The Folk Keeper

by Franny Billingsley

  The Sealskin fit me exactly, falling just to my fingertips, just to my toes. How marvelous that when I pulled it round my face, each side followed the curve of jaw to meet exactly at my chin. There was nothing wasted, not a single gap. But I had to be closer still. I sank to the floor, pressed it to every part of me. To my naked spine, to my belly and breast, how alive I was to it, or maybe it to me. We drank each other in through every pore.

  Taffy whined from the doorway. You have your own fur, Taffy; do not be jealous of mine.

  I have the Sealskin wrapped around me like a cloak as I write in the Trophy Room. Poor Taffy doesn’t know what to make of this new version of me. He thumps his tail but does not lie too near. Yes, Taffy, it may be that I am becoming a different creature and that soon you will not recognize me at all.

  Soon, but not yet. I cannot turn myself into a Sealmaiden without warning Finian and Lady Alicia about Sir Edward. I cannot leave without saying good-bye. Soon I will restock my Folk Bag and walk the three miles along the cliffs to Firth Landing.

  Everyone is away at the Harvest Fair, every servant, even the other dogs (for whom Sir Edward has doubtless bespoken the best rooms). It is unlikely that anyone will return before I do, but just in case, I will hide my Sealskin in the Cellar. It is too heavy to carry with me. No one would think to look there, and anyway, they’re all too afraid.

  I am very happy now, watching the rain fall in fat, hard strands. Have I ever been so happy?

  The world is a magical place and I’m lucky to be alive in it. Did my mother watch the rain driving against these windows and think it beautiful?

  Have I ever been so happy?

  14

  The Harvest Fair

  August 18 — the Harvest Fair

  Something inside has sprung a leak. I am growing accustomed to the salt water dripping down my face. I lean over my paper to hide, but no one in the tavern looks my way. They stand around the fire and drink to the Harvest Fair and to the rain and to anything else they can think of.

  No one pays attention to a serving girl.

  I was transformed this morning, from savage to servant with a bar of soap and servants’ clothes borrowed from Mrs. Bains’s storeroom. A laced bodice and calico shift, very clean and almost new. I wonder if Corin’s clothes would fit me now? I shall never be rosy and rounded — never like the Tragic Queen! — but if you squinted, you might almost take me for a young lady.

  I left my hair for last, twisting it into a knot at my neck. And then — oh, I was clapped once more into an acorn shell. The singing spaces collapsed around me; gone were the echoes that paint the universe like shadows.

  Imagine a world without shadows. You cannot touch a shadow, but a world without them is a hard world, and flat.

  I didn’t stumble once on the rough cliff-top walk to the Harvest Fair. Now that I know it’s my hair that gives the world dimension and depth, I can manage without it. It’s knowing the rules, I think.

  It’s as though you were standing in front of a mirror and tying a bow. If you know you’re moving in a mirror world, if you know everything runs right to left, back to front, why then, you know how to adjust. You know to move your fingers opposite the way your mind tells them to go. But if you don’t, you keep moving your fingers the wrong way and wonder why you can’t even make the simplest knot.

  The fairgrounds began at a grassy square in front of the Cathedral. The ground was a mass of mud, but the business of the first day was done, and the ale was flowing as freely as the rain, and certainly nobody seemed to mind.

  Smoky flares shone off canvas booths pitched along the Cathedral walls. “Penny a pitch! Penny a pitch!” called the barker at the coconut shy. “All sharp?” A peddler with a whetstone, his cart hung with knives and axe blades.

  The noise and cheer filled me with a delicious anticipation. I looked for Finian and I did not look for Finian. The search itself was an event to savor. Here, smells of clove and nutmeg drifted from the spice stall. There, mounds of sugared almonds and candied cherries glistened beneath striped canvas. The stonecutter had set out a tray of cunningly carved animals. I lingered over a tiny quartz rooster, all swagger and strut.

  “Perhaps your sweetheart will buy it for you!” called an unknown voice. A rush of laughter blew up from a knot of men. Blushing, and laughing too, I walked on. “A drink to the harvest!” Pewter tankards met with thuds of fellowship, warm ale sloshed over cold hands. “To the harvest!”

