Newford Stories by Charles De Lint Read Free Book Online

too—just as girls, not as crows—but I keep forgetting
about them, the way the world forgets about people like Hamish.”
She sat up straighter. “Think how dull we’d believe the world to be
without them to remind us…”
    Gerda waited a moment, watching her guest’s
gaze take on that dreamy distant look once more.
    “Remind us of what?” she asked after a
moment.
    Jilly smiled again. “That anything is
possible.”
    Gerda thought about that. Her own gaze went
to the window. Outside, she caught a glimpse of two crows flying
across the city skyline. She stroked Swarte Meg’s soft black fur
and gave a slow nod. After what she had seen tonight, she could
believe it, that anything was possible.
    She remembered her husband Jan—not as he’d
been in those last years when the illness had taken him, but before
that. When they were still young. When they had just married and
all the world and life lay ahead of them. That was how she wanted
it to be when she finally joined him again.
    If anything were possible, then that was how
she would have it be.
     

 
    The Buffalo Man
     
    The oaks were full of crows, as plentiful as
leaves, more of the raucous black-winged birds than Jilly had ever
seen together in one place. She kept glancing out the living room
window at them, expecting some further marvel, though their
enormous gathering was marvel enough all on its own. The leaded
panes framed group after group of them in perfect compositions,
which made her itch to draw them in the sketchbook she hadn’t
thought to bring along.
    “There are an awful lot of crows out there
this evening,” she said after her hundredth inspection of them.
    “You’ll have to forgive her,” the professor
told their hosts with a smile. “Sometimes I think she’s altogether
too concerned with crows and what they’re up to. For some people
it’s the stock market, others it’s the weather. It’s a fairly new
preoccupation, but it does keep her off the streets.”
    “As if.”
    “Before this it was fruit faeries,” the
professor added, leaning forward from the sofa where he was
sitting, his tone confidential.
    “Wasn’t.”
    The professor tched. “As good as was.”
    “Well, we all need a hobby,” Cerin said.
    “This is, of course, true,” Jilly allowed,
after first sticking out her tongue at the pair of them. “It’s so
sad that neither of you have one.”
    She’d been visiting with Professor Dapple,
involved in a long, meandering conversation concerning Kickaha
Mountain ballads vis-à-vis their relationship to British folktales,
when he suddenly announced that he was due for tea at the Kelledys’
that afternoon and did she care to join them? Was the Pope
Catholic? Did the moon have wings? Well, one out of two wasn’t bad,
and of course she had to come.
    The Kelledys’ rambling house on Stanton
Street was a place of endless fascination for her, with its
old-fashioned architecture, all gables and gingerbread, with
climbing vines and curious rooflines. The rooms were full of great
solid pieces of furniture that crouched on Persian carpets and the
hardwood floors like sleeping animals, not to mention any number of
wonderfully bright and mysterious things perched on the shelves and
sideboards, on the windowsills and meeting rails, like so many
half-hidden lizards and birds. And then there were the oak trees
that surrounded the building, a regular forest of them, larger and
taller than anywhere else in the city, each one easily a hundred
years old.
    The house was magic in her eyes, as much as
the couple who inhabited it, and she loved any excuse to come by
for a visit. On a very lucky day, Cerin would bring out his harp,
Meran her flute, and they would play a haunting, heart-lifting
music that Jilly never heard except from them.
    “I didn’t know fruit had their own faeries,”
Meran said. “The trees, yes, but not the individual fruit
itself.”
    “I wonder if there are such things as acorn
faeries,” Cerin said.
    “I must