The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,27
trees interlacing high overhead.
Only shafts of light filtered through, mysteriously illuminating what felt oddly like an ancient and magical landscape. I had a feeling that something awaited me around every bend …
A final scramble up a series of rocky outcrops brought us out onto a wide ledge, bordered by an iron rail, next to the point where the river gushed from the rocks.
We were so much higher now and there were stunted trees – oak and ash and hawthorn – springing from impossible crevices. Some kind of ferny plant framed the mouth of the river, like a deep green moustache.
One beam of light illuminated a rainbow dancing above the falls … and then I caught a fluttering movement out of the corner of my eye, though when I turned there was nothing there … except a faint sound of melodic voices and laughter, half heard and then suddenly turned off, like a radio.
I found Myfy looking at me strangely. ‘You can feel it, too, can’t you? Not everyone can and most of those who do are children. But there’s old magic here.’
‘Hence the name Fairy Falls, though you did say at lunch that some people thought they were angels rather than fairies.’
Like Mum, I thought; she certainly had.
‘The old name was the Angel Falls,’ Myfy said. ‘The Victorians renamed it when Jericho’s End became a renowned beauty spot – they seemed totally soppy about fairies. Then, of course, there was all that Cottingley Fairy business later on, between the wars. Do you know about that?’
‘You mean those two young girls who fooled everyone with their fairy photographs? I’ve seen a film about it. They even got Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to believe the photographs were real, didn’t they?’
‘Silly man,’ she observed. ‘But then, we so often see what we most want to, don’t we?’
‘True.’
‘Anyway, it rather debased the whole idea of fairies, except as some twee legend to attract tourists, and no one living in Jericho’s End wants to publicize what’s really here …’
She paused, her long, melancholy face going dreamy again, literally away with the fairies – or, more likely, the angels.
‘The legends about fairies living in the valley do pre-date the sixteenth century, when a local child swore she’d seen an angel by the falls, just like the one in the window in St Gabriel’s, the old church on the edge of Thorstane. The window is a very early one, well worth seeing,’ she added.
‘I’d love to go to look,’ I said. ‘Is that when the falls became known locally as the Angel Falls?’
‘That’s right. You can find it on very old maps. The child’s story was widely believed. At one time, there used to be an annual procession up here to bless the valley, but Elf thinks that might just have been a new spin on some kind of annual pagan fertility rite that has since died out.’
‘It’s all very fascinating,’ I said. ‘I did feel for a moment there was something other-worldly up here … very odd.’
‘As children, we were often aware of a winged presence, or heard something, when we came up here, but whatever they are, I’ve come to believe that angels and fairies are one and the same thing. So did Mum – she saw them when she was a little girl, too.’
‘So most of the actual sightings have been by children?’
‘That’s right, though some continue to see them when they grow up. There’s an early Victorian story about a teenage girl who came up here with friends and vanished entirely, a bit like Picnic at Hanging Rock. But Elf never found any evidence for that, so she left it out of the book.’
‘Do you still see them – whatever they are?’ I asked curiously.
‘I know they’re here,’ she said ambiguously. ‘They inspired my paintings and I think they’re why the valley is such a healing place.’
‘What was the café-gallery called, before it was Ice Cream and Angels?’
‘Just Verdi’s. Joseph and Maria Verdi moved here from London in the late nineteenth century and began selling ice-cream and water ices. Mum was Gina Verdi, the last of this branch of the family.’
I took a last, long look round.
It wasn’t eerie, or threatening, it just felt as if there was another dimension close by, through the thinnest of invisible walls. Perhaps you needed the eyes of a child to see through that.
Mum had told me she’d once seen what she’d described as a cloud of small, glowing angels … I’d love to see those. Suddenly