The Cottingley Cuckoo

by A. J. Elwood

  LONDON TELEGRAPH OFFICE

  ORIG BRADFORD UNITED KINGDOM

  19 SEPTEMBER 1921

  MR E L GARDNER

  MUST CANCEL VISIT –(STOP)– APOLOGIES FOR BREVITY AND INCONVENIENCE –(STOP)– STRUCK BY SEVEREST MISFORTUNE –(STOP)– LETTER TO FOLLOW WHEN ABLE MR L H FENTON 8.54 PM

  I bundle the letters together again, wondering what must have happened. Whatever it is, it will have to wait. I go to my locker, feeling brighter as I hide them away inside and slip the key into my pocket. No one’s around, no one to see or ask any questions. I could almost forget they’re her letters at all. It feels as if there are secrets waiting to be discovered within their lines, and for now, they’re mine.

  * * *

  20th September 1921

  Dear Mr Gardner,

  I scarcely know how to begin. First, may I extend my deepest apologies for having to defer your visit. Please rest assured that we had anticipated it most keenly and would only ever have done so in the direst circumstance. There was certainly no rudeness intended; indeed, I am mortified to imagine what you must think. I trust, when I explain all, you will understand.

  We have been struck by misfortune, not upon one count, but two. I shall begin, I suppose, and treat them chronologically, if not by the import with which we are affected.

  First, the little skeleton you so particularly wished to examine is gone. I do not know whither or how, but I feel its loss most acutely, or did so until worse came to take its place. I discovered its absence myself. I cannot express to you my astonishment and distress. Indeed, my pulse became so rapid I feared the worst; it took some moments to compose myself enough to peer once more under Charlotte’s bed.

  I do not know what had carried me into the room to look at it – I suppose with your arrival growing imminent, I wished to be certain that all was prepared to your liking. And yet the box was not there, and I thought my old heart would burst at last.

  I do not know how my daughter-in-law had not noticed the lack. She had been so assiduous in watching over it. I could not think what had happened, unless it was that she had decided its hiding place too precarious after all, and had found another. I comforted myself with that as best I could. She was then in the kitchen and I hastened to ask her, though I could hardly form the words. I saw at once it was of no use. Her eyes opened wide with surprise, and I cannot adequately explain, but I felt the lack of it – that the fairy had blessed us with its presence, and had now gone from us, and would remain far beyond our reach.

  I think I must have had a little turn, for Charlotte assisted me to a chair and helped me recover myself. I kept asking after the box, pushing aside the glass of water she held to my lips. I wanted nothing – only that which has become so precious to us! I tried all kinds of explanation, repeating that it must have been placed elsewhere. I think I even voiced suspicion of the photographer who had developed the skeleton’s photographs, though I distinctly recall giving him some patched-together explanation that it was a created thing, a kind of game cobbled together from the bones of a wren and the wings of an insect, and he had seemed to find that satisfactory. And anyway, however would he have found us – and it?

  All the time I rambled, Charlotte kept shaking her head and looking so sad – until her eyes filled with tears, as much with dismay at my wildness as at our terrible loss, I think. We had also roused Harriet from her accustomed place in the nursery. She delights at that time in sitting in the window seat deeply lost in a book, but I realised she was standing by me, quite stricken.

  I endeavoured to compose myself, but my distress overcame my sense, for the only words I said were, ‘Did you take it, Harriet – did you wish to play with the little maid under the bed?’

  I saw at once from her expression that not only was she thoroughly upset by the imputation but found the idea abhorrent, as of course it should have been. What child would play with a skeleton?

  Her demeanour at least had the effect of bringing me around and returning me to a care for those whom I love, at the expense of all the world and its beliefs and its knowledge. I comforted her, and in doing so in some measure comforted myself, though it sickens me to write of it still. I do believe I would grieve the creature as a human friend, if it were not that further misfortune has taken its place in all our hearts.

