Roxana Maria Renfield

Once upon a time, there was a girl who saw fairies.

They lived in the gorse and heather around her manor home, little men who set rabbit-traps and great, shining figures that looked to be dressed in gossamer, cobwebs and dew. She was a very young child then, but on the days when she could be quiet and still, she could watch these creatures for hours. She became a very quiet, still child.

She knew better than to tell her parents and her siblings any of this. She was almost the youngest of them and when she brought up the subject of fairies, her older sisters and her mother and father, who were all much more learned than she would say in serious voices that fairies weren't real -- but I saw them! she wanted to say.

Her brother Neville, barely one year older, was even worse, for he took tremendous joy in taunting his younger sister -- and fairies were his favorite subject. He'd go on following her through the house, asking her in a snide, high-pitched voice about fairy dances and fairy rings -- and though his sister tried to ignore him, she often couldn't and often would start to cry.

Only her older brother Archibald seemed to understand -- and if he didn't exactly believe her, at least he didn't disbelieve her, and so he was the only one she had any chance of getting to listen to her at all. But Archibald, her oldest brother, was hunchbacked and had a crooked spine and the girl's parents said even in his hearing that he would never amount to much -- so maybe it's no surprise that these two outsiders found shelter in each other.

On Archibald's suggestion, the little girl started bringing gifts for the fairies -- tiny bells and lemon-cakes and her sisters' makeup and little bits of string. She'd arrange these gifts very carefully in the clearings between the gorse and heather, a string of tiny, beautiful altars for the strange, mad creatures of the moor. Sometimes when she'd check the clearings two days later, what she'd left would still be there -- disarranged, most likely, and waterlogged by the dew. She'd take those things back home. But more often -- much more often -- her gifts would vanish, and sometimes very rarely she'd find a trinket left behind: a glass bead, a scrap of leather, an acorn shell roughly carved as a teacup. These she would show Archibald and then she'd take them to her room, and sometimes when it was very quiet she'd pass them back and forth in her hands. They were warm.

The fairies let her come closer now and she could watch them for hours through the hazy sunlight as they danced and quarreled and drew fog through their hands. Sometimes the littlest ones would look at her and make hideous faces and she'd make her face as grotesque in turn. Then they would giggle.

Of course, Neville followed her out into the moors one day.

"What are you doing? Leaving gifts for the fairies?"

The girl turned. "Go away."

But Neville wouldn't go away. He followed her as she set up her altars, saying rude things the entire time, and she ignored him as best she could, and finally when she was done she went back inside and didn't speak to him for the rest of the day. And that should have been that.

But when the little girl returned to the fairy altars the next day, she found that someone had kicked them over, smashed all the precious gifts, even written rude words in the moss with the toe of a boot. Everything she'd worked so hard to make pretty was now a ruined mess and worse than that, she couldn't see the fairies anymore -- not even when she squinted into the sunlight. Her older sister Bernadette found her shivering and weeping in the cold several hours later and dragged her back by the scruff of her neck and told her very sternly that there were no fairies. There never had been.

After that, try as she might, the little girl couldn't find any fairies.

And on that tragedy was heaped another, for very soon after the little girl's father announced that all the family would move to London, where everything was smelly and dirty and loud in order that her brothers and sisters could go to finer schools and also (the girl wasn't told this, but she listened in) because her family couldn't afford to keep the huge rambling many-roomed manor called Misselthwaithe anymore. They'd sold it to a man named Earnest Renfield, an industrialist.

And so it was the little girl said sad goodbyes to all the rooms in the manor house where she had played, explored and hidden, loved better than any home in the world, before moving with her family to London where everything was worse.

The girl hated London.

In London the streets were covered in crushed horse manure; the gutters ran with sewage; there were ill armless beggar-boys everywhere she couldn't give coins to; there was school, which was torment; and she had to share a room with her younger sister, a wee girl called Ruthie, who probably didn't mean any harm but after the moors she was taking no chances. She hid her fairy gifts away.

At about this time, she started reading.

Very soon, she read everything. This little girl was a voracious reader. Be it novels, newspapers or technical manuals, she'd read anything put in front of her, for every moment she spent inside a book was a moment she didn't spend in London. Fairy tales, in particular, she hoarded. Perhaps this was unsurprising.

And so the girl grew with her nose in a book and an odd little lost look in her eyes and suddenly one day she became beautiful and nobody was so surprised as she.

Her mother decided it was time for her to "come out," and started taking her to balls. Her sisters, when they heard this, seethed with jealousy. She barely noticed.

Of course she was approached by a number of suitors almost immediately, and this shocked her so that something shifted in her personality. Where before she had been sleepwalking through her life in London observing those around her quietly but never daring to participate in the strange dramas she saw around her, suddenly she was full of wit and vigor, and not only that, but thoughts and observations. It was as if a switch had been thrown inside her and suddenly she lit all the way through, and all at once she was suddenly so very present, so very actionable, no longer a passive observer to her own doings.

She decided to find the man who owned Misselthwaithe Manor.

The man was an industrialist named Earnest Renfield; he and his brother, Owen, had made their money mass-producing metallic coffins. Earnest had, many years ago, retired, left Owen the coffin business and determined to find for himself a country house in the beautiful moors in the North of England. He had settled on Misselthwaithe Manor after seeing how rambling and beautiful it was, and now he lived there most of the year, contentedly, though it was known that he wanted a wife.

Roxana Maria not-yet-Renfield saw her chance, and took it.

She spoke to Earnest Renfield at a ball one night; she asked him if he believed in fairies. He said he didn't know, but he wanted to believe; he said he thought the world would be better with magic. He said he had lived for twenty-odd years within a materialist paradigm; he said in those twenty-odd years he'd realized a world that was only matter and its motions and modifications felt only half-made; he wanted, he said, "a revival of the fantastic" to make the world be whole again. He loved stage magic for the wonder it brought to a world that seemed so often devoid of mystery; he loved travel journals, he loved fairy paintings, he loved going to tarot readings and seances even though he believed at least half the mediums were rapping under the tables.

He and Roxana married.

I'd asked a couple of questions after reading the above, and here are the answers:

To answer your questions:

Earnest Renfield and Roxana Maria Renfield (nee Craven) married a year after they met.

Family manor can totally be in Whitby.

End of story is basically -- they've been married for about six years now. They've spent a good deal of that time looking for the supernatural. They haven't found any. Roxana is sad because she has good Bullshit Detector and more or less doesn't want to be good at detecting bullshit -- she wants to believe the spiritualists she sees aren't just women rapping under tables, but she can't. She and Earnest have started bringing Sebastian on their "this might be supernatural, let's go see it" missions because, well, Sebastian debunks everything, and if it's Sebastian debunking the spiritualists, Earnest and Roxana don't have to, though of course that's not the ostensible reason. The ostensible reason is something like "because if anything can convince Sebastian it's really supernatural than it's definitely supernatural."

After six years of searching for something capable of reviving the fantastic and not finding anything, Roxana's starting to get a little discouraged, though she's trying to keep her spirits from flagging. Earnest seems more capable of sustained optimism than she is, something she is deeply ashamed of. She and Earnest have a two-year-old son, Edgar, who's still in nappies and with nurses. She's currently five months pregnant with another child.

NB: Edgar's age was changed to four.