Merry as the marigold
Careless as the columbine
Faithless as the foxglove fair
My lady, Queen Orfeia.
Alberon said: ‘That’s quite enough.’ He put his hand on Fay’s shoulder. ‘Don’t mind Peronelle, my Queen. It’s the madcap talking.’
He turned towards Peronelle and made a gesture of dismissal. ‘Leave us. Let’s have no more talk. Queen Orfeia and I have private business to discuss.’
Peronelle pulled a spiteful face. For a second Fay saw their outline shimmer, as if caught in a heat-haze. Then they dispersed into a cloud of tiny dancing butterflies that rose into the bonfire smoke and vanished in the moonlight. The butterflies were luminous, and all the same shade of purple as Peronelle’s hair. Alberon made the same gesture of dismissal to Cobweb and Moth, and both of them vanished in the same way, Cobweb into an emerald cloud, Moth into a silvery one. The butterflies rose out of sight, briefly covering the moon, then they were gone, and only he and Mabs remained beside the dying fire.
Fay looked down the street, and saw the bar of light had reappeared. The warm glow beneath the stones was back: cheery and enticing, like the light from around a secret door where a riotous party was going on. She stood up, feeling less disoriented. The last of the madcap had given her a reckless kind of determination, and though Alberon’s hand tightened on her arm, she pulled away from him, towards the glowing paving stone.
‘I wouldn’t,’ said Alberon gently. ‘You’re safe here, for the moment. But step off the path again and there’s no knowing where in the Worlds you’ll end up.’
But Fay was already crossing the road towards the bright crack in the pavement. The darkened shop windows reflected the moon in silent silver panels. She half-expected the light to go out again as she reached it, but this time it stayed, shining out between the slabs of heavy London stone.
Fay knelt to look more closely, putting her face to the crack in the ground. It was no more than half an inch wide, but the light was so brilliant that she had trouble focusing. And yet, as her eyes adjusted, a scene emerged, far away below her, but still as clear and bright as a child’s snow-globe. She saw a clearing in a wood, a clearing surrounded by hawthorn trees. Their blossom was as white as snow, and fluttered like confetti. Within the clearing itself, the ground was covered with bluebells – their sleepy scent reached her faintly through the crack in the pavement. And there, asleep in the bluebells, was a girl all dressed in white, under a blanket of wild rose—
For a moment there was no air in the air she was breathing. Her throat was tight; her mouth was numb; her heart was a burning ball of wire…
‘Daisy?’ she said.
The girl slept on. Far under the streets of London, she slept, cocooned in the scent of bluebells.
Fay tried to prise up the paving stone with the tips of her fingers, but the slab was unmoveable. She felt a fingernail tear to the quick; but the pain came to her from a distance, like something that happened to someone else, far away and long ago. From a distance, she could hear the sound of voices behind her: Alberon and Mabs were having an argument.
‘Let her be, for pity’s sake,’ said Mabs. ‘What good can you do her now?’
‘I will not lose her,’ said Alberon. ‘Not after all we’ve been through. Queen Orfeia…’ He raised his voice. ‘Your Daisy cannot hear you. She sleeps in the hall of the Hallowe’en King, and nothing you do here can wake her.’
But Fay was only aware of him as part of a background of white noise. Once more she called her daughter’s name, ringing it off the concrete and glass and stone of Piccadilly. The madcap must still have been working, because her call took shape in the air, rocketing into the sky and coming down in a shower of stars.
Through the crack in the pavement, the sleeping girl turned over and sighed.
Mabs said: ‘It’s pointless. You’ve lost her.’
Fay shouted, ‘Daisy! It’s me! I’m here!’ and hammered her fists against the stone, but only managed to bruise her hands.
Below her, the sleeping girl slept on.
Alberon sighed and said: ‘We’ll find her again in London Beyond. That is, if she gets that far.’
And at that he and Mabs disappeared silently into the smoke, he into a cloud of black butterflies, she into a cloud of silver ones, and if Fay had been watching them, she might have noticed that as they stood together in the moonlight, neither the man nor the woman had cast even the smallest shadow.
As it was, she barely saw them go. Instead she screamed and wept and clawed at the luminous crack in the ground that shone with such a fugitive gleam. But just as her fingers could not lift the stone, her voice seemed to bounce off the pavement, like fireworks hitting the ground. And then the light went out as suddenly as it had appeared, and Fay was left in darkness, alone, under an emptiness of stars.
Four
She must have slept, she told herself. How that could be, she did not know. Perhaps it was the madcap. In any case, when she awoke it was light, and the sky was blue, and she was wrapped in a blanket, with her backpack as a pillow, at the bottom of the steps under the statue of Anteros.
For a moment she was disoriented. Her muscles ached and her mouth was dry. She looked at her Fitbit. Seven-fifteen. She had spent the whole night here. It took her a moment to realize that there was no one else around. This went beyond the unusual, she thought, into the realms of fantasy. A deserted Piccadilly at night was already strange enough, but by seven in the morning, the streets should have been filled with commuters, and retail workers, and street-sweepers, and taxicabs, and delivery vans, and garbage men, and junkies, and joggers, and tourists. All the same, the streets were bare, both of vehicles and pedestrians. There were no people leaving the Tube; no rough sleepers by the entrance.
Something must have gone wrong, she thought. Maybe there had been a crime. Perhaps the square had been cordoned off by the police, and somehow she had slept through it. She stood up, automatically rolling up the blanket. It was blue, with silver stars, and some part of her mind seemed to recognize it, although she had no memory of bringing it with her on her run. But it was small, and she managed to fit it into her backpack along with the few things she always carried on her night-time runs: a bottle of water; some cereal bars; a purse containing emergency cash; a hoodie in case the night turned cold; her phone; a small first-aid kit; her keys on a key ring shaped like a tiny notebook. She looked down Shaftesbury Avenue, then across the square towards Regent Street. There was no one to be seen, not even where Alberon and his friends had had their fire at the mouth of the Tube. She walked to the spot where the fire-pail had been, but there was nothing left but a little pile of ash and a circle scorched against the stone.
The fire was real, said Fay to herself. That means it wasn’t all a dream. The idea that she might have invented Alberon and his friends – perhaps as part of some fugue state – had occurred to her. She looked around for more traces. But the Tube entrance was closed again; the ornamental gates bolted shut, and, looking down into the dark, Fay thought she could see some kind of creeper – bindweed, or bramble, or Russian vine – growing across the stairway. And there was something else too, deep in the tangle of creeper – Cobweb’s discarded wheelchair, at the foot of the stairwell.