Fairy Secrets

by Gwyneth Rees

  Mr Daniels sighed, but he didn’t look as cross as she’d expected. ‘To tell you the truth, I felt bad about tricking her too,’ he said. ‘But I just didn’t know what else to do.’

  ‘Well,’ Ellie began slowly, ‘I do have another idea.’

  ‘Come on then.’ Mr Daniels sounded hopeful. ‘Tell me what it is.’

  Ellie had been thinking a lot about Enid’s claim to have once belonged to the Queen. She knew the other toys thought Enid was making it up, but what if they were wrong? What if Enid really had belonged to the Queen? Surely that would mean they could ask the Queen to help them save the museum? Not that she could tell Mr Daniels what Enid had said. ‘I think we should try to contact some of the people – or the sons and daughters of the people – who gave these toys to the museum in the first place,’ she told Mr Daniels. ‘Maybe one of them will want to help us. You did say you had their details in the museum logbook, didn’t you?’

  Mr Daniels looked doubtful about her plan, but he agreed to let Ellie see the logbook, which turned out to be a large, flat, leather-bound ledger that was as old as the museum itself. It was kept on the highest shelf in the museum office, and Mr Daniels had to use his set of folding steps to reach it.

  ‘Fifty years ago, when my father started the museum, he bought this book so he could keep a record of all the toys,’ Mr Daniels said, opening the logbook at the first page. ‘The first entries are dated before the museum opened, because my father collected a lot of toys before he actually bought this place.’ He smiled. ‘I remember how excited he was about moving here. You see, legend has it that this building was erected on a piece of land where the village well once stood, and that it was no ordinary well but a magic one. It was said that some of the magic stones from the well were included in this building. Of course, it’s probably just a lot of old nonsense, but my parents always believed it. My mother used to say that the house was a lucky house because of it – and that meant our museum would be lucky too.’

  ‘Mr Daniels?’ Ellie’s attention had been caught by the old-fashioned spindly writing in the logbook. ‘How can you read any of this?’ There was no way she could make out Enid’s name, or the name of any other toy for that matter.

  ‘The best person to decipher that is my mother,’ Mr Daniels said. ‘She’s always been better than me at reading my father’s handwriting.’

  ‘Your mother’s still alive?’

  Mr Daniels grinned. ‘Why? Did you think I was too old to have a mother who’s still living? She’s ninety-eight and she lives in the village nursing home. We can go and see her now, if you like.’ He glanced quickly at his watch. ‘Yes, I don’t see why I shouldn’t close the place for an hour or so. After all, it’s not as if we’ve got a queue of visitors waiting outside, is it?’

  ‘Mr Daniels, does your museum ever get any visitors?’ Ellie couldn’t help asking.

  Mr Daniels smiled in a resigned sort of way. ‘We usually get a steady trickle of tourists during the summer, and the local school sometimes brings classes here during term-time. But the museum doesn’t bring in a lot of money these days, I’m afraid. It was much more popular in the old days. Look – that’s a photograph of the museum on its tenth anniversary. Look at all the visitors we had then!’ He was pointing at an old black-and-white photograph in a frame on the wall, which Ellie hadn’t noticed until that moment.

  ‘The museum looked exactly the same then as it does now!’ Ellie exclaimed.

  ‘My mother made me promise not to change things too much,’ Mr Daniels explained. ‘She especially didn’t ever want me to change anything in that central cabinet, I remember. It was her idea to sit those toys around the rug like that, as if they were having a picnic.’

  ‘Wow!’ Ellie gasped, because sure enough, if you looked closely, you could see Enid, Tedi, Dilys and Llewellyn sitting around the same rug in the same cabinet that they occupied today.

  Just then the telephone rang, and to Ellie’s surprise it turned out to be Aunt Megan.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’ Ellie asked her aunt, after Mr Daniels had handed her the phone.

  ‘I guessed! But you really should have rung me to let me know you weren’t coming straight home, Ellie.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Ellie mumbled. ‘Aunt Megan, is it OK if I go and visit Mr Daniels’s mother now? I want to ask her about some of the old toys.’

  ‘I suppose so. I must say that for a girl who’s meant to be shy, you seem to have become extremely sociable all of a sudden! Oh, and Ellie, have you seen David’s camera? He can’t find it anywhere.’

