The Little Country

  “I think we’re missing something here,” Felix said.

  Janey looked at the confusion on his and her grandfather’s features. Sighing, she plunked herself down on the sofa beside Felix.

  “We learned an awful lot from Peter Goninan,” she said.

  The Gaffer hrumphed. “I hope you listened with a grain of salt. The man is half-daft.”

  “But the other half,” Clare said with a smile as she took a seat, “is fascinating.”

  “I like him,” Janey added. “I like him an awful lot.”

  The Gaffer shook his head. “Now that do belong,” he said. “Peter Goninan charming anyone, little say you.”

  “I’m easy to get along with,” Janey protested. At the raised eyebrows that statement called up from everyone in the room, she added, “Well, in a manner of speaking.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of you so much, my love,” the Gaffer said, “as I was of Peter. He’s such an odd bird”‌—Janey couldn’t stop a little smile at that description of Goninan‌—“sticking to himself up on that farm of his the way he does. Gives new meaning to the word recluse, doesn’t he just? I’m surprised he even spoke to you at all.”

  “He’s dying,” Janey said.

  The Gaffer fell silent, considering that.

  “Maybe the reason he keeps to himself is because there’s never been anyone else interested in the kinds of things he is,” Janey added. “That doesn’t make him bad‌—just eccentric. He probably got into the habit of being alone when he was younger and now he just prefers it that way.”

  “I never thought of it quite like that,” the Gaffer said. “He was always‌—standoffish. Seemed to hold himself to be better than the rest of us. Didn’t care for games or fishing or anything that the rest of us did, just his books and his birds. The only ones of us who had any time for him were Billy and Morley Jenkin‌—but the Jenkins moved up country just before we all took our O levels and Billy never seemed to spend that much time with him‌—not that I ever saw.”

  “Maybe he just seemed standoffish,” Clare said. “It’s not easy to be mates when you don’t think you have anything in common with the rest of the blokes.”

  The Gaffer nodded.

  “That woman,” Janey said. “Her name’s Helen Bray and she’s his niece. She’s nursing him.”

  “And he’s dying, you say?”

  Janey nodded.

  “Makes me feel a bit of a rotter.”

  “I know exactly what you mean, Gramps. When I think of how I used to laugh at his stick figure out by the cliffs, I just feel awful.”

  “You couldn’t know,” Felix said.

  The Gaffer nodded. “But we should have been more charitable.”

  Janey sighed, then sat up a little straighter.

  “Anyway,” she said, “he knew all about the tattoo. It belongs to a hermetic order called the Order of the Grey Dove and the head of it is this John Madden who’s so mad keen to get his hands on Billy’s book.”

  She and Clare went on to relate what Goninan had told them of Madden’s background, of the different states of consciousness, and how an artifact or talisman like The Little Country was a kind of shortcut to attaining higher planes of being and the subsequent power that came with them.

  “The years of study are what prepares a person to be responsible when they finally attain those higher states,” Clare finished up. “Without it, they have power, but not the wisdom to use it properly. Responsibly.”

  Neither Felix nor the Gaffer had much to say and Janey knew exactly why. It all sounded a bit mad. Laid out as they had just presented it, she wasn’t all that sure herself anymore as to how true any of it was. It made a kind of sense‌—but first you needed to take that quantum leap forward that accepted the fact that paranormal abilities were possible in the first place.

  “He also told us about Lena,” Janey said. “Apparently her father, Roland Grant, is a big-shot American businessman who also just happens to be a member of the Order’s Inner Circle.”

  She went on to name the other three.

  “I’ve heard of Eva Diesel,” Felix said. “She doesn’t seem to fit in with what you’re telling us. So far as I can tell, from what I’ve read by her, she’s heavily into humanist causes and environmental concerns.”

  “It’s supposed to be a facade,” Clare said. “Mr. Goninan said that if you took the time to thoroughly document all the various causes she’s supported, together with the eventual ramifications of those that were implemented, you’d find that her hands are just as dirty as the rest of them.”

