The woman was tired, not just tired from the day
that was ending, but from too many similar days of unrelieved work and poverty.
There would always be more work to do, it would never stop, but for now she had
to put it to one side and tell her little boy a story, to send him to sleep, so
that he, at least, could have a time without worry.
“It was late one winter’s night,” she began, “when
there came a knock at the midwife’s door. She was surprised, because, as far as
she knew, none of the women who lived nearby were expecting a child, at least,
not for six months or so. She thought it might have been just a branch tapping,
for a wind had suddenly sprung up of which there had been no sign earlier. But
the knocking came again, louder, more urgent, in a different rhythm, so she
knew it wasn’t the wind, and opened the door.”
And as the midwife opened the door in the woman’s
story, so the door behind the teller of the story was opened, too, ever so
slowly and quietly, and the woman’s husband stood there, though he would have
been happier to have sat, after all the work he’d done, and the work he still
had to do. But nonetheless, he stood and listened to every word his wife spoke.
“A small man, dressed all in green, with a feather
in his cap, stood there, and behind him a handsome black horse with silver trim
on its harness fretted and stamped and steamed. It had clearly been ridden
hard, and was eager to be off again and complete its errand. And so was its
rider, for he did not quibble over fees, as some men did, even when time was
a-wasting, but said, “I’ll pay whatever you ask, but you must come at once, and
be ready to stay for a few days and look after the baby, for the mother will
need a while to recover her strength.”
“Well, the midwife thought that was a matter for the
mother to decide, not her man, but she’d been told she’d be paid, so she kept
her own counsel and only said, “My bag is here to hand, with all that’s
needful, including clothes for me, if I have to stay away a night or two,” and
she shut the door, and the little man took her by the hand and before she knew
what had happened, she was up on the horse’s back behind him and the two of
them were galloping into the dark.
“Only it wasn’t that dark neither, for there was a
full moon (which was strange, as the night before she could have sworn it had
been the last quarter), and she could see all the landscape as it rushed past
her as clear as day. And stranger still – she didn’t recognise any of it,
though she’d been attending childbeds twenty miles round the village these past
thirty years. But where they rode was a place she’d never been before, she
could have sworn it.
“It wasn’t long before they pulled up outside a low
little house, that didn’t seem to go with the fine horse and the fine bridle,
but she could hear by the cries of the woman within that her time was near, so
she made no fuss and went in to tend her, as a good midwife should, one woman
to help another. And, to cut a long story short, the birth was not as hard as
she had feared from the speed of the ride or the little man’s insistence,
though the mother was very pale and wan, almost silvery in her face. And the
baby was a handsome little thing, and quiet, so she had no worries about taking
care of him, though it seemed at first that the little man wanted to interfere,
for he hovered about while she bathed the new-born, and swaddled him, and
tucked him up to sleep, and then the little man said to her, “I can see you’ll
take care of him just fine, but there is one thing you must do for me,” and he
pulled a little pot out of his pocket, and pressed it into her hand, where it
felt colder and heavier than it had any right to. “There’s an ointment in that
pot,” said the little man, “and every day, morning and evening, you must dab a
little of it on the babe’s eyelids, or he’ll not see properly. But you must
also take the greatest care not to get any on your own, where it would have the
contrary effect, for you know that what’s medicine to one is poison to
another.”
“And no sooner had he spoken, than he was gone. And
the midwife lay down on a bed in the corner of the homely little room, and fell
asleep at once. Well, for the next week, she found she had no cause to stir out
of doors, nor even to see the daylight, for the curtains stayed tight drawn
however hard she pulled, but there were always fresh candles to burn and fresh,
piping hot food to eat, though she never knew how, nor saw a servant – but then
she found herself as often asleep as awake, like the baby itself, who slept and
slept, and grew and grew, so that at the end of seven days it was as big as if
it were three months old. And morning and evening the midwife dabbed the
ointment on the babe’s eyes, and wiped her fingers carefully on her own apron,
for she minded what the little man in green had said, and was by way of being a
doctor herself in her own small way, so she knew that what he said was true,
about a medicine being a poison and vice versa.
But at the end of the seventh day, just as she was
putting on the ointment, a fly flew up her noise, and she sneezed, and put her
hands up to her face, and tried to wipe it with her apron, but it was too late,
for she felt the ointment all cold and heavy on her right eyelid, and screwed
both her eyes tight shut, till the sensation went away. But when she opened
them, she found the mischief was done. For the plain deal table that she saw
with her left eye shone and glinted as the finest polished walnut when she
looked at it with her right one, and the coarse brown curtains at the windows
turned into the richest silks, and the rushes that covered the floor were
Turkey carpets with a pile so thick her feet disappeared into it.
