Fairytales for Wilde Girls

 

There's a dead girl in a birdcage in the woods. That's not unusual. Isola Wilde sees a lot of things other people don't. But when the girl appears at Isola's window, her every word a threat, Isola needs help. Her real-life friends – Grape, James and new boy Edgar – make her forget for a while. And her brother-princes – magical creatures seemingly lifted from the pages of the French fairytales Isola idolises – will protect her with all the fierce love they possess. It may not be enough. Isola needs to uncover the truth behind the dead girl's demise . . . before the ghost steals Isola's last breath.

 

 

 

Dedicated to my dad,

Peter Near,

with everlasting love

 

And to the memory of

Isola Francesca Emily Wilde

1857–1867

‘She can hear the daisies grow'

 

 

 

Death Meets Isola Wilde

Once upon a time, Isola Wilde was watching late-night television with her eldest brother, Alejandro, when Channel 12 broadcast a live suicide.

The teenage boy in his leather jacket had hair the colour of desert dust and freckles like actual spots of desert dust. The news camera zoomed, and he blurred then sharpened, a drunken vision.

Isola Wilde's shoulders tensed. Her hands curled into sucker-punch fists. Intrinsically, she knew this boy. He knew her.

They had never met.

He was at a county fair an hour north of Isola's hometown, Avalon. The boy had clambered from his fairy-lit gondola at the top of the Ferris wheel and stood amongst the network of steel. He didn't look frightened. He wasn't even shaking.

A crowd had gathered, forming an ouroboros around the Ferris wheel. Some pointed their phones and cameras at him, recording his silent last words. His Aladdin eyes flickered like candlelight – at the earth he'd soon slam into, at the news camera fixed on him – and he stared through the television to Isola, who met his gaze with rapt attention.

Her: curled up in a pile of pillows, in her striped socks and summery bloomers, gnawing on her necklace chain.

Him: standing at the precipice.

Then the boy was falling, and the air whistled around his plummeting body like somebody saying,
I love you
.

Too late, Alejandro realised and reacted. He ducked over Isola as though to shield her from the impact, as though he could take the folly of gravity upon himself.

At the top of the Ferris wheel, the empty carriage rocked with the momentum of his jump. Or maybe that was his ghost, already taking up residence, cursed to ride the glittering Ferris wheel forever.

There are worse destinies to be had, Isola supposed, as Alejandro apologised profusely for a death he didn't die, as the crowd's screams were intercut with shots of frazzled newsreaders pawing loose their ties that seemed suddenly like nooses.

Isola Wilde was watching television with her brother Alejandro.

She was an only child.

 

 

 

 

Curtain Up – A Setting

EXT. AVALON,
a mousy village on the south-west English coast, sunk at the bottom of a valley, ringed in scrubby woodland and leviathan hills.

The highest hill was dense with
VIVIEN'S WOOD,
deigned haunted by superstitious townsfolk and merely creepy by the sceptics. An unpaved road around the woodland was the only means of access, unless one wanted to tackle the hour-long trek through the rambling woods. Nobody did, except
ISOLA WILDE.

VIVIEN,
its namesake, was the lovely creature who entombed the wizard Merlin in his tree-casket. Perhaps insects burrowed into the log and munched through his putrefying guts, then spread his enchanted blood as pollen from glittering beetle-wings, or via their tiny dewy footprints on tree-leaves. Vivien trapped all kinds of magic in that forest.

AURORA COURT,
the tiny street isolated by the vast woodland. Only four mis-numbered houses stood on the lonely court. At Number Thirty-six lived
THE WILDES.
Houses one through thirty-five had presumably long since returned to nature, hungry vines having eaten through the rotted floorboards.

THE THREE OTHER HOUSES OF AURORA COURT:
one with a sign ‘To Let', another with a sign newly stickered ‘Sold', and the third occupied by an old hermit our heroine called
BOO RADLEY,
who occasionally shouted Bible verses and doomsday prophecies at her in the garden.

NUMBER THIRTY-SIX
was a weatherboard house: two stories tall; front door crooked from adolescent slamming; a garden hardly tended but thriving nonetheless; the enchanted castle behind the hedge of thorns. On the second storey was the princess's tower room, candles holding vigil on the sill; the door was only ever locked from the inside.