I moved closer, bent down, and examined the miniature work of art sitting in the palm of Miss Whitfield’s hand. Its wings were delicate and translucent, its body was covered in little letters, and its eyes were made from gleaming mother-of-pearl. It was very similar to the dragonfly I’d dreamed about so many times over the past few weeks. But unlike the creature in my dreams, this dragonfly was not alive. Its legs were stiff and rigid, and I could see the individual folds in the paper it was made from (which seemed to be a page out of a book). This dragonfly was mute and motionless.
“Did you make it?” I asked.
Miss Whitfield nodded. “I make one every time there’s a new moon. I’ve been making them for … well, for a very long time. And then I bring them here and set them free. This one was made from a page of an old botany book I found in the west wing library. I’m sorry I had to be so … so ruthless in my search for the chronicle. But after the incident with Dr. Meier and Miss Berkenbeck in the dining hall, I had an idea that somebody … Well.” She broke off, drew back her arm, and hurled the paper dragonfly into the air. The origami insect spiraled upward toward the roof of the cave, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if it had suddenly come to life in midair, flapped its wings, and flown away, never to be seen again.
But instead the dragonfly simply sailed through the air like a paper airplane, veered in a wide curve around our heads, and finally landed in the sea of silver leaves in the middle of the cave. Only then did I notice all the other dragonflies that must have been brought here by Miss Whitfield over the years. There were lots of them. Too many to count. Hundreds, maybe. Some of them were yellowed and torn; some were falling apart, half-buried under piles of leaves. Some looked a lot newer—bright white specimens that perched on the surface, gazing at us with their lifeless eyes.
I shivered and looked from the dragonflies to Miss Whitfield and back again. What did all this mean? Questions raced through my mind. What had Miss Whitfield done—and why? How old was she really? Why did she make the paper dragonflies? What was this place? And where on earth was Gina de Winter? Rather than attempt to unravel the tangle of evidence, clues, and theories inside my head, I blurted out the first question that sprang to mind. “You destroyed our library. Was that because you were looking for the chronicle?”
Miss Whitfield pressed her lips together. “Yes. I had no choice. That book is dangerous—it cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. For a long time I hoped that it had been lost or destroyed, like the other six, but…” She cleared her throat. “I had suspected for some time that that might not be the case, and eventually I realized I had to do something. As I said, I am truly sorry about the library.”
I sniffed. “At least it made a change from your weird hobby.” I cocked my chin toward the paper dragonflies. Then I couldn’t hold back any longer, and all my questions came tumbling out at once. “Why?” I shouted. “Why do you make these things?” My voice cracked. “What were you doing in that old photo? What do you know about the chronicle? And how do you know about it?”
Miss Whitfield sighed. “Listen carefully, Emma, and I’ll explain.” She turned to look at the sea of silver leaves. “There’s a fairy tale. In the chronicle. The tale of the faun and the fairy,” she began.
I moved to stand beside her. “I know. By Eleanor Morland.”
“Yes,” said Miss Whitfield quietly. “But the fairy tale doesn’t have an ending. It breaks off where the faun reminds the fairy of their pact. Where he tells her he has found his true love, and that she must turn him into a real man.”
I’d never noticed that there was no ending to the fairy tale anywhere in the chronicle. Again I became very aware of the book’s cloth binding beneath my fingertips. “And how did it end?” I whispered, almost forgetting to breathe.
“Not happily,” said Miss Whitfield. “Not happily at all. The faun…” But she got no further.
Darcy and Frederick had finally gotten their breath back. For a while they, too, had seemed mesmerized by this strange place, and by Miss Whitfield’s dragonflies, and they’d stood rooted to the spot. But now Frederick must have sensed an opportunity to finish what he’d started, and he lunged toward me with a shout. Before I could react, he’d grabbed hold of my wrist and snatched the book out of my hand. Darcy was by my side in an instant, wrapping his arms around Frederick’s neck and trying to drag him backward. But even as he gasped for breath and his face turned scarlet, Frederick managed to open the book and pull out his pen.
