so...the leaves are traditionally used internally—as syrup or tea—but also externally—for treatment of disorders of the respiratory tract, skin, insect bites, and infections. Infections...yes, we definitely need some of this.”

White dead nettle, not to be confused with the common stinging nettle...used as a medicinal herb for centuries and is believed to have astringent, anti...spasmodic, anti-inflammatory, and soothing properties.

White dead nettle, not to be confused with the common stinging nettle...used as a medicinal herb for centuries and is believed to have astringent, anti...spasmodic, anti-inflammatory, and soothing properties.

Cleavers are used to treat a variety of skin ailments, wounds, and burns...also used to make tea...believed to assist lymph nodes in cleaning out toxins.

Part of the book was dedicated to tinctures, with a whole section on the invention of "chemically formed aspirin” from willow bark of all things.

What if the bulldozers got to the tree and didn't know he was in there and just razed it to the ground?

By Thursday morning, she had applied multiple treatments. She held the poultice mixture in one hand and looked at him, curled up on his side, one paw outstretched, caked and matted with dried paste.

As his body began to shake uncontrollably, Rumpus succumbed to the fury of his fever.

It was as though her windpipe had been cut off by a wire cord, cinched tight.

The air smelled different, of sap and fresh-cut wood.

He went to the side of the pub, searching for the source of all the enticing smells. There he found a handful of empty picnic tables and a pair of huge, overflowing dustbins.

Gobs of mashed potato, half-eaten sausage, and gristly bits of steak, dripping cartons of cream, and butter wrappers scattered across the ground.

But he took one sniff of the cooked meat and looked at her with a kind of snooty disregard.

But she couldn't quite bear to leave Rumpus, so she lingered, sitting down beneath the great branches of the gnarled old tree.

The bark was encrusted with iced lichen and felt rough beneath her palms.

In a short while, the path narrowed and dipped beneath the fronds of a large weeping willow.

He watched as a small shoal of fish sunned themselves, tails quivering.

She shivered at the fresh-cut memory of her nightmares. The specter of "treatments” at Granville loomed larger than ever.

The slate-blue water was flanked on both sides by a quilt of rolling fields and hedgerows, a patchwork of browns and dark greens, covered in swathes of dwindling snow.

“I became something known as a ‘conscientious objector,’” Fred went on, “but your father thought I was a coward. He couldn't understand why I wouldn't serve, especially as I was a doctor. He still doesn't understand. In fact, that was the last time we talked, the last time you were here. We got into it one night and, well,'' Fred sighed.

She thought of the distant look in his eyes when she had said goodbye, his body stiff and unyielding. He had never properly returned a hug.

Fred led them down the other side of the bluff, following the well-worn footpath, comfortable with every twist and turn.

The shell was no bigger than her fingernail. She turned it over, the underside creamy white and flat, its two edges folding into a narrow, toothed slit. It was exquisite.

Maggie had still not decided when she overheard a snippet of the conversation from a larger table nearby.

"I saw them. Was not a dog that killed 'em. Torn to bits so they were. Mauled.''

Making a fool of herself wasn't the problem; it was all the things they had been saying about Rumpus, about him being a terrible monster. It was knowing how vulnerable he was but not knowing what to do about it.