Work Text:
November, 1935
Snow was swirling outwith the dimpled windows of Lee Rigg. Poppy watched it with quiet resignation that winter had arrived at last. It glinted, white sea of diamond and sheer against the sun. She poured out tea to a visiting Nan Meredith and said, as it tumbled golden into the teacups, 'Winter's dregs made desolate/ the weakening eye of day.'
The sentiment was somewhat undercut by the two fairies currently running amok of so much twig furniture in Poppy's living room, the one nut-brown and the other, some might have said, sporting hair like carrots. They were longer-limbed than she remembered, pink of cheek, and presently competing to see who could get closest to the fire without falling in as they by turns lovingly wrestled with Paisley, incorrigible Scottish terrier in residence and cosseted Proudfoot, she of the queenly feline bearing and many more claws than was usual. Their hair was all loose and fly-away and for Poppy's money, much too close to the fire. How Nan wasn't terrified the girls would light up like Roman candles Poppy didn't know; She certainly was.
'You're forgetting the rest,' said Nan with a smile. She gestured warning-fashion at Mandy before the young woman further imperilled herself or her fiery hair, or indeed Paisley's jaunty ears and tartan kerchief. Watching, Poppy reflected with no little affection that some things never changed.
'So little cause for carollings, recited Nan,
Of such ecstatic sounds,
Was written on terrestrial things,
Afar or nigh around…
Nan trailed off of necessity as reality reasserted itself. Mandy bent, hair wild, over the fire and began inexpertly stoking it. A testement to their almost-certain doom and the diminishing standards of the Girl Scouts and their fire-starters badge these days. Not to be left out, nut-brown Miri crunched a napkin into a ball and lobbed it, also inexpertly fire-ward, which inferno it missed by several inches, but not before setting Paisley off barking the rapturous bark of a ratter upon his prey. He pounced on the napkin, and the cat pounced on him, and almighty was the noise that followed. Nan smiled again, snared an arm around both girls and simultaneously hauled the dog up onto a maternal knee. Cue impish eyerolling from the Miisses Meredith that mother and Poppy affected not to notice. Satisfied, Nan smoothed Miri's glossy hair against her back and resumed her poetry the way lesser people did breathing.
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air,
Some blessed hope, whereof he knew,
And I was unaware.
'Jerry quoted it to me,' Nan said, suddenly thoughtful, 'when little Miri was so ill and we thought she was dying.' Her arm snaked tighter around the daughter in question. Too tight, Poppy thought, smiling, to judge from Miri's writhing, squirming response. Or perhaps it was only youthful embarrassment at such overt displays of parental affection. Nan's twins were well into the awkward years by now. Not that Nan blamed her friend the soppiness; They had all thought Miri dying. Indeed, Miri had been dying. Poppy could still picture her, blue-tinted lips and nails, a shadow of her autumnal sister. And yet, here she was, slender and spidery-limbed, outperforming that same sister for fireside acrobatics years later.
Said that stubbornly undead young madam with a toss of her nt-brown head She even went so far as to give a toss of that glossy brown head in an idiom that was all her maternal inheritance of pride and queenly overconfidence, 'Mums. You're being soppy. For no reason!'
Poppy stifled a smile. Nan made no such effort.
'Hardy and Novembers,' she said, 'no one's been able to say a word against either ever since, you know. Or not to me. They gave me my brave, wonderful girl back, proved winter could be lovely after all.'
'Mums,' said Miri again, but without heat.
'I'm glad,' said Poppy.
'For anything particularly?' asked Nan, and Poppy shrugged, eyes widening grey and owlish, and gestured at the tableau they made, two women, children and assorted animals as rendered by firelight on a fading November afternoon. It was halfway to being a Victorian painting. Family Teatime or something of that ilk. Poppy did not say so, lest it muster accusations of soppiness.
'All of it,' she said simply, even as the girls under discussion shucked the maternal embrace. Then, with a smile, 'Though particularly having someone who speaks Swallowgate on my doorstep. That's been quite nice, too.'
Tramping and stamping off feet in the hall was followed by a gently indignant 'I do speak Swallowgate!'
This declaration was followed by the appearance of Peter, tall, greying, and besnowed still from head to shoulders in the sitting room.
'Mouse,' he said to Poppy, stooping to kiss her head, 'Are the horse blankets being laundered?'
Poppy paused, halfway through pouring a cup of tea to weigh the question. She bit her lip, left the teapot idle too long, and was vaguely aware of Nan intercepting the teapot and strainer as she courted overflow and spillage.
