“I know this must all be rather unusual for you, Frances,” Mr. Gardner explained, “and I can assure you we only wish to understand the circumstances in which the images were captured. It isn’t every day one sees fairies at the bottom of the garden, is it?”
I said no, it wasn’t, and swung my legs nervously beneath the bench.
“Perhaps you could tell me how the photographs came about. Take me back to that summer’s day. Try to recreate the scene for me, as if it were a painting.”
I thought about those carefree days I’d spent by the beck, when I saw the fairies in abundance. It seemed silly to me now that we hadn’t tried to take a photograph of real fairies. Elsie was so intent on her idea of the cutouts, we’d never discussed it, let alone tried. “It was all done in a hurry, Mr. Gardner. We were only allowed the camera for a short while and only had one plate. We didn’t have time to think about what we’d seen. I stood behind the fairies and Elsie pressed the shutter. That was it.”
Mr. Gardner asked questions about the weather that day and how we’d reacted when we saw the image on the plate.
“It was a warm day,” I said. “Hot and sticky. We were very excited when we saw the plate. We wanted to prove to the grown-ups, you see. That there were fairies in the beck.”
“And did they believe you?”
“Mummy and Aunt Polly did. Uncle Arthur teased us about it.”
“How did that make you feel? When he teased you and said the fairies weren’t real?”
Finally he was asking some interesting questions. “I didn’t mind. It was only harmless fun, so I ignored it. Uncle Arthur was always teasing me and Elsie about something or other. But I knew what I’d seen.”
Mr. Gardner jotted things in his notebook as we talked, and I began to relax in his company.
“Do you believe the fairies are real, Mr. Gardner?”
He paused for a moment as the sun lit up his face, making him look less brown and more interesting. “I do, Frances. I believe there are other realms, other places, where fairies and elemental spirits dwell. For those who doubt, I say only this: Does something not exist simply because you cannot see it? You cannot see Conan Doyle right now, but you know he is real, don’t you?”
“Of course he’s real. He wrote a letter to me. And he wrote all his books about Sherlock Holmes.”
Mr. Gardner chuckled. “Ah, but how can you be sure he’s real if you’ve never seen him yourself?”
I was starting to feel confused by Mr. Gardner’s puzzles and was grateful for Mrs. Hogan’s words, which popped into my head. “Sometimes, we just have to believe, don’t we?”
He made some more notes in his book. “You are a wise young lady, Frances. I couldn’t agree more.”
Mummy appeared at the back door to say tea was ready. “It’s only egg and chips, Mr. Gardner. Nothing fancy. I hope that’s all right for you.”
“Egg and chips is my favorite of teas, Mrs. Griffiths. Thank you. I shall enjoy it very much.”
I let Mummy do the talking while I ate. I copied the way Mr. Gardner dipped his chips into his egg, because I knew Mummy wouldn’t have let me if we were on our own.
By the time Mr. Gardner said good-bye, I was almost sorry to see him go. He hadn’t mocked me or teased me or dismissed what I’d seen as some trick of the light—or sandwich wrappings. He believed me. And even if the photographs were staged, he believed in fairies, and for that alone, I liked him well enough. I was surprised he hadn’t asked me to describe the fairies in detail, or to speculate on what I thought they were doing, or how they appeared and disappeared, and why, but I presumed he must know the answers already. He was a clever man from London, after all.
He left a smart new Cameo camera and six packets of plates for me to practice with. “So that you’ll know what to do when you get to Cottingley,” he said.
Over the following weeks, I had great fun photographing my friends and the views from the castle and the harbor. I enjoyed messing about with the camera, so much so that I almost forgot its real purpose. It was only when Mummy said the Bainses would be coming to collect me at ten o’clock the following morning, to accompany me on the train journey to Cottingley, that my stomach churned.
“And stop taking silly photographs, Frances. You’re to save those plates for the fairies, remember?”
I remembered only too well.
Eleven
Ireland. Present day.
The more Olivia read of Frances’s story, the more she felt drawn back to Cottingley.
Reading Frances’s memories of Ellen Hogan was like having a front-row view into her family’s past. Olivia had never known or thought much about her great-grandmother. She vaguely remembered seeing her once or twice in old family photos, but the past is such a distant, colorless place to a child’s eyes, and it was only now that Olivia saw Ellen as a young wife, worrying about her husband away at war; as a mother, grieving for her lost little girl.
As she read Frances’s words, Olivia wept for Ellen’s loss, wishing she could step back in time to help her, or comfort her, or find some answers for her. More than ever, Olivia wanted to stitch together the scraps and fragments she was discovering about her family. Just as Nana used to make patchwork quilts, Olivia was sure she could create something meaningful from all the disparate parts. She just wasn’t sure how yet.
Taking Henry at his word, she made arrangements to travel to England. First to London, because the longer she stayed away, the more certain she was that in order to walk away from her future, she had to confront it. She would travel from London to Cottingley and to the library at Leeds University, where the archives about the fairy photographs were kept.
Despite the soothing lullaby of the sea, Olivia slept fitfully, her mind a confusing tangle of questions and doubts. She sensed her mother beside her, and always she saw the red-haired child, surrounded by flashes of brilliant jeweled light, handing her a flower. “For Mammy.” Each morning when Olivia woke, her body ached as if she hadn’t slept at all, and often she found the flowers from her dreams dropped on a stair, or on the floor beside the bed, or tangled between the crumpled bedsheets. She collected them and placed them in the coffee cup, suspending her disbelief and choosing, instead, to trust in the things she couldn’t easily explain or understand, but which charmed the childish wonder in her heart nevertheless.