Guardian of the Green Hill (2 page)

“Is it the baby? Oh, dear, has the doctor been sent for? I don't know why folk will still call me before the doctor for scalds and chicken pox. Cain, if your horse isn't done in, please ride for Dr. Homunculus and send him after us, just in case. Lysander, the coach—”

“Nearly ready, my dear,” he said calmly. These little emergencies cropped up all the time and might be anything from a broken leg to a cow gone dry. If a pretty daughter stayed out all night, Phyllida was called, on the certainty that the fairies had snatched her. If a man went astray, they looked to her for a charm to win him back from what was undoubtedly a glamour of some sort. If dishes broke a bit too often, it was surely the result of mischievous bogies who had to be banished. Phyllida had some serious duties to perform as Guardian of the fairy sanctuary, the Green Hill, but more often she played a role somewhere between patron and witch doctor for her tenants and the villagers of Gladysmere.

Bran tried to push himself up, but Phyllida was instantly at his side. “Stay, Bran dear. You'll open your wound again.” She might be his daughter, grown old in the real world while he was trapped by the fairies under the Green Hill, but sometimes she had to scold him like a mother. The arrow hole in his chest—mark of his great sacrifice in the Midsummer War—had nearly closed, but any vigorous movement still caused him great pain. If he wasn't very careful, the injury seeped thin pink-red blood through the bandage.

“But if it's the fairies—”

“If it's the fairies, I can handle it myself,” Phyllida snapped. “I did it for seventy years without you.”

Bran flinched, and Phyllida looked abashed. She hadn't meant to remind him how he had abandoned his wife and children for the twilight world under the Green Hill.

“It's likely nothing. You stay here and heal. Let May bring you some more tea.”

Bran mumbled something about tea coming out of his ears, and that he'd had enough mollycoddling, but he settled back into the chaise.

“Can we go with you?” Meg asked as her great-great-aunt and -uncle made their way to the circular drive at the front of the Rookery.

“I don't see why not,” Phyllida said. “It will be good for you. You can see a bit more of the countryside, meet some of the tenants. It's best to know the ins and outs of those who live and work on your land. Makes everything run so much more smoothly.”

But it's not my land, Meg thought.

“Can James come too?”

Phyllida assented, but when Meg asked if he wanted to go, he told her with great brevity that he was still delving into ant culture and couldn't be disturbed in his scientific and anthropological endeavors. He explained this all with the word “no.” At four years old, he was exquisitely single-minded.

“He'll be fine there,” Lysander said. “May and June will look after him.” May and June were maids, twin sisters born an hour apart, but in two different months.

Meg, less trusting, called out to her brother and sister in the distance where they still sported in their frenzied game with Finn. “Rowan! Silly! We're going on a drive with Phyllida.” They answered with shouts and screams. “Did you hear me? Watch James, will you?”

Rowan waved and called something that sounded like an affirmative, so Meg ran back to the drive where the carriage, driven by a liveried coachman, was just rolling up. The two dapple-gray horses stomped and flicked their tails, annoyed at having been taken from their oats on such short notice.

With the wind whipping her hair and the bright July sun browning her neck and freckling her nose, it felt like a festival day. Though she loved the Rookery, and the grounds (and the house itself) were vast and varied enough to entertain almost without end, it was good to get away and catch a glimpse of the rest of the world. The Rookery was nestled against the deep woods, but as they went east, they came to more open country, rolling fields of high golden hay. They passed houses that seemed to be from another time, half-timbered cottages with dormer windows, flowers trailing over the sills, pear trees climbing the walls. Where the river ran parallel to the road, she saw a mill with a great wooden wheel turning eternally in the flow. Fields were divided by hedgerows or by dry stone walls made with rocks removed in the first plowing centuries before, stacked without a drop of mortar to hold them in place. From some of the fields rose little hills, like the Green Hill in miniature, some the size of giant tortoises, some as big as cars, some oblong, as large as a bus. Meg pointed them out to Dickie.

