The older daughter, Lily, has also contracted the disease and will not survive long, according to the family physician. But the true horror is this. Lily has refused to leave her deceased sister’s side. She sleeps beside the body. She holds the dead child’s hand. She speaks to her as if she were alive. The mother is too overcome with grief to intervene.
The father is weak from his own illness. They sent for me because Lily requested it. The child wants a photograph of herself with her sister so mama can remember us together. I tried to explain that we could create a traditional memorial portrait, but Lily became hysterical. She demanded the photograph show both of them alive and together.
She made me promise to pose them in a way that would hide the fact that Rose was deceased. I am deeply uncomfortable with this deception, [clears throat] but the child is dying and her parents are too broken to refuse her anything. I agreed. God forgive me. I agreed. I photographed the two girls in the garden, positioned carefully so that Rose’s condition would not be obvious.
I posed them holding hands as Lily insisted. The older girl never stopped crying, but she tried to hold still for the exposure. She whispered to her sister throughout, telling her to stay calm, stay still just a little longer. The younger girl, of course, remained perfectly still. I completed the work in half an hour and left as quickly as possible.
The father paid me double my usual rate and begged me never to speak of this. I will honor that request. But I will never forget the sight of that living child clutching her dead sister’s hand, trying so desperately to pretend everything was normal, trying so desperately to keep a promise she should never have been asked to make.
Helen sat back, her hands trembling. The photograph suddenly made terrible sense. This wasn’t a deception meant to fool others. It was a gift from a dying girl to her griefstricken parents. A lie told out of love. A final attempt to give them one memory that wasn’t drenched in tragedy. Lily had known she was dying.
She had known this photograph would be the last thing she ever did. And she had used it to create an illusion, a moment frozen in time where both Davey’s daughters were together, alive and whole. Lily Davies died 3 days after the photograph was taken. Helen found her death certificate and medical records. The attending physician, Dr.
Samuel Morrison, noted. Patient declined rapidly following prolonged exposure to deceased sibling. Scarlet fever complicated by exhaustion and grief. Patient refused all food and water in final 48 hours. Last words. I kept my promise. Lily was buried beside Rose on June 11th, 1895. The joint funeral was attended by over 200 people.
The Boston Globe reported that Elellanar Davies, the girl’s mother, collapsed during the service and had to be carried from the church. Helen searched for what happened to the parents after their daughter’s deaths. The records were heartbreaking. Eleanor Davies never recovered. She was admitted to Mlan asylum in August 1895, diagnosed with acute melancholia and nervous prostration.
She spent the remaining 12 years of her life there, mostly unresponsive, staring at a photograph she kept in her room. According to asylum records, it was a portrait of her two daughters in white dresses holding hands. The photograph Helen was now examining. Robert Davies sold the Beacon Street house in September 1895.
He moved to New York and tried to rebuild his life. He remarried in 1899, but the marriage was short-lived. His second wife left him, citing his obsession with the dead. Robert died in 1904, age 49, of heart failure. His obituary mentioned his first family only briefly, preceded in death by his daughters, Lily and Rose, and his first wife, Ellaner.
But the photograph’s journey didn’t end there. Helen traced its ownership through the decades. After Elellanar’s death in 1907, her few possessions were sent to her sister Margaret Hartwell, who had been estranged from Eleanor during her lifetime. Margaret took one look at the photograph and understood immediately what it showed.
She wrote in her diary. Ellaner kept this photograph in her room at the asylum for 12 years. She would stare at it for hours, whispering to her girls. I understand why now. Lily is alive in this image, but Rose is already gone. Eleanor was looking at the moment between the moment when she still had one daughter left, trying to pretend she had both.
It’s the crulest kind of comfort. I cannot keep it. It’s too painful, but I cannot destroy it either. It’s all that remains of those poor children. Margaret stored the photograph in a trunk where it remained for 50 years until her death in 1957. Her daughter Catherine inherited it and kept it hidden, never showing it to anyone.
Catherine died in 1998, and the photograph passed to her son, James Hartwell, age 73. James was the one who finally sent it to the historical society in 2021. Helen managed to track him down through genealogical records and called him. I’m 94 years old. James told her, his voice weak, but clear.
My mother told me about that photograph when I was young. She said it was cursed, not by magic, but by love. She said it showed what love looks like when it refuses to let go. Even when letting go is the only mercy left. I’ve carried that photograph for 23 years since my mother’s death. I’m dying now. Cancer.
I don’t want my children to inherit this burden. Let history have it. Let someone else remember those girls. He died two weeks after sending the photograph. His obituary made no mention of the Davy’s sisters or the photograph. Dr. Helen Foster presented her findings to the Boston Historical Society’s board in April 2021. The response was divided.
Some members felt the photograph should be displayed as an important historical artifact illustrating Victorian attitudes toward death and childhood. Others argued it was too disturbing, too private, too painful to share publicly. Helen advocated for a middle path. Preserve it, document it, but restrict access. Make it available to researchers, but not as a casual exhibit.
Respect the tragic history it represented. The board agreed. The photograph was cataloged, digitally preserved, and placed in the society’s restricted archives. A detailed historical file was created documenting everything Helen had discovered about the Davies family. But Helen couldn’t stop thinking about one detail, the hidden inscription.
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