by A. J. Elwood
That sensation of being watched returns, redoubled. I picture Mrs Favell in the garden below, slowly turning her head from her game, towards her room; towards me. I haven’t sensed this in a long time, I realise. Is that because she’d decided I didn’t matter? Well, now perhaps I do.
I open the door and pause before entering. It occurs to me that it feels this way because she’s set some ward of her own – protection against me entering her room again. Is it because my own tricks are troubling her at last? And yet she isn’t going to stop me. I tell myself there is nothing preventing me from stepping across the threshold and after a moment, I do.
Everything inside is perfectly neat. It looks as if the room doesn’t belong to anyone in particular. Only the bureau seems in any way connected to its occupant and I find that it’s locked. I go to the china dish by her bedside, where once upon a time, she’d placed a key. It’s empty.
Unlike the bureau with its rich grain and glowing wood, the chest of drawers is relentlessly ordinary. I pull open the top drawer and see sweaters in soft wool, neatly folded. I rummage inside, feeling for the hard stem of a key, anything that doesn’t belong. There is only a drawer liner printed with rose petals, the faint remnant of scent rising from it.
The next drawer is slippery with silken nightgowns and full of underclothes rich with lace. They’re fancier than my own; I picture the ugly nursing bra I bought during my pregnancy and grimace. I search through those too and find nothing. The last drawer contains slacks in thicker fabrics, all ready for the winter, smartly ironed. It’s all so ordinary that I feel with renewed force what I’m doing. I’m a thief. I’m Theresa. How would it look to anyone who walked in? I have no reason to be here. Even if I came up with an excuse, the expression on my face would give me away.
Through the windowpane comes a faint cheer. Someone must have won the game. Have they finished or are there more rounds to play? I suppose I’ll find out soon enough.
Will Mrs Favell come striding up the stairs, her aching back forgotten? At that thought I turn to the bed. I lift the mattress and see the torn pages, still there as they must have been all night as she slept, and next to them—
A key. It’s her key, to her bureau.
I stare. Did she know about the Bible pages all along? Is this another one of her games – did her back ever hurt her at all?
Maybe I’d shoved the pages under her bed in such a hurry I hadn’t seen the key. Or she had slipped it under there without feeling the touch of the misplaced papers.
I remind myself that whatever the answer, the key is within my grasp. I let the mattress fall into place and turn my back on it. The key fits smoothly into the little lock on the bureau and turns with a soft yet decisive sound.
As soon as I open it I see two stacks of letters, of the same creamy stock I’ve grown familiar with. They are pushed right to the back and I pull one of them towards me, bringing it into the light. I recognise the faded ink, the slanted handwriting.
Dear Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Forgive the impertinence of my writing to you as a stranger and without introduction…
That was the first letter, one I’ve already read. I reach for the other bundle and see more letters, the one on top dated the nineteenth of September. Have I read that far? I can’t remember the dates. I scan the first paragraph. Dear Mr Gardner, Thank you, wholeheartedly, for your reply. There was no need to apologise for its brevity; the assurance of your continued friendship gave it an import more valuable than any longer missive could impart.
My fingers tingle. This is new. Perhaps here I’ll find the answers I need.
I check the bottom of the other pile and find the last letter I read. She’s divided them according to me then, the ones I’ve read and the ones I haven’t. Perhaps I matter to her after all. I grab the whole second bundle and this time I don’t worry about folding the lovely paper. I crease them haphazardly, stuff them into my uniform pocket, lock the bureau and throw the key back under the mattress. These will be safe in my locker before anyone comes in from the garden.
Then, surely, I will know the truth.
* * *
19th September 1922
Dear Mr Gardner,
Thank you, wholeheartedly, for your reply. There was no need to apologise for its brevity; the assurance of your continued friendship gave it an import more valuable than any longer missive could impart. I am glad to see that in at least one thing we can fully agree – that in such an enterprise we all must face the severest questioning, and to raise such issues amongst ourselves can be no obstacle compared to that of general disbelief.