“She would have cried out in shock and surprise, but
just at that moment the little man all in green came into the room, with a
jingling bag in his hand, and he thanked her kindly for all she had done
(though of course he didn’t know what she had done just this minute, otherwise
he might not have been so pleased), and told her that it was time she was off home.
He put her bag, that he had packed with all her clothes, into her hand, and
pushed her out of the door, and when she looked around, after coming to from
the shock of it, she found herself beside an old turf tump, on the edge of her
village, on a fine spring evening, with three months gone out of her life, and
nothing to show for it but a bag of gold – though that, at least, was real, not
like the gift of the sight, which seemed to have gone when she was pushed out
of the door, for squint as she might, with right eye or left, nothing about her
own village was ever changed from poor to rich just by the looking at it.
“Still, the gold, as I say, was real, and she
was at the market a month or two later, spending some of it, when she saw the
little man all in green, moving among the stalls, though no one else seemed to
notice him, and taking wares off them without paying, which no one seemed to
mind at all. Without thinking, the midwife called out to him, and he lifted his
head, in some surprise, but when he saw who was calling to him, his face grew
dark, and he strode across angrily. “So you can see me?” he asked. “Then you
must have disobeyed me!” But the midwife told him how it came about by
accident, and he believed her, because he said, “Then I’ll only take away what
was given you and no more.” And with that he raised his hand and touched her
right eye, and she never saw him any more, and though she could still see, her
right eye was ever the weaker afterwards, and grew stone-blind before the
other.”
The little boy shifted in his bed. He may have been
sleepy, but he was clearly not asleep. Perhaps the woman had done her work too
well, and he was fighting off slumber in order to have another story.
Outside the door, still unobserved, her husband
shifted his aching body from foot to foot, but never moved or made a sound, as
if he, too, desperately wanted to hear another tale.
“Of course,” the woman went on, “the fairies were an
old race, and a child was a rare thing for them, so that was why they took such
care of it. But there was an easier way, and that was to steal one from us
humans, and leave a block of wood in its place. Of course, they charmed the
block of wood, so it looked just like the child that was gone, and if they
could keep that child for a year, then it was theirs forever.”
“But how could you tell?” asked the little boy.
“Were they just the same?”
“Why, no,” said his mother. “At first they seemed
so, but as time went by, the changeling children grew less and less like the
ones that had been stolen. They lost all their manners, and all respect for
their elders and betters. They became slow, and stupid, and lazy, and
complained they were tired all the time. They slept all the day, and at night,
when they were supposed to go to sleep, they wouldn’t.”
“And what could the parents do about it, if they
thought they had a changeling child?” asked the little boy.
“Well,” said his mother, “they had to be very sure,
because what they did was to take the child and throw him on the fire, and the
charm would fly up the chimney with a loud scream, and all that remained was a
big lump of wood, and of course they left that on the fire to burn away, and
when it was all gone, they’d go and look outside the door, and there they would
find their own child, that the fairies had had to give back to them, wrapped in
a fine fairy blanket, and sleeping soundly, so soundly, that you knew it was a
real human being.”
And already the little boy’s eyes were closed, and
his breathing was as smooth and even as you could wish, and all because of the
story. So his mother moved away as quietly as she could with her aching limbs,
and shut the door gently, and as she turned round, to go back to her work,
which was never done, to make jam, or darn old socks, or knit new ones, she collided
in the dark (for they could not afford candles to carry about) with her
husband, and had it not been that her son was fast asleep in the next room, she
would have shouted at him then and there for the lazy good-for-nothing that he
was, but since she had to keep her voice low, she simply hissed at him,
“Standing idly by again, I see, while I do what is needful! What excuse have
you for that?”
And he answered, “I listened to you telling those
stories to our son, because I wanted, for once, to hear your voice when it
wasn’t giving me orders or accusing me of laziness. There was a time, you know,
when my ears and eyes were enchanted as surely as if they’d been smeared with
fairy ointment, when the sight and sound of you were the sweetest and most precious
things in the world to me.”
She looked at him then in the darkness for longer
than either expected. Finally she said, “There was a time in bed at night when
I turned to you and did not simply find a block of wood lying beside me.”
Silently he held his hands out to her, and silently
she took them, and he said, “Then when did the fairies steal us both away?”
Told at Southampton
Storyclub on July 3rd 2003
Written down July 16th
2003, between noon and 2.15pm