Philippa Fisher and the Fairy's Promise (15 page)

“Daisy,” I said. She looked up. “I don’t want to ruin your hopes or anything. I mean, I think this is a brilliant idea. But . . .”

“But what?”

“Well — how long has the stone fairy been there?”

“I’m not sure, exactly,” Daisy said absently. “ATC said each one’s there for a hundred years.”

“That’s right,” I said, remembering the conversation with the fairies at High Command. “And they said she was three quarters of the way through her assignment.”

“Which means she’ll have been there for about seventy-five years.”

“Maybe that’s why your request was invalid. Her best friend is probably way dead by now!” Tommy said.

Daisy shot him a filthy look.

“What? I’m helping!”

“She might not be dead,” I said to Tommy. “Maybe she just moved and can’t be traced.” I turned to Daisy. “What makes you think her best friend was a human, anyway?”

“All the stone fairies have to have a close relationship with a human. It’s what makes them able to do their job,” Daisy replied flatly.

That was when I had a thought. “Daisy, wait,” I said. “Maybe we can find her.”

“How?”

“Look, give me your MagiCell — the one that works.”

Daisy handed me the MagiCell. “What are you going to do with it?”

I smiled at her. “I’m going to call our friend — again.”

“That’s right, so anything you can find about the Blomley family from about a hundred years ago,” I said. “Did they move? Are they still alive? Anything at all.”

“Got it,” Robyn said. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve found something.”

I passed the MagiCell back to Daisy and tried to prepare myself for a long and possibly fruitless wait.

Tommy cleared his throat and nudged his glasses up his nose. “Listen, I know that this is probably top secret and all that,” he said. “But seeing as I’m already in the middle of it, do you think there’s any chance of filling me in on what exactly is going on?”

I looked at Daisy. She hesitated. “There’s no point,” she said.

“What do you mean, no point?” asked Tommy.

“You won’t remember.”

“Why not?”

She sighed. “Look, if we ever get you out of here, you won’t remember anything about it.”

“What? You mean I’ll have a complete blank for about a week of my life?” Tommy asked.

“Not exactly,” Daisy explained. “It’ll all just be a bit vague. You know how sometimes you can’t quite remember what you had for dinner the night before, or what someone told you five minutes earlier? It’ll be like that.”

“What about my family? They’ll know I’ve been gone!”

Daisy shook her head. “Anyone connected with your life will feel the same. Vague recollections but nothing to make them suspicious. They certainly won’t remember you were missing. It’ll be pretty much as though this never happened,” Daisy said. “It won’t even be in the newspaper anymore. It’ll have vanished, along with your memories.”

“What about me?” I asked. “Will it be the same for me too?”

Daisy nodded. “You’ve been part of the assignment in real time, so you’ll remember everything — Robyn will, too.”

“Wow,” Tommy said. “Well, if I won’t remember, and we can’t do anything till we hear back from your friend, you might as well tell me.”

Daisy pursed her lips as she considered it. “OK,” she said eventually, “but we can’t tell you everything.”

“Just tell me what you can.”

So we did. Between us, we explained about the stone fairies and the portals and the friendships from the old days. We explained a bit about ATC and all the different assignments. The only department we didn’t tell him about was EDD, and their predictions for the future. That was the bit we knew we couldn’t tell
anyone
— whether they would remember it afterward or not. It was too terrible to think about.

We’d pretty much covered everything when Daisy’s MagiCell buzzed.

“Robyn!” I grabbed the MagiCell and put it on speakerphone. “Have you got anything for us?” I asked before she’d even said hello.

“Well, I’ve got
something
— but I’m not sure how much help it’ll be.”

“It’ll be better than anything
we’ve
got,” Daisy said.

“Right. Well, first I tried the local phone book to see if there’s a Blomley family living locally. That was obviously too much to hope for. There’s nothing. So then I looked up the name online. Couldn’t find anything around here at first. But then I dug a bit deeper, and I found something.”

“What?” I asked.

“Well, there
was
a Blomley family nearby. Robert and Vera Blomley. And guess what?”

“They had a daughter?” Tommy suggested.

“Who was
that
?” Robyn asked. I suddenly remembered we hadn’t told her where we were, or mentioned anything about Tommy. And we still couldn’t.
Tommy
might not have any recollection of any of this once we got him out of here — if we ever did! But since Robyn would remember everything, and until we knew there wasn’t going to be anything to panic about, we couldn’t take the risk.

