by Charlie Freelander

Sir Arthur shifted awkwardly to ease the oppressing tightness in his chest. He opened one reluctant eyelid with great effort. Cool air wafted through the ajar window. It was still morning, though seeing anything but gray, blurred shapes was now beyond him.

There was no coming back from this, Sir Arthur knew it. Taxing as it was, he tried to smile, in case his loved ones were in the room. He was not sure. He heard only faint buzzing—whether it was someone speaking, flies, or merely the murmur of his own exhausted mind, he could not tell. During a lucid hour he had told Jean she was wonderful. The smile came easier, remembering he had managed to tell her.

The buzzing grew louder. Light faded. Sir Arthur drew a labored breath and slid to darkness.

✿

Until soft, shifting light shone through heart-shaped leaves. Sir Arthur extended his hand towards the clusters of abundant violet flowers. He suddenly felt light and vigorous; nothing oppressed him anymore. Air filled his lungs without effort, as it had in youth, when he was quite the sportsman and journeyed the world for work and for pleasure. He inhaled the subtle sweet scent of the blossoms and ran one gentle finger over the leaves: the texture was delicate yet perfect. A smile spread on his face as it dawned on him. This is it. I’ve crossed the threshold. I have arrived.

It seemed that Summerland was no mere figure of speech! As Sir Arthur looked around, he found himself in a garden not unlike the one where he had loved, entertained, and pursued his craft. But everything was more vibrant and without blemish; no ailing plants with browning leaves, just a lush abundance of peonies and roses in the flowerbeds. The lawn likewise looked soft and inviting. Sir Arthur removed his shoes and enjoyed the grass under his bare feet. He smiled as he noticed croquet hoops pinned in the lawn and a cozy table beneath a gnarled apple tree in blossom.

The wooden table was painted white, and a blue china pot upon it was still warm. But curiously, the cups and saucers on the table were tiny, a child’s tea service. The dregs of tawny tea lingered in one thimble-sided polka-dotted cup.

A red admiral butterfly descended on Sir Arthur’s hand and flapped its wings. It seemed to beckon him to follow towards a lavender bush by a weathered shed farther in the garden, where the lawn blended into a meadow. Even as the red paint chipped and a few boards were loose, the shed too felt more vibrant and perfect than its earthly counterparts. Thyme crept around a few cobbles marking the herb patch. The sturdy rosemary released its aroma as Sir Arthur rubbed a sprig in his fingers.

Another scent blended with the resinous aroma. It was faint but familiar. A thread of violet in midair, almost imperceptible, led towards the meadow, over a plank bridge crossing a bubbling brook. Sir Arthur and the butterfly followed. He recognized the scent now. “Lilac,” he said aloud, remembering the first thing that had greeted him.

“That’s my name! How did you know?” A little girl’s voice spoke up. A diminutive child with chestnut hair and a foxglove hat peeked from behind a cluster of daisies. She fluttered a pair of gossamer wings. The red admiral landed beside her and transformed into another winged child, who somersaulted in midair and hung upside down, pale curls hanging down.

A big man that he was, Sir Arthur kneeled down, speechless. Yet another little creature materialized, completely clad in green. A boy barely older than a toddler, he had stood completely still in the grass, only movement betraying his presence.

“You are real, after all!” Sir Arthur said.

The child who had spoken laughed. “Of course we are! Aren’t you?”

No, not a child. Beneath the light-hearted mischief the green eyes were ancient and wise. “Pardon me, I forget my manners. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, at your service.”

“My name you know already,” said Lilac, adjusting her foxglove hat. “This is Tomtom.” The little boy extended a clover leaf for Sir Arthur. “We know who you are, anyway.”

“We do, we do, we do!” sang the blond fairy, spinning in a few pirouettes before plucking a blowball.

“What’s your name then, little one?” asked Sir Arthur, but the fairy didn’t answer, just blew all the dandelion seeds to wind and laughed.

“Echo,” said Tomtom and grinned, drumming a plantain leaf with his tiny fingers, the echo a sensation rather than sound.

“I am, I am, I am,” sang the blond fairy.

Lilac shook her head and smiled. “Echo is aptly named.”

“And is Echo a boy or a girl?” Sir Arthur enquired, tucking the clover leaf behind his ear. He couldn’t quite make that out, as the fairy was in constant motion.

Lilac shrugged. “Boy. Girl. Both. Neither. Whatever strikes Echo’s fancy. Today, I think, she’s more of a she.”

Sir Arthur turned his attention to the clover patch where Tomtom had hidden. “As a boy I used to look for four-leaved ones, for luck.” He smiled wistfully, eyes growing distant. “It must have worked, for I had a wonderful life. I suffered grief and loss, yes. But I was hardly alone. All England grieved. Yes, I had a wonderful life,” he repeated.

Tomtom tipped his feathered, green felt cap. “Try.” The tiny boy grinned and parted a few clover stalks. “Can’t have too much luck.”

“I don’t suppose you can, at that. Even in the Summerland.” Sir Arthur started to study the clovers and soon discovered that they all had four leaves.

