The Cottingley Cuckoo

by A. J. Elwood

  But I must hold fast. For something else has struck me: a new idea which would explain all, and indeed show why Sir Arthur has not deigned to call upon me – why he would not dare to show his face!

  He has set out to offer serious proofs of fairy existence. He has presented himself as describing all that science can bring to matters of a spiritual nature. And yet he has so subtly interwoven his facts with stuff so clearly discoverable as fiction as to deliberately undermine his own arguments.

  The fairies, he says, appear stiff and frozen in the Cottingley photographs because they move so very slowly. I know this to be a blatant untruth. One of their apparently ‘pencilled’ faces is simply made to appear so by the outline of her hair. His eyewitnesses see them only in the derangement of the full sun or when they have been fasting.

  He notes in passing the coincidence that the Wright girl’s family was already ‘inclined to occult study’. He happens to mention that the elder child is imaginative, even dreamy, that she often spent her leisure hours drawing fairies, and that she was apprenticed for a time to a firm of photographers. He states that even her father asked the girls how they faked the pictures.

  One would almost think that he did not wish to be believed.

  Of course, Sir Arthur does not overtly draw attention to these matters. He is too experienced for that. He simply presents them all, and indeed his own doubts, as things that could easily be overcome, and allows people to read into it what they will.

  Here is the rub. Did he think no one would see through it? Did he imagine himself like his character, his Sherlock Holmes, building an unassailable wall of rationality? But I do see through it. I think Sir Arthur has purposely chosen examples of sightings that are poorer than mine. He has inserted passages of absurd surmise quite knowingly.

  It all culminates in the half-crazed comments from Bishop Leadbeater. He talks of the orange and purple fairies of Sicily, black and white ones of the Dakotas, the sky blue ones of Australia, and, more risibly, the gleaming crimson fairies resembling the metal orichalcum – the what, sir? – of the Atlanteans.

  Can anyone read this and not suspect? I see it now more clearly than ever. Why, when Sir Arthur writes that a high development of intellect is a bar to psychic perception, he must have been laughing down his sleeve!

  It is pure nonsense, sir, and I tell you, I know the reason why. It is not some mischief that is at the root of it all, but fear!

  Sir Arthur had taken on a sacred trust and was unequal to the task. And I think the key lies not with Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, but with another girl, and she, entirely blind.

  The one I mean is, of course, Miss Eva Longbottom, of whom Sir Arthur writes at length. Her claims of seeing the little folk clairvoyantly, whilst being completely blind, make her particularly easy to dismiss, and yet I sense the truth in her words. That fairy music is something of itself and untranslatable has the unmistakeable ring of authenticity. For a person without sight to gain the impression of dancing ‘without any tangles in it’ has also, and if I do not deceive myself, her account of fairies singing ‘in the tone of their colours’ has enough of the peculiar to convince.

  No: it is not her visions that I doubt, but the claim that the young lady was blind from birth.

  That, I do not believe. How else would she know what colours are? I think that she was struck blind, sir, for spying upon the fairies; and it is that, more than any other threat, implied or obvious, that has made Sir Arthur draw back from a more convincing disclosure.

  He has learned enough to discover that his fascination could come at a high cost and he has turned aside. He has glimpsed their true nature. Even as I write, I seem to recall something said in The Strand about their ‘grotesque, unmeaning tricks’, although I do not think he embellished the statement with any detail – that is telling in itself, is it not?

  He had committed to publish, but he did not want to be believed; not because the fairies were not real, but because he knew they were – yet different to how he imagined them to be.

  I cannot entirely blame him. What are these things we seek so heedlessly? I do not know and would not claim to. But they are loathsome creatures, and we have reason to fear them. Yes, I see through it: he has brought certain truths before the eyes of the world, even if they are not the ones he intended.

  I, sir, shall not flinch from my undertaking to do the rest. I return to my books.

  Yours sincerely,

  Lawrence H. Fenton

  * * *

  26th September 1922

  Dear Mr Gardner,

  Sir, I must protest. You must know me too well by now, at least from my letters, to make such accusations, no matter how tactfully couched. Does Sir Arthur Conan Doyle know himself to be sane, despite the accusations he has brought down upon his head by publishing his book? Well, I know myself to be sane, and after all your investigations, you should know better than to call it into question.

  I recognise that you were overwhelmed by a tide of fanciful reports following the article in The Strand. That is surely no response, nor an excuse for omitting an account of such importance. I realise that it was the great man’s choice, but I question whether he has been entirely level in making it.

  No matter. I realise I have unwittingly insulted you by questioning your integrity, and indeed that you are whom you claim to be. It was not my intention. I have simply been honest enough to relay every doubt that has assailed me; clearly, this was one I had long overcome. I see that conveying it to you has not illuminated the situation, and I would have better left it unsaid.

  As for Miss Eva Longbottom really being blind from a baby, and the claim that she receives great joy from the fairy presences all about – well, perhaps that is what you have been told. Men (and women) said to be of equal character to mine are not immune to the occasional untruth; and it is possible they may be mistaken. I merely paraphrase your own words.

