The Little Country

by Charles de Lint

“He doesn’t know what you did,” she said. “Just that you‌—you drugged him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him?”

  “For his sake at first,” Janey said. “And now . . . there’s really no point to it, is there?”

  “Who’s at the door?” Felix called from inside.

  Janey studied Lena for a long moment, then she sighed.

  “You might as well come in,” she said. “I can’t pretend I’ll be your friend, but if you want to say you’re sorry to him . . .”

  Lena shook her head. “I couldn’t face him,” she said. “I can hardly . . . face you.”

  She took a business card from her pocket and pressed it into Janey’s hand.

  “If I can ever help you,” she said, “with anything at all, just call me.”

  She turned and walked away then, just as Felix came to join Janey at the door. Her step showed only a slight trace of a limp now.

  “Janey . . .” he began, then he saw Lena’s retreating figure. “Is that . . . ?”

  “Lena Grant,” Janey agreed.

  Felix’s eyes narrowed, but Janey just gave him a tug and steered him back inside.

  “She came by to say she was sorry,” she said.

  “Sorry?” Felix said. “How can she expect us to believe that?”

  “She didn’t.”

  Janey looked at the business card again, then stuck it in the back pocket of her jeans.

  “But I think she really meant it,” she said as she closed the door.

  Coda

  All things are known, but most things are forgotten. It takes a special magic to remember them.

  ‌—ROBERT HOLDSTOCK,

  from Lavondyss

  The road that will take us forward, is also the road that will take us inward.

  ‌—COLIN WILSON,

  from Beyond the Occult

  Absurd Good News

  His playing, to me, seemed to typify the wild hills and moorland.

  ‌—BILL CHARLTON, founder of the Northumbrian Gathering, referring to Billy Pigg

  I wonder what happened to them after that,” Jodi said as Denzil closed the book.

  She was sitting on the windowsill, comfortably ensconced in a tiny beanbag chair that Denzil had made for her at the height of the sudden enthusiasm for miniature furniture that had taken hold of him in the first few weeks since the mouse-sized Jodi had come to live in his loft. His worktable was littered with more half-finished pieces, while all about the loft his handiwork made life easier for Jodi’s diminutive size.

  He’d taken a wooden crate and built a private bedroom for her that was now set on a lower shelf on one of the bookcases. A multitude of ladders provided her access to various tabletops and the windowsill and he was currently at work on an elevator device that would allow her to come and go from the loft at her pleasure, though he worried constantly under his breath about her being out on the streets alone. He was afraid of some normal-sized person stepping on her‌—not to mention Bodbury’s all-too-many cats.

  As it was, when she went outside now, it was in the pocket of one of the Tatters children, or with either Denzil or Taupin. Her days were full, filled with such excursions, or in helping Denzil with his work; she had the eye and size for the most painstakingly tiny craftsmanship‌—although not, much to Denzil’s dismay, the proper enthusiasm. What she liked best was lolling about in the evenings and having Denzil read to her as he had done tonight.

  The book they’d just finished was an old leather-bound volume that Taupin had found out on the moors near the Men-an-tol and subsequently presented to Denzil and Jodi since they were, as he put it, “the only ones he knew who would fully appreciate its preposterous conceits.”

  And then he had winked.

  “I hope they lived happily ever after,” Jodi said.

  “Maybe some of them did.”

  “Taupin says that the stories go on forever, whether we’re a part of them or not. They have their own lives. When we open a book, it freezes the tale‌—but only for so long as we’re reading it.”

  Denzil hrumphed. He and the hedgerow philosopher continued to have their long‌—and to Jodi, pointless‌—arguments; only now they centered around the particulars and specifics of certain aspects of folkloric wonders and their properties rather than the reality of magic itself.

  Two nights ago, which was the last time Taupin had been over, they’d gone on for hours about whether or not whiskey was an actual cure, or if calling it “the water of life” was merely symbolic of the altered state of mind into which the alcohol led the tippler.

  “The pair of you are like two peas in one pod,” Jodi told him. “I don’t know which one’s worse than the other.”

  “Watch it, you, or I’ll put you in a jar.”

  Jodi smiled, then cocked her ear to the open window.

  “Listen,” she said. “There it is again. Can you hear it?”

  “I hear something. . . .”

  But what was vague for him was clear as crystal to her. The wind was bringing a strain of the first music down from the moorland near the Men-an-Tol. In its measures, lifting high above the rest of the ethereal instruments, was the lilting voice of a set of small pipes, humming like a bird’s chorus against the bee-buzz of their drones.

  “I wonder if Taupin managed to remember to take it to the stone yet,” Jodi said.

  Denzil knew just what she spoke of‌—she’d talked of little since they’d finished making the small tin brooch that was a perfect replica of the cover of the book that Taupin had found by the stone.

  “Brengy does what he says he’ll do,” he admitted. Ollie was curled up on his lap, fast asleep. He scratched the little monkey between the ears. “He may forget for a week or two, but eventually he gets done everything he said he would.”

  “I wonder what she’ll think when she gets it,” Jodi said.

