“He’d have given in eventually. I can nag for hours.”
The waterfall was especially beautiful that morning, falling in a veil of silver silk, the water perfectly smooth as it tumbled in arcs over the stepped rocks. The continual rumble had become so familiar to me since that first fretful night when I’d heard it from the bedroom. I dipped my fingertips into the water, savoring the icy tickle as it ran across my skin.
Taking one last look around to check that nobody had followed us, Elsie began to arrange the fairy cutouts. She’d already taped a hat pin onto the back of each and stuck the ends of the pins into the earth. I stood to one side, watching my cousin work as I picked idly at the wildflowers around me, threading them together through their stems to make a garland that I placed on my head like a May queen’s crown.
Elsie laughed when she glanced up and saw me. “Look at you! The fairy queen. What was she called?”
“Which one?”
“The Shakespeare one? We learnt it at school.”
“Titania? From A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”
“That’s it. You look like Titania!”
I admired Elsie’s drawings again as she arranged them to make them look like they were dancing across the bank. I thought them very clever and beautiful, even though they weren’t much like the real fairies I saw, but I supposed it didn’t matter. Mummy and Aunt Polly and Uncle Arthur didn’t know what the real fairies looked like anyway, so Elsie’s attempts were good enough. While she fussed with the camera, I wandered along the stream, watching, listening, hoping to catch a glimpse of them.
“I’m ready, Frances.”
Splashing back along the edge of the water, I stood behind the dancing figures so that only my head and shoulders were visible above the grassy bank. “What shall I do?” I asked. I couldn’t suppress my dislike for being photographed. Not even now.
“Try and look like you’re watching them dancing in front of you.”
I tried a few expressions of surprise and wonder, which made Elsie laugh. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!” she said. “Try to look a bit more . . . I don’t know . . . dreamy.”
I did, but Elsie still wasn’t happy. “You look too stiff. Lean forward or something. Rest your elbow on the bank.”
I followed Elsie’s instructions, leaning forward onto my elbow and putting my hand under my chin. “Like this?”
Elsie bent down to peer through the viewfinder. “That’s it!” she squealed. “It’s perfect. Don’t move.”
As the waterfall tumbled behind me and the lightest of breezes ruffled the leaves on the trees above, I stayed as still as possible, and I couldn’t be absolutely certain, but in the second before I heard the click of the shutter, I thought I saw something stir among the wild blackberries behind Elsie’s shoulder. My eyes flickered away from the cutouts to follow the slightest glimpse of a lavender light disappearing into the foliage.
“Perfect!” Elsie was pleased with the setup. She couldn’t wait to get back to the house and ask Uncle Arthur to develop the plate.
“Is that it?” I’d expected it to take longer.
“That’s it.”
“Did it work?” I dared not move until Elsie was certain we’d got the photo.
“Hope so. Come on, help me get rid of all this, and we’ll take the plate back to Daddy.”
To hide the evidence of our joke, we pushed the hat pins down into the soft ground and tore the paper fairies into pieces. I thought it a shame to destroy all Elsie’s hard work, but she insisted. We scattered the torn paper into the beck, where it drifted downstream like fallen petals.
“There,” Elsie said. “Now nobody will ever know.”
We scrambled back up the bank and through the gate at the bottom of the garden, laughing as we ran to the house. I turned around once to check that we hadn’t been seen. There was nobody about, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere, between the ever-shifting shadows of the trees, watchful eyes had seen everything.
NOTES ON A FAIRY TALE
Cottingley, Yorkshire. July 1917.
Time limped painfully along as we waited for Uncle Arthur to come home, the seconds and minutes ticking idly by with no sense of urgency as the camera sat on the scullery table, taunting us with the promise of secrets captured inside. I sat down, resting my chin on my hands as I stared at the camera, wondering if our plan had worked. From the outside, the camera looked the same as it had that morning, and yet the longer I stared at it, the more it felt alive; as if part of me was trapped inside, trying to get out.
