The Cottingley Secret

by Hazel Gaynor

  When Olivia returned to the shop, she found a note on the desk from Ross to say well done on a fantastic night and that he’d sold loads more books after she’d left (ha ha). She loved that he’d written her a note. She loved that he’d signed it “Ross Bailey, Writer.” She especially loved the illustration of a fairy he’d added at the bottom. It looked a lot like her and whether coincidence or intentional, she loved that something so simple could make her smile from her eyes to her toes.

  She spent a little while reading the wishes the children had left for the fairies in the window, where the yellow cinquefoil and white harebells bloomed and green shoots were entwined around the window frame. Taking a piece of paper from her notebook, she wrote her own wish, adding it to the others beside the fairy door.

  Upstairs, in the flat, she searched in the boxes from Bluebell Cottage and looked through the family albums, but couldn’t find anything that resembled the additional fairy photograph Nana had described.

  Despite being physically exhausted, Olivia couldn’t sleep. She began packing for her trip to England, more eager than ever to get to Cottingley and more reluctant than ever to go back to the apartment in London to pick up a few things. Even though, in one of their few curt e-mail exchanges since his brief visit, Jack had told Olivia he would be away on a business trip, it would still be difficult to be back there. She’d already started the tricky business of canceling the wedding—endless apologies from her, endless tears from shocked family and friends. Their understanding and condolences were tough to take since she was the one causing all the upset, but she reminded herself constantly that an unhappy marriage would have been far tougher and would have lasted far longer. As Henry had told her when she’d confided in him about the wonderful mess she’d made of everything, this, too, would pass.

  To take her mind off things, she lit a candle and set the radio playing quietly in the background. With Hemingway purring at her feet, she reached for Frances’s manuscript, happy to escape from real life for a while and lose herself among the forgotten pages of someone else’s story . . .

  NOTES ON A FAIRY TALE

  Cottingley, Yorkshire. August 1920.

  I would travel to Cottingley with our family friends, the Bainses, who were returning to Bradford after holidaying in Scarborough.

  Mummy said her good-byes to me amid the bustle and noise on the station platform. I promised to behave for Aunt Polly and Uncle Arthur and to try my best to take more photographs of the fairies so that the men in London would be pleased.

  “Do try, Frances,” she urged, dabbing at my cheek with a moist handkerchief to wipe away a smut of smoke. “I know how daft you and Elsie can get when you’re together.” She gripped my shoulders and lowered her voice as she looked me straight in the eye. “This isn’t a holiday. You’re to remember why you’re going.” I nodded. “And when you’re done, we can put the whole business behind us.”

  I’d always trusted those dolphin-gray eyes. I hoped she was right.

  The slamming of the carriage doors and a great hiss of steam signaled that it was time to go. I stepped into the carriage as the stationmaster blew his whistle, the shrill cry following me inside the compartment, prodding and poking at my conscience. Tell her! it shrieked. Tell her! I pressed my glove to the window as Mummy blew a kiss and the pistons began to turn, and I knew it was too late. With a jolt and a judder, the great locomotive groaned along the tracks until I couldn’t see Mummy anymore and the soot-blackened walls of the station gave way to green countryside as the confession I had almost made faded into the distance, smothered by the great clouds of smoke streaming from the funnel.

  The locomotive ate up the miles between Scarborough and Bingley, whistling intermittently to the village children who ran through the fields to wave at the passengers. I held the new camera on my lap and wondered why it was that life kept pulling me in such strange directions; why it was that only a few years ago I’d been happily playing on Cape Town’s beaches, all thoughts of fairies confined to the pages of my books, and now fairies were all I ever thought about. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep so that Mrs. Bains couldn’t interrogate me about my visit to Cottingley, or the new Cameo camera I was taking with me.

  Despite my apprehension, I couldn’t deny the prickle of excitement when I stepped onto the platform at Bingley station, nor could I resist the smile that returned to my lips as I watched the familiar view through the motorcar window: the gorse and heather, the sweeping views, the rolling hills and steep valleys, the soaring chimney stacks from the distant mills and factories. It was like looking at old friends, and when Uncle Arthur pulled up outside Number 31, it was like coming home.

