The Fairy Ring (8 page)

Elsie explained that she couldn’t entice them in, since she had no power of her own over the fairies. The way to get them to come close, she said, was to just sit quietly and think about fairies. Then, when you heard a faint rustling or saw something moving in the distance, you just waved to them, to show them they were welcome.

Mr. Gardner asked Elsie about the gnome’s wings. Both he and Sir Arthur thought that the markings seemed to look like those on a moth’s wing.

Elsie explained that they weren’t wing markings but musical pipes. She added that on days when there wasn’t too much rustling in the wood, you could hear the faint, high sound of gnome music.

Mr. Gardner’s visit lasted two days. Before he left, Elsie told him she’d very much like to send him a picture of a fairy flying. There seemed little chance of that happening, though, since Elsie said she couldn’t take pictures of fairies unless Frances was with her. And of course, Frances was far away in Scarborough.

Mr. Gardner said perhaps Frances could come and spend her summer holidays in Cottingley? Then the two girls could take pictures of fairies together? He could just run up to Scarborough and see Frances’s parents about it.

And what could Elsie say then? She’d already gone and told Mr. Gardner she wanted to take a picture of a fairy flying!

The grown-ups seemed to think Frances would be
happy
to visit. And
of course
she’d want to take pictures of fairies. . . .

N
obody asked Frances, of course. The next thing
she
knew, it had all been worked out.

There was Mr. Gardner, sitting at the dinner table: a boring man in brown with nothing at all interesting to say. And now, because of him, she had to go to Cottingley and take pictures of fairies. The grown-ups had it all worked out.

Frances couldn’t call Elsie on the telephone and ask her what to do: neither of them
had
a telephone.

She couldn’t write. What if somebody found the letter?

August came, and in Scarborough the ocean was as warm as it would get all year. Frances’s friends were no doubt out swimming and running barefoot on the sand. And Frances? Frances was on her way to Cottingley, watching the Yorkshire countryside roll past.

Green hills. Stone fences. Sheep.

When Frances finally got to Cottingley, Aunt Polly did not seem to be her usual cheerful self, at least when it came to fairies.

“If Elsie takes one flying as she said she would, I will be quite satisfied about them,” she had written to Mr. Gardner. “And yet to doubt is worse, for then I must think they are not trouthfull, not a very happy state of mind to be in, is it, and yet I have never found either Elsie or Frances tell a lie. Please don’t blame me for feeling like that, it’s because the whole thing is so strange.”

Frances didn’t need to see the letter to tell that something had changed. She felt “horribly uncomfortable,” she wrote later. “It wasn’t a joke anymore. People were taking it too seriously and it had all got out of hand.”

Aunt Polly was even keeping Elsie home from work so the girls could go out to the beck together and take plenty of pictures.

After all, Mr. Gardner had sent Elsie an expensive new camera and
six dozen
glass plates.

When they were alone, Elsie told Frances she had painted two fairies, one for herself and one for Frances. She said they’d take two pictures and be done with it. The fairies were both cut out and ready.

Elsie’s fairy wore an evening dress and a fashionable bob haircut. In one hand, she held a bouquet of bell-shaped blue flowers. Harebells, they were called.

Frances’s fairy wasn’t wearing much of anything but some tights and wisp of gauze. Elsie had drawn her leaping into the air, her arms outstretched and her toes pointed. Frances didn’t think Elsie had gotten the back leg right, but it would have to do.

That night, Elsie and Frances wound their wet hair over rags and then slept on them, with the lumps digging into their heads. When they untied their hair the next morning, it was curled in long ringlets.

The day was gray and misty, not (they had told the grown-ups) the kind of weather that was good for taking pictures of fairies. But by afternoon it cleared.

Aunt Polly went to have tea with Aunt Clara so that Frances and Elsie could be alone. “I . . . left them to it,” she later wrote Mr. Gardner.

Elsie and Frances put on dresses trimmed with lace and ruffles, tied a big white bow in Frances’s hair, and went down the path to the beck.

