THE FOLLOWING MORNING, she woke to rain thudding against the window, and a message from Ross wishing her good luck for her trip to Cottingley. The fact that he’d remembered, that he’d thought about her that morning, brought a smile to her face, and although it was very inconvenient given the circumstances, her heart grew a fraction fonder of him.
The Leeds University library was a stunning domed building of white brick that reminded Olivia of the White House as she made her way up the impressive steps outside. At the registration desk, she filled in various forms and was given directions to Special Collections, where the Cottingley materials were held.
The main library was a circular room, the domed ceiling arching above a polished parquet floor. Sunlight seeped in through lofty windows, sparkling against an impressive art deco chandelier and illuminating the long reading benches that spread out from the central desk like spokes on a bicycle wheel. A concentrated hush filled the air as Olivia walked around the edge of the room, past rows of deliciously old books. Her heels echoed off the floor, and she instinctively went on tiptoe to quiet them.
In Special Collections, the staff spoke in almost-whispers as she was asked to place her things in a locker and given the first box of materials, which she carried to the reading room. It was already a quiet hive of research. Half a dozen people studiously consulted the contents of gray archive boxes and pored over ancient books and photographs, their white gloves carefully turning the fragile pages. Olivia sat at an unoccupied table and opened her box. There was so much information on the Cottingley fairies, she hardly knew where to start. Miscellaneous Press Cuttings was as good a place as any.
She worked through half a dozen boxes filled with many letters, newspaper reports, and photographs, losing herself entirely in the story of Frances and Elsie and the childish prank that became a national sensation as two young girls from working-class backgrounds were consumed by the greater influence of men who moved in the right circles of polite society.
The newspaper correspondence interested Olivia especially. She read the sensational headlines from the 1920s when Conan Doyle had written his Strand Magazine articles. Many of these early reports were sympathetic to the notion of fairies at the bottom of the garden, their tone one of curiosity and amazement. Experts were quoted as confirming that the photographs could in no way have been faked. One report stated, “We must either believe in the almost incredible mystery of the fairy, or in the almost incredible wonder of faked photographs. Which is it to be?” Another article made Olivia smile. “For the true explanation of the fairy photographs what is wanted is not a knowledge of occult phenomena, but a knowledge of children.” Through it all, she heard Frances’s voice, telling her own version of events.
More recent articles suggested some sort of practical joke was at play, but always when they were asked by reporters, Frances and Elsie maintained their story. The most recent article from the Times, dated 1983, carried the headline: THE COTTINGLEY FAIRIES: SECRETS OF TWO FAMOUS HOAXERS. Below the headline was the familiar photograph of Frances and the fairies, her enigmatic smile gazing back at Olivia through the years. The distance between them felt so narrow now that Olivia could almost hear the waterfall and the girls’ laughter. In some ways, Frances felt like part of Olivia’s family.
Family.
It had always been something of a strange notion to Olivia. Her family wasn’t conventional. It was misshapen. Different from the families she observed around her. Pappy used to tell her that family is what you create, not what you’re given. Olivia thought about Henry Blake and Nana. Ross and Iris. Mrs. Joyce. The bookshop. Hemingway, even. They were like a family to her now.
Box after box revealed more astonishing details of the Cottingley story and the level of scrutiny the photographs had come under, not just in Yorkshire or England but all over the world. It struck Olivia how overwhelming it must have been for Frances and Elsie. No wonder Frances had shied away from all the publicity.
As Olivia read on, it became apparent that, of all the Cottingley photographs, it was the curious fifth one that, in many ways, was considered the most interesting. Several copies of the photograph were included in the archive boxes, the same photograph Olivia had found between the pages of Princess Mary’s Gift Book on the back of which Frances had written, “To Ellen. Real fairies!” The image was more defined in the enlarged archived prints than in the copy Olivia had. She studied the enlargements carefully and could just make out what appeared to be winged female forms among the nest-like object in the grass. Could Frances have unintentionally photographed her real fairies, after all?
An interesting piece of correspondence from Edward Gardner referred to this fifth photograph as “The Fairy Bower.” He described the peculiar phenomenon of the fairy cocoon as “a magnetic bath woven by the fairies and used after dull weather and in the autumn especially.” Olivia remembered Nana talking about a sixth photograph, but there was only mention of five in all the boxes of letters and articles.
She worked steadily all morning, taking a short break for lunch. Toward the end of the day, she opened the final box, which contained several envelopes labeled Miscellaneous Correspondence. In one she found a small cutting from the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, dated October 1948. It carried a report of a missing child from the area, and referred to a previous incident of a missing child from around the time of the First World War. “The child’s mother, Ellen Hogan, a resident of Cottingley but originally from County Leitrim in Ireland, believed her daughter was taken by the fairies. The child was never found, nor was the stone fairy figurine her father had carved for her and which went missing at the same time. The mother and father are now deceased.”
Olivia’s heart ached for her poor great-grandmother, and for Nana Martha and for little Aisling, the sister Nana had never known, but as she picked up the next envelope, everything else faded into the distance. The other people in the room and the occasional scraping of chair legs melted away as she absorbed the words written on the archive note: “Ellen Hogan’s personal letters, written to her husband during the Great War. Ellen Hogan was Frances Griffiths’s schoolteacher.”
With great care, Olivia removed the fragile papers from the envelope, her heart full of curiosity as she ran her fingers across her great-grandmother’s neat script. Through her words, Olivia traveled with her, back over the years to Cottingley and the cottage in the woods . . .
Cottingley. May 1917
My darling Robert,