The Fairy Ring (7 page)

Painting by Elsie, done the year she turned 19

The young woman had dark hair, like Elsie.

But Elsie’s eyes were not green; they were a clear, bright blue. And all her life, Elsie had been deathly afraid of spiders.

What she was thinking when she painted that picture, no one would ever know.

For Elsie was a person with a secret she hadn’t told her mother, or her father, or the man from London. And inside her, the secret was growing.

T
he matter of actually going to see the girls had to be approached very carefully, Sir Arthur and Mr. Gardner agreed.

According to what Mr. Gardner had heard from various people, the girls were “very shy and reserved indeed,” he informed Sir Arthur. “They are of a mechanic’s family in Yorkshire, and the children are said to have played with fairies and elves in the woods near their village since babyhood.”

The investigation couldn’t be delayed too long, though. Mr. Gardner feared that, soon, the girls might not be able to see fairies anymore because they’d be too grown up. “Two children such as these are, are rare, and I fear now that we are late because almost certainly the inevitable will shortly happen, one of them will ‘fall in love’ and then — hey presto!!” Mr. Gardner wrote to Sir Arthur. Like something in a magician’s trick, the girl’s childhood would vanish.

Poof !
And the chance to find out more about fairies would be gone.

So in June of 1920, Mr. Gardner wrote another letter to Elsie’s mother. He mentioned that he’d had lantern slides made of the two photographs and was showing them to audiences in London. “Everyone who saw them was greatly interested. Indeed to say that many were excited about them would be understating the case,” he wrote. Lots of people were asking for copies, he explained, and he thought it best to ask her (and perhaps she would also ask Miss Elsie, he added) about copyright issues. He offered to get the photos copyrighted himself, and he offered Miss Elsie a percentage if she wanted it.

This time, Elsie wrote back herself.

She signed her name with a flourish.

Elsie

At the end of June, two more letters dropped through the mail slot at 31 Main Street. Both were from London, addressed to Miss Elsie Wright. One was from Mr. Gardner. The other, in neat, rounded handwriting, was on the stationery of a place called the Athenaeum.

E
lsie read the letter and the signature, and maybe she stared at it for a long moment.

For Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of her father’s great heroes.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, according to her father, was more than just smart. Sir Arthur was Brilliant. Elsie’s father had read all the Sherlock Holmes stories and Sir Arthur’s other books, too, thrilling adventure tales, such as
The Lost World.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a very famous, very important, very high-class person.

When Elsie’s father found out about the letter, he told her he was deeply worried.
Their family
was putting Important People’s reputations on the line, he said. Her little joke had gone far enough! She should tell him what the trick was and be done with the whole silly business.

But Elsie didn’t.

Elsie wouldn’t.

Elsie never answered Sir Arthur’s letter (or if she did, the letter has since been lost).

Instead, she wrote a letter to Mr. Gardner.

(Flourish.)

After that, Elsie and her family went to the seaside for a holiday, and when they got back, a package was waiting. When Elsie unwrapped it, she found the book Sir Arthur had promised to send. On a sky-blue cover, gilt letters said:
THE LOST WORLD
.

The inside cover showed a flat-topped mountain rising from a jungle. Waterfalls poured down from a mysterious world, high above. The title page was inscribed:
Yours sincerely, Arthur Conan Doyle, July 1920
. Underneath, it said:

A photograph captioned “The Members of the Exploring Party” showed four mustached and bearded men staring grimly at the camera. They did not look like the kind of people it was easy to fool. They looked like Important Men Who Got to the Bottom of Things.

“The Members of the Exploring Party.” Photograph from Elsie’s copy of
The Lost World.

But if Elsie felt a qualm, she didn’t tell anybody.

Explorers aren’t the only ones who can be brave. And besides, the Lost World was an interesting place. Anyone could see that just by paging through the illustrations.

One picture was “The Swamp of the Pterodactyls,” another the “Glade of the Iguanodons.” “The Central Lake” showed a sea monster’s head and coils rising above the waves.

The book was two and a half inches thick and 319 pages long. A slow reader would require quite a bit of time to get through it. Still, it was nice of Sir Arthur to send it to her.

He had a vivid imagination —
that
much was clear.

Elsie’s father, too, got a letter from Sir Arthur.

“I have seen the very interesting photos which your little girl took,” it said. “They are certainly amazing. I was writing a little article for the
Strand
upon the evidence for the existence of fairies, so that I was very much interested. I should naturally like to use the photos, along with other material.”

“I heard him moan to my Mother,” Elsie wrote in a letter years later, “‘How could a brilliant man like him believe such a thing?’” How could
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
be fooled?

And to think, her father said, that the great man had been bamboozled by “our Elsie, and she at the bottom of her class.”

Elsie’s father wrote Sir Arthur back.

In his letter, Sir Arthur had asked if he or Mr. Gardner might run up to Cottingley and have a little chat with the girls. Elsie’s father’s reply —
“Mr. Gardner . . . proposes coming to see us at the end of July. Would it be too long to wait until then?”
— very politely hinted that it would be best if Sir Arthur didn’t come.

So Elsie’s father never met his hero.

But one afternoon in late July, Elsie’s mother opened their front door to a quiet middle-aged man in a brown suit and a bow tie.

Elsie’s mother showed Mr. Gardner into the parlor and introduced Elsie. (Mr. Gardner remembered her later as “a shy, pretty girl of about sixteen.”) The three of them made conversation until Elsie’s father came home from work and they all had tea.

Mr. Gardner asked Elsie’s father to tell his part of the story. Elsie’s father said he’d put just one plate in the camera, given it to Elsie and Frances, and then developed the pictures as soon as they came back.

Elsie’s mother told Mr. Gardner she remembered quite well that the two girls were gone from the house only a short time.

Mr. Gardner examined Elsie’s hand — some critics of the gnome picture had said Elsie’s hand looked suspiciously large. “She laughingly made me promise not to say much about it, it is so very long!” he wrote later. Mr. Gardner traced the outline of Elsie’s hand on a piece of paper, for evidence.

And then, after tea, Elsie and Mr. Gardner went down to the beck. “I was glad of the opportunity of questioning the elder girl quietly by herself and of talking things over,” Mr. Gardner wrote later.

Mr. Gardner looked at the waterfall and the nearby toadstools. He took his own photographs of the exact spots where the fairy photos were taken. He asked Elsie what color the fairies were.

Elsie told him they were “the palest of green, pink, mauve,” he wrote later. “Much more in the wings than in the bodies, which are very pale to white.” The gnome, she told him, seemed to be wearing black tights, a reddish-brown jersey, and a red pointed cap.