by Gwyneth Rees
Connie tried to speak but, just like in her dream that morning, her voice wouldn’t come. Then, as her eyes adjusted, she saw that they were flying towards a solid wall of gold. There was a huge letter O written on the wall and it seemed to be increasing in size as they flew towards it. Just as they were almost there, the middle popped out of the O and they were shooting straight through it and out the other side.
‘We’re here!’ Sapphire gasped, laughing as they glided to a halt. ‘What do you think?’
Connie stared around her in amazement, totally speechless. They had arrived here in less than a minute. She felt dizzy. And whatever she had been expecting, it hadn’t been this.
They seemed to be in a fairy back garden, standing on a rectangle of bright-green grass. The lawn was bordered by flower beds full of bluebells, just like the ones Ruby had made grow by magic outside Bluebell Hall. A washing line was strung from one end of the garden to the other. On it were pegged what looked like sheets, but which were actually the pages of books hanging out to dry.
‘It’s part of our job to look after the books in the libraries,’ Sapphire explained. ‘Sometimes we give them a bath. They’re always very grateful because human librarians can’t do that. We use special magic water, you see, which means they don’t get ruined when they get wet.’
Connie looked behind her and saw a small house with a bright-purple back door. The colours all seemed brighter here, especially the fairies’ clothes. Sapphire’s pastel-coloured dress was a much more vivid shade of blue now, and Emerald’s was a much bolder green. Connie looked down at what she was wearing. Her jeans were less faded and her pale-yellow jumper now looked as bright as the sun.
‘Can you imagine how brilliant that ruby ring would have looked if it had come here?’ Sapphire said, wistfully. ‘No wonder Ruby wanted to bring it.’
‘Come on,’ said Emerald, sounding much more confident now that she was back in fairyland. ‘The library we want is this way.’
She led them out through a door in the garden wall, into a park that looked like the sort of place Connie might have drawn with her crayons when she was little. The grass was bright green and the sky was turquoise blue, with white cotton-wool clouds. The trees all had smooth brown trunks and bushy green foliage on top. Nestled in the foliage were rosy red apples and golden yellow pears, which all looked ripe enough to eat.
Fairies were dotted about the park in little groups, reading or sunbathing. As Connie looked at them, she noticed something odd. They had funny-coloured hair. A lot of them had black hair like Sapphire and a few had red hair like Ruby, but there were a lot with blue hair and some even had hair that was green. Sapphire saw Connie staring and explained. ‘Book fairies have hair the same colour as ink. That’s why it’s mostly black or blue, though a few of us are red-heads or green-heads. You’ll never see a blonde book fairy though.’
‘Excuse me,’ Emerald said huffily, pointing to her golden curls.
‘Except Emerald, of course,’ Sapphire added. ‘But she’s not a natural blonde. She dyes it. She’s got green hair underneath. She looks really silly when her roots start to show!’
‘I do not!’
‘Yes, you do!’
As they argued, Connie noticed three fairies with blue hair sitting together on the nearby grass having a picnic. They were waving to her and smiling as if they knew her.
‘Who are they?’ she asked Sapphire and Emerald, as she waved back.
Sapphire turned to look. ‘They’re Canadian book fairies,’ she explained. ‘Much friendlier than English ones. They’re always waving to complete strangers.’
‘Canadian fairies?’ Connie felt excited. ‘Can we ask them if they know Emma? She’s bound to have gone to a library in Canada.’
‘There’s no time to stop now, but don’t worry. There are always loads of Canadian fairies hanging out in this park because there’s a really long street of Canadian entry-books near here. We can go and talk to them on the way back if you like.’
‘A street of entry-books?’ Connie queried, thinking that sounded very odd.
‘That’s right. Like you get streets of houses. The entry-book we need is one of those over there. See those ones that back on to the park?’
Connie saw then, that what at first sight looked like a row of terraced houses on the other side of the park, was in fact a row of giant books, the backs of which contained little doors and windows. The windows all had brightly painted shutters and window boxes underneath full of flowers.
