His expression cracked. Just for a moment, but Alice was watching him closely, and she knew him better than anyone. His mouth turned down, pulling at his moustache, and his eyes glittered with tears.

‘It’ll be some time,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Alice. I wish there was another way.’

Something was wrong, very wrong. Alice fought a growing thickness in her throat.

‘Perhaps I should come with you,’ she said. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have dreamed of offering such a suggestion unbidden, but desperate times called for desperate measures. ‘You’ve always said I need more experience in the practical side of business—’

‘No,’ he said, a little too quickly. ‘Not this trip. When I get back . . .’ He forced a smile. ‘Maybe then it’ll be time for you to start making the rounds with me. But I’ll make sure to send you a postcard from every stop.’

The following day, Miss Juniper moved into one of the guest rooms and added looking after Alice to her tutoring duties, although in truth Alice didn’t take much looking after. She worked on her French, and her algebra, and completed everything she was assigned on time. When Miss Juniper asked her what she wanted to do for her day off, Alice told her that she wanted to go to the Carnegie Library. She spent eight solid hours there, a solemn girl alone at one of the great wooden reading desks, working her way through a stack of books that represented everything the library had on the subject of fairies.

Her father needed her help, she was certain of it. She wasn’t sure why, or how, but the brief glimpse of the fairy in the kitchen was all she had to go on. She took home a notebook full of references and scribbles, and as many books as the librarian would let her have. She stayed up late reading that night, and the night afterwards as well. Alice was not a girl who believed in half measures.

Two days later, Cooper brought her The Times with breakfast. The front page told her that President Hoover had given another speech promising that the worst was over, that the stock market had taken another tumble, and, below the fold, that the steamer Gideon had gone down in a freak storm off Hatteras, with all hands.

Chapter Two: Mr. Pallworthy

CHAPTER TWO

MR PALLWORTHY

After the storm of telegrams – the messenger boy kept bringing stacks of them, and Alice piled them unread inside the door to her father’s study – came an inundation of relations. They were mostly cousins, none of whom Alice had ever seen before and none of whom paid her more than perfunctory attention. They trooped through the big old house like visitors to a museum, offering her half-hearted pats on the head while giving the furniture appraising looks.