“No!” I cried, grabbing hold of the book’s back cover. Miss Whitfield came to my aid. We tugged at the chronicle with all our strength, while Darcy tightened his grip around Frederick’s neck.
“Let go of it,” Darcy snarled, through clenched teeth.
“You don’t know what you’re doing!” cried Miss Whitfield.
Frederick said nothing. He didn’t make a sound; he couldn’t even breathe. But his pen was sliding over the paper, finishing off the G he’d started, forming the beginning of an i.
“Stop!” I screamed.
Darcy was yelling, too, and for a fraction of a second he let go of Frederick. Then he flung his whole body weight against him, so hard that all four of us lost our balance. Miss Whitfield and I toppled over backward, plummeting through the air just like the paper dragonfly. I saw the glittering rock formations above me as I fell, and I glimpsed the fluttering pages of a book, and a hand that might have been Darcy’s or might not have been. The world blurred before my eyes.
Then came the leaves.
I fell backward into the rustling sea, which was not nearly as deep as I’d thought. Silvery letters swam before my eyes as I landed on the stony ground at the bottom of the pit, hitting the back of my head on the rock. The shock of the impact left me momentarily stunned. I gasped for breath, inhaling little scraps of paper through my nose and mouth. Then I wiped my face with my hands, accidentally crushing something that felt like an origami dragonfly. At last I managed to sit up.
I look around, dazed.
To my left sat Darcy, coughing up a leaf. To my right, Miss Whitfield was leaning over Frederick, who was lying motionless beside her. “I think he’s unconscious,” she murmured, but I hardly heard her because I’d just caught sight of something—
No, not something. Someone.
As we’d fallen into the pit, we’d caused most of the little leaves and paper dragonflies to scatter, so that the stony ground lay exposed. We could see, now, what had previously been hidden: a bright white skeleton, the bones jutting sharply into the air. My mouth went dry. A chill ran up the back of my neck all the way to the crown of my head.
This wasn’t just a pit.
It was a grave.
I saw a rib cage. A gleaming jawbone. A collarbone. A shoulder joint. A pelvic bone. The bones looked peaceful; beautiful, even.
“Gina?” I whispered. I felt sick. So Frederick had done it. That bastard had killed her. He’d murdered her.
Beside me, Darcy choked on a sob and sank to the ground.
Trembling, I crept closer to the skeleton, staring at the smooth thigh bones, the individual vertebrae of the spine, the teeth. And the skull, with its two protuberances on the forehead that curled upward and outward. Only then did I realize that I was wrong: This wasn’t Gina de Winter.
This was my meeting with the faun.
September 1794
“Why are you laughing?” the faun asked the fairy. “You promised to help me. Now you must keep your promise.”
But the fairy merely glared at him. “You fool!” she cried. “You fool!”
17
So the faun did exist. Or he had existed.
He was dead. But he had lived!
I stared into his empty eye sockets. I noticed the fine lines that snaked along the bones in dainty flourishes, coming together to form letters and words. The same handwriting appeared on the silver leaves that spilled out of the gaps between the bones and the cracks in the skull. The huge horns on the faun’s head were jus
t as imposing as the ones in the lord of Stolzenburg’s sketches. And the lower leg bones ended in cloven hooves instead of human feet.
The faun!
I still found it almost impossible to believe. The chronicle had created a living creature! And that living creature had died, long ago. Was that where all the silvery leaves had come from? If the faun had been made of words—if words were what had given him life—then perhaps he was returning to words as his body decayed, as dust returns to dust. Perhaps the silvery sheen of the leaves, and the words that were written on them, bore testament to the life they had once created. The rustling of the leaves around me suddenly seemed deafening, and it grew louder and louder the more I thought about the faun.
But above the rustling I could just make out the sound of suppressed sobs. Darcy was crouched on the ground a few yards away from me, his face buried in his hands.
“It’s not Gina,” I said softly. And then I almost shouted it: “It’s not Gina!”
