From Fairies and Creatures of the Night, Guard Me

by Emily de Courcy

  It would be a while before Rowland saw the Elf King as anything but a dark enchanter, or villain, but it would come in time, she thought.

  Helen took Lord Fitzroy’s hand and smiled into his eyes. “I meant what I said, about circling widdershins. But there is no time limit on this magic. Perhaps you had better join us for supper tonight. I shall tell the cook. We dine at seven.”

  Then she took Rowland, who was visibly disappointed at another aborted attempt to live up to the glory of his namesake. Most likely, he thought his sister a termagant who would be punishment enough to the fairy man for his lack of sense. Helen went home, Pulling Rowland along in her wake.

  “At least,” Helen told her brother teasingly, “you may keep the tambour – it is certain to take very well at one of your Cambridge parties. ”

  Pavane

  There was one day a year, every year, on which Galatea allowed herself to grieve. She always spent it in Vienna. That wasn’t to say that she didn’t sometimes grieve on other days, but that single day, set aside, was a necessity for remembering. She had a lot to remember and if she filled the rest of the year with her memories, there would be nothing of it left at all. Her head was full of faces and her heart of names, bluebells and Vienna. Always Vienna.

  It was a city of music, art and theatre, and a city of memories.

  Galatea sat with a tall glass of Einspänner, staring out of the big window of the little restaurant. Her coffee was mostly forgotten and the foam was starting to look a bit sad. Rain fell outside. The wide window was a little misted and people walked through the grey under a canopy of black umbrellas, bobbing like ships. She could almost catch her reflection in the glass. In this light, her blue eyes were the same shade as the endless grey outside.

  Staring at the rain, she let her mind drift on a breath and for a moment she saw him again in that crowded Viennese street, and heard his voice reaching out to her across time. Then she blinked and he was gone. There was a stranger in his place, in a black coat, huddled under another of the ubiquitous black umbrellas.

  Gala had sat there before, in her favourite coffee house, at the very same table, twenty years earlier, when things had been slower. She’d sat there with a tall thin man with fly-away hair, and she remembered arguing over cabaret tickets, and Act 2 Scene iii of some new play they had been writing, and whether they would be dreadfully late for the Opera ball.

  There was something about this new century that was unlike any of the ones that had come before, as though time had sped up all around her in one giant bound. The mortals walked this way and that, and she stood like a marble statue in their midst, feeling vaguely startled about the whole thing. The man with the fly-away hair had been blissfully impervious to any such force as time.

  Gala could still remember the early days, when time had begun to intrude into the world through sundials and church bells. They’d given people the illusion of conquering it, of having it at their disposal, and through this conquest they had become enslaved to it.

  The coffee house was one place where time seemed to halt a little, so that Gala might be allowed to keep up with it. She could sit there for hours, paging idly through her books, and musing, with nothing but coffee and fresh glasses of water to measure the hours.

  She remembered the way music had carried in the streets twenty years ago and poetry had been unabashedly recited at literature meets in cafes and smoky dizzy rooms full of students, connoisseurs, yuppies, and sometimes all three at once. She would go at night, the man with her, when the city lit up like a firefly.

  Gala supposed she could still find the poetry again, if she went in search of it, and perhaps she would, but it would never be quite the same.

  The man’s name had been Hans, as simple as he had been impossible. She supposed the name would echo around her heart forever, like the names of so many other friends and lovers through-out the centuries. In a way, that was its own kind of immortality.

  At least, a poet might have thought something like that, but the notion gave Gala little comfort. The wild grief never quite faded, no matter how many friends you lost, and on this one day she allowed it to bloom anew, so that it might fade just a little for the rest of the year.

  The date itself was quite inconsequential. When you’ve seen centuries bloom and wither, every date meant something and nothing. Gala could remember too well a time before official calendars and dates, almost beyond writing. And she had kept journals and grimoires from the moment she’d learned to hold a quill.

  She had volumes and volumes of scribblings now, in storage: a linguistic testament to the passage of time. Galatea herself was a far less convincing relic: she looked much the same as she had ever done. Her golden hair was shorter now, of course, and cleaner in the way of the 21st century , and her clothes more comfortable by far, if nowhere near as grand.

  She almost never bothered with witchcraft anymore. It didn’t seem to belong in such an expeditious first decade of an expeditious century.

  Gala watched a businessman sitting a table over, working his way through a stack of newspapers at his elbow, before returning her attention to her coffee. There was a book laid out before her, on the marble table top, bookmarked and scuffed.

  Gala ran a finger over the fading gold leaf on the cover. TS Eliot. Journey of the Magi. She opened it without thinking, eyes instantly drawn to the right line, and read, hearing another voice in her head: "I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different".

  It was a habit she had picked up from Hans. He was always reciting things, sometimes dipping in and out of books, sometimes pulling poetry out of thin air. He’d insisted that Gala was his muse, and she’d indulged him, though she’d known quite few real muses in her day and they had been nasty, capricious things, though pretty and charming.

