The Gypsies In The Wood

By Kim Newman

 

 

ACT I: THE CHILDREN OF EYE

 

i: “we take an interest”

 

 

“Mr. Charles Beauregard?” asked Dr. Rud, squinting through pince-nez.

 

Charles allowed he was who his carte de visite said he was.

 

“Of... the Diogenes Club?”

 

“Indeed.”

 

He stood at the front door. The Criftins, the doctor’s house, was large but lopsided, several buildings close together, cobbled into one by additions in different stone. At once household, clinic, and dispensary, it was an important place in the parish of Eye, if not a noteworthy landmark in the county of Herefordshire. On the map Charles had studied on the down train, Eye was a double-yolked egg: two communities, Ashton Eye and Moreton Eye, separated by a rise of trees called Hill Wood and an open space of common ground called Fair Field.

 

It was mid-evening, full dark and freezing. His breath frosted. Snow had settled thick in recent weeks. Under a quarter moon, the countryside was dingy white, with black scabs where the fall was melted or cleared away.

 

Charles leaned forward a little, slipping his face into light-spill to give the doctor a good, reassuring look at him.

 

Rud, unused to answering his own front door, was grumpily pitching in during the crisis. After another token glance at Charles’s card, the doctor threw up his hands and stood aside.

 

A Royal Welsh Fusilier lounged in the hallway, giving cheek to a tweeny. The maid, who carried a heavy basin, tolerated none of his malarkey. She barged past the guard, opening the parlour door with a practiced hip-shove, and slipped inside with an equally practiced flounce, agitating the bustle-like bow of her apron-ties.

 

Charles stepped over the threshold.

 

The guard clattered upright, rifle to shoulder. Stomach in, shoulders out, eyes front, chin up. The tweeny, returning from the parlour, smirked at his tin soldier pose. The lad blushed violet. Realising Charles wore no uniform, he relaxed into an attitude of merely casual vigilance.

 

“I assume you are another wave of this invasion?” stated the doctor.

 

“Someone called out the army,” said Charles. “Through channels, the army called out us. Which means you get me, I’m afraid.”

 

Rud was stout and bald, hair pomaded into a laurel-curl fringe. Five cultivated strands plastered across his pate, a sixth hanging awry—like a bell-pull attached to his brain. Tonight, the doctor received visitors without ceremony, collarless, in shirtsleeves and waistcoat. He ought to be accustomed to intrusions at all hours. A country practice never closed. Charles gathered that the last few days had been more than ordinarily trying.

 

“I did not expect a curfew, sir. We’re good, honest Englishmen in Eye. And Welshmen too. Not some rebellious settlement in the Hindu Kush. Not an enemy position, to be taken, occupied and looted!”

 

The guard’s blush was still vivid. The tweeny put her hands on her broad hips and laughed.

 

“Your ‘natives’ seem to put up a sterling defence.”

 

“Major Chilcot has set up inspection points, prohibited entry to Hill Wood, closed the Small Man.

 

“I imagine it’s for your protection. Though I’ll see what I can do. If anything is liable to lead to mutiny, it’s shutting the pub.”

 

“You are correct in that assumption, sir. Correct.”

 

Charles assessed Rud as quick to bristle. He was used to being listened to. Hereabouts, he was a force with which to be reckoned. Troubles, medical and otherwise, were brought to him. If Eye was a fiefdom, the Criftins was its castle and Dr. Rud—not the vicar, Justice of the Peace or other local worthy—its Lord. The doctor didn’t care to be outranked by outsiders. It was painful for him to admit that some troubles fell beyond his experience.

 

It would be too easy to take against the man. Charles would never entirely trust a doctor.

 

The bite-mark in his forearm twinged.

 

Pamela came to mind. His wife. His late wife.

 

She would have cautioned him against unthinking prejudice. He conceded that Rud could hardly be expected to cope. His usual run was births and deaths, boils and fevers, writing prescriptions and filling in certificates.

 

None of that would help now.

 

This sort of affair rang bells in distant places. Disturbed the web of the great spider. Prompted the deployment of someone like Mr. Charles Beauregard.

 

A long-case clock ticked off each second. The steady passage of time was a given, like drips of subterranean water forming a stalactite. Time was perhaps subjectively slower here than in the bustle of London—but as inevitable, unvarying, inexorable.

 

This business made the clock a liar. Rud did not care to think that. If time could play tricks, what could one trust?

 

The doctor escorted Charles along the hallway. Gas lights burned in glass roses, whistling slightly. Bowls of dried petals provided sweet scent to cover medical odours.

 

At the parlour door, the soldier renewed his effort to simulate attention. Rud showed the man Charles’s card. The fusilier saluted.

 

“Not strictly necessary,” said Charles.

 

“Better safe than sorry, sah!”

 

Rud tapped the card, turning so that he barred the door, looking up at Charles with frayed determination.

 

“By the bye, how precisely does membership of this institution, this club—with which I am unfamiliar—give you the right to interview my patient?”

 

“We take an interest. In matters like these.”

 

Rud, who had probably thought his capacity for astonishment exhausted, at once caught the implication.

 

“Surely this case is singular? Unique?”

 

Charles said nothing to contradict him.

 

“This has happened before? How often?”

 

“I’m afraid I really can’t say.”

 

Rud was fully aghast. “Seldom? Once in a blue moon? Every second Thursday?”

 

“I really can’t say.”

 

The doctor threw up his hands. “Fine,” he said, “quiz the poor lad. I’ve no explanation for him. Maybe you’ll be able to shed light. It’ll be a relief to pass on the case to someone in authority.”

 

“Strictly, the Diogenes Club has status rather than authority.”

 

This was too much for Rud to take aboard. Even the mandarins of the Ruling Cabal could not satisfactorily define the standing of the Diogenes Club. Outwardly, the premises in Pall Mall housed elderly, crotchety misanthropes dedicated only to being left in peace. There were, however, other layers: sections of the club busied behind locked steel doors, taking an interest. Gentlemanly agreements struck in Whitehall invested the Diogenes Club as an unostentatious instrument of Her Majesty’s government. More often than the public knew, matters arose beyond the purview of the police, the diplomatic service, or the armed forces. Matters few institutions could afford to acknowledge even as possibilities. Some body had to take responsibility, even if only a job lot of semiofficial amateurs.

 

“Come in, come in,” said Rud, opening the parlour door. “Mrs. Zeals has been feeding the patient broth.”

 

The Criftins was low-ceilinged, with heavy beams. Charles doffed his hat to pass under the lintel.

 

From this moment, the business was his responsibility.

 

* * * *

 

ii: “my mother said I never should”

 

The parlour had fallen into gloom. Dr. Rud turned the gas-key, bringing up light as if the play were about to begin. Act 1, Scene 1: The parlour of the Criftins. Huddled in an armchair by the fire is...

 

“Davey Harvill?”

 

The patient squirmed at the sound of Charles’s voice, pulling up and hugging his knees, hiding his lower face. Charles put his hat on an occasional table and took off his heavy ulster, folding it over a high-backed chair.

 

The patient’s eyes skittered, huge-pupilled.

 

“This gentleman is...”

 

Charles waved his fingers, shutting off the doctor’s preamble. He did not want to present an alarming, mysterious figure.

 

The patient’s trousers stretched tight around thin shanks, ripped in many places, cuffs high on the calf like knee-britches. He was shirtless and shoeless, a muffler wrapped around bird-thin shoulders. His calloused feet rested in a basin of dirtied water. His toenails were like thorns. Many old sores and scars made scarlet lakes and rivers on the map of his very white skin. His thatch of hair was starched with clay into the semblance of an oversized magistrate’s wig; his beard matted into pelt-like chest-hair, threaded through with twigs; his moustaches hung in twisted braids, strung with bead-like pebbles.

 

Glimpsing himself in a glass, Rud smoothed his own stray hair-strand across his scalp.

 

Charles pulled a footstool close to the basin.

 

The patient looked like Robinson Crusoe after years on the island. Except Crusoe would have been tanned. This fellow’s pallor suggested a prisoner freed from an oubliette. Wherever he had been marooned was away from the sun, under the earth.

 

An animal smell was about him.

 

Charles sat on the stool and took the patient’s thin hands, lifting them from his knees. His fingernails were long and jagged.

 

“My name is Charles. May I talk with you?”

 

The eyes fixed on him, sharp and bright. A tiny flesh-bulb, like a drop of fresh blood, clung to the corner of the right eyelid.

 

“Talk, mister?”

 

The voice was thin and high. He spoke as if English were unfamiliar, and his native tongue lacked important consonants.

 

“Yes, just talk.”

 

“Frightened, mister. Been so long.”

 

The face was seamed. Charles would have estimated the patient’s age at around his own, thirty-five.

 

Last week, Davey Harvill had celebrated his ninth birthday.

 

The patient had a child’s eyes, frightened but innocent. He closed them, shutting out the world, and shrank into the chair. His nails pressed into the meat of Charles’s hands.

 

Charles let go and stood.

 

The patient—Davey, he had to be called—wound a corner of the muffler in his fingers, screwing it up close to his mouth. Tears followed runnels in his cheeks.

 

Mrs. Zeals tried to comfort him, with coos and more broth.

 

“Rest,” said Charles. “You’re safe now. Talking can wait.”

 

Red crescents were pressed into the heels of Charles’s hands, already fading. Davey was not weak.

 

The patient’s eyes flicked open, glittering in firelight. There was a cunning in them, now. Childlike, but dangerous.

 

Davey gripped Charles’s arm, making him wince.

 

“My mother said, I never should... play with the gypsies in the wood... if I did, she would say, ‘naughty girl to disobey!’“

 

Davey let him go.

 

The rhyme came in a lower voice, more assured, almost mocking. Not a grown-up voice, though. A feathery chill brushed Charles’s spine. It was not a boy’s rhyme, but something a girl would sing. Davey smiled a secret smile, then swallowed it. He was as he had been, frightened rather than frightening.

 

Charles patted his shoulder.

 

“Has he an appetite?” he asked the housekeeper.

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“Keep feeding hirn.”

 

Mrs. Zeals nodded. She was part-nurse, probably midwife too. The sort of woman never missed until she was needed, but who then meant life or death. If a Mrs. Zeals had been in the Hill Country, Charles might still be a husband and father. She radiated good sense, though this case tested the limitations of good sense as a strategy for coping.

 

“We shall talk again later, Davey. When you’re rested.”

 

Davey nodded, as much to himself as Charles.

 

“Dr. Rud, do you have a study? I should like to review the facts.”

 

The doctor had hung back by the door, well out of reach.

 

“You’re in charge, Mrs. Zeals,” he said, stepping backwards out of the room, eyes on the patient. “Mr. Beauregard and I have matters of import to discuss. Have Jane bring up tea, a light supper, and a bottle of port.”

 

“Yes, doctor.”

 

Rud shot a look at the soldier. He disapproved of the invasion, but at present felt safer with an armed guard in his home.

 

“It’s this way,” he told Charles, indicating with his hands, still watching the patient. “Up the back stairs.”

 

Charles bowed to Mrs. Zeals, smiled again at Davey, and followed the doctor.

 

“Extraordinary thing, wouldn’t you say?” Rud gabbled.

 

“Certainly,” Charles agreed.

 

“Of course, he can’t be who he says he is. There’s some trick to this.”

 

* * * *

 

iii: “pebble in a pond”

 

Rud’s consulting room was on two levels, a step running across the floor raising a section like a small stage. One wall was lined with document-boxes. Locked cabinets held phials of salves, balms, cures, and patent potions. A collection of bird and small mammal skeletons, mounted under glass domes, was posed upon items—rocks, branches, green cloth representing grass—suggestive of natural habitat.

 

On the raised area was a desk of many drawers and recesses. Above this, a studio photograph of Dr. and Mrs. Oliver Rud was flanked by framed documents, the doctor’s diploma and his wife’s death certificate. Glancing at this last item, careful not to be seen to do so, Charles noted cause of death was down as diphth. and the signature was of another physician. He wondered if it was prominently displayed to caution the doctor against medical hubris, or to forewarn patients that miracles were not always possible.

 

Where was Pamela’s death certificate? India?

 

Rud sat by the desk, indicating for Charles an adjustable chair in the lower portion of the room, obviously intended for patients. Charles sat down, suppressing a thought that straps could suddenly be fixed over his wrists, binding him at a mad surgeon’s mercy. Such things, unfortunately, were within his experience. The doctor rolled up the desk-cover and opened a folder containing scrawled notes.

 

“Hieroglyphs,” he said, showing the sheaf. “But I understand them.”

 

A maid came in with the fare Rud had ordered. Charles took tea, while the doctor poured himself a full measure of port. A plate of precisely cut sandwiches went untouched.

 

“If you’ll start at the beginning.”

 

“I’ve been through this with Major Chilcot, and...”

 

Charles raised a finger.

 

“I know it’s tiresome to rehash over and over, but this is a tale you’ll retell for some years, no matter how it comes out. It’ll be valuable to have its raw, original form before the facts become, as it were, encrusted with anecdotal frills.”

 

Rud, vaguely offended, was realist enough to see the point.

 

“The yarns in circulation at the Small Man are already wild, Mr. Beauregard. By the end of the month, it’ll be full-blown myth. And heaven knows what the newspapers will make of it.”

 

“We can take care of that.”

 

“Can you, indeed? What useful connections to have... at any rate, the facts? Where to begin?”

 

“Tell me about Davey Harvill.”

 

Rud adjusted his pince-nez and delved into the folder.

 

“An ordinary little boy. The usual childhood ailments and scrapes, none fatal. Father was well set-up for a man of his stripe. Cabinet-maker. Skilled craftsman. Made most of the furniture in this room.”

 

“Was well set-up? Past tense.”

 

“Yes, cut his arm open with a chisel and bled out before anything could be done. Two years ago. Undoubtedly an accident. Risk of the trade, I understand. By the time I was summoned, it was too late. Davey and his sisters, Sairey and Maeve, were raised by their mother, Mrs. Harvill. Admirable woman. Her children will have every chance in life. Would have had, rather. Now, it’s anyone’s guess. Sairey, the eldest child, is married to the local baker, Philip Riddle. She’s expecting her first this spring. Maeve... well, Maeve’s an unknown quantity. She is—was—two years older than her brother. A quiet, queer little girl. The sort who’d rather play by herself. Davey, or whoever this vagrant might be, says Maeve is still ‘in the wood.’“

 

Charles sipped strong tea.

 

“Tell me about Davey’s birthday.”

 

“Last Wednesday. I saw him early in the morning. I was leaving Mrs. Loll. She’s our local hypochondriac. Always dying, secretly fit as a horse. As I stepped out of her cottage, Davey came by, wrapped up warm, whipping a hoop. A new toy, a birthday present. Maeve trailed along behind him. ‘If I don’t watch him, doctor, he’ll get run over by a cart,’ she said. They were walking to school, in Moreton.”

 

“Along Dark Lane?”

 

Rud was surprised. “You know the area?”

 

“I looked at the map.”

 

“Ah, maps,” said Rud, touching his nose. “Dark Lane is the road to Moreton on the map. But there’s a cart-track through Hill Wood, runs up to Fair Field. From there, you can hop over a stile and be in Moreton. Not everything is on the map.”

 

“That’s an astute observation.”

 

“Davey was rolling his hoop. There was fresh-fallen snow, but the ruts in Fair Field Track were already cut. I saw him go into the wood, his sister following, and that was it. I had other calls to make. Not something you think about, is it? Every time someone steps out of your sight, it could be the last you see of them.”

 

“Were you the last person to see the children?”

 

“No. Riddle, Sairey’s husband, was coming down the track the other way, with the morning’s fresh-bake. He told them he had a present to give Davey later, when it was wrapped—but gave both children buns, warm from the ovens. Then, off they went. Riddle hasn’t sold a bun since. In case they’re cursed, if you can credit it. As we now know, Davey and Maeve didn’t turn up for school.”

 

“Why weren’t they missed?”

 

“They were. Mrs. Grenton, the teacher, assumed the Harvills were playing truant. Giving themselves a birthday treat. Sledging on Fair Field or building a snowman. She told the class that when the miscreants presented themselves, a strapping would be their reward. Feels dreadful about it, poor woman. Blames herself. The Harvills had perfect attendance records. Weren’t the truant sort. Mrs. Grenton wants me to prescribe something to make her headaches go away. Like a pebble in a pond, isn’t it? The ripples. So many people wet from one splash.”

 

Rud gulped port and refilled the measure. His hand didn’t shake, but he gripped the glass-stem as if steadying his fingers.

 

He whistled, tunelessly. Davey’s rhyme.

 

“Are there gypsies in the wood?” asked Charles.

 

“What? Gypsies? Oh, the rhyme. No. We only see Romanies here at Harvest Festival, when there’s a fair on Fair Field. The rhyme is something Maeve sings... used to sing. One of those girls’ things, a skipping song. In point of fact, I remember her mother asking her not to chant it during the fair, so as not to offend actual gypsies. I doubt the girl took any notice. The gypsies, neither, come to that. No idea where the song comes from. I doubt if Violet Harvill ever had to warn her children against playing with strangers. This isn’t that sort of country.”

 

“I’ve an idea the gypsies in the rhyme aren’t exactly gypsies. The word’s there in place of something else. Everywhere has its stories. A ghost, a dragon, a witch’s ring....”

 

Rud thought a moment.

 

“The local bogey tale is dwarves. Kidnapping children to work in mines over the border. Blackfaced dwarves, with teeth filed to sharp points. ‘Say your prayers, boyo, or the Tiny Taffs will away with you, into the deep dark earth to dig for dirty black coal.’ I’ve heard that all my life. As you say, everywhere has its stories. Over Leintwardine way, there’s a Headless Highwayman.”

 

“All Eye lives in fear of Welsh dwarves?”

 

“No, even children don’t—didn’t—pay any attention. It came up again, of course. When Davey and Maeve went missing. There was a stupid scrap at the Small Man. It’s why the Major closed the pub. English against Welsh. That’s the fault-line that runs through the marches. Good-humoured mostly, but sharp-edged. We’re border country, Mr. Beauregard. No one is wholly one thing or the other. Everyone has a grandparent in the other camp. But it’s fierce. Come Sunday, you might hear ‘love thy neighbour’ from the pulpit, but we’ve three churches within spitting distance, each packed with folk certain the other congregations are marching in step to Hell. The Harvills call themselves English, which is why the children go to school in Moreton. The Ashton school is ‘Welsh,’ somehow. The schoolmaster is Welsh, definitely.”

 

Charles nodded.

 

“Of course, all Eye agrees on something now. Welsh soldiers with English officers have shut down the pub. I’m afraid the uniting factor is an assessment of the character and ancestry of Major Chilcot.”

 

Charles considered this intelligence. He had played the Great Game among the squabbling tribes of India and Afghanistan, representing the Queen in a struggle with her Russian cousin to which neither monarch was entirely privy, exploiting and being exploited by local factions who had their own Byzantine causes and conflicts. It was strange to find a Khyber Pass in Herefordshire, a potential flashpoint for an uprising. In border countries the world over, random mischief could escalate near-forgotten enmities into riot and worse.

 

“When were the children missed in Ashton?”

 

“About five o ‘clock. When they didn’t come in for their supper. Because it was the lad’s birthday, Riddle had baked a special cake. Davey’s friends came to call. Alfie Zeals, my housekeeper’s son, was there. Even if brother and sister had played truant, they’d have been sure to be home. Presents were involved. The company waited hours. Candles burned down on the cake. Mrs. Harvill, understandably, got into a state. Riddle recounted his story of meeting the children on Fair Field Track. Alfie also goes to Moreton School and admitted Davey and Maeve hadn’t been there all day. Mrs. Harvill rounded on the boy, who’d kept mum to keep his friend out of trouble. There were harsh words, tears. By then, it was dark! A party of men with lanterns formed. They came to me, in case a doctor was needed. You can imagine what everyone thought.”

 

Charles could.

 

“Hill Wood isn’t trackless wilderness. It’s a patch between fields. You can get through it in five minutes at a stroll. Even if you get off Fair Field Track and have to wade through snow. The children couldn’t be lost there, but mishaps might have befallen. A twisted ankle or a snapped leg, and the other too afraid to leave his or her sibling. The search party went back and forth. As the night wore on, we ventured further, to Fair Field and beyond. We should have waited till morning, when we could see tracks in the snow. By sun-up, the wood was so dotted with boot-prints that any made by the children weren’t noticeable. You have to understand, we thought we’d find them at any moment. A night outside in March can be fatal for a child. Or anyone. We run to bone-freezing cold here. Frost forms on your face. Snow gets hard, like a layer of ice. Violet Harvill had to be seen to. Hysteria in a woman of her age can be serious. Some of our party had come directly from the Small Man and were not in the best state. Hamer Dando fell down and tore a tendon, which should put a crimp in his poaching for months. Came the dawn, we were no better off.”

 

“You summoned the police?”

 

“We got Throttle out of bed. He’s been Constable in Eye since Crimea. He lent his whistle to the search. The next day, he was too puffed to continue, so I sent for Sergeant High, from Leominster. He bicycled over, but said children run off all the time, dreaming of the South Seas, and traipse back days later, crying for mama and home cooking. I don’t doubt he’s right, usually. But High’s reassurances sat ill with these circumstances. No boy runs away to sea when he has a birthday party to go to. Then, Davey’s new whip was found in the wood, stuck into a snow bank.”

 

“A development?”