  Felix shook his head. “You know what this sounds like? One of those nutty conspiracy fantasies. Paranoia running out of control. It doesn’t seem to fit the real world.”

  “I can’t help that,” Janey said.

  She could feel her back getting up and tried hard to stay calm.

  “What about things like the Christine Keeler affair or the American Watergate?” Clare asked. “They seemed just as Byzantine and improbable when news of them first surfaced.”

  Felix smiled. “But they didn’t involve magic.”

  “You’re just being obstinate,” Janey said.

  “No, I’m not. I’m just trying to put it into perspective, that’s all. I mean, it’s like seriously considering Elvis still being alive.”

  “It’s not like that at all,” Clare told him, “and you know it.”

  “Okay,” Felix said. “I stand corrected. But how’s this Goninan, living way out in the sticks the way he does, supposed to have the inside line on all this stuff?”

  Maybe his birds tell him, Janey thought.

  “That’s not really the point, my gold,” the Gaffer said.

  Felix turned to him. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, there’s the book itself.”

  Janey nodded. “We can prove it with the book. You’ve read it, Gramps. What’s it about?”

  “I was just looking at it again last night,” he replied, “but I remember the story well enough that I didn’t need to read it again. It takes place in an imaginary town, very much like Penzance, but set around the turn of the century, or perhaps even a bit before that.”

  Janey and Felix both nodded in agreement, but their features grew increasingly more puzzled as the Gaffer went on to relate his version of The Little Country, of the captain of a fishing lugger called The Talisman and the orphan girl who’d disguised herself as a boy to work on the boat with him.

  Clare, not having read the book herself, could make no comment, but Janey and Felix were both shaking their heads when the Gaffer was finally done outlining the novel for them.

  “That’s not the story I’m reading,” Janey said finally.

  “And it’s not the one I’m reading either,” Felix said. “Mine’s about a sailor, all right, but he works on a freighter. He comes to the same town, and he meets a girl with the same name, but she’s older than your orphan, Tom, and it looks to me like the book’s going to be a romance as much as it is an adventure story.”

  Janey felt an odd tingle start up in the base of her neck and travel down her spine.

  “There aren’t any sailors in the one I’m reading,” she said, “but there’s lots of magic. The story’s just thick with it.”

  Clare looked at them one by one. “This is weird,” she said.

  “Very weird,” Felix agreed. “I think I’m ready to listen to what your Peter Goninan had to say about all of this.”

  “Can I see the book?” Clare asked.

  Janey fetched the copy of The Little Country and brought it over to where Clare was sitting. She perched on the arm of the chair as Clare opened the book to the first page of text and started to read.

  “What’s the first line say?” Janey asked.

  “ ‘She hadn’t always been crippled, but she might as well have been,’ ” Clare read.

  Janey shook her head. “That’s not what I see.”

  She read out the opening line that was there for her, then looked
up at the others. It wasn’t even remotely the same. Her version opened with a line of dialogue.

  The tingle in her spine grew stronger.

  “It isn’t possible‌—is it?” she asked.

  The Gaffer only shrugged helplessly. Felix crossed the room to where the two women were sitting and, looking over Janey’s shoulder, read the opening line of his own version aloud.

  “It’s really true,” Clare said in a voice as quiet as a whisper. “It really is different for everyone. . . .”

  “Listen,” Janey said suddenly. “Can you hear it?”

  As shadows sometimes seemed to move when viewed from the corner of one’s eye, so she could hear‌—from the corner of her ear, as it were‌—a faint hint of music. She couldn’t pick out either the melody line or the instrumentation. It was too vaguely defined for that. But she could hear it. She knew it was there.

  And she’d heard it before. It was that same music that she’d been trying to pick out yesterday afternoon when the Rolling Stone reporter had come ’round and interrupted her.

  “Music,” the Gaffer said. “It’s like music. . . .”

