“Don’t worry. Everyone does. Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Yes. More than I was looking for actually, but there’s one other thing I’d like to find.” She asked where she might find local newspaper reports from the early 1900s.
“Do you have a name you wish to search for?”
“Yes.”
“Our microfiche might bring something up.” He checked his watch. “The main reading room is open for another half hour if you want to try.”
It didn’t take Olivia long to find several reports from local Bradford and Bingley newspapers regarding the disappearance of five-year-old Aisling Hogan. They stated that she was last seen by her mother when she’d checked on her before going to bed, and that the child was reported missing the following morning. She was known to sleepwalk, the reports said, and the conclusion reached by the local constabulary at the time was that she had fallen into a disused well or an old mine shaft. Only one report mentioned that the mother, local schoolteacher Ellen Hogan, of Irish descent but now living in Cottingley, believed her child had been taken by the fairies.
Olivia hadn’t heard the name Aisling used in connection with her family until Nana had first mentioned it shortly after Olivia had started to read Frances’s story. Having read about Frances’s dreams of the little girl, and having read Ellen’s heartbreaking letters to her husband, Olivia now understood why Aisling’s name had never been mentioned. Her disappearance was so distressing that nobody in the family could bear to talk about it. Aisling’s was an incomplete story that had tormented her mother until her dying day. No wonder she chose to believe her daughter had gone to play with the fairies.
As people began to return books to the desk and pack away their bags, Olivia scrolled through the last few reports. Her hand stilled as she read a short article from a local newspaper from the 1950s.
The remains of a young child were discovered yesterday when excavation began on a new housing estate in Cottingley, West Riding. Although formal identification is not usually possible in such cases, investigating officers were able to confirm that the remains are those of Aisling Hogan, a young child who was reported missing in 1916, close to the area of their discovery. The remains were found with a small stone figurine, carved into the shape of a fairy. It was described in detail to investigators at the time of the disappearance by the child’s mother, the child’s father having made it for her. A surviving relative, Martha Kavanagh (née Hogan), who now lives in Ireland, attended a private ceremony where the child’s remains were interred at St. Michael’s and All Angels Church cemetery, alongside her parents.
Tears fell silently down Olivia’s cheeks as she read the report. Nana had known. She’d been able to say good-bye to the sister she’d never met, but whom she remembered when so many other memories were now lost to her. It gave Olivia some small comfort to know that Aisling had been found and given a proper burial. Perhaps it was better that Ellen had died believing her own version of events, because believing in fairies was far easier than knowing her little girl had died in such tragic circumstances.
Olivia was the last to leave the library. Her footsteps echoed as she walked out of the lofty room—reminding her of all the women in her life who had come before her, and whom she knew walked beside her still.
Seventeen
Cottingley, Yorkshire. Present day.
Cottingley was everything Olivia had imagined as she’d read Frances’s story, her descriptions were so vivid and true: the heather-clad moors that dropped into wide, tumbling valleys, the narrow streets, the terraced houses like books on a shelf, Number 31 propping them all up like a bookend. She recognized it all, just as it had been seen through Frances’s impressionable young eyes. But Olivia didn’t just see the familiarity. She felt it, deep within her bones. Just like when she returned to Ireland, she had a sense of coming home, a sense that she had been here before, had once walked these streets and pulled her hat over her ears against the sharp prick of the cold east wind.
She stood opposite the humble stone-built house, where so many stories had been told and so many secrets were once held. She imagined Aunt Polly standing in the doorway, excited to see her sister and her niece, all the way from Cape Town. She could picture Uncle Arthur with his great big hands, and Elsie, as tall as the lampposts, a spark of mischief in her eyes. She saw Frances, hesitant at the gate, because something had drawn her attention away toward the darkness beyond the end of the street.
And then she heard it. Faintly at first, and then louder as the wind changed direction: the unmistakable rush and tumble of water. Following the sound, Olivia walked through a small opening between two of the houses where the ground sloped sharply down toward a shallow stream. The beck.
Everything was exactly as Frances had described it and yet even lovelier. The little waterfall. The willow bough seat. The sunlight illuminating the leaves on the trees. It was perfect.
Glad to be alone, Olivia sat for a moment, absorbing the essence of this enchanted place where her family had once lived and played, laughed and cried, and where magical things had caught the attention of watchful young girls. She listened to the breeze as it whispered through the leaves, listened to the quiet chatter of the water as it gossiped about the things it had seen long ago. She took off her socks and boots, dipping her toes into the frigid water, smiling to herself as she heard the distant echo of laughter as Frances and Elsie had planned their joke.
After crossing the stream on the stepping-stones, Olivia dried her feet with her cardigan, put her socks and boots back on, and clambered up the other bank. She followed a narrow pathway through the trees where the grass had been flattened by other walkers and secretive nocturnal creatures. As if in a dream, she walked on, led by some instinct, by a distant memory.