it had to fall, it would fall when and where I chose it to fall, and it broke into two pieces.
I couldn’t sleep. My head was bursting with that top-of-the-neck pain you get when you are too angry to be capable of expressing it. Hours passed. Realising that I would in all likelihood be awake to see the dawn, I decided to read something. I do not know what it was that made me choose that book: The Countryside Companion to the Wild Flowers of Britain and Ireland. Summer and its wildflowers were long dead, and botany was never my strongest suit, yet I felt compelled to read the book. Propped up in bed, I opened it where the paper naturally fell and something slipped out onto the counterpane—something gossamer and moonlit and light as a breath.
The pair of faery’s wings.
I picked them up delicately in my fingers, laid them on the palm of my hand, looked at them for a long time. Then I closed my hand and crushed them into dust.
This morning I did not want to see them. Whatever apology they offered, whatever apology they demanded, they would only have made me angry again. On the excuse of morning sickness, I rang for Mrs. O’Carolan to bring me breakfast in my room, which she did. At least I have one friend in Craigdarragh.
I went to the bathroom to wash, and as I did, I saw a thing contemptible in its familiarity in the light of a totally new revelation. At the end of the landing by the linen press was the small door that led to the old servants’ staircase and their quarters in the attics. In all my living memory it has been locked shut; Mummy says that the floorboards are not safe. Mrs. O’Carolan keeps a small bed-parlour beside the potato store—the heat from the range is good for her rheumatism, she insists. The rooms under the eaves have not been used since before I was born. This morning, the door stood the tiniest, the very least crack ajar. How could I not explore?
Such treasure that had been buried in those servants’ rooms and forgotten! The first room was filled with old cracked albums and crumbling boxes of photographs: soft, blurry daguerreotypes of upright moustached gentlemen in caps and bloomers proud beside their new bicycles; ladies who somehow looked cool and elegant in ruffled silks and taffeta on what must have been a stifling summer day; sportsmen in tweed jackets and knee boots leaning on staves; fox hounds too quick for the lens a blur about their feet; little boys in sailor suits, about to burst into tears; gents with hands thrust nonchalantly into pockets, lolling about the enclosure at the Sligo Races; tinker families posed self-consciously in their doorways, surly and unwashed looking; girls in first communion dresses standing shyly in front of Drumcliffe High Cross. Boating excursions, tennis parties, expeditions by jaunting car to local beauty spots, windswept family picnics in the dunes at Strandhill, weddings, baptisms, Easters, Christmases: all those times, all those moments, captured and frozen. I flicked through box after box of dusty, sepia-toned memories pressed like flowers in a Bible … and I stopped. The photograph was of a girl of about thirteen, standing by the sundial in the sunken garden. On the face of the sundial was something I could not quite distinguish; it had moved just as the photograph had been taken and the plate was blurred, but it looked like a tiny person, no more than a foot high. The caption read: Caroly: Wood nymph: The Time Garden, August 1881.
In the next room watery light through the streaming skylight cast strange, rippling shadows over the bare floorboards. Everywhere were piled trunks, up to the ceiling in some places. When I opened them they turned out to be filled with old clothes.
But what clothes! In the first I opened were pure silk hunting stocks; white kid gloves still folded in their tissue wrappings; voluminous skirts split for sidesaddle riding; whips, crops, sticks, and over-the-knee hacking boots; hunting pinks and dubbined britches
I couldn’t sleep. My head was bursting with that top-of-the-neck pain you get when you are too angry to be capable of expressing it. Hours passed. Realising that I would in all likelihood be awake to see the dawn, I decided to read something. I do not know what it was that made me choose that book: The Countryside Companion to the Wild Flowers of Britain and Ireland. Summer and its wildflowers were long dead, and botany was never my strongest suit, yet I felt compelled to read the book. Propped up in bed, I opened it where the paper naturally fell and something slipped out onto the counterpane—something gossamer and moonlit and light as a breath.
The pair of faery’s wings.
I picked them up delicately in my fingers, laid them on the palm of my hand, looked at them for a long time. Then I closed my hand and crushed them into dust.
This morning I did not want to see them. Whatever apology they offered, whatever apology they demanded, they would only have made me angry again. On the excuse of morning sickness, I rang for Mrs. O’Carolan to bring me breakfast in my room, which she did. At least I have one friend in Craigdarragh.
I went to the bathroom to wash, and as I did, I saw a thing contemptible in its familiarity in the light of a totally new revelation. At the end of the landing by the linen press was the small door that led to the old servants’ staircase and their quarters in the attics. In all my living memory it has been locked shut; Mummy says that the floorboards are not safe. Mrs. O’Carolan keeps a small bed-parlour beside the potato store—the heat from the range is good for her rheumatism, she insists. The rooms under the eaves have not been used since before I was born. This morning, the door stood the tiniest, the very least crack ajar. How could I not explore?
Such treasure that had been buried in those servants’ rooms and forgotten! The first room was filled with old cracked albums and crumbling boxes of photographs: soft, blurry daguerreotypes of upright moustached gentlemen in caps and bloomers proud beside their new bicycles; ladies who somehow looked cool and elegant in ruffled silks and taffeta on what must have been a stifling summer day; sportsmen in tweed jackets and knee boots leaning on staves; fox hounds too quick for the lens a blur about their feet; little boys in sailor suits, about to burst into tears; gents with hands thrust nonchalantly into pockets, lolling about the enclosure at the Sligo Races; tinker families posed self-consciously in their doorways, surly and unwashed looking; girls in first communion dresses standing shyly in front of Drumcliffe High Cross. Boating excursions, tennis parties, expeditions by jaunting car to local beauty spots, windswept family picnics in the dunes at Strandhill, weddings, baptisms, Easters, Christmases: all those times, all those moments, captured and frozen. I flicked through box after box of dusty, sepia-toned memories pressed like flowers in a Bible … and I stopped. The photograph was of a girl of about thirteen, standing by the sundial in the sunken garden. On the face of the sundial was something I could not quite distinguish; it had moved just as the photograph had been taken and the plate was blurred, but it looked like a tiny person, no more than a foot high. The caption read: Caroly: Wood nymph: The Time Garden, August 1881.
In the next room watery light through the streaming skylight cast strange, rippling shadows over the bare floorboards. Everywhere were piled trunks, up to the ceiling in some places. When I opened them they turned out to be filled with old clothes.
But what clothes! In the first I opened were pure silk hunting stocks; white kid gloves still folded in their tissue wrappings; voluminous skirts split for sidesaddle riding; whips, crops, sticks, and over-the-knee hacking boots; hunting pinks and dubbined britches
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