  Janey reached over to Clare’s lap and gently shut the book.

  The sound disappeared as soon as the cover was closed, vanishing as though a turntable arm had been lifted from the spiraling matrix of a record’s grooves. But the tingling sensation that Janey felt was still with her.

  “Magic,” she said.

  The others nodded in agreement. For a long time none of them could speak, each lost in the wonder of the moment.

  Janey hugged the reality of the book’s enchantment to her like the precious secret it was.

  Magic was real.

  Smalls and . . . that music . . . the hidden music that was the title of Billy’s second book . . . the music that she’d always wanted to hear. To be able to play it. . . .

  It was all real.

  And then another reality pressed to the fore of her mind. If the magic was real, then so was John Madden’s Order of the Grey Dove. And the danger they presented lay on more levels than simply the physical world.

  “Mr. Goninan said the book is a talisman,” she said. “A talisman that should only be wielded by its proper guardian. And that if none of us was that guardian, then we should hide it‌—keep it safely in trust for when that guardian would come for it.”

  “That guardian won’t be John Madden,” Clare said.

  Janey shook her head. “And I don’t think it’s any one of us, either, except. . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Except what, my flower?” the Gaffer asked.

  “I feel so close to its music. . . .”

  “Where can we hide the book?” Clare asked, ever practical.

  “I don’t know. I . . .” Janey looked around the room. “I can’t think of any place that would be safe.”

  “Mr. Goninan said the book would tell us,” Clare reminded her.

  Janey nodded. “That’s right. He did. Only if it does, I haven’t got to that bit in it yet.”

  “We should hide it quickly,” the Gaffer said.

  “We have to finish reading it first,” Janey said.

  “Now is that wise, my robin?”

  “That’s what Mr. Goninan said. Until we finish reading it, a crack of its magic will stay open and Madden will be able to use it to track the book down.”

  “Tom’s already finished it,” Felix said. “That leaves the three of us. We could sit together on the couch.”

  “Ta,” Clare said.

  Felix’s eyebrows rose quizzically. “What for?”

  “For including me.”

  “There was never any question,” Janey said. “It’s just. . .” She shook her head at the look that came over her friend’s features. “Oh, no,” she added. “I wasn’t changing my mind about your reading it. I was just wondering if we shouldn’t go through the rest of Billy’s manuscripts and the like first. He might have made notes on the book‌—written something that would explain things to us better.”

  “Want me to get them?” Felix asked.

  Janey nodded. “There’s the box in the kitchen that we almost lost to that burglar, and then more in the open chest in the attic.”

  She went to help him bring down the chest. The Gaffer set about making some tea while Clare prepared a plate of sandwiches. By the time it was all ready, the living room of the Gaffer’s house looked as though a bomb had hit it with manuscripts, papers, magazines, and the like piled every which way one turned.

  It was Clare who found the second piece of magic, hidden away in Dunthorn’s chest.

  “Look at this,” she said, holding up an old photograph.

  It was tinted in sepia tones, the image area fading near the edges. The surface of the photo was wrinkled from having been bent sometime in the past, but the image was still easy to make out.

  “That’s my Addie when she was a girl,” the Gaffer said.

  “Can I see?” Janey asked, reaching for it.

  The photo showed a young girl of about eleven sitting in an old fat-armed easy chair. She was dressed in an old-fashioned dress and brown lace-up shoes and her hair hung in ringlets. There was a cheerful smile on her face and her gaze was fixed on something just over what must have been the photographer’s shoulder‌—probably her father, making a face at her to get her to smile, Janey thought.

  Most of the rest of the photo was blurry, but she could make out curtains and a picture on the wall behind the chair, a door directly to the right of it, while on the left‌—

  Janey’s breath went short.

  There on the left arm of the chair was the ghostly image of a little man. He was dressed in a white shirt and dark trousers. His head was bald, but he had a full, trimmed beard. And he was playing a fiddle, hunched over the instrument that was in the crook of his shoulder.

