Read Online Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) by Robert Holdstock - Free Book Online Page A

…’
    ‘It wasn’t hostility, Beck. I was frightened too.’
    ‘Yeah. Well … it was all suddenly overwhelming. But the fact is,
I
didn’t kill Sebastian, even if my fingers did. There’s the ghost of that moment inside me, and that’s why I felt so frightened, but I don’t see why we should run from here because of the past. It feels good to be here, I feel I belong again. I thought the songpaths would be too weak to keep me, but now I’m not so sure.’
    What was she saying, that she wasn’t going to return to the outback?
    ‘And Flynn?’
    ‘Flynn is dead,’ she said, looking at Martin sharply. ‘I don’t mean physically. I mean, he and I are dead. The songpaths are a closed part of my life. Eveline’s death was the final marker of that experience, the defining moment. I had to come back when she died, and now I have to stay. I feel quite calm about this, Martin. If you want to leave, you go ahead. But I’m staying.’
    There was a certainty about Rebecca that was so intense it was almost stunning. A few moments before, Martin had been clear that he would sort out the affairs of the small estate and then leave for Amsterdam, or perhaps for a long vacation by the southern shore. Now he was confused. Eveline’s urgent demand, through herletters and the mouths of friends, that neither he nor Rebecca should risk their lives in Broceliande was still a powerful consideration, yet he felt himself weakening, his resolve to depart going.
    This was his home. This was the only place, in all the world, where he truly belonged. Rebecca belonged here less than he did, and yet she, too, was finding that old spirit again, the attachment to a place of ghosts, farms, rural existence and peace.
    ‘Why don’t we stay for a week,’ he said, ‘then review the situation. Eveline was quite adamant that we’re not safe here. There must have been a reason for it.’
    ‘Have some coffee,’ Rebecca said, filling a wide cup for him. She was smiling as she spoke. ‘Eveline was afraid for us, Martin. But she’s gone, now. It’s up to us to be aware, to be cautious. Whatever she was afraid of, maybe it had only to do with little Seb’s death, all those years ago. Maybe she knew that I had something to do with it – but what she couldn’t know was that whatever the possession at that time, whatever was in me, it’s gone. My new possession is song, ancient song, the songs of the earth, call it what you like, you know what I mean: song was always used in magic, and a little of that song-magic came into me from the people on the path. You couldn’t know it because you never went inside one of them. Well, only for an instant. And perhaps that was wise. I can’t in my heart feel any danger here.’
    ‘But we should be cautious,’ Martin said, and Rebecca smiled at him.
    ‘Of course. What else?’
    *
    Martin worked on the details of the estate with Uncle Jacques, and a solicitor from Rennes, a jocular man, with bushy side-whiskers and a florid complexion, ill-at-ease with the pin-stripe of his suit.
    Eveline had left an estate valued at two million, two hundred thousand francs, of which a quarter was in investments, insurances and savings. The farm stock accounted for very little of the remaining value, which was substantially contained within the building and outhouses, and in the land, twenty five acres, including woodland, that was divided between grazing and broccoli. There was a good water source, a spring that had been enclosed and channelled in the Middle Ages, and only two tumuli cut into the useable cultivation space.
    The farm was, of course, heavily untended. In her later years, Eveline had concentrated on pigs and chickens, with Uncle Jacques and another farmer, raising broccoli and maize in rotation on five acres. For the first time, reviewing the estate, Martin became aware that his father had had a not unreasonable business sense, since the investments he had made out of the very meagre profits from the