I missed Mummy and Daddy and Scarborough’s sea breezes and mooched about the house, complaining of being bored. Aunt Polly said she wished she was bored and found endless chores for me to do, such as running errands into the village, where I bumped into Mavis Clarke. She had doubled in size and was even more unpleasant than I remembered. Now thirteen, her sharp tongue had grown sharper, her mocking taunts even crueler. She goaded me with vague remarks about what Elsie and I had been up to at the beck that summer before the end of the war. Elsie told me to ignore her, but I couldn’t. Mavis Clarke unsettled me. As the days dragged on, everything about Cottingley began to unsettle me.
In another attempt to pass the time, I read some of Aunt Polly’s books about the Theosophist Society, the afterlife, spiritualism, and the occult. The ideas they contained had intrigued me when I’d first found them during the years I’d lived at Number 31, but they troubled me now, disturbing my sleep as I tossed and turned, my thoughts lingering in the mysterious parlor room séances described between the pages. I was glad when my more familiar dreams returned, taking me back to the stream where the girl with red hair was waiting for me and led me to a woodland cottage, where she lay a posy of wildflowers on the doorstep—ragwort and bindweed and campion—singing a song of old Ireland and the Little People before she sat on the step and wept, tears spilling onto her hands with a gentle pitter-patter . . .
I woke to rain-speckled windows and a murky mist. Not a day for photographing fairies.
With nothing much else to do, I put on my wellingtons and mackintosh and took a walk around the fields toward Mrs. Hogan’s cottage. I’d promised to visit whenever I was back and looked forward to seeing my old teacher again.
The cottage was concealed even more by bushes and trees that had grown lush and dense in the year I’d been away. Where the small black leather boots used to sit on the doorstep, a pair of stone boots now stood in their place, flowers growing out of the holes in the top, like plant pots. A perfect circle of toadstools still grew beneath the elder tree in the garden, the same sense of something I’d forgotten to do still whispered through the canopy of leaves above.
I knocked tentatively at the door, unsure whether Mrs. Hogan would remember me. I needn’t have worried. She was delighted to see me.
“Frances Griffiths! Well, would you look at you! So tall and pretty. Come in! Come in!”
The cottage was exactly the same inside. I remembered the tapestries and samplers on the walls, the array of paintings on the dresser. A couple of new ones had been added. A posy of wildflowers sat in a milk jug on the table: ragwort and bindweed and campion. I couldn’t stop staring at them. They were the same flowers from my dream.
A baby’s cry interrupted my thoughts.
“And we have a new addition to the family, Frances!” Mrs. Hogan excused herself as she rushed from the kitchen, returning a moment later with a tiny bundle swaddled in her arms. “Meet our beautiful Martha.”
The baby was as pink and as pretty as the rambling roses that grew around the cottage door, her hands tiny grasping fists. I peered into the blankets to admire her and let her grip my finger.
“She’s our special gift,” Mrs. Hogan said, beaming as she set baby Martha into her cradle. “I still can’t believe she’s ours to keep.” The catch in her voice betrayed her anguish, and when she continued, she spoke as if to herself. “We’ll never forget our beautiful little Aisling. I may only carry one child in my arms, but I will always carry two children in my heart.” She looked up then and smiled, as if she had forgotten I was there.
For the want of anything else to say, I told Mrs. Hogan I liked the name Aisling. “It’s very pretty.”
“Thank you,” she replied. “In Gaelic it means vision, or dream. And Martha was the name of a nurse who cared for my husband when he was badly injured during the war. He promised to call any future daughter after her if she made sure he recovered.”
While baby Martha cooed beside me, Mrs. Hogan made tea and asked me about my new home and school in Scarborough. Her face had lost the deep lines of worry that had been there before. She looked younger, despite the time that had passed since I’d seen her.
We chatted for half an hour or so before the door opened and a handsome man walked in.
“What’s this? Visitors?” He winked at me and washed his hands at the stone sink. “Frances, isn’t it?” I nodded and thought it nice of him to remember me after only meeting me briefly once, not long after he’d been demobbed. “Ellen . . . Mrs. Hogan still talks about you,” he continued. “Best pupil ever, she says.”
I blushed.
Mrs. Hogan laughed and said it was the truth and that the classroom was quiet without my questions. “Some people don’t wonder enough, Frances. Isn’t that right?”
I agreed and said I’d best be getting home before the next downpour.
“I suppose you and Elsie will be busy with your cameras again,” Mrs. Hogan said as I put my coat on. “I saw Elsie recently, taking pictures at the beck. It’s a lovely hobby to have.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say and mumbled a good-bye as she opened the door. As I stepped outside, my attention was caught by a painting in an oval frame on the windowsill. A little girl with flame-red hair, a posy of wildflowers in her hands.
I knew her.
She was the girl from my dreams. The girl who always gave me a flower. “For Mammy.”
Mrs. Hogan noticed me staring at the painting and picked it up. “It’s a favorite of mine. That’s our daughter. Aisling.” Her voice cracked with emotion.
“It’s a lovely painting,” I said. “She was very pretty.”
Was.
The word hung heavy in the air. An acknowledgment that Aisling lived in the past now. I wanted to take it back. I wanted to shout out, “Is! I meant is very pretty.” My mistake was so awful I practically ran out of the door, muttering a thank-you for the tea and nearly tripping over the stone boots on the step that Mrs. Hogan explained had been carved by her husband, to replace the leather ones. “More permanent,” she’d said.
“Come and see us again before you go back to Scarborough,” Mrs. Hogan called after me.
I called back that I would.
I thought about the painting of the red-haired girl all the way home and all through tea and all that evening in the front room as the rain danced against the windows. I thought about her as I fell asleep. Finally, I understood who the flowers in my dreams were for. They were for Mrs. Hogan. The little girl’s Mammy was Ellen Hogan, the kind, gentle woman whose heart had been silently breaking for the last four years, and in my dreams, my heart broke for them both.
By Thursday of the second week, the weather finally improved, and the early morning mists cleared to bright sunshine. Perfect weather for fairy hunting.
Elsie teased the curls in my hair before tying my favorite violet ribbons into them. “If half of England is going to see us, we might as well look our best.”