  A Small.

  Janey’s tingling sensation intensified as she looked at the little man. She could almost hear the music he was playing.

  “What is it?” Felix asked.

  “There,” Janey said. “On the left arm of the chair.”

  “Looks like a smudge of light‌—there was probably a window open behind the chair and the light coming through it reflected on the camera’s lens. They didn’t exactly have the best equipment in those days.”

  But Janey was shaking her head. “Look at it,” she said. “Take a really close look at it.”

  So Felix did, with Clare and the Gaffer peering over his shoulder.

  “What am I supposed to be seeing?” Felix asked.

  Janey pointed. “If that’s an arm . . .”

  “It’s a little man!” Clare cried. “Oh, my God. There’s a little man sitting there, playing a fiddle.”

  Felix started to laugh, but then both he and the Gaffer saw the Small as well.

  “Garm,” the Gaffer said. “I never.”

  “That’s unbelievable,” Felix added. “Even if it’s just a trick of the light, it’s just fabulous.”

  “It’s a Small,” Janey said. “That’s where ‘The Smalls’ and The Hidden People came from. That picture.”

  “Or maybe,” Clare said with a mischievous gleam in her eye, “it only confirmed something he already knew.”

  “I’ll bet you’re right,” Janey said.

  “I’ve seen that photo a hundred times,” the Gaffer said, “but I never noticed the little man in it before.”

  “You’ve got another copy?” Felix asked.

  The Gaffer nodded.

  “Can we see it?” Janey asked.

  “I’ll see if I can find it, my love.”

  He rummaged about through some photo albums in the bottom of the bookshelf near the hearth until he finally found the one he was looking for.

  “Here it is,” he said, holding the album open so they could all see it.

  “And the Small’s there as well,” Janey said. “I wonder if he’s in any more photos?”

  She started to reach for the album, but Felix touched
her shoulder.

  “It’s starting to get on,” he said. “Maybe we should get to the book. If Madden’s already in town as your friend Goninan said he was, we probably don’t have a whole lot of time.”

  Clare nodded. “I’m a fast reader so I’ll be able to catch up with the rest of you quickly.”

  “And in the meantime,” the Gaffer said, “I’ll continue to look through all of this.”

  He waved his hand at Dunthorn’s papers and manuscripts that were littering the room. True to his word, he sat himself down in his reading chair and picked up another sheaf of papers. The others made themselves comfortable on the sofa, Felix in the middle, Janey and Clare on either side of him, and started to read.

  “It’s not his usual style of writing, is it?” Clare said as she turned the page to the second chapter. “It’s not as well written as his other books.”

  “I thought that, too,” Janey said. “I suppose it’s because we’re telling the story to ourselves.”

  Felix tapped the book with his finger.

  “Let’s just read and save the critiques for later,” he said.

  “Spoilsport,” Clare said.

  “Bully,” Janey added.

  Felix smiled at the pair of them and shook his head.

  “Just read,” he said.

  2.

  John Madden sat quietly in the chair by the window in Gazo’s hotel room and watched the movement of the waves on Mount’s Bay, his mind far from the view that his eyes took in. Behind him, Gazo was still sitting on the bed, reading a magazine. Grant, was in the other chair, his daughter sitting by his knee. They had been conversing with each other in soft voices for a time, but now the only sound in the room was that of Gazo turning the pages of his magazine.

  Madden appreciated the quiet. It let him still his own thoughts. It let him put to rest all the inner conversation that the mind will always amuse itself with if given free rein, allowing the antiquity of the land to soak into his soul.

  From the westernmost tip of Land’s End to where the Tamar River followed the Devon-Cornwall border, almost making an island of Cornwall, the familiar spirit of the countryside spoke to him. Its quiet murmur filled him with its presence, whispering ancient stories and secrets, unlocking riddles, replenishing his store of its hidden wisdoms that had slowly leaked away since he had last walked its shores.