The Cottingley Secret

by Hazel Gaynor

  Mrs. Hogan’s eyes filled with tears. She clutched the locket that hung from a chain around her neck, her voice small and fragile as she spoke. “Is she alone when you see her?”

  “No, Miss. She’s never alone.” I took a deep breath and said it. “She’s always with the fairies.”

  A peacefulness fell over the room, like a cloud lifting.

  Mrs. Hogan reached forward and took my hands in hers as tears slipped down her cheeks. “Thank you, Frances. Thank you for telling me. It means more than you can ever know.”

  We spoke then as we had never spoken before. With the door open to let in a breeze, there were no more secrets to hide. I told her all about the fairies I’d seen at the beck that first summer, about how beautiful and charming they were, and how natural it had become for me to see them. She told me she’d seen them, too, when she was a young girl, and that Aisling had often talked about the special lights she saw at the beck. We talked for a long time, of things I had never been able to talk about with anyone else. Not even with Elsie. Mrs. Hogan didn’t question or doubt. She listened and understood.

  Before I left, I asked Mrs. Hogan if she believed our fairy photographs were real. It was the one secret I’d kept from her.

  She paused for a moment before answering. “I believe there is more to every photograph than what we see—more to the story than the one the camera captures on the plate. You have to look behind the picture to discover the truth. That’s where you find the real story.”

  She smiled, and I smiled in return, and that was all that needed to be said about it.

  I slept peacefully that final night in Cottingley; no dreams came to me. Aisling had gone.

  And so, it seemed, had my fairies. I thanked them silently and promised I would never forget them, or the magic and hope they had given me when I’d needed it the most. In my heart, I hoped I might see them again one day, but as I always said to Elsie, fairies will not be rushed. They would come back when they were ready.

  On the train to Scarborough, as Mummy dozed beside me, I read the final pages of The Water Babies. It was still a favorite of mine, but I no longer cried when I reached the end. “But remember always, as I told you at first, that this is all a fairy tale, and only fun and pretence; and, therefore, you are not to believe a word of it, even if it is true.”

  As the sun streamed through the carriage window, I closed my eyes and thought about the men from London and Mr. Hodson’s “aural senses” and Mr. Snelling’s photography expertise. I couldn’t help smiling to myself. Without realizing it, Elsie and I had written our own fairy tale. It was, after all, only fun and pretense. In the years since we’d taken that first photograph, I’d come to understand that whatever we might say on the matter now, people had made up their minds. They wouldn’t believe we had faked the photographs even if we said we had, because they didn’t want the truth. They wanted something magical.

  People wanted to believe in our fairies, whether we liked it or not.

  And perhaps, after all, that was the best way for the story to end.

  Sixteen

  London and Leeds. Present day.

  London was even more chaotic than Olivia remembered. After spending melodic weeks surrounded by nothing but the gentle hush of the bookshop and the nighttime lullaby of the sea, everything was too loud and too frantic. As soon as she stepped into the arrivals hall at Heathrow, the sickening sense of dread that had started on the plane began to swell. It grew all the way through the airport, and on the train into the city center, and on the Underground across London to Waterloo.

  Her breathing quickened with each station the train hurtled past: Vauxhall, Queenstown Road, Clapham Junction, Wandsworth; each stop ticked off in her mind, just as she used to mark the stops on her daily commute home: three more stops, two more stops, one more stop. She’d often been relieved to find the apartment empty when she got there.

  At Putney, she left the train station, mechanically following High Street toward the river, passing wine bars where she used to drink and the tapas restaurant where she and Jack met and had their first date, all on the same night. She’d been stood up. He was meeting a client whose flight was canceled. The champagne he’d put on ice to celebrate his business deal became Olivia’s first drink with him. He had saved her from eternal mortification and swept her off her feet in the process. For a while, at least.

  As she walked, she felt as if she was looking through an old photograph album, turning the pages on memories and moments, fast-forwarding through the life she’d known here.

