Other mortals fall in love, not with a fey, but with faerie: the idea of it, the unobtainable. Take James Sutherland, MA of Aberdeen—‘spoken of behind his back as Fairy Sutherland’ (245). As a scholar, he has channeled his desire into research. ‘Ever since he could remember, they had fascinated him. His nurse sang him to sleep with ballads about them; he pursued the hinds and shepherds on his father’s estate for stories ... read everything he could find on their subject’ (244). He ‘was not above examining Pictish remains, in case they afforded a small footprint’ (245). Taken sleeping on Foxcastle, he wakes in captivity, a specimen for study:

The fingernail explored the convolutions of his ear, left it, traced the lines on his cheek. Other hands were fingering him, lightly, delicately, adroitly. His shoes were taken off, his toes parted, the soles of his feet prodded. His coat was unbuttoned, his shirt opened. Fingers tweaked the hair in his armpits. The watch was pulled from his fob pocket. He knew they would not stop at that. (247)

It is as if he had been buried in an ant-hill, like Gobelet’s crow: an object for their cabinet of curiosities, much handled.

It was impersonal, the traffic of water flowing over a stone. And one day, when they were finished with him, he felt a pat on his shoulder. It intended him no harm, no good — and it almost destroyed him. It was as if he were falling apart with happiness. For the first time, a fairy hand had rested on him with the wastefulness of a caress. He froze, he burned; he was immortally awake, he was overwhelmingly sleepy; he experienced all the vicissitudes of love simultaneously. (251)

But ‘it was impossible to love them: they were too inconsistent to be loved. It was unavoidable not to be drawn to them’ (257). If he could only connect. Let to wander at last in their society, he finds himself eluded. For this man of the Enlightenment, ‘accustomed to a methodical social order where time is respected and persons occupy the portion of space where you expect to find them’, Elfin vagaries exemplify the Rabelaisian principle of Fay ce que vouldras: Do what thou wilt.

Some devoted themselves to astronomy. Others practised the French horn. Others educated squirrels. Some, he presumed, made measurements. [He has, appallingly, been measured.] ... Whisking from one pursuit to the next, they never collided. The best comparison he could draw from the outer world was the swarm of mayflies, indivisibly borne aloft, lowering, shifting, veering, like a shaken impermeable gauze veil over the face of a stream. (254)

Elfins are unknowable, a cloud of bright particularities. Or particles, perhaps, with charm and strangeness — Huons? Their otherness is sharp, if only you could pin it down; they are unshadowy as lightning, as elusive.