“He’s helping us,” Daisy said quickly. “Go on.”

“OK,” Robyn said. She sounded annoyed, and I wished we could tell her everything.

“Anyway, yes,” she went on. “They had a daughter — Elsie!”

“Bingo!” I shouted.

“So, have you got an address?” Daisy asked.

“Well, that’s the tricky part. They worked at Henley House, on the edge of the village. Robert was the butler and Vera worked in the kitchens.”

“Henley House?” I asked. I was pretty sure I’d read about a place called Henley House in a brochure. “But that still exists, doesn’t it?”

“The house itself does. It’s open to the public now — we’ve got brochures about it in the shop.”

“So what’s the problem?” Daisy asked.

“Well, there are two problems. The first is that Elsie either got married or changed her name, or left the area — or worse — because I haven’t managed to find any trace of her.”

“And the other?” I asked, wondering what could be more of a problem than the fact that the person we were looking for had disappeared without a trace.

“Well, they lived in one of the servants’ houses on the estate,” Robyn said. “All of which have been knocked down.”

“Knocked down?” Daisy burst out. “Why?”

Robyn hesitated for a second, then said, almost apologetically, “To build a theme park.”

“What are we going to do?” I asked. I didn’t really expect an answer. There wasn’t one. The only lead we had had disappeared without a trace. Even her
house
had been knocked down!

Daisy was sitting on the floor with her head in her hands. “I don’t know,” she said. “But we’re going to have to think quickly. We’re running out of time.” She checked her MagiCell. “It’s past nine o’clock! We’ve got less than three hours to sort this out, or else . . .”

She didn’t need to finish her sentence. I knew how disastrous the second half of it was — and I’m pretty sure Tommy did too, even if he didn’t know the details.

Wait! That was it! You didn’t always have to know the whole truth of something to
think
you knew it. The stone fairy wouldn’t know the whole truth about her friend, either.

“Daisy — we should go there anyway!” I said.

“Go where?”

“The theme park. The place where Elsie used to live.”

“What’s the point?” Daisy asked. “She’s not there, her family’s not there, her house isn’t there.”

“It doesn’t matter!” I cried.

“What do you mean it doesn’t matter? How can it not —”

“Because your fairy doesn’t know that,” Tommy said.

I looked at him. “Exactly.”

Daisy stared at us both for a moment. A second later, she was on her feet. “Of course!” she said. “Come on — let’s go. There’s no time to waste.”

Henley House was about a mile from Tommy’s house. We ran nearly all the way. Luckily Tommy knew a shortcut through the woods — although I have to say, running through a forest in virtual darkness with everything around me frozen and silent is perhaps the creepiest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

We got to the other side of the woods and looked around. “Now where?” I asked, resting against a fence as I got my breath back.

“Um.” Tommy looked frantically around. “I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean you’re not sure?” Daisy snapped. “Think! We’re running out of time.”

“Look, I’m doing the best I can,” Tommy snapped back. “If I wasn’t here, you wouldn’t even have known what direction Henley House was in.”

“If you weren’t here, none of us would be in this mess in the first place!” Daisy snarled.

Tommy didn’t say anything else after that.

We trudged across fields, looking all around us as we walked. After a while, a big building came into view in the distance. It looked very grand, with turrets at each end, a dome in the middle, and a row of newish-looking outbuildings to each side. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at it.

Tommy pushed his glasses up his nose and looked across to where I was pointing. “That’s it!” he said. “That’s Henley House — come on!”

And with that, he charged off and led the way across the fields. Daisy and I followed behind, and all I could do was hope that we really were heading for the right place.

My nerves were beginning to rattle. We’d scoured the whole theme park and hadn’t found anything yet.

We’d run the length of a mini train track full of people midwave with frozen grins slapped across their faces. We’d scanned the silent halls of a stately home, surrounded by people standing in front of paintings, as solid and still as the suits of armor beside them. We’d explored every bit of the zoo, examining the cages of monkeys staring out through the bars, suspended on one arm from a tree. One of them must have been midleap from branch to branch — he was actually frozen in midair! We’d been everywhere. No stone fairy. Nothing.