  As it turned out, it was a somewhat brutal thing, being anyone’s muse, even when you weren’t a real one, because sometimes it was not the muse that left but the artist. And then the muse was set adrift, seeing ghosts in the crowd, having conversations with them in her head and spending far too much time ignoring her perfectly good coffee.

  “I see the world in your eyes,” Hans had breathed one balmy summer night when the curtains had fluttered over the open balcony door.

  And Gala had seen the world in his too, of course: a messy dishevelled world, preoccupied with stories, typewriter ribbons and dog-eared paperbacks. And what a wonderful world it had been. Like a burning, living thing: Hans had blazed through life, not merely existing but really, truly living.

  It had made her feel an echo of the same joie de vivre that fed him just from watching him talk, eyes bright and hands flying. Sometimes he’d wave his cigarette about too, frenetically. Gala had been like marble, really, filled with light and coffee, and inevitably brought to life. But life was not a kind thing to anyone, and time even less so.

  “You shouldn’t ever fall in love with anyone who has flames in their eyes – no good can come of it,” one of her sisters had said to her, back in the days before calendars. In those days, fire could easily mean death as well as life.

  But Gala had known a lot of people with fire in their eyes, had loved them even, with many different shades of love: men and women who’d burned bright and fast. They had reminded her of the worth of a single breath, because it was too easy to forget and turn back to marble: a pretty shell bound in a long and endless existance.

  Galatea leaned back in her chair and thought of time.

  They had talked about it a lot, in all its various forms and permutations, in the last few years: in a round-about kind of way. They had never talked about death. Over the centuries, she’s had to find ways to disguise the fact that her hair never faded, and she’d come back as her own daughter too many times to count.

  Hans had not been able to understand eternity – not even imagine it, really, though he had done her the courtesy of trying. It was a strangely entrancing sight, watching him imagine – a glimpse of an impossible world. Gala had
been riveted. Sometimes, he would imagine her as mortal instead, and that had been even more fascinating: at once wonderful and atrocious as, in his imagination, she aged and died, a victim to time.

  Perhaps, she would linger as a memory, then, like all the memories of friends in her heart, and perhaps she would one day fade entirely, not even that anymore. It was an interesting thought. There would come a time when even the shadow of her, which had always lingered in his eyes, would have faded, because he had been so inevitably mortal. He would eventually have followed her into that great mystery of death which all her time on earth could never hope to solve.

  “I shall live on love then. Forever,” he would declare when they spoke of time. “And on inspiration.”

  “You can’t live on love,” she’d tell him teasingly, neurotic scribbler that he was.

  “Nonsense. You’ll see.”

  It was a side-effect of his art that he had taken her for what she was, no questions asked, not a drop of disbelief. Sometimes he almost made her believe that he too would live forever: Hans was a truly remarkable actor, and they would drift happily off in that fantasy. But you couldn’t imagine death away no matter how hard you tried.

  Hans would laugh when she’d tell him how mismatched they were. If only there was a way he could be cured of time, she’d whisper.

  “An apple tree never bears fruit on the both sides the same year,” he’d say chidingly to that unfinished wish, and furrow his brow. “At least, I read that somewhere. But it’s about right… There could never be a world in which we both lived forever and fiddled with magic. It would be too much, surely – a travesty. ”

  But what did she care about travesties?

  They always died, eventually: the dear and trusted and loved. It was the longest and the hardest lesson of all. With time, life faded until only Gala remained, forever enduring.

  Artists, she supposed, had more fire than most, and burned out that much quicker for it. But it was easy to forget how fragile mortal lives were, how delicate.

  In their own quiet, private ways, they had both predicted that all would end in grand tragedy – the onslaught of time was not a thing even Gala could stop, after all. But they had been wrong. It had not been grand at all, but quick, simple, and all the more tragic for it: who could ever have predicted a boating accident?

  Just like Percy Bysshe Shelley. Gala would tell herself Hans would have liked that and try to laugh. Only, of course, he hadn’t had a funeral pyre like Shelley. It had not been a very stately thing: there had been artists and writers there, actors, musicians, directors and costumers. He would have hated anything stately.

  Hans had been light and energy, and that terrible electronic music they played in shops. She was the pavane.

  It is a great shame that nobody dances the pavane anymore, Gala thought sadly. It had somehow become a stylised thing for listening, and while it was still beautiful in this new incarnation, she longed of the old strains of the stately march. For the sweep of velvet and the muted, warm glow of pearls. That had been a beautiful, brutal world, measured but never stagnant.

  It was surprisingly easy to become stylised and stagnant.

  Hans had felt for literature and words something that went beyond love, beyond even the world, and so Gala had searched for the perfect words out of all the ones he had loved, to say at his funeral.

  In the end, she had found Ondine, worn like all his books. She’d opened it on the words she would say, well aware that he would have been the only one to really understand them, to find the joke in the tragedy. Forever after we shall remember this hour, the very hour before you kissed me, Ondine had said to her dying lover, also called Hans, and then Gala said those self-same words after her. Unlike Ondine, Galatea did not have the luxury of forgetting all, and drifting into the kelp, surrounded by her sisters.