They stuck Elsie’s painted fairy to a branch. Elsie put her head down near, so it looked as though the fairy were offering her the bouquet.

Frances measured the distance the camera should be from Elsie. The two girls agreed on a shutter speed, Frances pushed the shutter, and “the deed was done,” Frances wrote later.

Elsie and the harebell fairy

Next, they went to Frances’s willow tree. They stuck Frances’s leaping fairy onto one of its branches. The light was dim, which meant they would have to set the shutter to stay open for a long time. Frances stood so her face was in profile with the fairy’s little knee just a few inches from her nose. She looked at the slip of paper in a friendly sort of way and kept her head quite still, so the image would not be blurred.

Elsie pulled the lever, and that was that.

Frances and the leaping fairy

“We wandered home, taking our time,” Frances wrote later. “We saw the baby frogs were no longer babies, the blackberries were still green but after the rain were beginning to fatten. I had no feeling of regret that I would not be there to pick and eat them, nor even that after this week my little men would be in my past.”

Uncle Arthur took the camera and disappeared into his darkroom. When he emerged with the photographs, Aunt Polly was disappointed to see that there were only two.

After that, it rained, and Elsie and Frances said they couldn’t take fairy pictures in the rain.

Aunt Polly told them they were very ungrateful. She’d written to Mr. Gardner telling him how excited Elsie was to have the camera and what a handsome present it was, and now all they had to show for
six dozen
plates were two pictures?

It would not do.

But day after day, it kept raining.

On the afternoon of the last day of Frances’s visit, Aunt Polly sent them out of the house, rain or no rain. Then she and Uncle Arthur went out with some friends for a drive in the countryside and locked the door behind them. They would be gone all afternoon.

“The weather was gloomy and we were gloomy,” Frances remembered later. “It was a hopeless task.”

In their raincoats, Frances and Elsie wandered down the garden path and into the beck. Frances caught a glimpse of little men, but they were off in the distance.

After a while, she and Elsie climbed up the banks to the high ground around the beck, the place where once (very long ago now) Elsie had taken the gnome picture. They wandered toward a little grove of trees and sat down.

They both agreed that if anyone wanted them to take more photos next year, they would say no.

Not far from them lay a little tangle of grass and leaves with drops of rainwater clinging to it. It didn’t look like much more than an old bird’s nest.

Afterward, they couldn’t agree which one of them took a picture of it, but neither of them thought it looked like much at the time. It was probably just a waste of a plate.

Then they wandered on home.

By the time Aunt Polly and Uncle Arthur returned, it was too late to develop the plate — Uncle Arthur needed daylight, shining through the darkroom’s red windowpane. It wasn’t until the next day that Aunt Polly found out that the girls had taken only one picture.

“It’s a queer one, we can’t make it out,” she wrote to Mr. Gardner.

In a letter Elsie wrote years later, she said that all that she and Frances could see when they looked at the photograph were “faded-out bits showing of wings and faces here and there . . . bits of dead leaves (that could have been wings) or shadows (that might have been faces).”

Aunt Polly didn’t tell Mr. Gardner that she was sorry and disappointed to have so few pictures to show for all the plates he’d sent. She just wrote, at the end of her letter, “She didn’t take one flying after all.”

F
rances went home to Scarborough. Summer ended and school began.

Elsie had another job now, in a Christmas-card factory in the hills above Bradford. All day long, she sprayed brown paint on reindeer, red paint on Father Christmas, and so on, for card after card after card.

The days grew shorter and colder. Dark fell early. Outside the factory, the real world began to look more like Christmas.

Then one day, in late November, Elsie received a hastily written letter from Mr. Gardner. “I send just this line at once as the
Strand
is out today and I am already getting numerous inquiries about the fairies,” Mr. Gardner wrote.

Elsie couldn’t just run out and buy one in the village, since there weren’t any shops that sold magazines in Cottingley. But when she did find a copy of the
Strand,
there was the headline, right on the front cover.

FAIRIES PHOTOGRAPHED