The Hidden People

by Allison Littlewood

  That night I slept upon a mattress stuffed with straw, and all too soon my little companions for the darkest hours emerged and crept in close. My arms and legs and back crawled at their touch; I burned with their bites. Whenever I searched for them upon my skin, I could not see them; but I knew that they were there.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The next day passed in a blur once again, a reverse of the last, as the filth of the City gave way to all the green and gold of the countryside. The sky was of mixed character, one moment innocently blue and scuffed with sheep-like clouds, the next darkening with the promise of rain. It put me in mind of another day, long ago, that had not been able to make up its mind, and yet I knew that when I saw Halfoak once more, it would still be summer.

  London felt far behind me, but my wife did not; she was constantly at my side, her face contorted with despair, yet so distant that she could not speak to me. I was determined that I would make all things right between us, though I could not see how to do so. Still, I tried to concentrate on what I must do before I returned to her. And here was my duty already: Constable Barraclough was waiting for me as I alighted from the train, his chest puffed out and his forehead creased. I noticed that he had a new button on his jacket; was that in honour of the occasion? He also held an envelope in his hand which I recognised as the one I had left for him the day before—so long ago. I had not known if he would treat my missive seriously; to judge by his expression, he had.

  I approached and said good day, but he only frowned more deeply. He waved the envelope before my face before staring at it with a gaze so penetrating he could surely read its contents through the paper.

  “I am bewildered, sir,” he began. “Whatever did you mean by it? Is it make-believe? I had not heard of there being such an infant in Halfoak, let alone one treated in such a fashion.”

  A twinge cut through me as I thought of another lost child, but I forced the thought from my mind. Now I must dwell only upon matters in Halfoak, just for one more day. Then, only then, could I leave it far behind me.

  The constable went on: “Of course, they keep theirselves to theirselves in Halfoak. They do not welcome my visits; they are reticent of tongue. The farmhands hereabouts have a saying: that a Halfoak man should prefer to speak to his pig than his neighbour if he were divided from him by the boundary of the village; and I cannot admit that there is not some truth in it.”

  “Well, that may have been part of the difficulty,” I said. “To answer your question: first, yes, there was such a child, and that was what they did to it, before the same thing was done to my cousin. It was the start of it all, you see. Well—not quite the start, perhaps. And no, there was no hue and cry; nothing came of it at all. Nobody knew of it because nobody cared—or perhaps they knew a little; the parson knew enough to preach against the child since it was born of sin. He turned his back upon it. I doubt he knows what became of it, nor that he wishes to know. And the father knew of it, of course; but how much easier for him if it had never existed!”

  “And where is it?”

  I thought of the little grave, unmarked with any name, on the green hillside. It was a few moments before I could gather myself enough to explain its whereabouts. I had wrapped the tiny body once again, after I had looked upon it, and replaced it. I think I had covered it with a fine layer of tilth; I thought I remembered doing so; but the evening had become unclear to me, as so much else.

  “It lies beneath the oaks there,” I said. “It will be quite plain where the sward has been disturbed and stacked a little to one side . . .” My voice cracked; I could not speak. Helena’s stricken face was before me, so real that I could almost touch her. There would be no grave for our child, nowhere she could visit, to take flowers, to shed her tears. There was nothing left but emptiness and hollowness and it stretched out before me, a gaping chasm at my feet.

  “Sir?” I realised the constable had asked me a question. He repeated, “How did you know where to find it? How did you know all of this?”

  “I will tell you,” I said, “but first, I think we should set out for Halfoak. I can explain everything to your satisfaction, I believe, along the road.”

  He nodded, his brows still lowered, and informed me that a horse and cart was waiting. We turned to leave, and he reached out and seized my arm, his fingers gripping vice-like as if I were some common criminal who might at any moment bolt and make my escape.

