He smiled. She forgot how to walk.
Donal tugged on her hand. “Mother, we shall be late!”
Eden took herself in hand and walked at a steady pace until she reached the cart. Donal held up his arms, and Hartley swung him about to deposit him in the rear seat. His gaze met Eden’s with a conspiratorial glimmer.
“Is your ladyship ready?”
“Always.” She offered her hand. He took it, squeezing lightly, and helped her up.
He held the ribbons only as a pretense while Copper pulled them down the lane at a brisk, cheerful pace. Wild-flowers lining the way—eyebright, buttercup, and globe-flower—swayed and nodded in the warm summer breeze, and the smell of ripening hay was everywhere. Soon it would be cut and heaped in great mounds in the fields to be dried. A bee set aside its diligent quest for nectar and buzzed lazily about Donal’s head as if confiding its secrets.
Near the village, children searched among the gooseberry bushes for early ripened fruit, eating as much as they gathered. They stopped to wave at the cart as it passed. Farmers and laborers, with families or without, made their ways singly and in groups to Mr. Topping’s byre, eager for the match.
Hartley exchanged more than one secret glance with Eden, and every so often he would point out a rare flower to her and Donal, or make a teasing remark that sent the boy into sudden laughter. That was something that had changed in him; he had learned to laugh, even jest, with genuine pleasure.
“Tell me another story about the Faerie Folk,” Donal said.
Eden realized that he was speaking to Hartley. Unease blossomed in her chest.
“What stories are these?” she asked.
“Hartley tells me about the Faeries, who used to live all over England,” Donal offered helpfully. “Only they don’t call themselves Faeries.”
“Indeed?” She glanced at Hartley. “It sounds… most entertaining.”
Was it her imagination, or did he seem to share her discomfiture?
He shrugged. “They are merely stories I have gathered in my travels,” he said, gazing at the road ahead. “This country is rife with them.”
“Like the one Kirkby told us—about the Faerie king who dived in the forest and cursed the dale?”
“No.” His jaw flexed under tanned skin. “Not like that.”
“Tir-na-nog is the place the Faeries go when they leave here,” Donal piped in. “It’s never cold there, and the trees are always green.”
“Are all the Faeries there now, Donal?” she asked with a tense smile. “You have never seen one, have you?”
“No,” he answered seriously. “Even when there were lots of them, they were hard to see. Some of them were very small. Some of them were as big as we are, so they could pretend to be real people. They were the ones who left first.”
Pretend to be like real people. Eden’s mind lost its way in a memory, in an image of Cornelius and the antlered man-beast he had become. Once more she thought of her notion that Hartley was somehow related. Who better to tell these tales than one of the Fair Folk himself?
“Why?” she whispered. “Why did they leave?”
“Because of the cold iron and all the mortals who cut down the woods.” Donal sighed, the sound as precociously adult as his words. “And because people didn’t want them anymore.”
She looked at Hartley. “Did you ever hear of one of these Faeries who… looked like a man, but had antlers growing from his forehead?”
“I see such creatures every day. Don’t you?” He laughed. “You refer to the old legends of horned gods. Those tales are also common here, and all throughout Britain. The priests took the old gods and shaped them into your devil. But they were never evil, only different.”
Different. “Are any of them… still here?”
“Oh, yes,” Donal said. “Sometimes boys and girls had a Faerie mother and a mortal father. Most of them went away, but some stayed.”
Though the sun was warm, Eden gathered her shawl more snugly about her shoulders. “What of… mortal mothers and Faerie fathers?”
“Yes. They could do magic, too. They must be sad to stay here and hide instead of going to Tir-na-nog.”