Chapter 1 - The Exchange of Greens
Hidden in the library at Hartfree Hall, Evan pressed himself deeper into his wingback chair. He’d positioned himself strategically behind a precarious tower of botanical journals, stacked at a rakish angle that would have horrified his father but served admirably as a visual barrier. If he remained perfectly still, breathed shallowly, and resisted the urge to sneeze, there existed a possibility that his mother would take her lecture of the day to one of his sisters. Her determination to turn him into a gentleman had become taxing. He had no desire to learn how to arrange a proper cravat.
The odds of avoiding his mother, Evan acknowledged with a grim fatalism, were not in his favor. His fingers stilled at the edge of a wood ear mushroom sketch he’d retrieved from his father’s notebook. The various stages of decay had been delicately rendered in ink and watercolor. Comparing it to his own efforts from the night before, he had to acknowledge that he hadn’t yet achieved his father’s mastery.
The mushroom had been a particularly fine specimen, discovered clinging to a fallen elder branch at the very edge of the estate where the manicured lawns surrendered, rather gratefully in Evan’s opinion, to the wild tangle of the marsh. He’d spent two blissful hours on his knees in the damp earth, oblivious to the dirt ground into his work breeches, measuring the ridges and recording the gelatinous texture of the specimen in his field notes. Those had been two hours in which no one had required him to have opinions about seating arrangements.
“Evan Augustus Hartfree, I can see your boot.”
The tower of journals proved no match for maternal determination. His mother’s voice, crisp as fresh linen, cut through his sanctuary with surgical precision. “I am conducting critical research, Mother.” Evan didn’t move, clinging to the flimsy hope that if he couldn’t see her, perhaps the reverse might apply. The laws of natural philosophy suggested otherwise, but desperation made optimists of even the most rigorous empiricists.
She folded her arms impatiently. “You are hiding from me?”
“Merely... minimizing my presence.”
“Behind your father’s collection of ‘horticultural periodicals’?” The distaste she injected into those two words could have curdled sweet cream. Evan’s father had been a second son, a gentleman of modest means whose primary passions were orchid cultivation and avoiding London society.
Those traits had bred true in Evan, much to his mother’s eternal consternation, which made it all the more perverse that the baronetcy, intended for his uncle and then his eldest cousin, had skipped down the line to land, with the heavy finality of a coffin lid, on the one Hartfree who preferred orchids to obligations. In the six months since, he’d become the suffocating recipient of attentions and social obligations that made his cravat feel three sizes too tight. He had the mounting suspicion that whoever designed evening attire for gentlemen must have harbored a deep personal grudge against the peaceful movement of air into human lungs.
“The ball is in a matter of days.” She stated, materializing at the side of the journal tower like a particularly determined specter, resplendent in a severe gray morning dress. She’d managed to convey both respectability and profound disappointment in a single ensemble. “I confirmed our attendance at Lady Nettlesby’s event. The Penworthy sisters. The Ashtons. Half the notable families within twenty miles are all coming to meet the new baronet and assess whether the Hartfree name will continue to mean something or descend into complete botanical eccentricity.” The way she pronounced “botanical” made it sound like a social disease.
Evan set down his sketch with careful precision, and his empty hands began their familiar nervous dance, smoothing his waistcoat, adjusting his cravat, seeking any occupation that didn’t require meeting his mother’s eyes. “I have agreed to attend and wear whatever configuration of items you deem appropriate. I have even accepted that I will have to dance, though I maintain that the waltz is an inefficient method of traversing the room and the steps themselves bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the territorial display common amongst grouse.”
“You will not discuss grouse mating habits at my ball.”
“Her ball, technically…”
“Evan.”
He subsided, heat climbing his neck in the blotchy, uneven fashion that plagued him during moments of stress. His mother’s expression softened marginally.
“I know this is not the life you would have chosen.” Her voice lost some of its starch. “But it is the life we have. Your sisters need respectable matches, Evan. Lydia is nineteen. Arabella is twenty-one. Without proper exposure and the right connections...” She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. Evan had cataloged the data himself: unmarried gentlewomen of modest fortune and no particular beauty faced prospects roughly as appealing as the local marsh during a drought.
