The Fairy Ring (5 page)

So not too long after that, Elsie found another help-wanted notice. This one was in the newspaper, seeking young school-leavers with “artistic ability.”

Elsie went to the address listed in the advertisement and found it was a button factory. She followed the manager to a back room. There, she saw two young girls sitting at easels, rubbing colored powder onto black-and-white photographs.

Many of the photographs were portraits of young men who had died in the War. A note attached to each photograph told what color the dead boy’s eyes and hair had been.

It was sad, looking at so many boys who had been just about her age when they died. But at least it was better than the other job. It was closer to being a real artist.

At home, Elsie’s drawings and paintings hung on the walls.

One was a watercolor of Cottingley Village, seen from the top of the hill. Elsie had painted the hay fields and Manor Farm and the lane down the hill. Above, she painted the wide sky and the birds winging away.

Sometimes Elsie drew gardens in faraway countries.

Once, she drew Titania, the queen of the fairies from Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The fairy queen lay sleeping on a bank, her lovely dark hair spread all around her.

The Fairy Queen
, copied by Elsie from an illustration by Arthur Rackham

Elsie had copied her out of a book illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Arthur Rackham was a real artist, famous for his illustrations of fairies.

But Elsie’s own fairies — the dancing ones that everyone said were so beautiful — were torn up and buried in the beck. The painted paper gnome was long gone. Their photographs lay forgotten in a drawer. For all Elsie knew, no one would ever look at them again.

And maybe that’s what would have happened if, one winter day, Elsie’s mother hadn’t decided to go on an outing. . . .

Elsie’s mother went to Bradford, where she liked to go to the moving picture shows. Sometimes, when there wasn’t anything she wanted to see at the cinema, she went to hear speakers of one kind or another.

That day she found herself in a square near the train station. In front of a grand stone building called Unity Hall, someone had posted a notice about a lecture on nature spirits. Elsie’s mother went in.

Inside were hundreds and hundreds of seats, for the lectures in Unity Hall were very popular.

The speaker was from an organization of people known as Theosophists.

The Theosophists, it seemed, had all kinds of scientific theories about nature spirits. Elsie’s mother listened closely. And nature spirits, it became clear as the talk went on, were . . . fairies.

The Theosophists didn’t seem to think fairies were a joke at all. When the talk was over, Elsie’s mother turned to the woman sitting next to her. Her daughter had taken a photograph of fairies, Elsie’s mother said, but “we all thought they were nothing but mischievous nonsense!”

Someone hurried up to tell the lecturer. The next thing Elsie’s mother knew, the Theosophists had arranged for a print of the photo of Frances and the fairy ring to be sent to London, where the English branch of the Theosophical Society had its headquarters.

Not long after that, a letter arrived for Elsie’s mother.

It had been written on a typewriter, on stationery engraved with an address on the outskirts of London: 5 Craven Road, Harlesden, NW 10. Telephone: Willesden 1081. It was dated February 23, 1920.

W
hen Elsie’s mother told her about the letter from London — written with a typewriter! from a man who belonged to an organization with branches all over the world!— Elsie could have told her mother and father the secret of the cutouts right then.

Elsie’s mother would have had to write back to Mr. Gardner saying it had all been a big mistake. The fairies weren’t real. They were only mischievous nonsense, after all, and that would have been the end of it.

But Elsie didn’t tell.

She had no way of knowing it was a decision that would change her whole life.

But then, there were a lot of things Elsie didn’t know.

How was
she
supposed to know that she had taken her photographs at a time when a number of very respectable, well-educated city people were starting to think that maybe fairies weren’t “magic” at all?

Maybe, these people thought, fairies were just something science didn’t understand yet but would soon. After all, many things seemed like magic if you didn’t understand them. Telegraphs that sent messages through wires! X-rays that could see the bones inside your hand!

To some, it seemed quite likely that a camera could take pictures of fairies. After all, an X-ray could take pictures of things people couldn’t see. Why couldn’t a camera?

In discussions going on in faraway London, people suggested that maybe soon, scientists would be able to study fairies. Soon, they reasoned, fairies, hobgoblins, brownies, and so on could be sorted into scientific groups such as order, genus, and species.

And that — though Elsie had no way of knowing this — was why Mr. Gardner’s letter asked Elsie to take “actual photographs of some of the orders.”

It was as though by taking the fairy photographs, she had pushed a button on a huge machine. She had no way of understanding all its cogs and gears. But now, it was beginning to clank and whir.

And it wanted, very much, to find out more about fairies.

The fairy seekers knew certain things already, from fairy lore.

They knew that fairies could be tiny, or they could be the size of humans. Fairies often dressed in green. They feared iron. If you followed them into a fairy hill and ate their food, you might stay there for what seemed only a short while, but when you went home, you’d discover that your family and friends were dead and forgotten. Fairies stole human babies and left little wizened fairy creatures, called changelings, in the babies’ cradles. Brownies helped around the house, especially if you left them a dish of milk.

Fairies often lived in valleys known as fairy glens. In modern times, fairies were retreating to wild places far from smoke and noise and machines. They lingered, still, in unspoiled countryside. And there (according to the experts in London), fairies could still be glimpsed by simple country folk.

Dancing fairies by Arthur Rackham, 1908

And now . . . here was a report of a fairy sighting from . . . Yorkshire!

Hum, whir . . .

Yorkshire, with its heather-covered moors, was one of the wildest places in England.

Bing!

And two little country girls had spotted the fairies, which made sense, since country people were the ones who knew the most about fairies.

Clank, hum, whir . . .

Ireland, according to fairy experts, was an even better place to look for fairies than Yorkshire. Which was no doubt why Mr. Gardner’s next letter began the way it did.

But now, what were Elsie and her mother supposed to say to the man from London?

The letter went on: