177. Gelsemine and her Fairy Godfather

177. Gelsemine And Her Fairy Godfather

“Your Uncle Gentlerain is a very kind man,” said the little elf Nimbo di Limbo. “We owe him a lot. Almost as much as Darcy. Who knows? Maybe more. You see, my mother…she started life being human. Born a little mortal girl, Mum probably was never very normal, because she was often sleepy. She says that was because she couldn’t sleep at night and always was tired during the day. One night, when she was eleven, she got out of her bed and then out of her room and next out of the house and after that out of its garden and wandered into a copse of trees and fell asleep inside it. When she awoke, fairies had kidnapped her. They were able to do that because her family had forgotten to christen her, so many things did they have to think about instead.

The fairies that stole her were not nice ones, as you can imagine. They were mean to her because she was always falling asleep, something that got worse and wose with time. These were fairies of the roads and one day they stopped by your parents’ palace to sell the cooks there saffron and seasonal herbs and mushrooms. One of the cooks came out of the kitchen and asked them what they wanted for their wares and they named their prices and  were duely paid. As they were leaving they learned that the person who prepared the desserts there, Granny Milksops, needed an assistant. They sold my mother to Granny Milksops in exchange for twelve bags of  white sugar and twelve sacks of  wheat flour. I suppose Granny Milksops would never admit to having bought my mother in so many words, because that’s not done among decent fairies, but she gave them the sugar and the flour and took charge of my mother.

From the very first day, Mama did nothing but fall asleep on the job, and Granny Milksops, who was a very cranky old woman, was fed up with her. In a week, Milksops receieved a letter from her dearest granddaughter, who said that if it pleased her gran she would come to the palace and stay to work at the kitchen with her. Milksops no longer needed Mama. She asked Mama to leave, saying there was no need for her to return the flour or the sugar, but to just go back to her family.

Mama had no idea where to find the fairies than had stolen her, nor did she want to, so she wandered into another copse of trees and slept there until she woke suddenly and remembered it was her twelfth birthday. She was very sad thinking that no one had sang a birthday song to her and she didn’t have a party or gifts or a cake or anything except a wish. She desperately wanted her wish to come true, so she got up and wandered back into the palace kitchen and stole a blueberry cupcake of the oversized kind Milksops baked and twelve tiny birthday cake candles, thin as matches, but she forgot to filch matches. She returned to the copse and put  the candles into the cupcake as best she could and then she saw she had nothing to light them with. How could her wish come true if she didn’t blow out the candles? But before she could figure how to light the candles, your Uncle Gentlerain and Mr. Binky appeared.

Well, it was Mr. Binky who appeared because your Uncle Gentlerain had made himself invisible. He was hiding from Mr. Binky who was hounding him as usual, but he was right there keeping very still and quite aware of what Mama was doing.  Now because Milksops had made a big fuss, everybody knew someone had stolen a cupcake from the palace kitchen, and everyone included Mr. Binky and your Uncle Gentlerain. Mr. Binky said to Gelsemine – that’s my mother’s name – that he was not going to tell on her because she was an underpriviledged fairy and a social misfit. He said he was going to fix all that one day and she should be very happy and grateful to him because he was working hard on it already. If there were fairy elections, it would be he she should vote for. The only thing Gelsemine understood was that the ants had gotten to the cupcake before he was finished saying all that and left to see if he could find Gentlerain elsewhere.

Gentlerain  then appeared before my mama and told her to wait a little right there and he would be back with a real cake for her. Gentlerain couldn’t show himself in the palace because Mr. Binky would detect him immediately and you know how it is forbidden to make yourself invisible there, so he couldn’t go to the kitchen to steal more cake. He went off and picked some blueberries in the woods and must have found a place to bake an exquisite blueberry, chocolate and meringue torte for that is what he brought to my mother in like a quarter of an hour, during which my mother had fallen fast asleep. Your uncle woke her singing a birthday song very  softly, “Yellow is the flower, the leaf is bright green, bluebirds sing a birthday song to you, Gelsemine!” This was both a song and a spell that made gelsemium flowers blossom in the copse and a couple of  blue birds tweet along too. Gentlerain gave my mother the torte,  with the candles already on it, but before he could wish her tanti auguri,  Mr. Binky appeared. He had traced Gentlerain and the first thing he did was ask your uncle if he had a licensce to pick berries in public forests because he had detected some were missing. Gentlerain told him to go fry asparagus instead of counting berries. He said it was Gelsemine’s birthday and he was giving her a birthday cake and no one was going to stop him. Mr. Binky said Gentlerain couldn’t give Gelsemine a cake because that was a donation and a tax had to be paid when a donation was made and Gelsemine was underpriviledged and couldn’t pay the tax, so it would have to be Gentlerain who would pay it, but your  uncle Gentlerain was broke from owing so much to the state in Mr. Binky’s opinion, so he couldn’t pay either. Mr. Binky’s family being so very rich and influential, Binky had managed to freeze Gentlerain’s nonexistent bank accounts. Therefore, no cake, said Mr. Binky confiscating it. Not until penniless Gentlerain paid the State all he owed and the State – it was not clear if the State was existent or not -  got down to buying Gelsemine one if it didn’t have something more urgent on which to spend public money. Gentlerain said, “That’s it, Mungo! I draw the line!” and made Gelsemine and himself disappear. What else could he do? Hex Mr. Binky? That would have grazed the illegal.

