Clementine's Crossroads: Wren in The Wood

A flicker of green pulsed at the edge of the wood, bright as a struck match swallowed by undergrowth. Barnaby looked up from the car's exposed engine bay, his wrench pausing mid-turn. The evening light had gone amber and long across the clearing, and the shape between the birches shifted, stumbled, and came tumbling out into the open grass clutching a glass jar that threw green fire against her shirtfront.

Wren.

Her wild hair caught brambles and bits of moss. Her cheeks were flushed from running, her mouth open, her chest heaving beneath a coat that had seen better seasons. The jar in her arms was stoppered with a rag and packed with something luminous and restless. Glow-worms, dozens of them, throwing pale emerald light across her knuckles, her collarbone, the bridge of her nose.

She saw Barnaby first. Her eyes went wide.

Then she saw Clementine, standing beside the open passenger door with one hand resting on the car's roof, and Wren stopped dead. The glow-worms swarmed against the glass. The grass smelled of cut hay and something older, peat smoke and wet fern.

"The grille," Wren breathed. Her voice came out thin and trembling, the Irish lilt stretched tight. "The car's grille. It's w-wearing listening runes."

Clementine straightened. Her hand slid off the roof. The soft rasp in her voice sharpened a fraction. "What did you say, child?"

Wren clutched the jar tighter. A glow-worm crawled up the inside of the glass and threw a wavering light across her eyes. "I saw them. In the bracken. I was, I was cataloguing the bog cotton at the southern fringe and I saw the light from your headlamps and I came closer and, and the grille is covered in them. Tiny ones. Etched into the metal. They move when you move."

Barnaby set the wrench down on the running board. The engine bay creaked as something settled in the cooling block. He had worked on this car for two days now, scraping rust from the fenders and coaxing the old motor back to something resembling life. He had not looked closely at the grille. He had been too busy keeping his hands busy, keeping his mind from the road behind them and what might have followed.

"Slow down," he said. "Breathe."

Wren drew in a breath that shook on the way down. The jar rattled faintly against her ribs.

"I c-can't," she said. "I have been walking since first light. The forest is wrong tonight, Mr. Barnaby. The wrens have gone quiet. The whole southern ridge has gone quiet, and when I came down through the hazel I saw the metalwork and I thought I was seeing things, but I am not, I am not seeing things." She looked at Clementine, then back at Barnaby, then at Clementine again. "Who is she?"

Clementine stepped forward. The light from the jar caught her jaw, her throat, the loose braid that hung over one shoulder. She was young, perhaps Barnaby's own age or a year younger, with the soft drawl of the southern counties and a weariness around her mouth that did not belong to someone her age.

"Clementine Hollis," she said. "I am surveying the boundary stones along the old cart road. I saw your vehicle and thought to ask directions."

"To where?" Wren asked.

"To anywhere that is not here, eventually." Clementine's mouth curved, but the smile did not reach her eyes. "For the moment, to the stone at Mossbridge Ford. I have been three days looking for it. The maps my father drew are not quite right."

Barnaby stepped around the front of the car. The headlights were off. The engine was off. He had removed the distributor cap an hour ago to clean the contacts, and the car sat with its hood up like a patient with its chest cut open. The grille faced the wood, a rectangle of old chromed steel crosshatched with horizontal bars, and he crouched now and looked at it properly.

There.

Tiny marks. So small he might have mistaken them for road grime, for the patina of age, for the kind of oxidation that came from decades of weather. But they were not random. They were patterned, deliberate, etched into the metal in lines that curved and intersected with a kind of logic. They shifted when he tilted his head. They caught the green light from the jar and threw it back in unexpected directions.

"Crumb," Barnaby called, without looking away from the grille.

A small figure detached itself from the shadow beneath the car's chassis. Crumb unfolded like a jointed toy, knees and elbows arriving first, then a narrow face smudged with axle grease. He blinked at Wren's jar, at Clementine, at Barnaby's crouch.

"That's new," Crumb said.

"Get Aldous."

Crumb vanished toward the cottage at the edge of the clearing, moving fast on his short legs.

Wren came closer, the glow-worms painting her throat in pale light. She smelled of bog water and crushed mint and the sharp green tang of crushed fern. "I have been studying the plants here for years," she said. "I know every rune marker from the old country, the boundary charms, the witch fences. What is on your car is not, is not any of those. It is closer to a binding script. But the direction of the lines is wrong. They are not keeping something out." She swallowed. "They are letting something in."

