At the Back of the North Wind

Three times the coachman's boy plugs the knot-hole in his hayloft wall with a twist of hay, and three times the wind blows it back in his face. The next night a voice through the boards says he has been shutting up her window. She is tall and pale, her black hair fills the loft, and soon Diamond is over the London rooftops in her arms.

One arm holds him safe, she says; the other is enough to sink a ship. She sinks one, and the wreck costs his family the house, the horses, the place. He comes back from her still country to a cab-mews and his father's reins. Modern English fantasy begins in books like this one, where wonder and ruin share a room.