I was fidgety and distracted, my thoughts returning continually to the cutouts we’d torn up and thrown into the beck. What if someone saw them? I suggested to Elsie that we go back to check they’d been carried off downstream, but she laughed and told me to stop worrying. I distracted myself with a book of British butterflies while Elsie worked on a new painting. She said it was a surprise and that I wasn’t to be looking over her shoulder.
It wasn’t until much later, after a painfully slow teatime punctuated with unsettling conversations about rationing and the latest battles on the Western front, that Uncle Arthur finally took the camera into his darkroom. There wasn’t room for all of us inside, so while Elsie squeezed in with her father, I waited outside, pressing my ear to the door to listen to what was being said. All I could hear was the heavy hush of expectation.
With each passing minute I grew more restless and eager to know if our plan had worked, picking nervously at the quick of my nail until I drew blood. I had just stuck my finger in my mouth when I heard Elsie’s delighted exclamations through the door.
“They’re on the plate, Frances! The fairies are on the plate!”
My heart thumped beneath my pinafore. It had worked. I jumped up and down on the flagstone floor, squealing with excitement.
The noise brought Mummy rushing to the top of the steps to see what the fuss was about. “What’s all the commotion down there? Sounds like someone’s being murdered.”
Uncle Arthur emerged from the darkroom, peering at me through narrowed eyes. “Been up to summat, these two have, Annie. Seems they weren’t alone today when they took their picture.”
Hitching up her skirt, Mummy made her way carefully down the narrow steps. “What do you mean?”
“Seems their fairies showed up an’ all.” He said the word fairies as if it were a foreign word none of us would understand and flapped his hands like wings to help the translation.
Elsie stepped out of the darkroom, her eyes bright with secrets and mischief. “Go and look,” she whispered, gripping my arm. “They’re all there. It’s ever so good!”
I stepped into the dimly lit room, my breath catching in my throat as I walked toward the bench where Uncle Arthur had laid out the glass plate. I don’t know how long I looked at it—a minute or two—but it felt like forever as I stared back at myself: a perfect negative image of my face, of the flowers in my hair, of my hand resting on my chin, of four dancing fairies in front of me. I leaned forward to take a closer look. The cutouts had come out perfectly, far better than I’d imagined. I shivered, touched by the invisible thrill of mischief. I covered my mouth with my hand to stop my secrets escaping.
I heard Elsie telling Uncle Arthur he would have to believe us now. “You see, Daddy? There really are fairies at the beck, and now we have a photograph to prove it, so you’re to stop teasing poor Frances.” She must have turned to Mummy then. “Now you know why she loves to play at the beck, Aunt Annie. I know I’d much sooner play with fairies than horrible Mavis Clarke.”
Mummy bustled into the room, her skirts brushing against the stone floor with a swish of starched fabric. She looked me straight in the eye. “Well? Where are these so-called fairies?”
I moved to one side to make room for her at the bench and held my breath as she scrutinized the image on the plate. Would she believe us? Would she notice the guilt that flared crimson on my cheeks? She looked at me only once in the two or three minutes she st
udied the plate. Then, without saying a word, she motioned for me to follow her out of the darkroom. She asked Uncle Arthur what he made of it.
He shook his head. “Must be sandwich wrappings. Whatever it is, I know it’s not fairies. Nowt but a prank. That’s all.” He closed the darkroom door, locking it behind him before he made his way up the narrow stairs, telling Elsie to go and fetch her mother from the neighbor’s. “A clever prank, granted, but a prank nonetheless.”
I watched Elsie’s boots disappear up the stairs and wished she would come back. I stiffened my knees and arms, determined to hold on to my promise not to tell as the inevitable question came from Mummy, now we were alone.
“Well, Frances? Did you see fairies? And I expect the truth now.”
I hardly dared look at her as my thoughts returned to that gray April evening when we’d first arrived in Yorkshire and she’d promised everything would be better in the summertime. She was right. Everything was better, mostly because of Elsie and my special friends at the beck. All I wanted was for Mummy to believe me and allow me to play there for the rest of the summer. Although my guilty conscience urged me to confess to the joke we had played, I remembered the solemn promise I’d made to Elsie and crossed my fingers behind my back.
