The Music Box: Chapter Fifteen

Percy’s mother’s fall had left her miserable and bedridden. She would recover in time, Doctor Whittaker had said, it was only a bad sprain to the ankle, but there was no question of her being on it.

Percy was therefore being kept very busy both day and night in the running of the inn. While has father tended to serving the drinks and chopping the wood and keeping the fires alive, Percy took over the more ‘womanly’ roles – ensuring the meals were being cooked, the rooms for the lodgers tidy enough to let out. He had helped out before, but never had he burned so badly to be elsewhere. Although he had all but given up hope of finding the girl – and really had no idea what he would do if he did - something told him he must try one more time. After three nights of this, of working until his body ached and fatigue carried him to bed with a heavy thud, he could take it no longer. Once the Sunday evening meals had been prepared, eaten and cleaned away, with the last few drinkers quietly propping up the bar, he pleaded with his father for just an hour’s break away.

“I promise I shall return,” he pleaded. “But I need to do this.”

His father was not pleased, but gruffly relented.

“You just make sure you is. I’ve a hard enough time here as it is with your head always up in the clouds. I don’t know what it is yer up to in there and I know fer sure I don’t like it.”

Percy raced upstairs to his little room. He knew the smell of pig grease and baked mutton pervaded his very pores, but he had no time to bathe now. He threw his filthy working clothes to the floor and drew out his best white shirt, usually worn only to church but luckily he hadn’t been that morning, tending to the inn while his father went. This, he remarked to himself, was the first stroke of luck he could count in an otherwise terrible few days. In his urgency to depart Percy almost sprawled headlong down the stairs, one of his boots still only half on. He regained his balance and took the remaining stairs three at a time, tearing out the front door with unseemly haste. When he neared the edge of the woods he realised he was puffing quite heavily, and in danger of soaking his shirt with a sweaty stench.

Slowing to a more manageable pace, gathering his breath, Percy decided that this had to be his last visit to the woods like this; that he could not go on this way.

***

Perched precariously on the top of the woodpile, Isabelle peered through the window. She could make out, in the glow of a dying fire, that this was the kitchen of the inn. She saw the heavy black pots, the wide workbench scattered with knives and ladles, jugs and plates, but – barring a large grey rat at the end of the bench gnawing on a rodent-friendly morsel of some sort - there was no sign of life.

She carefully climbed down from the high stack of wood, managing to catch a splinter up beneath the nail on her right index finger. She worked her way around to the next window, which looked onto the main part of the inn.

By now the evening was getting quite late – only the most dedicated drinkers remained at the bar. Isabelle hated being here in the village, away from the protective embrace of the forest’s bosom. If her heart had not become so twisted, so single-tracked in its ache, she would have fled far sooner. But now she was here, she was determined to see her plan through. Her time in the woods had not been spent idly; she had learned every trick there was to moving around so quietly, so naturally, that you remained almost invisible to the eye. She knew there was a way of standing, of holding yourself that even if someone was looking right at you, they still might not see you if their mind was turned to other things.

She had learned this from the owl, from the wolves and, finally, from the trees themselves. It’s how she had managed to watch Percy all those nights, to be so close that she could almost have ruffled his sandy hair, but that he had not realised. It was, she thought, how Aloysius must have been watching her all that time. She felt a twin-shudder – the thought of Aloysius’ warm breath on her neck, and the thought of touching Percy’s hair both mingling in a way she had never before felt. It was both pleasant and unpleasant at the same time.

While all this was passing through her mind her keen eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the inn and taken in its inhabitants. There was Percy’s father behind the bar, a large, roundish man with a thatch of greasy black hair upon the top of his head, perched like a castle surrounded by the moat of his high widow’s peak. He was leaning an elbow on the bar, his free hand describing an arc through the air and cutting back across, then spreading his hands to denote the size of something; no doubt an exaggeration whatever it was.

The audience was a pair of withered old men in clothes filthy from work, a cap pulled down firmly on the tired head of one and lank, gray hair sprouting from the other. The first shook his head at whatever Percy’s father had said, but the second nodded and chuckled. At a table in the back corner sat another man, a pitcher on front of him and his club of a hand wrapped around its handle. His half-shut eyes were bloodshot and looking right back at her, but Isabelle doubted he was seeing anything at all. There was, she realised with a sigh, no sign of Percy.

Isabelle was startled by the ringing of a bell from behind her, but looking around she realised it must only have been the wind, bored with its aimless wandering, diverting from its path through the main street and weaving its way through the church tower. This touch of reality broke her from the tableau before her and reminded Isabelle that no matter how well she was blending in, sooner or later she would be noticed. Dejectedly, she set off for home, back to the woods.

When she reached the edge of the forest, the path that led deep into its heart, she stopped cold. It was all too quiet, too still. Although Isabelle loved the peace of her woods, it was certainly not the peace of silence – there was forever the chatter of the squirrels, the playful teasing of birdsong, the subaudible thrum of the insects, the meandering murmuring of the wise old elms. Tonight it was all missing; the forest was holding its very breath.