Page 45 of Hansel and Gerhardt
“WhateverI ask of you,” Herr Candy insisted, digging thumbs into Gerhardt’s skin.
“Yes,” said Gerhardt. “Whatever you ask.”
Hansel’s chair flung back to the floor as he stood. “Gerhardt, we’re leaving.”
Herr Candy leant right down to Gerhardt’s ear, and smiling up at Hansel, he said, “And Hansel can leave if he doesn’t like it. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” whispered Gerhardt. “He can leave.”
“You don’t need him,” said Herr Candy.
“I don’t need him,” Gerhardt repeated.
Herr Candy tapped his shoulder with an incisive index finger. “Tell him.”
A strange smile pulled across Gerhardt’s face, and his chin jutted up. Speaking sharply, brightly, he said, “I don’t want you here, Hansel. Stupid farm boy. You can go away now, and we’ll be quite happy without you.”
He looked, for all the world, just like his old self. His voice was clear, his expression hard. And Hansel’s big heart might have broken in two with those words, had he not caught the sparkle of a single teardrop that fell fresh from Gerhardt’s eye and splashed down into his tea.
Splinter
Hansel’s tongue touched neither tea nor sugar, and Herr Candy waited only for the last crumbs of that strange biscuit to pass Gerhardt’s lips before he sent them to the back of his long and pretty yard to chop firewood.
“The logs are just there by the shed,” he called from the doorway. “Take it out into the yard so I can see y—I mean, so you don’t make a mess over there.”
It struck Hansel as peculiar that they should need to take the logs into the open, away from the woodpile, just to cut them. But all of it was strange, every single thing so odd that Hansel began to feel as though he’d stepped away from reality altogether.
Gerhardt, if he found it at all bizarre, gave no sign of the fact. Showing strength that Hansel wouldn’t have thought his starved body capable of twenty-four hours prior, he lifted an enormous log, then dropped it directly in the middle of the yard. He came back to the shed, where Hansel waited with his own log under an arm, the other gripping an axe tight, while he waited to speak with him. “What are you doing?”
Gerhardt looked him in the eye, the touch of a glare about him. “Will you insist on asking such stupid questions repeatedly?” He grabbed the axe from Hansel’s hand, turned, and left.
Hansel had to walk a little deeper into the shed to find another. He could see a handle, pale, up the back somewhere. Carrying his wood, he moved past the other thick logs stacked by the door, then reached for the handle. But as he did, his boot hit something that felt exactly like… his boot.
He stepped back, feeling as if he’d trodden on someone’s foot, only to find he almost had. The tips of a pair of boots stuck out from beneath an old blanket. Not so strange, to be sure, but with everything else so unusual about the place, the normal-looking boots threw him slightly.
He bent down, lifting the edge of the blanket. There were more boots. And more again. Perhaps twenty pairs, maybe more still.
His eyes were drawn to shelves deeper in the shed, and there he could see coats, shirts, breeches, dresses, all neatly folded. And there were weapons. A few swords, some knives. Even a crossbow.
Herr Candy’s house was large, two storeys. Why should he need to keep his things out here in the shed?
The idea made him look again at the boots. He pulled the blanket all the way back to survey the rows of shoes.
Worn. All of them. But… different styles and different… sizes. They couldn’t possibly all fit him. Some might have fit Hansel even, but some… some were tiny. Children’s shoes.
Something about it horrified Hansel, though he couldn’t rightly say what, so he fled fast, throwing his log down close to Gerhardt’s. “When are we leaving? You said we were going to find a town.”
“We hardly need to now, do we?” Gerhardt dropped his axe-blade into the log with a loudthwack. “We have everything we need here.”
“Everything?” Hansel repeated bitterly. “This is no different to what we just escaped from. What’s going on with you?” He placed a hand on Gerhardt’s arm, but Gerhardt shook it off, stepping away a little, raising his axe instead.
He brought it down on the wood,crack. “He’s nothing like our father.” With this, he raised his chin to the back window of the cottage, where Herr Candy stood, still drinking tea, watching them.
A cool shudder knocked down Hansel’s spine. He took a step away from Gerhardt and lined up his own axe. “I don’t trust him.”
Crackwent Gerhardt’s axe, and he threw down a shard of wood. “He’s been very kind to us. You shouldn’t speak about him that way.”
Crackwent Hansel’s axe, hewing rough wood from the log. “And why shouldn’t I? He can’t hear us from there.”
