‘I picked flowers while you were there,’ she protested. Yes, there had been some rather gorgeous cosmos in flower which had been decimated. ‘And then I played a game of hide and seek.’ She sighed. ‘But then Cecil was cranky. So I came to find you.’
Cranky Cecil… Nick didn’t want to dwell on that either.
Maeve’s fancies, Patricia would say with a gentle smile.Let her be a child, Nick. It all goes by so fast. Blink and you’ll miss it. And you already miss too much.
‘I’m glad you came to find me,’ he told her.
He squeezed Maeve’s hand and then hefted her up in his arms, settling her on his shoulders. She squealed with delight and stretched her hands out to thread her fingers through the leaves hanging over the path.
The laughter ran through the woods, high and bright and full of joy. Birdsong answered. Just birdsong, he told himself.
‘It’s beautiful here, Daddy,’ Maeve said.
And it was, when she was here.
‘It is, but remember the rules.’
‘I remember, I remember! Don’t come in here without you. Don’t stray from the path. Don’t talk to strangers or play their games. Don’t come in here after dark.’
‘Good girl,’ he murmured and all around him the wild murmured as well.
He wanted to believe the woods would never harm her. Not his Maeve. Not when he felt the way he did about her. He really wanted to believe that.
But the woods were wild. And she was so small.
‘Let’s go back to the house,’ he told her.
‘But we’re not finished.’
He glanced up at her. She had her hands tangled in his hair, her blue eyes fixed on something through the trees.
‘What do you mean,mo stórín?’
‘Look,’ she said, and pointed off through the trees. For a moment he saw nothing, and then the hare moved. It was little more than the flick of an ear, the blink of an eye. It was not there and then it was there, a pale golden brown, with amber eyes, watching him all too knowingly.
And behind it, a figure in green. Something made of leaves and twigs and moss. A trick of the light…
‘Who’s that, Daddy?’ Maeve asked.
Nick stopped, his body like stone, his eyes filling with tears he couldn’t let escape. He clung to Maeve now. Even up on his shoulders, holding onto him as he held onto her, he couldn’t shake the feeling that at any second he might lose her. That she might wriggle free and be snatched away by the woods, vanish into their depths never to be found.
The wild woods closed around them both, whispering, sighing, murmuring.
‘Just an old friend,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry about him. Let’s go back, Maeve. It’s getting late and Granny will be here to pick you up soon.’
‘But – oh, he’s gone.’ She sounded so disappointed and Nick finally managed to breathe a sigh of relief. ‘Is it like the house?’ she asked.
‘A little bit,’ he said warily. How much could he tell her safely? He tried to treat it all like a game, but it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. ‘But remember the cellar?’
He felt her tense suddenly and wished he’d never brought that up. ‘Yes.’ Her voice was suddenly small, the word little more than thesat the end.
‘We don’t go down there, do we?’
Maeve shook her head. ‘Are the woods like that?’ she asked, a tremble in her voice. She sounded like he had just broken her heart with that revelation.
If only that was all, he thought. But he couldn’t tell her. No more than he could tell Alex. Not yet.
He prayed that somehow there would never be a need.