The weight of their future happiness settled across his shoulders with familiar, leaden pressure. His sisters were his responsibility and duty. The care and keeping of female relatives worried him. Their futures depended entirely on his ability to navigate a social structure he understood poorly, even with frequent recourse to reference materials. “I will endeavor not to disgrace us,” he said, which was the most either of them could hope for.
His mother’s mouth tightened, and she nodded. “See that you don’t. And Evan? Do try to look approachable. You have a tendency to loom in corners examining the wallpaper as though categorizing its pattern of water damage.”
“The situation in our east drawing room really is quite concerning. I believe we have mold establishing a colony behind the…”
“Evan.”
“Right. Approachable. Smiling. No discussing toxic mold.” He attempted a smile to demonstrate his comprehension. From the look on his mother’s face, the result was not encouraging.
She swept from the library with the concentrated dignity of a woman who had married for mild affection, been widowed young, and subsequently developed the organizational skills of a major-general. When the door clicked shut, Evan sagged in his chair, the botanical journals collapsing around him in a cascade of paper and scholarly dreams. He let his mind drift to the only place he found peace anymore.
The marsh.
A week ago, he had fled the oppressive aftermath of dinner with his mother’s second cousin and the woman’s marriageable daughter. The young woman had spent the entire meal discussing her embroidery with a determined cheerfulness that suggested she’d been as horrified by the arranged meeting as Evan. He made his excuses as soon as was decent, possibly earlier, and walked with increasingly frantic speed away from the house, past the carefully groomed gardens, and the rose beds his mother kept manicured within an inch of their woody lives.
The marshland welcomed him like an old friend. Moonlight turned the standing water to mercury and illuminated the ghostly forms of the silver birches. The landscape sprawled, strange and liminal, beautiful in its mystery. He found his favorite thinking spot, a slight rise where an ancient oak’s roots created a natural bench, surrounded by a ring of Marasmius oreades. Fairy ring mushrooms, the locals called them, crossing themselves and walking the long way around their practical circles. Evan simply called them tasty and appreciated their elegant demonstration of mycelial network growth patterns.
He was sketching one of the fruiting mushroom bodies by the light of his handheld lamp, pencil moving in quick, precise strokes, when a sound like wind chimes caused him to pause in his labor. The tone was nothing he could properly classify. A creature perched on one of the mushroom caps, no larger than his thumb, and for a long moment Evan’s mind simply... stopped. Categorization failed him. Every system of taxonomy he’d memorized fled before the evidence of his eyes.
Translucent wings, veined like a dragonfly’s but shaped more like a moth’s, fluttered against her back. Her skin caught the lamplight with an opalescent shimmer. The colors shifted between pearl and moonstone with the faintest hint of lavender. The creature’s eyes were too large for its small face, unblinking, and reflected his lamplight at him with an intelligence that made his chest constrict. She wasn’t an insect. Nor a bird. No thing he had words for.
The creature cocked its head, studying him with the same intensity he applied to his specimens, and Evan did the only thing his panic-scattered mind could grasp. He remained absolutely still and tried not to breathe too loudly.
They stayed that way for several minutes, man and unknown entity engaged in mutual observation, until Evan’s stomach growled with embarrassing volume, reminding him he’d barely touched his dinner in his eagerness to escape. He reached into his coat pocket for the ham sandwich he’d secreted away from a tea tray. The creature’s eyes tracked the movement of his fingers with predatory focus. Even now, alone in the library, the recollection made the back of his neck prickle.
Hand halfway to his mouth, he froze, suddenly aware that he was alone in the marshland with something that might have been a hallucination brought on by too much stress and too little sleep, but which his scientist’s mind insisted was exhibiting all the characteristics of a living, breathing organism. A being currently eyeing his sandwich with unmistakable interest. “Are you... hungry?”
The question had felt absurd even as he’d asked it. The creature tilted its head in the other direction, wings fluttering with a sound like rustling silk.
Moving slowly, telegraphing his intentions the way one might with a wild fox or a particularly skittish woodland creature, Evan tore off a portion of the sandwich, the ham, specifically, though he’d included a bit of the bread for structural integrity, and extended it toward the mushroom ring. He set the food down on the edge of one of the mushroom caps, pulled his hand back, and waited.
