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.
