The Heartwood

Chapter 4

The third day in a row sees the sun prevailing. After Asher fetches an old burgundy scarf that his mother now loathes, and the book on England's wildflowers from his father's library, he packs a lunch for himself and rides on the back of carts all the way to Heart Wood. It is the earliest that he has arrived and a good guess has him finding the collapsed gate hiding in the shrubbery.

Asher ties a secure knot into the hedge and startles when he hears a rustling from above him. A large black bird croaks as it alights from the tree he crouches under. Asher squints into the sun as he ponders the creature. If a group of crows are present it would be called "a murder" but a group of ravens is called something else. He cannot remember but the Count would certainly know.

The Count is due back today and Asher now has a decent question to start a conversation with.

He conquers the tree he must climb and heads straight to the circle of mushrooms. The cup is once more outside of the ring and his smooth stone is absent.

The boy grins, despite himself. There is moisture in the bottom of the cup. Asher replaces the item where it had been before, as shown by its imprint. He then scouts a circumference of the area but can see no sign of the larger Mr. Durrant. With the additional time gained from his early start, Asher fetches a stick and gets lightly on his hands and knees, applying tiny footprints into the ground. They need to be faint and subtle, so he ends up making many tracks of these in order for a less critical eye to notice them. An hour passes quickly. Asher spends another dozen minutes making sure his own imprints are gone. It suddenly looks like a fairy ball had occurred, with tiny people waltzing all around the mushroom ring.

The boy whistles at his creation. Now he just needs to look presentable and the gardener will never suspect Asher as the cause of this. He may even begin to glance over his shoulder for tiny people when he works around Heart Wood.

At the manor he finds Mr. Durrant above the porch, sitting on the roof that shelters the steps over the front door. The boy watches the servant shuffle something out of his line of sight before a burlap sack is flung over the roof, landing a good two feet away from Asher. He steps sideways involuntarily, hearing an uncertain thing crack from the crashing bag's contents.

"Oh!" shouts the gardener. "Master Walsh. I did not see you there. Have I struck you?"

Asher waves to show that he is unharmed.

"Mr. Durrant, what are you doing?"

The man dusts his hands, shifting to find better purchase. "Another crow struck the house. I climbed up here to retrieve its body."

Asher glances at the bag, wondering now at the snap of its landing as well as at its current motionlessness. "Again, Sir?"

The figure on the roof shrugs. "I'm not rightly sure when this one collided. I was asked to make sure the lattice work was stable and in testing its weight myself by climbing, I noticed the body over here. I am no doctor or expert in animals, but it could have been dead for over a week."

"And you know it hit the house?"

"How else is a bird going to break its neck?" suggests the gardener.

Asher itches to look into the bag to see the black body for himself, possibly decomposing. Instead, he watches the gardener now gauging the distance of the lower roof and the ground.

"Are your hands in the earth?" Asher calls up.

The man stops and then laughs. "No, Sir. Good call. I don't think I shall want to try my luck now that finding the bird seems to have ruined it. In my shed is a ladder. That would be safest. Would you be so kind as to fetch it?"