  That is all I shall say, save this: no matter what there is to fear or dread, no matter what ridicule I face from those who should know better, I will not be turned aside from this important work.

  I shall trouble you no more.

  Sincerely,

  Mr L. H. Fenton

  12

  There are so many signs before me that fairies are nothing but pretence and imagination, I can almost feel the little skeleton crumbling in my hand. Perhaps the fairy remains were only ever the remnants of a decaying bird and insect wings. Harriet might have fabricated it, thinking it a charming game, never imagining how it would be seized upon. Hadn’t Fenton mentioned that she loved poking into birds’ nests? He had become too caught up in her game, seeing things that weren’t there. And having set her grandfather on such a path, how could she go back on it? It would have been too daunting, too terrifying. She would not have wished to prove him a fool. She was a little girl – and wasn’t that just what happened with the Cottingley photographs? Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths played a harmless game with their painted fairies and were propelled before the scrutiny of the world. They made a great man, Arthur Conan Doyle, a believer. Finding themselves in such a situation, how could they admit it was all invention? How could anyone?

  Yet even as Fenton spoke against their flat, lifeless images, he remained certain that the creatures he had found were very different. They brought pain, not delight. Was that the reason his discoveries felt real, where the original pictures did not? Even as the fairies dissolve into nothing, they rise again stronger than before. Anything nonsensical in Doyle’s reports – the stuff about orichalcum and the rest – had been taken as signs of proof, not otherwise. Did Fenton have some prescient insight, or was that the very stuff of madness? Or only the height of the fairies’ trickery and malice?

  He could have imagined Charlotte’s voice speaking to him in the night. His daughter-in-law might have been peacefully sleeping. He might have been sleeping himself and dreaming of her, not as she was in reality, but in his wildest thoughts.

  What proof ha
d he ever really possessed? What kind of impression must he have made on Gardner, that great proponent of fairies, for him to accuse Fenton of being insane? For I am certain that must be what had happened.

  Was Fenton mad? Was I?

  But Lawrence Fenton had a child to protect, and no matter what anyone else thought, no matter his own doubts, he had resolved to do what he must. He had refused to be afraid.

  I cannot bear what they have done to us. I cannot bear the hurt in Harriet’s eyes when she turns from her mother, the way she tries and fails to elicit some small sign of love.

  I think of Robyn growing older under Harriet’s elegant, cold gaze; the child trying to please her, make her laugh, to have her join in her childish games, to hold her when she cries. And I cannot bear it.

  I remember something else I’d heard once – not in the letters or in any book, but a long time ago, standing at my mother’s side in a darkened museum, looking into a glass case where a camera sat, untouched and unused for many years. Even after everything, even the girls’ eventual admission of falsity, hadn’t Frances always insisted that she saw fairies at the beck – that they were real, even if the photographs were fake? Or was that just a story my mother had told me?

  Had she wanted so very badly for me to believe?

  I leaf back to the preceding letter, scanning down the page until my eye snags on a phrase. But they are loathsome creatures, and we have reason to fear them.

  That is when the door to the locker room opens and I turn to see Mrs Favell standing in the gap.

  She barks, ‘Come with me, Rose.’ She gestures sharply towards the letters. ‘And bring the last.’

  As quickly as she came, she’s gone. My cheeks burn. I want to sink into the wall, to hide, to walk out of this place and never come back, but I don’t have a choice.

  She’s going to have me fired, and I still haven’t read to the end. I look down at the final sheets, leaf through them, see the greeting and the signature, and I realise that Mrs Favell was correct: only one letter remains.

  13

  Mrs Favell is standing where I expect her to be, in front of the window in her room, gazing towards the wood. I wonder what it is she sees. Is the wind stirring the tops of the trees? Is it inscribing its unknowable designs in the meadow grass?

  She gestures as if telling me to be quiet, or to stay where I am, and I do. The bureau is open. On its writing surface is the key, and next to it, mutilated pages from a Bible.

  I don’t want to see how much more angry she can become. She has always treated me like a servant or something to be toyed with. Now I have stolen from her, tried to trick her, even to hurt her.

  I think of Theresa, cast out, the police making their search. And I am afraid – though I wonder what else she might do to me. Can it really be worse than what she has already done? I stand a little straighter.

  Without turning she says, ‘Are you ready to read it now, Rose?’

  I look down and see I still have the last letter in my hand. This is exactly where I stood when I read the first one she gave me, summoned to her room for the purpose, and now here I am at the end of it.

  This time, when I start to read, I do so silently.

  * * *

  30th September 1922

  My Dear Mr Gardner,

  Pray, forgive the tone of my last. I regret it most earnestly. I dare say you did not expect to hear from me again, and you would not do so were it not a matter of the utmost urgency, indeed, possibly of life or death – or worse than either, as it may well turn out to be.

  I have little time to waste, and yet I must leave a record in the event that some terrible thing may befall us. Indeed, I think it has already befallen us, and it is too late – but soon I shall don my coat and go once more to the glen, and see what I may, and end this where I must.

