Chapter 7

To Lizzie’s delight, the whole Penny Gaff Gang agreed to come with her on the fairy hunt. Collette insisted on going along too.

‘At least Amelia will see her fairy, even if none of the others do,’ she said.

‘Are you sure you’re up to it?’ said Lizzie. ‘I mean, your back…’

Collette shrugged. ‘C’est rien. I am used to the pain, and I love les petites.’ She sighed dramatically. ‘I want to have children of my own one day – it is good to get the practice.’

‘“There is such a thing as too much practice,”’ Erin said, mocking Fitzy’s voice, and they all laughed.

Now they all stood together on a platform at Waverley station, which lay in a valley between busy shopping streets. Lizzie wished she’d brought a scarf, because the morning was grey and gloomy – not the kind of weather for a picnic at all. Maybe the fairies will blow the clouds away with their flapping wings, she thought sourly.

She looked around at her friends, wishing they could afford to dress more smartly. In the circus, the children’s best clothes were the ones they performed in. No expense was spared there: sequins and satin, cloth of gold and taffeta were all used. But for everyday life, they tended to wear hand-me-down clothes, darned and patched many times over.

Malachy wore a heavy overcoat, Nora and Erin simple long dresses of black cotton with white collars, Hari britches and a shirt a size too big, and Dru his smart travelling coat over tight trousers and a rather disreputable-looking ruffled shirt. Only Collette, with her wide hat and fashionable white dress, looked respectable by Edinburgh standards. Everyone’s going to be starin’ at us…

‘Look at that crowd!’ someone said behind her. ‘What a weird-lookin’ bunch.’

Lizzie’s heart sank – until she realized the man wasn’t talking about them. She turned around and saw what could only be the local chapter of the Spiritualist Society, dressed for a day out hunting fairies.

An old man with white whiskers, dressed in a kilt and an explorer’s pith helmet, was marching down the platform with a butterfly net over his shoulder. Behind him came two hollow-cheeked ladies – identical twins – dressed from head to toe in black, followed by a fat gentleman with a box hanging around his neck from a leather strap. Lizzie wondered what was in the box. Next came a thin young man in tweed wearing goggles with purple lenses, looking around himself excitedly and making notes in a book.

‘What on earth?’ murmured Hari.

‘I’m having second thoughts about this!’ Nora said. Beside her, Erin was snorting giggles through her nose.

To Lizzie’s relief, the rest of the Spiritualist crowd descending the stairs looked a lot more normal. She saw Alexander MacDonald, who waved. Behind him came Douglas Grant, surrounded by a crowd of female admirers. Uh oh, she thought.

‘There must be about twenty people here,’ Malachy said. ‘That’s a lot of oddballs.’

‘Be polite!’ Lizzie nudged him. ‘We’re their guests. And they’re feeding us, remember?’

Malachy pulled out a pocketwatch. ‘Half an hour there, half an hour back, most of the day spent chasing after fairies … I don’t see how we’re going to get back to Holyrood Park for six.’

‘We will.’

‘We’d better. We can’t miss tonight’s show or Dad’ll string us up.’

‘Mr MacDonald promised we’d be back in plenty of time,’ Lizzie assured him. ‘There he is. Good morning, sir. Good morning, Amelia.’

‘Lizzie!’ squealed Amelia. Behind her a man with thin, grizzled hair and a bushy beard winced and clutched his head at the noise. Lizzie recognized him from the portrait in MacDonald’s house – the one in which he was being tormented by goblins. It was the painter, Charles Doyle.

‘Can you please lower your voice, Amelia?’ the man begged. ‘My head is throbbing this morning.’

He’s got a hangover, Lizzie thought. Pa used to get those.

‘Ah, introductions,’ said MacDonald. ‘Lizzie, permit me to present Mr Charles Doyle. He has a gift for seeing the fairies.’

‘Charmed,’ Doyle said, blinking as if he were only just waking up. He offered Lizzie a sweaty hand to shake, as if she was a gentleman. She dropped a curtsey instead. Doyle realized his mistake and ran a hand through his thinning hair. His eyes wobbled unsteadily in his head, reminding Lizzie of an old toy whose pieces were falling apart.

‘And this,’ said MacDonald, ‘is his son.’

A teenaged boy stepped forward. ‘Arthur Conan Doyle,’ he said with relish, as if his own name tasted good on his tongue. ‘Capital to meet you. Lizzie Brown, eh? I’ve heard of you, I think.’

‘You might’ve,’ Lizzie said, grinning. She liked Arthur immediately. He wasn’t exactly handsome, with his struggling moustache and gangly walk, but he had a rich voice that she wanted to sit down and listen to.

Arthur snapped his fingers. ‘I’ve got it. The Phantom! You unmasked him, didn’t you? Down in London.’

‘Lizzie and her gang solve lots of mysteries,’ Malachy said. He paused and added ‘That’s us: the Penny Gaff Gang.’

