The Fairy Ring (3 page)

One night after a long day at work, Frances’s mother opened the front door and stepped though the tiny sitting room into the kitchen. There on the linoleum was a big, muddy puddle.

In her whole life, Frances’s mother had never yelled at her, but she did that night.
Why
couldn’t Frances stay out of the beck? She’d never been disobedient before!
What
was she going to do with her? Besides, there was nothing in the beck, anyway!

And Frances (for the first time in
her
life) yelled at her mother. “There is! I go up to see the fairies!”

Frances’s mother stared. The kitchen was dead silent.

“That’s the end,” said Aunt Polly. “You’ve started telling stories now!”

Aunt Polly turned to Elsie and asked her if she’d seen any fairies.

Elsie stood right next to Frances and said yes, she had.

By then, Uncle Arthur had come into the kitchen, but he didn’t say a word.

In the silence, Frances’s mother went upstairs to take off her coat and hat. Aunt Polly finished making tea.

They all sat down at the kitchen table.

None of them said much, because nobody seemed to know what to say.

Later, none of the grown-ups asked Frances anything more about the beck. Instead, if Frances was late coming home from one of her piano lessons, they’d ask her if she’d seen any fairies lately.

They teased Elsie, too, if she went into one of her daydreams. Maybe
she’d
seen some fairies?

Pretty soon Elsie said she was sick of it. And then . . . she told Frances she had an idea.

Why not take a photograph of the fairies? It would stop the teasing once and for all.

It would be splendid.

E
lsie would borrow her father’s camera, she said. She’d never taken a photograph in her life, but that didn’t seem to stop her.

It was summer now, and Elsie’s father had just gotten his first camera, secondhand from Uncle Percy. It was a wooden box about nine inches tall, covered with pebble-textured black paper. It had a leather strap on top. It weighed about two and a half pounds.

It didn’t use the kind of film that came in rolls, which was a rather recent American invention.

Instead, Elsie’s father’s London-made camera used an old-fashioned kind of film that came mounted on glass plates. “Perhaps the advent of the luxurious roll-film has, to a certain extent, displaced the box-plate camera from its proud position of constant companion,” the camera’s instruction manual admitted. “But,” it added, “there is no gainsaying the fact that the best pictures have always been, and will always be, produced from plates.” Each photograph taken with Elsie’s father’s camera required its own glass plate.

To load the plates into the camera, you had to take it into a darkroom, “i.e. a room from which all light, except that given by a ruby lamp . . . has been excluded,” according to the manual. Elsie’s father had built his own darkroom in a tiny space in the cellar, tucked under the stairs that came down from the kitchen. He didn’t have a ruby lamp. Instead, he had blocked off the darkroom’s one window except for a small pane of red glass.

In the dim red light of the darkroom, you had to insert the plates, one by one, into metal holders known as sheaths, taking care to make sure the film side of the glass plates was facing up. You had to load each sheath into the camera, then close the camera’s hinged door, which had a large spring that held the sheaths in place.

Just recently, Elsie’s father had begun taking his first photos. Anyone could see by watching him that it wasn’t easy.

First (by working a lever on the front of the camera) he had to adjust the amount of light that went into the lens. Too much light, and the picture would be washed out. Too little, and it would be too dark.

He also had to set the shutter speed, again using a lever on the front of the camera.

He had to stand the right distance from whatever he was photographing (a distance that depended on the setting he’d chosen for the light) and decide which of the two glass viewfinders he wanted to use: the one on the side of the box or the one on top. And finally, he had to work the shutter (another lever, on the side of the box) very carefully. “A steady pressure should be maintained on the lever until the shutter is released,” the manual warned, as “a jerky, sudden movement will seriously affect the ultimate picture.”

But Elsie’s father’s photographs turned out wonderfully.

One of them showed tall Elsie and a much shorter Frances. They were standing side by side in the sunshine by the beck in their bathing costumes.

It was a good thing the pictures turned out so well, since each glass plate cost quite a bit of money.

One Wednesday night, Uncle Arthur and Aunt Polly went off to choir practice and Frances and her mother went to Bradford to visit Aunt Clara. When Frances got home and she and Elsie were alone in their room, Elsie said she had something to show her.

It was a set of beautifully painted cutout paper fairies.

Elsie had copied the bodies from some dancing fairies in one of Frances’s storybooks, then added bigger wings. She had cut them out so carefully that not one tiny sliver of paper showed around the edges.

The dancing fairies in Frances’s storybook

Frances was filled with admiration.

Elsie slipped them into a book and hid it under her bed.

Now all she needed was some hatpins (the long, sharp pins ladies used to fasten their big hats to their high-piled hair) and some gum, for attaching the cutouts to the hatpins.

Then, when the cutouts, the hatpins, and the gum were all ready, Elsie and Frances would wait for the next time the grown-ups asked them if they’d seen any fairies lately.

It was a bright, sunny July day when someone made the next fairy remark.

Quick as anything, Elsie told her father that if he’d lend her his camera, she’d take the fairies’ picture.

It was only fair, she said. He should either lend her the camera or stop teasing.

Uncle Arthur didn’t like the idea one bit, but Elsie and Frances pestered him. Nattered him, as Elsie would say in her Yorkshire way.

Aunt Polly and Frances’s mother laughed and took the girls’ side, and finally, after much grumbling, Uncle Arthur went down to his darkroom and returned with the camera. He gave it to Elsie and told her she had to carry it, not Frances. “There’s one plate in. If you make a mess of it you won’t get another,” he said, “and mind you take care of my camera.”

Then, with Uncle Arthur yelling, “Now take care!” behind them, Elsie and Frances raced for the beck.

A
t the little pool at the bottom of the waterfall, Frances took her shoes off and waded. Elsie wandered around, looking at all the sunny spots nearby. In a little while, she called Frances over.

Elsie had stuck the hatpins, each with its dancing fairy, on a mossy bank among a tangle of ferns and wildflowers.

The watercolor fairies danced barefoot, on tiptoe, their filmy dresses and long hair flying. Elsie had painted their wings with spots like butterflies’ wings. One fairy played a set of long pipes. They were graceful, cheery-looking little creatures, with beautiful slender ankles.

Frances told Elsie how pretty they were. Then she got down behind them.

Frances was wearing an everyday dress with the sleeves rolled up, but the wreath of pansies in her hair looked nice. She rested her chin on her hand and gazed at the camera.

Elsie held the black box, Frances watched, and Elsie pressed the lever.

Frances and the fairies

After that, the two girls tore the paper fairies into little tiny pieces. They stuck the hatpins deep into the earth, climbed out of the beck, and gave the camera back to Uncle Arthur.

There wasn’t room for three in the darkroom, so Elsie and her father crowded into the little space under the stairs while Frances waited outside the door. There in the cellar, with the bright garden just outside, Frances hopped and jumped and danced in anticipation.

And then, from behind the darkroom door, she heard Elsie yell.

The fairies were on the plate!

Uncle Arthur wasn’t at all pleased, to hear Elsie tell it later. At first, as they watched the image emerge from the tray of darkroom chemicals, he grumbled that it was a nice picture of Frances, but they’d messed it up by leaving trash from a picnic lying around. He thought the fairies’ wings were “sandwich papers,” Elsie said, until he saw all the little legs coming up.

Uncle Arthur asked Elsie how she did it, but Elsie wouldn’t say. Later, in secret, she made Frances promise not to say anything, either.

Frances never heard the grown-ups discussing the photograph or the fairies, but now, at least, they didn’t fuss when she went down to the beck.

Maybe they figured she’d need new school shoes next year anyway? Or maybe it was that she had learned to keep her footing better on the rocks? But whatever their reasons were, the grown-ups left Frances in peace.

Down in the beck, the little men came and went, walking up and down the streambed in single file. Frances got to know their comings and goings: they reminded her of people going to work on a train every day. She especially liked to watch her favorite little man, the one who was always last in line. He wasn’t as serious as the rest of them. Every once in a while, as he brought up the rear, he’d hop or skip or do a little jig.

On fine summer mornings when Frances woke up, other sounds besides the brook might drift through her window: horses’ hooves in the lane, the clack of the mowing machines, the bleating of sheep in the fields. And in time, there were other things to do besides going down, all alone, to the beck.

When haymaking season came, Frances and Aunt Polly volunteered to help a farmer named Mr. Snowden. His farm lay right at the edge of Cottingley Village, not far from 31 Main Street. He needed help with his hay because so many men were away in the War.

With pitchforks, Frances and Aunt Polly tossed the hay into the wagon. Then they got to climb up and ride on top of the load. They would lie in the sweet-smelling hay while Mr. Snowden drove down the country lanes, past hedges blooming with roses and honeysuckle.

Mr. Snowden had a daughter named Ada, and she and Frances became friends. After that, Frances often went to visit her at Manor Farm.