 

“An unhappily suggestive one. The mother began insisting something be done, and I was inclined to support her. But what more could be done? We went over the ground again, stone cold sober and in broad daylight. My hands are still frozen from dismantling snowdrifts. Every hollow, every dead tree, every path. We looked. Riddle urged we call out the army. Stories went round that the children had been abducted by foreign agents. More foreign than just Welsh. I had to prescribe laudanum for Violet.”

 

“This was all five days ago?”

 

Rud checked his notes. “Yes. The weekend, as you can appreciate, was a terrible time. Riddle got his way. Major Chilcot’s fusiliers came over from Powys. At first, they just searched again, everywhere we’d looked before. Violet was besieged by neighbours offering to help but with no idea what to do. I doubt a single soul within five miles has had a night’s uninterrupted sleep since this began.”

 

Rud’s eyes were red-rimmed.

 

“Then, yesterday morning,” said the doctor, “Davey—or whoever he might be—came to his mother’s door, and asked for his blessed cake.”

 

Rud slapped his folder on his desk. An end to his story.

 

“Your patient claims to be Davey Harvill?”

 

“Gets upset when anyone says he can’t be.”

 

“There is evidence.”

 

“Oh yes. Evidence. He’s wearing Davey’s trousers. If the army hadn’t been here, he’d have been hanged for that. No ceremony, just hanged. We’re a long way from the assizes.”

 

Charles finished his tea and set down the cup and saucer.

 

“There’s more than that,” he said. “Or I wouldn’t be here. Out with it, man. Don’t be afraid of being laughed at.”

 

“It’s hard to credit...”

 

“I make a speciality of credulousness. Open-minded, we call it.”

 

Gingerly, Rud opened the file again.

 

“The man downstairs. I would put his age at between thirty-five and forty. Davey is nine years old. Ergo, they are not the same person. But, in addition to his own scars, the patient has Davey’s. A long, jagged mark on his calf. Done hauling over a stile, catching on a rusty nail. I treated the injury last year. The fellow has a perfect match. Davey has a growth under the right eye, like a teardrop. That’s there, too.”

 

“These couldn’t be new-made.”

 

“The scar, just maybe—though it’d have to be prepared months in advance. The teardrop is a birthmark. Impossible to contrive. It’s not a family trait, so this isn’t some long-lost Harvill popping up at the worst possible moment.”

 

Upon this development, Chilcot, like all bewildered field commanders, communicated with his superiors, who cast around for some body with special responsibility for changelings.

 

Which would be the Diogenes Club.

 

“Where does he claim to have been?”

 

“Just ‘in the wood.’“

 

“With the gypsies?”

 

“He sings that rhyme when the mood takes him, usually to end a conversation he’s discomfited by. As you said, I don’t think gypsies really come into it.”

 

“You’ve examined him. How’s his general health?”

 

Rud picked up a note written in shiny new ink. “What you’d expect from a tramp. Old wounds, untended but healed. Various infestations— nits, lice, the like. And malnutrition.”

 

“No frostbite?”

 

Rud shook his head.

 

“So he’s not been sleeping out of doors this past week? In the cold, cold snow?”

 

Rud was puzzled again. “Maybe he found a barn.”

 

“Maybe.”

 

“There’s another... ah, anomaly,” ventured the doctor. “I’ve not told anyone, because it makes no sense. The fellow has good teeth. But he has two missing at the front, and new enamel growing through the gums. Normal for a nine-year-old, losing milk teeth and budding adult choppers. But there is no third dentition. That’s beyond freakish.”

 

Rud slipped the paper back into the folder.

 

“That’s Davey Harvill’s file, isn’t it?”

 

“Yes, of course... oh, I see. The patient should have a fresh folder. He is not Davey Harvill.”

 

Rud pulled open desk drawers, searching for a folder.

 

“Follow your first instincts, Dr. Rud. You added notes on this patient to Davey’s folder. It seemed so natural that you didn’t even consider any other course. Logic dictated you proceed on an assumption you know to be impossible. So, we have reached the limits of logic.”

 

* * * *

 

iv: “Silas Gobbo”

 

In the snug of the Small Man, after breakfast, Charles read the riot act to the army. Though the reason for closing the pub was plain, it did not help Major Chilcot’s case that he had billeted himself on the premises and was prone to “requisitioning” from the cellar.

 

“Purely medicinal,” Chilcot claimed. “After a spell wandering around with icicles for fingers, a tot is a damn necessity.”

 

Charles saw his point, but suspected it had been sharpened after a hasty gulp.

 

“That’s reasonable, Major. But it would be politic to pay your way.”

 

“We’re here to help these ungrateful bounders....”

 

The landlord glared from behind the bar.

 

“Just so,” said Charles.

 

The Major muttered but backed down.

 

The landlord, visibly perked, came over.

 

“Will the gentleman be requiring more tea?”

 

“No, thank you,” said Charles. “Prepare a bill for myself and the Major. Keep a running tally. You have my word you will not be out of pocket. Tonight, you may reopen.”

 

The landlord beamed.

 

“Between sunset and ten o’clock,” insisted Chilcot.

 

A line appeared in the landlord’s forehead.

 

“That’s fair,” said Charles.

 

The landlord accepted the ruling. For the moment.

 

The Major was another local bigwig, late in an undistinguished career. This would be the making or breaking of a younger, more ambitious officer.

 

While he stayed cosy in the Small Man, his men bivouacked on Fair Field under retreat-from-Moscow conditions. They were diamond-quality. Sergeant Beale, an old India hand, had rattled off a precise report of all measures taken. It wasn’t through blundering on the part of the fusiliers that Maeve Harvill still hadn’t turned up.

 

Charles left the pub and walked through Ashton Eye. Snow lay thick on roofs and in front gardens. Roads and paths were cleared, chunky drifts stirred with orange mud piled at the sides. By day, the occupation was more evident. Soldiers, stamping against the cold, manned a trestle at the bottom of Fair Field Track. Chilcot, probably at Beale’s prompt, had established a perimeter around Hill Wood.

 

At the Criftins, Charles was admitted—by a manservant, this time. He joined a small company in the hallway. A fresh fusilier stood guard at the parlour. Dr. Rud introduced Charles, vaguely as “from London,” to a young couple, the woman noticeably with child, and a lady of middle years, obviously in distress.

 

“Philip and Sairey Riddle, and Mrs. Harvill... Violet.”

 

He said his good mornings and shook hands.

 

“We’ve asked you to here to put the man purporting to be Davey to the test,” Charles explained. “Some things are shared only among family members. Not great confidences, but trivial matters. Intelligence no one outside a home could be expected to have. Remarks made by someone to someone else when they were alone together. An impostor won’t know that, no matter how carefully he prepared the fraud.”

 

Mrs. Harvill sniffled into a kerchief. Her daughter held her shoulders.

 

“He is still in the parlour?” Charles asked Rud.

 

“Spent the night there. I’ve got him into a dressing gown. He’s had breakfast. I had my man shave him, and make a start on his hair.”

 

The doctor put his hand to the door.

 

“It is best if we hold back,” said Charles. “Allow the family to meet without outsiders present.”

 

Rud frowned.

 

“We’ll be here, a moment away, if needs arise.”

 

The doctor acquiesced and held the door open.

 

“Mam,” piped a voice from inside. Charles saw Davey, in his chair, forearms and shins protruding from a dressing gown a size too small for him. Without the beard, he looked younger. 

 

Mrs. Harvill froze and pulled back, shifting out of Davey’s eyeline.

 

“Mam?” Almost a whine, close to tears.

 

Mrs. Harvill was white, hand tightly gripping her daughter’s, eyes screwed shut. Her terror reminded Charles of Davey’s, last night, when he felt threatened. Sairey hugged her mother, but detached herself.

 

“You stay here, Mam. Me and Phil’ll talk with the lad. The gentlemen will look after you.”

 

Sairey passed her mother on to Rud.

 

Mrs. Harvill embraced the practitioner, discomfiting him, pressing her face to his shoulder. She sobbed, silently.

 

Sairey, slow and graceful in her enlarged state, took her husband’s arm and stepped into the parlour. Davey started out of his seat, a broad smile showing his impossible teeth-buds.

 

“Sairey, Phil...”

 

Charles closed the door.

 

Rud sat Mrs. Harvill on a chair and went upstairs to fetch a something to calm her. The woman composed herself. She looked at Charles, paying him attention for the first time.

 

“Who are you?” she asked, bluntly.

 

“Charles Beauregard.”

 

“Oliver said that. I mean what are you?”

 

“I’m here to help.”

 

“Where are my children? Are they safe?”

 

“That’s what we are trying to determine, Mrs. Harvill.”

 

The answer didn’t satisfy. She looked away, ignoring him. In her pettishness, she was like Davey. Charles even thought he heard her crooning “My mother said...” under her breath. She had found a fetish object, a length of rope with a handle. She bound her hand until the fingers were bloodless, then unwound the rope and watched pink seep back.

 

Rud returned and gave Mrs. Harvill a glass of water into which he measured three drops from a blue bottle. She swallowed it with a grimace and he rewarded her with a sugar-lump. If her son had been transformed into an adult, this business had turned her—in some sense—into a child.

 

A muffle of conversation could be heard through the door. The temptation to eavesdrop was a fish-hook in the mind. Charles saw that the doctor felt the tug even more keenly. Only the soldier was impassive, bored with this duty but grateful to be inside in the warm.

 

“What can be keeping them?” said Mrs. Harvill.

 

She fiddled again with her fetish, separating the rope into strands as if undoing a child’s braid. The rope was Davey’s new whip, which had been found in Hill Wood.

 

Charles could only imagine how Violet Harvill felt.

 

Pamela had died, along with their newborn son, after a botched delivery. He had blamed an incompetent doctor, then malign providence, and finally himself. By accepting the commission in the Hills, he had removed his family from modern medicine. A hot, hollow grief had scooped him out. He had come to accept that he would never be the man he was before, but knew Pamela would have been fiercely disappointed if he used the loss as an excuse to surrender. She had burst into his life to challenge everything he believed. Their marriage had been a wonderful, continuous explosion. In the last hours, clinging to him—biting deep into his forearm to staunch her own screams—and knowing she would die, Pamela had talked a cascade, soothing and hectoring, loving and reprimanding, advising and ordering. In London fog, he had lost the memory for a while. An engagement to Pamela’s cousin, Penelope Churchward, had been his first effort at reforming a private world, and its embarrassing termination the spur to think again on what his wife had tried to tell him. As he found himself deeper in the affairs of the Diogenes Club, Pamela’s voice came back. Every day, he would remember something of hers, something she had said or done. Sometimes, a twinge in his arm would be enough, a reminder that he had to live up to her.

 

Looking at Mrs. Harvill, he recalled the other loss, eclipsed by Pamela’s long, bloody dying. His son, Richard Charles, twelve years dead, had lived less than an hour and opened his eyes only in death, face washed clean by the ayah. If he had been a girl, she would have been Pandora Sophie. Charles and Pamela had got used to calling the child “Dickie or Dora.” As Pamela wished, he had served mother and child in the Indian manner, cremating them together. Most of the ashes were scattered in India, which she had loved in a way he admired but never shared. Some he had brought back to England, to placate Pamela’s family. An urn rested in the vault in Kingstead Cemetery, a proper place of interment for a proper woman who would have been disowned had she spent more time at home expressing her opinions.

 

But what of the boy?

 

Losing a child is the worst thing in the world. Charles knew that, but didn’t feel it. His son, though born, was still a part of Pamela, one loss coiled up within the other. If he ached for Dickie or Dora, it was only in the sense he sometimes felt for the other children Pamela and he would have had, the names they might have taken. The Churchwards ran to Ps and there had yet to be a Persephone, Paulus, Patricia, or Prosper.

 

Now he thought of the boy.

 

It was in him, he knew, wrapped up tight. The cold dead spot. The rage and panic. The ruthlessness.

 

Violet Harvill would do anything.

 

She seemed to snap out of her spell, and tied Davey’s whip around her wrist, loose like a bracelet. She stood, determined.

 

Rud was at the parlour door.

 

“If you feel you’re up to this, Violet...”

 

She said nothing but he opened the door. Sairey was laughing at something Davey had just said. The lad was smiling, an entirely different person.

 

“Mam,” he said, seeing Mrs. Harvill.

 

Charles knew disaster was upon them. He was out of his chair and across the hall, reaching for Mrs. Harvill. She was too swift for him, sensing his grasp and ducking under it. A creak at the back of her throat grew into a keening, birdlike cry. She flew into the parlour, fingers like talons.

 

Her nails raked across Davey’s face, carving red runnels. She got a grip on his throat.

 

“What’ve you done with them?” she demanded.

 

A torrent of barrack abuse poured from her mouth, words Charles would once have sworn a woman could not even know—though, at the last, Pamela had used them too. Violet Harvill’s face was a mask of hate.

 

“What’ve you done?”

 

Sairey tried to shift from her chair, forgetting for a moment her unaccustomed shape. With a yelp, she sat back down, holding her belly.

 

Riddle and Rud seized Mrs. Harvill and pulled her away. Charles stepped in and prised the woman’s fingers from Davey’s throat, one by one. She continued to screech and swear.

 

“Get her out of the room,” Charles told the doctor. “Please.”

 

There was a struggle, but it was done.

 

Davey was back in his huddle, knees up against his face, eyes liquid, sing-songing.

 

“Naughty girl to disobey... dis-o-bey! Naughty girl...”

 

Sairey, careful now, hugged him, pressing his head to her full breast. He rocked back and forth.

 

Charles’s collar had come undone and his cravat was loose.

 

He was responsible for this catastrophe.

 

“He’m Davey, mister,” said Sairey, softly. She didn’t notice she was weeping. “No doubt ‘bout it. We talked ‘bout what you said. Family things. When I were little, Dad do made up stories for I, stories ‘bout Silas Gobbo, a little wood-carver who lives in a hollow tree in our garden and makes furniture for birds. Dad’d make tiny tables and chairs from offcuts, put ‘em in the tree and take I out to the garden to show off Silas’s new work. Dad told the tales over, to Davey and Maeve. Loved making little toys, did Dad. No one but Davey could’ve known ‘bout Silas Gobbo. Not ‘bout the tiny tables and chairs. Even if someone else heard the stories, they couldn’t love Silas. Davey and Maeve do. With Dad gone, loving Silas is like loving him, remembering. Maeve used to say she wanted to marry Silas when she grew up, and be a princess.”

 

“So you’re convinced?”

 

“Everythin’ else, from last week and from years ago, the boy still has in ‘en. Mam’ll never accept it. I don’t know how I can credit it, but it’s him.”

 

She held her brother close. Even shaved, he seemed to be twice her age.

 

Charles fixed his collar.

 

“What does he say about Maeve?”

 

“She’m with Silas Gobbo. He’m moved from our tree into Hill Wood. Davey says Maeve be a princess now.”

 

* * * *

 

v: “filthy afternoon”

 

It was a dreary, depressing day. Clouds boiled over Hill Wood, threatening another snowfall. The first flakes were in circulation, bestowing tiny stinging kisses.

 

Charles walked down Dark Lane, towards Fair Field Track. A thin fire burned in a brazier, flames whipped by harsh, contradictory winds. The fusiliers on guard were wrapped in layers of coat and cloak. The youth who had tried to make time with Rud’s tweeny was still red-cheeked, but now through the beginnings of frostbite.

 

Sergeant Beale, elaborately moustached and with eyebrows to match, did not feel the cold. If ordered to ship out, Beale would be equally up for an expedition through Arctic tundra or a trail across Sahara sands. Men like Major Chilcot only thought they ran the Empire; men like Beale actually did.

 

“Filthy afternoon, sir,” commented the Sergeant.

 

“Looks like snow.”

 

“Looks and feels like snow, sir. Is snow.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Not good, snow. Not for the little girl.”

 

“No.”

 

Charles understood. If this Christmas card sprinkle turned into blizzard, any search would be off. Hope would be lost. The vanishing of Maeve Harvill would be accepted. Chilcot would pack up his soldiers and return to barracks. Charles would be recalled, to make an inconclusive report. The Small Man could open all hours of the night.

 

An April thaw might disclose a small, frozen corpse. Or, under the circumstances, not.

 

Charles looked over the trestle and into the trees.

 

The men of Eye and the fusiliers had both been through Hill Wood. Now, Charles—knowing he had to make sure—would have to make a third search. Of course, he wasn’t just looking for the girl.

 

“I’ll just step into the wood and have a look about, Sergeant.”

 

“Very good, sir. We’ll hold the fort.”

 

The guard lifted the trestle so Charles could pass.

 

He tried to act as if he was just out for a stroll on a bracing day. but could not pull it off. Pamela nagged: It was not just a puzzle: wounded people surrounded the mystery; they deserved more than abstract thought

 

Footprints were everywhere, a heavy trample marking out Fair Field Track, scattering off in dispersal patterns to all sides. Barely a square foot of virgin white remained. The black branches of some trees were iced with snow, but most were shaken clean.

 

Charles could recognise fifteen different types of snake native to the Indian subcontinent, distinguishing deadly from harmless. He knew the safest covert routes into and out of the Old Jago, the worst rookery in London. He understood distinctions between spectre, apparition, phantasm, and revenant—knowledge the more remarkable for being gained firsthand rather than through dusty pedantry. But, aside from oak and elm, he could identify none of the common trees of the English countryside. Explorations of extraordinary fields had left him little time for ordinary ones.

 

He was missing something.

 

His city boots, heavily soled for cobbles, were thin and flexible. Cold seeped in at the lace-holes and seams. He couldn’t feel his toes.

 

It was a small wood. No sooner was he out of sight of Beale than the trees thinned and he saw the khaki tents pitched on Fair Field. Davey and Maeve had been detained here, somehow. Everyone was convinced. Could the children have slipped out unnoticed, into Fair Field and over the stile or through a gate, disappearing into regions yet to be searched? If so, somebody should have seen them. No one had come forward.

 

Could they have been stolen away by passing gypsies?

 

In Eye, gypsies or any other strangers would be noticed. So, suspicion must range closer to home. Accusations had begun to run around. Every community had its odd ones, easy to accuse of unthinkable crimes. P.C. Throttle still said it was the Dandos, a large and unruly local clan. Accusing the Dandos had solved every other mystery in Ashton and Moreton in the last thirty years, and Throttle saw no reason to change tactics now. The fact of Davey’s return had called off the witch-hunt. Even those who didn’t believe Davey was who he claimed assumed he was at the bottom of the bad business.

 

If Davey was Davey, what had happened?

 

Charles went over the ground again, off the track this time, zigzagging across the small patch. He found objects trampled into muddy snow, which turned out to be broken pipes, a single man-sized glove, candle-stubs. As much rubbish was tossed here as in a London gutter. The snowfall was thickening.

 

Glancing up, he saw something.

 

Previous searches had concentrated on the ground. If Maeve had flown away, perhaps Charles should direct his attention upwards.

 

Snowflakes perished on his upturned face.

 

He stood before a twisted oak. A tree he could identify, even when not in leaf. An object ringed from a branch, just out of his reach. He reached up and brushed it with his fingers.

 

A wooden band, about eighteen inches in diameter, was loose about the branch, as if tossed onto a hook in a fairground shy. He found footholds in the trunk and climbed a yard above the ground.

 

He got close enough to the band to see initials burned into its inner side. D.H. Davey’s birthday hoop.

 

Charles held the branch with gloved hands and let go his knee-grip on the trunk. He swung out and the branch lowered, pulled by his weight. His feet lightly touched ground, the branch bent like a bow. With one hand, he nudged the hoop, trying to work it free. The branch forked and the hoop stuck.

 

That was a puzzle.

 

The obvious trick would be to break the hoop and fix it again, around the branch. But there was no break, no fix. In which case, the toy must have been hung on the tree when it was younger, and become trapped by natural growth.

 

The oak was older than Davey Harvill, by many human lifetimes. It was full-grown when Napoleon was a boy. The hoop had not been hung last week, but must have been here since the Wars of the Roses.

 

He let go of the branch. It sprang back into place, jouncing the hoop. Snow dislodged from higher up.

 

The tree creaked, waving branches like a live thing.

 

Charles was chilled with more than cold.

 

About twenty feet from the ground, packed snow parted and fell away, revealing a black face. A pattern of knot-holes, rather, shaped into a face.

 

We see faces in everything. It is the order we attempt to put on the world—on clouds, stains on the wallpaper, eroded cliffs. Eyes, a nose, mouth. Expressions malign or benevolent. 

 

This face seemed, to Charles, puckish.

 

“Good afternoon to you, Mr. Silas Gobbo,” he said, touching his hat-brim.

 

“Who, pray, is Silas Gobbo?”

 

Charles turned, heart caught by the sudden, small voice.

 

A little girl stood among the drifts, braids escaping from a blue cap, coat neatly done up to her muffler.

 

His first thought was that this was Maeve!

 

It struck him that he wouldn’t recognise her if he saw her. He had seen no picture. There were other little girls in Eye.

 

“Are you looking for Maeve Harvill?” he asked. “Is she your friend?”

 

The little girl smiled, solemnly.

 

“I am Maeve,” she said. “I’m a princess.”

 

He picked her up and held her as if she were his own. Inside, he melted at this miracle. He was light-headed with an instant, fast-burning elation.

 

“This is not how princesses should be treated, sir.”

 

He was holding her too tight. He relaxed into a fond hug and looked down at the fresh footprints where she had been standing. Two only, as if she was set down from above, on this spot. He looked up and saw a bramble-tangle of black branches against dirty sky.

 

He cast around for the face he had imagined, but couldn’t find it again.

 

Maeve’s Dad would have said Silas Gobbo had rescued Maeve, returned her to her family.

