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“I told you, I know you, we fit together,” said the voice in her ear, and she saw that it could be hard to forgo a second experience like this, and yet she was, yet she was—not ashamed—embarrassed—by the difference of it all, and her own involuntary motions.

• • •

When Olive was disturbed, she wrote. She wrote as she might dream, finding the meaning, or abandoning the images, later. She wrote to get back into that other, better world. When she was back in Todefright, after The Winter’s Tale and the Smugglers’ Rest, she wrote a long description of a passage in which the travelling company came upon a tall, swathed object, a pillar or a prisoner, something, she wrote, like a plaster sculpture, wound in dripping bandages, which were hardening into a permanent form. It was greyish-white, a more than life-size cocoon. The young prince advanced on it fearlessly, as he always did. He was warned by Gathorn. “Don’t touch it. Those are the webs she weaves, and they are poisonous.” The prince approached, in the dark passage, with his little lamp, and caught the glitter of living eyes in the woven hollow eyes that spoke, though the mouth was covered and the lips only a soft mound. “It’s alive, we must free it,” said the brave boy to the good goblin.

Here she was briefly foiled by her own ingenuity. How could he unwind her, if her bindings were poisonous? He did it with his magic blade, which hissed where it came into contact with the liquid, and chipped away at the bits that had solidified. She could see it now. The bindings lay in writhing little strips, and solid stuff like clay or porcelain, like broken fingernails. When all the wrappings were removed, she stepped out of her shroud, a white-haired woman with a bent head, and hunched shoulders, who looked for a moment too old and exhausted to survive her release. She stumbled forward, and the young hero caught her in his arms, and steadied her, and suddenly found that she was a youthful fairy, her snowy hair full of unearthly life and light, her emerald eyes glittering with magic. And then again, she was old, white-lipped, her skin drawn over her bones.

She told him she was a powerful fairy, who had gone Under the Hill to help those whose shadows had been stolen, and had been snared by the dark Weaving Queen down there, and bound in dead shadow-matter, sucked dry of life by the Weavers. If there had been enough to cover her eyes, she would have become as they were. But she still had a little power, in her look.

Olive stopped, dissatisfied. The image was a good image, but the Underground story was not the right place for it. And the presence of this—apparently adult—fairy seemed to her to weaken, not to strengthen, the conflict between the white Queen of Elfland and the dark Queen of the Abyss. She had somehow been unable to put in female characters who were not those two. They would not come to life, boy readers would find them sissy, they messed up the thread of the narrative.

Nevertheless the idea of the good creature bound in dead shadow-matter was too good to lose.

So she rewrote the passage, taking away the height and age and beauty of the fairy, and substituting an air spirit, fine-limbed, with hair like pale gold sunlight (and no visible sex, she referred to it as an it). She was fascinated by the Paracelsian earth spirits—sylphs, gnomes, undines and salamanders. But as she had begun consciously to craft Underground, she had taken to excising any words or images that too easily made short-cuts to classical mythology and aroused all sorts of lazy, facile responses she didn’t want her readers to make. She wanted her readers—Tom first, but she was very vaguely thinking of others—to see her air creature, as she had invented it. She made its hair spiky, as though the wind was in it, transparent as ice, but warm with sunlight. She gave it veins and sinews with blue of the sky and gold of the sun coiling in them. Its bones too were transparent. Its eyes? Uncanny yellow-gold eyes, with a black sunspot in the centre. She