  “Maybe she’ll write a book to tell you,” Denzil said.

  Jodi smiled. “Maybe she’ll write a tune, instead.”

  Outside the window, where the night lay thick on Bodbury’s narrow streets, the wind continued to bring a fey music down from the hills and take it through the narrow streets of the town and out to sea. In its measures were the steps of an old dance‌—the whisper of a mystery, echoing and echoing, across the moors, across the sea, hill to hill and wave to wave, on into forever.

  Contentment Is Wealth

  I met you long ago, but you couldn’t have known, for you weren’t there. Only your ghost. The ghost that slid out of one of your books and met me. . . .

  ‌—JACK DANN, from “Night Meetings”

  A year later Janey Little stood again on the moor by the Men-an-Tol, the small box in which she carried her Northumbrian pipes tucked under her arm. She often came out here, sometimes at night, sometimes during the day; sometimes with Felix, sometimes alone. She’d sit nearby the stone and play her whistle, trying to clear her mind, trying to remember. Tonight, on its first anniversary, she looked at the tolmen and regretted more than ever her inability to recall that night with the clarity and detail she tried to recapture every time she found herself here.

  But it remained obscure. She could remember John Madden and all he had put them through. She could remember what her grandfather had told her about his ordeal with Michael Bett and poor Davie Rowe. But the magic and the music . . . Memories of them stayed vague and distant. Especially those of the music.

  It was just like it had happened in the Dunthorn book‌—in her version of what lay between its boards.

  No one remembered, not really. It had all taken on a dreamlike quality for them as the months went by and one by one the various aspects of the sheer wonder of what had taken place were forgotten. Except by her.

  Sometimes she’d take out that photo of her grandmother and stare at the Small perched on the arm of her chair. It was a little man‌—she’d swear to that, and he was playing a fiddle‌—or at least it had been that night when they’d first come across it. But all t
oo often these days it looked like just a smudge of light.

  There was a session at the Boyds’ farm tonight‌—in honour of her and Felix’s return from a fall tour of California. Felix didn’t play on stage yet‌—except for adding a bit of rhythm on the crowdy crawn towards the end of an evening. Mostly he worked the soundboard‌—and Janey knew she’d never sounded as good as with him on it‌—and played at the sessions afterward.

  But he was getting closer. She could tell. If he didn’t get up with his box this next tour they already had booked, then it’d be the one afterward. She could be patient‌—the new and improved Janey Little still holding firm to all her resolutions.

  And he had played on almost every track of her third album‌—so much so that the only real argument they’d had this past year was in her wanting him to share the billing for the album, while he refused, saying that people would then expect him to be playing up there on stage with her on subsequent tours. He’d much rather just be listed in the credits with the other guest musicians, like Clare and Dinny and the other regulars of the sessions that had sat in on a tune or two. The new and improved Janey hadn’t pushed him after he brought that up.

  The album had done well‌—racking up pleasant sales both domestically and abroad, where they sold it off the stage in between sets and after the shows. They’d called it The Little Country, naturally enough. A reviewer in Folk Roots magazine opined that the title came from her surname, or from the “little country” that Cornwall might seem to some, but only those who had been involved with the Dunthorn book knew the real origin and they kept it a secret.

  There had only been one other major change in Janey’s life over the past year: her mother had begun to write to her. Janey had ignored the first letter, complete with its muddle of confused apologies‌—after all, what did she owe the woman? But the correspondence continued to arrive, once a month. There was never a reprimand for her not replying to them, hidden there in her mother’s untidy script. They were merely gossipy letters, talking about the changes in her mother’s life. How she’d moved from New York. How she’d finally become involved in repertory theatre in New England as she’d always wanted to. How she was poor, but finally happy. How she’d bought all of Janey’s albums and was so very proud of her.

  The close of each was a flourishing, “Your loving mother, Connie.”

  That afternoon Janey had finally sat down and written back. She sealed the envelope and took it up to the post office for a stamp just before tea. As she sent the letter off on its way, a weight that she hadn’t been aware she was carrying slipped from her shoulders.

  She’d felt a little light-headed and that was when she’d decided to come up to the Men-an-Tol tonight before the session.

  By herself.

  At moonrise.

  With her pipes.

  Kempy had been delirious to see her again, bounding about with great good enthusiasm. He lay now near the tolmen, tongue lolling, as he watched her fuss with her pipes. Opening their carrying box, she took them out and put them together, bellows attached to the air bag by one tube, chanter by another. But before she blew them up, she lay them down on the lid of their case and, giving Kempy a small embarrassed smile, walked over to the stone.

  The moon was just rising.

  She looked about the dark moor. Satisfied that there was no one watching her except for the border collie who was half mad himself anyway, she squeezed through the hole in the stone. Walking around, she went through again. And again. Nine times, all told.

  She wasn’t trying to find her own way into that otherworld. She just wanted to see it. To know that it was real.

  But the mist never rose from the surrounding moorland. There was no flare of light.

  No music.

