Free Shanghai Sparrow by Gaie Sebold

around the carriage, something, some living, breathing thing, listened.
    The shadows of great trees loomed beside the road. Eveline shivered, but could not stop looking, gulping in the cleanest air she’d smelled in years. She had been born and bred a country girl. Until that last terrible journey with Charlotte, the woods had held few fears for her. In the spring she’d lain for hours among the bluebells, half-drunk with their scent, watching the tiny flickering figures that hummed and dived among them, teasing the bees and stealing their pollen and sometimes, if she stayed very still, landing on her skirts, or tugging at her ribbons with minute, mouselike hands. They had huge insectile eyes in pale pointed faces, and wings like coloured glass.
    In the winter Eveline had run among the wet black trunks, catching her stockings on the hooked thorns of the bare red-stemmed brambles, leaving a tribute of stolen cake or bright ribbon in the fork of a tree; glimpsing a spike-headed bogle like a teazle with legs, and once a nixie with green-ripple skin and webbed fingers and a crown of ice, brooding at the edge of her frozen pool. Eveline had brought her a flowering snowdrop bulb stolen from her mother’s garden, and the nixie had smiled at her.
    Her father declared the Folk a still-living but less relevant version of the fossils that fascinated him and filled every spare shelf of the house – a fading mystery, soon to be relegated to academic lectures and browned-ink footnotes. Her mother had, like her daughter, been fascinated by the Folk. She had sought them out, sometimes with the instruments she made.
    A great tree stood by itself in the middle of a field, barely more than an outline in the gathering dark. Eveline had a sudden, painfully clear memory of her mother, cross-legged under just such a huge spreading oak, her hair falling out of its bun, a humming box in her lap, surrounded by curious Folk, many Lesser like bogles, and even one or two of the Higher, who looked like people, only prettier. They had laughed, when a change of note sent the little ones spiralling madly up into the branches.
    Eveline took every opportunity to escape from chores and lessons into the woods to seek out the Folk. They seemed to her, even then, such carefree creatures, unburdened by rules and Don’t s and Mustn’t s. And eventually, there had been Aiden.
    She didn’t want to think about Aiden. That was a long time ago, like her last trip through the woods. Then a wall of dark brick, blood-coloured in the swaying carriage light and at least eight feet high, imposed itself between Eveline and the view. She glanced at Holmforth; he had closed his eyes, but she knew he was not asleep.
    The coach slowed and turned left, and stopped. Eveline heard the driver speak – she assumed it was the driver, though she had yet to see his face. She peered out of the window, and could see only a brick column surmounted by a gas lamp, which threw yellow-green light on a strange object in brass, a little like the mouth of a trumpet, set into the column at the height of the coach-driver’s head.
    There was a clunk, a hissing creak, and the coach moved forward, the wheels clattering on gravel. The bars of a high iron gate, straight and unadorned, passed by the window, and Eveline could see the edge of a well-kept lawn fading into darkness beyond the reach of the carriage lamps.
    It occurred to her that there had been nothing on the gate or the column to mark what sort of place this was. She felt a cold churning in her stomach and glanced sidelong at Holmforth. Had she been gulled? Was this some sort of bawdy-house after all, or something worse?
    Holmforth opened his eyes. “There’s no need to look so anxious. I would hardly bring you all this way if I intended murder.”
    The coach crunched to a halt in a spatter of gravel. “One thing,” Holmforth said. “I wouldn’t advise trying to run. There are dogs that patrol the grounds, and they are