Darcy looked up, held his breath for a moment and then moved toward the skeleton. The look of despair vanished from his face, to be replaced by relief, then confusion, then disbelief. “Th-that’s…” he stammered, “that’s…”
“He was my friend,” said Miss Whitfield, who had come to stand beside us. She brushed a few stray leaves off her long skirt as she spoke. “I’ll tell you the story,” she said. “The whole story. But not here. It’s cold.” She beckoned to us to follow her.
Darcy and I got to our feet, a little unsteadily. Instinctively we held hands, and Darcy slipped his fingers through mine. I squeezed his hand; the warmth of his skin was comforting. As Miss Whitfield climbed out of the pit, I caught sight of Frederick. He was still lying on his back with his eyes closed. But his chest was rising and falling steadily and he seemed to be more or less unharmed.
“He’ll come round eventually and make his own way out of here,” said Darcy.
Miss Whitfield nodded. “And we need to put as much distance as possible between him and the chronicle before that happens. He seems a little … unhinged.”
“Okay,” I said as I clambered over Frederick. As I did so, I checked to make sure he hadn’t cracked his head open or anything: I didn’t want to be responsible for somebody’s death. Luckily, however, he didn’t seem to be in need of first aid.
Miss Whitfield reached the mouth of the tunnel and Darcy followed, dragging me along behind him. “Gina still has a chance,” he whispered. “Everything might still turn out okay. We escaped the book’s curse.”
He smiled at me, but I didn’t reply. I wasn’t so sure about that. After all, Gina might well have died years ago. And as for the book’s curse …
Miss Whitfield, Darcy, and I hurried through the tunnels back to the castle, and a few minutes later we pushed open the secret door in the west wing library, the one that was disguised as a bookcase. It creaked softly as it swung shut behind us.
“Okay,” I said to Miss Whitfield. “Fire away.”
She surveyed the room, glancing unhappily at the marks where the bookshelves had been ripped off the walls. “Here?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you rather come to my cottage and I’ll make us a nice cup of Earl—”
I shook my head. “We need answers. Now.”
Miss Whitfield sighed and lowered herself into one of the armchairs. The embers in the fireplace were almost extinguished, but Darcy was already laying more logs on top of them and rekindling the flames. I realized I was pacing up and down in front of Miss Whitfield as I waited for her to start speaking. Only when Darcy touched me gently on the arm did I force myself to take a few deep breaths and sit down on the sofa.
Miss Whitfield seemed tense all of a sudden. The corner of her mouth twitched and her eyes glittered. Or was that just the firelight flickering across her face? For a moment, the only sound was the crackling of the fresh wood on the fire. Then Miss Whitfield cleared her throat, sat up very straight in her armchair, and said resolutely, “Whitfield is not my real name. My real name is Eleanor Morland.”
Eleanor Morland? echoed a little voice in my head.
“Like the author?” asked Darcy, puzzled, as a chill ran down my spine.
“Not like the author,” I whispered, looking wonderingly at our teacher. “She is the author.”
Darcy scoffed. “That would make her over two hundred years old.”
“Two hundred and forty-one, to be precise,” said Miss Whitfield. “I was born on the sixteenth of December 1775. And I am still going strong.”
I heard Darcy give a sharp intake of breath beside me, but Miss Whitfield went on, unfazed. “It was the chronicle. It was an accident.” She flicked through the book, and showed us an entry from 1794. “I wrote it here myself, in my last ever entry. I will take my leave of this book and return without it to England, where I will live as an ordinary writer forever and always, without recourse to magic,” she read aloud. “Forever and always—do you see?”
“Yes,” I murmured, “and no. Where does the faun come into all this?”
“You made yourself immortal?” said Darcy.
“As I said, it was an accident. If I could take it back I would, believe me,” said Miss Whitfield, leaning back in her chair. “But anyway—I promised to tell you the whole story, and here it is. For the first eighteen years of my life I was just an ordinary English girl. I spent my childhood in England; I learned needlework and French and German and how to play the piano. Occasionally, I wrote stories and plays that I gave to my family to read. In the summer of 1794 my parents sent me to Germany, to stay with friends of the family at Stolzenburg. I was to spend several weeks here practicing my German.