“Yes, Mummy. I really do see fairies at the beck.” It was, after all, the truth.
She raised a skeptical eyebrow in reply. “Hmm. Well, I can’t for the life of me work out how you would make them appear on the plate if they weren’t actually there, so I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it.”
I’d expected her to be cross. I’d expected her to doubt Elsie, if not me. She was always scolding Elsie for filling my head with stories and nonsense. But she did neither. If anything, her face softened as she looked at me and put her hand over mine.
“Fairies, eh?”
I nodded. “They’re so lovely, Mummy. I wish you could see them.” I wanted to tell her everything: about their misty peculiarity and their changing colors.
She let out a long sigh that could have stretched all the way back to Cape Town. “So do I, love. So do I.”
“You do believe me, Mummy. Don’t you?”
“I want to, Frances. If we can believe in fairies, perhaps we can believe in anything, even in an end to this damned war. And wouldn’t that be something.”
The crack in her voice was as wide as the crack in the flagstones beneath my feet. Almost as wide as the crack I’d felt in my heart since Daddy had left us.
In our room that night, with Elsie snoring beside me, I couldn’t stop thinking about the photograph. My conscience nagged at me like an itch I couldn’t scratch, more noticeable somehow in the quiet darkness of nighttime. Were we wrong to play the trick, even if it was done with the best of intentions, and only to stop me getting into trouble? Should I have told Mummy the truth? I tumbled her words around in my mind—“If we can believe in fairies, perhaps we can believe in anything”—and the more I repeated them, the more I felt that perhaps believing in fairies was more important than seeing them. In belief, there is hope and wonder. In seeing, there is often question and doubt.
With the steady rumble of the waterfall keeping its nighttime vigil, and the stars blooming in the sky, I knew with a sudden clarity that I would never tell Mummy the truth about the photograph. I wouldn’t tell her not only because I had made a promise to Elsie, but because with the world still at war, we needed to believe in something better. In that moment, and perhaps for much longer, it seemed to me that the possibility of believing in fairies was more important than one little girl telling the truth.
Eight
Ireland. Present day.
When she reached the end of the chapter, Olivia followed Nana’s gaze outside, where the wind tossed the branches of the cherry trees around, sending their blossoms skittering across the lawns.
“The bluebells are out, Nana. Did you see them?”
Nana nodded, a small smile on her lips. “A carpet of bluebells,” she whispered. “It comes right up to the garden wall in the spring. We mustn’t trample on them in case the fairies are sleeping inside.”
Olivia moved closer. “Where is this, Nana? In Yorkshire? Cottingley?”
“Lovely place. Hidden among the trees. The beck runs along the bottom of the garden.” She remembered these distant places and events so clearly, Olivia found it hard sometimes to understand how Nana couldn’t remember what she’d had for breakfast that morning. “I can hear the waterfall from my bedroom,” she continued, tilting her head to one side, leaning forward slightly. “Listen. Do you hear it?”
Olivia listened. The rush of the wind around the eaves did sound a little like a distant waterfall. “I do, Nana. Very faintly, in the distance.”
“Must be a thaw. Did it snow?”
Olivia took her hand. “Not today, Nana, although the blossoms look like snowflakes dancing around on the lawns. Look.”
They watched the pink snow for a moment as the clock on the wall swept the minutes carelessly away. Minutes they would never get back.
“Do you have a photograph of the cottage, Nana? I’d love to see it.”
Nana pointed her walking stick toward the wardrobe. “In there. Get the book out, will you?”
Olivia took Nana’s memory book from the bottom of the wardrobe, turning the pages until Nana told her to stop at a photograph of a woman and a child, side by side in the doorway of a pretty cottage, a small pair of black boots on the step beside them. The image was in black and white, but Olivia could imagine the vibrant colors of the flowers and plants around them.
“Who is this, Nana?”
Nana took the album from Olivia, resting it on her lap. “That’s me. Chubby little thing, wasn’t I.” She tapped her fingernail on the woman in the photograph. “That’s Mammy.”