  Just the quiet of the night. The stars glimmering high above in a sky that was surprisingly clear for this time of night. The moon steadily rising.

  She had to laugh at herself for even trying. Standing on the far side of the Men-an-Tol after her ninth passage through its rounded hole, she brushed the stone dust from her jacket.

  That was desperation for you, she thought.

  She was disappointed with her failure, but not surprised by it. After all, if the magic could be so simply called up, why then anybody could simply waltz up to the stone and prove that there was such a thing. And as Peter Goninan had told her, the magic was more secret than that.

  It was‌—

  She paused as her fingers touched an unfamiliar object pinned to her jacket. Fumbling in her pocket, she took out the torch that she’d brought from the car with her and shone its light onto her chest.

  There was a brooch pinned to the fabric that hadn’t been there when she’d left the house earlier this evening. She touched it with wondering fingers. It seemed to be made of heavy tin‌—like the hefty little souvenir cottages and lighthouses that used to be on sale in Penzance and the village two summers ago. It was the shape of a book and the design of its cover . . .

  She traced the words of its title with a finger, wonder growing in her mind.

  The Little Country.

  An eerie warmth spread through her. Looking at the stone, she half imagined she saw a man sitting there on the top of the Men-an-Tol, swinging his legs so that his heels tapped against the stone. And she recognized him. William Dunthorn. Not as she knew him from her grandfather’s old photos, but the way he’d look if he’d lived to this day. Smiling at her, mysteries brimming in his penetrating gaze.

  She blinked, and the image was gone‌—but not the warmth. Nor the memory of him sitting there on the stone.

  And not the brooch.

  She flicked off the torch and picked up her pipes. She buckled on the bellows and arranged the small drones so that they lay across her left forearm. Then she blew up the air bag with a squeezing motion of her elbow. The drones hummed their quiet buzz. Inspired, she woke a new tune from the chanter, composed on the spot. For its title, she took that feeling of two Billys’ worth of Bully that was singing through her veins, following the deep rhythm of her heartbeat‌—

  Dhumm-dum. Dhumm-dum.

  ‌—that seemed to echo in the ground underfoot and off, away, across the moor.

  She felt as dizzy as though she’d just received some absurd good news and needed to shout it out to the world in a tune.

  A simple bit of a jig that was an echo of the first music. In its measures were the steps of an old dance‌—the whisper of a mystery, echoing and echoing, across the moors, across the sea, hill to hill and wave to wave, on into forever.

  The session at the Boyds’ that night was a rousing success, so much so that friends of theirs claimed to have heard the music spilling out of the Boyds’ kitchen from as far away as St. Ives and Land’s End.

  But Janey knew what music it was that they’d really heard.

  It had been an echo of the first music, she had explained to Felix and Clare the next day.

  The music of the Little Country that every person had hidden away inside them.

  Appendix I: A Selection of Janey Little’s Tunes

  The following tunes were written on the fiddle, but have proved admirably suitable for a wide variety of instruments. All tunes are copyright © 1991 by Charles de Lint; all rights reserved.

  ABSURD GOOD NEWS

  ALL OF A MONDAY NIGHT

  BILLY’S OWN JIG

  FELIX GAVIN’S REEL

  THE GAFFER’S MOUZEL

  THE GIRLS OF EDMONTON

  HER TWO CHAIRS

  JOHN WOOD’S MAZURKA

  THE MEIKLEJOHN JIG

  THE MEN-AN-TOL WALTZ

  THE NEW TASSELED SHOES

  THE NINE BLIND HARPERS

  SHE’S TOO FAST FOR ME

  STARGAZY PIE

  THE STONESS BARN

  THE TINKER’S BLACK KETTLE

  Appendix II: A Brief Glossary of Unfamiliar Terms

  I’m indebted to conversations with Phil and Audrey Wallis, as well as Douglas Tregenza’s Depart
ed Days: Mousehole Remembered (Dyllanstow Truran, 1984) and Ben Batten’s Old Newlyn Speech (self-published, 1984) for the following terms:

  agro‌—short for aggravation

  ansum‌—handsome

  bagle‌—a troublemaker

  brill‌—short for brilliant

  caboleen‌—rounded stone used as an anchor

  carker‌—little cork boat with a slate or iron keel

  come ‘pon that‌—so far as that goes

  dog in a tayser‌—square peg in a round hole

  emperent‌—cheeky, pert

  fore and after‌—clergyman

  garm‌—expression of surprise, wonder

  kitey‌—a bit loony

  la Ley!‌—exclamation

  making some crant‌—creating a fuss

  oh raw we‌—exclamation

  sparking‌—courting

  tatchy‌—irritable

  tee-ta-taw‌—a vaguely critical or mocking comment

  that do belong‌—that’s unusual

  three scats behind‌—too slow, late

  tuck-net‌—small net used to lift up pilchard in a seine

  two-deckers‌—any four-footed animal; sailors call them this rather than by their common names to ward against bad luck

  up country‌—the rest of England

  wam‌—very finicky person

  well, I go to sea‌—surprise, astonishment

  white choker‌—clergyman