The creature dropped from its perch with a movement too quick to track, landing beside the offering with barely a whisper of displaced air. It examined the ham with the same thoroughness Evan applied to fungal specimens, even going so far as to lean down and, he was almost certain, sniff it. Then it looked directly at him, nodded once with solemn formality, and began to eat.
Evan watched, transfixed, as the tiny being consumed what must have been at least a quarter of its body weight in ham. When it finished, it wiped its hands on a mushroom cap with fastidious precision, met his eyes again, and... smiled? The expression was brief, there and gone like summer lightning, but it transformed the alien features into something that made Evan’s heart perform an uncomfortable acrobatic maneuver behind his sternum.
Then the creature vanished. It was simply…gone. As though her presence had been nothing more than a trick of moonlight and exhaustion. Evan walked back to the house, scarcely feeling his feet on the path, convinced he’d imagined the entire encounter. When he’d laid out his papers the next morning, he’d found tiny marks across his sketches. Footprints no larger than a cat’s, but distinctly humanoid in shape, had smeared his charcoal.
He returned to the marsh that evening. And the next. And the next.
The creature, she… something about the delicate bone structure and the way she moved suggested femininity, though Evan acknowledged this might be anthropomorphization of the highest order on his part. She reappeared each night. The second evening, she watched him sketch, peering over his shoulder with flattering intensity. The third night, she settled close enough that he could hear her breathing, a sound like wind through grass.
He asked her questions and received no answers, but she listened with an attention that none of his academic colleagues had ever provided. He told her about the house, his mother’s expectations, and the suffocating weight of a title he’d never wanted. She made a sound that might have been sympathy or might have been the night breeze.
On that final evening, when he’d been preparing to leave, he’d done something uncharacteristically impulsive. He’d torn out the sketch he’d been working on, a careful rendering of the marsh’s edge, complete with annotated species lists, and offered it to her. “For you,” he’d said, feeling ridiculous and reckless and more alive than he had in months. “Since you seem to appreciate the work.”
She took the paper in her small hands, held it up to examine the image in the lamplight, and made a sound like bells singing. Then she pressed the sketch to her chest and looked at him with those too-large lavender eyes, and Evan had felt something shift in his chest, some fundamental reordering of his internal architecture. He walked back to the house that night feeling as though he’d left some essential part of himself in the mushroom ring.
That had been three days ago. Evan had not returned since. His mother had kept him imprisoned in a series of estate meetings, fitting sessions, and endless discussions of the damned ball. The memory of the little creature played on repeat in his mind during every dull conversation about table settings and calling cards.
Now, alone in his library with the ghost of his mother’s disappointment still lingering in the air, Evan pulled out his private field journal and flipped to the pages where he’d attempted to document the encounter. His sketches were rough, hasty, and inadequate to capture the reality of what he’d seen. The creature’s proportions had been captured, but the exact shade of her skin, or the impossible delicacy of those wings? No.
Working classification: Unknown, he’d written. Possibly hallucinatory in nature, though physical evidence suggests otherwise. Exhibits apparent intelligence. Responds to human presence without fear. Displays curiosity about artistic/scholarly pursuits. Diet unclear: carnivorous? Omnivorous? Sample size is insufficient.
He’d titled the entry with his typical scientific precision: Specimen encountered, marshland fairy ring. And then, because even Evan wasn’t quite empiricist enough to deny the evidence of his own pattern recognition, he’d added in smaller letters: Local nomenclature: Pixie? Requires further investigation.
He had no time to return to the marsh with the ball looming. In a handful of days he would be expected to smile, be “approachable,” and pretend he was the sort of gentleman who belonged in a ballroom rather than knee-deep in marsh water cataloging fungal colonies. A knock on the library door jolted him from his reverie.
“Sir?” Miggs, the butler, possessed a voice that conveyed both absolute professional neutrality and profound skepticism about the universe’s decision to make Evan a baronet. “You have a visitor.”