But you also make reference to my use of the word ‘misery’ in my last. It was sharp-eyed of you, and indeed considerate. I thank you for your continuing interest in my little home.
You are right, of course. When I previously left off, all must have seemed quite content and happy. Charlotte was restored to us and as blithe and gladsome as may be wished. Harriet had her mother back, just the way she was. I was disappointed in my pictures and bereft of my skeleton but I had my family, and I accepted that – nay, was grateful for it, and anxious to do nothing else that would risk them. I resolved to never again go to the glen, or to permit them to go either.
Nevertheless, we are in misery; an insidious, creeping, low kind of misery that has stolen upon us, and it is all the more dark because I can see no way out of it.
I have been much thrown together with Harriet in these past months; indeed, when not in school she is ever at my side. She grows a sweet, thoughtful child, always anxious to please her grandpapa, and though I love to see her bent over her book or whispering in her dolly’s ear, I would that she might prefer to spend a little more time in the company of her mother.
They have not argued. They have not had any quarrel that I know of. Indeed, Harriet is full young to have disagreements of any consequence, or to bear such things running on each day or week or even beyond, and yet to observe them is to know that something has come between them. And I must admit that I have felt a growing disinclination for Charlotte’s company also, though she smiles if anything more sweetly than she ever did, and professes delight in everything about her.
She sees everything now, of course. There is no impediment to her vision, and yet it strikes me as a shallow sort of seeing, for the warmth of feeling that once accompanied those little glances is absent, and I do not know how to recover it.
She has suffered from her experience of the fairies, of course. I wonder sometimes if she has a variety of shell-shock such as that still faced by many survivors of the war. She no longer likes to sew; she does not read – I could not even persuade her to look over Sir Arthur’s book, let alone a prayer book or her Bible. She picks at her food as if it is distasteful to her, and in consequence has grown rather thin and wasted. She sits quite still in the evenings and I believe would do so until she were in darkness if I did not suggest that we set a match to the gas-lights. And she gazes steadily out of the window, towards the place where the wind stirs the tops of the trees and describes its unknowable designs in the meadow grass.
If pressed, she tells me that she is happy. And yet – I cannot put it better than this – there is a blankness. I do not know what to make of it. Lines from Hartland come back to me: unwelcome lines about changelings and stocks of wood that I wish I had never read. They have planted images in my mind, and those images mock me and whirl and turn about until everything is confusion. She is not a changeling. She is unafraid of the fire; I have watched her most carefully. I have left iron scissors by her chair and she passed them to me when I asked for them. They did not burn her skin; she did not shiver at their touch. Could a changeling attend church? She was there with us even on Easter, that most holy of days, and she did not flinch. And yet…
Quite recently, I went again to see the woman in the village. Do you remember – the one who did not speak to me, but pushed Hartland’s book into my hand? This time I thrust my foot into the door when she attempted to close it in my fac
e. I asked her what she knew of changelings. Do you know what she said to me? ‘Dun’t dig,’ she said. ‘Dun’t dig where tha dun’t want buryin’.’
Burying. It makes me shudder to think of it. Fairies are said to dwell in the hollow hills, are they not? Their home is not in the sun but beneath the rocks, in utterly dark places, away from clean air and the sight of humanity or God.
When I returned I hurried to find Harriet, but I need not have worried – she had secreted herself behind the door as her mother busied herself about the kitchen. She still cooks, you see, though she eats so little. I myself taste the food carefully to see if she does anything differently now, and I do not detect a change, but how would I remember? It disturbs me to see her at table with us, raising the fork to her lips as she always did, hardly taking anything, smiling when she sees me watching.
It means she is staying with us, does it not – that she eats even a little of our food?
Harriet ran to my side at once and stood on tiptoe, as she does when she wants to whisper in my ear. ‘She’s wishing the butter,’ she said, and scurried away as if suddenly afraid.
