The Hidden People

by Allison Littlewood

  I slumped into the chair where Helena had been wont to sit, her back so straight, and distantly, I heard a sound.

  I went to the window and threw open the casement. My heart beat painfully within my chest. It was music—and such music as I had never before heard. It rose to meet me, the violins weeping and dying before rising again from the ash, a plaintive air so full of joy and sorrow that I yearned after it. In that moment, I knew that I would break; indeed, that I had already broken.

  I turned aside and found myself facing the wide, spotted mirror hanging upon the wall. I did not recognise my own reflection; I leaned in closer and stared, unblinking, at the pale-faced, withered creature before me. It stared back; I wondered that it did not flinch from the sight. The features were mine, albeit thinner than they had been, but they were strange to me. The lips were whiter, the cheeks more sharply carved into hollows, the shadows lying deeper than they once had. The eyes, though, were the most peculiar thing of all; they met my own with the look of a stranger.

  I swayed as a wave of dizziness took me, and the figure in the mirror swayed also, but I knew it to be a sham. It was something I did not—could not—understand, and then it came to me, I suddenly saw it all, and I felt sickened.

  The hands that had pushed my wife away were not my hands. The ones that stole her book from her, that left her miserable—surely not mine. The being who crept into a pantry in the dead of night and took up a jug of old, dried herbs and mixed them into a paste—those hands had not been mine; they could never have been mine.

  I caught my breath, started back from the mirror and peered at my fingers, spread before me. I saw it all. I had thought my wife a stranger to me; I had thought her changed, and she had been: she had changed as was natural, as should be expected. But I? I had changed also, and I had had no reason for it. My wife should have ever been as dear to me as she once was, but I had been a man possessed: a stranger even to myself. The one who had truly changed was me.

  I rushed back to the mirror, seizing the frame and pushing my face up close to the glass, staring into the dimness. The face inside it was wild; elemental; different. I did not understand how I had failed to see it before, and yet—the old stories told of this too, didn’t they? Some changelings forgot they were changelings, burying the knowledge so deeply that they could stay with their human families for ever.

  In the next moment, I had torn the mirror from its hook on the wall and thrown it into the fireplace. It shattered; my image was fragmented into a hundred pieces and all of them stared back at me with those eyes! I could not bear it. Did a changeling not know itself to be a changeling? Why could they not be brought to understand what they were before they could do harm?

  I looked at my hands once more, knowing what they had done—that they had stolen the life from my unborn child. All doubt drained from me. I was an unnatural creature; indeed, I know not how I could ever have considered myself to be a man.

  I fell to my knees upon the hearth and snatched up a shard of glass, pointed and wickedly sharp, and stared into it. There appeared once more before me that familiar form: an illusion; a spectre. And then something strange happened, because as I watched, the form’s expression changed; knowledge passed across its features—understanding, even an awful kind of acceptance. And then, slowly, the figure which looked just like me shifted and turned its back upon me.

  I stared for one brief moment at the back of its head, and then I hurled it into the fireplace and rushed from the house. This time, I left the key in the door behind me.

  Chapter Forty

  I hurried up the slope of Pudding Pye Hill, seeing everything anew, and yet remembering the first time I had taken this path. The sunshine lent the grass an almost unnatural brilliancy and the sky above me was the most vivid and peerless blue. Buttercups shone like glass amidst the viridian, and I saw that something had changed after all: the dandelions were reduced to stalks, denuded of their seeds. There were no more clocks. The hours, minutes and seconds had all blown away.

  I turned to see Halfoak, still somnolent, still peaceful, a thousand miles or more from the possibility of wickedness or tribulation. There, all went on as they always had—all, save perhaps for one.

  I did not wish to dwell upon it. I remembered the way I had once climbed this hill, unused, then, to the endless glare of summer, and I had sat upon the barrow. There, sleep had overtaken me, rising out of the earth until I had been enveloped by it. She had warned me, had she not, that it was dangerous to sleep in such a place; that the fairies would come and steal my soul away. Perhaps even then, they already had.

  I stumbled onward, not towards the crown of the hill but towards the little oaken grove. All was more vivid to my eye than it had ever been: enchanter’s nightshade nodded in the sunshine; self-heal pushed its purple flowers up from the verdure whilst henbane bent beneath my feet. I knew all their names at last; they had been revealed to me. And then, with a start, I saw them.

  It was so brief it might never have happened. I saw eyes, eyes peeping at me from behind a blade of grass, and then gone. Something fluttered at the edge of my vision and I whirled to see wings of the most brilliant blue, there in a moment and then vanished. As I stared, a little face emerged from the bell of a foxglove. It was sly and grinning, the eyes shaped like a cat’s and as black as sloes, and I realised that I could no longer hear their music; that in its place there was only the faintest tinkling of laughter.