  Life was a liquid thing, ebbing and meandering every which way: a silvery wisp you could never recapture, and you couldn’t wish someone back to life no matter how hard you tried, or how pure your love. Loss and time felt unsettling on her timeless shoulders. And so she had come back to Vienna, in the hope that Hans might teach her something, even in his absence.

  Galatea lived in a world of echoes.

  *

  She had unearthed Hans at the theatre sometime in the 1990s, just as he had unearthed his impossible collection of dusty paperbacks in forgotten crates in second-hand book shops, hopeful and triumphant.

  These days, Gala wrote scripts and put on old ones nobody remembered any more.

  She had a theatre of her very own now. It was a little scuffed around the edges, and the paint was somewhat peeling, but the boards were old and strong. She directed her own productions: bringing to life old ghosts and older memories, if only for a few nights. On her stage, she gave them words, bodies and life, and then they faded away once more when the lights were relit and the applause faded.

  Gala thought that she might add a dance to her latest offering. A pavane – stately and elegant, as it ought to be. A dance that had slowed over time, but lost now of its dignity in the slowing.

  In fact, the very first time she’d met Hans, he had turned up at another Viennese theatre where she’d worked – a friend of one of the actresses, he told her. They were in a writing circle together – met in a nearby café every Thursday.

  He didn’t really like modern theatre much, he’d confided in a dramatic whisper.

  Gala, run off her feet with putting on the new production, absorbed by last-minute scripting changes, and lulled by the sound of the rehearsal on stage, merely nodded.

  “You should put on something classic here. Shakespeare, Goethe!” he’d declared then, despite her inattention, making Gala look up from her script and pencils, startled.

  “Shakespeare?” she’d repeated in astonishment, wondering what he was talking about.

  “Oh yes! This is just the setting for it, don’t you know! And people will come. They always do, when you put on Shakespeare. They don’t even mind that he was English. And the costumes would be marvellous! Can’t you just picture it?”

  And he’d transformed, right there in front of her eyes, while she watched, still confounded by this young man who’d seemingly appeared out of nowhere.

  “Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake – it’s everything except what it is!” His voice was marvellous for a moment, bigger than the theatre. “Romeo and Juliet. Act 1, scene i,” he’d finished, giving her a charming smile.

  “Are you an actor?” Gala had asked. She met so many new ones every day, it was difficult to keep all the names and faces straight. She’d felt a little guilty, wondering if she was meant to know him.

  He’d looked a little sheepish then. “Oh no! I’m a writer.”

  And he really had been – he’d had cavernous stacks of notebooks, reference books and fiction all around his flat. And he was always writing – you could tell – even when there wasn’t a pencil or typewriter in sight.

  He’d lived in stories. He’d gone to plays and writing groups, concerts and bookshops. Somehow he’d managed to have a dozen adventures just by wandering the city, seeing what would come his way.

  It was an interesting form of magic – more solid and unpredictable than her witchery and also a lot more subtle. Gala had never made up her mind if she could call it magic. Hans had laughed and said it was, of a kind, and would she like to go to the park with him and have a few beers with his sculptor friends.

  And she would go, still wondering about the magic. There was a lot of magic around. Always had been.

  You always had to be careful not to leave pieces of your reflection behind in mirrors, polished pieces of cutlery and especially water: Gala had often heard that warning in the long-ago, and it must have stuck. It had been a wisdom carefully kept. A reflection could easily get stolen because it was such a fluid thing, evanescent and unsure. Hans had never heard of such a thing, and when she’d told him he’d taken a par
ticular delight in his carelessness – like a child walking the lip of a fountain.

  It wasn’t until he was gone and Gala was left with his stacks of notebooks in addition to her own, that she was grateful for his carelessness. She’d gone around the flat in a stupor, rustling like paper and looking at the pieces of mirror, but indirectly, out the corners of her eyes, lest the slippery images flit away like dreams. It was all that was left, after all. Gala would catch glimpses of him and that was how she was able to breathe.

  And then she’d taken to going to the coffee house and set aside a day for remembering, for him and or all the other echoes. She’d remember the funeral and Ondine, and she would realise that he had taught her something in his absence: about memory and time, and the amazing, impossible things love could do.

  “I’ve heard it said that only love and death change all things…” she quoted in a whisper, earning a strange look from the businessman next to her.

  Hans would have known who it was that had said that.

  Galatea would think of the funeral and remember that they didn’t start out like that.

  Oh no, Gala thought, closing her eyes, taking another sip of her coffee and listening to time.

  No, it all started in a little theatre in his beloved Vienna.

  Dear Readers

  Thank you so much for taking a chance on my book, and I very much hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. It’s always an honour to know what people are reading my stories and that hopefully these stories have made their pay just a little bit brighter.

  If you enjoyed this book, please consider leaving a review for it on Amazon – it doesn’t have to be a long one, but positive customer reviews are the best way to attract new readers and to help them gage if it’s a book they’d like to try.

  So I will be very grateful if you could drop a quick line!