Evan’s stomach sank. “Tell them I’m not receiving. I’m indisposed. I’m… conducting a critical experiment that cannot be interrupted.”
“The visitor was quite insistent, sir.”
“Mother will see to them.”
“Mrs. Hartfree suggested that you, specifically, should see them, sir.”
There was something in Miggs’s voice that Evan couldn’t quite parse. A note of confusion that the butler’s professional demeanor couldn’t suppress. Evan set down his journal with the careful movements of a man approaching a potentially venomous specimen.
“Who is it?”
Miggs consulted the calling card in his hand with the expression of a man who suspected he was being subjected to an elaborate practical joke but couldn’t prove it.
“A Miss Poppy Nettle Down, sir.”
The name hit Evan’s consciousness like cold water. Nettle Down. Nettle... His mind scrambled through his mental taxonomy charts, certain he’d encountered the name in some botanical text or classification system.
“Sir?” Miggs’s expression had shifted from professional neutrality to something approaching concern. “Are you well? You’ve gone rather pale.”
Evan’s hand had drifted to his cravat, tugging at the suddenly constrictive linen. Poppy Nettle Down. No. He would remember if he’d met anyone by that name. Evan cataloged every person he’d met recently as carefully as his fungi, the Penworthy sisters with their matching dimples and identical laughs, Lord Ashton with his unfortunate tendency to spit slightly when pronouncing words beginning with ‘p’, and Lady Catherine, who smelled overwhelmingly of rosewater and had once complimented his deportment in a way that suggested she’d confused him with someone else. But Poppy Nettle Down? The name meant nothing. There was something his mind was trying desperately to grasp and failing.
“Did she state her business?” Evan asked.
Miggs’s expression suggested that the visitor had indeed stated her business, and that he had found it both bewildering and potentially actionable. “She claimed, sir, to be your fiancée.”
The world performed a peculiar telescoping motion; sounds grew distant, and the library’s familiar dimensions suddenly became uncertain. Evan’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again with no more intelligence than a landed fish. “My what?”
“Your fiancée, sir. She seems quite convinced of the fact. She’s currently waiting in the entrance hall and has refused to be seated elsewhere until you’ve confirmed the... arrangement.” Miggs paused, then added with the careful neutrality of a man navigating a potential crisis, “She’s brought a lot of luggage for a social call. And she appears to be barefoot.”
Barefoot. Luggage. Fiancée. The words circled Evan’s mind like crows around carrion, refusing to form any coherent pattern.
“Sir, should I inform the lady that there has been a mistake?”
Evan’s brain, that usually reliable organ, had taken a temporary leave. He rose from his chair with the mechanical precision of a clockwork automaton, his hands smoothing his waistcoat in anxious repetition, his scholarly mind tried and failed to construct a logical framework in which he, Sir Evan Augustus Hartfree, Baronet and catastrophic wallflower, might have acquired a fiancée without any knowledge.
Had he sent some letter while drunk? No, he never drank more than a single glass; spirits made him sleepy and prone to extended lectures about lichen. Had his mother arranged something without telling him? Unlikely; she would have delivered the news with the force of a military campaign. Had he suffered some kind of head injury that resulted in localized amnesia or…
Poppy Nettle Down. His mind snagged on the name again, turning it over like an interesting rock. Nettle. Down. Poppy. Where had he heard that name? Somewhere. “Please inform Miss... Miss Nettle Down that I will come to her.” Evan heard himself say, his voice emerging with surprising steadiness given that his internal organs seemed to have rearranged themselves into an entirely new and uncomfortable configuration. “I will be there momentarily.”
Miggs nodded and withdrew with the practiced grace of a man who had long ago resigned himself to the eccentric behavior of the gentry. The door clicked shut.
Evan stood alone in his library, surrounded by his books, journals, and carefully pressed specimens. He tried very hard not to consider the possibility that the strange, beautiful creature he’d shared his ham sandwich with in a fairy ring three nights ago had decided to pay him a social call. That would be absurd.
A gift of food is a proposal.