  When I tried to look at them directly, they hid from me. I smiled at them but they would not greet me—that, perhaps, was as it should be. And yet I felt them watching, their eyes upon me, all around and everywhere. As I went on they were lost to sight, but I knew that they were there still, all of them, so bright and so beautiful; I saw their glowing colours; I glimpsed their tiny wings; and my smile broadened as I went, feeling all of their splendour, their presence, the magic that had been hidden and was revealed to me at last. And I saw that everything was more wonderful with them in the world. I did not sing the words that were in my heart, but the whole of my being expanded at the idea of them so that I felt it must burst for the joy and the madness of it.

  The grass was soft under my feet. Thorn bushes did not scratch or hinder my way. It was not long before I was standing once again before the fairy ring, marked out so plainly in the grass. I did not enter it, not now; there was no need.

  I stood beneath the first trees—they had not ceased their whispering; perhaps they never did. Perhaps now they would whisper to me. And it occurred to me then that they might all be waiting for me within the hill: my true wife, my true child. They would become the music I could almost hear, swelling and rising with the flowing of my blood and the beating of my heart, so filled with joy and sorrow and yearning. I would take them in my arms; they would cleave to me, and their smiles would have love in them; there would be nothing between us, no broken trust, no blackened promises, nothing to mar our perfect happiness. My heart, of a sudden, felt light, as if I were nothing but a dandelion seed, ready to blow away on the air.

  There was but one thing remaining to be done. I forced myself to walk to the little grave. It was just as I had described it, in another world entirely. The sward was cut and stacked, the topmost layers yellowing in the sun. The earth, which had been so dark beneath its covering, had dried to a dull, lifeless grey. I had, as I had thought, covered it once more; the sad contents were gratefully hidden. At its head, still in its place in the ground, was the iron blade, keeping the door open.

  I stood there for a time, looking down at the grave with its nameless occupant, returned to the hollow hill by the people of Halfoak. I did not know how long I lingered, but the air grew cooler and the breeze gained in strength, wrapping itself about me, and after a time its caress became interspersed with stronger gusts that presaged rain. The shadows lengthened, those of branches and twigs stretching inwards like fingers towards the cleft that lay on the other side of the grove. They pointed the way.

  The light grew lurid
with the hues of sunset, but still I did not turn. Instead I bent, seizing the knife by its leather handle, and without touching the iron, I pulled it from the earth. There was no reluctance; it slid out easily, the blade clean. The metal did not look as if it could burn my skin; it was cold and indifferent.

  I walked towards the door in the hill, taking the knife with me. How long I had pondered the secrets of what might lie within, and still I had no inkling of what they may be; I knew only that its mysteries, held so close, were now upon me; and that soon I should know them all. I knew also that I would never tell. There were things of this world—and not of this world—that each man must discover for himself.

  I did not look back. From somewhere behind me came the first distant intimations of thunder. It was the end of summer; the end of all things. It appeared, at last, that we were going to have a storm.

  Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,

  Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;

  Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight;

  Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

  Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:

  For there the mystical brotherhood

  Of sun and moon and hollow and wood

  And river and stream work out their will;

  And God stands winding His lonely horn,

  And time and the world are ever in flight;

  And love is less kind than the gray twilight,

  And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.

  William Butler Yeats

  Black and chill are Their nights on the wold;

  And They live so long and They feel no pain:

  I shall grow up, but never grow old,

  I shall always, always be very cold,

  I shall never come back again!

  Charlotte Mary Mew

  Acknowledgments

  A couple of years ago, a fellow writer called Simon Clark asked me to write a short story for an anthology he was editing, called The Mammoth Book of Sherlock Holmes Abroad. I’ll confess, the idea terrified me. I knew very little of Sherlock Holmes, and furthermore, the story would clearly need to be set not just in the past but overseas. It looked rather like a research-heavy nightmare, but the concept intrigued me, so I did what I often do with short story requests that sound like there might be an adventure attached: I said yes and figured I’d work it all out later. I followed up that “yes” with a month of immersion in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. Actually, I got lost in them. I watched all the re-runs of Sherlock adaptations on television that I could. I loved it all: not just the characters, but the author’s wonderful use of language. And then I wrote my story, and found I loved doing that too.

  This long-winded introduction is my way of thanking Simon Clark for giving me a nudge to try something, without which I’m not sure I’d have set out on the voyage that became The Hidden People. It not only gave me an interest in the era but a little confidence in writing a historical novel. So thank you, Simon, and indeed all the other independent press editors and publishers who have, from time to time, led me down new creative roads.

  Massive thanks are due as ever to my beloved editor, Jo Fletcher, along with the team at Jo Fletcher Books and Quercus. Your enthusiasm made it a whole lot easier, and once again, I have benefited from Jo’s editing magic (despite those darlings I couldn’t quite kill). Thank you too to my agent Oli Munson, who has been hugely supportive of this project. I am also grateful to Leo Nickolls for an amazing cover design and to Wayne McManus for taking care of my website.