'Not by me they're not,' said Poppy, finally. 'Wrong time of year, darling. Completely.' She tipped half the contents of the cup back into the teapot, losing some to the twig table and a saucer of Spode Woodland in the process. It occurred to her that this haphazard tea-table etiquette was not what had creased Peter's forehead.
'You're sure?'
Poppy gestured, teacup precariously in hand, at the assembled company of Nan and her attendant fairy train. Paisley, seizing an opportunity, catapulted off of Nan's knee and descended upon the neglected islands of spilled tea, the better to lap them into non-existence.
'I have been worshipping at the altar of the temple Meredith,' Poppy said with a shrug, 'and can even,' nodding Nan-ward, 'produce witnesses. In what time am I supposed to have started a laundry?'
'Early this morning?' said Peter, but he rendered it a question in the delivery. As logic went, Poppy thought, it was not entirely faulty.
'Or perhaps,' as he picked his way around the table and accepted the proffered teacup from Nan, 'the Misses Meredith required them for a fairy fortress. Was that it?'
So saying, he set the teacup down and fell upon a giggling, squealing Mandy, the better to tickle her into admission. It might have been years since they'd been neighbours, and Nan's daughter's might decry the mortification of maternal affection, but the little girl Mandy had been then was never far from the surface. Growing up, she had once declared, in the world-weary voice of the twelve-year-old, took entirely too much effort. Poppy was beyond delighted, Peter too.
'Now,' said Nan, observing their wrangling, 'if I said or did anything like that, I'd be accused of soppiness. What's the difference, do you think?'
Poppy laughed, a bright, merry sound like a contented fire. Proudfoot jumped onto her knees, and circled herself into comfort, eyes wide and unconvinced, the picture of disgruntled feline. Peter continued to tickle Mandy, undeterred by her flailing hands or the kicking of her pointed toes lightly against his shins.
'Well?' Peter said to her onslaught of laughter, 'Were you having a fairy picnic? Or swaddling an injured squirrel? Did the Queen of Arcadia appear and demand the softest castle you could build?'
'O!' squealed Mandy, breathless, her voice shrill in its excitability. 'No-o, Uncle Peter! Never!'
Peter was unrelenting. He hauled Miri into his unruly circus and said, 'You'll tell me, won't you, fawn?'
No luck. The girls were doubled up in giddy laughter. It was too long, Poppy thought, since they'd played like this. Almost ten years – and yet, how easy to slip back into yesterday.
'They really haven't, you know,' said Nan, for them. 'They carved a few snow angels into your garden earlier, just to prove they weren't as grown up as all that, but otherwise they've been gloriously undermining our attempt at a civilised tea, haven't they Mouse? I think you even went so far as to dry their hair with garden-variety towels, or tried to.' This with a swat at Mandy's still-damp hair.
'Hardly,' said Poppy, affecting indignation. 'They were first-rate towels woven from moss and spiderwebs, weren't they, Miri? Mandy?'
Both girls nodded solemn agreement. It was the best they could manage, Poppy supposed, as they recovered from the battle so lately fought. Peter was back to frowning.
He said, 'Well, blankets don't walk away, and they're not where they should be. If you haven't moved them, and I haven't moved them, and they haven't exactly got legs to walk about on…' He rubbed a cold-reddened hand in exasperated fashion against the back of his neck.
'Ghosts?' said Nan, as if this was an entirely ordinary observation to make.
'Bit out of season, isn't it?' said Peter, proving that he could, after all, speak Swallowgate as handily as any of the girls who pinned hopes. And well he ought, for he had known them throughout their tenure there, had courted Poppy there.
Nan tossed her head, glossier than ever by firelight and said, 'Nonsense.' She was the very echo of her young nut-brown daughter. 'You haven't exactly got a church round the corner. I make it reasonable odds some poor soul got lost back at Halloween and, missing their grave has been wandering around ever since, trying to get out of the cold.'
'Catkin,' said Poppy, her eyes more owlish and grey than ever, 'that is positively eerie. And I spent four years with a resident Ariel that spoke fluent fairy.'
'Quite,' said Nan and laughed. 'I learned from the best. It's not my fault Ontario has such a dearth of make-believe.'
'You and Mara keep me in steady supply,' said Poppy laughingly. 'I'm in exactly no danger of forgetting green people. Now,' as Miri surfaced from Peter's arms and half-fell upon a platter of giddily-iced gingerbread, 'where do you imagine our ghost is hiding?'
Miri snuggled into a nearby chair and as she fed gingerbread to a delighted Paisley, Poppy sent the gingerbread circling round their assembled party. Peter took a slice, conferred with it a moment and said to Mandy, still cuddled unapologetically against his chest, 'Some of your best work, this, Miss Amanda.'
'Dryad,' said Mandy. 'I've told you before,' and beamed at him before launching into an explanation of her culinary creation, which was rife with overlooked nuances. Peter nodded in all the right places.
Nan dipped a biscuit thoughtfully in her tea and said, 'What about Nelly's Room?'
'Nelly?' said Poppy and Peter in mutual perplexity. Nan nodded, as if this was a perfectly logical thing to have said, then hastened to rescue her biscuit from disintegration.
Said the little girls in unison, 'Everyone knows about Nelly's Room!'
'I don't,' said Peter and Poppy simultaneously.
'You know,' Nan said, 'the spare room or attic, or cupboard or what have you where all the lost things turn up. Every house has one.'
Miri and Mandy were nodding sagely, obviously well-familiar with Nelly's Room.
'That sounds more like the hazards of frequent moves, Catkin,' said Poppy.
'Oh, no,' said Nan, 'definitely not. I mean it could be, but there was one at the House of Dreams, the way Mums tells it, and Patty's Place too, you know. Even Green Gables had one. Aunt Marilla's mother is supposed to have named it, which explains why poor Nelly got such a prosey name. So you see,' with another judiciously measured dunk of biscuit, 'even long-term houses have a Nelly's Room. Aunt Phil used to say she shared a room with Nelly, because half the lost property turned up on her desk or under her bed.'
'Or,' said Peter, 'Your mother and company swapped things round almost as much as you girls who pinned hopes ever did.'
Miri and Mandy crossed their arms and shook their heads in indignation. Nan affected aggravation, and Poppy laughed. It was easier than pantomiming serenity by a Newfoundland mile.
'I'd give up while you're ahead,' she said and handed Peter another biscuit. Whether she meant it for Peter the cat he was now courting she hadn't decided. 'I think logic exited pursued by cold weather as you came in.'
'Really, Mouse,' said Nan, still with that playful show of offence that fooled no one, 'I don't know when you got to be so sensible. It's quite obviously ghosts.'
'Obviously,' said Mandy and Miri in unison.
'Obviously,' said Poppy, mouth twitching.
There was probably something to be said about how Nan's economies had never previously defied reality, or how even Mara's superstitions had been improbably wedded to the laws of nature. But Mandy and Miri were nodding in perfect synchronicity, resolutely capping the discussion. If the Misses Meredith said it was ghosts afoot, then ghosts it would be until they were safely returned to their home. Such was the tacit law of Lee Rigg, enthralled in perpetuity to their puckish whims, had been ever since they were little girls wintering at Crow Lake. So they had shot up several feet in the interim and gained the ability to articulate an opinion or ten in a language besides Gobbledegook. It changed nothing.
Afterwards, Nan and the girls bundled themselves up to the eyes, snow not so much crunching as snuffling under various snowshoes as they set off for Struan. Poppy saw them off with a flask of cocoa for the trip and a tin of gingerbread for good measure.
'Come back soon!' she and Peter called from the open door, and the departing Merediths shouted their vociferous assent onto the wind. The missed blankets were discovered a bit munched, but otherwise no worse for wear in a drift of snow behind the stables, and it was generally supposed the wind had carted them off overnight. Poppy lost a quarter-hour to mercilessly teasing Peter about how Nan and the girls had been right after all. Or, theorised Peter, undeterred, a fox had bedded down in them, and like any good canine-adjacent creature, given them a good gnawing. Paisley would testify to the necessity of this.
The snow settled into downy drifts and the cold began to deepen. Nan and the girls crunched back through the snow, Jerry in tow this time. He wanted to paint the stables by winter light. Why the spirit moved him to do it in sub-zero weather Poppy would never understand, but if it bought her another day with Nan and her family, she would brook no complaints. Off Jerry went, and the girls too, begging cocoa and biscuits from the kitchen to keep them warm while they befriended the birds and surrounding wildlife. Poppy thought nothing of it; No one did. It was a well-documented fact of Struan history that the animals of the forest were as much friends to the Meredith twins as anyone else might hope to be. Better, Poppy sometimes thought. So she gifted them their sweets, expressed a wish to visit with them sometime before they headed home and settled to a comfortable fireside tea with Nan. Do you remembers interspersed with can you believes as Proudfoot slept, sleek head pillowed on striped paws, by the fire and Paisley begged scraps from the table.
'And how,' Nan wanted to know, 'is Nelly?'
'I think she's departed,' said Poppy. 'Or else she's hibernating, bear-like. Nothing's gone walkabout lately.'
If afterwards, the Merediths safely home again, Poppy's store of food came up unexpectedly short she supposed she'd miscalculated when stockpiling provisions.