The thought surfaced from some half-remembered fragment of folklore, something his father had read aloud from a collection of rural superstitions, laughing at the quaint beliefs of the peasantry. Do not accept food from the fair folk or give them your name. Never, under any circumstances, make a bargain you don’t understand. Evan’s hands went cold. He’d offered her his sandwich, and she’d accepted it with a solemn nod. And then he’d given her his sketch, a gift freely offered, an artistic tribute.
He was a man of science. Evan dealt in observable phenomena and reproducible results. He did not believe in contracts sealed by ham. And yet. Evan straightened his cravat one last time, squared his shoulders with the resignation of a man heading to his own execution, and walked toward the front of the house to meet his apparent fiancée.
The entrance hall seemed longer than usual. His footsteps echoed against the marble with ominous finality. He could hear voices, his mother’s clipped tones, and something else, higher and brighter, like wind chimes or…
He rounded the corner.
The woman standing in his entrance hall was exactly his height, though her posture possessed such absolute certainty that she seemed to occupy more space than her physical dimensions suggested. She wore a dress of deep green that might have been muslin or crushed moss; the style vaguely fashionable but assembled with a creative interpretation that suggested its wearer had seen a proper dress once, from a distance, and attempted a recreation from memory.
Her hair was the color of thistledown, escaping from its pins in wild profusion, curling with an abandon that defied both gravity and conventional grooming. Her skin held that same opalescent shimmer he remembered from the marshland, subtle in the daylight but unmistakable once noticed, like the inside of certain shells.
And her eyes… Lavender gray. Too large. Rarely blinking, they fixed on him with an intensity that made his breath catch.
She smiled, and it was the same expression he’d seen in the mushroom ring, transforming her features from alien to achingly, impossibly familiar. “My Botanist,” said Miss Poppy Nettle Down, her voice like bells, like the wind through marsh grass, like nothing that should exist in a proper home. “I have come to inspect our nest.”
Evan’s knees briefly considered abandoning their structural responsibilities. He gripped the doorframe. His mother stood beside the creature, her expression suggesting she’d found herself hosting a force of nature and was trying to determine the appropriate etiquette.
Poppy took a step forward, bare feet silent on the marble, and Evan noticed with the hyper-focused clarity of panic that her footprints left the faintest shimmer behind, like dew on grass, fading even as he watched. “You appear,” she observed with clinical precision, “distressed. Is the offering not sufficient? I can accept additional courtship gifts if the sandwich proves inadequate tribute for your pride.”
Evan opened his mouth. No sound emerged. He tried again. “I think,” he managed, his voice strangled and too high, “we may need to have a conversation about the precise nature of our... arrangement.”
Poppy’s head tilted in that birdlike gesture he remembered, her expression shifting to something that might have been confusion or might have been offense. It was damnably difficult to read inhuman features. “You offered food,” she said, as though explaining something very simple to someone very slow. “I accepted. You provided an artistic tribute. The contract is sealed.”
“Contract?” Evan repeated faintly.
“The Exchange of Greens.” She spoke with the patient clarity of someone reciting well-established law. “You gave sustenance within the ring. You gave beauty for beauty. I have therefore come to fulfill my obligations as your mate and keeper of your nest.” She paused, then added with devastating sincerity, “I will be an excellent wife. I have already begun learning your customs. I did not eat any of your servants on the journey here.”
Somewhere in the back of Evan’s mind, the part still capable of scientific observation noted that this statement raised several extremely concerning questions about what pixie courtship might normally entail. The rest of his mind was occupied with the growing certainty that he had, through a combination of social awkwardness and profound ignorance of Pixie law, accidentally proposed marriage to an inhuman entity who was now standing barefoot in his entrance hall, smiling at him with those too-large lavender eyes, and waiting for him to confirm their betrothal.
His mother cleared her throat with the force of a small cannon. “Evan,” she said, in tones that suggested they would have a very lengthy conversation about this later. “Perhaps you’d like to introduce me to your... fiancée?”
Evan looked at Poppy. Poppy looked back, unblinking, expectant, absolutely convinced of the rightness and legality of their union. This, Evan thought with the clarity of absolute hysteria, was going to be significantly more complicated than the ball.
(This is a brand new pen name and genre for me! I'd love any feedback you would like to share. Did you enjoy the first chapter?)