  Elsie was waiting at the gate. She was nineteen now, more woman than girl. I felt shy in her company, unsure of her full bosom and the elegant limbs she draped across the furniture like silk fabric. Elsie wasn’t just older. She was a different shape. A different person altogether.

  Aunt Polly was all smiles and lavender water, exactly as I remembered her. “Eee, Frances Griffiths. You get taller every time I see you. Must be all that sea air, eh? Come into the front room, love. Kettle’s on.”

  The subject of fairies was fiercely avoided as we stuck to more comfortable topics of conversation: How was Scarborough? How was Annie? How was my father settling into his new appointment as a regimental sergeant major in Catterick? How was school? All this from Aunt Polly, whose questions poured out of her without end, much like the cups of strong tea she poured from the cracked pot. It was almost a relief when she finally acknowledged the elephant in the room.

  “Quite a turnup for the books, this business with the photographs, isn’t it, Frances? Who’d have thought they would be considered so interesting? Gentlemen from London visiting the likes of us!”

  I did my best to smile and agree that it was quite something, but in my heart I felt deflated about the whole episode. I couldn’t relax until Aunt Polly left Elsie and me alone and we took a walk down to the beck where the waterfall tumbled gently over the shale rock, and the water—patterned with the dappled shade from the trees—gurgled at our feet as we sat on the bank beside the mossy mound where we’d taken the first photograph. I still loved it there, but something had changed. I was no longer a nine-year-old girl full of curiosity and mischief. I was a twelve-year-old girl full of guilt and worry.

  “It all seems silly now, doesn’t it?” I said as I pressed my fingers into the cool moss. “Don’t you wish we’d admitted the photograph was a prank that first evening? I do.”

  “We did what we did, Frances,” Elsie said. “There’s no use crying over spilled milk.” She picked petals from a pink flower, muttering “He loves me, he loves me not” to herself. “I’m just fed up with all these men from London and experts from Kodak. Some experts!”

  She threw pebbles into the stream, and we watched the ripples spread out in ever-increasing circles. Like the interest in our photographs, they were unstoppable, spreading wider and further, seemingly without end.

  “What did you think of Mr. Gardner?” Elsie asked.

  I shrugged. “He was nice enough, I suppose. A bit brown. Everything he wore was a shade of brown.”

  Elsie laughed. Her voice was a tone deeper than I remembered it. “I’ve two cutouts prepared,” she said, reading my thoughts. “One each. A fairy handing me a harebell. Another one of a flying fairy for you. A fairy in midair! That’ll get those experts in London talking!”

  I dipped my toes into the water, relishing the cool memory of hot summer days when the real beck fairies had appeared in such abundance. It was a long time since I’d last seen them and I wasn’t even sure I could see them anymore. Although I was older and should probably have grown out of such things, part of me missed them.

  “What’s got you so narky, then?” Elsie asked as she passed me a posy of bindweed she’d tied with a stalk of grass. “You’ve hardly said two words since you got here.”

  Elsie always knew when I was in a bad mood.


  “I’m not sure it’s right to keep telling lies, Elsie. Everyone’s taking it too seriously now. And what about the article Conan Doyle’s writing for the magazine? What if lots of people read it? Then they’ll believe the photographs are real too.”

  Elsie had already resigned herself to the fact that we had to see it through. “I don’t see what else we can do, Frances. Conan Doyle and Gardner already think the first photographs are real. We’ll only get into more trouble if we tell the truth now, especially after all their meetings with experts and whatnot. Best to go along with it. Give them a few more photographs to study and write about, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  I hoped she was right.