Clementine's expression did not change, but her shoulders drew in a fraction. She had been leaning against the car with the casual ease of someone who trusted machines. Now her weight shifted forward, onto the balls of her feet, and Barnaby could see her fingers curl at her sides.

"You are the hedgewitch," Clementine said. Not a question.

Wren flushed. "I am not, I am not a hedgewitch. I am a self-taught botanist. The hedgewitch is my aunt, and she lives in Connemara, and she would laugh at me if she heard you say it. But I know my letters, and I know a rune when I see one, and those are runes."

Barnaby stood. His knees cracked. The grille gleamed faintly under the last of the daylight, and now that his eye had been caught, he could not stop seeing the patterns, the way they interlocked, the way they seemed to breathe at the edges of his vision.

"We did not put them there," he said.

"No," Wren agreed, very quietly. "You did not."

The forest exhaled. A breath of wind moved through the birches and brought with it the smell of wet stone and something else, something mineral and distant, like the air above a forge. Barnaby felt the hair on his forearms rise. The glow-worms in Wren's jar pulsed once, twice, and then went dark, all of them at once, as if a hand had closed over them.

Wren made a small sound. She held the jar up and peered at it. "That has never, that has never happened before."

"What made them go out?" Clementine asked.

"I do not know. They respond to light and warmth, not to, not to anything else. Unless." Wren trailed off. She was looking past Barnaby now, past the car, past the hood that stood propped open like a black wing. Her gaze had fixed on the grille. "Unless they heard what I heard."

"What did you hear?" Barnaby asked.

Wren's lips moved before the sound came. Then a thin, distant note drifted across the clearing, so faint that Barnaby was not at first certain he was hearing it at all. A sound like a tuning fork struck once and left to fade. It came from the wood. It came from the ground. It came, he thought, from somewhere inside the car itself.

Clementine went very still.

The glow-worms stayed dark. The runes on the grille seemed to deepen, their etched lines filling with a shadow that was not shadow.

Wren whispered, "They are listening, and what they are listening for is almost here."

The note did not fade so much as it withdrew, like a tide pulling back from shore. Barnaby stood with his hand still on the car's fender and felt the hum of it travel through his palm and up the bones of his wrist. Then it was gone. The runes on the grille held their dark for a long moment, and then the light came back into them, dim and grudging, like embers buried in ash.

Wren's glow-worms flickered on, one by one, each a small green pinprick in the darkening jar.

"Right," Barnaby said, and his own voice sounded to him like something borrowed. "We are closing the hood."

He lowered it carefully. The metal settled with a soft click that felt, in the quiet of the clearing, like a door being shut on a conversation he had not been meant to hear. Clementine gathered her coat from where it had fallen on the running board. Wren tucked the jar into the pocket of her skirt and stood looking at the wood for a count of five before she turned away.

They did not speak on the walk back. The path down from the ridge was steep in places, and the three of them concentrated on their footing, but the silence was the heavier thing to carry. Barnaby kept glancing at the treeline to his left. Nothing moved there. A thrush began to sing, late for the hour, and the ordinary foolishness of it made him laugh once, under his breath. Wren looked at him. He shook his head. She looked away.

They reached the town as the lamps were being lit. Barnaby left Clementine and Wren at the corner of the high street with a promise to come by in the morning, and he walked home through streets that smelled of bread and lamp oil and, faintly, of the forge. He did not sleep well. The note kept coming back to him in pieces, in the way a word heard once in a foreign tongue will circle the mind for hours.

He came by in the morning, then, as he had said he would.

The inn stood at the bend of the high street where the cobbles gave way to packed earth. It was a low building, whitewashed, with a sign that had not been repainted in twenty years and so showed nothing but a weathered rectangle. Barnaby pushed through the door and found Clementine in the private parlour at the back, and beside her a woman he did not know.

She was perhaps forty, perhaps younger, and dressed in a grey travelling suit cut close at the waist and shoulders. Her gloves were laid on the table with the fingers spread, and her hat sat beside them, a small dark thing with a single pin. She looked up when Barnaby came in, and her glance took him in from boots to collar in the time it takes to draw a breath.

"Clementine," she said, without turning her head, "is this the fellow with the motor?"

"Mira Ashbrook," Clementine said, and there was a careful flatness to the introduction. "Mira, this is Barnaby."

"How do you do," Barnaby said.