‘I can see I’ll have to get to know you all as soon as possible,’ Arthur laughed. ‘I want to know all your secrets. Mysteries! How do you get to the bottom of them, eh?’

‘I’m psychic,’ Lizzie said with pride.

‘A psychic detective.’ Arthur tapped his nose. ‘What an idea. I may steal it for one of my stories.’

‘You must forgive Arthur,’ MacDonald laughed. ‘He fancies himself a writer, and he’s always writing his friends into his stories.’

Charles Doyle tugged at his son’s sleeve and jerked his head at an approaching throng of people. ‘Beware, Arthur!’ he hissed. ‘Dionysus and his maenads are coming!’

Lizzie looked blank.

‘He means I should hide,’ Arthur said with an apologetic look, ‘because Douglas Grant and his crowd of women are heading my way.’

Lizzie felt a cold lurch in her stomach – she and Grant hadn’t exactly hit it off. As he strode down the station platform as if he owned it, a group of five or six Spiritualist women of varying ages surrounded him. They were saying things like, ‘Oh, pay it no mind’ and, ‘It’s just the spite of lesser creatures, dear’.

‘They’re fawning on him,’ Erin said, grimacing. ‘It’s disgusting, so it is.’

It wasn’t just that, Lizzie saw. They were reassuring him. But why?

Grant saw her. Their eyes locked for a moment, and his narrowed. Then he stopped, and the crowd of women stopped with him. They all glared at Lizzie, coming no closer.

Grant muttered something Lizzie couldn’t make out, but she caught the word ‘libel’. The women around him nodded like hens pecking up corn.

‘What’s his problem?’ Lizzie wondered aloud.

Malachy pointed back up the platform to where to a newspaper-seller was waving the latest edition of the Edinburgh Gazette. ‘Um, I think that might be the reason.’

The headline announced: FAMOUS MEDIUM A FAKE!

‘Oh, blimey,’ Lizzie said. ‘Fergus. He did it.’

‘Come on,’ Nora urged. ‘Everyone’s getting on the train. We need to find seats.’

‘Wait a moment!’ Malachy went hobbling back down the platform as fast as he could. Lizzie looked from him to the train, and back, then with a gasp of frustration, she followed the others onto the train.

The others sat down, but Lizzie waited by the door to the carriage. The guard scowled at her. ‘All aboard now, please!’ he yelled.

‘Hurry up, Mal!’ Lizzie called to him.

Malachy, who had bought a newspaper, came hurrying back down the platform. All the train doors had slammed shut. Lizzie swore and flung hers back open. The guard shouted something at her but she paid him no heed as she held her hand out to her friend.

Seconds later, she grabbed Malachy’s hand and pulled him onto the train.

‘Sorry,’ he gasped as the red-faced guard slammed their door and blew his whistle. ‘But we can’t miss this. Scoop of the century.’

He sat back in his seat like a businessman and unfolded the paper. The rest of the Penny Gaff Gang huddled around to listen.

‘The ancient Egyptians were bamboozled by their priests,’ he read, ‘being led to believe that a hollow statue of Memnon was speaking. It seems the tradition of fooling the faithful is alive and well today. We have gone behind the scenes and EXPOSED the stage trickery of one of the world’s most eminent mediums, the darling of America, Mr Douglas Grant himself. Every one of his famous set pieces, including the levitation for which he is so renowned, is nothing more than FAKERY, and this paper will not stand for it.’

Lizzie felt giddy and a little bit sick. The rocking, rattling train didn’t help, so she tugged the window open for some fresh air.

As Malachy read on, Lizzie recognized everything she and her friends had told Fergus. The phosphorus oil to make his hands glow, the painted bar on which Grant stood to levitate, the cold-reading techniques … it was all in there. Fergus had gone for the jugular, like a fighting terrier.

Malachy shook his head and whistled. ‘Almost makes you feel sorry for Grant, this. He’s ruined now. Down for the count.’

‘I ain’t so sure about that,’ Lizzie muttered. Grant had already tried to have her thrown in the river. Now the stakes were raised, and there was no telling how he’d seek revenge for this.

She squirmed in her seat when Malachy reached the end of the article: ‘Compared with Mr Grant’s elaborate stage show, Miss Lizzie Brown’s small tent appears humble. There is no flash and dazzle here, no patter, no stagecraft. There is only the plain light of simple truth. Have we not learned, time and again, that the Spirit appears not amidst wealth and glory, but among humble things? Did not Our Lord enter the world in a manger, between an ox and an ass?’

‘Strewth,’ Lizzie said.

Malachy raised his eyebrows. ‘Customers should not be deceived. There is but one genuine psychic in Edinburgh, and that is Lizzie Brown of Fitzy’s Travelling Circus.’ He folded the paper away.

‘No wonder Grant was looking daggers at you!’ Nora burst out. ‘You’ll be neck-deep in customers after this.’

‘Serves him right,’ Erin said. ‘Pompous ass. This’ll take him down a peg.’