 

It was the happy ending Charles wanted. He ran through his joy, and felt the chill again, the cold chill and the bone chill. He shifted the little girl, a delicate-boned miniature woman, and looked into her perfect, polite face.

 

“Princess, have you brothers and sisters?”

 

“David and Sarah.”

 

“Parents? Mam and Dad.”

 

“Father is dead. My mother is Mrs. Violet Harvill. You would do me a great service if you were to take me home. I am a tired princess.”

 

The little bundle was warm in his arms. She kissed his cheek and snuggled close against his shoulder.

 

“I might sleep as you carry me.”

 

“That’s all right,” he told her.

 

He trudged along Fair Field Track. When the guards saw him, they raised a shout.

 

“‘E’s gone and done it!”

 

Charles tried a modest smile. The shout was taken up, spread around. Soon, they became hurrahs.

 

* * * *

 

vi: “something about the little girl”

 

Dr. Rud’s parlour was filled with merry people, as if five Christmases had come along together and fetched up in a happy, laughing pile.

 

Mrs. Harvill clung to her princess, who had momentarily stopped ordering everyone as if they were servants. Philip and Sairey, stunned and overjoyed, pinched each other often, expecting to wake up. Sairey had to sit but couldn’t keep in one place. She kept springing up to talk with another well-wisher, then remembering the strain on her ankles. Philip had made another cake, with Maeve’s name spelled out in currants.

 

Rud and Major Chilcot drank port together, laughing, swapping border war stories.

 

People Charles had not met were present, free with hearty thanks for the hero from London.

 

“We combed Hill Wood and did all we could,” said the Reverend Mr. Weddle, Vicar of Eye. “Too familiar, you see, with the terry-toree. Could not see the wood for the trees, though acts of prayer wore the trews from our knees. Took an outsider’s eye in Ashton Eye, to endeavour to save the Princess Maeve. Hmm, mind if I set that down?”

 

Weddle had mentioned he was also a poet.

 

P.C. Throttle, of the long white beard and antique uniform, kept a close eye on the limping, scowling Hamer Dando—lest thieving fingers stray too close to the silverware. Hamer’s face was stamped on half a dozen other locals of various ages and sexes, but Throttle was marking them all.

 

Charles’s hand was shaken, again, by a huge-knuckled, blue-chinned man he understood to be the Ashton schoolmaster, Owain Gryfudd.

 

“Maeve’s coming to the Welsh school now,” he said, in dour triumph. “No more traipsing over the stile to that Episcopalian booby in Moreton. We shall see a great improvement.”

 

Charles gathered Gryfudd captained an all-conquering rugby team, the Head-Hunters. They blacked their faces with coal before going onto the pitch. The teacher still had war paint around his collar and under his hairline, from frequent massacres of the English.

 

Cake was pressed upon Charles. Gryfudd clapped his back and roared off, bearing down on a frail old lady—Mrs. Grenton, of Moreton Eye school—as if charging for a match-winning try.

 

Whenever Mrs. Harvill saw Charles, she wept and—if Maeve wasn’t in her arms—flung an embrace about him. She was giddy with joy and relief, and had been so for a full day.

 

Her princess was home.

 

As Sairey had said, she would never accept Davey as Davey. But Maeve’s return ended the matter.

 

That, among other things, kept Charles from entering into the spirit of this celebration.

 

In this room, he sensed an overwhelming desire to put Davey and the mystery out of mind. Davey was upstairs, shut away from the celebration.

 

All’s well that ends well.

 

But Charles knew nothing had ended. And nothing was well.

 

He could do no more. In all probability, his report to the Ruling Cabal would be tied with pale green ribbon and filed away forever.

 

He left the parlour. In the hallway, soldiers and maids sipped punch. Smiles all round.

 

But for Sergeant Beale.

 

“I suppose you’ll be back to London now, sir?”

 

“I see no other course.”

 

“There’s something about the little girl, isn’t there?”

 

“I fear so.”

 

“Where were those kids? What happened to the boy?”

 

“Those, Sergeant, are the questions.”

 

Beale nodded. He took no punch.

 

Charles left the Sergeant and walked to the door. A tug came at his arm. Sairey held his sleeve. The woman was bent almost double. It was nearly her time. That was all this party needed: a sudden delivery and a bouncing, happy baby.

 

“Phil and I’ll take in Davey.”

 

“I’m glad to hear that, Sairey. I know it won’t be easy.”

 

She snorted. “Neither one’ll take him in class, not Gryfudd nor Grenton. So that’s an end to his schooling. And he’s a clever lad, Davey. Give him a pencil and he can draw anything to the life. Mam... she’s daffy over Maeve, hasn’t any left for Davey. Won’t have him in the house.”

 

Charles patted her hand, understanding.

 

“And what is it about Maeve? She calls I ‘Sarah.’ I’ve been ‘Sairey’ so long I forgot what my name written down in the family Bible were.”

 

“She doesn’t know Silas Gobbo.”

 

Sairey closed her eyes and nodded.

 

“She frightens I,” she said, so quietly no one could overhear.

 

Charles squeezed her fingers. He could give no reassurance.

 

Riddle came into the hallway, looking for his wife. He escorted her back into the warmth and light. A cheer went up. Someone began singing...

 

“A frog he would a wooing go...

 

Heigh-ho, says Rowley!

 

And whether his mother would let him or no...”

 

Other voices joined. One deep bass must be Gryfudd.

 

“With a roly poly gammon and spinach...

 

Heigh-ho, says Anthony Rowley!”

 

Charles put on his hat and coat and left.

 

* * * *

 

ACT II: UNCLE SATT’S TREASURY FOR BOYS AND GIRLS

 

i: “Lady of the Leprechauns”

 

“If that’s the Gift,” commented a workman, “I’d likes ter know as ‘oo gave it, and when they’re comin’ ter fetch it back.”

 

Kate jotted the words into a notebook, in her own shorthand. The sentiment, polished through repetition, might not be original to the speaker. She liked to record what London thought and said, even when the city thought too lightly and said too often.

 

“Dunno what it thinks it looks like,” continued the fellow.

 

In shirtsleeves, cap on the back of his head, he perspired heavily.

 

Freezing winters and boiling summers were the order of the ‘90s. This June threatened the scorch of the decade. She regretted the transformation of the parasol from an object of utility into a frilly aid to flirtation. As a consequence of this social phenomenon, she didn’t own such an apparatus and was just now feeling the lack—and not because she wished the attention of some dozy gentleman who paid heed only to females who flapped at him like desperate moths. Like many blessed (or cursed) with red hair, too much sun made her peel hideously. Her freckles became angry blood-dots if she took a promenade sans veiled hat. Such apparel invariably tangled with her large, thick spectacles.

 

At the South end of Regent’s Park, the Gift shone, throwing off dazzles from myriad facets. Completed too late for one Jubilee, it was embarrassingly early for the next. To get shot of a White Elephant, the bankrupt company responsible made a gift of it (hence the name) to the Corporation of London. Intended as a combination of popular theatre, exhibition hall and exotic covered garden, the sprawling labyrinth had decoration enough for any three municipal eyesores. The thing looked like a crystal circus-tent whipped up by a colour-blind Sunday painter and an Italian pastry-chef.

 

It was inevitable that someone would eventually conceive of a use for the Gift. That visionary (buffoon?) was Mr. Satterthwaite Bulge, “Uncle Satt” to a generation of nieces and nephews, soi-disant Founder of Færie and Magister of Marvells (his spelling). This afternoon, she had an invitation to visit Bulge’s prosperous little kingdom.

 

“Katharine Reed, daredevil reporter,” called a voice, deep and American.

 

A man in a violently green checked suit cut through gawping passersby and wrung her hand. He wore an emerald bowler with shining tin buckle, an oversize crepe four-leafed clover boutonniere, a belt of linked discs painted like gold coins, and a russet beard fringe attached to prominent ears by wire hooks.

 

“Billy Quinn, publicist,” he introduced himself, momentarily lowering his false whiskers.

 

She filed away the word. Was it a coinage of Quinn’s? What might a publicist do? Publicise, she supposed. Make known personalities and events and products, scattering information upon the public like lumps of lava spewn from Vesuvius. She had a notion that if such a profession were to become established, her own would be greatly complicated.

 

“And, of course, Oi’m a leprechaun. Ye’ll be familiar with the leettle people.”

 

Quinn’s Boston tones contorted into an approximation of Ould Oireland. Inside high-button shoes, her toes curled.

 

“There’s not a darter of Erin that hasn’t in her heart a soft spot for Seamus O’Short.”

 

She was Dublin-born and Protestant-raised. Her father, a lecturer in Classics at Trinity College, drummed into her at an early age that pots o’ gold and wee fair folk were baggages which need only trouble heathen Papists dwelling in the savage regions of dampest bog country. Whenever anyone English rabbited on about such things (usually affecting speech along the lines of Quinn’s atavistic brogue), she was wont to change the subject to Home Rule.

 

“You’re going to love this, Kate,” he said, casually assuming the right to address her by a familiar name. She was grateful that he had reverted to his natural voice, though. “Here’s your fairy sack.”

 

He handed over a posset, with a drawstring. A stick protruded from its mouth, wound round with tinsel.

 

“That’s your fairy wand. Inside, there’s magic powder (sherbet) and a silver tiara (not silver). Tuppence to the generality, but gratis to an honoured rep of the Fourth Estate.”

 

Rep? Representative. Now, people were talking in shorthand. At least, people who were Americans and publicists were.

 

Quinn led her towards the doors of the Gift.

 

A lady in spangled leotards and butterfly wings attracted a male coterie, bestowing handbills while bending just so to display her décolletage to its best advantage, which was considerable. The voluptuous fairy had two colleagues, also singular figures. Someone in a baggy suit of brown fur and cuirass, sporting an enormous plaster bear’s head surmounted by an armoured helm. A dwarf with his face painted like a sad clown.

 

“Come one, come all,” said Quinn. “Meet Miss Fay Twinkledust, Sir Boris de Bruin, and Jack Stump.”

 

The trio posed en tableau as if for a photograph. Miss Fay and Jack Stump fixed happy grimaces on their powdered faces. Sir Boris perked up an ear through tugging on a wire. In this heat, Kate feared for the comfort and well-being of the performer trapped inside the costume.

 

Children flocked around, awed and wondered.

 

Jack Stump was perturbed by affections bestowed on him by boys and girls taller and heftier than he. Kate realised she’d seen the dwarf, dressed as a miniature mandarin, shot out of a cannon at the Tivoli Music Hall. This engagement seemed more perilous.

 

In the offices of the Pall Mall Gazette, she had done her homework and pored through a year’s worth of Uncle Satt’s Treasury for Boys and Girls. She was already acquainted with Miss Fay Twinkledust, Sir Boris de Bruin, Jack Stump, Seamus O’Short, and many others. Gloomy Goat and his cousins Grumpy (her favourite) and Grimy; Billy Boggart of Noggart’s Nook; Bobbin Swiftshaft, Prince of Pixies; Wicked Witch-Queen Coelacanth. The inhabitants of Uncle Satt’s Færie Aerie were beloved (or deliciously despised) by seemingly every child in the land, to the despair of parents who would rather their precious darlings practiced the pianoforte or read Euripides in the original in exactly the way they hadn’t when they were children.

 

Kate was out of school, and near-disowned for following her disreputable Uncle Diarmid into “the scribbling trade,” well before the debuts of Miss Fay et al., but her younger brother and sisters were precisely of an age to fall into the clutches of Mr. Satterthwaite Bulge. Father, whose position on the wee fairfolk was no longer tenable, lamented he was near financial ruin on Uncle Satt’s account, for a mere subscription to the monthly Treasury did not suffice to assuage clamour for matters færie-related. There was also Uncle Satt’s Færie Aerie Annual, purchased in triplicate to prevent unseemly battles between Humphrey, Juliet, and Susannah over whose bookshelf should have the honour of supporting the wonder volume. Furthermore, it was insisted that nursery wallpaper bear the likenesses of the færie favourites as illustrated by the artist who signed his (or her?) works “B. Loved,” reckoned by connoisseurs to be the true genius of the realm which could properly be termed Uncle Satt’s Færie Empire. In addition, there were china dolls and tin figures to be bought, board games to be played, pantomime theatrical events to be attended, sheet music to be performed, Noggart’s Nook sugar confections to be consumed. Every penny doled out by fond parent or grandparent to well-behaved child was earmarked for the voluminous pockets of Uncle Satt.

 

As a consequence, Bulge could afford the Gift. On his previous record, he could probably turn the White Elephant into the wellspring of further fortunes. Pots of gold, indeed.

 

The Gift was not yet open to the general public, and excited queues were already forming in anticipation. No matter how emetic the Uncle Satt oeuvre was to the average adult, children were as lost to his Færie as the children of Hamelin were to the Pied Piper.

 

A little girl, no more than four, hugged Sir Boris’s leg, rubbing her cheek against his fur, smiling with pure bliss.

 

“We don’t pay these people,” Quinn assured her. “We don’t have to. To be honest, we would if we did but we don’t. This is all gin-u-wine.”

 

Some grown-ups were won over to the enemy or found it politic to claim so, lest they be accused of stifling the childish heart reputed to beat still in the breasts of even the hardest cynics. Many of her acquaintance, well into mature years and possessed of sterling intellects (some not even parents), proclaimed devotion to Uncle Satt, expressing admiration if not for the literary effulgences then for the talents of the mysterious, visionary “B. Loved.” Even Bernard Shaw, whose stinging notice of A Visit to the Færie Aerie led to a splashing with glue by pixie partisans, praised the illustrations, hailing “B. Loved” a titan shackled by daisy-chains. The pictures, it had to be said, were haunting, unusual and impressive, simple in technique, yet imbued with a suggestiveness close to disturbing. Their dreamy vagueness would have passed for avant-garde in some salons but was paradoxically embraced (beloved, indeed) by child and adult alike. Aubrey Beardsley was still sulking because B. Loved declined to contribute to a færie-themed number of The Yellow Book, though it was bruited about that the refusal was mandated by Uncle Satt, who had the mystery painter signed to an exclusive contract. It was sometimes hinted that Bulge was B. Loved. Other theories had the illustrator as an asylum inmate who had sewn his own eyes shut but continued to cover paper with the images swarming inside his broken mind, a spirit medium who gave herself up to an inhabitant of another plane as she sat at the board, or a factory in Aldgate staffed by unlettered Russian immigrants overseen by a knout-wielding monk.

 

“Come inside,” said Quinn. “Though you must first pass these Three Merry Guardians.”

 

The publicist opened a little gate and ushered Kate into an enclosure that led to the main doors. The entrance was painted to look like the covers of a pair of magical books. Above was a red-cheeked, smiling, sparkle-eyed caricature of Uncle Satt, fat finger extended to part the pages.

 

Envious glares came from the many children not yet admitted to the attraction. Cutting comments were passed by parents whose offers of bribes had not impressed the Three Merry Guardians. Kate had an idea that, if his comrades were looking the other way, Jack Stump would not have been averse to slipping a half-crown into his boot and lifting a tent-corner.

 

“This is a Lady of the Leprechauns,” said Quinn, to appease the crowds, “on a diplomatic visit to Uncle Satt. The Gift will open to one and all this very weekend. The Færie Aerie isn’t yet ready to receive visitors.”

 

A collective moan of disappointment rose.

 

Quinn shrugged at her.

 

Kate stepped towards the main doors. Long, hairy arms encircled her, preventing further movement. Sir Boris de Bruin shook with silent laughter.

 

This was very irritating!

 

“I had almost forgotten,” said Quinn. “Before you enter, what must you do?”

 

She was baffled. The bear was close to taking liberties.

 

“What must she do, boys and girls?” Quinn asked the crowd.

 

“Færie name! Færie name!”

 

“That’s right, boys and girls. The Lady of the Leprechauns must take her færie name!”

 

“Katharine Reed,” she suggested. “Um, Kate, Katie?”

 

“Nooooo,” said Quinn, milking it. “A new name. A true name. A name fit for the councils of Bobbin Swiftshaft and Billy Boggart.”

 

“Grumpia Goatess,” she ventured, quietly. She knew her face was red. The bear’s bristles were scraping.

 

“I have the very name! Brenda Banshee!”

 

Kate, surprised, was horrified.

 

“Brenda Banshee, Brenda Banshee,” chanted the children. Many of them booed.

 

Brenda Banshee was the sloppy maidservant in the house of Seamus O’Short, always left howling at the end of the tale. It struck Kate that the leprechaun was less than an ideal employer, given to perpetrating “hilarious pranks” on his staff, then laughing uproariously at their humiliations. In the real world, absentee landlords in Ireland were boycotted for less objectionable behaviour than Seamus got away with every month.

 

“What does Brenda Banshee do?” asked Quinn.

 

“She howls! She howls!”

 

“If you think I’m going to howl,” she told Sir Boris quietly, “you’re very much mistaken.”

 

“Howl, Brenda,” said Quinn, grinning. “Howl for the boys and girls.”

 

She set her lips tight.

 

If Brenda Banshee was always trying to filch coins from her employer’s belt o’ gold, it was probably because she was an indentured servant and received no wages for her drudgery.

 

“I think you’d howl most prettily,” whispered Sir Boris de Bruin.

 

It dawned on her that she knew the voice.

 

She looked into the bear’s mouth and saw familiar eyes.

 

“Charles?”

 

“If I can wear this, you can howl.”

 

She was astounded, and very conscious of the embrace in which she was trapped. Her face, she knew, was burning.

 

“Please howl,” demanded Quinn, enjoying himself.

 

Kate screwed her eyes shut and howled. It sounded reedy and feeble. Sir Boris gave her an encouraging, impertinent squeeze.

 

She howled enough to raise a round of applause.

 

“Very nice, Brenda,” said Quinn. “Howl-arious. Shall we go inside?”

 

The book covers opened.

 

* * * *

 

ii: “details, young miss”

 

What did Charles Beauregard think he was about?

 

She scarcely believed that an agent of the Diogenes Club would take it into his head to supplement his income by dressing up as a storybook bear in the service of Mr. Satterthwaite Bulge. She recalled John Watson’s story in the Strand of the respectable suburban husband who earned a healthy living in disguise as a deformed beggar. Kate wondered at the ethics of publicising such a singular case; it now served as an excuse for the smugly well-off to scorn genuine unfortunates on the grounds that “they doubtless earn more than a barrister.” Money would not come into this. Charles was of the stripe who does nothing for purely financial reward. Of course, he could afford his scruples. He did not toil in an underpaid calling still only marginally willing to accept those of her sex. The profession Neville St. Clair had found less lucrative than beggary was her own, journalism.

 

Sir Boris hung back as Quinn escorted her along a low-ceilinged tunnel hung with green-threaded muslin. Underfoot was horsehair matting, dyed dark green to approximate forest grass.

 

“We proceed along the Airy Path, to Noggart’s Nook...”

 

Quinn led her to a huge tree trunk which blocked the way. The plaster creation was intricate, with grinning goblin faces worked into the bark. Their eyes glowed, courtesy of dabs of luminous paint. An elaborate mechanical robin chirruped in the branches. Quinn rapped three times on the oak. Hidden doors opened inwards.

 

“.. .and into the Realm of Bobbin Swiftshaft, Prince of the Pixies...”

 

Kate stepped into the tree, and down three shallow steps. Cloth trailed over her face.

 

“Mind how you go.”

 

She had walked into a curtain. Extricating herself, she found she was in a vaulted space: at once cathedral, Big Top, and planetarium. The dome sparkled with constellations, arranged to form the familiar shapes of B. Loved creatures. Miss Fay, Bobbin Swiftshaft, Jack Stump, Sir Boris, Seamus, and the rest cavorted across the painted, glittering ceiling. Tinsel streamers hung, catching the light. All around was a half-sized landscape, suitable for little folk, created through tamed nature and theatrical artifice. Kate, who spent most of her life peering up at people, was here taller than the tallest tree—many were genuine dwarves cultivated in the Japanese manner, not stage fakery—and a giant beside the dwellings. The woods were fully outfitted with huts and palaces, caves and castles, stone circles and hunting lodges. Paths wound prettily through miniature woodland. Water flowed from a fountain shaped like the mouth of a big bullfrog, whose name and station escaped her. The respectable torrent poured prettily over a waterfall, agitated a pond beneath, and passed out of the realm as a stream which disappeared into a cavern. An iron grille barred the outflow, lest small persons tumble in and be swept away.

 

All around were strange gleams, in the air and inside objects.

 

“The light,” she said, “it’s unearthly.”

 

Looking close, she found semiconcealed glass globes and tubes, each containing a fizzing glowworm. Some were tinted subtle ruby-red or turquoise. They shone like the eyes of ghosts.

 

“We’re mighty proud of the lighting,” said Quinn. “We use only Edison’s incandescents, which burn through the wizardry of the age, electricity. Beneath our feet are vast dynamos, which churn to keep the Aerie illuminated. The Gift quite literally puts the Savoy in the shade.”

 

Mr. d’Oyly-Carte’s Savoy Theatre had been fully electrified for over a decade. Some metropolitan private homes were lit by Edison lamps, though the gas companies were fighting a vicious rearguard campaign against electrification, fearing the fate of the candle-makers. Despite scare stories, the uninformed no longer feared lightning-strikes from newfangled gadgetry. They also no longer gasped in wonder at the mere use of an electrical current to spin a wheel or light a room. There was a risk that electric power would be relegated to quack medicinal devices like the galvanic weight-loss corset. In America, electrocution was used as a means of execution; in Britain, the process was most familiar from advertisements for the miracle food Bovril—allegedly produced by strapping a cow into an electric chair and throwing the switch. From H.G. Wells, the Pall Mall Gazette’s scientific correspondent, Kate gathered that the coming century would be an Era of Electricity. At present, the spark seemed consigned to trivial distraction; that was certainly the case here.

