The next morning was Sunday. George, Douce, and Great Harry were ringing, and John was walking down to St Martin’s with his mother and Ned, when the door of the tailor’s house opened and Master Fuller came out with his goodwife on his arm, trailed by his daughter Lettice—and no Janet. John left his mother, snatched off his cap, and crossed the street to intercept the Fullers.

But the tailor and his wife passed by, bidding him a smiling good-day, as if nothing were amiss. Only Lettice stopped for him.

“Oh, John, my poor cap.”

He glanced down at his hands and found that he had wellnigh crushed the starch out of it. Lettice took it from him and brought it back to life with a couple of practiced tugs. “I used stout thread in its stitching, God be thanked. Why do you mangle my cap so, John? Is something wrong?”

“Is Janet…”

“Oh!” Lettice glanced over her shoulder at the house. “Janet is only fussing over her ribbons again.”

Even as she spoke, Janet ran out the door of the house. “John,” she cried, lighting up with happiness, “John, do you know what day it is?”

He offered her his arm and clapped his cap onto his head, while relief seeped through his bones. “Sunday, is that not plain?”

“Yes—and in a week we will be married.”

And that valiant laughter, that perceptive kindness, would flicker like a fire at his own hearth. John smiled down at her, but the memory of last night still needled at the back of his mind. In the church, before he seated her in her father’s pew and went to sit with his mother and brother, he asked her, “Janet, will you walk with me this afternoon?”

She smiled up at him with no hint of worry in her eyes. “Oh, yes.”

John settled into his pew. With the summer sun streaming in the windows, the whole church took on a delicate golden tint. John closed his eyes in the warmth and imagined the world outside, a sweet-scented melon ripening in the sun. If he thrust in a blade—knife, maybe, or better yet spade, or plough—then would it crack open? Might he taste some sweetness that was more than earthly?

Then he shook himself back into the sunshiny limestone church on a golden Sunday morning. Where did a fancy like that come from?

Parson Plumtree climbed into his pulpit, but before he read out his text, he had news for them. There were great happenings in the world this morning: the young King had died, naming a kinswoman to heir, but the old King’s daughter, the Lady Mary, had gathered many gentlemen to her cause and entered London in triumph as Queen. As Parson reminded them of the duties of subjects, John thought of those gentlemen of high degree around the Lady Mary, of those Londoners who had banded together to choose a sovereign… Yes, that was a grim duty, and not to be taken lightly, for it would echo in the chronicles, and make or mar the fortunes of men unborn.

John thought of his own children, the ones he hoped Janet would give him in time. It was according to the deeds done by the great ones and the city men that they would suffer or flourish. The thought filled him with an odd tender fierceness, and suddenly he could see himself leaving the Dale—if it meant having a hand in affairs that could help or harm them.

They were his children, he thought, and the fierceness, despite its merely potential nature, glowed white-hot. Why should he leave their fate in the hands of strangers?

After church, after a full and sleepy dinner shared by their two families, when the two of them had walked out together and climbed the cliff path as if by wordless agreement, John said, “Janet, love, do you yet remember where you went last night?”

“Last night? Oh, John.” Her voice changed; her hands flew to her cheeks. “Oh, John, was it no dream, after all? Was it the truth that I met you on the road by moonlight?”

John gave a slow nod. He had half hoped it was a dream of his own. “Tell me what you remember.”

Janet bit her lip. “I thought I came down the road and met you, and you took me home.”

“And before that? Did you go up the valley?”

“Up the valley—no. I came up here, I think. To the wood…” Her voice faded away uncertainly.

“Where in the wood?” He hesitated on the forest-eave. “Show me.”

“But, John,” she protested with half a laugh, “that part must have been a dream. I walked in my sleep or some such thing.”

Her voice rang honest, but John had heard whispers of Faerie, and this was too like them for his uneasy mind. He looked down at her with a worried frown. “All the same, tell me what you dreamed.”

Janet sighed. “I saw lights in the wood, and they led me this way.”

“Lights.”

“They led me to the faerie market in a dell. It was not far.”

“Will you show me?”

Janet led the way in silence. Further on she said, “None of it is familiar to me now. But we have walked far enough; if the dell was here we would have found it.”

“Still, let us go a little further.”

“Why, it’s hardly like you to worry so much about a dream, John.”

“No,” John said unhappily, “but it is such a dangerous thing to have dreams about!”

She gave him a sharp glance. “You think I might not have been dreaming?”

He made his voice as gentle as he could for her. “If you had been to Faerie, would it not be the likeliest thing in the world that after you came away, you would believe it a dream?”

After that she walked in silence, nibbling her lower lip. At last they came suddenly to the lip of a dell, and John asked, “Is this the place?”

Janet stared doubtfully into it. “But it’s too far away from the Dale,” she said at last. “I did not walk a quarter of this distance.”

“But does it look like the place?”

“Yes. Yes, it looks like the place,” and there was something almost snappish in her voice. She went down before him into the dell, turning and turning. “I remember the ash-tree.” She pointed. “And the oak-tree. And the hawthorn…”

Her voice died away as she heard what she had said. John saw her shoulders go quite still.

“Oak, and Ash, and Thorn,” he said very quietly. “Just the place for a fay-market.” He bent and picked something off the leafy ground. “Look, Janet.”