  Although I was in some wise resolved to face the loss, and the possibility that it would expose me to censure from yourself and the great man we admire so well, my daughter-in-law could not allow it to rest. I curse myself for it! For it was in part her concern for me that must have driven her to put on her mackintosh and go to seek the little thing at once. Yet, I do not believe that to be the whole of it. I have previously mentioned her fascination; the little form always had exerted some pull over her.

  Charlotte at once imagined not that some thief had stolen it away, but that the fairy had somehow been returned to the glen. I am not sure why she thought so. Perhaps she caught the idea from me that it had gone beyond us, to some world that we could not reach after – but she did reach after it. I would that she had not!

  She insisted on it however, and to my great shame I did not press her to stay, for she raised some hope in me that all would be well. Perhaps she would find it lying on the rocks, or in some leafy bower – and so I let her go, and even wished her luck. I stood with Harriet and watched her hurrying away without so much as looking back, so intent was she upon her mission.

  I sat with the child and leafed over her book with her (it was the Brothers Grimm, though I cringed inwardly to see it), and ruffled her curls – as much to reassure myself, I think, as her. Time passed. The grandfather clock marked out the minutes with its mellow ticking, and the chime marked the quarter hour and then the half, and then the hour. I realised we were no longer looking at the book. Harriet sat quite still, a pensive expression on her face, her lower lip pinched between her teeth. I stared out of the window, though all was a-blur, and I do not think I had been conscious of gazing at anything.

  I examined the clock once more and found that another hour had begun. I stood and I paced. I prepared bread and butter for Harriet and she picked at it; I could eat none. We waited, and after a time Harriet went to her room. She slept, I think, or curled up on her bed and tried to.

  The afternoon was fading towards evening. The days are growing short, and shadows were stretching and joining without. My unease grew. For I could not help but think of what Charlotte had said once, about following the sound of magical pipes all the way to Fairyland. I had lost my wife and my son, and could not bear the idea of Charlotte being lost to me too, following some fairy dance to a place where she could never again be reunited with Harry – my boy!

  Grief overcame me. I did not put on my coat but rushed out as I was and started towards the beck.

  As I went, I thought I discerned a darker shape at the edge of the verdure where the trees began. At first it blended into the gloaming, visible only by its odd and rather irregular movement. It was not like a man, nor any animal I had hitherto seen. It almost appeared to lurch along, feeling its way, and I hurried towards it, already feeling the presentiment of some dreadful tragedy. With equal parts relief and dismay, I saw as I grew closer that it was Charlotte. She was stumbling along with one arm outstretched, and the other clamped to her left eye.

  I did not call out as I ran to her; I wanted only to reach her as quickly as I might. She looked up, staring at me with her one eye, and so it startled me beyond measure when I grasped her arms and she screamed in sudden terror. I cried out, calling her name, and tried to pull her hand from her face. I wanted to see what was the matter, but she drew back from me. ‘I’m blind,’ she said. ‘Blind!’

  I cannot describe my horror. I have no words sufficient for it even now; I have not the powers of a Conan Doyle or other great writer. My head swam and I could not speak, but she implored me to help her to the house and so I did; I supported her and guided her, though I did not understand. I found myself entirely unable to
fathom what had happened, or how such a calamity had visited her in such a lovely place, with such lovely creatures in it. What did it mean?

  She spoke little that night. I gave her a measure of brandy, which quieted her, and I settled her on the sofa, since she was unwilling to move; but she did at last uncover her left eye. I had dreaded what I might see, but to my great relief, it appeared normal. She only murmured one thing to me as she succumbed to the draught and fell into a doze.

  ‘They spit in your eye,’ she said. ‘They spit in your eye, and it’s gone. If I had not covered the other—’

  She was blind, you see, but not in the eye she had covered. She had lost the sight in her right eye and had kept her hand over her left to protect it from them. I know not how such a thing could happen, or if she had become confused somehow about the cause and had mistaken the little creatures’ intentions. I hardly dare to speculate, but something is terribly wrong.

