Page 28 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

There she was, as always, in the bottom right corner.

Frida let herself look at that unicorn for one long moment.

Then she blew out her breath and counted to ten, forcing the painful memories back inside. With a practiced flick, she locked her rosewood box and sent it spiralling into some dark corner of her mind. She pressed one hand to the ancient door, feeling the hum of the wards lick down her arm. At the same time, a sudden vice grip clamped around her skull. She whimpered at the pain but, putting it down to the cruelty of grief, she set her mouth in a stubborn line and forced herself to step inside the New Library.

Just as her left boot came down on something soft and crunchy.

Forgetting about the pain, she leapt back, realising she’d stepped on someone’s hand.

‘Ah shit!’ she cried. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Lana.’

Lana the librarian lay beneath her, wearing her familiar pinstriped suit, unstirring on the plush Persian carpet. Frida and Lana had dated briefly, but Frida had ended it. Hamish had been furious, claiming she’d ‘sabotaged her first romantic possibility in years’, and Antony upset because it meant he couldn’t go to the library anymore without being interrogated: Was Frida seeing anyone? No. Did she like anyone? Not unless you counted a ghost-lynx with rainbow fur or a unicorn with a penchant for ball games. Do you think Frida would want to go on another date? Sure, but only if you think you’re a better conversationalist than a grootneck.

Steeling herself, she stepped around Lana, flinching as her muddy boots made footprints across the carpet, the aroma of books and dust settling over her. She had to admit that she’d missed this place. She’d spent so much time here as a child, napping in the overstuffed leather armchairs as her mum read at her favourite corner desk. The LEZ often gave away low-cost tickets to people who couldn’t afford the exorbitant prices, and as a result, this library had basically become her mother’s university. Time away from the daily drudge of being a waitress, receptionist, bartender and cleaner. Ada Rose had emigrated from Russia as a pregnant twenty-one-year-old, estranged from her orthodox parents, desperate to give her child a different kind of life. Maybe it had been that hope she’d found in this library, in books that spoke about a time when real magic had lived in the world, and nobody had been embarrassed to call it that.

Frida ran her fingers over the floor to ceiling bookshelves. She breathed in the thick scent of the dusty carpets, the ancient magicians’ reading desks, the steady ticking of the ornate grandfather clock. When she came to the portraits of the seven Beaufort sisters, which lined the eastern wall, she stopped to gaze up at them. Her mum had always said that Joshua’s sisters had been the true heroes. While their brother had campaigned in parliament and travelled the world rescuing creatures, these women had been the lynchpins of the early conservation movement, working behind the scenes to raise money. All the while tending to the wounded animals Sir Joshua brought home to Forge House in the early days.

As an only child with no friends other than her mother and a toothless one-eared feral cat named Bonkers, Frida had always daydreamed about being part of the Beaufort family.

‘Help me,’ she whispered. Hannah, the eldest, looked down at her benevolently. Renowned for her flower paintings, Hannah held a pink peony in her lap, the Beaufort family’s famous auburn locks curling around her slender white shoulders. Her steady hazel eyes seemed to glimmer in the warm glow of the lamps, keeping her secrets.

Frida sighed. Georgiana was next, painted in front of the huge serpentine lake in the grounds of Forge House, where the sisters’ seven rescued kelpies – gifts from Sir Joshua – had lived. Georgina wore a deep copper dress, her red locks stirring artfully in a painterly breeze. Georgiana was the wildest sister. She’d married three times, each husband richer and more handsome than the last. She’d even gone on a few expeditions, discovering a new species of dragon in Romania with her brother, which they’d named the Great Crested Georgiest.

‘Help me!’ Frida repeated.

But Georgiana, like Hannah, stayed silent.

Dahlia, Charlotte, Eleanor, Arabella. Frida repeated the same plea to each of them. Finally, she came to Jane. The youngest, the only one with dark hair, collected in a simple coif at the back of her head; her beauty seeming more delicate than the rest. She’d been painted in the sisters’ drawing room, her eyes the pale washed-out blue of forget-me-nots, fixed on some unseen point out of the window. In a footnote in The History of the Famous Beaufort Family, Wildlife Conservationists and 19th Century Heroes, it mentioned that Jane had spent some time in a ‘private facility’, and the assumption, Frida guessed, was that she’d been a little mad. But there was no other reference to it, not that Frida could find, and she supposed, as she stood there looking up at Jane, that if Frida herself had lived in the 1800s, she might have been deemed mad too. Jane was the only one of the sisters who’d never married, and her kelpie had been called Sappho. Of all the sisters, Jane had been the only one to release her kelpie after they’d moved to Melody.

While Frida loved Georgiana as a figure of great romance, she suspected that it would have been Jane who might have been her friend. The silence from the portraits however, today of all days, was devastating. Not that she’d expected them to come alive in their frames, but . . . Frida wrapped her arms around herself, her headache worsening. Lana’s nasal breathing and the heavy ticking of the clock indicated that time was moving. Through the reinforced double-warded floor to ceiling windows she could see the black stretch of the water twinkling. The stars of spotlights seemed to go on forever. She could almost forget that out there, her world was hanging on by a thread.