  The crowd grew thin behind the Cathedral, the tents a little rumpled and shabby. “Who’ll put his silver on this glossy fellow!” called a gloomy voice beneath a canvas, and a bright smell stained the air. It was a cockfight. I’d never find Finian there.

  I was looking for Finian, only for Finian, confident my disguise made me invisible to anyone else. But when I turned away, I found a great beast with red ears blocking my way, asking politely for attention.

  “Liquorice! Let me pass!”

  “Liquorice!” Sir Edward called from the tent, not twenty feet behind.

  “Go!” I pushed at Liquorice, felt the bony lumps of skull. “Your master’s calling.” If only my hair were loose, I could call upon the power of The Last Word and send him howling away.

  “Who’s your friend, Liquorice?” Sir Edward’s voice brought back memories of fresh earth and mildew.

  I stamped on Liquorice’s foot; he yelped and slunk aside.

  I imagined elegant Sir Edward at the fringe of that shabby company, staring as I disappeared round the other side of the Cathedral. Small growling shivers ran up my spine. I was splashed with mud to my knees and wet all over, straining myself back into the crowd. The stalls no longer tempted me, not the scented candles, the supple leathers, the crimson stitching in a lady’s glove.

  Sir Edward could not recognize me, I told myself. Not in a dress, not from the back. My Folk Bag — could he recognize my Folk Bag? But there are many leather bags in the world, and only one Corinna, whom he presumed to be dead.

  The crowd flowed round a pretty bright-faced girl and her sweetheart, stopped in the middle of the lane. The man swung her close and kissed her full on the mouth. A most peculiar feeling overcame me; I was lightheaded as though I might have a fever. When the couple moved on again, I saw it was the Valet, and in a red leather vest!

  Now the crowd flowed around me, the crowd, together with flowing seconds and flowing thoughts and flowing hands, hands tightening round my waist, squeezing me through an alley between two stalls. Very delicately then, as though I were a waxen doll, the hands propped me against the Cathedral wall.

  It was dark in there, but when I looked up, I still saw the familiar blue vein at the corner of Finian’s eye. His voice was a shredded whisper. “You didn’t run away to the Mainland!”

  I felt none of the amazement I heard in my own voice. “How did you recognize me?” I felt nothing much at all. The perfect doll, dress-up clothes over a waxen heart.

  Finian reached for his handkerchief and peeled off his spectacles, which were foggy and beaded with rain. “I always recognized you.” He swallowed hard, as though he’d bitten off too many words.

  The wax doll was startled into life. A secret heart jumped at the dip of my throat; and all the lacings of my bodice couldn’t stop a wild warmth rising from beneath.

  “Have the Folk made mischief while I’ve been gone?” Oh, that I could simply melt away, like wax. Whatever I’d meant to say, it wasn’t that.

  “Rather a lot,” said Finian. “Four cows died, and the hay wouldn’t cure, just moldered away. But the oats and barley are safe, and that’s something. The Folk have been quiet since the first week in August.”

  He shoved the spectacles back on his nose. “Your hair! How could it have grown so?”

  “You forgot to wipe off the glass,” I said.

  “I can still see your hair. Oh, Corinna, where did you go?”

  “Where did you go, that day on the pier?” I hadn’t meant to say that, either, but the words had been swelling
inside a long time, and now came bursting out.

  Finian knew at once what I was speaking of. “I’m ashamed to say what I thought. But when I saw the Windcuffer, saw that she’d been tampered with . . .”

  “Tampered?” I remembered sailing the Windcuffer in the storm, the inexplicable burst of water through the floorboards, fitting my fingers between them. “You thought I did it!”

  “For revenge,” said Finian. “Although I didn’t know what I’d done to make you so angry.”

  “I would never harm the Windcuffer.”

  “Never?” said Finian, and I felt myself go red. “But when you set off after me, in the Windcuffer, I knew of course it wasn’t you.”

  “Sir Edward!” The probability of this burst on me in a cold wave. He’d been worried about what Finian knew, worried he might not make a complacent stepson. “Trying to do away with you, just as he tried Midsummer Eve, pushing you from the cliffs.”

