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seemed to draw me deeper into the wood until I came at last to a small glade I am quite sure I have never seen before. Bridestone Wood is not a very big wood—a few acres on the side of Ben Bulben—and I was certain I knew its every nook and cranny, but this glade was new and unfamiliar to me. Here the air was so still and heavy it seemed almost that I parted a curtain as I entered the dell. The leaves of the oaks light-dappled the carpet of grass; one shaft of hazy, dusty light illuminated a small mossy stone. On top of the stone I found them—two pairs of wings, like a butterfly’s, though no butterfly ever flew on wings so large, so delicate. Like dragonfly’s wings, they seemed, like lace, finer than the finest Kenmare needlepoint, and the precise colour of oil on water.
    Faery wings. I imagined a tiny figure, no larger than my hand, climb up on this rock, drop a pair of old, used-up wings to the moss; imagined the new, crumpled buds of new wings unfolding from her shoulders, opening, drying in the sun as she sat there, waiting, fluttering them from time to time until they were strong enough that, with a soft whirr, she would leap from the stone and be carried away into the leaf-dapple.
    I carried them home and pressed them between the pages of a botany book. I pondered about whether to tell Mummy. She had been brought frequently to Craigdarragh as a child—her mother and Daddy’s mother were cousins. I wonder, did she ever see things in the woods—strange, wonderful things, things from a world not ours at all, but altogether more wonderful and magical. I think this because when I read her poetry, I can see the magic in it—I can hear the faraway horns and hear the baying of the hounds of the Wild Hunt. I think Mummy must have experienced something, but like the old standing stones she told me about, her childhood glimpses of Otherworld must have become overlain with the trappings and ornaments of this world. That is why she writes about them in her poems and books; only there can she hear the horns of Elfland blowing from faraway.

Dr. Edward Garret Desmond’s Personal Diary: July 2, 1913
    I PAUSE HERE IN my records of Project Pharos (which is proceeding to my complete satisfaction, though I have not yet received replies to one-tenth of the invitations I have sent to prominent members of the astronomical community to witness the greatest event of this, or, dare I say? any other age: the establishment of communications with a race from another world) to comment upon a lesser matter, of a personal nature, which is causing me not inconsiderable distraction. I refer, of course, to the increasingly irrational behaviour of my daughter Emily. Since her return from Dublin she has floated around Craigdarragh as if in a daydream, paying only the scantest attention to her father and his epochal work, her head filled rather with fantastic notions about faeries and mythological creatures haunting Bridestone Wood. I can not comprehend, much less tolerate, my daughter’s absolute insistence upon the objective truth of these fantastical notions. And as if this were not enough, she has now intimated to me that she wishes to borrow one of my portable cameras with which I am charting the progress of the Altairii vessel to take a series of photographs of these “faery folk” at play in the woods around the demesne. Is she doing this out of spite for me and my rational, scientific philosophy of life in a pique of adolescent rebellion? We had the most fearful row, Emily insisting that she was not a little girl any longer, that she was a woman and that I treat her accordingly; I arguing with gentle persuasiveness and calm rationality that to be treated like a woman, she cannot revel in childish hysteria. Alas, nothing was resolved, and I fear that, as in every other decision regarding our daughter, Caroline will refuse to support me and side with Emily.
    But that I had more time to spend with Emily! Maybe then she would not have