  The cart was waiting for us outside the station. I had half expected to see Widdop’s bay mare, but a smart chestnut with a clean white blaze down its nose stood in the traces. It harrumphed and stamped one foot as we approached, impatient at standing still. A driver stood by its shoulder and another constable—I had not seen him before—was already seated. We climbed aboard, the driver hastily gathering the reins, and we were soon on our way. The road was as dry as ever; the sky was blameless; there was not a single cloud. The sun glared down, ready to burn us all to cinders. Perhaps we deserved no less.

  It was not long until the town lay at our backs and the fields were all around us, full of golden-brown stubble where wheat and corn had been harvested.

  “You see,” I said after a while, “the people here work so hard. I had not thought it so when I first saw Halfoak; I thought all was peaceful repose, when in reality there is as much difficulty and tribulation as in the city—possibly even more so.” I was lost in reverie, thinking of the labourers’ hardscrabble existence, until I realised the constable was waiting for me to go on.

  “Mrs. Gomersal complained to me once that her son was a child of the fairies. She tried to impress upon me what a trial that was to her, but afterwards, I could not help but think she had come out of it rather well: she did not have to slave in the fields as others did. She has a decent cottage and well-dressed children and everything about her is comfortable and neat.

  “Her child was not the son of a fairy, Constable Barraclough. Ah—you raise your eyebrows as if to say, of course he is not. But many in these parts believe it, or at least in the possibility of it.

  “You see, her son—how odd that I find I am uncertain of his name—he is in appearance quite fairy-like, and he barely says two words together. He is practically a wordless child of nature, and so why should people not think him strange? And he was born, after all, long after the death of her husband. How much easier must it have been, particularly in a village with such a thunderous parson, to say she had been bewitched by a fairy, rather than admit what he was?”

  “And what was he?”

  “He was not the son of a fairy, for certain. He was born of the squire’s son: of Edmund Calthorn.”

  The constable raised his eyebrows, all astonishment.

  “He lay with her on the fairy hill, most likely—he goes riding there, and she wanders there often. It was most convenient, then, for her to think of the fairies when she found she was with child. And how fortunate a child! They say the old squire’s time is near, and there is no doubt the family has been brought lower by the father’s illness and subsequent mismanagement, and yet the son manages quite well to keep Mary Gomersal in her cottage, and to meet her every requirement. He takes care of the boy, though he may well be disappointed to see how he turned out—” Again, an image stopped my words: my father’s face, his eyes turned upon me, the tightness of his lips expressing his coldest severity.

  I shook my head to dispel the image. ‘And if anyone should ask how it is that she lives so well, and her a widow—why, then, the fairies provide! For who does not know the stories of fairy gold? You see how neatly it is all explained. And such has been the way of it for seven years, while the boy grows more silent and the mother fades, until the present—and then what happens? Why, another comes along, younger and more comely, her blonde hair all in curls and her cheeks all blushes: Essie Aikin, who needed a position, and found one most readily at Throstle Grange, under the watchful eyes of the squire’s son. His fondness for female company is no closely guarded secret. All laugh at it; they
sing of him when they are in their cups.

  “His mother, Mrs. Calthorn, would naturally have the management of the servants, but her every moment is presently occupied with her husband’s care. So the most natural outcome ensued: Essie Aikin, despoiled and swelling by the day, cast out of her position and unlikely to find another—and what do you suppose might have happened then? An ageing mother and a surly boy giving way to a pretty maid with a laughing baby, and Edmund Calthorn’s shrinking purse unable to keep them both.”

  The constable grunted; I did not know if it were in understanding or doubt.

  “Mrs. Gomersal’s fine cottage, her upkeep—all might have devolved to another, if Calthorn’s purse had proved as fickle as his eye.”

  He frowned. “But the pages from Lizzie Higgs’ journal, enclosed with your letter—I trust that is what these are—speak of ‘they.’ I know not who ‘they’ are, sir, and begging your pardon, it could have referred to anyone, could it not?”