‘The doors lead to the libraries,’ Sapphire explained. ‘But the windows are just for decoration. Pretty, aren’t they?’ And she led the way across the grass.
‘This is the fairy librarian who works in the same library as Eliza,’ Sapphire said, introducing Connie to a fairy in a yellow dress, who had come to meet them just outside the door of one of the book-houses. The fairy had long, black curly hair and looked very similar to the other fairies, except that she wore a badge with the word LIBRARIAN printed on it in gold letters. It reminded Connie of the badges the class librarians wore at school.
‘When we go through the door, the beam will take us to the library,’ the fairy explained. ‘As you can see, the door is quite narrow so it’s best if we go through one by one. I’ve put a wastepaper basket at the other end to give Connie a soft landing.’ She slipped a gold key into the lock, turned it and opened the door.
Connie gasped. A beam of light that started at the door and was as high and as wide as the doorway itself, seemed to stretch inwards into the house, except that there was no house on the other side of the door. There was nothing but the lightbeam.
‘I’ll go first.’ The fairy librarian stepped over the doorstep, became a glowing yellow colour for a few moments, then accelerated away from them along the beam pathway.
‘You go next,’ Sapphire told Connie.
Connie stepped forward nervously and found herself surrounded by light just like before, only this time it was a bit scarier since she didn’t have the hands of the two fairies to hold on to. But before she had time to think, she was being whooshed at top speed along the beam and then, after only a minute or two, the light was gone and she felt herself falling through the air. She landed with a bump in a huge heap of scrunched-up giant balls of paper.
‘Are you all right?’ a fairy voice called out to her.
Connie, who was struggling to see anything over the top of all the paper, cried out, ‘Please can you help me out of here?’
The fairy librarian flew down to grab both of Connie’s hands. She pulled her up and out of the giant basket to land safely on the floor, by which time, Emerald and Sapphire had arrived too.
‘In a few minutes the shrinking spell should wear off and then you can go and find Eliza,’ Sapphire told her.
Connie expected that the shrinking spell would wear off gradually and that she would get bigger very slowly, bit by bit. But that didn’t happen. Instead, one second she was leaning against the spine of a huge book with her fairy friends on either side of her, and the next, she was in a completely different place – or so it seemed – leaning against a bookshelf in a huge round room. Her three fairy companions were still with her, but she had to look down at her feet to see them.
She seemed to be on a narrow balcony that ran round the entire wall of the room. She could see lots of old-fashioned desks below her where people were sitting reading, and a central desk, raised up higher than the others, where a librarian was sitting. Connie looked up at the ceiling and held her breath because, even for somebody who was human-sized, the huge gold and blue domed ceiling of the library was awesome. It had a glass window in the top and more windows lower down.
The balcony on which she was standing was the higher of two that ran round the book-lined walls. She looked for a staircase leading up to it from below, but there wasn’t one. And nobody seemed to be on either of the balconies except her.
A grey-haired woman who obviously worked there was rushing towards her, waving
her arms about. ‘How did you get up there?’ she shouted up to her crossly. ‘Nobody is allowed up there.’
Everyone in the library seemed to have stopped what they were doing to look up at her.
‘Sapphire! Emerald!’ Connie whispered desperately. ‘Help me!’
But instead of helping, the three fairies just giggled and flew off the balcony. ‘WOW!’ Connie heard Emerald gasp in an excited voice. ‘This is the coolest library ever! Let’s fly right to the top.’
Connie could see two men in brown uniforms entering the main door as she looked round again for a way to climb down. The security guards quickly joined the librarian and Connie heard them ask how they could get up on to the top balcony. Connie saw the women point to a concealed door in one of the wooden wall panels.
Just then a loud gasp went up. Connie looked up with everybody else and saw that the dome above was totally filled with a bright sparkly dust.
