The Lord of Hardenmoor (Part 1)

The UK has nine native species of fairy. Increasingly it’s suspected that there exist more, which are shy, secretive, or just plain good at passing themselves off as a Ludgate Pixie or a Cheshire White-Winged Fey. Even of the nine confirmed ones – and that’s not counting the migrants, who arrive here around Hallowe’en time and are gone by Bonfire Night – some are rarer than others. Every child would recognise a Painted Gentleman down the end of the garden from the characteristic cut of his coat; and the famous Speckled Swallowtail on the crest of West Bromwich Albion FC put faeology on a million beer mats in a thousand grimy pubs. (Worth noting the logo is inaccurate in several minor yet infuriating ways. The fairy perches on a hawthorn branch, but the Swallowtail family tend to stick to meadows and open moorland away from thorny thickets where natural predators like cats or trolls might hide; the creature’s mouth is open in some sort of cry or even song, but Swallowtails are characteristically silent and communicate using a fascinating combination of pheromones and telepathy. Next time you’re in one of those pubs, you can thank me.)

But among the rarest of British fairies is the Lord of Hardenmoor. I’m not talking “rare” like the Little Tortoiseshell, which is usually quoted as the rarest in the land, having only a population of a few dozen living in the Palm House at Kew. No, the Lord of Hardenmoor is a tricky little bastard because even if there were one sitting on the windowsill before your very eyes, you wouldn’t have a clue it was there. You see, the Lord of Hardenmoor is visible only to the mad.

I was in the second year of my PhD when I first caught a glimpse of a Lord of Hardenmoor, and if it hadn’t been for Yoana I wouldn’t have seen it at all. I’d just turned in a first chapter to my supervisor Mean Ian (to distinguish him from Nice Ian in the library – obviously not a name anyone said to his face). I’d written it over the course of a long, painful term where every time I opened my word processor I found myself overwhelmed by the intense blankness of the page and had to close my laptop before I’d typed a single word.

I had reams of research into the ecology of Devon pixies, the product of many happy hours of fieldwork ankle-deep in the Dartmoor heather with Ted and Priyasha and Dr Ru. As we chatted and laid down traps and detectors I felt full to the brim with ideas about my thesis. All the accepted models were wrong, and all the conservation projects misguided; our social understanding of fairies and pixies, our treatment of these vicious, capricious yet beautiful creatures, in need of a severe kicking up the arse.

But when I stepped off the train back in Birmingham it all fell out of my brain as soon as the doors slid shut. Something about the straight-lined red-brick skyline drained it from me, just as the kilns and factories of the Industrial Revolution had banished fairies from the Black Country and hastened the extinction of several of the fairies most common in Shakespeare’s time, like the Red Titania and the Puck which inspired the famous anthropomorphic fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The cursor on the Word page seemed to flash with dreadful regularity – I could almost hear it ticking down the hours until my first draft was due. Eventually, with twelve hours before my 9am deadline, slowly, agonisingly, caught between despair and terror at incurring Mean Ian’s wrath, I wrote. I made it to four thousand, three hundred and ninety-eight words before literally falling asleep on my keyboard.

When I woke up at 8:57am the final line of Chapter 1 (“Context and Historiography”) went a bit like this:

For this reason, existing commentaries fail to adequately distinguish between the fairy-as-pest and fairy-as-deliberate-troublemaker. In this work I will explore the consequences of this categorisation and outline the learnings for modern faeological conservation efforts in the UK and Ireland-v 0c,0yhlujhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

I hastily deleted the garbage, stuck in a full stop which I hoped gave the paragraph a confidence and authority which I absolutely did not share, stuck it in an email to Mean Ian and hit Send.

Then I rolled into bed and did not notice the faintest gleam of a greasy thumbprint on the outside of my window before I fell asleep.

Dear Ivy,

This isn’t your best work. Based on the synopsis we reviewed in December I was expecting a more cogent critique of Havelockian discourse around the fae ecological niche. Despite you calling this chapter “historiography” you haven’t gone beyond a surface-level description of the literature at all. I know you understand Gates better than this. So why are you characterising him as a third-rate quack? I attach a reviewed copy with more detailed notes –

“I think I get the idea,” said Yoana, handing me back my phone. “Crikey, I see why you call him Mean. Can’t you, like, send in for a new one?”

I stared despondently at my coffee and tried to make it explode using only the power of thought. (It refused.) “There’s nobody else in my field in the department,” I said. “I’d essentially have to drop out and reapply elsewhere.”

Yoana leaned over the picnic bench and poked me in the forehead. We were sitting outside the park café, the sun was out, and all the children on the planet were screaming in the playground next door. “You’re ruminating.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are. I see you. You’re doing the ‘oh, nothing in my life turns out right’ and ‘there is no way out of my problems’ and ‘woe is me, life is suffering, blah blah blah’.”