You see? I believe you have always said that children see the fairies better than anyone. Or has there simply been too much talk of fairies altogether in this house, and we are all cast half into a dream?
But I can tell you nothing definite, there is nothing certain, and so I will turn to Sir Arthur’s book and relate some things that have occurred to me since my last reading. Indeed, there are several points that on closer inspection I do not like – things that disturb me greatly, in fact, and I believe it is my duty to bring them to your notice.
There are many mentions of the fairies dancing as an expression of their joy and carelessness, and indeed it is speculated that they only assume a human shape in order to do so, as if such a thing were merely some kind of holiday from their regular existence. I cannot tell you how this troubles me. Something about it makes me shudder, and I do not know what; only that I feel most strongly that it cannot be so.
There is an account given by one gentleman who claims to have followed a fairy, that it particularly noticed him and beckoned him onward. Why should a fairy show such interest in the affairs of man? And did it really mean to show him a flint arrowhead when it pointed at the ground? I wonder instead if it intended to lure him to some doorway into the other realm. And there is another case – one ‘seen’ in the mind by your clairvoyant, it is true, but he says a lovely fairy appeared to one of the girls, wearing an expression ‘as if inviting Frances into Fairyland’. Why so? What did it want with her? And what is this land, if it lies beneath the ground?
I am reminded of something Harriet once said: ‘They don’t really know how to dance. They only wish to make us want to be where they are.’
Then there is the account to which you have referred previously, about the fairies whose beauteous faces became of a sudden as ugly as sin. Hartland speaks of that too, you know – people’s grand and beautiful visions of the folk being torn away to reveal ‘the most hideous imps of hell’.
When taken against the whole, these are hints, discordant notes in an otherwise harmonious symphony of pure and lovely beings, but do you not think we should listen to them? Who will hear, if we do not?
And yet that is not all – you know it is not. There is the case simply given as that of Mrs H., who said of a fairy that ‘no soul looked through his eyes’. She saw – she saw! Is that what is so wrong when I look at Charlotte? I do not know, but I wonder.
You see, I think Sir Arthur selects what he will to support his cause and disregards the rest. He believes in the good of all creation. He does not wish to muddy the waters of spiritualism; he wishes the world to believe in a realm of goodness and beauty. He cannot admit the possibility that we have discovered something which is of creation – or perhaps not, as we understand it – but that is dark.
Yet these things creep in. They cannot help being seen in glimpses, like the fairies themselves. One witness even says, ‘They are capable individually of becoming extremely attached to humans – or a human – but at any time they may bite you.’
I do not doubt the latter. It is the former I am struggling with. Are they capable of such attachment?
Charlotte dresses her daughter. She wipes her face; she directs and guides her. But does she care for her?
I will watch and I will write to you soon.
Yours,
Lawrence Fenton
11
I read the first letter standing in the locker room. The risk I’m taking is nothing next to my desire to know what happens. The bundle is thin – there can’t be more than three or four letters left – and I feel so close to the end of the story I can’t wait any longer.
And what a letter it is. Here is Charlotte, returned but changed, gladsome and yet cold. She looks the same but she is without feeling, without warmth; a mother, yet without love. The touch of iron did not reveal her for what she was. Even fire failed to do that. The church was as ineffectual as the Bible under Mrs Favell’s pillow, and I wonder why that was. Did La Belle Dame sans Merci have them in thrall?
I can tell you nothing definite, there is nothing certain.
But he had, hadn’t he? For the Charlotte of the letters had gone, just as Mrs Favell once said – She vanished long ago, and she’s never, ever coming back again – and yet she was there, replaced.
Could Fenton’s daughter-in-law and my Charlotte be the same person after all? How long could the beings we like to name ‘fairies’ live? Perhaps they really don’t die like humans do. They do not wither – unless they are glimpsed in the full light of the sun, when the truth of their age is revealed.
