Poor Mammy took her grief to her grave. Aisling’s remains were found several years later and I was glad to be able to travel to Cottingley to see her laid to rest. She is the sister I never knew, but she is never forgotten. I often feel her—an echo, a shadow, a flash of light, the sense of someone walking beside me. I talk to her sometimes. People think I’m going daft in the head, hearing voices, seeing things. But I know what I see, what I hear.
Frances wrote to me a few years ago to say she was writing her account of the Cottingley events. She eventually sent on the finished pages with a note saying she thought I might like a copy, since so much of the story included my mother and my dear sister. I am pleased to have it, although not entirely sure what to do with it. My husband says if he ever opens his bookshop he’ll have it bound and kept on display. Cormac doesn’t believe in fairies, but he does believe in the power of stories. We both believe that Frances’s story deserves to be told.
In many ways, I wish the story had ended that autumn of 1917, that the girls’ secret had remained theirs alone. But some secrets are too big to keep and even as I write these final comments, I have a feeling that Frances’s story will go on. In interviews, Frances often spoke about the curious fifth photograph—but she never referred to it as the last.
I wonder.
People speculate about why Frances and Elsie didn’t admit to the hoax sooner, but I can understand why. So many people made the story their own, twisting and turning the facts so that in the end it almost wasn’t Frances and Elsie’s truth to tell anymore. The story they had created—albeit unintentionally—filled people with excitement and wonder and hope. The truth would have destroyed the girls and their family, not to mention the hopes of a nation recovering from war.
In Frances’s final years, people still asked her if she really had seen fairies at the bottom of the garden. Now that her story is written down, I suppose people will make up their own minds. I only hope that Frances and her fairies will be talked about for many years to come.
Perhaps I’ll write my own story one day. It would be nice to capture my memories before I become too old and forgetful.
For now, dear reader, thank you for setting Frances’s words free. May they fly ever onward.
Martha Kavanagh
July 1987
Beneath these last typed words of Nana Martha’s was a handwritten note. Olivia’s heart roared with emotion as she read it.
Dear reader,
My mother once told me that if a lie is told often enough it will eventually become the truth. Like any story well told, with each retelling it grows and strengthens so that over many years we might forget it was ever anything but the truth. That is, after all, how legends and myths are born. She always believed that was what happened in Cottingley. A little white lie, told for good reason, became a story in itself. A story that has endured for decades.
The photograph of Frances and the fairies has passed down through several generations of my family, and now belongs to me. I keep it in my jewelry box in the same silver frame my Nana Ellen first placed it in. One day I’ll show it to Olivia and tell her all about Frances and Elsie and the fairies in Cottingley, just as my mother told me, and as her mother told her. Like all good fairy stories, it should endure and grow.
Photographs have always fascinated me; the way they offer a portal into our past, the way they capture a fleeting moment and make it last forever. There is one particular photo of myself and Olivia that I especially love, the tips of our noses just touching as she gazes into my eyes. When I look at it, I’m instantly transported back to that moment: her adorable fat little hands scrunched into tiny balls, the delicious folds of her skin, the ripe-peach smell of her, the velvet touch of her hair, her searching eyes following something around the room as she gurgled into space. I wonder what she saw.
I found Frances’s book when I was clearing out the back bedroom at my parents’ cottage. I read it on quiet afternoons while the wind howled around the eaves and Olivia sent her teddies and dolls on great adventures.
I can hear her now as I write this, making up her innocent little stories.
I love her more than I can find the words to say.
It breaks my heart to know that she will grow up and have to try to understand the world, with all its complications and uncertainties. I hope she won’t try to understand everything, and that some of the magic she knows now will stay with her.
Perhaps she’ll ask about her father one day, and I will tell her what a kind and clever and wonderful man he was. Like every good story, I will make him the best sort of hero, because that is the father she deserves. I will invent a story for her, one we can believe in together, because she deserves more than the truth as far as he is concerned. We will learn to do this together, Olivia and I. She will teach me how to be a good parent, and I will teach her how to tie her shoelaces and how to tell the time on a dandelion clock. As in all good fairy tales, we will find our happy ending.
Our story is just beginning, but Olivia will write her own conclusion. And perhaps that is the greatest gift I can give her: the confidence to fill the blank page, the desire to live a life full of tomorrows in which everything is possible and all our best stories are waiting to be told.
Katherine (Kitty) Kavanagh
April 1988
The wind rattled the door frame.
Time seemed to stop, a respectful silence in which a lifetime shifted and found a new center. Olivia clutched these final pages to her chest as tears slipped down her cheeks in silent silver ribbons.
Frances had not only written a fascinating account of her incredible fairy photographs, but in doing so, she had brought together all the disparate parts of Olivia’s story too.
Olivia worked late, stitching and gluing until these final loose pages became part of Frances’s account, and everything was encased in a new leather cover. With painstaking care, she added the title in gold lettering on the front:
“Notes on a Fairy Tale, by Frances Griffiths.”
The story, complete.
Nineteen
Ireland. Three months later.
Ireland was at its loveliest in the autumn: sun-gilded and rosy-cheeked. It was a season of growth and abundance, the season when Olivia felt most alive. This was her spring. Her renewal.
Since Nana’s death, life had taken on a different shape. Losing the last link to her past, the last remaining member of her immediate family, had left Olivia feeling peculiarly alone, untethered to anyone and anything, although Henry often reminded her that nobody can ever be truly alone when they are surrounded by stories, as she was.