“They're tumuluses, I think. Tumuli? I'll have to ask the Wyrm.” That learned but forgetful beast had fallen asleep in the sun-warmed carp pond back at the Rookery. “Graves, in any case, or barrows, as they call them here. They could be from the Neolithic. That's the Stone Age,” he added, seeing that she didn't know but wouldn't ask. “They were probably a lot bigger, but have been worn down.”

“You mean there are … bodies … under all of those mounds?” Fairies were ceasing to scare her, but she shivered at the thought of ghosts.

Lysander, overhearing, said, “Don't be silly, girl. There are bodies all around us.” Meg looked, half expecting to see a field of corpses. “People have been treading this earth, and falling on it, for centuries … millennia! Our tiny lives are but an ant's step along the long road of human history. Every man who has ever lived in this green and pleasant land, save those alive now, is dead and buried. Only think how they outnumber us! Makes our troubles seem wee, doesn't it?”

“I don't like to think about it,” Meg said in a little voice.

“Lysander, leave her alone,” Phyllida chided.

The sun was as warm as ever on Meg's shoulders, but beneath it blew the first breeze of impending evening, and Meg felt suddenly chilled. She made herself look at the barrows again, trying to dispel the feeling of doom. You're just being silly, she told herself. Dead people … ghosts … bosh! There, that's just a hill with sheep-cropped stubble on it, nothing more.

She gave a little shriek, quickly stifled with her hand. A form rose from the tumulus like a corpse from the grave. A dust-colored man in loose clothes, as though his flesh had shrunken away from them, sat, then stood, then looked directly at the carriage. Directly, Meg would have sworn, at her.

“Who is that?” she asked.

They all looked, but none could identify him. Her relatives didn't seem concerned. “Probably an artist,” Phyllida concluded, dismissing it. “They like to gather around here to paint the old church up on the rise, or the remnants of the hill fort. He'll probably wander to the Rookery eventually.”

“And like as not try to sell you his sketches,” Lysander added. “I can't tell you how many pen-and-inks and charcoals and watercolors I have filed away, just waiting for one of 'em to be worth something when the artist becomes famous. Or dies. Hasn't happened yet.”

Meg stared back at the form shrinking rapidly into the distance. Sure enough, he had a contraption beside him that looked like a folding easel. Only an artist out to capture the hazy golden hues of the declining sun. And he had not been staring at her in particular. Why, they rode in such an outlandish contraption, who could help but stare? While there were many farmers who still used horse-drawn carts, they were big, practical things with modern rubber tires. Sometimes she even saw tractors and mechanical threshers being pulled by a team of drafthorses. But the Ashes' conveyance was straight out of the Victorian beau monde, a barouche on high, red wooden wheels. The carriage itself looked like an old-fashioned perambulator, seating four passengers face-to-face. It might have rolled down the streets of Victoria's London unremarked. Of course anyone new to the area would stare.

The dust-colored man was forgotten when they pulled up to the little brick farmhouse half surrounded by unmown hay mixed with wildflowers. Rusted cans, snippets of curling wire, and planks studded with nails lay scattered along with other rubbish. The front was cleared, probably by the peregrinations of a large Yorkshire sow and her farrow. White geese raised their sinuous necks in alarm as the barouche rolled to a stop, then arched them downward, hissing threats.

Without warning, Meg felt dizzy, a throbbing rush of blood to her head. For a moment, her vision dimmed and she was aware of a sorrow so terrible it was like an uncontrolled fear, swallowing her up, leaving her shaking and irrational. She grabbed for Phyllida's hand and squeezed the old woman's fingers until she cried out, “Mercy, Meg, what's wrong?”

“I don't know … I don't know! Something terrible has happened here. Can you feel it? We should have come quicker. I should have known before. Oh! It's too late!” She collapsed into sobs, much to Dickie's consternation. He took her other hand awkwardly while Phyllida disengaged herself from Meg's viselike grip and, alarmed, scurried into Moll's house.

“Meg, what is it?” Dickie asked when they were left alone.

“I don't know,” she said again, calming, though convulsive aftershocks of sobs still echoed through her. “I just felt, all of a sudden, a sadness so great.… Dickie, what's wrong? What's wrong with me?”

“I don't feel anything,” he said. “Something to do with the fairies, maybe? The house does look dour, though.” Little sooted-over windows glared balefully at them from the ramshackle dwelling. It was obvious that no one had cared for it in quite some time.

