CHAPTER 15

 

She led them to the caretaker's cottage where the door was open, an electric space heater was humming, and the kettle was already on. She set their silver cups in front of them, one by one, on the pretty primrose-covered tablecloth. She looked very homey and North Country matron in gray-green cord pants, green wool socks, gray running shoes with green stripes, a dark green turtleneck jersey with a heavy heathery gray-green cable-knit sweater that was complimentary to her red hair, demurely tied back in a jade-green Duchess of Windsor bow.

"Now then, my dears," she said in a completely new accent—a touch of Yorkshire, perhaps, northern but wavering between upper-class Scottish and country English, "I always find a spot of tea so warming and conducive to sensible discussion, don't you?"

"Who are you?" Anna Mae asked. "The Wizard just did what you said as if you made out his paycheck. Is this another setup or what?" She glared at Gussie—or, probably, at Sir Walter, within Gussie.

"Well, dearie, I know you'll find this a bit hard to take—though no harder, perhaps, than Willie found what my Lulubelle Baker persona had to tell him—but you see, oh, my, this is a little awkward to say without sounding arrogant or undemocratic or anything but—it just so happens that another of the little hats that I wear is, um—no gay jokes now—I'm the Queen of the Fairies."

"No shit?" Brose asked.

"None at all," she said seriously. "I'm very well known in these parts—better than anywhere save Ireland, perhaps. Sir Walter knew me at once, didn't you, Wat?"

Gussie's ghost guest nodded, thrilled to its nonexistent marrow.

"And since most of his magical powers come from me, I suppose your assessment, Anna Mae, that I pay Michael Scott's paycheck is not too far off the mark."

"Well, if you're so damned powerful why didn't you just help us already? Why make us go through all this rigamarole?" Willie asked.

"Because, my sweet, as you've already mentioned, I am, nominally, mostly, formally, on the record, anyway, officially working for the opposition. You might recall that song about a protégé of mine, a boy named Tam Lin? Very promising lad, he was, but as roguish as you, Willie. Got some bird in a family way and ran off on me just when I needed him most."

Julianne said, "The ballad says you were about to pay your tithe to hell by using him as a sacrifice."

Torchy/Lulubelle/the Queen of the Fairies nodded agreement. "Oh, yes, handpicked him and groomed him for the position myself. But unfortunately, at tithing time, he was playing hide the sausage with that Janet bird."

"So you couldn't pay the rent!" Gussie said.

And Sir Walter said, "Aye, that's how it was, even as you feared, lady, in the ballad variation that went, as I recall:

 

"Up bespak the Queen of Fairies

And she spak wi a loud yell

"Aye at every seven years' end

We pay the kane to hell

And the koors they hae gone round about

And I fear it will be mysel'."

 

The woman in green reached over and patted Gussie/ Walter fondly on the cheek. "There, then. You do see how it is, don't you? A girl has her position in this world to maintain and so I embarked on a new career." She sighed a deep, put-upon sigh. "Still, I do try in my own little way to reward those who have pleased me in the past. I'm sure you'll never know how often I've been on the very precipice of a descent into the truly tacky parts of hell because I managed to finagle some little advantage here and there that would give you people an 'out,' despite your stubborn refusal to be realistic—I'm not awfully fond of realistic, actually, so I can sympathize with you. So from time to time I've been able to stir things up a bit when you get in a jam. If I can't actually help you, I can at least create opportunities, you see?"

"Oh, so you take the credit for every time we've been able to escape from a trap you've gotten us into? Is that it?" Anna Mae asked.

"You do see, then, don't you?" Torchy beamed approvingly. "Why, I've been like a fairy godmother to you, a guardian angel, a—"

Gussie's cough erupted and continued for a few seconds as she looked up over her glasses at Torchy.

"Well, I suppose there's no sense in getting sloppy about it. But I've been a peach and I do think you should trust me when I tell you that while I can see where you'd want to do this thing auld Mike's set up, I don't think it's a very good idea and I don't think you know what you're letting yourselves in for. More tea, Willie, luv?"

"Sure."

"Like I said, you'll only have seven years—"

"What's this seven-year jazz?" Brose demanded.

"Why, luv, when you put yourself under an enchantment and oblige yourself, so to speak, to Fairie, it's always seven years, didn't you know that?"

"He's a bluesman really," Julianne apologized for him. "He's not really into the Celtic stuff."

"Oh. I do see. Well, then, I'm very glad I've got a chance to explain a few things to you. Seven years is quite the common contract unless, of course, you do something to make it permanent and you certainly wouldn't want to do that."

"Why not?"

"Well, darling, think about it! They did not make songs that lasted for hundreds of years out of days of long, dreary peace and quiet or the contented moo of the livestock. Ballads are full of treachery, murder, lost love, rape, war, etcetera, and in order for you to do what Sam Hawthorne and this implement of his want you to do, you'll have your hands full in seven years going into a new persona just long enough to live out the ballad situation, claim it for your own, and emerge into a new one. The whole scenario is perfect hell and there are so few of you to do it."

"There's Faron and Ellie," Gussie reminded her.

She smiled a phony, society-lady smile, lips-up-lips-down. "Sorry, dear. They're out of the picture. My minions took care of them back at Abbotsford. Besides, they didn't hear the tune Michael Scott played, and you'll find you can't really teach it, you know. Spells can be like that."

Sir Walter sighed. "My Lady, Your Majesty, you burned my Abbotsford?"

"Don't be such a puppy, Wattie dear. Grow up. You're dead. You don't need a house. If you want to haunt something you can haunt the ruins. Much more appropriate anyway. And I may be a tad more simpatico to this operation than my bosses really like, but I must do my job competently, don't you see? I couldn't allow any of the printed collections to fall into your hands or it would be as much as my job is worth. And I have no desire to be busted to pitchfork patrol. Plays perfect hell with one's manicure."

"But if you destroyed all the collections and we have to go to the source to reclaim the songs, then we don't have any choice but to do what the Wizard said if we want to get the songs back, do we?" Julianne asked.

"No. You don't. Actually, you haven't got any choice anyway. It's the tea, you see. Water's from the river in Fairie and I'm afraid boiling doesn't do a thing to the enchanted quality. Once you drink it you're into me for the seven years. Sorry. Part of the job. Of course, I could just take you on for seven years and you wouldn't have to do the musical enchantment bit. We'd have lots of fun. Oh, I don't have much in the way of jeweled underground realms anymore and a court and such, but I have plenty of other folks at my command. Probably most of them are motes of my former subjects, Michael Scott would say. People who still want to get away from it all with a little glamourie—these days they find it in a bottle or a syringe or a dab of fairy dust rather than by falling asleep on some knowe or the other—and some of them look for it in sex or try to win it, but they're all my subjects, you see. You, Willie, have always been, though without the special allegiance you'd owe me if you went the route I'm proposing, and you too, Brose, before you broke faith with me. Juli has been looking in all the wrong places though she would have come around sooner or later, I've faith, with a little nudge in the right direction. You, Anna Mae, were going to choose one of the other routes—in the ballad days, they'd send you to Bedlam the way you've been carrying on and you'd have gotten worse by the time we were done with you, especially after your dear friends in the capital had you committed for all of your strange delusions and hallucinations, whether you had them or not—but then, you see, given proper medication and stimulus, you really would have had them. I've grown very fond of you all and I wouldn't be too taxing a mistress and you'd get to do things you already like—just no songs and no stories of any sort, I'm afraid, except for certain orchestrated misdirections in a good cause."

"I don't think this seven years at finding ballads sounds all that bad," Brose said.

"It's no longer than it would take you to get a doctorate in folklore if you had to start as a freshman in a BA program," Juli said. "And it is what we started out to do. It's not like it would be real"

"Oh, it's real, okay, ducky." Torchy smiled the lips-up-lips-down unpleasant little smile again. "You'll see if one of you is fool enough to try it—your body is gone and it doesn't come back unless and until you've done all your gathering—and followed all of the rules and regulations, of course. If you slip up, well, then, you stay there and all of your little motes get to come back as somebody else—and I promise you, they'll be so scattered even your best friends would never want to know the people you'll come back in. As for that little spark the Wizard was so fond of, why, if you break the rules that's forfeit to me, of course. And you've all heard the ballads. I needn't tell you what deliciously gruesome things are apt to happen to your bodies."

"The Wizard didn't say anything about any rules," Anna Mae said.

Torchy smiled again. "My dear, that's because we're playing by mine. The tea water, you know."

"And just what might those be?" Gussie asked.

"Oh, they're not complicated. It's just that you will only come to as the ballad character at the moment that the situation is happening—as it truly happened. Oh, and that brings me to the last little rule. It's my favorite and very simple really. You'll find that a lot of these situations boil down to two things—sex and death. If you get laid or murdered, you lose, game's mine. You have to get out just before either of those things happens, or come in just after they happen to the character, but not with you—er—in character. Clear?"

"Not especially," Anna Mae said antagonistically.

"Good. Then you do see that it's much more sensible to take me up on my proposition. More tea? In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. Oh, yes, there is one more thing. Riddles. You'll have to answer any riddles put to you correctly or again. you lose."

"Is there any way we can avoid losing?" Willie asked.

Sir Walter's ghost cleared his throat. "It is customary, Your Ladyship, to give some sort of magical encouragement or enabling device to folk on a difficult quest. You were kind enough, though you forbade True Thomas to eat or drink or speak to any others while in your realm, to provide him with earthly food and drink and to speak to him yourself. You've made it much more difficult for these folk. Have mercy, lady, for you once loved music as well as they."

The woman in green first frowned, then looked thoughtful. "Your appeal strikes, if you will pardon the expression, the right chord with me, Wattie. Very well. Though I know I'll get in hot water for being such a softie. I'll tell you what. For every song each of you survives collecting, I'll throw in seven other associated ballads, free of charge. Now that couldn't be any fairer, could it?"

Sir Walter cleared his throat. "It raises the incentive, lady, but 'tis not the sort of thing tae help them survive the task."

"You do drive a hard bargain, but then, I forget, you were a lawyer while alive," Torchy said, smiling a brittle but fond smile. "Okeydoke then. Let me think. An escape clause. Oh, I've got it. Very well. Here it is. You see the extra lengths of string at the tuning pegs, curled into little rings when last Mr. Sam Hawthorne strung those strings that always stay in tune? You will not be able to take the banjo with you to the other side, but if you decide to go, when you have played the first note of the tune, you may clip off one ring each and wear it on your middle finger where it will remain while you are within the ballad. If you find yourself in one of the forbidden situations, you have but to twist the ring three times widdershins around your middle finger and the string will sound the tune that will take you to the next ballad. What could be fairer?" she asked, her smile deepening to a dazzle beamed in Gussie's and Sir Walter's direction. "I think that takes care of all the details. The caretaker will be here at ten. That's three hours from now which is more than ample time to make up your minds. I'll be back with the car then to pick up any of you who have been sensible."