  I will try to write again soon.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Lawrence Fenton

  11

  I smooth out the letters, which are laid over my steering wheel. I don’t know what to think of the one I’ve read. I’m sitting in my car, parked just off the High Street in town. It’s not far from Sunnyside, though I can barely see anything outside the car; rain smears the windows, rapping on the roof, as loud as knuckles. It’s lunch hour, for me anyway. Back at Sunnyside the residents will be settling into their sofas, sleeping theirs off. I wanted to be away from everything when I read the letters, to be alone, where no one could see.

  I run my fingers over the paper again, feeling the texture of another age. I feel somehow bereft that the little fairy skeleton had vanished, and so completely, as if disintegrating into the lines between the ink. But of course it had to disappear; the skeleton could never have been inspected or tested, because it wasn’t real. How could it have been? Yet it is strange to read of its disappearance just as I’ve discovered the box hidden under Charlotte Favell’s bed.

  But Mrs Favell is further away than ever from this Charlotte – who was struck blind, at least in one eye. I should feel sorry for her, but what I mostly feel is an odd kind of relief that Mrs Favell has no such impairment. Her gaze is too sharp; she would never tolerate such a thing.

  I shake my head. Do I really need further proof that Mrs Favell can’t be the same Charlotte as in the letters?

  But perhaps I do, because while Mrs Favell was having lunch with the others, and when Patricia wasn’t looking, I slipped out and went once more to her room.

  This time I hadn’t felt repelled so much as drawn to it, though that was surely because of the determination overspilling inside me: I’d decided I wasn’t having it any longer. I wasn’t going to put up with the way she’d made me feel. I wasn’t hopeless; I wasn’t worthless; I wasn’t tarnished. I wouldn’t stand for any of it.

  As soon as I went in, I saw that she had left the bureau open. It seemed like a gift and so I began there, looking over its contents without touching anything; I wasn’t going to do that. I wasn’t like Theresa, the girl before me.

  And yet the first thing I saw was an old-fashioned fountain pen, its black ebonite a little chipped, the gold fittings bearing a patina of age, and I hadn’t been able to resist reaching out and uncapping it. Not wishing to mark her paper or leave any trace of my presence behind, I ran the nib across the palm of my hand. The ink was royal blue, bright and strong, nothing like the faded smoke of the letters, and it sank into the lines of my hand at once.

  I had stared at it. Pulled a face. I stare at it now, but the mark remains imprinted on my skin.

  Then, on a shelf inside the bureau, I saw a stack of writing paper. I reached out – with my clean hand, so as not to taint it – and touched its creamy surface. It didn’t feel old. It was smoother than the letters had been; the sheets weren’t darkened at the edges. Of course, ink could be changed and paper thrown away. Still, it felt as if whatever I had come to find was not there. But then, I already knew that.

  If she’d written the letters herself, wouldn’t she have called her fictional Charlotte Favell, not Fenton? Wouldn’t she have addressed them to the more famous Doyle, not some little-known acquaintance?

  Unless Fenton really was her maiden name. Patricia had said that she’d been married, and I wish now I’d questioned her about it. But perhaps even that wouldn’t have been subtle enough for Mrs Favell’s game.

  And it does feel that some game is being played. Why else is she feeding me the letters like this, revealing her story a little at a time?

  Had she even left the bureau open like that on purpose?

  It had occurred to me then that she was laughing at me. Perhaps she even planned to send Patricia to her room on some pretext, ready to catch me snooping like a thief.

  I had still lowered myself to my knees. I positioned myself next to her bed, ready to look beneath it, already picturing the box concealed there, surely the true reason I had gone poking around in the first place, breaking the rules, seeing what there was to discover.

  I had reached out and pulled back the valance and then stared at it – seeing not the box but the little smudge of blue ink marring the clean, cream cotton.

  Even now, I grimace at the memory. I hadn’t been worried that someone would guess what I’d done. How would they work it out? This wasn’t a fairy tale. Mrs Favell wasn’t Bluebeard, surmising from the smudge of blood on a key that the young wife had trespassed into the forbidden chamber. I had thought I could easily wash the ink from my hand. I can still hide the stain somehow, or come up with some excuse for its being there. A leaking biro, maybe.