  ‘Maybe his dream was real after all,’ Ellie blurted, before quickly adding, ‘I’ve got to go now, Aunt Megan. I’ll see you later, OK?’

  As she came off the phone, Mr Daniels was putting on his outdoor jacket. ‘We won’t be able to keep Mrs Lloyd-Hughes waiting forever,’ he reminded her.

  ‘I know,’ Ellie said. ‘But I still want to see if your mother can help us first. Do you think we can take that old photograph with us to show her? It might help her remember the toys and where they came from.’ Ellie already had a photograph of Enid saved on David’s camera, but it showed Enid in her new yellow dress rather than her old blue one, which Ellie thought might confuse the old lady.

  ‘I don’t see why not, but before we go, you have to promise not to tell my mother that I might have to sell the museum,’ Mr Daniels replied. ‘She doesn’t know anything about it yet, and goodness knows what she’d say if she thought that my father’s whole collection of toys was going to be sent to London for some spoilt little rich girl to play with.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mr Daniels. I’m getting very good at keeping secrets,’ Ellie assured him as she followed him outside, carrying the logbook very carefully under one arm and the old picture of the museum just as carefully under the other.

  The nursing home was situated on the edge of the village in the opposite direction from Aunt Megan’s house. Mr Daniels said that since the sun was shining his mother would probably be sitting outside in her wheelchair so, after they had signed the visitors book in the hall, he led the way straight through to the back garden.

  Several old people were sitting outside and some of them had visitors or a nurse sitting with them.

  ‘There she is,’ Mr Daniels said, leading Ellie towards a tiny old lady, wearing large round spectacles, who was sitting in her wheelchair on the patio.

  The old lady looked delighted to see him, and she gave Ellie a big smile when her son introduced her. She looked very wrinkly and extremely frail, but that wasn’t surprising since she was almost a hundred years old, Ellie thought.

  ‘Ellie wanted to come and see you because she’s very interested in our toy museum,’ he told his mother. ‘We were trying to read Dad’s logbook, but I couldn’t make out his writing. I told Ellie you’d probably be able to help us.’

  ‘Of course I can! Now what is it you want to know, my dear?’ Mrs Daniels asked Ellie.

  ‘I’d like to know where some of the toys came from,’ Ellie began shyly. ‘There’s one toy in particular – a china doll – that I’d really like you to look up in the logbook. I’ve brought this old photograph to show you. That’s her there – the china doll in the cabinet with the other toys. See?’

  ‘Ah . . . now . . . I can still remember the day that picture was taken,’ the old lady said with a wistful sigh as she peered through her glasses at the old photograph. ‘The china doll is Enid . . . and that’s Dilys, Tedi and Llewellyn, all sitting around the rug with her.’

  ‘I didn’t know you gave any of the toys names, Mam.’ Mr Daniels sounded surprised.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t name them,’ the old lady said, giving Ellie a knowing look. ‘They chose those names themselves.’

  Ellie stared in surprise at Mrs Daniels, suddenly wondering if she knew about the fairies and how they were able to make the toys in the museum come to life.

  Mr Daniels was looking a little worried, as if he thought his mother’s mind might not be as so
und as he had previously thought. ‘Are you feeling all right, Mam?’ he asked. ‘The sun’s not too strong for you, is it?’

  Mrs Daniels smiled at her son and quickly asked him to show her the logbook, which he placed on her lap and opened at the first page. ‘Some dolls keep the names their owners give them,’ she told Ellie. ‘In that case, the name will be in the logbook. But if I remember correctly that wasn’t the case for any of those toys . . . Now . . . I think Dilys and Tedi were two of the first toys we were given, just after the museum opened.’ She stopped at the bottom of the first page and bent her head down closer to the book in order to read the spindly writing. ‘Here we are. They came to the museum together. They’re listed here as “Welsh costume doll” and “teddy bear”. They were both donated fifty years ago by the local vicar who was leaving to go and work in another parish. He was moving out of the vicarage and he found some toys in the loft that he said had been put there just after his wife died twenty years before. She had been collecting things for a church sale apparently, only the sale never happened because she got ill. After she died he couldn’t face sorting through all the stuff she had collected, so he shoved it all out of the way up in his loft – and there it stayed for the next twenty years! Tedi and Dilys were among those things.’

