Into the Wilderness
Page 153

There was a faint smile on his face. "I see you, Miz Elizabeth. You more and more like that Father Mansard, that Jesuit. You want to talk logic, and I'm talking Windigo. My skin ain't the same color as yours, and you see that, and you believe it. But if I tell you there's another kind of man, with enough of a pelt to live in this bush in the winter, then you sit back and get a frown line."
"You think they sleep through the winter?" Nathaniel asked from behind Elizabeth.
"Never said that. Don't know. All I can say is that in the night I seen them here, usually a big male, but once there was two of them. Chunking things at me, and howling. And I drove them off with fire."
"Perhaps they meant you no harm," Elizabeth said.
Joe's face contorted. "I wonder if that very same idea is going through the rabbit's head when the shadow of the owl falls over it." Another wave of deep sleepiness moved on his face, but he kept her gaze firmly in his own. "They like to play with folk, scare 'em. But don't be fooled, these ain't no fairy folk. Will you keep that in mind?"
Elizabeth wanted to assure him that she would indeed, but he had slipped away suddenly into sleep. When Nathaniel spoke behind her, she jumped.
"I'll set up in here."
She didn't protest.
* * *
By the light of the fire they dozed, and woke and then dozed again. Joe talked in his sleep, mutterings that couldn't be followed. Once Elizabeth rose to go out of the shelter and relieve herself, and when she came back, Nathaniel was sitting up with his arms slung around his knees, staring into the low flames. She stood looking at him for a moment, the strong profile lit by the fire, his eyes hooded with worry. There was grass caught in his hair, and she went to him and took it out.
He caught her wrist and pulled her down next to him.
"When she was a girl," said Elizabeth, "My cousin Amanda would come into my bed at night because she feared the Green Man. Did your mother ever tell you of him?"
When Nathaniel shook his head, she sighed. "I think that for many years I have put the story out of my head quite willfully."
"Tell me."
Elizabeth took a minute to gather her thoughts. "Oakmere sits on the edge of a great wood. Nothing like these woods." she said hastily. "But still, for England very large, and old. And there are tales of the Green Man that the common folk tell. I believe it was one of the upstairs maids—a young woman called Maisie—who told it to Amanda one day, although Amanda herself denied that. She claimed to know nothing of it, only that she woke sometimes at night to see a man looking in her window. A man grown out of a tree, she said, with moss for a face and hair of oak leaves and fingers like sticks which he used to scratch upon her window."
Nathaniel leaned in closer to her, and she took his hand to cradle between both of hers.
"Amanda was a flighty girl, very dramatic. But when she came to my bed at night to be comforted, I had no doubt that her fear was real."
There was a mumbling from Joe, and they both looked toward him. When he had settled again, Elizabeth continued.
"I was five years older, you see, and it had always fallen to me to be the sensible cousin to all of them, but especially to Amanda. And I suppose I was well suited to that role. It was one thing that finally gave me some . . . presence in the family. I remember how strangely my uncle Merriweather looked at me, that first night that Amanda woke the whole household screaming and would not take comfort from her mother, nor from anyone but me. He looked at me as though he had never seen me before, and I suppose in a way that was true. He was never cruel to me, I was just—" She paused.
"You were invisible to him," Nathaniel supplied.
She nodded, reluctantly. "And so they left to me to convince Amanda that the Green Man was no more than a tale told at the hearth on a winter's night to entertain. But it didn't matter really what I said to her, she often ended up back shivering at my bedside in the deep of the night, when there was rain especially."
"What happened?" Nathaniel asked.
"She married at eighteen, and moved away," said Elizabeth. "When she had been married some weeks she came home to visit, and I asked her, when I had the opportunity to address her privately, how she was sleeping. I thought perhaps that she might even have forgot about the Green Man."
"But she hadn't."
Elizabeth paused. "No. I remember quite clearly the expression in her eyes, resigned and a little sad. "He's come along, too, Lizzie," she told me. "Along with the ponies and the silver. I suppose he is mine, and I must learn to live with him."
"What are you trying to say?"
"I'm not sure. I suppose I mean to say that we each of us have our personal demons, and that for some they are more . . . tangible than for others. And we carry them with us wherever we go, although we would much rather leave them behind."
"And what demon do you carry with you?" Nathaniel asked, very quietly.
"I am tempted to claim that I have none," she said, leaning against him and staring into the low fire. "But I fear you know me too well already to accept that."
He brought her fingers up to his mouth and kissed them. His eyes rested on her face in a caress as warm and direct as his touch. "Listen, now, because I want you to hear me."
In the night outside the shelter, there was a long, high howl, but Nathaniel's gaze held her steady.
He said, "You'll never be invisible again. Not to me, never to me."