  Would she know?

  I shake my head at the thought. Whatever had run through my mind didn’t matter: I had awoken.

  I had let the valance fall back into place, keeping any secrets it held. I’d stood once more and hurried from the room. I’d told myself that isn’t who I am.

  Yet even as I sit here in the car, I’m still wondering if the box had been there, within my reach. I’m wondering what’s inside. And I’m wondering if the fact of the bureau being open when I entered the room wasn’t so much an opportunity as something else: a distraction, maybe. Even a feint.

  I sigh, my breath adding to the mist clouding the windows, and sit back in my seat. Probably the box contains nothing of interest: jewellery, keepsakes, or as unlikely as it seems, old love tokens. At least this way I’m not disappointed.

  I run my fingertips over the papers still in my hand. I don’t want to return them to Mrs Favell’s unfeeling ownership. If they were mine, I’d read them over and over. While I was lost in their words I didn’t even think about anything else and now I don’t want to. I let my thoughts drift, taking me back in time, away from the present, and I turn to the next letter and lose myself again.

  24th September 1921

  Dear Mr Gardner,

  Thank you for your response, and indeed your good wishes. It is a salve to my heart, on one count at least, that you do not think badly of us for so precipitately deferring your visit.

  I shall take up where I left off: with the question of Charlotte’s sight. It is indeed the presiding concern of our household. Her right eye remains dark, and it is doubly unfortunate for she says her left eye is weaker, and so she has not only a shadow over all that she sees, but everything is less distinct than before.

  I have tried, quietly and gently, to speak to her of what happened, but she will not be drawn on it, save for one thing, to which I will return.

  I took her to Bradford to have her examined by an ophthalmologist. He could see nothing wrong and suggested it a kind of hysterical blindness brought on by extreme anxiety. I wonder if that is so? I hardly dare believe, for if such is the case her sight may be restored naturally. He said she would gradually see lights – but she shuddered at that, and he did not go on.

  Indeed, the three of us pass our days sunk into gloom, for though I almost allow myself to hope for recovery, Charlotte is adaman
t it will not occur; and thus far, bitter experience has proved her correct.

  Charlotte is resilient under her suffering, however. If I try to discuss it with her, or even if she catches me watching her, she smiles as if she is the one who needs to reassure me. She said to me, the key of her voice soft and low, that there are ‘worse things in the world’, and I knew that she was thinking of the loss of my son. How brave she is! He would have been proud of her forbearance. And at least she can still see little Harriet’s face – I know she takes comfort in that. More than ever before, she likes nothing so much as to have the child sit on her knee, and to rest her cheek against her golden curls. Such a wistful look comes across her face then – ah, but it is full of love as well as sorrow, and the former, I must believe, shall always triumph over the latter.

  It heals my heart to see them so, which is of inestimable relief, because I have worried incessantly. Charlotte does not wish to speak of the fairies, as I have stated, but I have pressed upon her that she must never return to the glen. If something else did befall her, how much more terrible would it be for something to happen to her good eye – how dreadful, to be cast altogether into the dark! And she says she will not go, but there is a terrible restlessness in her. I sense it beneath the surface, even when she sits over her sewing, tilting her head to see it the better, as if she were in thrall to something never far from her thoughts.

  I should return, now, to the single occasion when Charlotte has spoken to me of the fairies. It was late one evening, when I had, as is the way of old men, nodded off before the fire. Charlotte had retired some time before, and Harriet of course had been long abed. It must have been late because the fire was reduced to only a few fitful embers, one moment setting the room agleam, then plunging all into darkness. Somewhere without, an owl hooted mournfully about the house.

  I did not trouble with a lamp; I knew my way well enough. I went up the stairs, making sure not to knock the treads and make a noise about it. I did not wish to wake anyone, but it seemed someone was awake after all, for as I reached the passage the door halfway along it opened.