They waited in awful silence until suddenly a keening wail rose, an unearthly sound that made the very windows rattle. A woman with eyes glassy-red from weeping burst from the shack, looking wildly around.

“Colin!” she cried. “Colin, love, where are you? Come back to me, my darling!” She disappeared into the greenwood, her hair streaming behind her.

Phyllida tried to follow, but though she was hardly frail, a person of eighty-odd years can't catch a woman of twenty-five. She rested against a linden, panting. “Moll! Come back!”

“She's looking for the Green Hill,” Lysander said, coming up behind her. He leaned heavily on his gnarled cane. “She thinks she'll find him there.”

“We must go after her. She'll do herself harm.”

While Lysander mustered some villagers to go after the crazed Moll, Phyllida sat Meg down on a bench at the edge of the pig wallow.

“They came to me,” Phyllida said, speaking with her eyes closed. “When Bran was healing in his ash tree, Moll's mother came and tried to speak with me. They never call the doctor, if they can help it. I refused to see her. I was so worried about Bran. Then Moll's brother came, just two days ago, and I turned him away with a wave. I said I'd be by soon. Oh, not soon enough!” She hid her face in her hands and fell to her knees in the muck. “Such a happy little man Moll's baby was! I was there for his birth, and I swear he smiled to see the world for the first time. Not yet a year beneath the sun…”

“Her son died? Phyllida, it's not your fault.”

“Yes, yes, it is! I was so caught up in my own life, my own fears, I neglected my duties. The Green Hill, the people who live nearby, my people, my tenants, are more important than me or my own blood. I should have come at the first call, even if it was nothing, only some petty problem. That is my obligation. Better Bran had died than that poor wee laddie. Better I had died.”

“Can't we do something?” Meg asked. “We brought Bran back to life. Isn't there something we can do for the baby?”

Phyllida shook her head. “That kind of thing happens once in a thousand years. Bran was dead, but his life was trapped elsewhere. And Bran had an ash tree bound to him. The babe doesn't. It is a custom that has fallen out of fashion. Ah, another failing! I should plant a tree for every one of them. I haven't kept the old ways as I should. Oh, Meg, I am so old, so useless.” She bowed her head until she was almost lying in the pig filth.

Meg didn't know what to do. The poor baby, and now her great-great-aunt, font of wisdom and pillar of strength, collapsing into helplessness and despair like this. She took Phyllida by the shoulders and pulled her up almost roughly. “Tell me what to do,” she said earnestly.

By the time the doctor arrived in his little red convertible, Phyllida and Meg had laid out the tiny body, a time-honored female chore. They had cleaned and dressed Colin as well as they could. The best of his clothes were hardly fitting—rough and twice-mended, with food stains on the collar—so Phyllida had improvised a shroud with her petticoat and covered his face with a lace handkerchief embroidered with bluebells and foxgloves.

Dr. Homunculus assured Phyllida there was nothing she could have done—nothing even he could have done. “He had a trouble with his heart since birth. Some illnesses are past mending,” he told her.

His words meant little to her. She was Guardian of the Green Hill and of her people, not he. Ignoring him, she told Meg, “Poor Moll has lost her mind for a time, but the fairies look after the mad. We'll find her soon enough and do what we can to give her peace.”

And You After Her, My Pretty Pet?

“D
ICKIE,”
M
EG ASKED
a few minutes later as they strolled along the dusty unpaved road to the Rookery, “do you think I should help Phyllida look for Moll? Or maybe try to find Gul Ghillie and ask him to help?”

“Speak of the devil,” cried a merry little voice, “and he will come!”

A brown, freckled boy stepped out from behind the Rookery gates to meet them. He cut a little caper. Then, too full of high spirits to simply walk, he turned into a great gray lumpy toad and hopped the intervening distance. A tongue thick as a cow's flicked out and lapped up a snail. He turned into a boy again, still crunching the gastropod.

“Gul!” Meg cried. “Nice to see you.”

“Oh? I thought perhaps you never wanted to see me again.” He spit the snail's horny operculum onto the turf and crushed it with his heel.