I found my courage in the woods, by chance. I wanted to give dear Mr. Quill a final opportunity to show his face, to bare his waxy, trowel-shaped beard again. I’d call his name and let the echo seek him out. I took the lane toward the place where the Beldams first set up their den and followed round the outer edge of Turd and Turf, so silent then and glistening with last night’s rains. The storm had quelled the usual stench to some extent. The carcass domes were mostly hidden by the water. Had there been anybody there to follow me, I’d appear a halting figure with legs as weary as any oxen’s and shoulders as tucked as any goose’s. I could not help but stagger on the rougher ground. For once I felt like Mr. Quill must have felt since his sudden palsy as a child, wooden from the shoulder to the ribs, a man who was not fitted for outdoors. But still I did my best to not look to my left, despite the raucous foraging of our abandoned pigs, happy to be free and in the mire. I was in no hurry to discover evidence of Willowjack or what little remained of the short man from the pillory. Nor did I want just yet to risk discovering the body of my Mr. Quill. I’d rather believe for a few moments more what was most likely true. He had been warned. He ran away — or lurched away, I ought to say. He was already safe. But I had to be sure, or surer anyway, before I could feel free to lurch away myself.

The longpurples were beaten down by rain. You wouldn’t name it Blossom Marsh today. The major colors were the grayish-greens of goat-willows and the purple-browns of beech — but there was no sun to liven them or paint reflections in the flood. I found a raft of almost solid ground, then dared to look across the bog. There was an oblong monument of piled stones I hadn’t seen before. The Beldam daughter had been dutiful and loving, unobserved by us. She couldn’t let her father rest without a stone memorial. There wasn’t any sign of Mr. Quill’s distorted frame. Not above the surface anyway. So I spread my legs and cupped my hands and called his name, despite the head pain that the calling out intensified. I summoned “Mr. Quill” and “Mr. Earle,” until the two names caught the booming echo in the dell and merged to make a distant liquid L. The pigs were not disturbed at all. Shouting doesn’t bother them. But I was loud enough to set some rooks and pigeons in the air, and cause some crashing through the undergrowth. A deer. If Mr. Quill was in the woods or hiding somewhere underneath a roof, he would have heard — and recognized, I hope — my voice. I listened then. I half expected his reply. Nothing answered other than the echo, and the muffled sneezing of a skulking snipe. I must have tried a dozen times before I started swaying back toward the open fields.

I found the fairy caps growing in an oval ring between two exposed root arms under the goat-willow hedge which we have sometimes coppiced for fencing. At least, I think they were fairy caps. It is the time of year for fairy caps. I’ve seen some picked ones recently and believe I’d recognize their pointed parasols and purple gills. It seems a lifetime ago but it is hardly seven days since the Derby twins and Brooker Higgs jaunted along the lane in front of my cottage with their bloating faces and their bloated sack of toadstools. “Had any luck?” I’d asked them. Oh, what bitter luck indeed. I can still almost smell their forest spoils, the caps, the shawls, the giant moonball beneath their dampening of leaves and the smoky cloud of yellow spores. I think it’s reasonable to say that if it were not for their foraging, there would not have been that fire in the dovecote and the loft. There would have been no men in the pillory. There would have been no slaughtering of Willowjack, or anything that followed on from that. I would not have drunk so much or suffered this throbbing headache. The fairy caps must take the blame for everything. It makes less sense to say there would have been no pasturing of sheep before next spring, that Master Jordan has been conjured up, like a demon, by the young men’s flames, that without their flames he would have stayed where he belonged. In town. But I still feel the truth of it. The tinder of the giant moonball has brought misfortune to our land. The fairy caps have set our lives alight.

I think if I had not been wearied by the night and growing weary of myself, I might simply have passed those mushrooms by. But my body was still full of ale. I could smell it in my sweat and I could see it in my piss every time I stopped — and that was often, this morning — to relieve myself. My throat was sore from being sick. My head was, surely, just as tender as if it really had been hammered with a lump of stone and pierced with a metal prong. How else should I explain the deep crevice of pain behind my eyes? I had been split and ruptured by that half-imagined prong.