Almost.

She prayed the Jellies weren’t at the bottom of a shrimp’s belly.

With renewed haste, she started scanning the shelves, searching for anything relating to fairy sleep and fairy trees. It didn’t take long before she’d amassed a promising pile: Forest Fairies Laid Bare; A Mythology of All Things Quickthorn; The Dryads and Drus of Ancient Britain, A Compendium; How to Tame a Tree Fairy in 101 Curious Ways; Infamous Nymphs and their Wicked Deeds Revealed; The Dark and Devious Fairies of the Green Woods of Ye Olde England; Enchanted Sleep Spells for Beginners. She was feeling almost optimistic as she sank down at one of the desks, the pile of books in a neat, alphabetised stack in front of her and a full mug of Lana’s coffee at her side. And then she began to read.

Chapter Seventeen

‘Disabuse thyself of fancy, dear Reader! The creatures known as Fairies, though oft adorned in the trappings of Myth and Wonder, were in truth mindless beasts void of Feeling and incapable of Woe, all of them strangers to Affection, Love, or any bright stirrings of Soul. That such beings have passed from this World is neither Tragedy nor Marvel, but the natural Consequence of their own brutish simplicity.’

Frida shut the book with a disgusted snap, sending a cloud of dust into the air. She coughed, waving it away, and put the tome into her steadily growing pile that deserved to be burned on the altar of a storm monkey. In the last hour, she’d read a lot about sage, crystals and dancing topless under a new moon.

‘What crap,’ she muttered, taking another gulp of cold coffee as she opened the next with a burgeoning sense of dread. Within a few pages of Forest Fairies and Their Ungodly Ways, she’d learnt that the majority of fairies shrivelled up in the sun. They only ate bones and every single one of them had voices as beguiling as ‘the tender touch of moonlight on daisies’. Dozy’s voice, she remembered all too well, had been like old dead leaves. She found herself thinking desperately about Plan B, where she somehow grew the strength of ten Olympic athletes and managed to drag a warded fence up to the Hawthorn. Maybe the storm monkeys would help. Sixteen Jellies could probably re-wire a few fences, right?

She shoved Forest Fairies and Their Ungodly Ways away. She’d done the mandatory training on how to rig wards in an emergency, but that had been five years ago at the very start of her tenure, when she’d been more interested in figuring out when it was ok to polish the stone giants. Dumbly, she started flicking through The Dark and Devious Fairies of the Green Woods of Ye Olde England, wishing that Antony and Hamish were with her. Antony had always been the best at research, and Hamish best at choosing the playlists, making the coffee, coordinating the snacks and being generally helpful in the most distracting way possible.

Should she circle the walls to see if she could find a hidden tunnel? Should she go back to the Hawthorn and threaten it with an axe? Should she be constructing some impossible radio tower out of toothpicks and griffin feathers that would somehow give her phone the ability to function again?!

Words and useless diagrams about how to prepare a shelter to protect against woodland fairies skittered before her eyes. It might have been helpful, if the author’s advice wasn’t to hang a siren’s vocal cords from the rafters and sprinkle ground-up giant’s teeth across the door. This book, like so many of the others she’d picked up, had been written in the 1700s by a pompous man with a surplus of adjectives and an unhealthy fascination with destroying as many ‘heathen beasts of the woods’ as he could. Mr H. Botherington was this one’s name. Along with the normal rubbish about fairies appearing to be as doting as new mothers with their newborn babes, whilst simultaneously crawling with enough malice to rival the devil himself, Mr Bother claimed that:

‘When thou dost venture into the deep Woods, thou must turn thy garments inside out and refrain from uttering thy true Christian name in a Fairy’s sly hearing. For to speak thy name is to yield thyself unto their Power, and to summon a Peril from which no mortal craft may deliver thee.’

Well, Frida thought with a sigh, Dozy already knew her name. There wasn’t much she could do about that now.

‘Their Hearts,’ Mr Bother went on, relentless, ‘are black as the very Night, and within their beating marrow lieth the very Fountain and Root of their Magics. Should you, by Providence or by Artifice, find thyself in a Position to sever one from its Breast and preserve it from Corruption, thou wouldst count thyself most fortunate indeed.’

Frida spent a few moments considering whether she’d have the guts to go back up the hill and carve Dozy’s heart out as Mr Bother seemed to be suggesting, but the thought made her nauseous. Zookeeper she was, fairy-killer she was not. She prayed it wouldn’t come to that. She was about to stop reading when she caught the words, ‘The manifold and diverse Gifts of lustful Pleasure bestowed by a Forest-Fairy are as freely given as a Druid upon the Winter Solstice.’ She snorted but read on. ‘A Fairy’s locks – long, leafy, and untamed as the Woods themselves – do cascade with deliberate Artlessness down their Backs, as they engage in wanton Dalliance beneath the silvery Eye of the full Moon.’ Apparently, witnessing such an event would lead to one’s imminent doom.