There was a big scandal about their disappearance because Gentlerain was like twenty-something back then and married since he was seven and now evil tongues were wagging that he had ran off with a twelve year old once human girl who was a wandering thief, just like he was according to Mungo Binky. Since we can marry once we are seven, and Gelsemine was twelve,  age was not so much the issue, though marriages between people of very different ages  are usually frowned on. It was that Gentlerain already had a wife. And one with a very large and proud family too. 

It is incredible how everyone talked and talked about Gentlerain and his band of thieves and nobody realized that he had only acted like a fairy godfather. “Maybe he was feeling bored,” they said, “and has gone thrill-seeking.” But Gentlerain only said he didn’t give a tinker’s curse about all this gossip. The only thing he believed in was goodwill. Mr. Binky might be able to change the world, but not him. Of course, since he said this in hiding, no one back home got to hear his version. As for Mr. Binky, when Gentlerain disappeared, he was most disappointed, for he had thought that if he could make an example of as popular a fairy as your uncle, all the rest would be frightened and pay him whatever he pressed them for.

Gentlerain asked my mama what she would have wished for  if she had been able to make her wish and my mother told him because she thought it was not going to come true anyway. But it was, because Gentlerain made it happen. She wanted to return to her mortal home. And Gentlerain took her there and waited outside until the door shut behind her. Then he left to keep hiding from Mr. Binky, who was tracking him down for nonexistent tax evasion and not paying inexistent  fines. Nobody  knew what all that meant, because no fairy had ever paid fines or taxes. All they knew about was -and is-  fairy favors, fairy gifts, fairy justice and fairy vengeance. But they thought Gentlerain had to have done something awful to disappear so entirely. 

Now my mother was back home and her people were very surprised to see her but treated her as if nothing had happened and just told her not to wander off again because she already knew that nothing good came of it.  A week or so later your uncle dropped by Gelsemine’s human household looking like a human himself and asked if he could see Gelsemine. He wanted to know if she was happy there. She said she was and he gave her Granny Milksops’ notebook, with Granny Milksops’ apologies for having sent her back to the bad fairies. He did that because Granny Milksops was so upset about the Gelsemine affair that she kept crying salty tears into her desserts because she felt she could have avoided Mr. Gen’s being defamed if she hadn’t let Gelsemine go off on her own. Seeing her so upset, Gentlerain made himself visible to her and she told him she didn’t believe a word of what people were saying about him and gave him her recipe book because she could no longer handle the stress of working there and meant to retire and live by the sea with her dearest granddaughter. Before Gentlerain left Gelsemine to find refuge and protection in the only place he could, he put a non animadverto spell, which is a do not notice spell, on her house, so people would not notice there was something weird going on there and it must have been a very good one because to this day they haven’t. Neither mortal nor fay ever gave us trouble.

Now, although my mother lived among humans, she was no longer human. She was a fairy. The people she lived with had grown older in her absence and in no time they were dead, never having asked her why she didn’t age. She found herself living alone in the house and sleeping more and more. This went on until one day she decided she had to do something with her life and she climbed up to the roof of the house. She wanted to jump from there to see if she could still fly. Before she could make up her mind to try to or not, she slipped, and knocked her head on a small gargoyle there was on the roof, protecting the house. The gargoyle came to life and hugged her so she would not fall off the roof. She saw that she had somehow given life to the little gargoyle and that she now had someone to live with in her empty house. She was much happier, but she still kept falling asleep all the time and… well, you all know the Christmas story of the fairy gargoyle and his sleeping beauty mama. All I will add is that to Mama, your uncle Gentlerain is “Il mio padrino.” Just as Darcy is mine.”