I am writing this as I sit by the cottage window, watching young Elsie Wright play at the beck with her cousin Frances, who has come to stay while her father is at war. Their laughter is such a joy to hear. It is a rare treat nowadays. I lap it up like a cat drinking cream and wish you were here to listen with me. We must try to laugh more when you come home.
I think often of the past during these long summer days, reflecting on distant places and times and the fairy stories Mammy used to tell me of Old Ireland. It was Mammy who taught me the William Allingham poem: “Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We daren’t go a-hunting For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together; Green jacket, red cap, And white owl’s feather!” Do you remember I used to sing it to Aisling when she was a baby?
Dear, sweet Aisling. The world is unrecognizable to me since she went away.
They say time is a great healer, but they are wrong. Time is a great illusionist, that’s all. It tricks and it taunts. It sweeps away minutes and hours, months and years without any release from this endless wondering.
In brief moments, I can believe I am happy. I smile at the lambs capering in the fields. I appreciate the beauty of a summer’s day. I’m thankful for the food on my plate. And yet, when I blow out the candle at night, it is there, waiting for me. My grief roars in like a winter storm, knocking me down to leave me broken and crumpled. It is during those dark hours when I feel the ache of her absence, when I cannot accept that I will never hold her hand again, or whisper to her of the sídhe and the púca.
And now you are gone from me too, Robert. Is there no end to this war? No end to my anguish?
I fill my days with insignificant things. I set the kettle on the stove, fill the ewer with water, peel potatoes, scrub the floors, and wash the windows until they gleam like jewels. I paint and knit and sew. I help on the farm—we are all needed to do something or other with the men away. But I can never escape this torment, no matter how many ways I try to occupy myself. If only they could tell me where she is. It is the thing that haunts me the most, the thought of our beautiful little girl alone and afraid in the dark and the cold. That cannot be how her story ends, so I create my own story for her, one where the fairies took her somewhere safe and where she will play in their world until we can meet her there.
I keep her boots beside yours on the doorstep, ready to welcome you both home. Wildflowers and moss already grow around Aisling’s. Never around yours. I take comfort from it, to know that nature thrives around her, that her boots will become as much a part of this woodland cottage as she is a part of me. Of us.
Come home to me soon, dearest. The world is too dark without you both in it.
Your ever loving wife,
Ellen
x
Cottingley. July 1917
Darling Robert,
In these balmy summer evenings, I sit at the window and pick over old tapestries that still hold the smell of the turf fires from Ireland. I pick and I stitch. I knit comforts to send to you and the boys. I knit and sew as if my life depended on it. You will think me silly, but I set myself little milestones: by the end of this spool of thread, he’ll be home. By the end of this skein of wool, it’ll be over.
It never is.
I watch the girls—Frances and Elsie—as they play at the beck, lost in the beauty and magic of the place. It pleases me to hear them. Elsie blossoms from a girl into a young woman, unfurling like the rambling roses around the cottage door. She comes alive in the company of her cousin, who encourages her to be a child again. They make a curious pair. One so tall. The other so slight. Watching them through the summer foliage is like watching a mother and child. I am reminded of how Aisling and I used to play there. How many inquisitive pairs of adventurers have sat at that old willow tree, I wonder?
No news as such. Arthur Wright has a new camera—the whole village knows about it. Most of us have been photographed by him at some point or another! The girls brought it down to the beck yesterday. I didn’t mean to pry, but their laughter drew me to the window and I watched Elsie take a photograph of Frances near the waterfall, flowers arranged on the bank in front of her. They scattered the petals into the beck before they clambered up the bank, giggling as girls do.
I took my usual walk along the stream yesterday evening. I like to listen to the soft cooing of the wood pigeons in the branches as the sun gilds the fields and the sheep. I stopped to pick some wildflowers and my eye was drawn to something caught in an eddy. At first I thought it was pieces of old cardboard, all sodden and bent out of shape, but I noticed drawings on them. I brought the sodden pieces back to the cottage and set them on the windowsill to dry. Only then could I piece them together, like a jigsaw puzzle, and would you believe it, they were drawings of fairies. Quite lovely too. I wonder if that was what I’d seen the girls scatter into the water, if Elsie’s photograph wasn’t of flowers in front of Frances—but paper fairies! I’ve placed the fragments of paper into my special box of Aisling’s things.
I still keep the lock of her hair and yours in my locket. It is all I have to know that either of you were ever real: a single lock of hair. One as black as night, the other as red as a harvest moon. And here I am, trapped in a permanent twilight where nothing makes sense and I must dream my unquiet dreams of our beautiful little girl, playing with the fairies. Hair like flames in the setting sun. The beauty of all things around her.
Stay safe, my love.
You are always in my heart and in my prayers.
Your ever loving wife,
Ellen
x
Tears slipped silently down Olivia’s cheeks as she read her great-grandmother’s words, some of them almost erased with the passing of the years and the many hands that, like hers, had held these fragile memories. In reading Ellen’s letters, Olivia felt incredibly close to her and to this distant part of her past. Her great-grandmother Ellen, like her Nana and her mother, was part of who she was, part of her story.
It didn’t surprise Olivia that Ellen had seen Frances and Elsie take the photographs, and had found their torn-up cutouts, as Frances had worried somebody might, but she was glad Ellen had kept the girls’ secret safe. She wondered what had happened to the fairy cutouts. Lost, she imagined, over the decades.
At the bottom of the box was a withered posy of dried wildflowers. Olivia knew them: harebell, bindweed, campion, and bladderwort. With the letters was a collection of paintings, some small enough to fit inside a locket. All of them were of the same red-haired girl, and always she was surrounded by fairies and flowers. Olivia knew the girl in the paintings. It was, unmistakably, the girl from her dreams.
“Aisling.” The name fell from her lips in a whisper, as if someone else spoke for her.
“Excuse me, but we’re closing now.”
Olivia jumped at the voice beside her. The librarian smiled and apologized for giving her a fright.
Olivia began to gather her things. “Sorry. I lost track of time.”