Her eyes flickered around the dimly lit room. Every surface was covered with books, every shelf buckling beneath the weight of them. Teetering piles of recently donated books leaned against walls and table legs: the discarded spoils from house clearances waiting for rare treasures to be found. Some had toppled over, left where they fell, like a Neolithic monument. Olivia walked up and down the shelves, running her fingertips along the ridged spines. Layer by layer, the shop had grown over the decades. Like ancient rock, each newly added section held the story of a specific time in her life: Irish Poets was secondary school. Myths and Fables was graduation. British Classics was art college. Children’s Books was London. Pappy had been working on a new section, Fairy Tales and Folklore. The shelves gaped with empty spaces. The job incomplete. Olivia’s to finish.
Stepping over threadbare rugs with treacherous curls at the corners, she walked over to the old oak desk and put down her coffee, her fingertips tracing the stories that had been told here, captured forever in the grain. She pictured the three of them sitting around the desk to celebrate the infamous wonky sign-hanging. They’d laughed as they slurped red lemonade from Nana’s best china teacups and sent bubbles up their noses. It was the first time Olivia had laughed since the accident. Everyone noticed, but nobody remarked on it, afraid to break the rare spell of happiness.
The silence of the shop grew heavy with expectation. Like a bored child waiting for ideas from a parent, Olivia sensed that it was waiting for her to tell it what to do next.
“What should I do, Pappy?”
The wind whistled through the letterbox, rattling the window frames, replying with her echo. What should I do? What should I do?
She finished her coffee and switched on the radio. Classical music blared out: Lyric FM. Pappy refused to listen to anything else, declaring other stations an insult to his ears. She was glad for the symphony that filled the impatient silence of the shop, glad for the dramatic crescendos and decrescendos that infused everything with a rich melody of possibility. She sat down in the Queen Anne chair and, for want of anything better to do, began to empty the desk drawers.
The first was full of boring-looking accounts and serious-looking business correspondence. Bills for rent and bills for the nursing home. She scribbled the name Henry Blake onto a scrap of paper and put it in her cardigan pocket. Whoever this colleague of Pappy’s was, she had a feeling she would need his help sooner rather than later.
The second drawer contained the heavy old ledgers in which Pappy had diligently cataloged all the books, stubbornly refusing to embrace any new technology and insisting that the old ways were the best. She thumbed through the pages and pages of entries. All of them would have to be transferred onto a website if she was to have any hope of connecting with a wider range of collectors and buyers. It was a daunting task, but at least it was something practical she could do.
The third drawer—the last—refused to open at first. Olivia tugged at the handle, jiggling it from side to side until the drawer eventually gave way to reveal a tan leather briefcase, battered and mildewed. She lifted it out, brushed off a thick layer of dust, unbuckled the rusted straps, and folded back the soft leather flap. A sweet, musty smell bloomed around her, the scent of lost secrets and stories to be told. Inside the briefcase were a large hardback book and a manila folder full of yellowing newspaper articles. Olivia lifted everything out onto the desk to take a closer look.
The book was a children’s picture book called Princess Mary’s Gift Book. The binding was still mostly intact, and despite a little foxing on the frontispiece and flyleaf, it was in good condition. On the title page an inscription read, “To Frances. Happy Christmas, 1914. From Mummy and Daddy. ‘It is only by believing in magic that we can ever hope to find it.’” Olivia turned the pages carefully, savoring the delicious old-book smell of leather and vanilla and imagination. The book naturally fell open at a poem called “A Spell for a Fairy” by Alfred Noyes, beautifully illustrated with pencil sketches of ethereal young girls in flowing dresses. Tucked into the seam between the last two pages of the poem was an old sepia photograph. It was a strange image, nothing but a jumble of shapes among long grass. On the back, in neat script, were the words “To Ellen. The fifth photograph. Real fairies! From Frances.”
Putting the book and photograph to one side, Olivia picked up the manila file next and took out several yellowed pages from a publication called The Strand Magazine, dated November 1920 and March 1921. The headlines grabbed her attention:
FAIRIES PHOTOGRAPHED
AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT DESCRIBED BY
A. CONAN DOYLE
and
THE EVIDENCE FOR FAIRIES
BY
A. CONAN DOYLE
WITH NEW FAIRY PHOTOGRAPHS
She was surprised to discover Arthur Conan Doyle had written about fairies, but the articles interested her. She scanned over the first one, stopping at a paragraph halfway down the page: “It was about the month of May in this year that I received a letter from Miss Felicia Scatcherd, so well known in several departments of human thought, to the effect that two photographs of fairies had been taken in the North of England under circumstances which seemed to put fraud out of the question.” But it was when she turned to the second page that Olivia’s hands stilled and the shop fell extraordinarily quiet. The page carried a black-and-white photograph of a little girl, a garland of flowers on her head, a slight smile at her lips as she watched a group of fairies dancing in front of her. The caption beneath it read:
ALICE AND THE FAIRIES.
Alice standing behind the banks of the beck, with fairies dancing before her. She is looking across at her playmate Iris, to intimate that the time had come to take the photograph. (An untouched enlargement from the original negative.)
Olivia’s hand rose instinctively to her heart. She knew this photograph. Like a fossil in rock, the image of the girl and the fairies was imprinted forever on her mind, part of a forgotten story she had always sensed was somehow linked to the unwritten pages of her own. The sight of it sent her thoughts rushing back over the years as painful memories pushed forward, forcing her to remember.
SHE’D FOUND THE photograph at the bottom of her mammy’s jewelry box and was instantly enchanted by the picture of the girl watching the fairies. She asked her mother about it while she was getting ready to go out.
“Ah, now, that’s a very interesting story, Olivia. Far too interesting to tell you in a hurry.” Her face was alight with secrets as she pressed the silver photo frame into Olivia’s hands. “You take care of it. I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”
She remembered that her mother’s hands were cool in hers. She remembered the sweet marzipan scent of her hand cream, the rattle of the hooks as she drew the curtains, the tickle of hair against her cheek as she bent down to kiss her good-night and tuck her in. She remembered the smooth edges of the silver photo frame as she’d held it beneath the tight cocoon of sheets and blankets. She remembered small details like this.
It was her mammy’s birthday. She was going out for the evening with friends and had never looked more beautiful to Olivia.