She took the cutouts and hat pins from the biscuit tin beneath the bed. I didn’t like to say much after the effort she’d gone to, but they looked rushed, not as detailed or delicate as the first ones. The sight of them made me sick to my stomach. Were we really going to do this again?
After dinner, Aunt Polly shooed us out of the house. “I’m off to Bradford to have tea with our Clara. I’ll leave you to it.” She stood at the cellar door, arms folded, as we trudged miserably off down the garden, our wellington boots squelching over the rain-soaked grass. “Mind those cameras and make sure you take some good photographs,” she called after us.
Her words crept along my spine, like guilty fingers pushing me on.
We were careful with our new cameras, a gift from Conan Doyle. Uncle Arthur said they were much more sophisticated machines than his Midg and that the lenses alone cost ￡20 each and we should be very careful with them.
In the top field where we’d taken the photo of Elsie and the gnome, we set up a picture of Elsie with the fairy handing her a harebell. As I peered through the viewfinder, I could hardly believe that anyone with sense or intelligence could think these cutout fairies real. This one looked especially stiff and flat, its feet in a balletic second position.
After I’d clicked the shutter, we gathered everything up and returned to my favorite spot at the willow tree to set up the next photo. Elsie used a hat pin to stick the cutout of the “leaping fairy,” as she called it, into the branch of the tree. After a short discussion, we agreed that a two-second exposure would be enough.
“Stand in front of it, with the side of your face turned to me, and look straight at the fairy,” Elsie said. “It’ll seem as though she’s jumping toward you.”
I followed Elsie’s instructions but had no real enthusiasm for it. Elsie had to remind me to look enchanted more than once as she measured the distance and set the speed for the shutter, allowing a longer exposure time due to the dim lighting with the leaves and bushes around us. I moved my head slightly as Elsie pressed the shutter. I hoped it wouldn’t spoil the plate. We stuck the hat pins into the ground and threw the torn-up cutouts into the stream, as before.
“That’s it, then,” Elsie said as we clambered up the bank. “We never have to take pictures of ruddy fairies again.”
We burst out laughing because it was such a funny thing to say.
We idled for a while by the water, remembering lazy days of racing our leaves and baby frogs and watching Mr. Snowden’s ducklings. The blackberries were hard green bullets on the bushes, and I was glad to know I would be back in Scarborough long before they ripened. I was still fond of Cottingley, but it didn’t hold the same magic it once had. Perhaps there was only a limited time for anyone to feel what I’d felt at the beck during those wartime summers. Perhaps it was someone else’s turn now. Time for another little girl to play here and continue the story.
While Uncle Arthur developed the plates that afternoon, I practiced my scales at the piano. I had no inclination to wait outside the darkroom, no inclination to see the photographs at all, not even when Elsie popped her head around the door to say they had come up nicely.
When Aunt Polly returned from Bradford, she was pleased enough with the photographs, but disappointed we’d only managed the two, and neither of them with the fairies flying as Elsie had promised. She muttered and grumbled as she set the kettle on the stove. “I’ll write to Mr. Gardner to tell him. You can go out tomorrow and try again.”
My heart sank into my boots. “How many more photographs do we need, Aunt Polly?”
“Well, I should think half a dozen wouldn’t be too much to ask, not after all the trouble and expense Mr. Conan Doyle went to, sending you those new cameras and plates.”
I kicked Elsie under the table. I knew she didn’t have any more cutouts prepared.
“But the fairies only come in good weather, Aunt Polly,” I said. “They won’t come in the rain.”
“Then let’s hope for good weather tomorrow, Frances.”
I prayed for bad weather as I knelt beside the bed that night, and I prayed for poor little Aisling too.
NOTES ON A FAIRY TALE
Cottingley, Yorkshire. August 1920.
On my last day in Cottingley I woke to the steady patter of rain against the window. Murky gray clouds covered the sky like ink spots. Mists rolled over the valleys, washing away the hilltops and distant views and any hope of seeing fairies.
But this was not a task to be given up lightly, especially now that the time and expense of important men from London were at stake. Also, there was Aunt Polly’s Yorkshire stubbornness to take into account. Despite the drizzle and the mist, she insisted we try one last time to get another photograph. She sent us out straight after dinner with our cameras and two glass plates each.
We made a sorry pair in our mackintoshes and boots. I felt as gloomy as the weather as we trudged toward the beck, where we mooched about for a while, sulking about everything to do with fairies, and talking about Elsie’s plans to emigrate to America.
It was only toward the middle of the afternoon, as the rain stopped and a weak sun poked through the clouds, that Elsie said we should take one picture each.
“You never know,” she said. “We might catch a real fairy! I’ll go down to the bridge. You take something here.”
Elsie was only gone for ten minutes when I saw a flash of color beside the waterfall. My heart quickened. Another flash came. Then another.
They were here.
It wasn’t only what I saw that thrilled me. As before, I heard a light ringing in my ears. As before, my skin tingled with the sensation of being watched. I tiptoed as quietly and as quickly as I could toward them. There they were, just as I remembered them, so magical in their misty barely-there beauty. I watched, spellbound, for a minute, before I remembered the camera. Quickly I set what I hoped would be the correct aperture and speed. I looked through the viewfinder and pressed the shutter. When I glanced up from behind the lens, they had gone.
Elsie was striding along the bank, calling to me. “Frances! I said, shall we try up near the reservoir?”
I stood up and brushed the damp from my skirts. As I walked away from the beck, I instinctively knew I’d seen the fairies for the last time. They had come to say good-bye.
In the field beside the reservoir, we spread our mackintoshes on the ground and sat down to discuss what we were going to do, and how we would explain the lack of photographs to Aunt Polly. I didn’t tell Elsie what I’d seen. I didn’t know if I’d captured the fairies, anyway, and didn’t want to get her hopes up.