“No I’m not,” I said again, weakly. I could feel the edges of a migraine coming on, which didn’t help. All the colours of the world seemed to be growing a little more vivid, like they were planning something.

Yoana straightened up. “Is this about Phil?”

Oh my god I do not want to talk about that. “No.”

“You’re an adult. You’re a professional. At undergrad you got the highest grade in our year.”

“In first year.”

“The highest grade. I can’t believe Mr Mean has turned you into a blubbering mess.”

“Evidence is to the contrary. Blubbering mess, reporting for duty.”

“No, I mean, come on. Look at him. He’s a troll. Pantomime villain. All the paint runs off if he gets caught out in the rain.”

I took my chin off the table and looked up at Yoana. “Are you trying to make me feel even more pathetic? Because, like, the only thing worse than being taken to pieces by a respectable academic is having a clown do it.”

“Oof. That’s me told.” She pushed her empty coffee cup aside. “Look, what I’m trying to say is, you’ve been through a lot this last year. You’re allowed to slow down a bit.”

“No…”

“Ask for an extension. Take some time off. When was the last time you had a break?”

“Look –”

“Was it Christmas? I bet it was Christmas. Womankind was not meant to survive this much stress for this much time, Ivy.”

As though to prove her point, my migraine was getting worse. The sunlight was a little too bright, echoing off the roof of the ice cream van and the shiny bin. I closed my eyes, but the sunlight kept reverberating around the inside of my skull. Shadows danced.

Yoana said, “Ivy? You okay?”

I moaned. I must’ve put my head in my hands. The dark shapes on the inside of my eyelids had a shape to them almost like the silhouette of a person.

“Look, I’m gonna get you some water, okay.”

I opened my eyes. Yoana was gone. But in the blazing sunlight I saw a tiny figure. It sat dangling its legs into the bin, wings opening and closing like a butterfly’s. It wore a lovely purple tailcoat with gold stripes running from the sternum over the shoulders. Its face was unmistakeably Fairy, with the glittering compound eyes of a bluebottle, wringing its forehands over its mouth. But its face was strangely human, with a round chin like a child’s, and an expression I couldn’t help but read as gentle concern.

It was utterly beautiful and I had never seen anything like it in any of the faeological textbooks.

It chittered and it sounded like a bubbling brook, or a madwoman’s chatter.

“Ivy, drink this.”

A cup of water was pushed under my nose. I looked at it and back up at the fairy, but it was gone. I blinked. The sunlight already seemed to be losing its bite, colours fading back towards normal. The bench wobbled as Yoana sat. “Seriously. Do you want some painkillers or something? I have ibruprofen, but we’ll have to stop at the chemist’s if you want paracetamol.”

I stood, but the world revolved. I sat back down and felt Yoana’s hands pressing me upright. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. One step at a time, girl.”

I gestured. “Did you see it?”

Yoana looked at the ice cream van and back to me. “See what?”

“The fairy.” My throat sounded like crap. I lifted the cup and took a gulp so big I coughed and had to wait a bit before answering. “There was a fairy, there on the bin.”

“I missed it. Maybe it flew away. Are you feeling ok?”

I downed the water and made myself stand. “Yeah… yeah, I’m fine. Just a migraine. I think I’ll go home and ride it out.”

“Let me order you a taxi.” Yoana helped me up, but I shook her off. As she messed around with her phone I went to put the cup in the bin, and squinted at the rim looking for any sort of mark. Nothing. Wait – in the dust. There was the slightest hint of a scuff mark. It could’ve been a bird, or someone dragging something across the lip as they threw it away. But I could’ve sworn it looked like the footprints of a fairy.

Later, after the migraine had faded, I reached for my laptop. You might judge me for this, but my go-to source of fairy categorisation isn’t some nifty wildlife app but the Wikipedia page “List of British fairy species”. I scrolled past the “native” section, but couldn’t see anything like those yellow-gold stripes. On to the “seasonal”, “vagrant” and “in captivity” sections, but still nothing. There’s a fairy native to bits of central Asia and the Himalayas which has lovely green-gold streaks, but the only time that was loose in the UK was after an escape attempt at a private zoo in the 1910s and was generally believed to have died out. And its wings were completely the wrong shape.

This was weird.

I scrolled back up to the top of the page. Was I hallucinating?

Something made me pause. At the bottom of the “Native” section, one entry didn’t have a photograph. All the others had mostly-in-focus open source images of each fairy from a range of enthusiastic contributors, but this one had only a black-and-white pencil drawing, and a poor one at that. It was twee in a Victorian greetings-card kind of way, all rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes, far too humanoid in its features. The pencil lines lacked a sort of precision you might expect from the really good natural historians, and the shading was all over the place.

But what struck me was the shape of its face. A rounded chin and a certain set of the eyes, almost reminding me of a human with Down’s. The description read: