Changelings at Court

by Ken Altabef

  “Yes, but one must be careful not to let sentiment and cosmetic beauty dull one’s senses. We are not so far removed from those primal barbarians as we imagine. Atrocities are committed in dark corners. There are secret murders and kidnappings all too often among the docks. Even mild-mannered housewives can be driven to murder quite easily, it seems, judging by how often it happens along Gin Lane. Crimes that would make your blood run cold. Take that terrible incident in Covent Garden just last week. That Chinese butcher, a dreadful snake in our little garden, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes. Of course. I heard about that. How horrible.”

  “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to disturb you. Just pointing out that looks can be quite deceiving.”

  “Surely I spend enough time around actors and actresses to know that. And loquacious theater-managers too. But what about you? How do I trust you aren’t a Gin Lane murderer yourself? A maniac?” She flashed a disarming smile.

  “How do I know you’re not?” He smiled back.

  “And what suspicions could you have about me? A poor working seamstress.”

  “As I said, looks can be deceiving.”

  “Hmm, yes. They can. A man can put on a fancy coat, a pair of spectacles, a fancy walking stick…”

  “It’s all too easy for a man, I agree. Most men can’t be trusted in any event. But how about a woman?”

  Something was wrong. Nora felt that same annoying tingle she’d experienced ever since meeting Templeton, but now it seemed to be growing worse. Perhaps it was just a symptom of the morbid turn of their conversation, but she didn’t think so. The buzzing in her head had become truly uncomfortable. She decided to suggest a return to the menagerie when it struck her full on. Damn it. She knew what it meant.

  “You’re fae, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Yes of course. I was wondering how long it would take you to notice. Don’t fault yourself. Human glamours are a sort of specialty with me.”

  “Your glamour is fine. Not so much as a crack. I just knew. I can’t explain it very well. There’s a sort of a tingle.”

  “Maybe it’s love?” His whole face smiled. “Or perhaps something else? Where exactly did you feel this tingle?” He laughed and somehow she didn’t feel offended. “Forgive me. I have a wicked sense of humor sometimes. You’re absolutely right. Usually faeries can tell each other right away.”

  “Each other?”

  “That’s right.”

  There was no getting around it. “Is that how you knew about me? The tingle?”

  “No, not at all. You give off no such sign.”

  She was glad to hear it. Of course, she reminded herself, she was only half faery. “Then how?”

  “I know your mother. That’s why I came to see you. Let me clear the air, Miss Grayson. My name is Threadneedle.”

  Threadneedle. Nora had heard of him, though they had never met. A faery spy in London. Legendary. What could he possibly want with her?

  “I have a proposition for you. Oh nothing lurid, I assure you.”

  “What is the proposition?

  “You are a talented actress. I need your help.”

  Chapter 8

  October 19, 1760

  Payne’s Garden, London

  Eric assumed the meeting would take place in the central court beside the famous boxwood hedge. He stood for half an hour beneath the hedge, a towering topiary trimmed in the figure of a gigantic snake turned upon itself to represent infinity. But William Pitt did not appear.

  Eric canvassed the many little lanes that crisscrossed the idyllic setting. Though dwarfed by St. James’s Park to the south and Green Park to the west, Payne’s was still quite large enough to get lost in, as Eric soon discovered. He hurried among the tightly packed rows of exotic trees looking for any sign of William Pitt.

  At each disappointing turn in the green, his optimism of the morning withered further away. He’d slept well, having taken a room at the widow’s place on Tottenham Road as Warburton had suggested. It was a respectable house and Eric found a secluded room on the first floor certainly a rare privilege in crowded London town. Another bonus—the mattress harbored no bedbugs or lice to disrupt his rest. His room was not too drafty, despite ill-fitted windows. And yet sleep had been slow in coming. A journeyman cabinetmaker had taken the other free room and tapped away with his hammer in fits and starts throughout the night, and the laundress in the room directly above seemed also to be an insomniac, pacing the floor late into the evening until her lover arrived and an entirely new set of distracting noises took the place of her anxious footsteps. Eric was reminded how sorely he missed Theodora.