As the cloud of fairy dust floated downwards to reach first the balconies, then the reading room itself, everything it touched seemed to light up. The books, the reading desks, people’s clothes, even their faces, all started glowing. And then – in the time it took her to blink – Connie found that she was no longer alone on the top balcony, but sitting at a desk with lots of other people on the ground floor. After a few more blinks, the fairy-dust cloud had vanished and the library had returned to normal apart from the two security guards who were still standing staring upwards, looking confused.
‘Yes? Can I help you?’ the librarian asked them, as if she had totally forgotten what had just happened.
Connie saw that everyone else in the library had gone back to what they had previously been doing – reading or working on the computers – as if their memories of the last few minutes had been completely wiped out too. Fairy dust was obviously pretty strong stuff. She looked up and could just make out three little specks of green, blue and yellow, whizzing around the dome far above them.
As the librarian walked past her, she remembered why she was here and jumped up from her seat. ‘Excuse me,’ she began. ‘I’m . . . I’m looking for a librarian who works here called Eliza.’
For an awful moment Connie thought that this fierce-looking woman was going to turn out to be Mrs Fitzpatrick’s great-niece – gone prematurely grey from being so bad-tempered – but, after staring at Connie suspiciously for a second or two, she replied, in a loud whisper, ‘Eliza is over at the main desk.’ She pointed towards a much younger woman with dark hair who was sitting at the desk in the centre of the room.
Connie hurried over, starting to run through in her mind what she was going to say when she got there. It was all very well for Ruby to send her off to speak to Eliza and find out about the ring, but it might have helped if she’d suggested a few ways for her to bring up the subject. As it was, Connie had ended up having to plan what she was going to say herself, and she wasn’t sure how convincing it was going to sound.
Connie went and stood in front of the desk. The young woman looked up at her and smiled. ‘Yes?’
‘Eliza?’ Connie asked nervously.
‘That’s right. Can I help you?’
‘You don’t know me,’ Connie continued quickly, ‘but I know your great-aunt, Mrs Fitzpatrick. She wanted me to come and say hello.’
‘My great-aunt?’ Eliza was frowning as if she couldn’t think who Connie meant.
‘Yes. She’s your mother’s aunt. She lives in a big house called Bluebell Hall – at least, she used to.’
That seemed to jog the librarian’s memory. ‘Oh, I know. My grandmother told me about that place, but I’ve never been there – or met my great-aunt. How did she find out that I worked here?’
‘Because . . .’ Connie faltered, but only for a second. ‘Because her cousin told her. I’m staying at Bluebell Hall with my aunt and uncle. I met Mrs Fitzpatrick and she told me about her family and about her ruby ring. It was a sort of family treasure that was handed down from generation to generation. I’m doing a project about history and antique stuff, you see, and she thought you or your mother might be able to tell me more about the ring.’
Eliza was looking even more surprised now. ‘Are you talking about the famous ring that caused the big family feud? The one that made Grandma and her sister stop speaking to each other?’
‘Yes. Mrs Fitzpatrick feels really bad about that now. The thing is, she’s lost the ring so I said . . . I said I’d write a story about it for her instead. And she told me that the person who knew most about it was her sister, only she was dead, but that she might have told her daughter about it – your mother. And we didn’t know where she lived but we knew where to find you. So . . . since . . . since I was coming to London to visit . . . I-I thought I’d ask you if you could ask your mother.’
‘My mother’s dead now too, I’m afraid,’ Eliza said. ‘She died last year.’
‘Oh.’ Connie flushed bright red, but Eliza continued swiftly.
‘My grandmother used to tell me stories about the special family ring though. I probably know more about it than my mother did. Mum was never as interested as I was in family history.’
‘Can you tell me about it then?’ Connie asked, starting to feel excited again.
‘Well, yes . . . I guess I can . . . But wait a minute – this is all really weird. Who’s here with you?’
Connie paused, feeling her heart starting to thump. ‘Er . . . Sapphire,’ she replied
Eliza started to look around as if she expected a responsible adult to appear from behind the books and introduce herself. ‘Is she your childminder?’