'You don't miscalculate, Posey,' said Peter, frowning alternately between a pair of overworked snowshoes and the list of goods he was being sent to fetch in from Struan.
'Everyone does,' said Poppy, reasonably, working her bread dough. 'Even us mathematical types.'
'Not you,' said Peter, stubbornly. 'Not over numbers. You didn't outperform our year at mathematics on sheer luck.'
It was impossible to both kneed bread and be cross, much less irritated. The bread dough waxed silky under Poppy's fingers and the kitchen smelled pleasantly of yeast and butter. Poppy dusted her fingers with flour, eyes owlish in the morning light.
'No one asked me to factor in Nelly,' she said and kissed Peter's cheek.
Peter duly went out, returning in the afternoon dragging a wagon of tins and foodstuffs behind him. Paisley all but ricocheted off the walls as he barked a jubilant welcome home. The bread dough grew to a lovely, enriched loaf heavy with cardamom and cinnamon smells that permeated the kitchen. Poppy oscillated between ministering to it and tending various horses. She picked her way back towards the house grateful that Peter and the wagon had previously trammelled the snow to a negotiable height, and put a call through to Nan and family inviting them down for the afternoon.
'I've made Christmas bread especially,' she told Nan, only realising the fairy queens of Struan were listening in when shrieks of glee came sailing down the line. Poppy laughed as she signed off, ears ringing. Then she sat at the scarred kitchen work table and wrote out an account of the food, as she slotted tins into the pantry, and biscuits into the battered tin with poinsettia stamp in anticipation of their arrival. It would never do, after all, if their resident dryads should appear and miss the promised Christmas treat.
Poppy heard her friends' arrival before she saw them; The familiar tread of snow-shoes and ringing, elfin laughter through the clear, cold air. The girls barrelled into her, snowshoes and all, with cries of 'Aunt Poppy, we're here!' in case she had somehow failed to realise this fact. They even – oh glorious, unlooked for bounty – condescended to a cursory fireside snuggle before haring off, bread in ungloved hands, through the snow. Nan threw some maternal admonition after them to mind the cold, but no one appeared to listen.
'Let them have their fun, Catkin,' Poppy said. 'I can't help this feeling they're getting all the adventures you and I were short-changed on.'
'That might be the wisest thing you've said yet, Mouse,' said Nan, and cradled her teacup close.
Jerry and Peter joined them, talking of so many inches of snowfall and how hard the winter was. Poppy went for more refreshments, certain there was more bread in the pantry. There was not. The fact that she had cut slices from it a little under an hour ago seemed a moot point. There was the cutting board, as she had left it, and the bread knife, and a vast quantity of crumbs. No bread. If she tried she could still faintly smell trace amounts of cardamom and cinnamon, but that was all. Biscuits then. But she was short those, too. Gently, Poppy closed the pantry door and stared at it, thinking not of Nelly, whoever or whatever Nelly turned out to be, but of Faith on a long-ago autumnal afternoon in 1916. Poppy could be specific because the memory partially orbited - as had nigh on everything that autumn – the death of Walter Blythe. The twins and Ruthie Blake were assembled around the scrubbed-pine table, scarred with kitchen-work and pen nibs, and Poppy had born a cup of tea up to Faith, scribbling away in her room.
Only Faith hadn't been scribbling; she'd been staring vacantly at the unremarkable floral paper on the wall opposite her, and Poppy's entrance, all squeaking door and mildly rattling saucer had spooked her – like one of the horses confronted with an unsolicited rain puddle, Poppy thought now, with a smile.
Do you believe in ghosts, Mouse, Faith had asked then, and Poppy had not.
There were no biscuits in the pantry. The stoneware jar yielded only a brandy soaked fruitcake. Poppy set it aside for duty imminently. The tin in poinsettia stamp, gifted to them by Peter's mother two Christmases before her death, was empty. This, Poppy thought, was absurd. She knew there were biscuits, because she had baked a batch on purpose yesterday afternoon.
Do you believe in ghosts, Mouse? Had said Faith Meredith, all cheese-coloured and wan in the fading light of the afternoon. I haven't, not since Henry Warren's ghost turned out to be only a bedsheet…But would Faith have so theorised, Poppy wondered – here with a traitorous look at the poinsettia stamped tin – if Henry Warren had started filching Jem's fried fish, or stealing the choicest of Susan Baker's plum puffs? Impossible to stand in the winter-grey cloister of Lee Rigg kitchen, empty poinsettia stamp tin before her, and not wonder at least a little.
'Ah,' said Peter behind her, 'we thought we'd lost you.'