 

A bulb atop a lantern-pole hissed, flared, and popped. A tinkling rain of glass shards fell.

 

“Some trivial teething troubles,” said Quinn.

 

A lanky fellow in an overall rushed to attend to the lantern. He extracted the burned-out remains, ouching as his fingers came into contact with the hot ruin. He deftly screwed in a replacement, which began at once to glow, its light rising to full brightness. Another minion was already sweeping the fragments into a pan for easy disposal.

 

“Unusual-looking elves,” she commented.

 

“It takes a crew of twenty-five trained men to keep the show going,” said Quinn. “When the Gift is open, they will be elves. Each will have their own character and place.”

 

Uncle Satt was insistent that in Færie, as in mundane society, there was a strict order of things. If a woodsman wed a fairy princess, it was a dead cert he was a prince in disguise rather than a real peasant. The reader was expected to guess as much from a well-born character’s attention to personal cleanliness. Children knew the exact forms of protocol in Uncle Satt’s imaginary kingdom, baffling adults with nursery arguments about whether a knight transformed into a bear by Witch-Queen Coelacanth outranked a tiger-headed maharajah from Far Off Indee.

 

Charles had shambled in and was sitting on a wooden bench, head inclined so he could talk quietly with one of the worker elves. Quinn had not noticed that Sir Boris had abandoned the other Merry Guardians.

 

When Mr. Henry Cockayne-Cust, her editor, sent Kate to the Gift, she had considered it a rent-paying exercise, a story destined for the depths of the inside pages. Much of her work was fish-wrap before it had a chance to be read. It was a step up from “Ladies’ Notes”—to which editors often tried to confine her, despite an evident lack of interest in the intricacies of fashionable feminine apparel or the supervision of servants—but not quite on a level with theatre criticism, to which she turned her pen in a pinch, which is to say when the Gazette’s, official reviewer fell asleep during a first night.

 

An item (“puff piece”) about the Færie Aerie seemed doomed to fall into the increasingly large purview of Quinn’s profession. She lamented the colonisation of journalism by organised boosterism and the advertising trade. In some publications, people were deemed worthy of interest because of a happenstance rather than genuine achievement. The day might come when passing distraction was valued higher than matters of moment. She held it a sacred duty to resist.

 

If Mr. Charles Beauregard, if the Diogenes Club, took an interest in the Gift, an interest was worth taking. Some aspect of the endeavour not yet apparent would likely prove, in her uncle’s parlance, “news-worthy.”

 

Quinn’s jibe about “daredevil” lady reporters had niggled. Now, she wondered whether there might not be a Devil here to dare.

 

“This, dear Brenda, is Uncle Satt.”

 

While she was thinking, Mr. Satterthwaite Bulge had come up out of the ground.

 

Illustrations made Bulge a cherubic fat man, a clean-shaven Father Christmas or sober Bacchus, always drawn with gleam a-twinkle in his bright eye and smile a-twitch on his full, girlish lips. In person, Bulge was indeed stout but with no discernible expression. His face was the colour of thin milk, and so were his long-ish hair and thin-ish lips. His eyes were the faded blue of china left on a shelf which gets too much sun. He wore sober clothes of old-fashioned cut, like a provincial alderman who stretches one good suit to last a lifetime in office. Bulge seemed like an artist’s blank: a hole where a portrait would be drawn. More charitably, she thought of actors who walked through rehearsals, hitting marks and reciting lines without error, but withheld their performance until opening night, saving passion for paying customers.

 

Bulge had climbed a ladder and emerged through a trap-door, followed by another elf, a clerkish type with clips on his sleeves and a green eyeshade.

 

“This is Katharine Reed, of the Pall Mall Gazette,” said Quinn.

 

“What’s the circulation?” asked Bulge.

 

“Quite large, I’ll wager,” she said. “We’re under orders not to reveal too much.”

 

That, she knew, was feeble. In fact, she had no idea.

 

“I know to the precise number what the Treasury sells by the month. I know to the farthing what profit is to be had from the Annual. Details, young miss, that is the stuff of my enterprise, of all enterprises. Another word for detail is penny. Pennies are hard to come by. It is a lesson the dear children learn early.”

 

She did not think she would ever be able to call this man “Uncle.” The instant Bulge used the phrase “the dear children” and slid his lips into something he fondly imagined to be a smile, Kate knew his deepest, darkest secret. Mr. Satterthwaite Bulge, Uncle Satt of Uncle Satt’s Treasury for Boys and Girls, greatly disliked children. It was an astonishing intuition. When Bulge used the word “dear,” his meaning was not “beloved” but “expensive.” Some parents, not least her own, might secretly agree.

 

“Do you consider the prime purpose of your enterprise to be educational?” she asked.

 

Bulge was impatient with the attempt at interview.

 

“That’s covered in the, ah, what do you call the thing, Quinn... the press release. Yes, it’s all covered in that. Questions, any you might ask, have already been answered. I see no purpose in repeating myself.”

 

“She has the press release, Mr. Bulge,” said Quinn.

 

“Good. You’re doing your job. Young miss, I suggest you do yours. Why, all you have to do to manufacture an article is pen a general introduction, copy out Quinn’s release and sign your name. Then you have your interview with Uncle Satt at a minimum of effort. A fine day’s work, I imagine. A pretty penny earned.”

 

The flaw, of course, was that she was not the only member of the press to receive the “release.” If an article essentially identical to her own appeared in a rival paper, she would hear from Mr. Harry Cust. The editor could as devastatingly direct disapproval in person at one tiny reporter as, through editorial campaign, at an entire segment of society or tier of government. For that reason, the excellent and detailed brochure furnished by Quinn lay among spindled documents destined for use as tapers. The “press release” would serve to transfer flame from the grate to that plague of cigarettes which rendered the air in any newspaper office more noxious than the streets during the worst of a pea-soup fog.

 

“If I could ask a few supplementary questions, addressing matters touched upon but not explored in the release...”

 

“I can’t be doing with this now,” said Bulge. “Many things have to be seen to if the Gift is to open to the dear children on schedule.”

 

“Might I talk with others involved? For instance, B. Loved remains a man of mystery. If the curtain were lifted and a few facts revealed about the artist, you could guarantee a great deal of, ah, publicity.”

 

Bulge snorted. “I have a great deal of publicity, young miss.”

 

“But...”

 

“There’s no mystery about Loved. He’s just a man with a paint-box.”

 

“So, B. Loved is a man then, one man, not...”

 

“Talk with Quinn,” Bulge insisted. “It’s his job. Don’t bother anyone else. None can afford breaks for idle chatter. It’s all we can do to keep everyone about their work, without distractions.”

 

Quinn, realising his employer was not making the best impression, stepped in.

 

“I’ll be delighted to show Kate around.”

 

“You do that, Quinn.”

 

“She has her fairy sack.”

 

Kate held it up.

 

“Tuppence lost,” said Bulge. “Quinn’s extravagances will be the ruin of me, young miss. I am surrounded by spendthrifts who care nought for details.”

 

“Remember, sir,” said Quinn, mildly, “the matter we discussed...”

 

Bulge snorted. “Indeed, I do. More jargon. Public image, indeed. Arrant mumbo jumbo and impertinence.”

 

If Uncle Satt wrote a word published under his name, Kate would be astounded. On the strength of this acquaintance, she could hardly believe he even read his own periodicals.

 

Which begged the question of what exactly he did in his empire.

 

See to details? Add up pennies?

 

If B. Loved was a man with a paint-box, was he perhaps on the premises? If not painting murals himself, then supervising their creation. She had an intuition that the trail of the artist might be worth following.

 

A nearby tower toppled, at first slowly with a ripping like stiff paper being torn, and then rapidly, with an almighty crash, trailing wires that sparked and snapped, whipcracking towards the stream.

 

Bulge looked at Kate darkly, as if he suspected sabotage.

 

“You see, I am busy. These things will keep happening...”

 

Wires leaped like angry snakes. Elves kept well away from them.

 

“Accidents?” she asked.

 

“Obstacles,” responded Bulge.

 

Bulge strode off and stared down the cables, which died and lay still. The electric lamps dimmed, leaving only cinder ghosts in the dark. Groans went up all around.

 

“Not again,” grumbled an elf.

 

Someone struck a match.

 

Where the tower had fallen, a stretch of painted woodland was torn away, exposing bare lath. Matches flared all around and old-fashioned lanterns lit. It was less magical, but more practical.

 

“What is it this time, Sackham?”

 

“Been chewed through, Uncle,” diagnosed the clerk, examining the damage. “Like before.”

 

Bulge began issuing orders.

 

Kate took the opportunity to slip away. She hoped Bulge’s attention to details would not extend to keeping track of her.

 

These things will keep happening.

 

That was interesting. That was what they called a lead.

 

* * * *

 

iii: “goblins”

 

“Is this a common event?” she asked an idling elf.

 

“Not ‘arf,” came the reply. “If it ain’t breakin’ down, it’s fallin’ down. If it ain’t burnin’ up, it’s messin’ up.”

 

This particular elf was staying well out of the way. Several of his comrades, under the impatient supervision of Uncle Satt, were lifting the fallen tower out of the stream. Others, mouths full of nails and hammers in their hands, effected emergency repairs.

 

“They says it’s the goblins.”

 

Kate wanted to laugh, but her chuckle died.

 

“No, ma’am,” said the elf, “it’s serious. Some ‘ave seen ‘em, they say, then upped and left, walkin’ away from good wages. That’s not a natural thing, ma’am, not with times as they are and honest labour ‘ard to come by.”

 

“But... goblins?”

 

“Nasty little blighters, they say. Fingernails like teeth, an’ teeth like needles. Always chewin’ and clawin’, weakenin’ things so they collapse. Usually when there’s someone underneath for to be collapsed upon. The craytors get into the machinery, gum up the works. Them big dynamos grind to a ‘alt with a din like the world crackin’ open.”

 

She thought about this report.

 

“You mean this is sabotage? Has Satterthwaite Bulge deadly rivals in the færie business? Interests set against the opening of the Gift?”

 

“What business is it of yours?”

 

The elf realised for the first time he had no idea who she was. Her relative invisibility was often an aid in her profession; many forgot she was there even as they talked to her. Now, her spell of insignificance was wearing off.

 

“Miss Reed is a colleague, Blenkins,” came a voice.

 

They had been joined by a bear. His presence reassured the elf Blenkins.

 

“If you say so, Sir Boris,” he allowed. “My ‘pologies, ma’am. A bloke ‘as to be careful round ‘ere.”

 

“A bloke always has to be careful around Miss Reed.”

 

She hoped that, in the gloom, Charles could not discern the fearful burning of her cheeks. When he first strolled into her life, Kate was thirteen and determined to despise the villain set upon fetching away her idol, Pamela Churchward. Father was lecturing at London University for a year and Kate found herself absorbed into the large, complicated circle of the Churchwards. The beautiful, wise Pamela was the first woman ever to encourage Kate’s ambitions. Her engagement seemed a treacherous defection, for all the bride-to-be insisted marriage would not end her independent life. Penelope, Pamela’s ten-year-old cousin, said bluntly that Kate’s complexion meant she would end up a governess or, at best, palmed off as wife to an untenured, adenoidal lecturer. Just then, as Kate was trying in vain not to cry, Pamela introduced her princely fiancé to her protégé.

 

Of course, Kate had fallen horribly in love with Charles. She doubted she had uttered a coherent sentence in his presence until he was a young widower. By then, courtesy of interesting, if brief, liaisons with Mr. Frank Harris, another editor, and several others, none of whom she regretted, she was what earlier decades might have branded a fallen woman.

 

Now, with Pamela gone and pernicious Penelope in retreat, she knew the thirteen-year-old nestled inside her thirty-two-year-old person remained smitten with the Man From the Diogenes Club. As a grown-up, she was more sensible than to indulge such silliness. It irritated her when he pretended to think she was still a tiny girl with rope braids down to her waist and cheeks of pillar-box red. It was, she knew, only pretence. Like his late wife (whom she still missed so), Charles Beauregard was among the select company who took Katharine Reed seriously.

 

“Sir Boris, you do me an injustice.”

 

The bear-head waved from side to side.

 

For once, she was not the most ridiculous personage in the room.

 

“Still, I’m sure you intended to be a very gallant bear.”

 

She reached up and tickled the fur around his helm. It was painted plaster and she left white scratches. She stroked his arm, which was more convincing.

 

Blenkins slipped away, leaving them alone.

 

“There’s a catch at the back,” Charles said, muffled. “Like a diver’s helmet. If you would do me the courtesy...”

 

“You can’t get out of this on your own?”

 

“As it happens, no.”

 

She found the catch and flipped it. Charles placed his paws over his ears and rotated his head ninety degrees so the muzzle pointed sideways, then lifted the thing free. A definite musk escaped from the decapitated costume. Charles’s face was blacked like Mr. G.F. Elliott, the music hall act billed as “the Chocolate-Coloured Coon.” She found Elliott only marginally less unappealing than those comic turns who presented gormless, black-toothed caricatures of her own race. Charles’s make-up was to prevent white skin showing through Sir Boris’s mouth.

 

He whipped off a paw and scratched his chin.

 

“I’ve been desperate to do that for hours,” he admitted.

 

He used his paw-glove to wipe his face. She took pity, produced a man-size handkerchief from her cuff, and set about properly cleaning off the burnt cork. He sat on a wooden toadstool and leaned forwards so she could pay close attention to the task.

 

“Thank you, mama,” he teased.

 

She swatted him with the blacked kerchief.

 

“I could leave you looking like a Welsh miner.”

 

He shut up and let her finish. The face of Charles Beauregard emerged. Weary, to be sure, but recognisable.

 

“You’ve shaved your cavalry whiskers,” she observed.

 

His hand went to his neatly-trimmed moustache.

 

“A touch of the creeping greys, I suspect,” she added, wickedly.

 

“Good grief, Katie,” said Charles, “you’re worse than Mycroft’s brother!”

 

“I’m right, though, am I not?”

 

“There was a certain tinge of dignified white,” he admitted, shyly, “which I estimated could be eliminated by judicious barbering.”

 

“Considering your calling, I’m surprised every hair on your person hasn’t been bleached. It’s said to be a common side effect of stark terror.”

 

“So I am reliably informed.”

 

He undid strings at the back of his neck and shrugged the bear-suit loose, then stepped out of the top half of the costume. The cuirass, leather painted like steel, unlaced down the back to allow escape from straitjacket-like confines. Underneath, he wore a grimy shirt, with no collar. High-waisted but clownishly baggy furry britches stuck into heroic boots that completed the ensemble.

 

“The things you do for Queen and Country, Charles.”

 

He looked momentarily sheepish.

 

“Charles?”

 

“I’m at present acting on my own initiative.”

 

This was puzzling and most unlike Charles. But she knew what had brought him here. She had seized at once on the “news-worthy” aspect of the Gift.

 

“It’s the goblins, isn’t it?”

 

He flashed a humourless smile.

 

“Still sharp as ever, Kate? Yes, it’s Blenkins’s blinkin’ goblins.”

 

The hammering and tower-raising continued. The electric lights fizzled on again, then out. Then on, to burn steady. Charles instinctively stepped back, into a shadowed alcove, drawing Kate with him.

 

Bulge flapped a list of “to do” tasks at the elves. Mr. Sackham was presently at the receiving end of the brunt of Uncle Satt’s opprobrium.

 

“What do you know that I don’t?” she asked Charles.

 

“That’s a big question.”

 

She hit him on the arm. Quite hard.

 

“You deserved that.”

 

“Indeed I did. My apologies, Katie. Life inside a bear costume is, I’m afraid, a strain on any temperament. When the Gift opens to the public, I should not care to let a child of my acquaintance within easy reach of anyone who was forced, as the ‘show-business’ slang has it, ‘to wear a head.’ An hour of such imprisonment transforms the most patient soul into Grendel, eager for a small, helpless person upon whom to slake his wrath.”

 

“You have my promise that I shall write a blistering expose of this cruel practice. The cause of the afflicted ‘head-wearers’ shall become as known as, in an earlier age, was that of the children employed as human chimney-brushes or, as now, those drabs sold as ‘maiden tributes of modem Babylon.’ A committee shall be formed and strong letters written to Members of Parliament. Fairies will chain themselves to the railings. None shall be allowed to rest in the Halls of Justice until the magic bears are free!”

 

“Now you‘re teasing me.”

 

“I have earned that right.”

 

“That you have, Katie.”

 

“Now this amusing diversion is at an end, I refer you back to my initial question. What do you know that I don’t?”

 

Charles sighed. She had sidestepped him again. She wondered if he ever regretted that she was no longer tongue-tied in his presence.

 

“Not much,” he admitted, “and I can’t talk about it here. If you would meet me outside in half an hour. I am acting on my own initiative and honestly welcome your views.”

 

“This goblin hunt?”

 

“That’s part of it.”

 

“Part only?”

 

“Part only.”

 

“I shall wait half an hour, no longer.”

 

“It will take that to become presentable. I can’t shamble as a demi-bear among afternoon promenaders.”

 

“Indeed. Panic would ensue. Men with nets would be summoned. As an obvious chimera, you would be captured and confined to the conveniently nearby London Zoo. Destined to be stuffed and presented to the Natural History Museum.”

 

“I’m so glad you understand.”

 

He kissed her forehead, which reddened her again. She was grateful her blushes wouldn’t show up under the electric lamps.

 

* * * *

 

iv: “a pale green ribbon”

 

A full forty-five minutes later, Kate was still waiting in the park. On this pleasant afternoon, many freed from places of employment were not yet disposed to return to their homes. A gathering of shopgirls chirruped, competing for the attention of a smooth-faced youth who sported a cricket cap and a racy striped jacket. Evidently quite a wit, his flow of comments on the peculiarities of passersby kept his pretty flock in fits.

 

“With her colourin’ and mouth,” drawled the champion lad, “it’s a wonder she ain’t forever bein’ mistook for a pillar box.”

 

Much hilarity among the filles des estaminets.

 

“Oh Max, you are so wicked... you shouldn’t ought to say such things...”

 

Kate supposed she was redder than usual. The condition came upon her when amused, embarrassed, or—as in this case—annoyed.

 

“I ‘magine she’s waitin’ to be emptied.”

 

“The postman’s running late today,” ventured the boldest of the girls.

 

“Bad show, what. To leave such a pert post-box unattended.”

 

Charles emerged from the Gift at last, more typically clothed. Most would take him for a clubman fresh from a day’s idleness and up for an evening’s foolery.

 

As he approached, the girls’ attention was removed entirely from Max. Their eyes followed Charles’s saunter. He did such a fine job of pretending not to notice that only Kate was not fooled.

 

“He must have a letter that desperately needs postin’,” said the amusing youth.

 

“If you will excuse me,” said Charles, raising a finger.

 

He walked over to the group, who fluttered and gathered around Merry Max. Charles took a firm grip on the youth’s ear and dragged him to Kate. The cap fell off, revealing that his cultivated forelock was a lonely survivor on an otherwise hairless scalp.

 

“This fellow has something to say to you, Kate.”

 

“Sorry,” came the strangled bleat, “no ‘ffence meant.”

 

Now someone was redder than she. Max’s pate was practically vermilion.

 

“None taken.”

 

Charles let Max go and he fell over. When he sat up again, his congregation was flown, seeking another hero. He snatched up his cap and slunk off.

 

“I suppose you expect me to be grateful for your protection, Sir Boris?”

 

Charles shrugged. “After a day in the bear head, I had to thump someone. Max happened to be convenient. He was making ‘short’ jokes about Jack Stump earlier.”

 

“I believe you.”

 

He looked at her, and she was thirteen again. Then she was an annoyed grown-up woman.

 

“No, really. I do.”

 

Charles glanced back at the Gift.

 

“So, Mr. Beauregard, what’s the story? Why take an interest in Uncle Satt?”

 

“Bulge is incidental. The mermaid on the front of the ship. Oh, he’s the one who’s made the fortune. But he’s not the treasure of the Treasury. That’s the other fellow, the mysterious cove...”

 

“B. Loved?”

 

Charles tapped her forehead. “Spot on. The artist.”

 

“What does the B stand for?”

 

“David.”

 

“Beloved. From the Hebrew.”

 

“Indeed. Davey Harvill, as was. B. Loved, as is.”

 

The name meant nothing to her.

 

“Young Davey is a singular fellow. We met eight years ago, in Herefordshire. He had an unusual experience. The sort of unusual that comes under my purview.”

 

It was fairly openly acknowledged that the Diogenes Club was a clearinghouse for the British Secret Service. Less known was its occult remit. While the Society for Psychical Research could reliably gather data on cold spots or fraudulent mediums, they were hardly equipped to cope with supernatural occurrences which constituted a threat to the natural order of things. If a spook clanked chains or formed faces in the muslin, a run-of-the-mill ghost-finder was more than qualified to provide reassurance; if it could hurt you, then the Ruling Cabal sent Charles Beauregard.

 

“Davey was lost in the woods and found much older than he should be. I don’t mean aged by terrible experience, your ‘side effects of stark terror.’ He disappeared a child of nine and returned a full-grown man, as if twenty years had passed over a weekend.”

 

“You established there was no imposture?”

 

“To my satisfaction.”

 

Kate thought, tapping her teeth with a knuckle. “But not to everyone’s?”

 

Charles spread his hands. “The lad’s mother could never accept him.”

 

She had a pang of sympathy for this boy she had never met.

 

“What happened after he was returned?”

 

“Interesting choice of words. ‘Was returned?’ Suggests an agency over which he had no control. Might he not have escaped? Davey was taken in by his older sister, Sarah Riddle. Maeve Harvill, Davey’s other sister, also went into the woods. She came out like her normal self and was embraced by the mother. Sadly, Mrs. Harvill died some time afterwards. I have questions about that, but we can get to them later. Sarah, herself the mother of a young son, became sole parent to both her siblings. By then, Davey was drawing.”

 

“The færie pictures?”

 

“They poured from his pencils,” said Charles. “He does it all with pencils, you know. Not charcoal. The pictures became more intense, more captivating. You’ve seen them?”

 

“Who hasn’t?”

 

“Quite. That’s down to Evelyn Weddle, the Vicar of Eye. He took an interest, and brought Davey’s pictures to the attention of a Glamorgan printer.”

 

“Satterthwaite Bulge?”

 

“Indeed. Bulge, quite against his nature, was captivated. The pictures have strange effects, as the whole world now knows. Bulge put together the first number of his Treasury. It made his name.”

 

“Who writes the copy?”

 

“At first, Weddle. He’s the sort of the poet, alas, who rhymes ‘pixie’ with ‘tipsy’ and ‘færie’ with ‘hurry.’ Don’t you hate that diphthong, by the way? It’s one step away from an umlaut. What’s wrong with f-a-i-r-y, I’d like to know? The vicar was so flattered to see his verses immortalised by type-setting that he cared not that his name wasn’t appended. He fell by the wayside early on. Now, Bulge has many scribbling elves—though he oversees them all, and contrives to imprint his own concerns upon the work. All that business about washing your hands, respecting princes, and punishing servants. Leslie Sackham, whom you saw dancing attendance, is currently principle quill-pushing elf. They are interchangeable and rarely last more than a few months, but there’s only one B. Loved.”

 

“Is this golden-egg-laying goose chained to an easel?”

 

Charles shook his head. “His artistry is of a compulsive nature. The Treasury can’t keep up with the flow. Even under a hugely unfair personal contract the Harvills knew no better than to accept, Davey has become very well off.”

 

She thought of the illustrations, wondering if she would see them differently now she had some idea about their creator. They had always seemed portals into another, private world.

 

“What does Davey say about the time he was away?”

 

“He says little. He claims an almost complete loss of memory.”

 

“But he draws. You think not from imagination, but from life?”

 

“I don’t suppose he is representing a literal truth, no. But I am certain his pictures spring from the place he and his sister were taken—and I do believe they were taken—whether it be a literal Realm of Færie or not.”

 

“You know the stories...”

 

Charles caught her meaning, “...of the little people, and babies snatched from their cribs? Changelings left in their stead? Very Irish.”

 

“Not in the Reed household. At least, not until the rise of Uncle Satt. But, yes, those stories.”

 

“They aren’t confined to the emerald isle. Ten years ago in Sussex, a little girl named Rose Farrar was allegedly spirited away by ‘angels.’ That’s an authenticated case. We took an interest. Rose is still listed among the missing.”

 

“It’s not just leprechauns. Someone is always accused of child abduction. Mysterious folk, outsiders, alien. Dark-complected, most like. Wicked to the bone. There are the stories of the Pied Piper and the Snow Queen. Robbers, imps and devils, Red Indians, the gypsies...”

 

“Funny you should mention gypsies.”

 

“Tinkers, in Ireland. Have they ever really stolen babies? Why on earth would they want to? Babies are bothersome, I’m given to understand. Nonsense is usually spouted about strengthening the blood-stock of a small population, but surely you’d do better taking grown-up women for that. No. it seems to me that the interest of the stories is in the people who tell them. There is a purpose, a lesson. Don’t go wandering off, children, for you might fall down a well. Don’t talk to strangers, for they might eat you.”

 

Afternoon had slid into evening. One set of idlers had departed, and a fresh crowd come upon the scene. This was a park, not wild woods. Nature was trimmed and tamed, hemmed in by city streets and patrolled by wardens. Treetops were black with soot.

 

A shout went up nearby, a governess calling her charge.

 

“Master Timothy! Timmy!”

 

Kate felt a clutch of dread. Here, in the press of people, was more danger than in all the trackless woods of England. Scattered among the bland, normal faces were blood-red, murderous hearts. She had attended enough coroners’ courts to know imps and angels were superfluous in the metropolis. Caligula could pass, unnoticed, in a celluloid collar.

 

Master Timothy was found and smothered with tearful kisses. He didn’t look grateful. Catching sight of Kate, he stuck out a fat little tongue at her.

 

“Beast,” she commented.

 

Charles looked for a moment as if he was going to serve the ungracious little perisher as he had Merry Max. She laid a hand in the crook of his arm. She did not care to be complicit with another assault. Charles laid his hand on hers and tapped, understanding, amused.

 

“The Diogenes Club has a category for everything,” he said, “no matter how outré. Maps of Atlantis—we have dozens of them, properly catalogued and folded. Hauntings, tabulated and subcategorised, with pins marked into ordnance survey charts and patterns studied by our learned consultants. Witch-Cults, ranked by the degree of unpleasantness involved in their ritual behaviour and the trouble caused in various quarters of the Empire. There’s also a category for mysteries without solution. Matters we have looked into but been unable to form a conclusion upon. Like the diplomat Benjamin Bathurst, who ‘walked around the horses’ and vanished without trace. Or little Rose Farrar.”

 

“The Mary Celeste!”

 

“Actually, we did fathom that. It remains under the rose for the moment. We’ve no pressing desire to go to war with the United States of America.”

 

She let that pass.

 

“Unsolved matters constitute a large category,” he continued. “Most of my reports are inconclusive. A strategy has formed for such cases. We tie a pale green ribbon around the file and shelve it in a windowless room behind a door that looks like a cupboard. The Ruling Cabal, which is to say you-know-who, disapproves of fussing with green ribbon files. As he says, ‘when you are unable to eliminate the impossible, don’t waste too much time worrying about it.’ The ribbons are knotted tight and difficult to unpick—though, from time to time, further information comes to light. Of course, it’s easier to work in the green ribbon room you think of people as cases.”

 

“And you can’t?”

 

“No more than you can. No, I don’t mean that, Katie. You, more than anyone, are immune to that tendency. I am not. I concede that sometimes it helps to consider mysteries purely as puzzles. Pamela would nag me about it. She always thought of people first, last, and always.”

 

Pamela’s name did not come up often between them. It did not need to.

 

“So, in her memory and for fear of disappointing you, I tied the pale green ribbon loosely around Davey Harvill. I had thought the whole thing buried in Eye, a local wonder soon forgotten. However, here we are in the heart of London, before Davey’s færie recreated. There are the goblins to consider. Blenkins’s goblins. How did they creep into the picture?”

 

Kate snapped her fingers. “That’s how B. Loved draws goblins, hidden as if they’ve crept in. You have to look twice, sometimes very closely, to see them, disguised against tree bark or peeping out of long grass. In the Annual, there’s a plate entitled ‘how many goblins are being naughty in this picture?’ It shows a country market in an uproar.”

 

“There are twenty-seven goblins in the picture. All being naughty.”

 

“I found twenty-nine.”

 

“Yes, well, that’s a game. This is not. Workmen have been injured. Nipped as if by tiny teeth. Rats, they say. The thing is, when it’s rats, parties involved usually say it isn’t. That’s when they talk about mischievous imps. No one who wants to draw in crowds of children likes to mention the tiniest rat problem. But here everyone says it’s rats. Except Blenkins, and he’s been told to shut up.”

 

“.. .if it can hurt you...”

 

“I beg your pardon.”

 

“Just something I was thinking of earlier.”

 

There was another commotion. Kate assumed Timmy had fled his governess again, but that was not the case.

 

“Speak of the Devil...”

 

Blenkins was running through the crowds, clearly in distress.

 

He saw Charles and dashed over, out of breath.

 

“Mr. B,” he said, “it’s terrible what they done...”

 

Police whistles shrilled nearby.

 

“I can’t credit it. ‘appened so quick, sir.”

 

Cries went up. “Fire!” and “Murder!”

 

“You better take us in,” said Charles.

 

“Not the lady—beggin’ your pardon, ma’am—it’s too ‘orrible.”

 

“She’ll be fine,” said Charles, winning her all over again—though the casual assumption of the strength of her constitution in face of the truly ‘orrible gave her some pause. “Come on, quick about it!”

 

Blenkins led them back towards the Gift.

 

* * * *

 

v: “the scene of the occurrence”

 

There was a rumble, deep in the ground, like the awakening of an angry ogre. The doors of the Gift were thrown open, and people—some in costume—poured through. Bulge, collar burst and a bruise on his forehead, was carried out by a broken-winged fairy and a soot-grimed engineer.

 

Charles held Kate’s arm, holding her back.

 

Bulge caught sight of her and glared as if she were personally to blame.

 

Blenkins took off his cap and covered his face with it.

 

Something big broke, deep inside the Gift. Cries and screams were all around.

 

Quinn, beard awry and hat gone, staggered into the evening light, dazed.

 

The elves stumbled into an encircling crowd of curious spectators. Kate realised she was in danger of belonging to this category of nuisance.

 

A belch of smoke escaped and rose in a black ring.

 

The doors clattered shut.

 

Breaths were held. There was a moment of quiet. No more smoke, no flames or explosions. Then, everyone began talking at once.

 

The police were on the scene, a troop of uniformed constables throwing up a picket around the Gift. Kate recognised Inspector Mist of Scotland Yard, a sallow man with a pendulous moustache.

 

Mist caught sight of Charles and Kate. He shifted his bowler to the back of his head.

 

“Again we meet in unusual circumstances, Inspector,” said Charles.

 

“Unusual circumstances are an expected thing with you, Mr. Beauregard,” said the policeman. “I suppose you two’ll have the authority of a certain body to act as, shall we say, observers in this investigation.”

 

Charles did not confirm or deny this, a passive sort of mendacity. She had a pang of worry. Her friend stood to lose a hard-to-define position. She had dark ideas of what form expulsion from the Diogenes Club might take.

 

“We’re not sure any crime has been committed,” she said, distracting the thoughtful Mist. “It might be some kind of accident.”

 

“There is usually a crime somewhere, Miss Reed.”

 

Mist might look the glum plodder, but was one of the sharpest needles in the box.

 

“Hullo, Quinn,” said the Inspector, spotting the publicist. “Not hawking patent medicines again, are we?”

 

Quinn looked sheepish and shook his head.

 

“I’m relieved to hear it. I trust you’ve found respectable employment.”

 

The former leprechaun was pale and shaking. His green jacket was spotted with red.

 

Mist ordered his men to disperse only the irrelevant crowds. He told the elves not to melt into the throng just yet. Questions would have to be answered. More policemen arrived, then a clanking, hissing fire engine. Mist had the Brigade stand by.

 

“Let’s take a look inside this pixie pavilion, shall we?”

 

Quinn shook his head, insistently.

 

Mist pulled one of the book-covers open, and stepped inside. No one from Bulge’s troupe was eager to join him. Blenkins hid behind Miss Fay, whose wand was snapped and leotards laddered. Kate followed the Inspector, with Charles in her wake. In the murk of the tunnel, Mist was exasperated. He pushed the main door back open.

 

“Who’s in charge?” he called out.

 

Some elves moved away from Uncle Satt, who was fiddling with his collar, trying to refasten it despite the loss of a stud.

 

“Mr. Bulge, if you would be so kind...”

 

The Inspector beckoned. Bulge advanced, regaining some of his composure.

 

“Thank you, sir.”

 

Bulge entered his realm, joining the little party.

 

“If you would lead us to the scene of the occurrence...”

 

Bulge, even in the shadows, blanched visibly.

 

“Very well,” he said, lifting a flap of black velvet. A stairwell wound into the ground. Smell hung in the air, ozone and machine oil and something else foul. Arrhythmic din boomed from below. Kate felt a touch of the quease.

 

Mist went first, signalling for Bulge to follow. Kate and Charles waited for them to disappear before setting foot on the wrought-iron steps.

 

“Into the underworld,” said Charles.

 

“I didn’t realise Noggart’s Nook harboured circles of damned souls.”

 

“Children who don’t wash their hands before and after meals, maids who sweep dust under the carpets.

 

Beneath the Gift were large, stone-walled rooms, hot and damp. Electric lamps flickered in heavily grilled alcoves.

 

“Good God,” exclaimed Inspector Mist.

 

The dynamos were still in motion, though slowed and erratic. Huge cast-iron engines, set in concrete foundations, spat sparks and water-droplets as great belts kept the drums in motion. Wheels and pistons whirled and pounded, ball valves spun, and somewhere below a hungry furnace roared. The central dynamo was grinding irregularly, works impeded by a limp suit of clothes filled with loose meat.

 

Kate gasped and covered her mouth and nose with her hand, determined not to be overcome.

 

Flopping from the suit-collar was a deflated ball with a bloody smear for a face.

 

“Sackham,” cried Bulge.

 

She could not recognise this rag as the clerkish elf she had seen earlier, scurrying after his master.

 

“What’s been done to you?!” howled Bulge, with a shocking, undeniable grief.

 

The human tangle was twisted into the wheels of the machine, boneless legs caught in cogs. A ball valve whined to a halt and shook off its spindle. With a mighty straining and gouts of fire, the central dynamo died. Its fellows flipped over inhibitors and shut down in more orderly fashion. The lamps faded.

 

In the dark there was only the stench.

 

Kate felt Charles’s arm around her.

 

* * * *

 

ACT III: FÆRIE

 

i: “events have eventuated”

 

After a day as Sir Boris and a night at a police station, Charles needed to sleep. The situation was escalating, but he was no use in his present state. He had told Inspector Mist as much as he could and done his best to spare Kate further distress.

 

He was greeted at the door of his house in Cheyne Walk.

 

“Visitors, sir,” said his man, Bairstow. “I have them in the reception room. Funereal gentlemen.”

 

He considered himself in the hall-mirror. Unshaven, the grey that Kate—clever girl!—had deftly intuited was evident about his gills.

 

These visitors would not care about his appearance.

 

“Send in tea, Bairstow. Strong and green.”

 

“Very good, sir.”

 

Charles stepped into his reception room, as if he were the intruder and the others at home.

 

The two men were dressed like undertakers, in long black coats and gloves, crepe-brimmed hats, and smoked glasses.

 

“Beauregard,” said the senior, Mr. Hay.

 

“Gentlemen,” he acknowledged.

 

Mr. Hay took his ease in the best armchair, looking over the latest number of the Pall Mall Gazette, open to an article by Kate. Not a coincidence.

 

Mr. Effe, younger and leaner, stood by a book-case, reading spines.

 

Charles, not caring to be treated like a schoolboy summoned before the beak for a thrashing, slipped into a chair of his own and stretched out, fingers interlaced on his waistcoat as if settling down for a nap.

 

(Which would be a good idea.)

 

Two sets of hidden eyes fixed on him.

 

“Must you wear those things?” Charles asked.

 

Mr. Hay lowered his spectacles, disclosing very light-coloured, surprisingly humorous eyes. Mr. Effe did not follow suit. Charles amused himself by imagining a severe case of the cross-eyed squints.

 

At this hour in the morning, a maid would have opened the curtains. The visitors had drawn them again, which should make protective goggles superfluous. He wondered what his visitors could actually see. It was no wonder Mr. Effe had to get so close to the shelves to identify books.

 

“The salacious items are under lock and key in the hidden room,” said Charles. “Have you read My Nine Nights in a Harem? I’ve a rare Vermis Mysteriis, illustrated with brass-rubbings that’d curl your hair.”

 

“That’s a giggle,” snarled Mr. Effe. “Of course, rooms.”

 

“Three. And secret passages. Don’t you?”

 

He couldn’t imagine Mr. Hay or Mr. Effe—or any of their fellows, Mr. Bee, Mr. Sea, and Mr. Dee, all the way to Mr. Eggs, Miss Why, and Mr. Zed—having homes, even haunted lairs. He assumed they slept in rows of coffins under the Houses of Parliament.

 

Mr. Effe wiped a line down a mediocre edition of The Collected Poems of Jeffrey Aspern and pretended to find dust on his gloved finger.

 

Charles knew Mrs. Hammond, his housekeeper, better than that.

 

“You’ve been acting on your own initiative,” said Mr. Hay. “That’s out of character for an active member of the Diogenes Club. Not that there are enough of you to make general assumptions. Sedentary bunch, as a rule.”

 

“Did you think we wouldn’t notice?” sniped Mr. Effe.

 

Mr. Hay raised a hand, silencing his junior.

 

“We’re not here for recriminations.”

 

Millie, the second-prettiest maid, brought in the tray. He approved; Lucy, the household stunner, was in reserve for special occasions. After thanking the by no means unappealing Millie, he let her escape. Mr. Effe’s attempt at a charming smile had thrown a fright into the girl. Charles poured a measure of Mrs. Hammond’s potent brew into a giant’s teacup, but did not offer hospitality.

 

“Events have eventuated,” said Mr. Hay. “Your Ruling Cabal was short-sighted to green-ribbon the Harvill children. You, however, were perceptive in continuing to take an interest. Even if unsanctioned.”

 

“Bad business under Regent’s Park,” commented Mr. Effe.

 

Charles expected these fellows to be up on things.

 

“Your assumption is that this is the same case?” asked Mr. Hay.

 

He swallowed tea. The Undertaking knew full well this was the same case.

 

“Mr. Effe, if you would do the honours,” said Mr. Hay, snapping his fingers.

 

Mr. Effe unbuttoned his coat down the front, and reached inside.

 

Charles tensed, ready to defend his corner.

 

Mr. Effe produced a pinch of material, which he unravelled and let dangle. A pale green ribbon.

 

“Removed from the Harvill file,” said Mr. Hay. “With the full cooperation and consultation of the Ruling Cabal.”

 

“You’re official again, pally,” snapped Mr. Effe.

 

Charles relaxed. He would have to make explanation to the Cabal in time, but was protected now by approval from on high (rather, down below). There was a literal dark side to this. For all its stuffinesses and eccentricities, he understood the Diogenes Club: It was a comfort and shelter in a world of shadows. The Undertaking was constituted on different lines. Rivalry between the Club and the men in smoked glasses held a potential for outright conflict. It had been said of Mycroft Holmes, chairman of the Ruling Cabal, that sometimes he was the British Government; the troubling thing about the Undertaking was that sometimes it wasn’t.

 

“We’ll see your report,” said Mr. Hay.

 

He remembered how tired he was. He closed his eyes.

 

When he opened them again, he was alone.

 

Something tickled on his face. He puffed it away, and saw that it was the ribbon.

 

* * * *

 

ii: “thrones, powers, and principalities”

 

Kate’s story dominated the front page of the Pall Mall Gazette. An affront to a national treasure (for so Uncle Satt was reckoned), a gruesomely mysterious death, and rumours of supernatural agency meant Harry Cust had no choice but to give her piece prominence. However, it was rewritten so ruthlessly, by Cust himself at the type-setting bench, that she felt reduced to the status of interviewee, providing raw material shaped into journalism by other hands.

 

She was cheered, slightly, by a telegram of approval from Uncle Diarmid, who ought to be reckoned a national treasure. It arrived soon after the mid-morning special was hawked in the streets, addressed not to the Gazette offices but to the Cheshire Cheese, the Fleet Street watering hole where Kate, and four-fifths of the journalists in London, took most meals. Uncle Diarmid always said half the trick of newspaper reporting was getting underfoot, contriving to be present at the most “news-worthy” incidents, gumming up the works to get the story.

 

The image conjured unpleasant memories. She had ordered chops, but wasn’t sure she could face eating—though hunger pangs had struck several times through the long night and morning.

 

Reporters from other papers stopped by her table, offering congratulations but also soliciting unrefined nuggets of information. Anything about Satterthwaite Bulge was news. Back-files were being combed to provide follow-up pieces to fill out this afternoon and evening editions. The assumption was that the notoriously close-mouthed Inspector Mist would not oblige with further revelations about the death of Mr. Leslie Sackham in time to catch the presses.

 

Kate had little to add.

 

The story about the goblins was out, and sketches already circulated (“artists’ impressions,” which is to say unsubstantiated, fantastical lies) depicting malicious, oval-headed imps tormenting Mr. Sackham before tossing him to the dynamo. Most of Uncle Satt’s elves had come forth with tales of goblin sightings or encounters in the dark. Blenkins was charging upwards of ten shillings a time for an anecdote. The rumour was that Scotland Yard were looking for dwarves. Jack Stump was in hiding. Kate wondered about other little people—like Master Timothy, the obnoxious child. How far could such a prankster go? Surely, nursery ill-manners did not betoken a heart black enough for murder. It made more sense to look for goblins. The sensation press had already turned up distinguished crackpots willing to expound at length about the vile habits of genus goblinus. Soon, there would be organised hunting parties, and rat-tail bounties offered on green, pointed ears.

 

Kate’s chops were set before her. She had ordered them well-cooked, so that no red showed. Even so, she ate the baked potato first.

 

There was the problem of Mr. Sackham’s obituary, which was assigned to her. The most interesting thing about the man’s life was its end, already described at quite enough length. His injuries were such that it was impossible to tell whether he had been thrown (or fallen) alive into the dynamo. Indeed, the corpse was mutilated to such an extent that if the incident were encountered in a penny dreadful, the astute reader would assume Mr. Sackham not to be dead at all but that the body was a nameless tramp dressed in his clothes and sacrificed in order to facilitate a surprise in a later chapter. The second most interesting thing about Sackham was that he had penned many of the words recently published under the byline of Uncle Satt, but Cust forbade her to mention this. Exposing hypocrites was all very well, but no newspaper could afford to suggest that Satterthwaite Bulge was less than the genial “Founder of Færie and Magister of Marvells” for fear of an angry mob of children invading their offices to wreak vengeful havoc. She was reduced to padding out a paragraph on Sackham’s duties at the Gift and the fact that he very nearly could legitimately call Uncle Satt his uncle; Leslie Sackham had been the son of his employer’s cousin.

