I did my best to smile and agree that it was quite something, but in my heart I felt deflated about the whole episode. I couldn’t relax until Aunt Polly left Elsie and me alone and we took a walk down to the beck where the waterfall tumbled gently over the shale rock, and the water—patterned with the dappled shade from the trees—gurgled at our feet as we sat on the bank beside the mossy mound where we’d taken the first photograph. I still loved it there, but something had changed. I was no longer a nine-year-old girl full of curiosity and mischief. I was a twelve-year-old girl full of guilt and worry.
“It all seems silly now, doesn’t it?” I said as I pressed my fingers into the cool moss. “Don’t you wish we’d admitted the photograph was a prank that first evening? I do.”
“We did what we did, Frances,” Elsie said. “There’s no use crying over spilled milk.” She picked petals from a pink flower, muttering “He loves me, he loves me not” to herself. “I’m just fed up with all these men from London and experts from Kodak. Some experts!”
She threw pebbles into the stream, and we watched the ripples spread out in ever-increasing circles. Like the interest in our photographs, they were unstoppable, spreading wider and further, seemingly without end.
“What did you think of Mr. Gardner?” Elsie asked.
I shrugged. “He was nice enough, I suppose. A bit brown. Everything he wore was a shade of brown.”
Elsie laughed. Her voice was a tone deeper than I remembered it. “I’ve two cutouts prepared,” she said, reading my thoughts. “One each. A fairy handing me a harebell. Another one of a flying fairy for you. A fairy in midair! That’ll get those experts in London talking!”
I dipped my toes into the water, relishing the cool memory of hot summer days when the real beck fairies had appeared in such abundance. It was a long time since I’d last seen them and I wasn’t even sure I could see them anymore. Although I was older and should probably have grown out of such things, part of me missed them.
“What’s got you so narky, then?” Elsie asked as she passed me a posy of bindweed she’d tied with a stalk of grass. “You’ve hardly said two words since you got here.”
Elsie always knew when I was in a bad mood.
“I’m not sure it’s right to keep telling lies, Elsie. Everyone’s taking it too seriously now. And what about the article Conan Doyle’s writing for the magazine? What if lots of people read it? Then they’ll believe the photographs are real too.”
Elsie had already resigned herself to the fact that we had to see it through. “I don’t see what else we can do, Frances. Conan Doyle and Gardner already think the first photographs are real. We’ll only get into more trouble if we tell the truth now, especially after all their meetings with experts and whatnot. Best to go along with it. Give them a few more photographs to study and write about, and that’ll be the end of it.”
I hoped she was right.
“I heard Daddy telling Mummy that it’s too late for us to tell the truth now anyway, even if it was a joke,” Elsie continued. “He says we can’t be making the likes of Conan Doyle look like a fool. Not with him being so well respected. He says we’d be the laughingstock of England, never mind Cottingley, or the West Riding.” She ran her fingers through her curls. “Let’s do what they ask, and in a couple of months, it’ll all be forgotten about. You wait and see.”
“Do you really think so?”
Elsie threw another pebble into the stream before turning to look at me, her blue eyes full of intent. “I’m sure of it. People have more important things to be worrying about than a few photographs taken by some girls in Yorkshire. And Conan Doyle won’t use our real names in his article. I’m to be called Iris Carpenter, on account of me being so tall, like the flowers, and you’ll be Alice Carpenter, after Alice in Wonderland. We’re to live in a made-up village called Dalesby. Nobody will ever know it was us.”
Like a dandelion seed caught on the wind, our joke had already traveled much farther than we’d ever intended. I knew how dandelions liked to spread and grow, how they stubbornly grew back no matter how many times you pulled them up. Mrs. Hogan was right. “Small villages can’t keep secrets.” They would always escape in the end.
Elsie stood up and brushed grass from her skirt. “At least we were clever enough to hide the evidence. Those torn-up cutouts will be out in the Irish Sea by now. Or the English Channel. I don’t know which direction the Aire flows.”
I didn’t know, either. Whichever direction it was, I hoped those scraps of paper were at the bottom of the sea. Lost forever.
As we walked back to the house, I wished more than ever that I’d held my tongue when Mummy was vexed with me that summer afternoon in the scullery. I wished I’d never told anyone about the beck fairies and I wished I was back in Scarborough, cycling along the laneways with Mary or swimming in the sea.
But wishes, like fairies, are fickle things. They rarely do what you want them to do.
NOTES ON A FAIRY TALE
Cottingley, Yorkshire. August 1920.
The weather was dreadful for the first week of my visit. Aunt Polly groused about the incessant rain and mithered at the pair of us for getting under her feet. She had insisted Elsie stay off work until some satisfactory photographs were taken.
“Maybe you should go out and try,” she said, sighing at the rain-spattered window and polishing the brass for the second time that week.
“The fairies won’t come in such awful weather,” I explained. “And besides, we don’t want to get water into the cameras and damage them.” It was, after all, the truth.
Aunt Polly said fairies were fussy little beggars and we would have to hope for better weather, then, wouldn’t we.
As the rain spilled down outside and the cameras and glass plates sat idle on the table in the front room, Elsie and I occupied ourselves by sketching and reading and taking trips to the pictures in Shipley, like we had before the end of the war. In the evenings, we wound our hair into rags to make curls when we woke the next morning. We fell easily back into our familiar routines, and I was happy to be with Elsie again. Even though she was distracted at times and talked a lot about the young men she knew, she still made me laugh with her stories and wicked sense of humor.
After the first week, I began to feel restless and homesick for Scarborough. Aunt Polly wasn’t her usual cheery self, either. She was irritable and short-tempered, snapping at Uncle Arthur at the slightest provocation. He retreated to the safety of the Briggs’s manor and his beloved motorcars, happy to leave us to it. Aunt Polly wrote to Mr. Gardner in London to explain that the rain was preventing us from going outside, but that we would try as soon as there was a break in the weather.