  There was no sense of regret. None at all. Yet, when she reached the apartment block, the tightness in her chest intensified.

  When they’d agreed on a date for her to collect a few things, Jack had promised he wouldn’t be there, but still Olivia’s heart raced as the lift ascended. She counted the floors until the doors opened and she stepped into the penthouse apartment.

  She could smell him. His aftershave. His hair gel. His leather brogues.

  Putting her bag down, she walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows, telling herself to calm down. “Breathe, Olivia. Breathe.” The Thames and all of London spread out before her like a Turner painting in the early evening haze. It was a view that had always held the promise of more, a view she’d often wished she could reverse, so that she was out there among it, not stuck in a flashy penthouse admiring it from a distance. Everything had felt inside out. Disjointed.

  She noticed Jack had removed their canvas engagement photo, the pale rectangle against the sun-faded wall the only sign it had ever existed. The empty space reflected perfectly the hollow void their relationship had become, had perhaps always been.

  Not wanting to stay too long, Olivia got on with the task. In the guest room wardrobe she found her boxes of books. Disorganized and mismatched and imperfect with their cracked spines and slightly torn dust jackets, brimming with personality and so out of keeping with the high-gloss apartment and its floating shelves. More show house than home, it left Olivia cold and she longed for the cramped coziness of the flat above the bookshop.

  It didn’t take long to do what she’d come for. After a couple of hours, she had everything she needed repacked and labeled for the courier who arrived just after seven. Once again, she was shocked to discover how quickly a life could be cleared away.

  It was as if she had never been there.

  In many ways, she never had.

  Before she left, she placed an envelope on the kitchen island. Inside was her engagement ring and a single piece of paper on which she’d written, “I didn’t need diamonds. I needed a best friend. Olivia.”

  She took a final moment to look around, a moment to leave behind the memories of the five years she’d spent there. This was where that part of her story ended, where the old Olivia would always be.

  She closed the door behind her with a thud, and in that single sound, it was over.

  From London she traveled to Leeds, dozing as the train sprinted northward. At her hotel, she sent a text to Henry to ask how Nana was. Having managed without a phone since throwing hers into the sea, it was with a sense of regret she’d bought a new one, but being away from Nana worried her, and she wanted the nursing home to be able to contact her should anything happen while she was away. Henry replied to say Nana was comfortable and Olivia wasn’t to be worrying. She typed a text to Ross then, but deleted it. Too exhausted to read, she fell into bed, too exhausted even to dream.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, she woke to rain thudding against the window, and a message from Ross wishing her good luck for her trip to Cottingley. The fact that he’d remembered, that he’d thought about her that morning, brought a smile to her face, and although it was very inconvenient given the circumstances, her heart grew a fraction fonder of him.

  The Leeds University library was a stunning domed building of white brick that reminded Olivia of the White House as she made her way up the impressive steps outside. At the registration desk, she filled in various forms and was
given directions to Special Collections, where the Cottingley materials were held.

  The main library was a circular room, the domed ceiling arching above a polished parquet floor. Sunlight seeped in through lofty windows, sparkling against an impressive art deco chandelier and illuminating the long reading benches that spread out from the central desk like spokes on a bicycle wheel. A concentrated hush filled the air as Olivia walked around the edge of the room, past rows of deliciously old books. Her heels echoed off the floor, and she instinctively went on tiptoe to quiet them.

  In Special Collections, the staff spoke in almost-whispers as she was asked to place her things in a locker and given the first box of materials, which she carried to the reading room. It was already a quiet hive of research. Half a dozen people studiously consulted the contents of gray archive boxes and pored over ancient books and photographs, their white gloves carefully turning the fragile pages. Olivia sat at an unoccupied table and opened her box. There was so much information on the Cottingley fairies, she hardly knew where to start. Miscellaneous Press Cuttings was as good a place as any.