 

She finished her copy and her chops at about the same time, then gave a handy lad tuppence to rush the obit to the Gazette in the Strand. As Ned made his way out of the Cheese, he was entrusted with a dozen other scribblings—some on the reverse of bills, most on leaves torn from notebooks—to drop off at the various newspapers on his route.

 

Now, she might snatch a snooze.

 

“Kate.”

 

She looked up, not sure how long (or if) she had dozed in her chair.

 

“Charles.”

 

He sat down.

 

“Scotland Yard is saying it was an accident,” he said.

 

Kate sensed journalistic ears pricking up all around.

 

“That doesn’t sound like Mist,” she observed.

 

“I didn’t say ‘Mist,’ I said ‘Scotland Yard.”‘

 

She understood. Decisions had been made in shadowed corridors.

 

“The Gift is declared ‘unsafe’ for the moment,” he continued. “No grand opening this weekend, I’m afraid. There’ll be investigations, by the public health and safety people and anyone else who can get his oar in. It turns out that the Corporation of London still owns the site. Uncle Satt is lessee of the ground, though he has deed and title to all structures built on and under it. There’ll be undignified arguments over whose fault it all is. In the meantime, the place is under police guard. As you can imagine, Regent’s Park is besieged by aspirant goblin hunters. Some have butterfly nets and elephant guns.”

 

She looked around. The cartoonist responsible was lurking somewhere.

 

“I was given this,” he said, producing a length of green ribbon.

 

“The Ruling Cabal want you to continue to take an interest?”

 

“They’ve no choice. Another body has made its desires known. There are thrones, powers, and principalities in this. For some reason beyond me, this matter is important. My remit is loose. While the police and the safety fellows are concerned with Sackham’s death, I am to pull the loose ends. I have leeway as to whom I choose to involve, and I should like to choose you.”

 

“Again? You’ll have to put me up for membership one day.”

 

She was teasing, but he took it seriously. “In a world of impossibilities, that should be discussed. I shall see what I can do.”

 

Previously, when Charles involved her (or, more properly, allowed her to become involved) in the business of the Diogenes Club, she had gathered stories that would make her name if set in type but which wouldn’t even pass the breed of editor willing to publish “artist’s impressions,” let alone Henry Cockayne-Cust. Still, she had an eternal itch to draw back the curtain. Association with Charles was interesting on other levels, if often enervating or perilous.

 

“If the Gift is being adequately investigated, where should we direct our attentions?”

 

Charles smiled.

 

“How would you like an audience with B. Loved?”

 

* * * *

 

iii: “the Affair of the Dendrified Digit”

 

“So this is the house that Færie built?” said Kate.

 

“Bought,” he corrected.

 

“Very nice. Pennies add up like details, indeed.”

 

They were on a doorstep in elegant Broadley Terrace, quite near Regent’s Park and a long way from Herefordshire.

 

“What’s that smell?” asked Kate, nose wrinkling like a kitten’s.

 

“Fresh bread,” he told her.

 

The door was opened by a child with flour on his cheeks and a magnifying glass in his hand. The boy examined Charles’s shoes and trouser-cuffs, then angled his gaze upwards. Through the lens, half his face was enlarged and distorted.

 

“I be a ‘tective,” he announced.

 

“What about the flour?” asked Charles.

 

Kate had slipped a handkerchief out of her tightly buttoned cuff, possessed of a universal feminine instinct to clean the faces of boys who were perfectly happy as they were.

 

The boy touched his forehead, then examined the white on his fingertips.

 

“I be a baker too, like my Da. I be baker by day, ‘tective by night.”

 

“Very practical,” said Kate. “In my experience, detectives often neglect proper meals.”

 

“Are you a ‘tective too, mister?”

 

Charles looked at Kate, for a prompt.

 

“Sometimes,” he admitted. “But don’t tell anyone. Affairs of state, you know.”

 

The boy’s face distorted in awe.

 

“A secret agent.... Come in and have some of my boasters. I made them special, all by myself. Though Da helped with the oven.”

 

Charles let Kate step into the hallway and followed, removing his hat.

 

A woman bustled into the hall.

 

“Dickie,” she said, incipiently scolding, “who’ve you let in now?”

 

The woman, neat and plump, came to them. Sairey Riddle, well shy of thirty, had grey streaks. In eight years, she had filled out to resemble her late mother.

 

She remembered him.

 

“It’s you,” she said, face shaded. “You found her.”

 

“Maeve.”

 

“Her.”

 

He understood the distinction.

 

“This is my friend, Miss Katharine Reed. Kate, this is Sairey Riddle.”

 

“Sarah,” she said, careful with the syllables now.

 

Dickie was clinging to his mother’s skirts. Now, he looked up again at Charles.

 

“You be that ‘tective. Who found Auntie when she were lost? In the olden days?”

 

“He means before he were... was born. It’s all olden days to him. Might as well a’ been knights in armour and fire-breathing dragons.”

 

“Yes, Dickie. I found your Aunt Maeve. One of my most difficult cases.”

 

Dickie looked through his magnifying glass again.

 

“A proper ‘tective,” he breathed.

 

“I do believe you’ve found a hero-worshipper,” whispered Kate, not entirely satirically.

 

Charles was intently aware of a sudden responsibility.

 

“Don’t mind our Dickie,” said Sarah. “He’s not daft and he means well.”

 

For the first time in months, Charles felt the ache in his forearm, in the long-healed bite. It was the name, of course. By now, his son would have been almost an adult; he would have been Dickie as a child, Dick as a youth, and be on the point of demanding the full, respectful Richard.

 

“Are you all right?” enquired Kate, sharp as usual.

 

“Old wound,” he said, not satisfying her.

 

“Have you come about the business in the park?” prompted Sarah. “We heard about poor Mr. Sackham.”

 

“I’m afraid so. We were wondering if we might see Davey?”

 

Sarah bit her lower lip. He noticed a worn spot, often chewed. She glanced up at the ceiling. The shadow that had fallen over this family in Hill Wood had never been dispelled.

 

“It’s not been one of his good days.”

 

“I can imagine.”

 

“We never did find out, you know, what happened to him. To them both.”

 

“I know.”

 

Sarah led them into a reception room. She left Dickie with them while she went to look in on her brother.

 

“Do you want to see my clues!” asked the boy, tugging Charles’s trouser pocket.

 

Kate found this hilarious but stifled her giggles.

 

Dickie produced a cigar box and showed its contents.

 

“This button ‘nabled me to solve the Case of the Vanishing Currant Bun. It were the fat lad from down the road. He snitched it from the tray when Da weren’t looking. This playin’ card, a Jack of Hearts with one corner bent off, is the key to the Scandal of the Cheatin’ Governess. And this twig that looks ‘zactly like a ‘uman finger is a mystery whose solution no man yet knows, though I’ve not ‘bandoned my inquiries.”

 

Charles examined the twig, which did resemble a finger.

 

“What do you call the case?” he asked the boy.

 

“It hasn’t a name yet.”

 

“What about the Affair of the Dendrified Digit?” suggested Kate.

 

Dickie’s eyes widened and he ran the words around his mouth.

 

‘“What be a ‘dendrified digit?’“

 

“A finger turned to wood.”

 

“Very ‘propriate. Are you a ‘tective too, lady?”

 

“I’m a reporter.”

 

“A daredevil reporter,” Charles corrected.

 

Kate poked her tongue out at him while Dickie wasn’t looking.

 

“Then you must be a ‘tective’s assistant.”

 

Kate was struck aghast. It was Charles’s turn to be amused.

 

Dickie reached into his box and produced a rusty nail.

 

“This be...”

 

He halted mid-sentence, swallowed, and stepped back, positioning himself so that Kate stood between the door and him.

 

The handle was turning.

 

Into the room came a little girl in blue, as perfectly dressed as a china doll on display. She had an enormous cloud of stiff blonde hair and a long, solemn, pretty face.

 

Beside her, Dickie looked distinctly shabby.

 

The girl looked at Charles and announced, “we have met before.”

 

“It’s Auntie,” whispered Dickie. Charles saw the wariness the lad had around the girl; not fear, exactly, but an understanding, developed over years, that she could hurt him if she chose.

 

“Maeve,” Charles said. “I am Mr. Beauregard.”

 

“The man in the wood,” she said. “The hero of the day. That day.”

 

Kate’s mouth was open. At a glance from Charles, she realised her lapse and shut it quickly. Dickie wasn’t quite hiding behind Kate’s skirt, but was in a position to make that retreat if needed.

 

Maeve wandered around the room, picking up ornaments, looking at them and putting them down in exactly the same place. She didn’t look directly at Charles or Kate, but always had a reflective surface in sight to observe their faces.

 

Instinctively, Charles wanted to know where she was at any moment.

 

If Dickie were seven or eight, Maeve should be nineteen or twenty. She was exactly as she had been when he first saw her, in Hill Wood.

 

“I thought you’d be taller,” said Kate.

 

The girl arched a thick eyebrow, as if she hadn’t noticed Kate before.

 

“Might you be Mrs. Beauregard?”

 

“Katharine Reed, Pall Mall Gazette,” she said.

 

“Is it common for ladies to represent newspapers?”

 

“Not at all.”

 

“Oh, really? I rather thought it was. Most common.”

 

She turned, as if dismissing a servant.

 

Maeve Harvill did not act like a carpenter’s daughter or a baker’s niece. She was a princess. Not an especially nice one.

 

“You’ll have come to see poor David.”

 

“Poor” David owned this house and was the support of his whole family. Charles wondered if Davey even knew that.

 

“About the unpleasantness in the park.”

 

“You know about that?”

 

“It was in the newspapers,” she said, tossing a glance at Kate. “Do you know Mr. Satterthwaite Bulge? He’s ghastly.”

 

That was the first child-thing she had said.

 

“Does Uncle Satt call here often?” asked Kate.

 

“He’s not my uncle. He stays away unless he absolutely can’t help it. Will he go to jail? I’m sure what happened to Leslie is all his fault.”

 

“You knew the late Mr. Sackham?” Charles asked.

 

Maeve considered Kate and then Charles, thinking. She pressed an eyetooth to her lower lip, carefully not breaking the skin, mimicking Sarah—whom it was hard to think of as the princess’s sister.

 

“Is this to be an interrogation?”

 

“They be ‘tectives, Auntie,” said Dickie.

 

“How exciting,” she commented, as if on the point of falling asleep. “Are we to be arrested?”

 

She held out her arms, voluminous sleeves sliding away from bird-thin wrists.

 

“Do you have handcuffs in my size?”

 

She spied something on a small table. It was Dickie’s twig-clue. She picked it up, held it alongside her own forefinger, and snapped it in half.

 

“Dirty thing. I can’t imagine how it got in here.”

 

Dickie didn’t cry but one of his eyes gleamed with a tear-to-be.

 

Maeve made a fist around the twig fragments as if to crush them further, then opened her hand to show an empty palm. With a flourish she produced the twig—whole—in her other hand.

 

Kate clapped, slowly. Maeve smiled to herself and took a little bow.

 

“I be a ‘tective,” said Dickie, tears gone and delight stamped on his face. “Auntie Maeve be a conjurer.”

 

“She should go on the halls,” said Kate, unimpressed. “Mystic, Magical Maeve, the Modern Medusa.”

 

The girl flicked the twig into a grate where no fire would burn till autumn. Neither of her hands was dirty , the neatest trick of all.

 

“She makes things vanish, then brings “em back.” said Dickie.

 

“That seems to happen quite often in this family,” commented Charles.

 

“More things vanish than come back.” said Maeve. “Has he told you about the Bun Bandit from two doors down?”

 

“A successful conclusion to a baffling case?”

 

Maeve smiled. “Sidney Silcock might not think so. He was thrashed and put on bread and water. Dickie has to keep out of the way when Sidney pays a call. A retaliatory walloping has been mentioned. There’s a fellow who knows how to bide his time. I shouldn’t be surprised if he waits years, until everyone else has forgotten what it was about. But the walloping will be heroic. Sidney is one to do things on an heroic scale.”

 

“He sounds a desperate villain.”

 

“He’s desperate all right,” said Maeve, smiling her secret smile again.

 

“Greedy Sid’s sweet on ‘er,” said Dickie.

 

She glared calmly at her nephew.

 

Sarah came into the room, took in the scene, and nipped her lip again.

 

“Sarah, dear, I have been renewing a friendship. This, I am sure you realise, is Charles Beauregard, the intrepid fellow who rescued me from the gypsies in the wood.”

 

“Yes, Maeve, I realise.”

 

Sarah was not unconditionally grateful for this rescue. Sometimes she wished Charles had left well enough alone, had not lifted the princess from the snow, not carried her out of the wood.

 

“Davey says he’d like to see you,” Sarah told Charles, quietly—like a servant in her mistress’s presence. “And the lady.”

 

“You are privileged,” said Maeve. “My brother rarely likes to see me.”

 

She was playing with a glass globe that contained a miniature woodland scene. When shook, it made a blizzard.

 

“Happy memories,” she commented.

 

“Davey’s upstairs, in his studio,” said Sarah. “Drawing. He’s better than he was earlier.”

 

Sarah held the door open. Kate stepped into the hall, and Charles followed. Sarah looked back, at her son and her sister.

 

“Dickie, come help in the kitchen,” she said.

 

Dickie stayed where he was.

 

“I can see he stays out of trouble while we have visitors,” said Maeve. “I’ve been practicing new tricks.”

 

Sarah was unsure. Dickie was resigned.

 

“I be all right, Ma.”

 

Sarah nodded and closed the door on the children. A tear of blood ran down the groove of her chin, unnoticed.

 

“Maeve hasn’t changed,” said Charles as Sarah led them upstairs.

 

“Not since you saw her,” she responded. “But she did change. When she were away. As much as Davey, not that anyone do listen to I. Not that Mam listened, God rest her.”

 

From the landing, Charles looked downstairs. All was quiet.

 

“Come through here,” said Sarah. “To the studio.”

 

* * * *

 

iv: “industry is a virtue”

 

Kate was expecting Ben Gunn—wild hair, matted beard, mad eyes. Instead, she found a presentable man, working in a room full of light. Beard he had, but neatly trimmed and free of beetles. One eye was slightly lazy, but he did not seem demented. Davey Harvill, B. Loved, sat on a stool, over paper pinned flat to a bench. His hand moved fast with a sharp pencil, filling in intricate details of a picture already sketched. To one side was a neat pile of papers, squared away like letters for posting. By his feet was a half-full wastepaper basket.

 

This was the neatest artists’ studio she had ever seen: bare floorboards spotless, walls papered but unadorned. Uncurtained floor-to-ceiling windows admitted direct sunlight. The expected clutter was absent: no books, reference materials, divans for models, props. Davey, in shirtsleeves, had not so much as a smudge of graphite upon him. He might have been a draper’s clerk doing the end-of-day accounts. It was as if the pictures were willed into being without effort, without mess. They came out of his head, whole and entire, and were transmitted to paper.

 

Mrs. Riddle let Kate and Charles into the room, coughed discreetly, and withdrew.

 

Davey looked up, nodded to Charles and smiled at Kate. His hand moved at hummingbird speed, whether his eye was upon the paper or not. Some mediums practiced automatic writing; this could be automatic drawing.

 

“Charles, hello,” said Davey.

 

As far as Kate knew, the artist had not seen Charles in eight years.

 

“How have you been?” asked Charles.

 

“Very well, sir, all things considered.”

 

He finished his drawing and, without looking, freed it from its pinnings and shifted it to the pile, neatening the corners. He unrolled paper from a scroll, deftly pinned it in place and used a penknife to cut neatly across the top. A white, empty expanse lay before him.

 

“Busy, of course,” he said. “Industry is a virtue.”

 

He took a pencil and, without pause, began to sketch.

 

Kate moved closer, to get a look at the work in progress. Most painters would have thrown her in the street for such impertinence, but Davey did not appear to mind.

 

Davey’s pencil-point flew, in jagged, sudden strokes. A woodland appeared, populated by creatures whose eyes showed in shadows. Two small figures, hand in hand, walked in a clearing. A little boy and a girl. Watched from the trees and the burrows.

 

“This is my friend Kate Reed,” said Charles.

 

Davey smiled again, open and engaging, content in his work.

 

“Hello, Kate.”

 

“Please forgive this intrusion,” she ventured.

 

“It’s no trouble. Makes a nice change.”

 

His pencil left the children, and darted to the corners of the picture, shading areas with solid strokes that left black shadows, relieved by tiny, glittering eyes and teeth. Kate was alarmed, afraid for the safety of the boy and the girl.

 

“I still haven’t remembered anything,” said Davey. “I’m sorry, Charles. I have tried.”

 

“That’s all right, Davey.”

 

He was back on the central figures. The children, alone in the woods, clinging together for reassurance, for safety.

 

“What subject is this?” she asked.

 

“I don’t know,” said Davey, looking down, seeing the picture for the first time, “the usual.”

 

Now his eyes were on the paper, Davey stopped drawing.

 

“Babes in the Wood?” suggested Charles. “Hansel and Gretel?”

 

Something was wrong about the children. They did not fit either of the stories Charles had mentioned.

 

“Davey and Maeve,” said the artist, sadly. “I know everything I draw comes from that time. It’s as if it never ended, not really.”

 

Charles laid a hand on the man’s—the boy’s—shoulder.

 

Davey began to work again on the children, more deliberately now.

 

Kate saw what was wrong. The girl was not afraid.

 

As Davey was doing the girl’s eyes, the pencil-lead broke, scratching across her face.

 

“Pity,” he said.

 

Rather than reach for an india rubber and make a minor change, he tore the paper from the block and began to make a ball of it.

 

“Excuse me,” said Kate, taking the picture from its creator.

 

“It’s no use,” he said.

 

Kate spread the crumpled paper.

 

She saw something in it.

 

Charles riffled through the pile of completed illustrations. They were a sequence. The children entering the woods, taking a winding path, walking past færie dwellings without noticing, enticed ever deeper into the dark.

 

Kate looked back at the rejected picture.

 

The girl was exactly the child-woman Kate had met downstairs, Maeve. Her brother had caught the sulky, adult turn of her mouth and made her huge brush of hair seem alive. A princess, but a frightening one.

 

In the picture, the children were not lost. The girl was leading the boy into the woods.

 

“This is your sister,” said Kate, tapping the girl’s scratched face.

 

“Maeve,” he said, not quite agreeing.

 

“And this is you? Davey?”

 

Davey hesitated. “That’s not right,” he said. “Let me fix it...”

 

He reached for his pencil, but Charles stayed his hand.

 

They all looked closely at the boy in the picture. He was just beginning to worry, starting to consider unthinkable things—that the girl who held his hand was, in a real sense, a stranger to him, a stranger to everyone, that this adventure in the woods was taking a sinister turn.

 

It might be Davey, as he was when he went into the woods eight years ago, as a nine-year-old.

 

But it looked more like Dickie, as he was now.

 

* * * *

 

v: “Richard Riddle, Special Detective”

 

“If I were a real detective,” said Auntie Maeve, “I shouldn’t be content to waste my talents tracking down bun-thieves. For my quarry, I should choose more desperate criminals. Fiends who threaten the country more than they do their own trouser-buttons.”

 

Dickie trailed down the street after his aunt.

 

“I should concentrate exclusively on cases which constitute a challenge, on mysteries worth solving. Murders, and such.”

 

Maeve led him past the Silcock house, which gave him a pang of worry. Greedy Sid was, like the Count of Monte Cristo, capable of nurturing over long years an impulse to revenge. Behind the tall railings, bottom still smarting, the miscreant would be brooding, plotting. Dickie imagined Sidney Silcock, swollen to enormous size, become his lifelong nemesis, the Napoleon of Gluttony.

 

“The mystery of Leslie Sackham, for instance.”

 

The name caught Dickie’s mind.

 

He remembered Mr. Sackham as a bendy minion, hair floppy and cuffs ink-stained, trailing after Mr. Bulge in attitudes of contortion. A tall man, he tried always to look up to his employer, no matter what kinks that put into his neck and spine. Sometimes, Mr. Sackham told stories to children, but got them muddled and lost his audience before he reached the predictable endings. Dickie remembered one about Miss Fay Twinkledust, who put all her sparkles into a sensible investment portfolio rather than tossing them into the Silver Stream to be gobbled by the Silly Fish. Mr. Sackham had been a boring grown-up. Now he was dead, the limits of his bendiness reached inside the works of a dynamo, Dickie felt guilty for not having liked him much.

 

It would be fitting if he were to solve the mystery.

 

Everyone would be grateful. Especially if it meant the Gift could open after all. Mr. Bulge’s business would be saved from the Silly Fish. Dickie understood the fortunes of the Harvill household depended in some mysterious way on the enterprises of “Uncle Satt”—though only babies and girls read that dreary Treasury for anything but Uncle Davey’s pictures.

 

Maeve took his hand.

 

“Where are we goin’?”

 

“To the park, of course.”

 

“Why?”

 

“To look for clues.”

 

At this magic word, Dickie was seized by the rightness of the pursuit. Whatever else Maeve might be, she was clever. She would make a valuable detective’s assistant, with her sharp eyes and odd way of looking at things. Sometimes, she frightened people. That could be useful too.