When she turned and saw what he was holding—a brown and shrivelled husk, as of some strange fruit with all the seeds sucked out—she went very white, and so still that she seemed not to breathe.

With that, John knew. An icy hand closed on his gut, but he tried not to show it. Instead, he tossed away the husk and said more briskly, “Well, you dreamed you came to the night-market of the Lordly Folk. And what did you dream you did here?”

Janet stared up at him, touching her tongue to her lips. “It was no dream. I thought—I thought it was a dream.”

He nodded wordlessly.

“I made no bargains, John. I wandered about looking at the people and the stalls. And then I ate a pomegranate which a fruit-seller gave me—and then I think I must have come away. That was all; I remember it now.”

“You ate a pomegranate?” He took a deep breath, and the fear which he had kept bottled up all night and all day rushed out. “Don’t you know how dangerous it is to eat fay fruit?”

“But it was given to me.”

“Given! Free of charge? Or will they exact a price later, when you least expect it?”

“Oh, John, I know it was foolish. But the fruit-seller cut it open for me, and then it smelled so good...And Mary at Dovewater said she ate some and came to no harm.”

He was convinced that Mary at Dovewater was far too much of a coward to go anywhere near Faerie. Not like his Janet. He buried his face in his hands.

“But why, Janet? Why did you go? You know how dangerous it is, how few who go there ever come back.”

She looked at the ground, a tide of red rising faintly in her face, as if she had no easy answer. At last she whispered, “I love you, John.”

She did not go on at first. He tried to make sense of her words. “What, you went because you love me?”

“No. But...” Her voice trailed away. “But I would not come back to the Dale if I did not love you.”

John stared at her, and in that long silence felt part of himself shrivel and die. “You are discontent in the Dale.”

She did not answer at once. “John, I—”

When the Dale meant so much to him! A terrible pang ran like a knife through his heart.

“You are discontent with me.”

“No, John! Not that! Pray you, will you hear me?”

He seated himself on a fallen log, not taking his eyes from Janet’s face. She went on staring at the ground with a nervous twisting motion of her hands, and John waited in something close to despair. Within a sennight this woman would be his wife, for good or ill, and he needed to know.

Even St Joseph had needed to know.

“All my life,” Janet began, “I have dreamed of leaving the Dale and going away, far away over the hills to the kind of places that Parson Plumtree speaks of. That was why I worked so hard at the tailoring, John. I thought I would become a seamstress to some great lady someday. And then at last I might go and see how people live in places that are not our own, and how they talk, and how strange and lovely are the sights they see day by day, and how if deep down men really are the same, as they say, in great houses and far-off places as they are here, in Middleton Dale…

“But then you began to come and see me, John. And one day I saw the Dale through your eyes, and it was so lovely it looked like another Elfland. That was the day I knew you were going to ask me, and that was the day I knew my word to you would be Yes, John, and to the Dale, Yes, and to the wide world, No.”

“And yet you went to Faerie?”

Her hands stilled. “Yes,” she whispered. “I thought, I am going to be a good wife to John, but there are so many things I am giving up for him. Let me steal out and see one marvel before I wake from all my dreams, and settle down, grave and sober at his hearth.”

He had a sudden horrifying vision of a Janet with her fire quenched, a Janet sad and pining for what she could never have. He swallowed.

“That is not what I want at my hearth.”

She went on twisting her hands together.

“It is an odd means you have chosen to prove your love for me.” He could not prevent an edge of bitter hurt creeping into his words. Janet’s eyes filled with tears.

Far away, an early owl screeched, heralding dusk.

He took a deep breath and tried again, more gently this time. “Janet, sweetheart! I know that some are born under a wandering star. But I was born fixed, and fixed I shall ever be. If you could not give yourself to me freely, holding nothing back, why give yourself at all?”

She came forward and sank onto the log beside him, holding out an appealing hand. “Oh, John, please don’t…I have been very foolish, I know, to set such store by these wretched splendours. Won’t you forgive me?”

Forgive her? Presently, perhaps. But say he did forgive her, what now? He jumped to his feet and took a couple of blind steps away from her into slanting shafts of sunlight. What now? She had proven that even now, with the first love warm in her veins, she yearned for a wider life than a village smith could give. God knew he was only a simple man, and loved a peaceful life. When tedious and dismal days cooled the love she bore him, what constancy, what resolve, would bind her to his side?

He glanced back at her. She did not dare to look at him; her head was bent and even as he watched she put up a hand to brush the tears from her eyes. He wished dully that she had only passed off her trip to Faerie as an impulsive prank. Then he could have married her, and blithely.

Perhaps it was best to break it off. He could stay in the Dale. She could be set free to follow her star.

And yet—and yet this was Janet, who had grown entwined into his heart like a green vine.

Behind him, she began humming under her breath, an odd sad tune that John had never heard before. In a little space, it resolved into words.

My little bird, with the necklace red,

Sings sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.

The slanting sunlight began to lessen. John glanced up. Through the trees he could see the sky bleeding as though something was being killed in heaven. And the light went on fading.

Sunset. Sunset in the wood, far away from Middleton Dale.

He sings that the dove must soon be dead,

Sings sorrow, sor—

“Janet!” John turned, his voice shattering the forest peace, just as the song faded to a wordless warble.

Janet was gone. In her place, a little brown bird with a speckled breast sat on the fallen log, and its song began and faded once more, as if in confusion.