The Cottingley Secret

by Hazel Gaynor

  “It’s a lovely painting,” I said. “She was very pretty.”

  Was.

  The word hung heavy in the air. An acknowledgment that Aisling lived in the past now. I wanted to take it back. I wanted to shout out, “Is! I meant is very pretty.” My mistake was so awful I practically ran out of the door, muttering a thank-you for the tea and nearly tripping over the stone boots on the step that Mrs. Hogan explained had been carved by her husband, to replace the leather ones. “More permanent,” she’d said.

  “Come and see us again before you go back to Scarborough,” Mrs. Hogan called after me.

  I called back that I would.

  I thought about the painting of the red-haired girl all the way home and all through tea and all that evening in the front room as the rain danced against the windows. I thought about her as I fell asleep. Finally, I understood who the flowers in my dreams were for. They were for Mrs. Hogan. The little girl’s Mammy was Ellen Hogan, the kind, gentle woman whose heart had been silently breaking for the last four years, and in my dreams, my heart broke for them both.

  By Thursday of the second week, the weather finally improved, and the early morning mists cleared to bright sunshine. Perfect weather for fairy hunting.

  Elsie teased the curls in my hair before tying my favorite violet ribbons into them. “If half of England is going to see us, we might as well look our best.”

  She took the cutouts and hat pins from the biscuit tin beneath the bed. I didn’t like to say much after the effort she’d gone to, but they looked rushed, not as detailed or delicate as the first ones. The sight of them made me sick to my stomach. Were we really going to do this again?

  After dinner, Aunt Polly shooed us out of the house. “I’m off to Bradford to have tea with our Clara. I’ll leave you to it.” She stood at the cellar door, arms folded, as we trudged miserably off down the garden, our wellington boots squelching over the rain-soaked grass. “Mind those cameras and make sure you take some good photographs,” she called after us.

  Her words crept along my spine, like guilty fingers pushing me on.

  We were careful with our new cameras, a gift from Conan Doyle. Uncle Arthur said they were much more sophisticated machines than his Midg and that the lenses alone cost £20 each and we should be very careful with them.

  In the top field where we’d taken the photo of Elsie and the gnome, we set up a picture of Elsie with the fairy handing her a harebell. As I peered through the viewfinder, I could hardly believe that anyone with sense or intelligence could think these cutout fairies real. This one looked especially stiff and flat, its feet in a balletic second position.

  After I’d clicked the shutter, we gathered everything up and returned to my favorite spot at the willow tree to set up the next photo. Elsie used a hat pin to stick the cutout of the “leaping fairy,” as she called it, into the branch of the tree. After a short discussion, we agreed that a two-second exposure would be enough.

  “Stand in front of it, with the side of your face turned to me, and look straight at the fairy,” Elsie said. “It’ll seem as though she’s jumping toward you.”

  I followed Elsie’s instructions but had no real enthusiasm for it. Elsie had to remind me to look enchanted more than once as she measured the distance and set the speed for the shutter, allowing a longer exposure time due to the dim lighting with the leaves and bushes around us. I moved my head slightly as Elsie pressed the shutter. I hoped it wouldn’t spoil the plate. We stuck the hat pins into the ground and threw the torn-up cutouts into the stream, as before.

  “That’s it, then,” Elsie said as we clambered up the bank. “We never have to take pictures of ruddy fairies again.”

  We burst out laughing because it was such a funny thing to say.

  We idled for a while by the water, remembering lazy days of racing our leaves and baby frogs and watching Mr. Snowden’s ducklings. The blackberries were hard green bullets on the bushes, and I was glad to know I would be back in Scarborough long before they ripened. I was still fond of Cottingley, but it didn’t hold the same magic it once had. Perhaps there was only a limited time for anyone to feel what I’d felt at the beck during those wartime summers. Perhaps it was someone else’s turn now. Time for another little girl to play here and continue the story.

  While Uncle Arthur developed the plates that afternoon, I practiced my scales at the piano. I had no inclination to wait outside the darkroom, no inclination to see the photographs at all, not even when Elsie popped her head around the door to say they had come up nicely.