“I had a wonderful time—the de Winters made me feel very at home, and I loved the castle and its grounds. I spent most of my time roaming around the old building looking for secret passageways. And I badgered the servants to tell me all the stories and legends they knew about Stolzenburg: I had already developed a keen interest in fairy tales, and I knew that every castle worth its salt has its own ghost story. At first they didn’t want to tell me much—nobody wanted to frighten young Miss Morland. But eventually I managed to get one of the kitchen maids to share what she knew. She told me about the legend of the seven enchanted books, and about the lord of Stolzenburg (who had died just a few decades earlier) and his obsession with creating a supernatural being. From then on there was no stopping me. I immediately started searching for clues.
“I combed the whole of the castle, every corner, every room, every staircase, no matter how obscure. And I found them both. The book and the faun.”
Miss Whitfield’s eyes took on a dreamy look, and a sad smile flitted across her face as she continued. “He was wonderful. The first time I saw him—the faun, the word-eater—was one balmy full-moon night as I was sitting by the window in my bedroom. The sweet, heavy scent of the roses drifted up to me on the night wind. It was dark—the woods were casting a shadow across the parkland—but I knew he was there, at the edge of the courtyard. I saw him moving out of the corner of my eye, and I heard the crunch of the gravel. Perhaps he thought everyone in the castle was already in bed, or perhaps he wanted me to see him, I don’t know. All I remember is that he suddenly stepped out into the moonlight, closed his eyes, and tipped back his head, turning his face up to the heavens.
“I’ll never forget that sight: His face and his naked upper body were those of a man, but his legs were covered in hair like a goat’s and he had hooves instead of feet. The two curled horns growing out of his temples reached right around his head to the back of his neck, and his skin shone silver in the darkness; it was covered with little letters, like a web of tiny tattoos. I leaned farther out of the window to get a better look at this wondrous creature, but I accidentally knocked the window frame with my elbow and the faun heard me. He looked up at me for a moment with his golden eyes, then he disappeared back into the darkness with one great bound.”
I sighed. “Did you ever see him again?”
Miss Whitfield smi
led. “Many times. The next few nights I waited for him, down in the courtyard, and when at last he plucked up the courage to return, I stepped out of the shadows and spoke to him. He almost ran away, but when he realized I was not afraid of him, he stayed. I think I was the first human being he had ever seen close up, because he seemed just as fascinated by me as I was by him.” Miss Whitfield brushed a lock of hair out of her face, the way she must have done as a young girl.
“Neither of us could understand what the other was saying, for the language the faun spoke was neither German nor English—it was a sound like the rustling of paper. Nonetheless, we became friends. We met in secret in the underground tunnels he showed me, and we walked together in the woods and around the castle. I showed him my human world, and he played to me on his flute.”
“Well, um—that must have been lovely for you,” said Darcy, his chin propped on his hands. “But what does all this have to do with us? The faun may have existed once upon a time—but he’s long dead now.”
Miss Whitfield nodded. “I know. That’s what’s so tragic. The faun wasn’t human; he was a magical creature. He was immortal. It should have been him, not me, sitting here with you. But I was too young, too inexperienced, too rash in everything I did. I thought I was an adult, I thought I knew what I was doing, but unfortunately the opposite was true.
“When I came across the book in a dusty corner of what used to be the lord of Stolzenburg’s bedroom, and realized how it worked, I wrote things in it that I regret to this day. And the thing I regret most of all is the story of the faun and the fairy.” Miss Whitfield’s voice had grown brittle. She stood up from her chair in silence and walked over to the fire, where she gripped the mantelpiece with both hands, rested her head on the marble, and stared into the flames for a moment.
“Miss Whitfield?” I asked quietly. “What happened?”
“I wanted to help him,” she whispered. “I knew how lonely he’d been before we met, and I knew we had only a few weeks left together until I had to return to England. So I decided to write something that would set him free, something that would grant his dearest wish and help him to become human. I thought I would combine the old legends about the fairy queen on the banks of the Rhine with my own ideas, so that later on they could all become part of the same legend. I thought it was a simple yet brilliant plan.”
The Forgotten Book Page 24