This is the first part of a fairy tale I'm working on. It's mostly finished, but it's missing a piece in the middle and needs polishing. Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.
Mathilde lived at the bottom of the garden. She had once been a fairy godmother, but all of her godchildren had grown up, taking her blessings with them. When the weather was fine and the chores were done, the children loved to go and visit with her. All of the children loved Mathilde, but especially Katy.
In the mornings, as soon as the table was cleared and the dishes washed, and before her mother could tell her to help with the washing or pick up the toys in the nursery, Katy would slip out the door and run down the path to the edge of their property. When she came to the hole in the hedge that was Mathilde’s front door, she would pause and make one of the birdcalls the strange little woman was teaching her. If Mathilde wasn’t too busy for callers (which she very rarely was), an answering call would pipe from within the hedge, and Katy would push aside the branches and duck inside, slipping down the hallway formed by the arched leaves overhead.
Within the hedge was a little clearing in a thicket, small, but not so small that it could possibly have been contained within the hedge at the bottom of the garden. That was one of the small magics left to an aging fairy godmother with no more children to bless. Within the clearing in the thicket was a tiny cottage, too small for grown-up people, but just right for children and fairies. Within the cottage was Mathilde.
Mathilde looked just like a small, bent old woman – she was only a few inches taller than Katy, who was just ten in those days, and she said every day that she expected Katy to tower over her on her next visit. She was wrinkled, in a friendly, grandmotherly way, and her voice was always soft and kind, and somewhat muddled with age. Only her eyes gave her away as a fairy godmother. Her eyes were purple, not the indigo that grown-ups call purple eyes, but a startling shade of lavender – and at their centers, instead of round little black pupils like everyday people have, Mathilde had oval pupils, like a cat’s – and Mathilde’s pupils were gold.
Katy had visited Mathilde for as long as she could remember. When she was three, the ball she had been playing with in the garden rolled down toward the hedges that bordered it. Chuckling to herself in a mix of grown-up words and baby language, the toddler had followed the ball across the garden. Each time she had nearly caught up with it, though, the ball had begun rolling again, until the baby Katy had fetched up to the hole in the hedge, and there it seemed to have stopped. Crowing triumphantly, she reached for her ball, but it rolled just a little, just enough to put it out of reach. At this point Katy seriously considered crying, for she had become very frustrated at the way the ball always stayed just out of reach. But, looking around, she saw that there was no one near to come running, pick her up and cuddle her, or tickle her out of her tears, and so, like any sensible baby, she gave up the notion and doggedly crawled into the hedge after her ball.
Inside the hedge it was dark, and although it was much cooler than out in the sun, and the branches had moved up over her head to form a tunnel more than big enough for a small girl to crawl through, Katy began to be afraid. She didn’t like the dark, and her infant senses (more attuned to these things than those of older, “wiser” heads) told her that something strange was afoot. Uncertain, the baby turned away from her ball to look behind her. She could still see the opening in the hedge through which she had crawled, but it seemed much further away than it should be, and she could not see her mother, or any of her brothers and sisters, at all.
Just then, she heard a noise, like someone coming up behind her. She turned again, towards the clearing she could not yet see, and lost her balance, as toddlers often do. Sitting down with a thump, Katy forgot all about the fact that no one was there to see her cry and began to wail.