  It may sound a little odd to thank a whole county in the acknowledgments, but this book owes so much to Yorkshire, as do I. It is a place full of richness and beauty and bluffness and odd words and wonderful sayings, even if, as Albie discovers, it may sometimes be a little short on consonants. Thanks in particular to Julie Law and the Meadowcroft girls for helping me collect Yorkshire-isms. I will try harder in future to “put t’ wood in t’ oyle.”

  Finally, for putting up with my odd and bookish ways, thanks are due as ever to Fergus, and to my parents Ann and Trevor. Love always.

  Author’s Note

  The idea for this novel began, somewhat sadly, with the rather unpleasant case of Bridget Cleary, an Irish woman who was burned as a fairy changeling in 1895. Hers wasn’t an isolated case, though it was one of the most recent and shocking deaths connected with the idea of changelings. Of course, fairy beliefs are perhaps rooted deepest and linger longest in the Celtic countries. The word “Celtic” comes from the Greek “keltoi,” with “kel” meaning hidden—so they were the original “hidden people.” The name Kelthorpe in this book is a little nod in that direction.

  Yorkshire has its own tales of the folk, however. The name Pudding Pye Hill is borrowed from an ancient barrow near Thirsk, a mound which was said to have been raised by the fairies. Legend has it that if you run around it nine times, climb to the top and stick a knife in the ground, you will be able to hear their revelry within. Maybe one day I’ll try it. There are also ancient tales of farm labourers stepping into fairy rings and being stolen by the folk; probably a grand excuse for an unexplained absence.

  Several of my sources tell of the railways sweeping such beliefs away, and yet they persisted in forgotten corners of the land, or even not so forgotten: as late as 1917, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle proclaimed his belief in the fairies said to have been caught on camera at Cottingley, near Bradford in West Yorkshire. In his treatise The Coming of the Fairies he included several accounts of people’s sightings of the little folk.

  It may surprise many that cunning folk such as the wise woman were operating as late as the first half of the twentieth century. They did indeed gain much of their income from simple charms, herbal remedies or finding lost things; using iron goggles to view the fairies or staring into a bird’s yellow eye to draw out the jaundice are based on real examples of their art.

  And now to sources. The lines from William Butler Yeats in the epigraph are from a lesser-known version of his poem “The Stolen Child,” as published in his book Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. I preferred the mention of woodland to the more usual “waters and the wild” for the contrast with Charlotte Mary Mew’s rather more terrifying wood in the extract from her poem “The Changeling.” The lines at the end of the novel are taken from the same poem by Mew, whilst the verses from Yeats are from “Into the Twilight.” All Things Bright and Beautiful was written by Cecil Frances Alexander.

  The sharp-eyed will spot that Helena’s “Look, Lizzie” song in chapter twenty-eight is from Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market.” I have of course quoted in several places from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and from the traditional folk songs A Beautiful Boy, My Bonny Yorkshire Lass and The Poor Old Weaver’s Daughter. The Yorkshire Garland website at www.yorkshirefolksong.net was invaluable for setting me on their trail.

  For those who would like to delve more deeply into some of the subjects touched on in the novel, here are some of the books or websites I found particularly interesting during my research:

  The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story, Angela Bourke

  The Science of Fairy Tales: An Enquiry into Fairy Mythology, Edwin Sidney Hartland

  The Coming of the Fairies, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Edge of the Unknown, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Celtic Twilight, W. B. Yeats

  The Wind Among the Reeds, W. B. Yeat

  Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, W. B. Yeats

  Grimm’s Fairy Stories, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

  Fairy Tales: Their Origin and Meaning, With Some Account of Dwellers in Fairyland, John Thackray Bunce

  The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns & Fairies: A Study In Folk-lore & Psychical Research, Robert Kirk

  Once Upon a Time, Marina Warner

  www.fairyist.com

  http://plover.net/~agarvin/faerie/poems/

  The Old Straight Track: Its Mounds, Beacons, Moats, Site
s and Mark Stones, Alfred Watkins

  County Folklore Vol 2—The Folklore Society, 1899, Mrs. Gutch

  Wit, Character, Folklore and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire, Richard Blakeborough

  Yorkshire Folk-Talk, Marmaduke Charles Frederick Morris

  Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain, Russell Ash and Katherine Briggs

  Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History, Owen Davies

  Daily Life in Victorian London: An Extraordinary Anthology, Lee Jackson

  The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed, Judith Flanders

  The Real Lark Rise to Candleford: Life in the Victorian Countryside, Pamela Horn

  How to be a Victorian, Ruth Goodman

  Victorian Country Life, Janet Sacks

  Victorian London: The Life of a City 1840–1870, Liza Picard

  Victorian Farm, Alex Langlands, Peter Ginn and Ruth Goodman

  Houdini and Conan Doyle, Christopher Sandford

  What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, Daniel Pool

  Forms of Speech in Victorian Fiction, Raymond Chapman

  Hedingham Harvest: Victorian Family Life in Rural England, Geoffrey Robinson

  www.ephemera-society.org.uk

  www.crystalpalacefoundation.org.uk

  http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk