"But where was your Queen Mab then? In God’s name, where were you?"
Oxford turned and waved a hand to the southward.
"The Queen Mab was down there, distant something over thirty-five miles, statute, and so below the horizon to one standing on the very summit of this island."
"And you? Where were you hiding, and how had you got here on Flang?"
"I wasn’t hiding," Guy Oxford told him. "And I wasn’t here. I was on board the Queen Mab, and the vessel herself, as I have said, even the very tips of her masts, was hidden from here."
"Do you expect me to believe that? Why not give over this flubdub, Oxford? You were here, or you could not have seen. But you were seen! And I thought that it was only a trick of Ferdy's! Yes, you were seen, and I—I never dreamed it."
"You mean when he pointed—just before he made to spring at you and you shot him?"
"Yes," said Griswold. "But how could it have been you? He said that you—he said it was in the sky!"
Guy Oxford looked at Captain Spar, and Griswold saw a smile in those black (and to the murderer terrible) eyes of his.
"Up in the sky!" Guy Oxford said. "We were! Yes, we were in two places at once, though, of course, we didn't know that until I saw Chantrell point."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"About our being on the Queen Mab's deck and yet up in the sky. You should have turned, Griswold, turned and seen us there. Then, perhaps, your hour of triumph would not have proved your hour of disaster and ruin. And a fairy—Griswold, 'twas a fairy that did it all! I told you this is the Island of the Fay."
5. The Fairy Morgana
"A fairy?" Cuthbert Griswold exclaimed. "Do you expect me to believe such bosh? You a scientist and talking about fairies!"
"Your scientist," Oxford returned, "is the true believer in fairies—only he doesn’t call them that, unless he happens to be in a poetic mood."
"You and all your fairies and your hocus-pocus and your flubdub be damned!" Griswold cried. "What I want to know is this: where were you hiding, and how had you got here? Handsome Ferdy no more dreamed than I did myself that another man was on this island, on this—ha, ha, this Island of the Fay."
"I told you that I wasn’t here, that I was on board the Queen Mab. But I had an excellent little telescope. Oh, not one of your spy-glasses but an astronomical, fitted, of course, with a terrestrial eyepiece, so that the image is upright."
"But you were thirty-five miles away! A line drawn from the very summit of Flang—and I was one hundred and fifty feet below that—to the very tip of the Queen Mab's mainmast would be intercepted by the ocean. Can you, with this wonderful telescope of yours, see around curves?"
"No. But you forget my fairy! No telescope can enable a man to see what is on the other side of a hill; but my fairy has shown men that more than once. Do you want an instance? Here you are:
"Between Ramsgate, England, and Dover Castle, a hill intervenes—or did when this happened. Above this hill—to an observer at Ramsgate—only the turrets of the castle were visible. Yet Dr. Vince and a companion, on the 2nd of August, 1806, saw the whole castle itself. And not only did they see the whole of it, but the castle seemed to be on their side of the hill!