As Sir Arthur looked up, Tomtom was rolling in the grass and laughing. “Made you look!”

Echo flitted around, eyes twinkling. “He made, he made, he made!”

Lilac tilted her head, smiled and shrugged.

“Well! Glad that I was able to be of amusement, I suppose. What’s over there?” At the edge of the meadow, beyond a copse of hawthorn trees in bloom, a lone sturdy oak stood apart from beeches.

“Follow us to the edge of the forest and you will see,” Lilac said.

Sir Arthur raised an eyebrow. “Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild. With a faery, hand in hand, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. ”

“Ah, the Irish poet, who dreams of Sidhe monds. Come on, come on!”

Sir Arthur followed the little creatures, bees buzzing in the flowers and the brook bubbling in the background. “I wonder if Yeats could see you, like the girls who took the photographs.”

Tomtom snorted. “Those were not real.”

Echo snapped her fingers and produced a flute she started to play in a parody of the first photograph.

Lilac hopped on sir Arthur’s shoulder. “Come, now. There were hair pins in the picture. Where they had pinned the cardboard cuts. In plain sight.”

Sir Arthur flushed. That was, exactly, what so many had said to him. Even genteel friends who had shared his many interests. They had started to consider him an embarrassment and quietly drifted away.

“It was a jolly jest, though,” said Tomtom. “We laughed and laughed.”

“We did! We did! We did!” Echo had put away her flute and landed on Sir Arthur’s nose tip.

“We almost wanted to show ourselves to those girls for making us laugh so,” said Lilac. “But they were too old. Babes too young to talk see fairies. And saints. And madmen.”

“I suppose I can take solace in that this proves I was not the latter, either,” Sir Arthur mumbled.

Lilac nuzzled his earlobe. “Don’t feel bad. You have the earnest heart of a child in the mind of a fine, smart gentleman. Not many can say the same.”

Tomtom had dropped his grin and hung from Sir Arthur’s sleeve. “That’s why we love you. That’s why we are here.”

Sir Arthur’s embarrassment melted away like morning dew. He paused to admire a treehouse up the lone oak, a rope ladder leading up there. A rope swing hung from a lower branch and a blackened stone ring bespoke campfires long put out. “I should have loved that as a boy.”

“You should, you should, you should!”

Tomtom lightly swatted her. “You’re annoying.”

“I am! I am! I am!” Echo laughed and spun through the air, then landed on the oak branch.

“Well, do you want to be a boy? You can be anything you like,” Lilac said.

“Don’t mind if I do!” Arthur grinned as he now was the boy he had been so long ago, a joyful, adventurous boy. Knees full of small cuts and bruises he hadn’t the slightest idea where he had got them from, short trousers, summer shirt, sun-bleached hair caressed by the wind. He glanced up at the treehouse.

“Come on, you can climb there later! Follow us to the forest’s edge first!”

It occurred to Arthur that he had not asked about his loved ones. His handsome soldier son Kingsley. Gentle Louise, his first wife taken by tuberculosis. And so many others. But somehow the matter didn’t seem urgent. The vibrancy permeating everything in this corner of the Summerland seemed to carry something of their essence. They were around. He would meet them. What was time or distance anymore?

After following the fairies through a fern thicket, the meadow gave way to rolling hills and beech copses. A green river flowed through the hills and into a lake, reeds lining its shores. A simple white pavilion stood where the waters met. Arthur gasped as he saw a crumbling ruin of a medieval tower, ivy creeping over the masonry. Two yews flanked a heraldic shield and sword carved in limestone, a lone thistle at the base. A statue of a ponderous seated gentleman gazed at the tower from a short distance. Another gasp, as Arthur recognized his beloved Sir Walter Scott.

“It was always real, you know,” said Lilac. “All that you so desperately wanted. Not just fairies. Wonder. Whimsy. Mystery. Broader horizons.” As if to corroborate her words, a silhouette of a brigantine shimmered at the other side of the lake, then disappeared again. “But it doesn’t answer to summons or experiments.”

Echo flew in front of Arthur’s face and looked him in the eye, face solemn for once. The eyes were deep cobalt, like the waters of the Aegean sea where Arthur had once sailed. “Poor, tired man,” she said. “You don’t have to fight anymore.” Then her eyes shifted to quicksilver color again. “No more, no more, no more,” she sang.

They had arrived at the edge of a thicker forest, where a mossy footpath wound into the foliage. The forest sighed and shuddered. The fairies had vanished, and only the bees buzzed faintly. In front of Arthur stood three tall, regal, luminous creatures—like Ireland’s Sidhe that Yeats wrote about. Arthur frowned—then revelation dawned. A chestnut-haired female elf. A blonde one with silver eyes that could be either male or female. And a young, handsome man clad all in green. His friends: Lilac, Echo and Tomtom. “What happens now?” he asked.

“Now,” said Lilac, “an adventure begins.”

❀✿❀

Charlie Freelander (she/her) writes historical fiction shaped by myth, legend, and liminal spaces. A wanderer at heart, she is drawn to ruins, coastlines, and the traces history leaves behind. She splits her time between Spain and Finland and volunteers for marine conservation and heritage projects.