  When Aunt Polly returned from Bradford, she was pleased enough with the photographs, but disappointed we’d only managed the two, and neither of them with the fairies flying as Elsie had promised. She muttered and grumbled as she set the kettle on the stove. “I’ll write to Mr. Gardner to tell him. You can go out tomorrow and try again.”

  My heart sank into my boots. “How many more photographs do we need, Aunt Polly?”

  “Well, I should think half a dozen wouldn’t be too much to ask, not after all the trouble and expense Mr. Conan Doyle went to, sending you those new cameras and plates.”

  I kicked Elsie under the table. I knew she didn’t have any more cutouts prepared.

  “But the fairies only come in good weather, Aunt Polly,” I said. “They won’t come in the rain.”

  “Then let’s hope for good weather tomorrow, Frances.”

  I prayed for bad weather as I knelt beside the bed that night, and I prayed for poor little Aisling too.

  NOTES ON A FAIRY TALE

  Cottingley, Yorkshire. August 1920.

  On my last day in Cottingley I woke to the steady patter of rain against the window. Murky gray clouds covered the sky like ink spots. Mists rolled over the valleys, washing away the hilltops and distant views and any hope of seeing fairies.

  But this was not a task to be given up lightly, especially now that the time and expense of important men from London were at stake. Also, there was Aunt Polly’s Yorkshire stubbornness to take into account. Despite the drizzle and the mist, she insisted we try one last time to get another photograph. She sent us out straight after dinner with our cameras and two glass plates each.

  We made a sorry pair in our mackintoshes and boots. I felt as gloomy as the weather as we trudged toward the beck, where we mooched about for a while, sulking about everything to do with fairies, and talking about Elsie’s plans to emigrate to America.

  It was only toward the middle of the afternoon, as the rain stopped and a weak sun poked through the clouds, that Elsie said we should take one picture each.

  “You never know,” she said. “We might catch a real fairy! I’ll go down to the bridge. You take something here.”

  Elsie was only gone for ten minutes when I saw a flash of color beside the waterfall. My heart quickened. Another flash came. Then another.

  They were here.

  It wasn’t only what I saw that thrilled me. As before, I heard a light ringing in my ears. As before, my skin tingled with the sensation of being watched. I tiptoed as quietly and as quickly as I could toward them. There they were, just as I remembered them, so magical in their misty barely-there beauty. I watched, spellbound, for a minute, before I remembered the camera. Quickly I set what I hoped would be the correct aperture and speed. I looked through the viewfinder and pressed the shutter. When I glanced up from behind the lens, they had gone.

  Elsie was striding along the bank, calling to me. “Frances! I said, shall we try up near the reservoir?”

  I stood up and brushed the damp from my skirts. As I walked away from the beck, I instinctively knew I’d seen the fairies for the last time. They had come to say good-bye.

  In the field beside the reservoir, we spread our mackintoshes on the ground and sat down to discuss what we were going to do, and how we would explain the lack of photographs to Aunt Polly. I didn’t tell Elsie what I’d seen. I didn’t know if I’d captured the fairies, anyway, and didn’t want to get her hopes up.
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  Elsie picked at the grass beside her, placing a blade between her finger and thumb and blowing through it to make a high-pitched whistle. It reminded me of the sound I heard when I saw the fairies. She suggested we use our last two plates to take a picture of a tree or the bushes. “We can say the fairies flew away just as we pressed the shutter. Or we can say we can’t see them anymore. I read a book of Mummy’s about psychic abilities. It said children can communicate with other realms, but that when they grow up, they lose the ability. They’ll believe that.”

  It was a muggy afternoon. Bees and wasps buzzed around us as I let my thoughts wander back to the beck, grateful that I had seen them one last time. As Elsie blew her grass whistle, a movement in front of me caught my eye. Leaning forward to take a closer look, I saw something resembling a bird’s nest, almost hidden in the grass. Without stopping to think, I unfolded the lens sleeve, pointed my camera, and took a five-second exposure.