  In the morning he dressed and breakfasted, then made his way to Westminster. After a long wander in the garden, Eric finally realized that to William Pitt a meeting in Payne’s Garden meant an audience in a small room off the greenhouse. Eric arrived at the Prince’s box, a glass walled sitting room, a little bit out of breath and very late for the meeting. Luckily Pitt was still in residence, sitting in a deep leather wing chair, sipping tea. The same broad iron-gray wig sat atop his head. A small round mahogany table sat before him, bearing the remains of his breakfast. He sat perusing a news sheet by the light of a silk-shaded reading lamp. His page boy gently tapped his shoulder at Eric’s arrival and he looked up.

  “Ah, Lord Grayson,” he said showing only a mild agitation, “I was just thinking you’d forgotten our meeting.”

  “My apologies, Mister Pitt. I seem to have got lost in the garden.”

  Eric noticed Pitt sat with one leg stiffly extended and the other bent at the knee, a posture common among gout sufferers. The Secretary winced slightly as he shook Eric’s hand but did not get up from the chair. The day before, when he’d been addressing Parliament, he had stood as straight as an arrow with not even a twinge to show upon his face, though he must have been suffering great pain at that time as well.

  “You’ll forgive if I cut the niceties short,” Pitt said. “I understand you have a proposition for the crown? I beg you be brief. I don’t mean to be rude, but I have serious matters to attend.”

  “I understand. And this is a serious matter as well.”

  “I will treat it so.”

  As there was no other chair at hand, Eric was forced to stand before the Secretary of State. He took a deep fortifying breath as clandestinely as possible, then went on as if making casual conversation. “It’s about the faeries––”

  “Pfahh, I thought as much. The Grayson name seems inextricably linked with them, having gone from one extreme to the other. Not long ago you wanted to stamp them out completely and now? It’s enough to make one’s head spin.”

  “You promised you would listen. I shall be brief. The proposition: a parcel of land for the faeries in exchange for their cooperation.”

  As Eric had hoped, Pitt seemed intrigued by that angle. “Cooperation? This is new.” He sat thinking for a minute with his hands crossed. “What precisely, may I ask, is on offer?”

  “The faeries have a certain link with the land. They can help with the crops. We’ve already done this on a small scale at my farms. They can make things grow faster and better. Yields will rise substantially all the way from Carlisle to Weymouth. And they have certain healing arts. Herbal remedies unknown even in our highest institutions of medicine. And some of them have something else, I call it a type of empathic healing. Its methods are complex and come at a cost to the practitioner but in certain cases, for very special patients, I believe they can heal almost anything. For example, they can rid you of that gout, I am sure.”

  Anger flashed in Pitt’s eyes. “I am not concerned here about personal gain.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest any such thing. I was just citing an example.”

  “Apology accepted,” Pitt said. He turned his head to watch the page boy refresh his cup of tea.

  Eric decided to press his case. “Their services are substantial and they are not asking very much in return.”

  “What exact
ly, are they asking?”

  “A place of their own, as I said.”

  “A grant of land? Is that all? It may not be impossible. Perhaps we can afford them a parcel in one of our East India holdings. Perhaps Guam or something like that. Do you think?”

  “No sir. England is their home. They won’t settle for anything less. If it were only the question of land, I could grant them from my own estates.”

  “What then?” snapped Pitt, growing suddenly annoyed.

  “Sovereignty. They just want to live in the open again. A small capital to call their own, and freedom to walk the streets of Britain unmolested.”

  “That’s a tall order, Grayson. People are set in their ways.”

  “It can be done. Attitudes will soften. Certainly not all at once, but over time. Slowly. The faeries could remain within their own borders until the public view changes sufficiently. We will benefit greatly from this! Surely you can see that. All that is necessary is to put aside prejudice and hate.”

  “A lot of past history.”

  “Bury the past in the past. Build a new future. We can benefit from this greatly.”

  “You’ve said that already.” Pitt sipped his tea, and then suddenly said, “No, no it can’t be done.”