"I do very well, thank you." Mira Ashbrook's voice was crisp and a little cool, and she spoke the way a person counts money, precisely and without waste. "I have been hearing about you. I understand you have a hand for machines."

"He has a hand for trouble," Clementine said.

"Sometimes those are the same hand." Mira smiled, and the smile was a tool, well-polished and well-used.

Barnaby sat down. On the table between the women lay the leather seat cover from Clementine's small motor, a high-backed single bench upholstered in dark brown hide that had been torn along one seam and worn through at the corners. Wren was not there yet. She arrived a few minutes later, her hair not quite tamed and a jar of something viscous in her hand that she set down on the windowsill without explanation.

"I brought the gum," she said to Clementine. "And a needle. And I have not eaten, so if someone will tell me where the bread is kept, I will mend and chew at the same time and call it industrious."

Clementine pointed toward the kitchen. Wren disappeared and returned with the heel of a loaf and a wedge of hard yellow cheese, and she sat cross-legged on the floor with the leather cover spread across her knees, and she began.

Barnaby watched. Mira watched. Clementine watched from her chair, one ankle crossed over the other, a cup of tea going cold in her hands.

Wren threaded the needle with a length of waxed thread. She bit the end of the thread to flatten it, then drew it through the first hole in the leather. As she pulled the stitch taut she spoke, very softly, a word that was not quite English and not quite anything else. The thread seemed to settle into the leather of its own accord. She drew the needle through again. Another word. The stitch pulled tight and lay flat without the usual small puckers of hand-stitching.

"It is not magic," Wren said, without looking up, though no one had asked. "Well. It is, a little. It is more that I am asking the thread to remember what shape it ought to be in, and it is being obliging."

"Being obliging," Mira repeated.

"Thread does have opinions," Wren said. "If you have ever tried to mend a sail in a wind, you will know that."

Mira tilted her head. Her eyes, which were a pale, unsettling grey, moved from the needle to Wren's face to the leather and back again. "I have not tried to mend a sail in a wind," she said. "I have, however, watched a woman talk a pair of boots back together in a market square in Bristol, and she charged three pounds for the privilege."

"Then she was charging for the travel, not the stitch," Wren said. "Mind you, I would not turn down three pounds. My boots are finished, and the cobbler in the village will not see me because I argued with him once about the classification of mosses and he took it personally."

Clementine made a sound that was almost a laugh. "He took it personally because you were right."

"That is what made it personal."

Wren worked her way down the seam. Each stitch was small and even, and each was accompanied by its own murmured syllable. The words were not the same. Some were single syllables, some two. One was longer, three notes run together, and when she spoke it the leather cover seemed to sigh against her knee, as if it had been holding its breath.

Mira uncrossed her legs. She leaned forward. "What language is that?"

"It is not a language," Wren said. "It is more a remembering. The leather came from a cow. The thread came from a flax field. I am just, I am reminding them that they used to be part of larger things, and that larger things do not come apart without a bit of fuss."

"And that works?"

"It works if you do not ask too much of it. If I tried to mend a tear in a king's robe and make the king love his people again, I would deserve to be disappointed."

Barnaby found he was smiling. He glanced at Clementine, and she was smiling too, though her smile was the careful kind she wore when something was costing her.

Wren finished the seam. She tied off the thread with a small knot and spoke one last word over it, very low, almost a hum. Then she held the cover up and turned it in her hands. The tear was gone. The place where the two edges had been joined was marked by a fine straight line of stitching, but the leather itself lay flat and supple as if it had never been opened.

"There," she said. "It will hold. And if you are ever caught in a rain with it, the water will run off it rather than into it, which is more than I can say for the original work."

Clementine took the cover from her. She ran her thumb along the seam and felt the place where the torn edges had been. "Wren."

"It is only mending."

"It is not only mending."

They looked at each other. Wren's face went pink at the tips of her ears, and she bent to pick up the heel of bread and took a large bite to cover whatever she had been about to say.

The parlour filled with the small sounds of an afternoon: the creak of the settle, the distant clatter of the kitchen, a cart going by on the high street. Mira rang for more tea. The girl who brought it set down a plate of bread and butter and a small crock of pickled onions, and the four of them drew their chairs closer to the table.