  “Ah—it was not anyone, constable. But I am running ahead.” I glanced around me, lulled by the steady plod of the horse, its ears flicking at a cloud of flies about its head; by the heat; the somnolence of the day. The driver had not once turned, though his back was stiff, and I wondered what he made of it all.

  “Mary Gomersal did not wish to change places with another,” I said. “She had grown rather fond of her situation in life. And so, after the baby came into the world, she wasted no time in accusing it of being a changeling. She told its mother that the fairies had stolen her real child away, and after all, Mary knew all about the fairies, did she not?”

  “But they surely would not believe her.”

  “Ah, but they did! And circumstances supported her claims. The parson, full of disgust at its parentage, would have refused to christen it. The girl had not yet even named it, which meant the child was not protected from the fairies by God nor by man. Mrs. Gomersal found a way to have at it.” My voice turned bitter, and I endeavoured to speak calmly.

  “I have spoken to the mother. She was quite convinced her own child would be returned to her after they disposed of the changeling in the way you have read of already in those pages. I even saw her one night, upon the fairy hill, waiting for it. I believe her to have been entirely taken in; her father, also. It says little for their credulity, but—well, such is the way of Halfoak. And people have believed in stranger things, I suppose.”

  Another image came to me: my own hands tearing pages from a book and stuffing them into a keyhole. I swallowed down my shame and went on steadily, “It was all in my cousin’s journal, but I fear the rest of it is burned now. It was destroyed in an accident, you know. It is a pity. I had read from it, but I had passed over what might have been the most important matters of all: not of the belief in fairies, but about everyday things. Lizzie had written there about Mary’s home and situation, and of her own, and of her neighbours’. I did not dwell on the detail; there was nothing of magic in it, you see—”

  Suddenly I buried my face in my hands. “How would you know?” I asked. “If someone told you that your wife was not your wife, that your child was not your child—how could you ever really look into their eyes again and be certain? Every strange word, every infant temper, everything you had not seen before would raise its own doubts. We are born to wonder, are we not, we human beings? If we did not, if we had no wonder, no curiosity, no . . . imagination, what would we be then? We would be no better than beasts in the field.”

  The constable made another sound in the back of his throat, balanced exactly between assent and denial. I did not answer it, but roused myself and continued, “Mary Gomersal once said to me that in offering her treatments—her cures—to the little changeling, she was only trying to be kind. She said she was trying to spare its mother from what she had. I thought at the time she was speaking of her own fairy child, but now I think she was not. I think she was mocking me. She did wish to spare Essie Aikin what she had—but what did she have? A good home and a steady income. You see, I had thought it was all truly about the fairies. Halfoak is a place particularly lent to dreaming, is it not? ’Alfoak—our folk. There have been tales told about the hidden people of its hills and dells for centuries.”

  I paused. “I had thought it a story as old as time,” I said, “and you see, it was—but a story of a different kind. It was about love, and jealousy, and passion, and about the material conditions of life. What was one little baby in the face of all their comforts? I wonder, after all, how much its mother, and poor Essie’s father, actually wished to believe. It would have been so much easier, so . . . but that is a question I cannot answer. I only know they were sincere enough for me to be convinced of them as the dupes of Mary Gomersal.”

  “We shall know soon enough,” the constable said.

  He was right; there ahead of me was the road leading into Halfoak. There was the inn, its rusty horseshoes still nailed above its doors. There was the church, the grey spire with the clock still dragging its too many hands around its face. There was the green, and there, in the middle of it all, the cloven tree from whence the village had gained its name: the blasted thing, half living and half dead, still holding a misshapen crown aloft, trailing ragged ribbons and ancient withered flowers in its wake.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  I directed the driver towards the little cottage where I had last seen Mary Gomersal and her brood sitting by the door. I realised these might be my last peaceful moments before we reached it, but I felt too much turmoil within to find any comfort in exterior things.