  This summary judgement came as a slap in the face to Eric. “But uh… may I... I just don’t understand.”

  “It won’t do. We can’t very well just go back on as if faeries were normal people.”

  Eric had heard this argument too many times before, from pig-headed landed gentry to cloud-minded members of parliament. He’d thought Pitt would be different. Pitt was a reasonable man.

  Eric had no intentions of letting this go. He must appeal to the rational mind. He tried a different tactic. “It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice.”

  “You quote Demosthenes to me?” Pitt said with a wry smile. “You understand I spent a good portion of my younger days translating his works? Of course you do. I see, that’s just the point. But I think, in this case the Greek would disapprove of your suggestion. The entire quote says: ‘It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, perjury, and treachery.’ And treachery is the hallmark of your friends the faeries, is it not? If the equation is looked at from the opposite angle, Demosthenes tells us no lasting union can be made with such people as those. The Greek also said, ‘The easiest thing in the world is self-deceit.’”

  “That goes both ways,” Eric said with rising desperation. “The difficulty we have here… it’s just a misunderstanding.”

  “Oh, I understand them very well. They are all evil. Every bastard one of them.”

  “No, sir. Not evil. Merely different. It’s not right to oppress an entire people simply because they are different.”

  “That’s funny coming from you, Grayson, after what your grandfather did. I remember him hanging faeries in the town square. He had them locked in iron cages dangling from trees as I recall.”

  “I’m not my grandfather.”

  “I realize that. One minute you want to butcher all their kind, the next you take them to bed, to wife. Decadence—that’s their way, and you know it, perhaps too well.”

  Pitt had gone too far, but Eric struggled to remain calm. He’d win nothing with a shouting match against this man. He felt his desperation rising. It was all slipping away, probably already beyond the point of no return, but there was one more appeal he could muster. “We must show them mercy. It’s the right thing to do. The Christian thing.”

  “Ah, the morality of religion. The right thing to do? Is that so, old sport? Tell me, what religion do they practice? Dancing naked in the woods, worshipping Mother Nature or the moon or the devil himself. No, I don’t think so. You’ve tripped yourself up, Grayson. This is the strongest argument against a pact with the faeries. We have enough problems already with the Catholics. We don’t need these leafy pagans flaunting their impiety in the streets. No, I rather think not. Let them stay underground with the other vermin.”

  Pitt winced as he adjusted his gouty leg, then went on, “It might be they can benefit us—with that healing and the other things they can do. Might be. But what about the evil they are like to do? They steal children. They lure men to their deaths out on the moors. All for what, I ask, for a few laughs? They delight in doing mischief to mankind. It’s intolerable.”

  “There are good and bad men too, but we don’t jail them all irrespective of their actions.”

  Pitt took that point, but shook his head sadly. “Sometimes there are too many problems. The French, the Spanish, the God-damned Hindus! It’s my job to control the parts of the world I can. I have natives in the Americas cutting off Englishmen’s scalps and wild men in Ceylon cutting off their heads. I have man-eating tigers in Bengal. Things are not right in the Colonies, nor on the Indian subcontinent. The Crown suffers savages and rebellion in every quarter of the empire. But I’ve got everything—every last red drop of it—in some sort of control right now. And it’s a very careful, delicate balance, I can tell you. The faeries represent power, a magical power that is incomprehensible and therefore uncontrollable. I can’t risk mixing things up. The faeries stay underground. And I’ll put you there too, Grayson, if I have to. Request denied. It ends here. The King is not to be troubled with this. He has troubles enough already.”

  “It can’t end like this.”

  “It ends with you walking out that door with your neck still attached to your lordly shoulders. Take that and be grateful. You’ve made a nuisance of yourself thus far. But charges of treason and sedition can make things much worse, I warn you. Good day, sir.”

  “But you can’t just—”

  “I said good day, sir!”

  Chapter 9

  Meadowlark wrung the squirrel’s neck until its eyes rolled groggily back into its head. Then he let it go, not yet dead. The poor little thing staggered drunkenly around in a circle as its senses returned. Then, in a flash it tried to run.