  She is gone from me – little Harriet is gone. I shall try to restrain my feelings, and my rapidly scrawling pen, and explain myself in a rational manner.

  It began this morning. Charlotte was in the kitchen as she so often is, and Harriet was peeping from behind the door. Charlotte was butchering a rabbit. She was making a stew, and humming some strange air, so quietly it was beyond recognition. She kept stopping – the strokes of her knife against the board would cease and the tune would pass beyond hearing, and after a few moments would begin again. Perhaps she was listening to the child breathing; who knows?

  Of a sudden, I heard her stepping towards the door. Then she said, in a too-sweet voice, ‘Do you watch me, child?’

  I set down my pen at once. I hurried into the passage to see Harriet staring up at her mother, her eyes wide and not saying a word. Charlotte in turn stared at the child, her eyes a fixed gleam in her awful thin face. She never once shifted her gaze to me. She clutched the knife in her hand and blood dripped from it to the floor, but I think I was the only one who noticed.

  Then Charlotte leaned over her daughter, and she raised the knife and said, ‘I shall put both your eyes out of your head.’

  I cannot describe the effect of her words. It was not just their intent but the way they were spoken, so cold, so true – but Harriet could not move. It was I who caught her arm and pulled her away, turning her from the sight of her mother’s ugly staring, because she was entranced by it; I would almost say she was under some spell.

  It broke when I pulled her back and knelt before her. She cried, then; indeed, you may only imagine her distress. I tried to soothe her, though I did not really know how, and with my shaking hands and unsteady voice – but I did what I could, which is all any of us can do.

  I know what you will say. You will think Charlotte’s words were suggested by her own experiences or by her fancies, and that the memory of them will fade. You will say she will one day be well again. But I heard the way she spoke and saw the way she looked, and I cannot doubt the truth.

  All the time I comforted her child, I felt Charlotte watching us. And in her demeanour she betrayed – oh, from her stance I would have thought it amusement, but it was not even that; there was only the most terrible indifference.

  If I had doubted before, I could not do so then. But she still held the knife, and I must confess that I was afraid.

  I did not heat the poker and describe the sign of the cross upon her forehead. I did not slip a prayer book under her pillow or douse her with holy water or hold her before the fire to trick her into betraying herself. I did none of those things – curse my useless hands! I told Harriet to run along and read her book and not bother her mama, and I straightened to see that Charlotte had already gone. The sound of a knife on wood came once more from the kitchen, and I wondered what kind of stew she would like to make; I wondered if she would eat it all up.

  I sat before my work, and looked upon it, and despaired. I do not know how time passed, but it was not until later that I thought to look in on Harriet. She was gone, of course.

  She had left only a note behind:

  They took my mama. I am going to find her.

  And beneath:

  I think I hurt the fairy lady with my stick.

  At once I saw her in my mind’s eye on that day in the glen, busying herself about the pool so brightly, so innocently, poking beneath each rock and branch to seek them out, only to meet with – what? I saw again that tiny figure of a man, a child’s vision, the loveliness of him; I saw the perfection of his tiny, dark, brilliant eyes, lit with perfect rage. And I saw again the little maid at his feet. Had she been in health when Harriet came along and discovered her? But the child had meant no harm. Had Harriet truly caused the little fairy’s death with her poking and prying – with her curiosity? It surely could not be!

  If it was so, then all their mischief, all their revenge, would really be intended for the child. And she had gone once more to the glen – gone into their hands! What if, this time, she did not come back?

  What if she did come back?

  I cannot express to you my horror at the thought. Harriet, lost to me for ever – o
r Harriet returning, her feet browned with earth, scratching on the door perhaps at midnight, the eyes that were so like her father’s as black as sloes. Harriet without the enlivening principle that makes her truly herself – without an ounce of love in her.

  What might the wicked creatures do to my true grandchild if she had really done them such an injury as she suspected, and she fell into their hands?

  You will see it all, I suppose. For perhaps this was the reason our encounter with the fairies was not like that of other people, or some of them. I do not know if they think like we do, if they have any system of morality we could recognise. I had not imagined that they discriminate: I thought their punishment had fallen to all of us, my son’s wife more than anyone, but perhaps it is not yet finished.

  It was Harriet who injured the fairy. It was I who carried off the little body. I cannot keep away from them, of course. I am going to seek them in the glen – the real Charlotte, with her eyes as soft and warm as they used to be, and my own sweet Harriet, unchanged, throwing her arms about my neck.

  I fear it may be too late. For time is said to pass differently in the fairy realm, and if they have eaten of their food – what then?

  Fairies are said to steal humans away and leave changelings in their place in order to strengthen their line. Will I find Charlotte big with a fairy child? Or Harriet being raised a fairy? How would a human being ever become one of those frail creatures – or is there some race of fairy I have not yet seen? I cannot imagine it at all. For the thing that divides us is surely the possession of a soul, and how could that difference be surmounted, unless the fairies have by some means removed their souls from them?