Of course, I was a novice in the arts of drinking heavily. I was not prepared for such harsh penalties. I was ashamed to be so vulnerable, but also — like all drunkards on the dawn; I’d seen this in my neighbors many times — I was just a bit pleased with myself, pleased at my capacity, pleased that I had lived to tell the tale, pleased to know the innards of a pot at last. I wished that at least some of my old friends could witness me today, especially the ones who’d always been suspicious of my levelheadedness, my reluctance to make myself insensible, no matter what the feast or celebration, no matter what misfortune had occurred. “You do not truly love the barley, Walt,” they said, a terrible rebuke, and more evidence of my timidity. “There’s no fermenting you.”

I suppose it might have been partly this wanting to prove myself to them again and partly my ale-soaked lack of judgment — I’d loved the barley far too much last night and so could not be sound of mind — that made me bend and look more closely at the fairy caps. I only brushed them with my fingertips. All mushrooms are a fearsome sight and even worse to touch. These were as cold and high and clammy as a week-old corpse. But I suppose my brushing with my fingertips was enough for them to work their sorcery on me. I became their carrion at once. I’d given them a brief taste of my skin. Looking back from the more clear-headed safety of this afternoon, I can’t explain my madness or their sudden taking hold of me. But if I recall it correctly — though good recall isn’t something that has survived undamaged from this morning’s loss and doubling of senses — that timid brushing with my fingertips provided me the courage I had sought and lost so quickly drinking ale. I half remember reaching out and cupping mushrooms in my palms. I pinched them firmly at their stems. Against all reason, I wanted to discover what or who they tasted of.

Firstly, though, my country wisdom halted me. I had to make sure these were fairy caps. I picked a single one, the one least touched, the one least bruised, by the brushing, cupping, pinching of my hands, and pressed it to my nose. It’s said that if a fungus is harmful to eat, you’ll sneeze on smelling it. Its spores will warn you they’re not safe. I did not sneeze. I smelled the forest and the earth, the dampness of a fast-retreating year, the acridness of leaf mold, and a kitchen odor which I could have taken for yeast but yeast that was soured from neglect. I can only think that I was insanely hungry, or more damaged than I’d thought possible by Kitty Gosse’s ale and the nightmares that followed it, or suicidal, even, because I did not hesitate. The man who always hesitates did not, on this occasion, hesitate. He popped the mushroom in his mouth and started to chomp down on it. It did not taste as he expected it to.

The one and only time I tasted fairy caps before, with John Carr when we were younger men, we’d soaked them first in honey. I remember they were sweet and sinewy. I don’t remember tasting this reasty mix of horse’s hoofs, burned hair and candle wax, nor the leather chewiness. All I could do was break and tear the mushroom with my teeth and swallow the pieces whole. I ought to have stopped after the first piece and let the mushroom declare itself. If there was any poison in its flesh and now in mine, then let it poison me in no great quantity. But he who dithers is a mouse, I heard my neighbors say. I would not allow myself to be a mouse. Only a townsman would be that timid. I finished that first fairy cap but, for an age, it produced nothing in me but a belch — and the certain knowledge, coming to me from thin air, that the one was “not enough,” that only three of them would bring the courage I required. I did not know what voice had whispered that number to me, but I was sure that three would do the trick. One for Brooker and one each for the twins. I would be as mad as they were on the day they played with fire. I wanted their immodest fits of laughter. So I picked another pair of fairy caps. I knew better than to chew this time. I swallowed them whole so quickly that I almost choked and coughed them up. I had to sit on the grass bank, among the willow roots, and catch my breath. What living fairy caps remained were growing in between my knees. I snapped and picked the surviving twenty or so, the ones I did not mean to eat, and tossed them toward Turd and Turf, waxy titbits for our happy pigs. And then I waited. I do remember that I stretched out on the still-damp ground and waited. Simply lingering.