I was beginning to think we’d gotten it completely wrong. Amber simply wasn’t here. It was obvious. I checked my MagiCell. Twenty past ten! This was awful! We were going to fail. We really were going to be trapped here forever! My breath caught in my throat, almost choking me.

“Hey!” Tommy was running toward me. “Daisy, I think I’ve found something. Come on, quick.”

We ran along a lane and around the corner, then down a narrow path I hadn’t noticed before, and out the other side.

“More theme park rides,” I said, looking around. Where would we even start? We couldn’t afford any more dead ends. We simply didn’t have time.

“Not just any rides,” Tommy said. “Look. Hurry!” He pulled me over to an entrance with a placard outside it.

“‘Hedge Maze,’” I read from the placard. “‘The biggest and best in the world!’”

“Look!” He was pointing at the picture in the center of the maze, with a title above it.

“‘The Fairy Garden,’” I read.

“Exactly. That’s where she’ll be! I’ll bet you anything!”

I stared at the picture, and the words, and then at Tommy.

He looked back at me, his confidence slipping a little. “It’s got to at least be worth a try, right?” he asked.

For a moment, I wanted to cry with despair. He’d brought me to a toy fairy garden! But then I thought again. Maybe he was right. If the stone fairy saw this picture, she wouldn’t necessarily know it was only a tourist attraction. She
might
think it would feel like home.

“You know what, Tommy?” I said. “It just might be.”

Tommy ran over to grab Philippa, and we made our way into the maze.

“This way,” Tommy said, turning left at the first T junction.

“How do you know?” Philippa asked.

Tommy shrugged. “Just a guess.”

“Well, I think it’s
this
way.” Philippa turned right.

Tommy shrugged again. “Fine.” We turned right and hit a dead end almost immediately.

“Um . . .” Tommy said.

“OK, you were right, come on,” Philippa said sharply, and we turned left again.

But as we followed path after path, took wrong turn after wrong turn, and hit dead end after dead end, everyone’s tempers started to fray.

“Daisy, why can’t you just fly there?” Philippa asked after we came to a dead end we’d already reached three times.

“I can’t. Not here. It’s one of the things about this place. I don’t have those powers.”

“What powers
do
you have?” Tommy asked.

“Here, not a lot. Mainly just my MagiCell.”

“Why not use that, then?” Tommy asked. “Can’t it find our way around?”

“How’s it supposed to do that?” I snapped.

“Look.” Philippa pointed to a sign in front of us.
LIFT FOR CLUE
,
it said. We lifted it.

“‘Exit that way,’” Philippa read aloud. There was a hand pointing left.

“But we don’t want the exit,” I complained.

“Wait — maybe we do,” Tommy said. “Where we came in, they had postcards with a picture of the maze on them.”

“So if we go out and come back in again, we could use a postcard to help us find our way around?” Philippa asked.

Tommy smiled. “Exactly.”

“Come on, then,” I said. “No time to lose.”

We tore through the maze, following clues all the way to the exit. Eventually we were out. Tommy ran over to the ticket office and grabbed a postcard. We huddled around it, examining the route.

“Wow — it looks pretty easy,” Tommy said.

I shot him a look. “Anything’s easy when you’ve got the solution in your hand,” I said. “Come on, let’s go.”

“OK, left at the next junction, then around this bend, and then —” I looked up from the postcard. “That’s it!”

We’d done it! We’d found the fairy garden in the middle of the maze.

“Wow,” Tommy said, turning around to survey the fairy garden. “
Look
at it!”

A perfect green lawn with trees dotted all over it, a row of tiny stone cottages, with some steps made from logs leading up a hill — all in miniature! A river ran through the middle of it all, with a stone bridge across it. Here and there, little doors formed entrances into the hill. And hidden in nooks and crannies all over the place were little fairies!

One of them was sitting on a swing looped over a tree’s branch. Another sat at the water’s edge just below the bridge. The more I looked, the more of them I saw. They were absolutely everywhere!

“We haven’t got time to look around,” Daisy said. “We need to find Amber.”

A second later, Tommy gasped and clapped a hand over his mouth. He pulled at my sleeve. “Philippa, come with me,” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth. Then he whispered out of the other corner, “Daisy, come on. Don’t say anything, and don’t make it obvious.”

