Elsie picked at the grass beside her, placing a blade between her finger and thumb and blowing through it to make a high-pitched whistle. It reminded me of the sound I heard when I saw the fairies. She suggested we use our last two plates to take a picture of a tree or the bushes. “We can say the fairies flew away just as we pressed the shutter. Or we can say we can’t see them anymore. I read a book of Mummy’s about psychic abilities. It said children can communicate with other realms, but that when they grow up, they lose the ability. They’ll believe that.”
It was a muggy afternoon. Bees and wasps buzzed around us as I let my thoughts wander back to the beck, grateful that I had seen them one last time. As Elsie blew her grass whistle, a movement in front of me caught my eye. Leaning forward to take a closer look, I saw something resembling a bird’s nest, almost hidden in the grass. Without stopping to think, I unfolded the lens sleeve, pointed my camera, and took a five-second exposure.
Elsie looked up. “What are you doing? Don’t waste the plates.”
“I thought I saw something.”
“What sort of something?”
“I’m not sure. Something in the grass. A nest of some kind.”
“Probably a field mouse.” Elsie stood up. “Come on then. It’s better than nothing, I suppose. We’ll say it was the best we could do.”
We wandered back to the house, lost in our thoughts, all talk of fairies quite done with.
Aunt Polly was waiting for us in the garden. “Well? What did you manage?”
“We’re not sure,” Elsie said.
“What d’you mean, you’re not sure? Did you see fairies or not?”
“We thought we saw something in the grass in the top field, but it moved too quickly to get a close look. Hopefully it’ll come up clearer on the plate.”
Aunt Polly sighed. “Let’s hope so. Otherwise I’m afraid Mr. Gardner and Mr. Conan Doyle will think you a pair of silly girls only able to capture two fairies with all those plates and such good cameras. Two fairies. Honestly!”
Uncle Arthur developed the plates that evening, declaring them all duds, even the one I’d taken of the waterfall. Only the photograph of the nest in the grass was considered half decent and even that Uncle Arthur didn’t think looked like a nest at all. “More like a basket of jumbled up washing if you ask me. It’s a dud. That’s about all it is.”
Aunt Polly rubbed her hands on her apron and peered at it again. “Dud or not, it’ll have to do. I’ll send the prints to Mr. Gardner in the morning.”
That night before I went to bed, I asked Aunt Polly if she thought the men from London would be happy with our photographs.
She patted my arm reassuringly. “They’ll have to be, won’t they? I suppose you can’t get fairies to order, like buttons and ribbon in the haberdashery. It would have been nice to have more, but we’ll make do.”
“You still believe the beck fairies are real, though, don’t you, Aunt Polly?”
She thought about this for a moment as she smoothed the front of her skirt and let out a long sigh. “Yes, Frances. Happen I do. If we can’t believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden, then I’m not sure there’s much point believing in anything.”
That was good enough for me.
By the end of the week, I was back in Scarborough, enjoying my cycles along the quiet country lanes with Mary. We watched the cricket festival and county matches at the Queen’s ground, swam in the sea, picked flowers for our presses, and knit jumpers for our dolls. All thoughts of Cottingley and fairies slipped away, like the tide carried out to sea.
If I’d known what lay ahead, perhaps I would have made more of those quiet, simple days in Scarborough that summer. Perhaps I would have lingered longer in the water before rushing back for my towel. Perhaps I would have relished the quiet joy of being alone, with only my thoughts. Perhaps I would have appreciated the days that I had, rather than wishing for the days that were yet to come.
I had never liked reaching the end of a story, and mine wasn’t finished yet.
While I enjoyed Scarborough’s summer, the next chapters of my particular fairy tale were being written in a London townhouse as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle evoked the marvel of our so-called “Yorkshire fairies” in words, sentences, and eloquent paragraphs. Soon his pages would be in the hands of the typesetter. By the end of the year, my story would be clattering along the great machinery of the printing presses, our photographs displayed on newsstands across England as the much-anticipated Christmas issue of The Strand Magazine went on sale, bearing the dramatic headline:
FAIRIES PHOTOGRAPHED
AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT DESCRIBED BY
A. CONAN DOYLE
My story was far from over.
In many ways, it was only just beginning.
NOTES ON A FAIRY TALE
Scarborough, Yorkshire. January 1921.
Within days of Conan Doyle’s article hitting the newsstands, talk of the fairy photographs reached Scarborough. Speculation was rife. How could it not be when the article claimed to contain “the two most astounding photographs ever published”? I pulled my hat over my eyes when I heard people talking about it on the bus, afraid someone would recognize me, even though our names had been changed to Iris and Alice, and Cottingley was described as the “quaint old-world Yorkshire village of Dalesby.” Conan Doyle had written, “We are compelled to use a pseudonym and to withhold the exact address, for it is clear that their lives would be much interrupted by correspondence and callers if their identity were too clearly indicated.”
Our lives were “much interrupted” regardless.
Mr. Gardner wrote to me straightaway. My hands shook as I read his words, my mouth as dry as toast. “Dear Frances, I send just this line at once as the Strand is out today and I am already getting numerous inquiries about the fairies. . . . It is just possible you may be found out and an attempt made to interview you despite my endeavor to protect you and yours from discovery . . .”
Far from concealing our identity, Conan Doyle had left enough clues that even an amateur Sherlock Holmes could work out who we were. Yorkshire folk are not easily dissuaded once they set their mind to something, and I knew it wouldn’t take long for someone to recognize us. I thought about Mavis Clarke’s sneering and Mrs. Hogan’s knowing looks. I curled my toes inside my boots as I looked at the photographs. They had been labeled “Alice and the Fairy Ring” and “Iris and the Gnome.” There was also a picture of Mr. Gardner looking serious beside the waterfall, and another of Elsie that made her look sulky and heavy in the face, which I knew she would hate.
What surprised me most was the paragraph relating to Mr. Snelling, the photography expert. “He laughs at the idea that any expert in England could deceive him with a faked photograph. ‘These two negatives,’ he says, ‘are entirely genuine, unfaked photographs of single exposure . . .’” Much as the whole thing worried me, I couldn’t help smiling when I read that Mr. Gardner had tested Elsie’s artistic skills, suspecting that she might have drawn the fairy figures. The article stated that “while she could do landscapes cleverly, the fairy figures which she had attempted in imitation of those she had seen were entirely uninspired and bore no possible resemblance to those in the photograph.”