Page 54 of The Wulver's Bond
He smelled death.
‘No,’ he keened softly.
Arran rose from his crouched position and stared at nothing. The scent of decay mixed with the scent of pollen from the garden.
He was tugged from grief by a pale tendril of roots wrapped around his wrist. Arran looked back to Moss, who watched him with a troubled expression. Moss mouthed a question.What’s wrong?
Arran beckoned him over. ‘I’m afraid she has passed.’
‘Passed?’ Moss’s eyes widened. ‘Oh.’
Moss stared at the basket. ‘You said she was old.’ Arran half-expected this to be followed by a quip, but instead Moss’s hand curled into his paw.
‘There’s nothing you could have done,’ Moss said, gazing earnestly into his eyes. ‘She probably went peacefully.’
He is comforting me,Arran realised, thickly. How had Moss become so good at reading his emotions?
Arran was overcome with the sense of loss, and at Moss’s willingness to catch him. For years, for decades, Arran had tended to his lonely neighbour.
She hadn’t always been alone. He found himself saying this out loud.
‘She had a husband, once,’ he said, his voice rough. ‘Children, and grandchildren too, I think. They visit perhaps once a year. It shall be months before they discover her.’
He’d watched her grow up on these cliffs. Watched as she’d grown a whole family up, and then watched as it disintegrated around her. Arran felt a kindredness with her for this. With all humans, really. There was always something, if you watched for long enough. Something that would link your lives together,make you a little bit the same—the breadth of human experience was so vast.
‘We should bury her,’ Arran said.
Moss nodded and squeezed his hand. ‘Okay.’
Inside the cottage, Arran found his neighbour in her bed. Her face was free of pain. She hadn’t been dead for long. Her normally plaited grey hair spilled in loose curls over her shoulders, as though she’d decided to leave the world as she’d entered it, young and vibrant.
Moss picked up a piece of paper from her bedside table. ‘I think this is for you.’
He passed over the page, which was covered in a rickety scrawl of handwriting. Arran silently read the words she’d left behind.
To him what finds me. I expect it’ll be you. Doctor says I don’t have long. But he said that last year too. Tonight feels different though.
I’ll leave the door open for you. You’ll know that, because you’re reading this. Of course you will. My mind’s all muddled.
Help yourself to anything in the house. Except the china dogs over the fireplace. They’re for my great-grandson. And the jade necklace is for Diana. I don’t care what happens to the rest.
Bury me in the garden. I know you’ll do right by me. I don’t need no gravestone.
Look after yourself, old man. The rest will take care of itself.
‘Not even a thank you,’ Moss said, frowning at Arran’s side.
Arran carefully folded the letter into his pocket. ‘She has never owed me anything.’
‘I know. I think I understand.’
Moss stood back as Arran lifted his neighbour from her bed, wrapped in a pastel green bed sheet. They found a clear spot in the garden, sheltered by shrubs and overlooked by a hardy rose.
‘Do you want me to create a hole?’ Moss asked, as Arran returned from the small garden shed with a shovel in hand.
‘I would rather dig. I can honour her with my labour.’
Moss took the shovel from him. ‘I want to help.’
