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.