  Elsie looked up. “What are you doing? Don’t waste the plates.”

  “I thought I saw something.”

  “What sort of something?”

  “I’m not sure. Something in the grass. A nest of some kind.”

  “Probably a field mouse.” Elsie stood up. “Come on then. It’s better than nothing, I suppose. We’ll say it was the best we could do.”

  We wandered back to the house, lost in our thoughts, all talk of fairies quite done with.

  Aunt Polly was waiting for us in the garden. “Well? What did you manage?”

  “We’re not sure,” Elsie said.

  “What d’you mean, you’re not sure? Did you see fairies or not?”

  “We thought we saw something in the grass in the top field, but it moved too quickly to get a close look. Hopefully it’ll come up clearer on the plate.”

  Aunt Polly sighed. “Let’s hope so. Otherwise I’m afraid Mr. Gardner and Mr. Conan Doyle will think you a pair of silly girls only able to capture two fairies with all those plates and such good cameras. Two fairies. Honestly!”

  Uncle Arthur developed the plates that evening, declaring them all duds, even the one I’d taken of the waterfall. Only the photograph of the nest in the grass was considered half decent and even that Uncle Arthur didn’t think looked like a nest at all. “More like a basket of jumbled up washing if you ask me. It’s a dud. That’s about all it is.”

  Aunt Polly rubbed her hands on her apron and peered at it again. “Dud or not, it’ll have to do. I’ll send the prints to Mr. Gardner in the morning.”

  That night before I went to bed, I asked Aunt Polly if she thought the men from London would be happy with our photographs.

  She patted my arm reassuringly. “They’ll have to be, won’t they? I suppose you can’t get fairies to order, like buttons and ribbon in the haberdashery. It would have been nice to have more, but we’ll make do.”

  “You still believe the beck fairies are real, though, don’t you, Aunt Polly?”

  She thought about this for a moment as she smoothed the front of her skirt and let out a long sigh. “Yes, Frances. Happen I do. If we can’t believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden, then I’m not sure there’s much point believing in anything.”

  That was good enough for me.

  By the end of the week, I was back in Scarborough, enjoying my cycles along the quiet country lanes with Mary. We watched the cricket festival and county matches at the Queen’s ground, swam in the sea, picked flowers for our presses, and knit jumpers for our dolls. All thoughts of Cottingley and fairies slipped away, like the tide carried out to sea.

  If I’d known what lay ahead, perhaps I would have made more of those quiet, simple days in Scarborough that summer. Perhaps I would have lingered longer in the water before rushing back for my towel. Perhaps I would have relished the quiet joy of being alone, with only my thoughts. Perhaps I would have appreciated the days that I had, rather than wishing for the days that were yet to come.

  I had never liked reaching the end of a story, and mine wasn’t finished yet.

  While I enjoyed Scarborough’s summer, the next chapters of my particular fairy tale were being written in a London townhouse as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle evoked the marvel of our so-called “Yorkshire fairies” in words, sentences, and eloquent paragraphs. Soon his pages would be in the hands of the typesetter. By the end of the year, my story would be clattering along the great machinery of the printing presses, our photographs displayed on newsstands across England as the much-anticipated Christmas issue of The Strand Magazine went on sale, bearing the dramatic headline:

  FAIRIES PHOTOGRAPHED

  AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT DESCRIBED BY

  A. CONAN DOYLE

  My story was far from over.

  In many ways, it was only just beginning.

  NOTES ON A FAIRY TALE

  Scarborough, Yorkshire. January 1921.

  Within days of Conan Doyle’s article hitting the newsstands, talk of the fairy photographs reached Scarborough. Speculation was rife. How could it not be when the article claimed to contain “the two most astounding photographs ever published”? I pulled my hat over my eyes when I heard people talking about it on the bus, afraid someone would recognize me, even though our names had been changed to Iris and Alice, and Cottingley was described as the “quaint old-world Yorkshire village of Dalesby.” Conan Doyle had written, “We are compelled to use a pseudonym and to withhold the exact address, for it is clear that their lives would be much interrupted by correspondence and callers if their identity were too clearly indicated.”