  ‘So I suppose you never knew who their original owners were?’ Ellie said.

  ‘No. Twenty years is a long time. I suppose Tedi and Dilys’s original owners were quite grown-up by then. But it was the china doll you especially wanted to know about, wasn’t it? Now let me think . . . I believe it was Mr Owen from the garage who brought her to the museum – along with Llewellyn, the wooden soldier.’

  ‘I’ve met Mr Owen already!’ Ellie exclaimed. She was about to add that he was a good friend of the fairies, but decided against it since Mr Daniels looked confused enough as it was.

  ‘It was when he was very young man, just after his father died, I think . . .’ the old lady continued. ‘That must have been a year or two after we opened the museum. He found the toy soldier when he was clearing out his father’s things. I believe the china doll belonged to a young lady he was courting at the time. I don’t have any more information than that – but you can always go and speak to him yourself if you want to know more.’

  ‘Was . . . was the girl he was courting a member of the royal family, by any chance?’ Ellie couldn’t help asking.

  Mr Daniels and his mother burst out laughing.

  ‘I don’t think so, or it would have been the talk of the whole village,’ the old lady replied, smiling. ‘But why don’t you go and ask him – I expect he’ll be tickled pink at the idea!’ She paused for a moment. ‘Now tell me, Ellie . . . why all these questions about the toys?’

  But before Ellie could reply, Mr Daniels jumped in, saying, ‘She’s just very interested in the history of old dolls, isn’t that right, Ellie?’

  Ellie nodded and did her best to smile innocently.

  Mrs Daniels was looking at her curiously. ‘Well, that’s very nice. So you like dolls a lot, do you, Ellie?’

  ‘Oh yes, I love them!’ Ellie replied. ‘Especially the ones in your museum.’

  ‘And have you many dolls of your own?’

  ‘Quite a few. My favourite is a rag doll called Trixie.’

  ‘And do you have any . . . what you might call . . . antique dolls?’

  Ellie shook her head. ‘My granny had a beautiful china doll that I really loved and I thought she might give her to me, but she gave her to my cousin instead because she’s the oldest grandchild.’ Ellie had been quite sad about that, especially since her cousin didn’t like dolls nearly as much as she did.

  ‘I see.’ The old lady looked thoughtful. ‘Perhaps you might come and see me another time, Ellie. And if you come on your own, we can have a nice girlie chat. How about that?’

  ‘What’s a girlie chat?’ Mr Daniels wanted to know.

  ‘Oh – it’s when we talk about things you wouldn’t be interested in, Daniel. About . . . oh . . . princesses and mermaids and fairies and the like . . . Isn’t that right, Ellie?’

  Ellie stared at the old lady, certain now that she had met the fairies. She was longing to know more, but she knew she couldn’t ask any further questions while Mr Daniels was with them.

  ‘I’ll come and see you again soon, Mrs Daniels,’ she promised. First though, she had to go and see Mr Owen and find out once and for all whether Enid really had belonged to the Queen.

  *

  The first thing Ellie did when Mr Daniels dropped her off at Aunt Megan’s front gate was to delete the photos she had taken on David’s camera. She had a problem, she realized now. How was she going to return the camera without David guessing that she had had it all along?

  ‘Need some help?’ asked a familiar fairy voice, and suddenly Myfanwy appeared from behind the hedge, closely followed by Bronwen.

  ‘Myfanwy! Bronwen! I thought you weren’t going to come to the valley any more, in case you got stuck here!’

  ‘As soon as we saw the fairy portal was still working, we knew you must have stopped Enid from being taken, so Queen Lily asked us to come back and round up all the fairies who are still out in the valley. They’re all on their way back to the museum now, and we’re meant to go with them, but we thought we’d come and see how you were getting on first.’

  Ellie quickly told them about David’s camera.

  ‘Leave it to us,’ Myfanwy said, flying down and grabbing it from her. ‘We’ll give it back. You never know – if we do it properly it might be enough to make him believe in fairies again!’