 

Though it was too warm out for caps, scarves, and coats, Maeve had insisted they dress properly for this sleuthing expedition. They might have to go underground, she said.

 

Dickie wore his special coat, a “reversible” which could be either a loud check or a subdued herringbone. If spotted by a suspected criminal one was “tailing,” the trick was to turn the coat inside-out and so seem to be another boy entirely. He even had a matching cap. In addition, secret pockets were stuffed with the instruments of his calling. About his person, he had the magnifying glass, measuring callipers, his catapult (which he was under strict orders from Ma not to use within shot of windows), a map of the locality with secret routes pencilled in, a multipurpose penknife (with five blades, plus corkscrew, screwdriver, and bradawl), and a bottle of invisible ink. He had made up cards for himself using a potato press, in visible and invisible ink: “Richard Riddle, Special Detective.” Da approved, saying he was “a regular Hawkshaw.” Hawkshaw was a famous detective from the olden days.

 

Maeve, with a blue bonnet that matched her dress, was a touch conspicuous for “undercover” work. She walked with such confidence, however, that no one thought they were out on their own. Seeing the children—not that Aunt Maeve was exactly a child—in the street, people assumed there was a governess nearby, watching over them.

 

Dickie didn’t believe in governesses. They came and went so often. Ma lamented that most found it difficult to work under a baker’s wife, which proved the stupidity of the breed. He might bristle at parental decrees, especially with regards to the overrated virtues of cleanliness and tidiness, but Ma knew best—better than a governess, at any rate. Some were unaccountably prone to fits of terror. He suspected Maeve worked tricks to make governesses vanish on a regular basis, though she never brought them back again. He even wondered whether his aunt hadn’t had an unseen hand in one of his greatest triumphs, the Mystery of the Cheating Governess. Despite overwhelming evidence, Miss MacAndrew had maintained to the moment of her dismissal that she had done no such thing.

 

In the park, children were everywhere, playing hopscotch, climbing anything that could be climbed, defending the North-West Frontier against disapproving wardens, fighting wild Red Indians with Buffalo Bill. Governesses in black bombazine flocked on the benches. Dickie imagined a cloud of general disapproval gathering above them. He pondered the possibility that they were in a secret society, pledged to make miserable the lives of all children, sworn to inflict etiquette and washes on the innocent. They dressed alike, and had the same expression—as if they’d just been made to swallow a whole lemon but ordered not to let it show.

 

He shouldn’t be at all surprised if governesses were behind the Mystery of the Mangled Minion.

 

Mr. Sackham had died in the park. There were always governesses in the park. They could easily cover up for each other. In their black, they could blend in with the shadows.

 

He liked the theory. Hawkshaw would have found it sound.

 

A pretty child with gloves in the shape of rabbit-heads approached, smiling slyly. She had ribbons in her hair and sewn to her clothes. She was overdecorated, as if awarded a fresh ribbon every time she said her prayers.

 

“Little boy, my name is Becky d’Arbanvilliers,” said the girl, who was younger than him by a year or more. “When I gwow up and Papa cwoaks, I shall be Lady d’Arbanvilliers. If you do something for me, I’ll let you kiss my wabbits.”

 

Maeve took the future Lady d’Arbanvilliers aside, lifted a curtain of ribbons, and whispered into her ear. Maeve was insistent but calm. The girl’s face crumpled, eyes expanding. Maeve finished whispering and stood back. Becky d’Arbanvilliers looked up at her, trembling. Maeve nodded and the girl ran away, exploding into screams and floods of tears.

 

“Hey presto, Hawkshaw,” she told Dickie. “Magic.”

 

Becky d’Arbanvilliers fled to the coven of governesses, too hysterical to explain, but pointing in the direction where Maeve had been.

 

An odd thing was that two men dressed like governesses, not in long skirts but all in black with dark spectacles and curly hat-brims, were nearby. Dickie pegged them as sinister individuals. They paid attention to the noisy little girl.

 

“How cwuel,” said Maeve, imitating perfectly. “To be named ‘Rebecca’ and yet pwevented by nature fwom pwonouncing it pwoperly.”

 

Dickie laughed. No one else noticed that his aunt could be funny as well as frightening. It was a secret between them.

 

Maeve led him towards the Gift.

 

A barrier of trestles was set up all around the building, hung with notices warning the public not to trespass. A policeman stood by the front doors, firmly seeing away curiosity-seekers. Dickie and Maeve had visited while Uncle Davey was helping Mr. Bulge turn the Gift into the Færie Aerie, and knew other ways in and out. Special Detectives always had more information than the poor plods of the Yard.

 

Maeve led Dickie round to the rear of the Gift. A door there supposedly only opened from the inside, so the used-up visitors could leave to make room for fresh ones. Unless you knew it was there, you wouldn’t see it. The wall was painted with a big, colour copy of one of Uncle Davey’s drawings, and the door hid in a waterfall, like goblins in a puzzle.

 

They slipped under an unguarded trestle.

 

Commotion rose in the park, among governesses. Becky d’Arbanvilliers had been able to explain. Though the governess instinct was to distrust anything a child told them, something had upset the girl. A hunt would have to be organised.

 

The men dressed like governesses took an interest.

 

Dickie was worried for his aunt.

 

Maeve smiled at him.

 

“I shall spirit us to safety, with more magic,” she announced. “Might I borrow your catapult?”

 

He was reluctant to hand over such a formidable weapon.

 

“I shall return it directly.”

 

Dickie undid his secret pocket and produced the catapult.

 

Maeve examined it, twanged the rubber appreciatively, and pronounced it a fine addition to a detective’s arsenal.

 

She made a fold in the rubber and slipped it into the crack in the falling waters that showed those who knew what to look for where the door was. She worked with her fingers for a few moments.

 

“This is where a conjurer chats to the audience, to take their minds off the trick being done in front of their eyes.”

 

Dickie watched closely—he always did, but Maeve still managed tricks he could not work out.

 

“I say, what are you children doing?”

 

It was a governess, a skeleton in black.

 

“Have you seen a horrid, horrid little girl...? Dipped in the very essence of wickedness?”

 

Maeve did one of her best tricks. She put on a smile that fooled everyone but Dickie. She seemed like all the sunny girls in the world, brainless and cheerful.

 

“I should not like to meet a wicked little girl,” she said, sounding a little like Becky d’Arbanvilliers. “No, thank you very much.”

 

“Very wise,” said the governess, fooled entirely. “Well, if you see such a creature, stay well away from her.”

 

The woman stalked off.

 

Maeve shrugged and dropped the smile.

 

“I swear, Hawkshaw, these people. They’re so stupid. They deserve... ah!”

 

There was a click inside the wall. Maeve pulled the catapult free and the door came open.

 

She handed him back the catapult and tugged him inside, into the dark.

 

The door shut behind them.

 

“This is an adventure, isn’t it?”

 

He agreed.

 

* * * *

 

vi: “intelligence reports”

 

Sarah Riddle, over the first shock, slumped on a hall settee, numb, and cried out.

 

Charles understood.

 

The worst thing was that this was a familiar anxiety.

 

Maeve and Dickie were missing.

 

“It’s her,” said Sarah. “I always knew...”

 

The house had been searched. Kate turned up Bitty, a maid who recalled noticing Dickie and his aunt, dressed as if to go out. That she had not actually seen them leave the house saved her position. Charles knew that even if Bitty had been there, she would not have been able to intervene. Maeve treated her family like servants; he could imagine how she treated servants.

 

“It’s like before,” said Philip Riddle, standing by his wife. “Only then it were Hill Wood. Now, it’s a whole city.”

 

Charles reproached himself for not considering Dickie. He had given a lot of thought to Davey and Princess Cuckoo, but rarely recalled that this household harboured one proper child. When Charles was in Eye, Dickie had not been born, was not part of the story.

 

Now, Charles saw where Dickie fit.

 

Davey had escaped something. Dickie would do as replacement.

 

“Charles,” said Kate, from the top of the stairs. “Would you come up?”

 

He left Sarah and Philip, and joined Kate. She led him into the studio.

 

Davey was still drawing.

 

Kate showed him finished pictures in which the children ventured deeper into the woods. A smug bunny in a beribboned pinafore appeared in a clearing. The girl, more Maeve than ever, loomed over the small, terrified rabbit. In one picture, her head was inflated twice the size of her body, hair puffed like a lion’s mane. She showed angry, evil eyes and a toothy, dripping shark’s maw. The rabbit fled, understandably. In the next picture, Maeve was herself again, though it would be hard to forget her scary head. She was snatching the boy, Dickie, away from a clutch of old-womanish crows who sported veiled hats and reticules. Then the children came to a waterfall. Maeve used long-nailed fingers to unlock a door in the cascade—a door made of flowing water, not ice—to open a way into a wooded underworld.

 

“What does this mean, Davey?”

 

He drew faster than ever. Tears spotted his paper, blotching the pencilwork. His face shut tight, he rocked back and forth, crooning.

 

“My mother said... I never should... play with the gypsies... in the wood.”

 

Another picture was finished and put aside.

 

The children were in a forested tunnel, passing a fallen tower. Goblins swarmed in the undergrowth, ears and tongues twitching, flat nostrils a-quiver.

 

“I know that ruin,” said Kate. “It’s in the Gift. We were there when it collapsed.”

 

“And I know the waterfall door.”

 

Kate began searching the studio.

 

“What are you looking for?” he asked her.

 

“A sketch-pad. Something he can carry. We have to take him to the park. All this is happening now. The pictures are like intelligence reports.”

 

Kate opened a cupboard in the workbench and found a package of notebooks. She took several and shoved one opened under Davey’s pencil, whispering to him, urging him to shift to a portable medium. After a beat of hesitation, he began again, drawing still faster, pencil scoring paper. Kate gathered the completed pictures into a sturdy artists’ folder.

 

“Stay with him a moment,” Charles told her, leaving the study.

 

Dickie’s parents were at the foot of the stairs, looking up.

 

“Is this household on the telephone?” Charles asked.

 

“Mr. Bulge insisted,” said Philip Riddle. “The apparatus is in the downstairs parlour.”

 

“Ring up Scotland Yard and ask for Inspector Henry Mist. Tell him to meet us at the Gift.”

 

Riddle, a solid man, didn’t waste time asking for explanations. He went directly to the parlour.

 

Kate had Davey out of his studio and helped him downstairs. He still murmured and scribbled.

 

“Bad things in the woods,” Kate reported. “Very bad.”

 

Charles trusted her.

 

“Have you called a cab?” she asked.

 

“Quicker to walk.”

 

Sarah reached out as Kate and Charles helped Davey past, pleading wordlessly. Her lip was bleeding.

 

“There’s hope,” he told her.

 

She accepted that as the best offer available.

 

On the street, he and Kate must have seemed the abductors of a lunatic. When Davey finished a picture, Kate turned the page for him.

 

From a window peered the fat face of a sad little boy. He alone took notice of the peculiar trio. People on the street evaded them without comment. Charles did his best to look like someone who would brook no interference.

 

Every pause to allow a cart or carriage primacy was a heart-blow.

 

The streets were uncommonly busy. People were mobile trees in these wilds, constantly shutting off and making new paths. London was more perilous than Hill Wood. Though it was a sunny afternoon and he walked on broad pavement, Charles recalled snow underfoot.

 

“What’s in the pictures now?” he asked.

 

“Hard to make out. Children, goblins, woods. The boy seems all right still.”

 

Maeve and Dickie must have taken this route, perhaps half an hour earlier. This storm had blown up in minutes.

 

If it weren’t for Kate’s leap of deduction, the absences might have gone unnoticed until teatime. Another reason to propose her for membership.

 

In the park, there was the expected chaos. Children, idlers, governesses, dogs. A one-man band played something from The Mikado.

 

“The crows,” said Kate.

 

Charles saw what she meant. Some governesses gathered around a little girl, heads bobbing like birds, veiled hats like those in Davey’s illustration.

 

“And that’s the frightened bunny,” he pointed out.

 

He remembered Maeve’s temporary scary head. Davey’s drawings weren’t the literal truth, he hoped. They hinted at what really happened.

 

“Ladies,” he began, “might I inquire whether you’ve seen two children, a girl of perhaps eleven and a slightly younger boy? You would take them for brother and sister.”

 

The women reacted like Transylvanian peasants asked the most convenient route to Castle Dracula, with hisses and flutterings and clucks very like curses.

 

“That horrid, horrid girl...” spat one.

 

Even in the circumstances, he had to swallow a smirk.

 

“That would be the miss. You have her exactly.”

 

The governesses continued, yielding more editorial comment but no hard news.

 

“Why is that man dwawing?” asked the ribboned girl.

 

“He’s an artist,” Charles told her.

 

“My name is Becky d’Arbanvilliers,” she said proudly. “When I gwow up and Papa cwoaks, I shall be Lady d’Arbanvilliers.”

 

Few prospective heirs would be as honest, he supposed. At least, out loud. In cases of suspicious death, the police were wont to remember such offhand remarks.

 

“Did you meet a bad girl, Becky?”

 

She nodded her head, solemnly.

 

“And where is she now?”

 

Becky frowned, as angry as she was puzzled.

 

“I told Miss Wodgers, but she didn’t believe me. The bad girl and the nasty boy went to the waterfall in that house.”

 

She pointed to the Gift.

 

“There was a girl,” said the governess, whose name he presumed was Miss Rodgers. “But not the one who so upset Becky. This was a nice, polite child.”

 

Becky looked at Charles, frustrated by her governess’s gullibility.

 

“It was her,” she insisted, stamping a tiny foot.

 

Davey finished one notebook and started on the next. Kate took the filled book and leafed through, then found a picture.

 

“This girl?” she asked. “And this boy.”

 

“That’s them,” said Becky. “What a pwetty picture. Will the man dwaw me? I’m pwettier than the bad girl.”

 

“Miss Rodgers,” Charles prompted.

 

The governess looked stricken.

 

“Yes,” she admitted. “But she smiled so...”

 

Recriminations flew around the group of governesses.

 

“Will the man dwaw me?”

 

Kate leafed through the folder and found a picture of the children meeting the ribboned rabbit, the one in which Maeve was not showing her scary head. She handed it over. Becky was transported with delight, terrors forgotten.

 

Miss Rodgers saw the picture, puzzled and disturbed.

 

“How did he do this? It was drawn before he set eyes on Rebecca...”

 

They left the governesses wondering.

 

From the corner of his eye, Charles glimpsed a couple in black who weren’t governesses. Mr. Hay and Mr. Effe. Since this morning, he had been aware of their floating presence. The Undertaking was playing its own game and had turned up here before he did. He would worry about that later, if he got the chance. Right now, he should be inside the Gift.

 

By the time they found the door concealed in the waterfall design, Inspector Mist was on the scene.

 

“Mr. Beauregard, what is all this about?”

 

* * * *

 

vii: “stage snow”

 

Kate knew that Charles would make a token attempt to dissuade her from continuing. The argument, a variation on a theme with which she was bored, was conducted in shorthand.

 

Yes, it might be dangerous.

 

Yes, she was a woman.

 

No, that wouldn’t make a difference.

 

Settled.

 

Mist of the Yard was distracted by Davey’s compulsive sketching.

 

“Is this fellow some sort of psychic medium?”

 

“He has a connection with this business,” Charles told Mist. “This is Davey Harvill.”

 

“The boy from Eye.”

 

The Inspector evidently knew about the Children of Eye. Kate was not surprised. Whisper had it that Mist was high up in the Bureau of Queer Complaints, an unpublicised Scotland Yard department constituted to deal with the “spook” cases.

 

Mist posted constables to keep back this afternoon’s crowds. Rumours circulated. The Gift was about to be opened to the public. Or razed to the ground. No one was sure. Helmeted bobbies assumed their usual attitudes, bored resignation to indicate nothing out of the ordinary taking place behind the barriers and truncheon-tapping warning that no monkey business would be tolerated. Popular phrases were recited: “move along, now” and “there’s nothing to see ‘ere.”

 

Two men in black clothes augmented by very black spectacles sauntered over. At the flash of a card, they were admitted to the inner circle.

 

They chimed with another whisper, about funereal officials seen pottering about new-made meteor craters or the sites of unnatural vanishments. Another high-stakes player at this table, in competition or alliance with the Diogenes Club and the BQC. The poor plodders of the Society for Psychical Research must feel left out, stuck with only the least mysterious of eternal mysteries, trivial table-rappings and ghosts who did nothing but loom in sheets and say “boo!” to handy geese.

 

Charles made rapid introductions. “Mr. Hay and Mr. Effe, of the Undertaking. Mist you know. Katharine Reed...”

 

Mr. Effe bared poor teeth at her. Even without sight of his eyes, she could gauge his expression.

 

“Do we need the press, Beauregard?” he asked.

 

“I need her.”

 

Argument was squashed. She was proud of him, again. More than proud.

 

“The missing boy is in there,” said Mist. “And his... sister?”

 

“Aunt,” corrected Charles. “Maeve. Don’t be taken in by her. She’s not what she seems. The boy is Richard. Dickie. He’s the one in danger. We must get him out of the Gift.”

 

“The girl too,” prompted Mr. Hay.

 

Charles shook his head. “She’s long lost,” he said. “It’s the boy we want, we need...”

 

“That wasn’t a suggestion,” said the Undertaker.

 

Charles and Mist exchanged a look.

 

“Get that door kicked in,” Mist told two hefty bobbies.

 

They shouldered the waterfall, shaking the whole of the Gift.

 

“It’s probably unlocked and opens outwards,” Kate suggested.

 

The policemen stood back. The dented door swung slowly out, proving her point. Inside, it was darker than it should be. This was a bright afternoon. The ceiling of the Gift was mostly glass. It should be gloomy at worst.

 

White powder lay on the floor, footprints trodden in.

 

“Is that snow?” asked Mist.

 

“Stage snow,” said Charles. “Remember, nothing in there is real. Which doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.”

 

“We’ll need light. Willoughby, hand over your bull-lantern.”

 

One of the bobbies unlatched a device from his belt. Mist lit the lamp. Charles took it and shone a feeble beam into the dark. Stage snow fell from a sky ceiling. It was a clever trick—reflective sparkles set into wooden walls. But Kate did not imagine the cold wind that blew from the Gift, chilling through her light blouse. She was not dressed to pay a call on the Snow Queen.

 

Charles ventured into the dark.

 

Kate helped Davey follow. He had stopped chanting out loud but his neck muscles worked as he subaudibly repeated his rhyme.

 

In his pictures, goblins gathered.

 

Mist came last, with another lamp.

 

Mr. Hay and Mr. Effe remained outside, in the summer sunshine.

 

This was not a part of Færie that Kate had seen yesterday, but Charles evidently knew his way. The walls were theatrical flats painted with convincing woodlands. Though the corridor was barely wide enough for two people side by side, scenery seemed to extend for miles. In the minimal light, the illusion was perfect. She reached out. Where she was sure snow fell through empty air, her fingers dimpled oiled canvas.

 

They could not be more than fifty feet inside the Gift, which she knew to cover a circle barely a hundred yards across, but it seemed miles from Regent’s Park. Glancing back, she saw the Undertakers, scarecrows against an oblong of daylight. Looking forward, there was night and forest. Stars sparkled on the roof.

 

The passage curved, and she couldn’t see the entrance any more.

 

Of course, the Gift was a fairground maze.

 

Charles, tracking clear footprints, came to a triplicate fork in the path. Three sets of prints wound into each tunnel.

 

“Bugger,” said Mist, adding, “pardon me, miss.”

 

She asked for light and sorted back through Davey’s pictures. She was sure she had seen this. She missed it once and had to start again. Then she hit on sketches representing this juncture. On paper, Maeve led Dickie down the left-hand path. In the next picture, goblins tottered out of the trees on stilts tipped with child-sized shoes which (horribly) had disembodied feet stuffed into them. The imps made false trails down the other paths, smirking with mean delight, cackles crawling off the paper.

 

Kate was beginning to hate Davey’s goblins.

 

Charles bent low to enter the left-hand tunnel, which went under two oaks whose upper branches tangled, as if the trees were frozen in a slapping argument. Disapproving faces twisted in the bark.

 

Even Kate couldn’t stand up in this tunnel.

 

They made slow, clumsy progress. It was hard to light the way ahead. All Charles and Mist could do was cast moon-circles on the nearest surface, infernally reflecting their own faces.

 

The tunnel angled downwards.

 

She wondered if this led to the dynamo room. The interior of the Gift was on several levels. Yesterday, it had been hot here. Now snowflakes wisped on her face like ice-pricks.

 

“That’s not likely,” said Mist, looking at snowmelt in his palm.

 

Davey stumbled over an exposed root. Kate reached out to catch him. They fell against a barbed bramble and staggered off the path, tumbling into a chilly drift. Painted walls had given way to three-dimensional scenery, the break unnoticed. The snow must be artificially generated—ice-chips sifted from a hidden device up above—but felt unpleasantly real.

 

Mist and Charles played their lamps around.

 

Kate assumed they were in the large, central area she had visited, but in this minimal light it seemed differently shaped. Everything was larger. She was now in proportion with trees that had been miniature.

 

A vicious wind blew from somewhere, spattering her spectacles with snow-dots. The waterfall was frozen in serried waves, trapping bug-eyed, dunce-capped Silly Fish in a glacier grip.

 

Charles took off his ulster and gave it to her. She gratefully accepted.

 

“I never thought I’d miss my Sir Boris costume,” he said.

 

Mist directed his lamp straight up. Its throw didn’t reach any ceiling. He pointed it down, and found grass, earth, and snow—no floorboards, no paving, no matting. In the wind, trees shifted and creaked.