  She worked through half a dozen boxes filled with many letters, newspaper reports, and photographs, losing herself entirely in the story of Frances and Elsie and the childish prank that became a national sensation as two young girls from working-class backgrounds were consumed by the greater influence of men who moved in the right circles of polite society.

  The newspaper correspondence interested Olivia especially. She read the sensational headlines from the 1920s when Conan Doyle had written his Strand Magazine articles. Many of these early reports were sympathetic to the notion of fairies at the bottom of the garden, their tone one of curiosity and amazement. Experts were quoted as confirming that the photographs could in no way have been faked. One report stated, “We must either believe in the almost incredible mystery of the fairy, or in the almost incredible wonder of faked photographs. Which is it to be?” Another article made Olivia smile. “For the true explanation of the fairy photographs what is wanted is not a knowledge of occult phenomena, but a knowledge of children.” Through it all, she heard Frances’s voice, telling her own version of events.

  More recent articles suggested some sort of practical joke was at play, but always when they were asked by reporters, Frances and Elsie maintained their story. The most recent article from the Times, dated 1983, carried the headline: THE COTTINGLEY FAIRIES: SECRETS OF TWO FAMOUS HOAXERS. Below the headline was the familiar photograph of Frances and the fairies, her enigmatic smile gazing back at Olivia through the years. The distance between them felt so narrow now that Olivia could almost hear the waterfall and the girls’ laughter. In some ways, Frances felt like part of Olivia’s family.

  Family.

  It had always been something of a strange notion to Olivia. Her family wasn’t conventional. It was misshapen. Different from the families she observed around her. Pappy used to tell her that family is what you create, not what you’re given. Olivia thought about Henry Blake and Nana. Ross and Iris. Mrs. Joyce. The bookshop. Hemingway, even. They were like a family to her now.

  Box after box revealed more astonishing details of the Cottingley story and the level of scrutiny the photographs had come under, not just in Yorkshire or England but all over the world. It struck Olivia how overwhelming it must have been for Frances and Elsie. No wonder Frances had shied away from all the publicity.

  As Olivia read on, it became apparent that, of all the Cottingley photographs, it was the curious fifth one that, in many ways, was considered the most interesting. Several copies of the photograph were included in the archive boxes, the same photograph Olivia had found between the pages of Princess Mary’s Gift Book on the back of which Frances had written, “To Ellen. Real fairies!” The image was more defined in the enlarged archived prints than in the copy Olivia had. She studied the enlargements carefully and could just make out what appeared to be winged female forms among the nest-like object in the grass. Could Frances have unintentionally photographed her real fairies, after all?

  An interesting piece of correspondence from Edward Gardner referred to this fifth photograph as “The Fairy Bower.” He described the peculiar phenomenon of the fairy cocoon as “a magnetic bath woven by the fairies and used after dull weather and in the autumn especially.” Olivia remembered Nana talking about a sixth photograph, but there was only mention of five in all the boxes of letters and articles.

  She worked steadily all morning, taking a short break for lunch. Toward the end of the day, she opened the final box, which contained several envelopes labeled Miscellaneous Correspondence. In one she found a small cutting from the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, dated October 1948. It carried a report of a missing child from the area, and referred to a previous incident of a missing child from around the time of the First World War. “The child’s mother, Ellen Hogan, a resident of Cottingley but originally from County Leitrim in Ireland, believed her daughter was taken by the fairies. The child was never found, nor was the stone fairy figurine her father had carved for her and which went missing at the same time. The mother and father are now deceased.”

  Olivia’s heart ached for her poor great-grandmother, and for Nana Martha and for little Aisling, the sister Nana had never known, but as she picked up the next envelope, everything else faded into the distance. The other people in the room and the occasional scraping of chair legs melted away as she absorbed the words written on the archive note: “Ellen Hogan’s personal letters, written to her husband during the Great War. Ellen Hogan was Frances Griffiths’s schoolteacher.”

