Guardian of the Green Hill Read online

  “Who is that?” she asked.

  They all looked, but none could identify him. Her relatives didn’t seem concerned. “Probably an artist,” Phyllida concluded, dismissing it. “They like to gather around here to paint the old church up on the rise, or the remnants of the hill fort. He’ll probably wander to the Rookery eventually.”

  “And like as not try to sell you his sketches,” Lysander added. “I can’t tell you how many pen-and-inks and charcoals and watercolors I have filed away, just waiting for one of ’em to be worth something when the artist becomes famous. Or dies. Hasn’t happened yet.”

  Meg stared back at the form shrinking rapidly into the distance. Sure enough, he had a contraption beside him that looked like a folding easel. Only an artist out to capture the hazy golden hues of the declining sun. And he had not been staring at her in particular. Why, they rode in such an outlandish contraption, who could help but stare? While there were many farmers who still used horse-drawn carts, they were big, practical things with modern rubber tires. Sometimes she even saw tractors and mechanical threshers being pulled by a team of drafthorses. But the Ashes’ conveyance was straight out of the Victorian beau monde, a barouche on high, red wooden wheels. The carriage itself looked like an old-fashioned perambulator, seating four passengers face-to-face. It might have rolled down the streets of Victoria’s London unremarked. Of course anyone new to the area would stare.

  The dust-colored man was forgotten when they pulled up to the little brick farmhouse half surrounded by unmown hay mixed with wildflowers. Rusted cans, snippets of curling wire, and planks studded with nails lay scattered along with other rubbish. The front was cleared, probably by the peregrinations of a large Yorkshire sow and her farrow. White geese raised their sinuous necks in alarm as the barouche rolled to a stop, then arched them downward, hissing threats.

  Without warning, Meg felt dizzy, a throbbing rush of blood to her head. For a moment, her vision dimmed and she was aware of a sorrow so terrible it was like an uncontrolled fear, swallowing her up, leaving her shaking and irrational. She grabbed for Phyllida’s hand and squeezed the old woman’s fingers until she cried out, “Mercy, Meg, what’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know … I don’t know! Something terrible has happened here. Can you feel it? We should have come quicker. I should have known before. Oh! It’s too late!” She collapsed into sobs, much to Dickie’s consternation. He took her other hand awkwardly while Phyllida disengaged herself from Meg’s viselike grip and, alarmed, scurried into Moll’s house.

  “Meg, what is it?” Dickie asked when they were left alone.

  “I don’t know,” she said again, calming, though convulsive aftershocks of sobs still echoed through her. “I just felt, all of a sudden, a sadness so great.… Dickie, what’s wrong? What’s wrong with me?”

  “I don’t feel anything,” he said. “Something to do with the fairies, maybe? The house does look dour, though.” Little sooted-over windows glared balefully at them from the ramshackle dwelling. It was obvious that no one had cared for it in quite some time.

  They waited in awful silence until suddenly a keening wail rose, an unearthly sound that made the very windows rattle. A woman with eyes glassy-red from weeping burst from the shack, looking wildly around.

  “Colin!” she cried. “Colin, love, where are you? Come back to me, my darling!” She disappeared into the greenwood, her hair streaming behind her.

  Phyllida tried to follow, but though she was hardly frail, a person of eighty-odd years can’t catch a woman of twenty-five. She rested against a linden, panting. “Moll! Come back!”

  “She’s looking for the Green Hill,” Lysander said, coming up behind her. He leaned heavily on his gnarled cane. “She thinks she’ll find him there.”

  “We must go after her. She’ll do herself harm.”

  While Lysander mustered some villagers to go after the crazed Moll, Phyllida sat Meg down on a bench at the edge of the pig wallow.

  “They came to me,” Phyllida said, speaking with her eyes closed. “When Bran was healing in his ash tree, Moll’s mother came and tried to speak with me. They never call the doctor, if they can help it. I refused to see her. I was so worried about Bran. Then Moll’s brother came, just two days ago, and I turned him away with a wave. I said I’d be by soon. Oh, not soon enough!” She hid her face in her hands and fell to her knees in the muck. “Such a happy little man Moll’s baby was! I was there for his birth, and I swear he smiled to see the world for the first time. Not yet a year beneath the sun…”

  “Her son died? Phyllida, it’s not your fault.”

  “Yes, yes, it is! I was so caught up in my own life, my own fears, I neglected my duties. The Green Hill, the people who live nearby, my people, my tenants, are more important than me or my own blood. I should have come at the first call, even if it was nothing, only some petty problem. That is my obligation. Better Bran had died than that poor wee laddie. Better I had died.”

  “Can’t we do something?” Meg asked. “We brought Bran back to life. Isn’t there something we can do for the baby?”

  Phyllida shook her head. “That kind of thing happens once in a thousand years. Bran was dead, but his life was trapped elsewhere. And Bran had an ash tree bound to him. The babe doesn’t. It is a custom that has fallen out of fashion. Ah, another failing! I should plant a tree for every one of them. I haven’t kept the old ways as I should. Oh, Meg, I am so old, so useless.” She bowed her head until she was almost lying in the pig filth.

  Meg didn’t know what to do. The poor baby, and now her great-great-aunt, font of wisdom and pillar of strength, collapsing into helplessness and despair like this. She took Phyllida by the shoulders and pulled her up almost roughly. “Tell me what to do,” she said earnestly.

  By the time the doctor arrived in his little red convertible, Phyllida and Meg had laid out the tiny body, a time-honored female chore. They had cleaned and dressed Colin as well as they could. The best of his clothes were hardly fitting—rough and twice-mended, with food stains on the collar—so Phyllida had improvised a shroud with her petticoat and covered his face with a lace handkerchief embroidered with bluebells and foxgloves.

  Dr. Homunculus assured Phyllida there was nothing she could have done—nothing even he could have done. “He had a trouble with his heart since birth. Some illnesses are past mending,” he told her.

  His words meant little to her. She was Guardian of the Green Hill and of her people, not he. Ignoring him, she told Meg, “Poor Moll has lost her mind for a time, but the fairies look after the mad. We’ll find her soon enough and do what we can to give her peace.”

  And You After Her, My Pretty Pet?

  “DICKIE,” MEG ASKED a few minutes later as they strolled along the dusty unpaved road to the Rookery, “do you think I should help Phyllida look for Moll? Or maybe try to find Gul Ghillie and ask him to help?”

  “Speak of the devil,” cried a merry little voice, “and he will come!”

  A brown, freckled boy stepped out from behind the Rookery gates to meet them. He cut a little caper. Then, too full of high spirits to simply walk, he turned into a great gray lumpy toad and hopped the intervening distance. A tongue thick as a cow’s flicked out and lapped up a snail. He turned into a boy again, still crunching the gastropod.

  “Gul!” Meg cried. “Nice to see you.”

  “Oh? I thought perhaps you never wanted to see me again.” He spit the snail’s horny operculum onto the turf and crushed it with his heel.

  “That was a long time ago,” she said, referring to the war of two weeks past.

  “What are you doing here?” Dickie asked rather rudely, and Meg looked sidelong at him. This was the Seelie prince, albeit in disguise! Didn’t he have any idea how to treat royalty?

  “Oh, just taking the air,” Gul said nonchalantly. “I heard about the trouble yonder. Bad business.” He shook his head. “He was a fine child. Any fairy mother would be glad to have such a bonnie laddie.”

  �
��You’re not supposed to be here,” Dickie insisted. “None of the fairies are supposed to be at the Rookery unless invited, especially you.”

  This was strictly speaking true, but a fairy who had risen from the earth as soon as the molten magma cooled enough that there was earth certainly wouldn’t be stopped by any silly rules. It usually took a fair amount of Phyllida’s skill and fairy lore to keep fairies safe from humans and humans safe from fairies. Lately she had been neglecting her duties. Iron nails driven into the sod had rusted away, never to be replaced. Crows stole the bells that tinkled in the wind at the gatepost. There hadn’t been a four-leaf clover hunt for weeks. None of these things alone can keep out a determined fairy, but collectively they create a general feeling that fairies are unwelcome, and usually that suffices to keep them at bay.

  “You know more than a lad of your age should,” Gul told Dickie, giving him that intense stare a border collie gives a straying sheep, then bolted for the tall grass, where he was soon lost among the cowslips and yarrow.

  “I wonder what he was here for,” Dickie mused.

  “Well, he would have stayed if you hadn’t been so rude,” Meg countered. “I haven’t seen him since—”

  “Since you killed Bran for him,” Dickie finished for her. “You’re getting as bad as Silly, thinking the fairies are safe. If he was here, he was up to no good. Prince or no prince, he’s a fairy, and that means trouble. We should check with the others.”

  They found Rowan, Silly, and Finn in their rooms performing perfunctory ablutions in preparation for dinner. Rowan’s hands were pristine below the wrists, filthy above. Finn had a streak of grime behind each ear as if his face was a clean mask slipped on over permanent dirt.

  “Did you see Gul?” Meg asked from the hall.

  “Was he here?” Silly asked, jumping up and down on her bed in glee. “Oh, I can’t believe he didn’t come to see me. I wanted to show him what I’ve learned. I’ve been practicing my fencing with a pair of swords I found in the old armory.” The Rookery was filled with arms and relics from every generation that inhabited it, from sabers and arquebuses to modern fowling shotguns. “They’re not the same as Hen and Brychan, but I’m getting used to them.” Much to her dismay, her fairy weapons had been taken from her after the Midsummer War.

  “He doesn’t care what you’ve learned,” Meg said sharply. Dickie was right. Fairies were dangerous, selfish. How had she forgotten? She rubbed her eyes. She felt a little hazy all of a sudden, confused. They were dangerous, weren’t they? She didn’t feel like herself. I’m just tired, she thought. Tired and upset by what I saw today. She shook herself like an agitated bluebird puffing her feathers.

  “He trained us for the war, that was all. He doesn’t need us for anything now. I’m sorry, Silly, but he’s not our friend. You can’t trust him.”

  Silly stuck her tongue out and called Meg an old stick-in-the-mud.

  Meg ignored her. “If he didn’t come to see us, what was he here for? Phyllida and Lysander weren’t around. Did he visit Bran?”

  “Bran came to play croquet with us,” Silly said. “We would have seen if he was talking to Gul.”

  “Bran got out of his chair? He … played?” He was too weak to run around. Trust that stubborn lout to put himself in danger as soon as her back was turned. The others wouldn’t think to make him lie back down. Things seemed to fall all to pieces when she or Phyllida was gone from the Rookery.

  She looked around, aware of an empty space. “Where’s James?” she asked her brother.

  Rowan shrugged.

  “But you said you’d watch him.”

  “I did? I don’t remember.”

  “When we were leaving. He was watching the ants and you said … Oh, Rowan, you’re useless!” Meg stomped off to take care of things herself.

  She wasn’t really worried. The Rookery was swarming with servants, and Phyllida was so loved and respected there was no one in the village who would do her or hers any harm. But what if James broke his leg, or got stuck in a tree? What if he fell into an abandoned well? It didn’t matter that she didn’t know of any wells on the property. In fact, that made it all the more likely, because who would fall into a well they knew about? Maybe little James had been poking around the old summerhouse, and when he pushed aside the brambles in search of some novel bug, he crashed through the forgotten well to his doom.…

  Oh, no, there he was, still playing with ants on the croquet lawn.

  “James,” she called, running up to him and hugging him, relieved as if she’d just dragged him dripping from the well. He felt unnaturally cold. “Are you all right?” she asked, laying the back of her hand on his forehead.

  He shook her off and stared at her unblinking. “Your eyes are red and puffy. You look ugly!”

  She gasped. Gentle, loving, self-contained little James hardly ever had anything but hugs and caresses and praise for his adored eldest sister. Before bed every night, he would crawl into her lap and stroke her dark brown hair while she told him a story. Surround me with your armies, she’d say, and he’d throw his plump little arms around her neck, squeezing with all his love until she cried, I surrender! He’d never said an unkind thing to her in his life. She gulped and tried to dismiss it. Maybe it was just a phase.

  “Come in and get washed up for dinner,” she said.

  “Dinner? Hooray!” He jumped up and did a little dance. Well, at least he was cheerful, if not his typical sedate self.

  “Look out, James. You’re stepping on the ants.”

  “I know,” he said serenely, continuing his jig.

  She grabbed his arm and pulled him off the mound. “James! I’m ashamed of you! You know you don’t kill bugs. It’s not right.” And it’s not like you at all, she thought. “Especially ants here at the Rookery. You know what Bran said. They might be very old fairies.”

  He struggled against her grip, snaking out one leg to stomp a few more. “These aren’t fairies,” he said. “I checked. They’re just crunchy ants.” He wiped his mouth, and she thought she saw a tiny black leg flick off his cheek.

  “You didn’t … eat … an ant, did you?”

  “I’m hungry!” was all he said, and he broke free and ran inside.

  Phyllida failing, James rude and cruel … What’s happening? Meg thought.

  Phyllida and Lysander still weren’t home by the time the children gathered for supper. Meg looked worriedly at James, but as far as she could tell, he was his old self—he focused on his food with single-minded determination and hardly seemed aware of the others, unless they tried to snag some last morsel he’d set his heart on.

  Though she knew it wasn’t exactly a polite topic for the dinner table, she told them about Moll, sparing them a detailed description.

  “I think we should look for her,” Meg said.

  Rowan, stuffed and sleepy after an afternoon of turning croquet into a blood sport, said, “Sounds like Phyllida will take care of it. That’s what she does, isn’t it?”

  “But I’m supposed to … I should help. Come on. Silly? Will you go?”

  “Well…”

  “We’ll go to the Green Hill.”

  “I’ll go!” Finn chimed in.

  “Already a cyclops,” James said, not looking up from stuffing buttered boiled new potatoes into his mouth. “Wanna be blind?”

  “James!” Meg admonished. But it was true. Finn had been punished for spying on the fairies, and even if he went under her aegis, he wasn’t likely to be welcomed. “I’m sorry, Finn. I can’t take you to the Green Hill.”

  “Go on, take him,” James said, spewing crumbs. “Maybe he’ll fall in love with you like you want.”

  A wave of crimson climbed from Meg’s neck up to her cheeks.

  “And if he’s blinded,” James added, “he won’t care how you look!” He chortled while the others looked on, aghast.

  Meg reddened the rest of the way, until even the part in her hair was a line of scarlet. She stared straight ahead so there wasn
’t the slightest chance of making eye contact with Finn and said, “James, go to your room this instant!”

  He ignored her.

  “I said—”

  “I heard you,” James said, grabbing half a leftover roll from Dickie’s plate. “Don’t have to do what you say.”

  She was sorely tempted to throw a fit, if only so she could yell away some of her embarrassment, or failing that, to grab James by whatever arms and legs she could catch and haul him off to his room. But she thought he would probably ignore her ranting lectures, and no doubt struggle against apprehension. Successfully wrestling a determined four-year-old without hurting him is a difficult undertaking, and just at that moment Meg really didn’t feel up to it. She had to get away, from her family, from the Rookery. She had to get out into the woods.

  She bolted from her chair and ran out the door, only breathing easily when she reached the edge of the forest. She heard steps behind her and turned to find Finn.

  He regarded her with one dark blue eye … one beautiful blue eye … Stop that this instant, Meg Morgan! He fingered the black silk patch that covered the other eye, and Meg shuddered to think what might be beneath it.

  “It’s okay. You can stare,” Finn said casually, and it took her a moment to realize he meant stare at his eyepatch, not the rest of him. She usually only did that when she was absolutely sure no one was watching. How in the world had James known she had the smallest, tiniest, ever-so-insignificant crush on Finn? Perhaps she hadn’t taken the trouble to guard her feelings from him as she had the others, since he was only four. Evidently growing up, though, to judge from today’s outbursts.

  “Do you want to see it?” he asked.

  “Your … eye? No, no thank you.”

  She thought, hoped, it was an attempt at friendship, but realized that being Finn, he was probably just trying to make her feel sick and squeamish.