  His left hand blocked its path, appearing to the squirrel as a gigantic cat’s paw. The squirrel reversed course, only to be met by a swipe of his right hand, also a shaggy paw. The blow knocked the squirrel over and sent it tumbling across the ground.

  Meadowlark could feel the little rodent’s terror. It was a deep blue color—just like the colored sheets of faery glass he used to play with as a child. Tasted it. Blue terror. Yes, a deep, drowning sea blue. Delicious.

  The squirrel’s eyes darted wildly. It didn’t know what to do next. Its fear turned to desperation and Meadowlark tasted the bitter bile of that emotion too. He grew tired of his game. He withdrew from the mental link and let the creature roam free. It dashed for the nearest maple and scrambled up the trunk.

  Almost without thinking he sent a few yellow lights popping in front of the squirrel’s face. Startled, it fell from the tree. It landed awkwardly, temporarily blinded by the bright lights.

  Oh, useless. This was all so useless. No fun at all. He reached down and snapped the squirrel’s neck. But he immediately regretted it and flung the carcass aside. He was tired of eating roasted squirrel. He was tired of tramping up and down this secluded forest looking for her. There were only so many jests he could play against stupid woodland creatures.

  He had been too many days alone, out in these woods. He had to find her. That was the thing. And the sooner the better. Now. Right now. Today. She mustn’t be too far away. He stood up and continued walking. He saw a rocky ridge not far ahead, half buried beneath a stand of red maple. Perhaps that was the place.

  He knew he was close. He could feel it. Back Annis lived somewhere in these midland woods, in a cave with a blackened entrance. Alone, because she wanted to be alone. She would always be alone. People said that when she was hungry her howls could be heard for miles around, rolling up and down the lonely marshlands. But now the woods were deathly quiet. She must be well fed just now. Well fed or put snugly to bed. A lot of good those screeches would have done him anyway. Her wails in the
night marked an area for men to avoid, not explore. No one cared to know the exact place she laid her head. No one ever looked for her.

  What was he doing this for, anyway? What did he really know about the Winter Court? They kept to themselves, hidden in their own pocket dimension. Rumors of their merry jests abounded, from luring travelers from their courses with beguiling lights or using their enchantments to drive men mad. And then there was the Wild Hunt which ravaged across the countryside every hundred years or so, leaving a trail of broken corpses in its wake. Their leader, it was said, was the most cruel and beautiful faery woman ever to live. Yes, that was a lady he wanted very much to meet.

  But would they take him in? That was the question. Those of the Winter Court were none too fond of the Summer Court faeries, but he was determined to prove himself the exception. Why not? He had no love for the Summer Court now either. After the way Moonshadow and the others had treated him. Mocked him. Discarded him. For daring to suggest they fight instead of lying down to be murdered in their beds. Yes, his thoughts and desires were much more well-aligned with the Winter Court. They would see that.

  Moonshadow and the others just didn’t understand, and Theodora worst of all. Why did his thoughts return so often to her? She was no different from the rest. He didn’t care one whit about her. She loved her little lordly husband and that was the end of it. He couldn’t change that. He didn’t even want to change it.

  He’d moved on to bigger issues. World-shaking events. Devastation. Conflagration. Yes, the Winter Court was the place to go. But would they take him in? What’s to know? What’s to care? It would be an adventure, if nothing else.

  The rocky ridge began to show promise indeed. Meadowlark circled warily about until he noticed a wide oak tree, as ancient and stoop-backed as its master. This must be the fabled tree that marked the entrance to Back Annis’ cave. He paced nervously back and forth. He wasn’t scared to go in. Despite all the things that had been said about Black Annis over the years, he wasn’t afraid. That she was thousands of years old, her soul as dry and shriveled as Egyptian parchment. That she could freeze a man’s blood with a single gaze from her milky eye. That she delighted in nothing so much as murdering children and sucking the sweet marrow from their bones. All true, he thought. Those things are certainly all true.