  Ellie watched the two fairies disappear through an open window on the top floor, then made her way inside the house, to find Aunt Megan in the kitchen decorating a batch of fairy cakes.

  Almost immediately she had an idea. ‘I’d really like to take one of those cakes to Mr Owen, Aunt Megan,’ she gushed. ‘He was so kind, giving me that flower bracelet and the chocolate! And I bet he really likes fairy cakes, since he believes in fairies!’

  Aunt Megan turned to smile at her. ‘That’s a very nice idea, Ellie. I don’t see why we shouldn’t give some away. Maybe Mr Daniels would like some as well, even though he doesn’t believe in fairies. What do you think?’

  Ellie nodded and started to tell her aunt about her visit to Mr Daniels’s mother. ‘Maybe we could take her some cakes too,’ she suggested.

  ‘Well, why don’t you make some more, Ellie? I’ve got enough ingredients left over for at least another batch. Then you can give them to whoever you think would like them.’

  ‘Oh, but I’d like to go and visit Mr Owen now,’ Ellie said quickly.

  Just then David yelled out, ‘ELLIE!’ from the top of the stairs, so Ellie left Aunt Megan putting the chocolate buttons and sparkly sprinkles on to her cakes and headed up to their bedroom.

  David was sitting on his bed, looking as if he had just seen a ghost. His camera was lying on the bed beside him and there was no sign of Myfanwy or Bronwen.

  ‘I just saw . . .’ he began, and his voice was trembling slightly. ‘I mean, I think I just saw . . .’

  ‘Did you see a fairy?’ Ellie asked him excitedly, hardly able to believe that her brother could now see fairies too.

  David nodded, looking nervous. ‘Maybe it was a trick of the light.’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t! I told you – there really are fairies here, but you can only see them if you believe in them.’

  ‘But I don’t believe in them!’ David protested.

  ‘Once a believer, always a believer!’ a little voice called out, and this time it was clear that David could hear the voice too. Then Myfanwy flew out from behind the wardrobe and added, ‘You believed in fairies once, you see, so when you saw your camera flying through the air just now, your belief in fairies – even though you’d completely forgotten you had any – was reawakened by your disbelief that a camera could fly on its own! So that’s why you saw me!’

  David was staring at her, complete
ly stunned.

  Myfanwy was so pleased that she did a loop-the-loop in mid-air. ‘I’m the fairy you saved when I fell into the fishpond! Do you remember that now?’

  Slowly David nodded. ‘I . . . I think I’m starting to.’

  Bronwen, who had been standing on the window ledge watching, flew over to Ellie and whispered in her ear that they should leave David and Myfanwy alone for a little while to get reacquainted.

  Ellie went back downstairs to the kitchen (with Bronwen flying at her side) and they found Aunt Megan putting two fairy cakes in a little food container and pressing on the lid. ‘Is David all right?’ she asked Ellie. ‘He’s been very upset since he lost his camera.’

  ‘Oh, he’s just found it again,’ Ellie said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Really? Where?’

  ‘Oh, just in his bedroom somewhere . . . Aunt Megan, is it OK if I go to the garage now to visit Mr Owen? I know how to get there and it’s not that far.’

  ‘I don’t want you walking all that way on your own, Ellie,’ Aunt Megan said. ‘Help me clear up here first, and I’ll come with you. Now, did you have anything to eat with Mr Daniels?’

  Ellie had forgotten all about lunch, what with everything that had happened.

  ‘There wasn’t really time,’ she admitted, so Aunt Megan insisted that Ellie sit down and eat a cheese sandwich before they set off to visit Mr Owen.

  By the time she had finished it (with Bronwen helping by taking tiny bites of the cheese) David had arrived downstairs with Myfanwy. Aunt Megan asked about his camera and he grinned apologetically and said that it had been in his room the whole time. And before their aunt could ask any more questions Ellie told her brother that she wanted to go to see Mr Owen, and suggested he take her.

  ‘Sure,’ he agreed immediately, seeming to guess that the visit to Mr Owen had something to do with the fairies.

  ‘Well, I don’t know . . .’ Aunt Megan began uncertainly. ‘I don’t like the idea of the two of you going off by yourselves and arguing the whole way there and back.’