Tiphaine is rare among Elfins. Most are fleetingly diverted by such pretty things as Thomas, gathered with the dew on them, at their perfection, and discarded as they wither. Otherwise, Elfins much prefer still life. They see no moral in a memento mori, only the beauty of the thing itself.

In Bourrasque, the mortal servant Gobelet gives Lady Fidès an exquisite token: a ‘crow’s skeleton, wrapped in a burdock leaf. Every minutest bone was in place’. It is carrion, transfigured by its burial. ‘In her rapture she forgot to thank him, and he went away thinking she was displeased’ (140).

Gobelet had been a gift himself, at seven, when ‘Fidès’ husband
... took a fancy to his roly-poly charm, and had him stolen, giving him to Fidès for St Valentine’s Day. Gobelet grew up short-legged and stocky, and inexpugnably mortal’ (140). Fidès finds him repulsive: he is not her kind. Yet she repudiates her own chance-got child because Grive is ‘just another Elfin: he had never been, he could never become, a bird’ (141). Only ‘Gobelet pitied the pretty child who had suddenly fallen out of favour’ (142).

He becomes Grive’s inseparable playfellow. As much for himself as for the Elfin child, he gives him toys of transience:

He cut him a shepherd’s pipe of elder wood, taught him to plait rushes; carved him a ship which floated in a footbath. By whisking up the water he raised a stormy ocean; the ship tossed and heeled, and its crew of silver buttons fell off and were drowned. On moonlight nights he threw fox and rabbit shadows on the wall ... When these diversions were outgrown, they invented an interminable saga in which they were the two last people left alive in a world of giants, dragons, and talking animals. (142)

That romance is unfinished: like all mortals past their prime, Gobelet is too unsightly to be kept. Fidès discards him. Grive thinks of his old servant dead in a ditch ‘with the crows standing round like mourners’ (143), but the peasant will live by his wits.

Grown old, he halts his way across a devastated world, through pestilence and famine, to renounce his fairy overlords: ‘to look … and turn away’ (149). But all the court has fled — all but Grive, who is dying, and so must be saved. Gobelet has walked into their old fantasy of endless rescue and escape. He picks it up again, as easily as a cat’s cradle, turn and overturn between their hands:

With Grive ‘high overhead, circling while Gobelet walked, sailing on the wind’ (150), they go east and south, disputing where the swallows winter. Grive ‘was master. It was part of Gobelet’s happiness that this was so’ (151). He lives at first by ‘pell-mell pleasures: a doubled rainbow, roasting a hedgehog’ (150). But imperceptibly, their picaresque and pastoral is changing genre, quickening toward the sea, the ship, the fury of the gulls: Grive’s terrible apotheosis.