 

“Bloody good trick,” said the policeman.

 

Davey hunched in a huddle, making tinier and tinier pictures.

 

There was movement in the dark. Charles turned, pointing his light at rustles. Wherever the lantern shone, all was stark and still. Outside the beam, things were evilly active. The originals of Davey’s goblins, whatever they might be, were in the trees. The illustrations, satirical cartoons, were tinged with grotesque humour. Kate feared there would be nothing funny about the live models.

 

“Dickie,” shouted Charles.

 

His echo came back, many times. Charles’s breath plumed. His shout dissipated in the open night. Kate could have sworn mocking, imitative voices replaced the echo.

 

“There’s a castle,” she said, looking at Davey’s latest drawings. “No, a palace. Maeve is leading “Dickie up steps, to meet... I don’t know, a prince?”

 

Davey was still working. His arm was in the way of a completed picture. Gently, she shifted his wrist.

 

In a palatial hall, Dickie was presented to a mirror, looking at himself. Only, his reflection was different. The boy in the glass had thinner eyes, pointier ears, a nastier mouth.

 

Davey went on to another book.

 

Kate showed Charles and Mist the new sequence.

 

“We have to find this place, quickly,” said Charles. “The boy is in immediate danger.”

 

* * * *

 

viii: “the game is up”

 

Maeve had turned her ankle. Dickie’s aunt did not usually act so like a girl. After helping as best he could, he left her wrapped up by the path. She kept their candle. When the mystery was solved, he could find his way back to her light. Bravely, Maeve urged him on, to follow the clues.

 

In the middle of the Gift, she said, was a palace.

 

Inside the palace was the culprit.

 

Steeled, Dickie made his way from clue to clue.

 

Moonbeam pools picked them out. A dagger with the very tip sheared away, a half-burned page of cipher, a cigarette end with three distinctive bands, a cameo brooch that opened to a picture of a hairy-faced little girl, an empty blue glass bottle marked with skull and crossbones, a bloodied grape-stem, a dish of butter with a sprig of parsley sunk into it, a dead canary bleached white, a worm unknown to science, a squat jade idol with its eyegems prised out, a necklace crushed to show its gems were paste, a false beard with cardboard nose attached.

 

Excellent clues, leading to his destination.

 

When he first glimpsed the palace through the trees, Dickie thought it a doll’s house, much too small for him. When, at last, he found the front door, spires rose above him. It was clever, like one of Maeve’s conjuring tricks.

 

Who was the culprit?

 

Mr. Satterthwaite Bulge (he had known the dead man best, and could have been blackmailed or have something to gain from a will)... Uncle Davey (surely not, though some said he was “touched”; he might have another person living in his head, not a nice one)... the clever gent and the Irish lady who had called this afternoon (Dickie had liked them straight off, which should not blind him to sorry possibilities)... Greedy Sid Silcock (too obvious and convenient, though he could well be in it as a minion of the true mastermind)... Miss Mac Andrew (another vengeance-plotter?)... Bitty, the rosy-cheeked maid (hmmmn, something was stirring about her complexion)... Ma and Da (no!)...

 

He would find out.

 

The palace disappointed. It was a wooden façade, propped up by rough timbers. There were no rooms, just hollow space. The exterior was painted to look like stone. Inside was bare board, nailed without much care.

 

He could not see much. Even through his magnifying glass.

 

“Hello,” he called.

 

“‘lo?” came back at him, in his own voice.

 

Or something very like.

 

“You are found out.”

 

“Out!”

 

The culprit was here.

 

But Dickie was still in the dark. He must remember to include a box of lucifers in his detective apparatus, with long tapers. Perhaps even a small lantern. Having left his candle with Maeve, so she wouldn’t be lonely, he was at a disadvantage.

 

“The game is up,” he announced, sounding braver than he felt.

 

“Up?”

 

“This palace is surrounded by special detectives. You are under arrest.”

 

“Arrest?”

 

The culprit was an echo.

 

The dark in front of his face gathered, solidified into coherence. He made out human shape.

 

Dickie’s hand fell on the culprit’s shoulder.

 

“Ah hah!”

 

A hand gripped his own shoulder.

 

“Hah,” came back, a gust of hot breath into his face.

 

He squeezed and was squeezed.

 

His shoulder hurt, his knees weakened. He was pushed down, as if shrinking.

 

The hand on his shoulder grew, fingers like hard twigs poking into him. His feet sank into earth, which swarmed around his ankles. His socks would get muddied, which would displease Ma.

 

Shapes moved all around.

 

The culprit was not alone. He had minions.

 

He imagined them—Greedy Sid, Miss MacAndrew, Uncle Satt, an ape, a mathematics tutor, a defrocked curate. The low folk who were part of the mystery.

 

“Who are you?”

 

“You!”

 

* * * *

 

ix: “two jumps behind”

 

There was light ahead. A candle-flame.

 

Charles pointed it out.

 

The light moved, behind a tree, into hiding.

 

Charles played his lantern over the area, wobbling the beam to indicate where the others should look, then directing it elsewhere, hoping to fool the candle-holder into believing she was overlooked.

 

Charles was sure it was a she.

 

He handed his lantern to Kate, who took it smoothly and continued the “search.”

 

Charles stepped off the track.

 

Whatever was passing itself off as snow was doing a good job. His shins were frozen as he waded. He crouched low and his bare hands sunk into the stuff.

 

He crept towards the tree where the light had been.

 

“Pretty princess,” he breathed to himself, “sit tight...”

 

He had picked up night-skills in warmer climes, crawling over rocky hills with his face stained, dressed like an untouchable. He could cross open country under a full moon without being seen. In this dark, with so many things to hide behind, it should be easy.

 

But it wasn’t. The going was treacherous. The snow lay lightly over brambles that could snare like barbed wire.

 

Within a couple of yards of the tree, he saw the guarded, flickering spill of light. He flexed his fingers into the snow, numbing his joints. Sometimes, he had pains in his knuckles—which he had never mentioned to anyone. He stood, slowly.

 

He held his breath.

 

In a single, smooth movement, he stepped around the tree and laid a hand on...

 

...bark!

 

He summoned the others.

 

The candle perched in a nook, wax dribbling.

 

Clear little footprints radiated from a hollow in the roots. They spiralled and multiplied, haring off in all directions as if a dozen princesses had sprung into being and bolted.

 

Kate showed Charles a new-drawn picture of Maeve skipping away, tittering to herself.

 

“Have you noticed he never draws us?” he said.

 

“Maybe we’re not in the story yet.”

 

“We’re here all right,” said Mist. “Two jumps behind.”

 

Mist supported Davey now. The lad was running out of paper. His pictures were smaller, crowded together—two or three to a page—and harder to make out.

 

“Let me try something,” said Kate.

 

She laid her fingers on Davey’s hand, halting his pencil. He shook, the beginnings of a fit. She took his chin and forced him to look at her.

 

“Davey, where’s the palace?”

 

He was close to tears, frustrated at not being able to draw, to channel what he knew.

 

“Not in pictures,” she said. “Words. Tell me in words.”

 

Davey shook his head and shut his eyes. Squeaks came from the back of his throat.

 

“.. .mother said... never should...”

 

“Dickie’s in the woods,” said Kate.

 

“With the gypsies?”

 

“Yes, the naughty, naughty gypsies. That bad girl is taking Dickie to them. We can help him, but you have to help us. Please, Davey. For Dickie. These are your woods. You mapped them and made them. Where in the woods...”

 

Davey opened his eyes.

 

He turned, breaking Kate’s hold, and waded off, snow slushing around his feet. He pressed point to paper and made three strokes, then snapped the pencil and dropped the notebook.

 

“This way,” he said.

 

Davey walked with some confidence towards a stand of trees. He reached up and touched a low-hanging branch, pushing a bird’s nest, sending a ripple through branch, tree and sky. He took out his penknife, opened the blade and stuck it into the backdrop. With a tearing sound, the knife parted canvas and sank to the hilt. Davey drew his knife in a straight line, across the branch and into the air. He made a corner and cut downwards, as if hacking a door into a tent. The fabric ripped, noisily.

 

Charles thought he could see for hundreds of yards, through the woods. Even as Davey cut his door, Charles could swear the lad stood in a real landscape.

 

Davey slashed the cam as, methodically.

 

There was a doorway in the wood.

 

Beyond was gloom but not dark. It looked like the quarter where backstage people worked, where Sir Boris had got dressed and prepared or took his infrequent meal and rest-breaks.

 

“Through here,” said Dickie.

 

They followed. Beyond the door, it wasn’t cold any more. It was close, stifling.

 

Dickie cut a door in an opposite wall.

 

“I know where you’re hiding,” he said, to someone beyond.

 

A screech filled the passage. A small person with wild hair tore between their legs, launching a punch at Davey’s chest, clawing at Kate’s face, sinking a shoulder into Mist’s stomach.

 

Charles blocked her.

 

The screech died. The girl’s face was in shadow, but could no longer be mistaken. This was not—had never been—Maeve Harvill. This was Princess Cuckoo, of Pixieland. Rather, of the shadow realm Davey recreated in his pictures, which Satterthwaite Bulge had named Færie and built in the real world. That was what she had wanted all along.

 

“Where is he?” Charles asked. “Dickie?”

 

The little face shut tight, lip buttoned, chin and cheeks set. This close, she seemed a genuine child. No Thuggee strangler or Scots preacher could be as iron-willed as a little girl determined not to own up.

 

“I know,” said Davey. “It’s where she took me, where I got away from.”

 

The girl shook her head, humming furiously.

 

“That’s an endorsement,” Charles commented. “Lead on, Davey.”

 

* * * *

 

x: “holes”

 

They descended into the ground. Brickwork tunnel walls gave way to shored earth and flagstones. Kate could not believe Regent’s Park was only a few feet above their heads.

 

She squirreled through, following Davey. Charles dragged Maeve after him. Inspector Mist held the rear.

 

The place smelled of muck.

 

They emerged in the dynamo chamber, site of the sacrifice that had kept the throngs away from the Gift so Maeve could make her private exchange. Roots thick as a man’s torso burst through, spilling bricks on the floor, entwining like angry prehistoric snakes. A canvas cover over the dynamos, stained with red mud, was partially lifted. Ivy grew like a plague, twining into ironwork, twisting around stilled pistons and bent valves. The weed grip had cracked one of the great wheels.

 

Green sparks nestled in nooks. Fairy lights, little burning pools which needed no dynamos.

 

Dickie sat in front of the machine, knees together, cap straight.

 

“There he is,” said Maeve. “No harm done. Satisfied?”

 

Charles shone his lantern. Emerald light-points danced in the boy’s eyes. He raised a hand to shield his face.

 

“Princess,” said the boy. “Is that you?”

 

They were here in time! Kate wanted to hug the errant special detective.

 

“Dickie,” said Charles, offhandedly. “Tell me, what clue enabled you to solve the Baffling Business of the Cheating Governess?”

 

Dickie lowered his hand. His eyes were hard.

 

Ice brushed the untidy hair at the nape of Kate’s neck.

 

“Who was the Bun Bandit?” she asked.

 

No answer. The lightpoints in his eyes were fixed. Seven in each. In the shape of the constellation Ursa Major.

 

“That’s not D-Dickie,” said Davey. “That’s...”

 

“I think we know who that is,” said Charles.

 

Kate’s insides plunged. She looked at the boy. He was like Maeve, but new-made. Clean and fresh and tidy, still slightly moist. He did not yet have the knack of passing among people.

 

Davey whirled about the chamber, tapping roots, tearing off covers.

 

Maeve and the boy exchanged gazes and kept quiet.

 

Kate knew that Sarah Riddle would not be happy with a boy who merely looked like her son.

 

“So, it’s another one,” said Inspector Mist, walking around the boy.

 

He looked up at the policeman, unblinking, head rotating like an owl’s.

 

“That’s a good trick,” Kate said.

 

The boy experimented with a smile of acknowledgement. It did not come off well.

 

Charles was with Davey, talking to him quietly, insistently.

 

“Think hard, Davey... this is that place, the place that was under Hill Wood...”

 

“Yes, I know. But this is London.”

 

“The place where you were taken is somewhere else, Davey. Somewhere that travels. Somewhere with holes that match up to holes here. I don’t know how the hole was made in Eye. Perhaps it was always there. But the hole here, in the Gift, you made.”

 

Davey nodded, to himself.

 

“I thought I’d got away, but I brought it with me, in my head. The drawing, the dreams. That was it, pressing on me. I cheated them, by their lights. I owed them.”

 

He felt his way around now, carefully. He began humming his rhyme— his long-lost sister’s rhyme—then caught himself, and was quiet, chewing his lip like a Harvill.

 

“A hole,” he said, at last. “There’s a hole. Something like a hole.”

 

Davey took out his penknife. He shook his head and threw it away.

 

“Would this be any use?” suggested Inspector Mist.

 

The policeman pulled a giant-sized spanner from the clutches of greenery and handed it over.

 

Davey took the length of iron, felt its heft, and nodded.

 

Charles stood back. Davey took a swing, as if with an axe. The spanner clanged against exposed root. The whole chamber rung with the blow. Kate’s teeth rattled. Old bark sloughed, exposing bone-yellow woodflesh. Davey struck again, and the wood parted.

 

There was an exhalation of foul air, and a vast inpouring of soft, insect-inhabited earth. Almost liquid, it slurried around their ankles, then grew to a tidal wave that threatened to fill the chamber. Some of the lights winked out. She found herself clinging to Charles, who held onto a dangling chain to steady his footing. Mist hopped nimbly out of the way.

 

The sham children paid no mind.

 

In the dirt, something moved. Charles deftly shifted Kate’s grip to the chain and weighed in, with Davey, shovelling earth with cupped hands.

 

A very dirty little boy was disclosed, spitting leaves.

 

Charles whispered in his ear.

 

“Jack of Hearts, with one corner bent off,” Dickie shouted.

 

Davey hugged his nephew, who was a bit embarrassed.

 

The dirty boy looked at his clean mirror image. Dickie had a spasm of fear, but got over it.

 

“You’d better leave,” Charles told the impostor.

 

The failed changeling stood, lifted his shoulders at the girl in a well-I-tried shrug, and stepped close to the fissure in the wall. The gap seemed too narrow. As the faux Dickie neared the hole, he seemed to fold thinner, and be sucked beyond, into deeper, frothing darkness. The stench settled, but remained fungoid and corpse-filthy.

 

Everyone looked at Maeve.

 

“So, Princess Cuckoo,” said Charles, hands on hips, “what’s to be done with you?”

 

She regarded him, blankly.

 

* * * *

 

xi: “you might not know what you get back”

 

The place was changing. The roots withdrew. The crack in the wall narrowed, as if healing. A machine-oil tang cut through the peaty smell.

 

“The holes are closing,” said Davey.

 

Charles considered the Princess. It had been important that there be two cuckoos, Prince and Princess. Davey’s escape from the realm beyond the holes had stalled some design. If Dickie had been successfully supplanted, it would have started again, rumbling inexorably towards its end. Charles did not even want to guess what had just been thwarted. Plans laid in a contingent world were now abandoned—which should be enough for the Ruling Cabal.

 

That unknown place rubbed against thinning, permeable walls. Davey’s drawings were not the first signs that barriers could be breached. Everywhere, he once said, has its stories. Many places also had their holes, natural or special-made. It was difficult, but travellers could pass through veils that separated there from here and here from there.

 

This girl-shaped person was one such.

 

“Princess, if I may call you that...”

 

She nodded. Her face was thinner now, cheekbones more apparent, pupils oval, skin a touch green in the lamplight.

 

“.. .outside the Gift are two men dressed in black.”

 

She knew the Undertaking.

 

“They would like me to hand you over to them. You are a specimen of great interest. As you once had plans for us, they have plans for you. Which you might not care for.”

 

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

 

“You say that now. You’re disappointed, of course. Your life for the past eight years—and I can imagine it has been utterly strange—was geared up to this moment. And it’s proven a bust.”

 

“No need to rub it in. Mr. Detective.”

 

“I am just trying to make you realise this might not be the worst moment of your sojourn here.”

 

The girl spat out a bitter little laugh.

 

She was like a child. Perhaps they all were. That childishness was evident in all the impressions that came through the holes, dressed up and painted in and cut about by Davey Harvill and Uncle Satt and Leslie Sackham and George MacDonald and Arthur Rackham and many, many others. They were the little people, small in their wonderments, prone to spasms of sunlit joy and long rainy afternoon sulks.

 

“Mr. Hay and Mr. Effe might tire of asking questions. It can be boring, not getting answers. In the end, the Undertaking might just cut you up in the name of science. To find wings folded inside your shoulder-bones, then spread them on a board and pin you like a butterfly. There’s a secret museum for creatures like you. It’s possible you’d be under glass for a long time.”

 

A thrill passed through her. A horror.

 

That was something to be proud of. He had terrified the Medusa.

 

“What do you want?” she said, quietly.

 

“His sister,” he said, nodding at Davey.

 

She thought it over.

 

“There’s a balance. She can’t be here if I am. Not for long. You saw, with Dickie. Things bend.”

 

“You’re not going to let her go?” said Kate.

 

Charles sympathised with Kate’s outrage. Mist, as well. This girl was responsible for at least one murder. Sackham, obviously—to keep the Gift shut, so her business could proceed. Almost certainly, she had contrived the death of Violet Harvill, who could not be fooled forever. (Did Davey know that? How could he not?) Charles was certain the Princess would answer for her failure to the powers she served or represented.

 

“It is for the best,” he told Kate.

 

Mist gave him the nod. Good man.

 

“I should warn you,” said the Princess, “you might not know what you get back. Time passes differently.”

 

He understood. If thirty years fly past in a three days, what might not transpire in eight years?

 

The Princess stood by the fissure, which pulsed—almost like a mouth.

 

She looked at them all.

 

“Good-bye, Hawkshaw,” she said. “The Dickie who was almost is less fun.”

 

Dickie frowned. Kate had most of the dirt off his face.

 

“Auntie,” he said. “I know you didn’t mean it.”

 

The Princess seemed sad but said nothing. Suddenly boneless and flimsy, she slid into the slit as if it were a post-box and she a letter. Long seconds passed. The fissure bulged and creaked. An arm flopped out.

 

Davey took hold of the hand and pulled.

 

Charles grabbed Davey’s waist and hauled. Mist and Kate lent their strength. Even so, it was hard going. Davey’s grip slipped on oily skin. Charles’s forearm ached, as he felt the old bite.

 

A shoulder and head, coated with mud, emerged. Eyes opened in the mask of filth. Bright, alive eyes.

 

Then, in a long tangle, a whole body slithered out. She drew breath, as if just born, and gave vent to a cry. Noise filled the dynamo chamber.

 

“Let’s take the quickest way out,” Charles said.

 

Kate went ahead with the lanterns. The three men carried the limp, adult length of the rescued girl between them. Dickie, magnifying glass held up, followed.

 

When they banged out of the waterfall door, Mist ordered a constable to fetch water from the horse-trough in Regent’s Crescent. The newfound girl lay on the ground, head in Davey’s lap. A drapery wound around her, plastered to her body like a toga, but her bare, gnarled feet stuck out.

 

Kate held Dickie back.

 

Mr. Hay and Mr. Effe exchanged dark glances, unreadable. When Charles looked again, they were gone. A worry for another day.

 

Philip and Sarah Riddle got past the cordon and bustled around, too relieved at the return of Dickie to ask after the new arrival. They took their son, scolding and embracing him.

 

Mist had his men round up buckets of water, and had to stop PC. Willoughby from dashing one in the woman’s face.

 

“Looks like she’s been buried alive, sir,” said the constable.

 

“It’s not so bad,” said Dickie, bravely.

 

Charles requisitioned a flannel from a stray governess, soaked it, and cleaned the face of the woman who had come back.

 

A beautiful blank appeared with the first wash. She was exactly like the Princess. Then a few lines became apparent, and a white streak in her hair.

 

“Maeve,” said Davey.

 

The woman looked up, recognising her brother.

 

Charles would have taken her for a well-preserved forty or a hard-lived thirty. He stood back, and looked at the family reunion.

 

“How long’s it been?” she said.

 

“Not but a moment,” said Davey.

 

She closed her eyes and smiled, safe.

 

Charles found that Kate was holding his elbow, face against his sleeve. He suspected a manoeuvre to conceal tears. A pricking in his eyes suggested discreet dabbing might be in order to repair his own composure.

 

A crowd began to assemble. There was still interest in the Gift. It occurred to Charles that it might even be safe to open the place, though Mist would have to write up the Sackham case carefully for the BQC files.

 

Maeve rolled in Davey’s grasp and flung her arms around his neck.

 

Sarah Riddle noticed her sister, recognised her at once. She gasped, in wonder. Her husband, puzzled at first, caught on and began to dance a jig.

 

Charles slipped his own arm around Kate’s waist. Her hands were hooked into his coat. They had been through a great deal together. Again. Pamela had been right about Katharine Reed; she was an extraordinarily promising girl. No, that was then. Now, she was an extraordinarily delivering woman.

 

He lifted her face from his arm and set her spectacles straight.

 

“What should a fairy tale have?” he asked.

 

Kate sniffed. “A happy ending,” she ventured.

 

He kissed her nose, which set her crying again.

 

She arched up on tip-toes and kissed him on the lips, which should not have been the surprise it was.

 

Mist gave a nod to Willoughby.

 

The constable raised big hands to his belt, thumb tapping the handle of his truncheon.

 

“Move along, now,” he told the gathering crowds. “There’s nothing to see ‘ere.”