  Our lives were “much interrupted” regardless.

  Mr. Gardner wrote to me straightaway. My hands shook as I read his words, my mouth as dry as toast. “Dear Frances, I send just this line at once as the Strand is out today and I am already getting numerous inquiries about the fairies. . . . It is just possible you may be found out and an attempt made to interview you despite my endeavor to protect you and yours from discovery . . .”

  Far from concealing our identity, Conan Doyle had left enough clues that even an amateur Sherlock Holmes could work out who we were. Yorkshire folk are not easily dissuaded once they set their mind to something, and I knew it wouldn’t take long for someone to recognize us. I thought about Mavis Clarke’s sneering and Mrs. Hogan’s knowing looks. I curled my toes inside my boots as I looked at the photographs. They had been labeled “Alice and the Fairy Ring” and “Iris and the Gnome.” There was also a picture of Mr. Gardner looking serious beside the waterfall, and another of Elsie that made her look sulky and heavy in the face, which I knew she would hate.

  What surprised me most was the paragraph relating to Mr. Snelling, the photography expert. “He laughs at the idea that any expert in England could deceive him with a faked photograph. ‘These two negatives,’ he says, ‘are entirely genuine, unfaked photographs of single exposure . . .’” Much as the whole thing worried me, I couldn’t help smiling when I read that Mr. Gardner had tested Elsie’s artistic skills, suspecting that she might have drawn the fairy figures. The article stated that “while she could do landscapes cleverly, the fairy figures which she had attempted in imitation of those she had seen were entirely uninspired and bore no possible resemblance to those in the photograph.”

  Clever Elsie.

  The only redeeming thing about the article was a paragraph in which Conan Doyle supported the existence of fairies. That was what interested me. Not the tedious analysis of our photographs to prove if they were genuine or fake, but the study of fairy life: where they live, what their purpose is, how some people see them and others can’t. “These little folk, who appear to be our neighbors, with only some small difference of vibration to separate us, will become familiar. The thought of them, even when unseen, will add a charm to every brook and valley and give romantic interest to every country walk. The recognition of their existence will jolt the twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life.”

  These
words, more than any others, I agreed with. Still, I hated to see the photograph of Elsie with that silly gnome.

  Over Christmas, I tried to put the Strand article out of my mind, even when more plates arrived from Mr. Gardner, which I thanked him for in a letter, saying I hoped to take photographs of fairies in the snow. The New Year did bring snow flurries, but it also brought another letter from Aunt Polly, which added another twist to the tale.

  15 January ’21

  Dear Annie,

  Trouble at mill. The girls’ identities are out.

  A reporter arrived from the Westminster Gazette. He’d been sniffing around, asking folk what they knew about the Yorkshire fairies and the girls in the Strand article photographs. His questions eventually led him to our Elsie.

  I answered his questions as best I could and assured him Elsie has always been a truthful girl but he tracked her down at work (she’s at Sharpe’s card factory now, in Bradford) and asked her lots more questions. She told me he was quite polite and that she answered his questions as best she could. Having read his report, I’m not sure she did. I’ve told her to give better answers next time, and not so much “I suppose” and “I can’t say” and “you don’t understand.”

  I’ve enclosed a copy for you to read. It’s a pity he gives your address. I’d hoped you might escape some of the attention.

  Love to all,

  Polly

  x

  I put Aunt Polly’s letter down and read the enclosed article from the Westminster Gazette. It was very long and detailed. I hardly had the patience to read it all, but one particular paragraph drew the breath from my lungs. “The ‘heroine’ of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story is Miss Elsie Wright. . . . When Miss Wright made the acquaintance of the fairies she was accompanied by her cousin, Frances Griffiths, who resides at Dean Road, Scarborough.”

  It didn’t take long for the more tenacious newspaper reporters to track me down. They waited for me after school, lurking in the shadows with their trilby hats and notebooks and awkward questions.