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We gazed at each other for a moment. I said, “I need to get him out.”

The faerie nodded. “I will go,” he said with as little ceremony as he said anything.

“But—” I stared at him in astonishment, a dozen objections rising within me. For some reason, the one that came out was “I must get him out.”

Because of course it must be me. Wendell was my responsibility. Moreover, he was mine. I had taken us on the journey that had led him to this, his body cold and half hidden behind a leafy winding-sheet. Who was this small grey faerie before me? I knew not one thing about him, other than that his days were spent tidying rooms, not venturing into other worlds.

“You cannot be proposing to go alone,” I said.

He gazed at me, his face unreadable once more. His hand was at his rag again, passing it absently through his fingers. “He is one of ours,” he said.

Then, before I could move or speak, he stepped forward and opened a door—I thought I saw a flash of it, just for a moment, a thing of gossamer and darkness in the left side of Wendell’s shadow. And he was gone.

22nd January

The moments that followed the housekeeper’s disappearance were spent in a state of agonized expectation.

For the faerie to reappear. For Wendell to reawaken. For something.

“What is happening?” I demanded of no one in particular, pacing back and forth. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more frustrated, for I had no stories to guide me now, no academic knowledge to fall back on whatsoever. Morning arrived, and it brought an improvement in the weather, the clouds beginning to break, the steady rain fading to a sunlit drizzle. Mourners came and went, bowing in my direction but otherwise ignoring me, none seeming to sense the significance of what was happening.

Lord Taran’s response, when I told him what I had done, was one of flat disbelief.

“There are no doors to Death,” he said. “The Lady was mistaken—or, more likely, she invented a story to allow herself time to flee. The housekeeper has gone somewhere else, perhaps another realm, and gotten himself lost. Perhaps he is too embarrassed to return.”

“Not Death,” I corrected him. “The Lady told me there is a place, half in this world and half elsewhere, where the spirits of the Folk linger for a time before they are truly gone. Only a short time—she said that I must make haste if I wished to pull Wendell out. She had never done anything of that nature herself, but she believed it was possible.”

Lord Taran only gave me a pitying look. Fortunately, Niamh arrived shortly thereafter and I was able to lay the matter before her.

“Emily!” she exclaimed, holding up her hands. “I’m glad to find you have left your rooms. But you will need to slow down.”

I forced myself to go back to the beginning, trying to keep my voice steady. It was not easy. Not only because of my excitement, but I felt lightheaded—I could not remember the last time I had eaten anything. If Wendell had been with me, he would have been appalled and not left off nagging me until I’d had some toast at least.

“My grandfather believed that the Lady in the Crimson Cloak knew of a door to Death,” I finished. “I have his journal—though he was only a hobbyist, he was quite well-read. He cites several sources in arguing—well, essentially, for the existence of faerie ghosts. But I am not familiar with the names he references.”

Niamh took the journal from my hand, pausing to allow the braille enchantment to work, then ran her finger over the page I had marked.

“Robbins?” she said musingly. “I wonder if he means Archibald Robbins at the University of Amsterdam. He was seen as an iconoclast in my day; his theories concerned interactions between the Folk and the spirit world. A few reputable scholars still believed in ghosts back then and would debate whether some stories concerned ghostly or fae protagonists, but Robbins went further than many were comfortable with.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” I said with some indignation. I had thought myself familiar with the work of all dryadologists within the last century.

“He did not publish much before his death—which was nothing suspicious; he took a fall somewhere in Scotland. The Grampians, I believe. What little he did write was mostly retracted as scholarship evolved.” She paused. “Helen W.W. could be a reference to Helen Worthington-West. She was before even my time. Wasn’t she at Cambridge?”

I made a frustrated sound. “Of course! How did I not guess that? Bran Eichorn co-authored several papers with her. But then I have never bothered much with the writings of the spiritualists.”

“Not much value in it, except in tracing the development of dryadology itself,” Niamh agreed. “One might as well study phrenology. Still, my research supervisor—a lovely man, but very much the product of an older era—encouraged me to read Worthington-West. She had some intriguing theories about bogles, or bogeys as they termed them then, but on the whole I found her ideas outdated and rather sensationalist. She presented a paper at a conference in Paris—it may have been ICODEF, before it was called that—in which she claimed to have interviewed a household brownie who had visited the afterlife and spoken with her recently deceased mother. Apparently this matriarch provided her daughter with instructions on what to serve at her funeral reception, including a recipe for lemon scones.”

“What!” I exclaimed. “Where was this published?”

“It wasn’t, unsurprisingly. I only know about it because my supervisor was at the conference. There was quite the backlash.” Niamh paused thoughtfully. “All this is to say that the Lady’s claim regarding doors to some sort of spiritual limbo, your grandfather’s references to ghosts—such things are not entirely without context in the field of dryadology. Certainly the Worthington-West school would not have been surprised.”

I gave a weak laugh and sank back onto the bench, resting my head in my hands. “I had thought that reading the histories of great faerie monarchs would prepare me for whatever Wendell and I would encounter here. Instead I should have spent my time on ghost stories.”

“So it appears,” Niamh said. I could tell that she was skeptical, if not outright disbelieving, but nevertheless her voice held a trace of hope. I noticed for the first time that her eyes were red and shadowed, and I recalled that she had known Wendell from his boyhood.

“And what does this old misanthrope have to say about your theory?” she said, adopting the familial, teasing tone she often used with Lord Taran, which always gave me a shiver of trepidation.

“Nothing whatsoever,” he replied. “I have no use for the arguments of scholars. And I am not so much a villain as to offer false hope.”