  With great care, Olivia removed the fragile papers from the envelope, her heart full of curiosity as she ran her fingers across her great-grandmother’s neat script. Through her words, Olivia traveled with her, back over the years to Cottingley and the cottage in the woods . . .

  Cottingley. May 1917

  My darling Robert,

  I am writing this as I sit by the cottage window, watching young Elsie Wright play at the beck with her cousin Frances, who has come to stay while her father is at war. Their laughter is such a joy to hear. It is a rare treat nowadays. I lap it up like a cat drinking cream and wish you were here to listen with me. We must try to laugh more when you come home.

  I think often of the past during these long summer days, reflecting on distant places and times and the fairy stories Mammy used to tell me of Old Ireland. It was Mammy who taught me the William Allingham poem: “Up the airy mountain, / Down the rushy glen, / We daren’t go a-hunting / For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, / Trooping all together; / Green jacket, red cap, / And white owl’s feather!” Do you remember I used to sing it to Aisling when she was a baby?

  Dear, sweet Aisling. The world is unrecognizable to me since she went away.

  They say time is a great healer, but they are wrong. Time is a great illusionist, that’s all. It tricks and it taunts. It sweeps away minutes and hours, months and years without any release from this endless wondering.

  In brief moments, I can believe I am happy. I smile at the lambs capering in the fields. I appreciate the beauty of a summer’s day. I’m thankful for the food on my plate. And yet, when I blow out the candle at night, it is there, waiting for me. My grief roars in like a winter storm, knocking me down to leave me broken and crumpled. It is during those dark hours when I feel the ache of her absence, when I cannot accept that I will never hold her hand again, or whisper to her of the sídhe and the púca.

  And now you are gone from me too, Robert. Is there no end to this war? No end to my anguish?

  I fill my days with insignificant things. I set the kettle on the stove, fill the ewer with water, peel potatoes, scrub the floors, and wash the windows until they gleam like jewels. I paint and knit and sew. I help on the farm—we are all needed to do something or other with the men away. But I can never escape this torment, no matter how many ways I try to occupy myself. If only they could tell me where she is. It is the thing that haunts me the most,
the thought of our beautiful little girl alone and afraid in the dark and the cold. That cannot be how her story ends, so I create my own story for her, one where the fairies took her somewhere safe and where she will play in their world until we can meet her there.

  I keep her boots beside yours on the doorstep, ready to welcome you both home. Wildflowers and moss already grow around Aisling’s. Never around yours. I take comfort from it, to know that nature thrives around her, that her boots will become as much a part of this woodland cottage as she is a part of me. Of us.

  Come home to me soon, dearest. The world is too dark without you both in it.

  Your ever loving wife,

  Ellen

  x

  Cottingley. July 1917

  Darling Robert,

  In these balmy summer evenings, I sit at the window and pick over old tapestries that still hold the smell of the turf fires from Ireland. I pick and I stitch. I knit comforts to send to you and the boys. I knit and sew as if my life depended on it. You will think me silly, but I set myself little milestones: by the end of this spool of thread, he’ll be home. By the end of this skein of wool, it’ll be over.

  It never is.

  I watch the girls—Frances and Elsie—as they play at the beck, lost in the beauty and magic of the place. It pleases me to hear them. Elsie blossoms from a girl into a young woman, unfurling like the rambling roses around the cottage door. She comes alive in the company of her cousin, who encourages her to be a child again. They make a curious pair. One so tall. The other so slight. Watching them through the summer foliage is like watching a mother and child. I am reminded of how Aisling and I used to play there. How many inquisitive pairs of adventurers have sat at that old willow tree, I wonder?

  No news as such. Arthur Wright has a new camera—the whole village knows about it. Most of us have been photographed by him at some point or another! The girls brought it down to the beck yesterday. I didn’t mean to pry, but their laughter drew me to the window and I watched Elsie take a photograph of Frances near the waterfall, flowers arranged on the bank in front of her. They scattered the petals into the beck before they clambered up the bank, giggling as girls do.