Poppy handed him the empty biscuit tin. Peter raised both eyebrows. 'What exactly am I supposed to be looking at, Mouse?'
'Nelly's work,' she said. 'I think.'
'I thought,' said Nan, materialising in the kitchen doorway, 'You disbelieved in Nelly.'
'Except I put my finger into the print of the nails, ' said Peter, and then, with a grin, 'or, as the case might be, the empty biscuit tin…' he shrugged. Nan laughed.
'Odds are on it's our favourite sprites,' said Peter.
'Yes,' said Poppy, 'but they wouldn't eat everything.'
Nan hummed, thoughtful. Poppy said, 'You're thinking, Catkin. Anything interesting?'
'Call it an intuition,' said Nan.
On the strength of nothing stronger than a maternal hunch, they bundled themselves into scarves, coats, gloves – several in Poppy's case – hats and all sorts, and set out around the house, tracking the still-dainty footprints of Nan's little girls. As babies they had run in what Poppy dubbed an enviably natural skip-change-of-step, and Mandy particularly still did it, even in winter, even in boots. Right foot forward, close behind, reach and onto the left foot. She walked with her feet turned out at an angle, her prints like a duck's. It was no trouble at all to pick out the path they had taken, snow not so much drifting as sifting around them.
Peter spotted them first, elbows propped against a far-off fence, cold-reddened hands full of something. Presumably spoils from the kitchen.
'What – ' Nan began to ask, but Poppy hushed her.
There was something the other side of the fence, all ears and skittishness. You didn't devote years to horses without learning to spot that sort of a mood, all twitches and nervous energy. They stood still for a long moment, there in the snow, Poppy's fingers growing painfully bloodless. She was certain if she stripped her gloves off it would be to find index and middle finger white and aching. An old symptom that, and it got worse with time.
Whatever-it-was the other side of the fence bunted Mandy's fingers and stuck its nose up under her elbow. Their little party risked moving forward. Miri was stroking it's ears, or trying to. Mandy's armpit was in the way and the velvety nose of the interloping animal wasn't budging from its nesting place.
A deer, Poppy realised, when still some feet off. More particularly, a fawn. God alone knew where from, much less how Mandy had got it snuggled against her slim little person as if it were little more than your garden variety dog or cat or domestic animal of choice. Mara's Iain had tame foxes, of course, or near enough, and even a rook, while to hear Nan's account, Jerry's brother had cultivated both a monkey and a buffalo. It should have been nothing to see Mandy there, the fawn under her am, nuzzling and snuffling as if it had found home.
Presently it lay down in the snow and they inched closer, Poppy's fingers more painful than ever. Peter folded them into his pocket and the rustling that generated set velvety ears twitching in time to Mandy and Miri.
'I did wonder,' said Nan, sitting down in the snow still several feet short of her children. Brown and hazel eyes went wide in sudden anxiety.
'We were going to tell you,' said Mandy.
'Really, we were,' said Miri. She retreated a pace or three, so that she was roughly on a level with her mother and the rest of them.
'We think some hunter got her Mums,' said Mandy, mournfully, as she rubbed circles against a black nose.
'And it wasn't always your food, you know.' This from Miri.
'We brought some down from the house,' said Mandy, effortlessly fishing her sister's thought, even as Nan blinked in surprise.
'We talked lots about telling you,' Miri reiterated. 'Only…' she waved a gloved hand, atypically inarticulate.
'No one would have minded,' said Peter. He was trying, Poppy could tell, not to grin with amusement. He was largely failing.
'I take it,' said Peter, 'those blankets…'
Here Mandy interjected. 'It was so cold. And she was shivering, so. We were always going to bring them back. But they seemed to help, and she was just so frightened…' Here Mandy trailed off, fingers affectionately stroking the dappled forehead. 'Weren't you, darling?'
'Oh, no,' said Poppy, eyes more owlish than ever. They gleamed with mirth in the sun-dappled afternoon light as she said, 'You can do much better than that for a name, Mandy-mine. That is Nelly.'
That did it; Peter laughed outright, and Nan joined him. Nelly, resident deer, widened her eyes and kicked a tentative hoof against the snow, but Mandy soothed her. Peter went for more blankets – to keep her warm, he said – and Poppy stored up the memory and imprinted it deep in her mental history of Struan. She would tell it years later to Stella and Jemma, as she sqiunted with them over comics up at the Challow Farm, Mandy rolling her eyes behind the teapot. She would tell it with no small affection while her nieces' children goggled; How Mandy and Miri Meredith had conjured a ghost and how that ghost had proved to be after all another of Mandy's woodland friendships. Nelly,she would tell them in after years, the fire crackling and popping cheerfully. We called her Nelly.