  I could say no more. My throat swelled with the notion that Finian thought I’d avenge myself on him; worse still, it could have been true. A silent rainfall of weeping overcame me.

  Finian pressed a square of cambric into my hand. “I’ve gone back to saying my prayers every night like a good boy, praying for the chance to explain. To apologize.”

  I waited until I could speak. “I never use a handkerchief.”

  “Perhaps you never needed one until now.”

  “No, not much like Corin to need a handkerchief.”

  “You were never much like Corin,” said Finian. “Lucky me, not to have been wearing my spectacles that first day we met. I missed the fine points of your appearance, but I wasn’t fooled by them, either. I saw from the way you carried yourself that you were no boy.”

  “Even Sir Edward never guessed,” I said. “People never think a Folk Keeper could be a girl.”

  “Not even Edward, and he’s so clever, too!” Finian said this so seriously, I was sure he must be laughing.

  “Why did you never tell?” I said. “All these months, and you knew there was no Corin.”

  “Boredom, I suppose. If I told, all the excitement would be over at once. But I never thought it would be this exciting.”

  “It’s more exciting than you know,” I said. “It’s my turn now to tell you Secrets. Did you know the Lady Rona was a Sealmaiden? That I’m her daughter?”

  There was no room for a large person to be surprised; to start, or step back. Finian only whispered, as I had that night in the graveyard, “But the baby died at birth!”

  “Lord Merton didn’t want one of the Sealfolk as his heir and gave out that I’d died.”

  “I hear what you say,” said Finian. “I even believe it. But I can’t digest it.” He pressed his fist to his middle as though he might have a bellyache. “How do you know this?”

  “Sir Edward told me. He didn’t want me as heir, either, so he dropped me through the Graveyard Shaft.”

  “The Graveyard Shaft! Yes, let’s return to Edward. Tell me enough to hang him.”

  “He means to marry your mother.”

  “Ha!” said Finian. “He might have, six weeks ago. But now she disagrees with him on almost everything. It started when you vanished, which thoroughly upset our ways of thinking. I am to have a whole shipyard if I like!”

  I have read and reread my account of that night in the churchyard. It was easy to remember and recount what Sir Edward had said during those long minutes I lay pressed into my own grave.

  “Hanging’s too easy,” said Finian. “An axe might do better.”

  “Only if it’s blunt,” I said, thinking of my breathless fall through the Shaft.

  “You’re right,” said Finian. “The old-fashioned ways have their charms. What do you say to drawing and quartering?”

  I was a long time describing my days in the Twilight Cavern, my discovery of Old Francis, my starless night with the Folk.

  “Do you mean to say you don’t have the power of The Last Word?”

  “I do now,” I said, thinking back to early August. Hadn’t Finian said that’s when the Folk grew quiet?

  “I don’t know whether to be worried or relieved.”

  “Be both at once.”

  “Just tell me there’s a happy ending,” said Finian. “This Otherfolk story of yours is terrifying.”

  “It still hasn’t ended, not until I return to the sea.”

  I still remember his look of — of what? Puzzlement? Astonishment? Anger? What right had he to be angry?

  Just a thin slice of canvas away, a merchant was charging a young man too much for two blue ribbons. “They will go with brown hair?” the young man said. “You’re sure they go with brown hair?”

  “I see,” said Finian. “You came to warn me. I’d rather hoped — oh, there’s an end on it.” He seemed to change the subject. “I began leaving the Cellar door ajar for Taffy. He must have known where you were all along, poor fellow. Couldn’t you leave your own door ajar, Corinna? Go to the sea, just come back, too.”

  But I couldn’t risk ending up like my mother, my Sealskin stolen or destroyed. “What would I come back for?”

  “For the Folk. For me. You could marry me.”

  He said this rather indifferently, but he peeled off his spectacles, and when he leaned forward, only our lips touched. Warm, hard fingers around my wrist; warm, soft lips against mine.