  “I heard Daddy telling Mummy that it’s too late for us to tell the truth now anyway, even if it was a joke,” Elsie continued. “He says we can’t be making the likes of Conan Doyle look like a fool. Not with him being so well respected. He says we’d be the laughingstock of England, never mind Cottingley, or the West Riding.” She ran her fingers through her curls. “Let’s do what they ask, and in a couple of months, it’ll all be forgotten about. You wait and see.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  Elsie threw another pebble into the stream before turning to look at me, her blue eyes full of intent. “I’m sure of it. People have more important things to be worrying about than a few photographs taken by some girls in Yorkshire. And Conan Doyle won’t use our real names in his article. I’m to be called Iris Carpenter, on account of me being so tall, like the flowers, and you’ll be Alice Carpenter, after Alice in Wonderland. We’re to live in a made-up village called Dalesby. Nobody will ever know it was us.”

  Like a dandelion seed caught on the wind, our joke had already traveled much farther than we’d ever intended. I knew how dandelions liked to spread and grow, how they stubbornly grew back no matter how many times you pulled them up. Mrs. Hogan was right. “Small villages can’t keep secrets.” They would always escape in the end.

  Elsie stood up and brushed grass from her skirt. “At least we were clever enough to hide the evidence. Those torn-up cutouts will be out in the Irish Sea by now. Or the English Channel. I don’t know which direction the Aire flows.”

  I didn’t know, either. Whichever direction it was, I hoped those scraps of paper were at the bottom of the sea. Lost forever.

  As we walked back to the house, I wished more than ever that I’d held my tongue when Mummy was vexed with me that summer afternoon in the scullery. I wished I’d never told anyone about the beck fairies and I wished I was back in Scarborough, cycling along the laneways with Mary or swimming in the sea.

  But wishes, like fairies, are fickle things. They rarely do what you want them to do.

  NOTES ON A FAIRY TALE

  Cottingley, Yorkshire. August 1920.

  The weather was dreadful for the first week of my visit. Aunt Polly groused about the incessant rain and mithered at the pair of us for getting under her feet. She had insisted Elsie stay off work until some satisfactory photographs were taken.

  “Maybe you should go out and try,” she said, sighing at the rain-spattered window and polishing the brass for the second time that week.

  “The fairies won’t come in such awful weather,” I explained. “And besides, we don’t want to get water into the cameras and damage them.” It was, after all, the truth.

  Aunt Polly said fairies were fussy little beggars and we would have to hope for better weather, then, wouldn’t we.

  As the rain spilled down outside and the cameras and glass plates sat idle on the table in the front room, Elsie and I occupied ourselves by sketching and reading and taking trips to the pictures in Shipley, like we had before the end of the war. In the evenings, we wound our hair into rags to make curls when we woke the next morning. We fell easily back into our familiar routines, and I was happy to be with Elsie again. Even though she was distracted at times and talked a lot about the young men she knew, she still made me laugh with her stories and wicked sense of humor.

  After the first week, I began to feel restless and homesick for Scarborough. Aunt Polly wasn’t her usual cheery self, either. She was irritable and short-tempered, snapping at Uncle Arthur at the slightest provocation. He retreated to the safety of the Briggs’s manor and his beloved motorcars, happy to leave us to it. Aunt Polly wrote to Mr. Gardner in London to explain that the rain was preventing us from going outside, but that we would try as soon as there was a break in the weather.

  I missed Mummy and Daddy and Scarborough’s sea breezes and mooched about the house, complaining of being bored. Aunt Polly said she wished she was bored and found endless chores for me to do, such as running errands into the village, where I bumped into Mavis Clarke. She had doubled in size and was even more unpleasant than I remembered. Now thirteen, her sharp tongue had grown sharper, her mocking taunts even crueler. She goaded me with vague remarks about what Elsie and I had been up to at the beck that summer before the end of the war. Elsie told me to ignore her, but I couldn’t. Mavis Clarke unsettled me. As the days dragged on, everything about Cottingley began to unsettle me.

  In another attempt to pass the time, I read some of Aunt Polly’s books about the Theosophist Society, the afterlife, spiritualism, and the occult. The ideas they contained had intrigued me when I’d first found them during the years I’d lived at Number 31, but they troubled me now, disturbing my sleep as I tossed and turned, my thoughts lingering in the mysterious parlor room séances described between the pages. I was glad when my more familiar dreams returned, taking me back to the stream where the girl with red hair was waiting for me and led me to a woodland cottage, where she lay a posy of wildflowers on the doorstep—ragwort and bindweed and campion—singing a song of old Ireland and the Little People before she sat on the step and wept, tears spilling onto her hands with a gentle pitter-patter . . .