Connie nodded. (Well, it wasn’t a total lie. Sapphire and Emerald were her minders – in a way.) ‘She . . . er . . . thought I should come and speak to you myself.’
‘Well, listen . . . I get a break at eleven o’clock. Can you get Sapphire to bring you back then? I could meet you in the cafe in the courtyard – the one on that side.’ She pointed to her left. ‘I expect you’ll want to have a look round the museum while you’re waiting, won’t you? The Egyptian stuff is really good.’
‘What museum?’ Connie asked.
‘This one, of course. This is the reading room in the British Museum!’
‘Oh.’ Connie glanced up again to look at the magnificent domed ceiling. She couldn’t see any sign of the fairies up there now. She quickly agreed to meet Eliza in the cafe and slipped away, saying that Sapphire would be waiting for her. She felt bad about telling so many lies, but she couldn’t see how else she could get Eliza to tell her what they needed to know.
Outside the library she found herself with lots of tourists in a very bright indoor courtyard. The courtyard had white walls and a white marble floor and its roof was made up of triangular panes of glass, all fitting together to make a huge glass ceiling. The white library building had two wide white staircases curving up in each direction round its outside, leading to a restaurant at the top.
Connie followed some signs pointing towards the Egyptian section of the museum. As it was the summer holidays, there were lots of people here with children, so Connie didn’t look out of place as she crossed the courtyard.
Connie took her time looking round the colossal statues of sphinxes and falcons and ancient Egyptians, then found her way to the rooms where they kept the Egyptian mummies and stone coffins. She was so busy studying a diagram that showed how to embalm a body and prepare it for the afterlife that she hardly noticed the time passing. She was surprised when she looked at her watch and found that it was nearly eleven o’clock.
She easily found the right cafe and Eliza appeared a few minutes after eleven, carrying a paper cup of coffee. She sat down on the bench beside Connie and asked, ‘Where’s your childminder then?’
‘Sapphire’s in the library,’ Connie said. ‘She really likes that domed ceiling. Don’t worry. She knows that I’m meeting you here.’
‘Hmm.’ Eliza took a sip of her drink. ‘Well, I’m still feeling really shocked by all of this. I mean, it
’s incredible – you knowing my great-aunt and coming here and looking me up. I didn’t even know my mother’s aunt was still alive, let alone aware of my existence.’
‘Her cousin told her about you before she died,’ Connie said. ‘Mrs Fitzpatrick doesn’t have any other relatives. She doesn’t get many visitors. I think she upsets people quite a lot, but I don’t think she means to. I think she’s quite lonely really.’
‘Oh dear,’ Eliza sighed. ‘Now you’re making me feel guilty for not visiting her myself. But my mother always said that if we ever tried to get in touch, she was bound to think we were just after her mon—’ Eliza stopped abruptly, obviously having second thoughts about confiding this to Connie who she had, after all, only just met.
‘Don’t worry,’ Connie said quickly. ‘Mrs Fitzpatrick couldn’t possibly think that now, because she hasn’t got any money any more. All she’s got is Bluebell Hall and she’s selling that to pay for her nursing home.’
‘She’s in a nursing home?’
‘Yes. She fell down the stairs and broke her hip so now she’s in a wheelchair.’
‘Oh dear.’ Eliza was silent for a few moments. Then she said, ‘You must like her a lot to be doing all this for her.’
‘I like—’ Connie stopped herself just in time. She had been about to say that she liked Ruby a lot and that was the reason why she was doing this. But it was true that she quite liked Mrs Fitzpatrick too. ‘I do like her. So can you tell me some stories about the ring then?’
Eliza nodded. ‘My grandmother talked about that ring all the time. She could go on for hours about it. Let’s see now . . . There was the story about the wishing tree and how it grew from the spot where the ring was first given to one of Grandma’s ancestors. That was a good one. And there was the story about how the ring was used in a secret engagement in the bluebell woods. Or there’s my favourite story, about how Grandma’s grandmother – my great-great-grandmother – went for a midnight swim in the lake and lost the ring until the fairies found it for her.’