  The press of air peeled away, and there came a moment of suspension, of liquid floating. I sank into those lips. I was still solid Corinna — I could feel it in the curious little shock that shivered through my middle — but like ice in water, I floated in my own liquid self.

  And then my arm was flying wildly, connecting with his hand, with warm flesh and cold spectacles. The spectacles flew against the wall with a sharp crack, and I flew the other way, into the mud and clamor of the Harvest Fair. Finian could have caught me easily, but there came only his voice floating after.

  “Listen to this. Corinna, listen! Midsummer Eve, the strands in my peat were silver!”

  How I ran then! But I couldn’t run as far as I wanted. A fisherman stationed at the foot of the cliff path advised me to take a wagon inland, as the rains had washed out a section of cliff. And so I did, with a crowd of Harvest revelers, two crying babies, and five chickens.

  I wait now at this tavern for a farmer who’s offered to take me the rest of the way in his cart — after he finishes his ale. I’d rather walk, but it would take me hours to reach the Manor, and my Sealskin.

  All I can hear in my head is Finian’s voice. The strands in my peat were silver! Silver! Silver!

  August 18 — later

  Why didn’t I go? Why didn’t I seize my Sealskin this morning and plunge into the sea? Oh, foolish waiting, foolish human waiting. I wanted to warn Finian, I wanted to explain. I wanted to say good-bye. What a stupid thing to do — a stupid human thing! I swore I’d never let myself get caught as my mother had. And where has it left me? Trapped in the Caverns.

  Should I have suspected something? But I’m sure everything was just as I’d left it, the doors to the Kitchens and Cellar ajar. At the top of the stairs, I pulled the pins from my hair. I needed no light to find my way to my Sealskin.

  When I stepped into the inner Cellar, I felt at once a new texture, the fabric of the air pulled taut, as though . . . as though there’d been a candle recently burning. I swung my hair, reading the walls — Poor Rona! Poor Rona! — to the spot beside the Folk Door where I’d left my Sealskin.

  In that instant, a flint scraped, a spark flared, a lantern cast a halo round Sir Edward and his angel smile.

  I leapt for the Folk Door, hurled myself through. It slammed behind.

  “Come out, Corinna.” Sir Edward spoke through the Door. “It will be worse if I have to come after you.”

  “Come in, if you dare.”

  “Oh, I dare,” said Sir Edward. “Didn’t I snuff my candle when I heard you coming down the Cellar stairs? That should tell you I’m not afraid of the Folk.”<
br />
  That had been astonishingly brave. “Come in, then.”

  Sir Edward’s footsteps drew near the Folk Door, paused. He did not dare.

  I dived into my Folk Bag and lit a candle to start writing. Have I not told myself things through my writing I hadn’t thought of before? Hadn’t I told myself I could find my way through the Caverns without a candle? What can I tell myself now?

  Sir Edward cannot keep me trapped here; in two days, the others will return. Don’t worry, Corinna. You can wait this out.

  Why, then, am I terrified? Why have my bones turned to water? Am I melting, Corinna turned to liquid, trickling beneath the Door?

  And why is Sir Edward laughing?

  15

  The Harvest Fair (Will It Never End!) Through the Storms of the Equinox

  August 18 — night of the Harvest Fair

  I must have known somewhere deep inside why I could not wait it out. Why, too, Sir Edward might laugh.

  “I have your Sealskin,” he said. “The only question is how to destroy it. Fire, perhaps?”

  I blew out my candle, as though to keep fire as far from me as possible. And there, in the dark, the spark of an idea flared.

  “You think yourself powerful, don’t you?” I cried, as scornfully as I could. “Listen to this: The night of the Storms, it was I who threw the skin of your jungle beast to the hounds.”

  “You!” Sir Edward said no more. He gave a piercing whistle, and soon I heard a soft panting outside the Folk Door.

  “Liquorice is here with me,” he said. “With me and your Sealskin. At it, lad!”

  I sprang through the Folk Door, already casting a net of hair to gather The Last Word.

  The story of a maiden fair,

  Sing briney, briney brink.

  With shades of silver in her hair,

  Sing briney, briney brink.

  Shut off forever from the sea,

  Consigned to Merton’s company.