“What was her name?”
“Ellen,” she said without missing a beat. “Ellen Hogan.”
Olivia’s mind whirled. Of course! That was why the name was familiar. Ellen Hogan—the schoolteacher Frances had written about so fondly—was her great-grandmother. Everything was starting to make sense.
Nana gazed at the photograph, as if puzzled. “I wonder where Aisling was.” She pronounced the name Ash-ling. “Probably playing at the beck with Frances. Frances often came to visit in the summer.” She chuckled to herself; a childish sound. “She used to tell me all about the fairies.”
“Frances Griffiths?”
“That’s right. Or was it Elsie? I get confused.”
There was so much Olivia wanted to know about her great-grandmother, and Frances, but Aisling was a new name to her. “Who’s Aisling, Nana?”
A distant look clouded Nana’s face. She pushed the album away and shut her eyes. Olivia knew the signs. Like a book being closed, the story was suspended. There was nothing more to know. Not today, at least.
Olivia sat with Nana for the rest of the afternoon, occupying herself by tidying up, changing the water in the vase of flowers on the table, and refreshing the jug of water by Nana’s bed. She polished the photo of Pappy with her cardigan sleeve, so handsome in his uniform, off to war. But no matter how much she tried to distract herself, her thoughts kept returning to Frances, and Cottingley, and her great-grandmother, and the connection between them all.
At teatime, Olivia took her cue to leave, kissing Nana’s cheek and telling her she would visit again in a few days. She left Nana with a bowl of soup and a quiz show on TV, the volume turned up so high she wasn’t sure if Nana heard her say she loved her.
On the bus home, Olivia thought about the story unraveling in Frances’s memoirs, and in the Arthur Conan Doyle book Mrs. Joyce had found at the cottage and which Olivia had been reading in quiet moments at the shop. One paragraph in particular had resonated with her:
There are certain facts which stand out clearly and which none of the evidence I was able to obtain could shake. No other people have seen the fairies, though everyone in the little village knew of their alleged existence.
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Everyone in the village included her great-grandmother, Ellen Hogan. Had she seen fairies too?
The more Olivia thought about Frances and Elsie’s photographs and the cottage in the woods and Ellen’s missing child, the more she felt an urge to visit Cottingley. Something was pulling her back there, a sense of family connection. Like a skein of wool being wound, she was being drawn in.
Back in Howth, she followed the slope of colorful houses that decorated the street, so pretty in the evening sunlight, and there was Bluebell Cottage at the crest of the hill. Tonight was Olivia’s last night there. Tomorrow she would say good-bye.
SHE SPENT THE evening poring over mountains of paperwork to make some sense of it all. Business transactions. Orders. Invoices. Rent. She checked her e-mail, a wall of black unread messages. She scrolled through as quickly as she could, and there it was, a message from Jack asking if her phone was broken because the wedding planner had been on to him to say she couldn’t get hold of Olivia. He added that everything was going well in China and that he might have a trip to Germany the following week but would make it up to her with dinner somewhere fancy when he got back. She felt more like his mistress than his soul mate. She didn’t have the desire, or the energy, to reply.
Too restless to sleep, she took Pappy’s old radio upstairs and listened to classical music into the small hours: concertos and symphonies, Mendelssohn’s “Fairies’ March,” Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers.” It soothed her soul. When she did drift into sleep, she dreamed of forests and glistening streams and the voices of children, laughing and whispering, their faces and secrets concealed behind the leafy trees. Sometimes she felt the sensation of cool, wet grass under her feet, and always there was a little girl, hair like flames, handing her a white flower. “For Mammy. For my Mammy.”
The dreaming had started after the accident, her darkest fears and insecurities manifesting in curious images and strange people and faraway places, so vivid that when she woke up, she wasn’t sure if they were dreams or reality. She didn’t tell anybody at first. It was when the sleepwalking started that her grandparents became aware of it. Anxiety, the doctors said; the result of trauma and shock. They said she would grow out of it, but she hadn’t, and she was glad.