It was Mira who steered the talk, the way a sailor steers a boat into a current she has chosen. She spoke of Bristol, of the road north, of a piece of land she had once owned and sold and regretted. She spoke of Clementine's land in that same breath, casually, as if comparing one bottle of wine to another. Clementine answered her in short, even sentences, and her drawl seemed a little more pronounced than usual, as if she had put it on like an older coat.

Barnaby ate his bread and listened.

It was the bread and the butter, in the end, that opened the door. Wren took a piece of butter and spread it thick on the bread, and she murmured over it as she had murmured over the thread, and the butter melted a little against the crust as if it had been glad of the attention.

"You do that to everything," Mira said. She said it without reproof, almost with envy. "You talk to everything."

"I talk to most things," Wren agreed. "Most things do not answer. The ones that answer are the ones worth listening to."

"And how many of those are there? In a place like this, I mean."

Wren considered the bread in her hand. She turned it over and looked at the underside of the crust, as if she might find the answer written there.

"More than people admit," she said. "That is the first thing to understand. Enchanted objects are not rare. They are common as blackberries in September, and folk walk past them every day of their lives and never notice, because they have been told that such things are rare, and so they do not look."

Mira set down her cup. "And in this wood?"

"In this wood," Wren said, and she bit the bread, and chewed, and swallowed, and did not go on.

Mira waited. The silence grew a quarter-inch longer than comfortable. Barnaby kept his eyes on the butter dish. Clementine looked at Wren with an expression that was half warning and half curiosity.

"There are three I have heard of," Wren said at last, "in Berrenwood. Three that I would call true. The car is one of them, though I do not yet know what it is for. There is another I will not name, because to name it is to make it attend to you, and I am not ready to attend to it. And there is a third."

She stopped.

"A third what?" Mira asked.

"A third something," Wren said. "I have heard it spoken of by a woman who keeps bees in the lower valley, and by a boy who tends the ferry, and by Old Tobias, who keeps to himself and so is not often believed. Three witnesses, three separate tellings, and they agree on the shape of the thing if not on the name. That is enough for me to be cautious, and not enough for me to be certain."

"And you will not say what it is."

"I will not."

Mira looked at Clementine. Clementine looked at the table. Barnaby looked at Wren, and Wren was looking at her own hands as if they belonged to someone else she was trying not to disturb.

"I have said too much," Wren said quietly. "I have said more than I meant to, and the bread is to blame, because bread makes me honest in a way that is not always convenient."

The afternoon light came in low through the parlour window and put a long pale bar across the floor. Mira drew on her gloves. She laid them on one at a time, finger by finger, with the deliberation of a woman deciding what she would and would not spend.

"I will be in the village for some days yet," she said to Clementine. "There is no rush. There is never as much rush as one thinks."

She stood. She nodded to Barnaby. She looked once more at Wren, and something in her face shifted, just at the corner of her mouth, and was gone.

"A pleasure," she said, and left.

The door closed behind her. The room felt larger.

Barnaby let out a breath he had not been aware of holding. Clementine poured herself more tea from the pot, and the tea was so cold that she made a face and set the cup down again.

"Wren," she said.

"I know."

"You cannot just say things like that to a woman who wants to buy my land."

"I did not say which thing it was."

"You said there were three."

"I said I would not say what they were. I did not say how many."

Clementine opened her mouth, and then she closed it, and then she laughed, a single short bark of a laugh that surprised all three of them. Wren laughed too, helplessly, and the heel of bread in her hand crumbled a little at the edges.

Barnaby looked at the window. The light was going. In the glass he could see, very faintly, the reflection of the three of them at the table, and behind the reflection, as if seen through water, the dark line of the wood on the hill.

Three enchanted things in Berrenwood. One of them in a locked garage at the edge of town. One of them in the keeping of a woman who would not name it. And one of them waiting, perhaps, in the deeper wood, for someone foolish enough to speak its name aloud.

He finished his bread. He wiped the butter from his fingers with the corner of the tablecloth, because there was no napkin, and because in a world where a woman could talk a torn seat back together with a word, a small discourtesy seemed forgivable.

"I will walk you back to the wood's edge," he said to Wren.

She shook her head. "Not tonight. Tonight I am going home to put the kettle on and pretend I did not say what I said."

"Clementine?"

"I am going to sit here," Clementine said, "until Mira Ashbrook has had time to get clear of the inn, and then I am going to bed."

Barnaby stood. He buttoned his coat. He went out into the street, and the evening was coming on, and the lamps were being lit again, one by one, along the high street.

Somewhere, in the wood, something was listening still.