  I woke to rain-speckled windows and a murky mist. Not a day for photographing fairies.

  With nothing much else to do, I put on my wellingtons and mackintosh and took a walk around the fields toward Mrs. Hogan’s cottage. I’d promised to visit whenever I was back and looked forward to seeing my old teacher again.

  The cottage was concealed even more by bushes and trees that had grown lush and dense in the year I’d been away. Where the small black leather boots used to sit on the doorstep, a pair of stone boots now stood in their place, flowers growing out of the holes in the top, like plant pots. A perfect circle of toadstools still grew beneath the elder tree in the garden, the same sense of something I’d forgotten to do still whispered through the canopy of leaves above.

  I knocked tentatively at the door, unsure whether Mrs. Hogan would remember me. I needn’t have worried. She was delighted to see me.

  “Frances Griffiths! Well, would you look at you! So tall and pretty. Come in! Come in!”

  The cottage was exactly the same inside. I remembered the tapestries and samplers on the walls, the array of paintings on the dresser. A couple of new ones had been added. A posy of wildflowers sat in a milk jug on the table: ragwort and bindweed and campion. I couldn’t stop staring at them. They were the same flowers from my dream.

  A baby’s cry interrupted my thoughts.

  “And we have a new addition to the family, Frances!” Mrs. Hogan excused herself as she rushed from the kitchen, returning a moment later with a tiny bundle swaddled in her arms. “Meet our beautiful Martha.”

  The baby was as pink and as pretty as the rambling roses that grew around the cottage door, her hands tiny grasping fists. I peered into the blankets to admire her and let her grip my finger.

  “She’s our special gift,” Mrs. Hogan said, beaming as she set baby Martha into her cradle. “I still can’t believe she’s ours to keep.” The catch in her voice betrayed her anguish, and when she continued, she spoke as if to herself. “We’ll never forget our beautiful little Aisling. I may only carry one child in my arms, but I will always carry two children in my heart.” She looked up then and smiled, as
if she had forgotten I was there.

  For the want of anything else to say, I told Mrs. Hogan I liked the name Aisling. “It’s very pretty.”

  “Thank you,” she replied. “In Gaelic it means vision, or dream. And Martha was the name of a nurse who cared for my husband when he was badly injured during the war. He promised to call any future daughter after her if she made sure he recovered.”

  While baby Martha cooed beside me, Mrs. Hogan made tea and asked me about my new home and school in Scarborough. Her face had lost the deep lines of worry that had been there before. She looked younger, despite the time that had passed since I’d seen her.

  We chatted for half an hour or so before the door opened and a handsome man walked in.

  “What’s this? Visitors?” He winked at me and washed his hands at the stone sink. “Frances, isn’t it?” I nodded and thought it nice of him to remember me after only meeting me briefly once, not long after he’d been demobbed. “Ellen . . . Mrs. Hogan still talks about you,” he continued. “Best pupil ever, she says.”

  I blushed.

  Mrs. Hogan laughed and said it was the truth and that the classroom was quiet without my questions. “Some people don’t wonder enough, Frances. Isn’t that right?”

  I agreed and said I’d best be getting home before the next downpour.

  “I suppose you and Elsie will be busy with your cameras again,” Mrs. Hogan said as I put my coat on. “I saw Elsie recently, taking pictures at the beck. It’s a lovely hobby to have.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say and mumbled a good-bye as she opened the door. As I stepped outside, my attention was caught by a painting in an oval frame on the windowsill. A little girl with flame-red hair, a posy of wildflowers in her hands.

  I knew her.

  She was the girl from my dreams. The girl who always gave me a flower. “For Mammy.”

  Mrs. Hogan noticed me staring at the painting and picked it up. “It’s a favorite of mine. That’s our daughter. Aisling.” Her voice cracked with emotion.