THIS STORY IS RECORDED by Ralph of Coggeshall and by William of Newburgh, both of whom say that it took place in their own time, about the middle of the twelfth century, in West Suffolk.
At a place called the Wolf-pits, a woman of the village came upon two children at the entrance to one of the pits, a girl and a younger boy. The Wolf-pits, though everyone knew about them, had never been explored, as they were considered dangerous and unlucky, and no one knew how deep they were or where they led. The two children stood blinking in the sunlight, their pale eyes blank as though they had just opened them on this world. They were quite small for what seemed their age, and their skin was green, the pale, luminous green of the verges of a twilight sky in summer.
The woman dropped the ball of wool she had been gathering, crossed herself, made other signs against the Evil Eye and the Good People; the children watched her, but made no response, as though they didn’t understand these gestures to be directed at them. The woman, feeling that despite their green color, the color of fairies, they might be just lost children after all, approached them, asking their names and where they came from. They drew back from her, the boy attempting to run into the pit’s mouth; the girl caught him, and held him back, and spoke words to him the woman couldn’t understand. The boy shook his head and shouted, as though not believing what the girl told him; she pulled him again roughly away from the pit’s entrance, and spoke sharply to him. The boy began to weep then, a storm of tears, and his sister—it seemed to the woman they must be brother and sister—held him tightly as though to smother his tears, all the while looking with her large pale eyes at the woman, for help, or from fear, or both.
Pity overcame the woman’s wonder, and she came to them, telling them not to be afraid, asking if they were lost.
“Yes,” the girl said, and her speech, though in form different from common human speech, was intelligible. “Yes. Lost.”
The woman took them to her own house. The boy, still weeping, refused to enter it, but with her rough yet protective manner his sister drew him in. The darkness within seemed to calm them both, though the boy still whimpered. The woman offered them food, good bread, a bowl of milk, but they refused them with revulsion. The woman decided to get help and advice. Making gestures and speaking softly, she told them to stay, rest, she would be back soon; she put the food nearby in case they should want it, and hurried out to call her neighbors and the priest, wondering if when she returned the green children would not have disappeared, or her belongings, or the house itself.
She brought back with her a weaver known to be a fairy doctor, who could cure the stroke, and his wife, and several others whom she met, though not the priest, who was asleep; and they all went to see the green children, the village dogs barking behind them.
They were as she had left them, sitting on the bed, their arms around each other and their bare green feet hanging down. The fairy doctor lit a bit of blessed candle he had brought, but they didn’t start at it; they only looked with silent trepidation, like shy wild things, at the faces peering in the door and window at them. In the darkness of the house they seemed to glow faintly, like honey.
“They won’t eat,” the woman said. “Give them beans,” the fairy doctor said. “Beans are the fairy food.”
They were fairies to this extent, at least; when the woman gave them beans, they devoured them hungrily, though they still refused all other food.
They would answer no questions about the place they had come from, or how they had come to the Wolf-pits; when asked if they could return to where they came from, they only wept, the boy loudly, the girl almost grudgingly, her face set and her fists clenched and the tears trembling on the lashes of her luminous eyes. But later, at twilight, when the people had all gone away, and the boy had fallen asleep exhausted by grief, the woman by kindly questions did learn their story, holding the girl’s cool green hand in hers.
They came from a land below the earth, she said. There it is always twilight, “like this,” she said, gesturing to include the dimness of the house, the crepuscular fast-darkening blue of the doorway and the window, perhaps also the birds sleepily speaking and the hush of evening wind in the leaves outside. It was cool there; the rushing cool breath the villagers had noticed coming even in high summer from the Wolf-pits was the exhalation of her country. Everyone there was the same hue as herself; she had been as much frightened, she said, by the woman’s odd color as by the unbearable brilliance of the sun.
She and her brother were shepherd’s children, and had gone in search of a lost lamb. They had got lost themselves, and after a long fearful time had heard, far off, a bell ringing. They had followed the sound of the bell, and had found the exit of the pit.
Would they go home again? the woman asked. No, they could not. Whatever is an exit from that country, the girl said, is not an entrance; she was sure of that, though why this should be so she couldn’t explain. They couldn’t go back that way again. Her brother, she said, wouldn’t believe this; but it was so.
Night had come, and the woman again offered the girl the bowl of sweet milk. She took it now, with a kind of reverent fear, and as carefully as though it were mass-wine, she drank some. She gave the bowl back to the woman, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, her face frightened yet resolute, as though she had drunk poison on purpose. The woman put her to sleep on the bed with her brother, and curled up herself on the floor. In the night she heard the boy more than once awake and cry; but the girl cried no more. Years later the woman would look back and try to remember if the girl had ever cried again; and did not remember that she ever had.
In the morning the priest came. He questioned the children closely. The boy hid himself behind his sister and was silent, but the girl, less tongue-tied now, told in her strange accents what she had told the woman the previous evening, shyly insisting this was the truth, though the priest tried subtly to trap her into an admission that they were of the devil, either minor demons themselves or figments created by the devil to lead mortals into error. They had no fear of his cross or of the saints’ relics he had brought in a glass vial; yet the girl could not answer any questions he put to her about their Savior, the church, heaven or hell. At last the priest slapped his knees and rose, saying that he couldn’t tell who or what they might be, but they must at least be baptized. And so they were.
The boy remained inconsolable. He would not eat any food but beans, which he gorged on ravenously, without seeming to gain nourishment from them; he spoke only to his sister, in words no one else understood. He wasted rapidly. His sister would let no one else nurse him, not the woman, especially not the fairy doctor, though it was clear the boy declined; soon he even ceased to weep. In the middle of one night, the girl woke the woman and, dry-eyed, told her that her brother was dead. After some thought and prayer, the priest determined that he might be buried on consecrated ground.
The girl continued to live with the woman, who was childless and a widow. She came to eat human food without difficulty, and in time lost most of her green color, though her eyes remained large and strangely golden, like a cat’s, and she never grew to proper size, but remained always tiny, thin, and somewhat insubstantial. She helped the woman about the house; she herded the village sheep, she heard Mass on Sundays and holy days, she went to processions and festivals in the village. The priest, still alert for devilish signs, heard stories that she was wanton and had no modesty and that any boy who asked her in the right way might have her under the hedge; but she was perhaps not the only one in the village of whom that might be said.
The woman, grateful that she had stayed and had not sickened like her brother, ceased asking her about her far country and what went on there; but many others wanted to hear her story, and came from some distance away to question her. She received them all, sitting in the chimney corner in her best dress, and rehearsed the tale for them; and over time it grew a little longer. She said that the name of her country was St. Martin’s Land, because St. Martin was its patron. The green people there were Christian, she said, and worshiped our Savior, but on Saturdays like the Jews. She said that at the border of her country was a wide river, and beyond that river was a bright country where she had always longed to travel but could never reach. When she talked of this bright land, her pale eyes sometimes grew tears. The woman, old now, hearing her tell these things, and remembering how before the priest she had been ignorant of religion, wondered if these stories were not substitutes for true memories of her far dark country, which she had lost over time as she had lost her twilight color.
Eventually, it is recorded, the green child married a man at Lenna, and there “survived many years.” It’s not recorded what sort of man he was, or what sort of wife she made; nor if there were children of this union, and, if so, whether the blood in them of the land their mother called St. Martin’s Land made them different from other children. If there were children, and children of those children, so that in some way that green land elsewhere and also the distant bright country glimpsed across the wide river entered our plain human race, it must surely be so diluted now, so bound up and drowned in daylight and red blood, as not to be present in us at all.
William of Newburgh says these events took place in the reign of King Stephen, and that at first he didn’t believe the story, but that later the general testimony compelled him to believe it to be true.