into the brown Brazilian eyes of the two coffee cups together; and then Smoky, with an apologetic cough, got up and got the brandy bottle from a high shelf. "It's a long walk," he said, and spiked the coffee.
Smoky?
Yes; George could see that there could well have grown in him in the last years a sort of constriction of feeling sometimes that a nip can untangle. No problem really; just a nip, so he can begin to ask Auberon if he's sure he has enough money, if he's got Grandpa's agents' address and George Mouse's address and all the legal instruments and so on about the inheritance and so on. And yes he does.
Even after Doc died, his stories continued to be published in the City's evening paper—George read them even before he read the funnies. Besides these posthumous stories squirreled away like winter nuts, Doc left a mess of affairs as thick and entangling as any briar patch; lawyers and agents pursued his intentions there, and might for years. Auberon had a special interest in these thorny matters because Doc had specified a bequest to him, enough to live for a year or so and write unhampered. Doc had hoped, actually—though he was too shy to say so—that his grandson and the best friend of his last years might take up the little adventures, though Auberon was at a disadvantage there—he would have to make them up, unlike Doc, who for years had been getting them firsthand.
There's a certain embarrassment, George could easily imagine, in learning that you can talk to animals. No one knew how long Doc's conviction was in growing, though some of the grown-ups could remember his first claiming it was so, shyly, tentatively, as a joke they supposed, a lame sort of joke, but then Doc's jokes weren't ever very funny except to millions of children. It took later the form of a metaphor or puzzle: he recounted his conversations with salamanders and chickadees with a cryptic smile, as though inviting his family to guess why he spoke so. In the end, he ceased trying to hide it: what he heard from his correspondents was just too interesting not to recount.
Since all this was happening as Auberon was coming into consciousness, it only seemed to him that his grandfather's powers were growing surer, his ear more keen. When, on one of their long walks together through the woods, Doc at last stopped pretending that what he heard the animals say was made up, and admitted that he was passing on conversations he heard, they both felt a lot better. Auberon never much liked let's-pretend, and Doc had hated lying to the child. The science of it escaped him, he said; maybe it was only a result of his long devotion; anyway, it was only certain animals he could understand, small ones, the ones he knew best. Bears, moose, the scarce and fabulous cats, the solitary, long-winged predators he knew nothing of. They disdained him, or couldn't discourse, or had no use for small talk—he couldn't tell.
"And insects and bugs?" Auberon asked him.
"Some, but not all," Doc answered.
"Ants?"
"Oh, yes, ants," Doc said, "sure."
And taking his grandson's hands where they knelt together beside a new yellow hill, he gratefully translated for him the mindless shoptalk of the ants within.
George Mouse Goes on Overhearing
Auberon was asleep now, on the bursting loveseat, curled beneath a blanket, as who would not be who had risen as early and come as far in as many ways as he had today; but George Mouse, subject to tics and exulting on the giddy chutes and ladders of High Thought, kept watch over the boy and continued to overhear his adventures.
When, oatmeal untasted but coffee finished, he went out the great front door, Smoky's hand paternally on his shoulder though it was higher than his own, Auberon saw that he wasn't to make his getaway without goodbyes. His sisters, all three, had come to see him off; Lily and Lucy were walking up the drive arm-in-arm, Lily bearing her twins fore-and-aft in canvas carriers, and Tacey was just turning in at the end of the drive on her bike.
He might have known, but hadn't wished this sendoff, wished it less than anything because of the formal finality his sisters' presence always lent to whatever partings or arrivals or conjunctions they attended. How the hell anyway had they known this was to be the morning? He had only told Smoky late last night, and sworn