  We turned our back on the green and followed the lane. I did not shout when we reached the little gate but reached out and tapped the driver’s arm. He pulled up the horse at once and all of us got down save him. We did not speak to one another. I looked towards the cottage and there they were: Mrs. Gomersal, sitting there with her weaving, golden corn stalks flashing in her hands, and both her daughters were beside her, just as if nothing terrible had happened; as if nothing had changed. The boy was there, too. He had caught a bright green cricket, and was engaged in trying to stuff blades of grass down the little creature’s throat.

  Mary stood the moment I set my hand upon the gate. Her brows drew down in anger, and then she saw the constables at my back and her expression changed. She turned to the girls and ushered them inside at once, her voice shrill. They left their work scattered upon the step and went in, casting sharp little glances towards us. The boy, as before, stayed where he was; he did not even look up.

  I did not know where I should begin, but I realised I did not have to. The constable stepped in front of me. “A most interesting tale has come to my ear, Mrs. Gomersal,” he began. “Most interesting indeed. It concerns a baby born to one Essie Aikin—you do know her, I take it?”

  If he had expected her to pale at this revelation, he had been mistaken. She raised her head and jutted forth her chin. “I ’eard tell of it. What’s it to me?”

  “I think you have done more than hear tell of it, madam. I think you had a hand in its death, did you not?”

  Her eyes flashed, with fury or fear, I could not tell. She shot a look at me so full of malignity it made me shudder.

  “I should like to hear it from your own lips,” the constable went on. His colleague stood back, waiting. “It would be far better so—about how it was not wanted, and taken for a changeling, and what was done with it thereafter.”

  Mary tossed her head. “It’s not for me to meddle,” she said. “They only asked for my ’elp, an’ I’m not one to refuse a neighbour. They knew it was a wrong ’un, that bairn. They wanted to do summat forrit, so I went to t’ wise woman, an’ I teld ’em what she teld me. That’s all. I might ’ave brung a cure for ’em to give it—only a few ’erbs an’ such, to put t’ fairy out on it. Nowt really. But I din’t give ’em to t’ bairn, an’ I din’t do nowt else to it neither, when t’ cure din’t do what they wanted.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Why, send it back, o’
course. They thowt it were a fairy, an’ so they wanted rid on it, an’ to get their own bairn back again.”

  The constable cleared his throat. I felt his gaze on my cheek and turned to him. “Wise woman?” he asked.

  I nodded. “She is a mad woman who lives in a shack in a field—they call it the leys. She is quite deluded. She claims to have lived among the fairies—she even imagines that she can see them.”

  “And is it true it was she who supplied the child’s cure? You did not speak of this.”

  “I had no time. Yes, it is true. She is a wild creature, unreclaimed, and I dare say does much harm to those foolish enough to visit her. The woman sells charms for her living. She finds lost items, turns off the evil eye, makes little potions and such like. She is poor, but she earns her bread by putting it about that she’s ‘failproof.’ That is why men go to her who should have more sense than to listen to such nonsense. It would never be in her own interest to fail at sending back a changeling—she, who claims to know the fairies better than anyone. She would never intend to effect so hard a cure that the child was sent beyond the very boundaries of this world.”

  I turned to Mary, whose face had reddened with fury. “But it was in your interest, was it not, Mrs. Gomersal? It was you who persuaded Miss Aikin that her child was not her own. It was you who convinced her to try your cures—you did it for his sake.” I gestured towards her boy, who still sat playing with his little captive upon the ground. At last the child felt our presence and raised his tousled head and gave a sudden broad grin, flashing his white teeth and tossing his curls. In that moment, there could be no doubt of his parentage.

  “He is the child of Edmund Calthorn, and it is Calthorn who provides this cottage and his bread, is it not? He paid for the boots upon the boy’s feet. Such matters are easily proved. You may turn your face away if you wish; we do not need your answer. We shall ask Calthorn himself.”