Lizzie thought uneasily of the day ahead. Grant would be there, along with all his devoted followers, and it was sure to be awkward. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have come.’

‘But it will be fun!’ Dru said. He gave Lizzie a look she knew all too well. The twinkly-eyed boy had mischief in mind.

* * *

The train rattled on, passing out of Edinburgh and through green hilly land that Lizzie thought was beautiful. She could understand people believing in fairies if they’d grown up in a country like this. Old flint stone walls, ancient cottages with smoking chimneys … there must have been stories told around those firesides for centuries, passed down from mother to daughter, generation to generation.

Amelia came bounding in to their compartment and settled herself on Collette’s lap. ‘I’m bored,’ she announced.

‘We can’t have that,’ Collette laughed.

‘Everyone in my carriage is talking about boring grown-up stuff. So I’ve come to talk to you instead.’

Lizzie still had stories on her mind. ‘Maybe Erin or Nora can tell you a fairy story?’

‘Oh, we can!’ Nora said.

‘We could keep you in stories all the way to Land’s End,’ Erin added.

Amelia snuggled between the twins while they told her the tale of the giant Finn McCool, and how he’d tricked the bigger, more fearsome giant, Cuchulain. ‘When Finn heard that Cuchulain was coming to fight him, he asked his wife to disguise him as a baby!’ Erin explained.

Lizzie had heard the story from Ma Sullivan a dozen times already. Nora and Erin made a brilliant double act, with Nora telling the story and Erin doing the voices. It’s a shame there are no little children in our circus, she thought, because those two would be the best big sisters ever.

‘Cuchulain crashed in through the door,’ said Nora.

‘“I’ve come to fight Finn!”’ Erin bellowed. ‘“Where is the coward?”’

‘So Finn’s wife pointed to the enormous cradle where Finn lay. “Finn’s not home, but there’s our baby son.”’

‘“Thunder and blazes! If that’s the size of the baby, then how big must the father be?”’

Amelia fidgeted excitedly all through the story and clapped when it was finished. ‘I love fairy stories,’ she said. ‘Maisie used to read them to me.’ Her happy smile suddenly vanished. ‘Maisie had to leave.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Lizzie said.

‘But I’ll see her again,’ Amelia said. ‘I know I will.’

Lizzie didn’t have the heart to tell the little girl that she’d probably never see her nanny again.

Amelia suddenly lunged out of her seat and jumped up at the window and Lizzie felt a brief moment of panic before Amelia shouted, ‘It’s our mill! Look, everyone! There’s the clock tower.’

The MacDonald woollen mill was not pretty: it was a stone-grey ogre, a monstrous thing like a giant from one of Erin and Nora’s stories. Tall chimneys smoked above rows of rooftops, miserable as a prison. Lizzie couldn’t see through the murky windows, but she could guess what was inside – row upon row of machines, roaring and thrumming and clattering, and people bent over them like exhausted slaves. Factories ate human beings alive.

Amelia, though, was beaming with pride. To her, it was a family treasure.

‘You all right, Lizzie?’ Nora asked. ‘You’ve gone all quiet.’

Lizzie was remembering another factory, and the stink of phosphorus oil clouded her mind. She saw the ragged children coughing, the women with rotting, infected jaws bound up with bandage. Phossy jaw, it was called.

‘Lizzie? What’s wrong?’ Erin was concerned as well.

Lizzie shuddered. ‘I don’t like factories,’ she said. ‘My brother died from working in one – I can’t stand to look at them now.’

‘Maisie didn’t like factories either,’ Amelia said. ‘She said they hurt children. But our mill is nice.’

‘Have you ever been inside?’

‘Course I haven’t, silly. But it makes such pretty things.’ Amelia smoothed the fine woollen fabric of her skirt.

At what cost? Lizzie thought darkly, and glanced back at the mill windows.

It was a relief when, not too far beyond the mill, the train finally stopped. Everyone piled out of the carriages and onto the country station platform. Three groups quickly formed: the Penny Gaff Gang and Amelia, Grant and his hangers-on, and MacDonald and the eccentrics, including the Doyles.

‘This way,’ MacDonald called, and swung a gate open onto a path.

Lizzie saw Grant was glaring at her again. She turned away with her nose in the air. She was here now, and she might as well try to enjoy it, even if Grant was doing his best to make her feel unwelcome.

The path led up into a pine wood. For Lizzie, who had only ever seen forests from the top of a moving caravan, it looked like a shadowy and bewitching labyrinth. Huge trunks loomed out of the mist and a sweet scent of pine reached her nose.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said to herself.

The pine trees were as tall as the factory chimneys, but they were green and bursting with life, and the air was pure and clean. As they moved from the bright sunshine into the welcoming woods, where shafts of light slanted cathedral-like from between the branches, Lizzie felt a tingle of excitement.

In a place like this, untouched by man since the dawn of time, perhaps fairies really could exist…