Fenton had known that a changeling could be dangerous. The writer of The Science of Fairy Tales had seen it too. Both learned, all too quickly, of the fairies’ propensity to bite, their love of tricks. Of games. And Charlotte had been given the charge of little Harriet, just as my Harriet, in turn, has charge of Robyn. I wonder if she loves her at all. Is there any love in her?
But I haven’t reached the end. And I’ve heard no one; I’m alone. Despite the earlier cheering, I don’t think anyone has come back inside. I take the next letter from the top of the pile, see how brief the following one is, and start to read them both.
* * *
22nd September 1922
Dear Mr Gardner,
You will have been waiting, I am sure, for my letter, though I have not heard from you in the meantime. I shall not wait; I must tell you of my decision.
I have been drawn, night after night, to take up The Coming of the Fairies again. That title! In the dark, with nothing outside but the moon riding high and the bats clicking, it could be almost prophetic. Perhaps it is, but then, I have learned to fear other things than those which roam without; it is the ones within that must be watched.
The thing that draws me to the book is this. In your later investigations, you say – or Sir Arthur says – you paid visits to the New Forest and Scotland as well as Yorkshire, speaking to those who love and seek the fairies – you do not mention me, of course, but perhaps I no longer quite fitted that description.
You say that your part in revealing the Cottingley photographs to the world was the worst introduction possible, and that the pictures so used were considered an outrageous trespass and violation. You present this as a question of local attitude, not mentioning in the slightest my own findings; that the fairies do not like to be observed. But those who know, know. Why else would an old lady say to me that I should not dig where I do not wish to be buried?
I cannot bear what they have done to us. I cannot bear the hurt in Harriet’s eyes when she turns from her mother, the way she tries and fails to elicit some small sign of love. What can I do, I have vainly asked myself? And yet now I see what was plain before me all along. I must trespass further upon the fairies; I shall publish.
Sir Arthur did not see fit to include my account within his own. What of that? I have no reputation in
the literary line, no publishing contact, no idea of where to begin. But what I do have is a story of no less interest than your own, and the determination to see it presented before the world.
And so I have begun. I am currently preparing it. It is a fact that my photographs no longer hold true; they do not look so much like fairies as creations of the imagination, but that has not prevented others. And I still have the photographs I had the prescience to take of the little skeleton. Some will no doubt say it is nothing more than the partial remains of a tiny bird with a dragonfly’s wings appended, but my character, my testimony, shall speak for the truth, as you did for the Wright girl.
I will warn people what they are really like. There shall be no talk of their gladsome frolics and dancing, only of their wickedness.
Charlotte sees what I am about. She thinks I cannot watch her as I once did, but I know! And I see Harriet, her little pensive face as she leans over her book, so pale from keeping indoors. The looks we exchange, when we think her mother does not see – it is all there, all evident.
The world will know. And if you do not believe my proofs are enough – why, I have heard her give herself away, with my own ears! It happened late at night, when I thought everyone was abed and I was going over my papers. Her voice came quite plainly from the passage outside my room, low and unlike herself, but perhaps like her true self; the one she hides from us.
‘I stung you once,’ she said. ‘I’ll have the rest soon enough.’ And she made chewing sounds with her mouth, as if she was hungry at last – as if she was ravenous, and anticipating the sweet meat of her little daughter.
I rushed out upon the instant. She was too quick for me; she was not there.
She is a changeling, I know it now. Oh, I have moments when I doubt; weak moments when I merely think she will end her days in Bedlam with the other lunatics, or perhaps I will. But under such pressures, and quite alone with a child to protect, it is little wonder I experience some confusion. Why, sometimes I wonder if you are indeed who you claim to be, and if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was ever in receipt of my letter; if you have not kept him apprised, as you promised to do, with all I have to say. I wonder if I have been cruelly deceived in everything – even led astray by a child’s fancies, as some would say we all have.