Page 46 of Hansel and Gerhardt
Gerhardt looked across at Hansel sharply. “Can’t he?”Crackwent his axe.
Herr Candy’s smile seemed to widen a little when Hansel looked again, but, stubbornly, he said, “No.” And down his axe came. He smacked the new slice of wood onto the small pile they were making. “I think he seems a lot like our father. And I don’t like the way he puts his hands on you.”
Gerhardt readjusted his log. “Are you jealous?”
The question, asked point blank, drew heated colour to Hansel’s cheeks. Gerhardt didn’t even look up when he said it. He carried on as if it were nothing, just a playful jab like he might have once made about Hansel’s axe skills.
Hansel felt as if he was placing his heart on top of Gerhardt’s log when, in a low voice, he said, “Yes. I am. I don’t like how he’s looking at you. I don’t like how you’re acting. I likedyou, Gerhardt. You in the forest, just before. Last night. Just this morning in the dark. And now you feel different.”
Smashand down came Gerhardt’s axe, directly on top of his log, cracking it in two. “I’ve just grown up a bit. He can see that. Why can’t you?” Then, his eyes disconcertingly fast on Hansel’s, Gerhardt threw down his axe. He brought his lovely fingers to the string of his shirt and pulled it loose.
“What are you doing?” asked Hansel.
He made no answer as he bundled the white linen in his hands, wrenching it from his breeches, taking the lot over his head and throwing it down to the grass.
“It’s freezing,” Hansel cried, making for the shirt. “Put it back on!”
But Gerhardt had his axe in hand again, the other readjusting his log. “I’m hot.”
Hansel could see the goosebumps breaking out on his pale skin. Even as he lifted the axe high, the muscles tensed not only with effort, but with the chill of the evening air. He brought the axe down with acrack, then shivered as he threw the split wood aside.
“You’re cold. It’s dangerous to handle the axe when you’re shivering like that.”
“You need to eat,” said Gerhardt. He said it so quietly that Hansel was forced to ask him to repeat it. Gerhardt cracked another piece off, then, “You’re not eating. He wants you to eat.”
Hansel looked long down the yard, but Herr Candy’s eyes were stuck on Gerhardt as he lifted his axe high above his head, as the length of his fit, lithe torso stretched out in full.
“I don’t want you to eat his food,” Hansel said. “I think there’s something wrong with it. You know it’s magical, of course it is. And I think it’s doing something to you.”
Crack. “I think if you don’t eat—” Gerhardt threw down the split wood “—something very bad is going to happen to both of us.”
“Then you admit it,” Hansel gasped out. “He’s some kind of evil, and he’s done something to the food.”
“You need to eat,” was all the reply Gerhardt made him.
Hansel’s fingers clenched tighter on his axe. He stared at Herr Candy, drinking his tea, drinking in Gerhardt.
And he made for the house.
He was no killer. He would have been one of the gentlest men to walk the earth, had he been left to his own devices. And just then, he wasn’t even sure what it was he intended to do. All Hansel knew was that Gerhardt was in danger. They both were. And that man, somehow, was at the centre of it.
Maybe he was going to threaten him?
Maybe he was going to smash a hole in his wall so large he’d throw the pair of them out in a fit of anger?
Maybe hewasgoing to kill him…
Whatever it was, Hansel was bringing his axe with him to the house, striding fast.
But then something very peculiar happened.
The axe, true and heavy, with a steel blade that had destroyed elm—with a handle of varnished oak that had catapulted all the strength of his arms into the log—that axe felt lighter in his hand.
He barely registered it at first. He kept on down the lawn, anger and fear scrambling his senses.
Then his fingers sunk deep into the wood.
He’d been gripping the axe so tight his fingers had been white, and they closed almost completely in on themselves.
