Franny Billingsley - The Folk Keeper

Nothing.

Nothing.

There! A wave-picture describing not only Finian’s shape, but also his composition. Mostly liquid, save for a pocket watch in his waistcoat, and in his jacket pocket the lacy outline of a key.

My hands were caught by old habits, still reaching ahead, grasping at handfuls of water, not believing my hair alone could guide me through the dark. They groped along invisible walls, utterly useless until they closed first on a rough sleeve, then on a head of hair. It took only one strong push off the seafloor.

Thank the Saints for water, dense almost as a large and heavy man, helping Finian to the surface.

I swear I’ve never breathed before. Air exploded into my lungs, into depths never before used. And as though I were hearing music, my hair rose, making an echo space above my scalp, filling with bubbles of air. I was marvelously buoyant. I was foam on the sea, wafting Finian to shore. I was a bubble, holding up the world.

My heart jumped from its deep-sea calm. I was re-inhabiting my land-body, or maybe it was re-inhabiting me. My ears opened of themselves to an assault of voices, jarring after that great silence. The babble screeched to a crescendo, now sorting itself into words.

”Corin! Corin!” Everyone calling my name, and then Sir Edward’s voice above the rest. “Over here, lad!”

We’d drifted north and surfaced at the beach. The tide was flowing, water lapped almost at the edge. Long arms reached down, a hand heavy with rings grasped Finian and reeled him up. Another hand reached for me, but I sank below the surface, not yet ready to return to the world of laughter and tears and smoldering peat. The rock face was alive with tiny delicate branches. I’d known the barnacles only as hard conical shells, but underwater they reached with feathery legs to sweep the sea.

“Corin! Corin!” The voices came to me underwater. I closed my ears — extraordinary, I can truly close my ears. The voices vanished. But what if there were news of Finian? I rose to the surface.

“Your hand, Corin!” My buoyant sea-body slipped away as Sir Edward helped me onto the beach. There I stood, water streaming off me in all directions. How light it was already, the sky the color of goldenrods, the sea all gilded swells and shadowed troughs.

“Your lips aren’t even blue,” said Sir Edward. “Here, wrap this around you, anyway.”

I draped the jacket over my head like a hood, and around my shoulders and chest. Wet hair, plastered to my scalp, might look very unlike a wig. And the growing Corinna, in a wet tunic, even less like a Folk Keeper. It was Sir Andrew’s jacket; Sir Edward had not wanted to give up his own.

“Lady Alicia won’t like it that you let Finian fall off the cliff,” I said.

“She won’t,” said Sir Edward. “I shall have to admit to her that we quarreled, and that when he shoved me I was childish enough to shove him back, and so it went.”

“You quarreled about his costume?”

He shrugged. “It all seems so unimportant now.”

“What if he dies?”

“You’re a cool little thing, aren’t you. What if he dies, you ask, calm as can be.” He pointed down the beach to a broad backside bent over a long body. “The problem was not that Finian can’t swim, but that he hit his head. Mrs. Bains is doing what she can.”

I did not feel like a cool little thing. There was a terrible emptiness in my stomach, and I kept thinking of all the things I’d never said to Finian. Did he know I treasured the amber beads? Did he know I even laughed at his jokes, deep inside? I could not imagine how it must be for Lady Alicia, who leaned against the cliff. A scrap of gold satin lay on the crumbled rock, a piece of morning sky come to earth. She is very brave. I will never know what a mother feels when she waits to learn if her son lives or dies.

I was suddenly seized in a plush embrace. “Bless the boy!” cried Mrs. Bains. She was still wearing her house-keeper slippers. “He asked for you, Master Finian did. Asked for you then laughed a bit — you know the way he has — and said, ‘Tell Samson not to cut his hair!’”

Finian would live! Oh, the relief of it — my stomach filled up and my mind emptied out. I could wonder for the first time how Mrs. Bains had managed the cliff path; I could almost laugh at the thought that she’d need a winch to help her up again.

The Valet and his scornful cousins appeared, rather out of breath, with eiderdown quilts and a bottle of amber liquid. I glanced Finian’s way, then wished I hadn’t. His wet hair was dark and dead-looking on the rock. I’d rather remember him from last night, when the firelight shone through his hair, shooting it with red lights.

The footmen exchanged looks of dismay when Mrs. Bains said it was time to carry Finian up the cliff.

“Up with you, too, Master Corin!” Mrs. Bains’s heavy hand was on my shoulder. “Come get warm, Saints love you.”

My feet were sure and light up the cliff path. It was as though I had just then memorized the cliff, learned by heart its craggy tapestry. Where did clumsy Corinna go?

I look into the bedchamber mirror, which now reflects the twilight sky. Is this the old clumsy me, or the new surefooted one?

I must tend the Folk. I missed my chance to gather Saint-John’s-Wort at Midsummer dawn. How shall I control the Folk during the Feast of the Keeper?

My Folk Bag leans against the dressing table, looking rather full. Of course, it is the peat. I told Sir Andrew I will never marry, and that is the truth. But I may as well break it open, just to amuse myself.

I am back, staring into the twilight mirror. It is all silliness, and wouldn’t Finian laugh if he knew that the strands that bind my peat are dark red.

June 23

Clumsy Corinna is back. How can it be that my body did what I asked of it for only one night? I miss the skipping freedom of that Midsummer girl. Who can explain it: How did she come? Where did she go? I’ve been looking for her.

I dropped off the edge of the beach today, into water to my waist. After a few rocky steps, I slipped and came up spluttering. Where was that new dimension, the sudden electrical opening of the world?

Finian has been weak and ill. Mrs. Bains delights in trapping him under trays of broths and gruels and iced jellies. She wanted me to take to bed, too. “All that time in the nasty sea, and you such a little thing!”

“I am never chilled,” I tell her, and close my ears against her entreaties. Closing my ears — I revel in it. It is a new power.

If anything, I am rather too warm. I am always flushed these days of summer, my skin surging to rose in the midday sun. No, it is heat, not cold, that affects me most. The Folk are unnaturally quiet, resting up, perhaps, for the Feast of the Keeper, now fewer than two weeks away. I have no charms now; I missed my chance to gather Saint-John’s-Wort.

The easy days are gone.

July 4 — Balymas Day

I almost welcome Taffy’s companionship. He’s curled beside me on the cliff top, but I do not go so far as to pat him when he asks. His fur is sticky and old, worn down to the skin. He does not insist, however, and I tell him that at least his manners are good. His tail thuds on the rock.

The Folk continue quiet. They have consumed:

One barrel of herring

One dozen lobsters, with most of the

shell.

Mrs. Bains was not pleased. She was hoping to have one of those lobsters for herself. Today Finian has consumed:

A dram of ginger wine