He walked a few steps away from the fairy garden, in an exaggerated impression of someone trying to look casual. Daisy and I followed, giving each other any-idea-what-this-is-about looks.

Tommy leaned in toward us. “She’s here,” he whispered.

“What?” Daisy nearly shouted. “How do you know?”

“Shh, don’t give it away!” he stage-whispered back at her.

“Which one is she?” I asked, turning around to look again.

“Don’t make it obvious!” Tommy hissed. “She clearly doesn’t want us to find her, or she wouldn’t be trying to disguise herself as one of these. She’s halfway up the hill behind the bridge.”

I pretended to scratch my neck and turned around so I could see where he meant. “The one with long hair?”

“Yes. The only one who looks as though she’s paused in the middle of trying to get somewhere.”

Now that he mentioned it, I could see what he meant. She did look as though she was midpace, and all the others seemed to be either sitting or leaning against something.

Daisy looked across too. “That’s not really enough to prove she’s —”

“And the fact that she’s a bit bigger than the others,” Tommy went on.

Daisy snorted. “Hardly! And that’s not exactly —”

“And the fact that I’ve already seen her, remember! When she flew out of my hand?”

I stared at Tommy, mouth open. Daisy did one quick double take from Tommy to the fairy and back again. “You’re absolutely sure?” she asked.

“Positive,” Tommy said seriously.

“Right,” she said. And with that, she stomped right up to the fairy before I’d even had a chance to close my mouth.

Daisy grabbed the fairy and lifted it up. “It’s you, isn’t it?” she said.

The fairy didn’t reply. It didn’t move.

Daisy shook the fairy. “Tell me!” she shouted at it, holding it tightly in her hand. “You’re the stone fairy, aren’t you? Not
a
stone fairy like these ones — you’re
the
stone fairy.
Aren’t
you?”

The fairy still didn’t move. I was beginning to think Tommy had gotten it all wrong. “Daisy, are you sure —”

“Answer me!” Daisy squeezed the fairy harder — and then, all of a sudden, the fairy made a sound. She let out a breath! It
was
her!

The fairy gasped for breath. “You’re hurting me!” she said. “You’re holding me too tight!”

“I’m not letting go till you admit it,” Daisy said. “Answer my question. Are you Amber?”

The fairy stared up at Daisy for a silent few moments. Then, finally, she lowered her eyes. “Yes,” she said in a voice so quiet, we might have missed it if it wasn’t so still and silent all around us. “I’m the one you’re looking for. I’m the stone fairy.”

“What were you doing?” Daisy shouted at the fairy. “Why were you hiding like that?”

The fairy lowered her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Look, please just let me down, and I’ll tell you.”

“No chance.”

“
Please.
I promise I won’t run away.”

“Daisy, put her on the ground,” I said. “She can’t get very far with all three of us watching her every move.”

Daisy opened her hand. “If you even
try
—”

“I won’t,” she said firmly.

Daisy glared at her for a moment, then set her back down on the ground.

The fairy shook herself, then looked around at all three of us. “So you know who I am?” she asked.

“You’re Amber,” I replied.

“The stone fairy,” Tommy added.

She nodded. “And I’m guessing you’ve come to take me back to the stone circle, so I can get back to my job.”

“That’s right,” Daisy said, glancing at her MagiCell. “And we need to get a move on. We’ve got just over an hour to get back!”

“Right,” Amber said. “Well, in that case, I’d better tell you something important.”

“Amber, tell us quickly,” I begged. I was getting so impatient, my teeth were starting to itch!

“Very well.” She pressed her lips together and rubbed her chin. Then she nodded, as though making an agreement with herself. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “I’m not going back.”

“You’re not going back?” Daisy yelled in a high-pitched screech. “What do you mean, you’re not going back? You most definitely are going back, if I have to drag you there my —”

“Daisy, wait.” I put a hand on her arm. I’d never seen her like this. Even when we first met and I accidentally threw her out of the window, she wasn’t as angry as this. “Let Amber tell us the full story.”

“The full story?” Daisy snapped. “We haven’t got
time
to hear her story!”

“I’d say we haven’t got time
not
to hear it,” Tommy said. “It doesn’t look like she’s going to do what you say if we don’t.”

“You should listen to your friends,” Amber said to Daisy. “They’re talking sense. You could drag me back to the stone circle, but you cannot return me to my work without my agreement.”