“Where are you from, Professor?” he said with a hint of his former friendliness. I think he is the type who can never keep someone at a distance for long.
“I live at Cambridge.”
“Yes. But where are your folk?”
I suppressed a sigh. “I grew up in London. My brother lives there still.”
“Oh.” His expression cleared. “You’re an orphan?”
“No.” This was not the first time someone has assumed that about me. I suppose people are often looking for a way to explain me, and a childhood of neglect or deprivation is as good as any. In truth, my parents are perfectly ordinary and perfectly alive, though we are not close. They have never known what to make of me. When I read every book in my grandfather’s library—I must have been eight or so—and came to them with certain thorny passages memorized, I had expected my mother and father to offer clarity—instead, they had stared at me as if I had suddenly become very far away. I never knew my grandfather—he had no interest in children, nor anything else besides his society of amateur folklorists—but after he died, and we inherited his house and possessions, his books became my best friends. There was something about the stories bound between those covers, and the myriad species of Folk weaving in and out of them, each one a mystery begging to be solved. I suppose most children fall in love with faeries at some point, but my fascination was never about magic or the granting of wishes. The Folk were of another world, with its own rules and customs—and to a child who always felt ill-suited to her own world, the lure was irresistible.
“I have been at Cambridge since I was fifteen,” I said. “That is when I began my studies. It is home to me, more than any other.”
“I see,” he said, though I could tell that he didn’t at all.
After Finn departed, I unpacked the rest of my things, which, as I had expected, took but a moment—I brought only four dresses and some books. The familiar smell of Cambridge’s Library of Dryadology wafted out with them, and I felt a shiver of yearning for that musty, ancient place, a haven of quiet and solitude in which I have whiled away many hours.
I glanced around the little cottage, which still smelled of sheep and was a home to many a cobweb-laying spider, but I’ve little patience for housework and soon gave up the idea. A house is merely a roof over one’s head, and this one would serve me adequately as it was.
Shadow and I finished our breakfast (I gave him most of the goose egg), and I filled my canteen with stream water and tucked it into my backpack along with the rest of the bread, my box camera, a measuring tape, and my notebook. Thus prepared for a day in the field, I turned my attention to banking the fire per Finn’s instructions.
I raked the poker through the embers, then stopped. I pushed aside the husk of a log, reached within, and drew out Bambleby’s letter. I blew at the ash and skimmed the elegant cursive. It was entirely unscathed.
I added wood to the fire, stoking the flames, and tossed the letter back in. It did not catch. The fire coughed smoke, as if the letter were an unpleasant obstacle lodged in its throat.
“Damn you,” I muttered, narrowing my eyes at the heavy stationery staring insouciantly back at me from the flames. “Am I supposed to keep the bloody thing under my pillow?”
I should, I suppose, mention here that I am perhaps ninety-five percent certain that Wendell Bambleby is not human.
This is not the product of mere professional disdain; Bambleby’s impossible letter is not my first piece of evidence regarding his true nature. My suspicions were aroused at our initial meeting some years ago, when I noticed the sundry ways in which he avoided the metal objects in the room, including by feigning righthandedness so as to avoid contact with wedding rings (the Folk are, to a one, left-handed). Yet he could not avoid metal entirely, the event including a dinner, which invariably involved cutlery, sauce boats, and the like, and he mastered the discomfort well enough, which indicated that either my suspicions were unfounded or that he is of royal ancestry—they are the only Folk able to bear the touch of such human workings.
Lest I appear credulous, I can attest that this was not enough to convince me. Upon subsequent encounters, I noted sundry suspect qualities, among them his manner of speaking. Bambleby is supposedly born in County Leane and raised in Dublin, and while I am no scholar of the Irish accents, I am expert in the tongue of the Folk, which is but one with many dialects, yet possessing a certain resonance and timbre that is universal, and which I hear whispers of in Bambleby’s voice in occasional, unguarded moments. We have spent a significant amount of time in each other’s company.
If he is Folk, he likely lives among us in exile, a not uncommon fate to befall the aristocracy of the Irish fae—their kind rarely goes without a murderous uncle or power-mad regent for long. There are plenty of tales of exiled Folk; their powers are sometimes said to be restricted by an enchantment cast by the exiling monarch, which would explain Bambleby’s need to resign himself to an existence among us lowly mortals. His choice of profession may be part of some fae design I cannot guess at, or it may be a natural expression of Bambleby’s nature, that he should set his sights upon acquiring external affirmations of self-expertise.
It remains possible that I am wrong. A scholar must always be ready to admit this. None of my colleagues seem to share my suspicions, which gives me pause, not even the venerable Treharne, who has been doing fieldwork for so long he likes to joke that the common fae no longer hide themselves away when he comes, seeing little difference between him and some old, lumpen piece of furniture. And for all the stories of exiled Folk, it’s not as if any have been discovered in our midst. Which lends itself to one of two conclusions: either such Folk are exceptionally skilled at camouflage or the stories are false.
I removed the letter, still wholly unburnt, and tore it to shreds, which I folded into the ashes. Then I put Bambleby from my mind, twisted my hair into a knot atop my head (from which it would begin its escape almost immediately), and threw on my coat.
The loveliness of the view outside stopped me in my tracks. The mountain fell away before me, a carpet of green made greener by the luminous dawn staining the clouds with pinks and golds. The mountains themselves were lightly ensnowed, though there was no threat of a sequel in that cerulean canopy. Within the hinterlands of the prospect heaved the great beast of the sea with its patchy pelt of ice floes.
I set off with a light step, much heartened. I have always loved fieldwork, and I felt that familiar rush of excitement as I contemplated the field in question: before me lay uncharted scientific territory, and I the only explorer for miles. It is in moments like this that I fall in love with my profession all over again.
Shadow ambled along at my side on our way up the mountainside, sniffing at mushrooms or the melting frost. Sheep eyed me with their characteristic look of incurious anxiety. They danced a little at the sight of Shadow, but as he only lumbered contentedly by, his snout more engaged by the earth than the familiar woolly boulders that dotted the fields of his stomping grounds in the Cambridgeshire countryside, they soon ignored him.
The forest slowly folded me into itself. The trees were not all stunted, and in places they formed a dense, dark canopy over the narrow path.
I spent most of the morning surveying the perimeter, wading in and out of the trees. I noted mushroom rings and unusual moss patterns, the folds in the land where flowers grew thick and the places where they slid from one colour to another, and those trees which seemed darker and cruder than the others, as if they had drunk of a substance other than water. An odd mist billowed from a little hollow cupped within the rugged ground; this I discovered to be a hot spring. Above it, upon a rocky ledge, were several wooden figurines, some half overgrown with moss. There was also a small pile of what I recognized as rock caramels, the salty-sweet Ljosland candies that several of the sailors had favoured.
After taking some photographs, I dipped a hand in the spring and found it pleasantly hot. The temptation arose in my mind, for I had not bathed properly since leaving Cambridge, and I felt the salt of the journey upon me still like a second skin. Yet it was dismissed quickly; I was not about to go frolicking about an unfamiliar country in a state of undress.