“What do fairies feel like?” he’d asked. “When you feel them.”
Tobias had thought about it a little while.
“Old,” he’d said at last. “Sad.”
* * *
“Of course it exists,” said Maud Lindhurst. The candlelight flickered on her tightly bound guinea-gold hair: the paraffin stove gave off a faint glow that lit her long face from below, making skull-shadows of her cheeks and brows. “How could it not exist? Consider how many legends of Fairyland there are. No smoke without fire, you know. A lady investigating our country’s folklore may feel as sure of the Kingdom of Fairy as a lady investigating railway tracks may be sure of steam engines.”
“I have thought as much myself,” Silver admitted. By God, how he had hungered for Fairyland once! The Wood had taken up some of that space in his thoughts; but what was the good of it, in the end? He had rejoiced so greatly in his discoveries. Now his house was a ruin; he had no good clothes left; his main social intercourse was with a dryad who plainly thought him an inferior specimen of humanity, though Bramble would probably have regarded kings and emperors as inferior next to Tobias Finch.
Maybe he had forgotten himself, somewhere, between the Wood and Fabian Rafela and Tobias bloody Finch. If it took a girl like this to remind him what it had felt like to have a serious conversation about the supernatural, then it really had been too long. Who was he, if not Henry Silver, gentleman scholar, hunter of secrets, lover of fairy tales?
“God knows it would be a remarkable discovery,” he said. “I don’t deny it. Amazing—marvellous—if it were possible. But no one has ever found Fairyland yet, and you must know you’re not the first to try. What makes you so sure you know where you’re going?”
Maud was grinning. The expression lit up her awkward face. “It’s simple enough. I’ve been there before,” she said.
Through all this Tobias had sat in silence, like a man carved of wood. Silver had almost—almost—let himself ignore the man’s presence. But at that he sucked in a breath.
Maud turned her head and gazed at Tobias in rudely direct curiosity for a long moment.
“It is you,” she said. “I thought so all along. I was only a child, but I don’t forget. Do you remember me? In your wood?”
And as she said it Silver realised with a lurching sensation that he actually had a kind of memory of her, a vision of a silent little yellow-haired scrap of humanity in the arms of a shimmering half-seen figure disappearing among the trees. It was his thought and yet not his thought. It came from the Wood.
“Yes, miss,” said Tobias heavily. “I remember.”
* * *
At the age of six Maud Lindhurst, visiting her aunt near Hallerton, had been kidnapped by a fairy.
She was not able to describe, exactly, what the fairy looked like. Its legs were long, she said. Its eyes were hard to look at.
It had taken her to a strange place along a road made of moonlight. She had been very hungry, but she had not made a sound. Being an intelligent and resourceful six-year-old, she had paid attention to the road; and when her peculiar captor’s attention was distracted on their arrival, she had stood up on her small and sturdy legs and run back along the silver pathway until she found herself among trees, lots of trees.
There the fairy, rushing after her, had caught her again and picked her up in its arms; and she had looked into its disturbing eyes and it had said something, maybe, though Maud could not say what the words were or even if it had been speaking in a language she knew.
“What was it like?” asked Silver, fascinated. The candles on their tall golden candlesticks guttered and flickered, casting dancing shadows over the walls of Abbot Julius’s crypt.
“Sad,” said Maud, her expression very distant. “It was so sad.”
Then, as the human child stared up at its captor and the fairy continued to—speak? To sing?—a big man in big boots had come stomping out of the woods towards them. The fairy had taken fright and tried to run, but the burden of a human child had been too much for it—Maud described it as skinny, spindly even, without strength in its long limbs—and it had carefully set her down on a grassy knoll. The big man had come upon her there, crying furiously, surrounded by a ring of white mushrooms. He had been very fearsome. When he tried to pick her up, Maud screamed and ran away; and strangely enough, the trees had moved around her, so that she found herself stumbling out of the straggling edge of Greenhollow Wood and into the outskirts of Hallerton village, where the aunt she was staying with had not even noticed she was missing.
Quiet followed Maud’s story.
“I got there too late,” Tobias said abruptly. “Always feared as much, when I saw it’d left you in a ring. You’re mazed, miss; you’re fairy-mad. Like a mouse that’s looked a snake in the eye. Better go home to your parents.”
Maud stared at him a moment in silent outrage and then turned to Silver. “Do I seem mad to you?” she demanded.
“You seem like a very unusual young lady,” Silver said carefully.
“Unusual! And so you’ll cart me home and send me to bed without my supper, will you? And then my parents will send me for rest cures, and cut off my correspondence, and take my books again, and—” She stood up. Her right hand was in the pocket of her corduroys: not a casual gesture, Silver understood perfectly well, because that was the pocket with the revolver in it. “Well, gentlemen, it has been terribly interesting to meet you. For a moment I thought at least one of you would understand. If you’ll excuse me, I mean to chart the road to Fairyland, to discover its history and its society, and by interview and observation to ascertain the nature of its inhabitants. I know the way; I have walked it before. Good night.”
She moved swiftly, swinging the canvas pack up onto her shoulders, leaving the cleaver; she was halfway up the ladder Silver had barely noticed in the far corner of the room before either Silver or Tobias had time to react. Tobias moved first.
“She has a gun,” Silver said behind him as they started up the ladder, “for God’s sake, be careful—”
Tobias grunted in assent.
So this was what they were now: partners in a professional matter, hunters of the supernatural, rescuers of alarming young ladies. So this was what became of falling in love with a marvel out of legend.
Silver thought he might, in time, become resigned to it.
* * *
In the flickering firelit shadows of the vampire’s lair, Silver had half-forgotten where they were. Emerging behind Tobias onto the hillside above Rothport, he took a great gasp of the cold sea air and felt tremendously grateful for it. Tobias put out a hand to steady him when he stumbled. It was an unthinking kindness, like passing a coin to the tramp. Silver could expect nothing from him, now, except the kindness that ran deep in his nature as the current of a rushing stream. But it was good to breathe freely again. The death-scent lingering underground had been mostly his imagination, he was sure. Mostly.
The ruined abbey’s bones rose out of the earth about them, dark and slick with rain though the skies had cleared. Below them Rothport curled around the dark blot of the bay, its one string of gas lamps flaring like stars to mark the line of the high street. Silver could not see Maud at first. Then Tobias said sharply, “There!”