The Blood Dimmed Tide Page 14

  I swerved on and off the shoulder of the cobbled streets dodging old women selling creels of wizened potatoes and churns of golden butter. The throng of horses and carts came to a halt for cattle and sheep, but trundled over flocks of banty hens. A milk-wagon horse expired outside the station, causing more delay, and then a bicycle transporting a tower of freshly baked bread collapsed in front of me.

  Anxious at being late, I bounded into the station, aware of the attention I was receiving from a group of men in belted raincoats and soft hats huddled at the station doors. I assumed they were undercover police checking for wanted men and women travelling in and out of the town.

  Fortunately, the train from Galway had just arrived. Among the disembarking passengers, I spied a man with a greatcoat which spread like wings as he stepped from his carriage. A soft black sombrero shaded his angular features and a voluminous silk tie flowed from his collar. His trousers dragged over his long feet as he strutted up and down the platform. In his wake stepped a woman with a clear, intelligent face.

  Even before greeting him and smelling his familiar odour of carbolic soap, medicine and old books, I was seized by a deep tug of loyalty and tenderness to my mentor, William Butler Yeats, which was quickly replaced by anger and self-pity that he had left me to my own devices in such dangerous territory. A few days previously, I had received a telegram that he and Georgie had travelled to Ireland and were spending a night or two with Lady Gregory at Castle Coole in Galway before making their onward journey to Sligo. Their arrival could not have come soon enough for me. I embraced him warmly on the busy platform.

  ‘I was afraid I might die,’ announced Yeats, ‘if I left it another day or even an hour to return to this wild coast.’ His nose ran in the wind but he appeared oblivious to it. A group of tired-looking soldiers shuffled by in grey uniforms, making his habit and gait appear even more eccentric.

  Georgie stood at his side like a silent guard. ‘Willie has had the cold but is much better today,’ she advised me. ‘He was worried you might have made contact with his ghost and secured its release.’

  Some of the crowd stopped to stare at Yeats and his young wife, as though they were royalty visiting their raffish kingdom of rain. On the adjoining platform, another train snorted with steam, anxious to leave. The carriages rocked as passengers boarded. The press of bodies, enthusiasm and noise threatened to swallow us up.

  ‘I trust you’ve had a comfortable stay at Lissadell,’ shouted Yeats.

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ I confessed, ‘this supernatural quest is like a fever. Everyone treats me as though I’m contagious. I’ve found Sligo to be one of the most hostile places I’ve ever visited.’

  The wheeze of the locomotive engine and its cloud of hissing steam drowned my words. In any case, Yeats did not appear to be listening. The tide of embarkation had captivated his attention.

  ‘What a wonderful sight,’ he declared. ‘No longer do I feel like a shadow. Or an exile. In London, everyone pretends to be living. But we’re all frauds, hiding behind our stacks of books in the British Library.’ He turned round and surveyed the throng with the look of a schoolboy who’d been detained too long from play by his teacher. ‘I’ve lost contact with Irish crowds, with ordinary people. I’ve lost touch with the forces working for Ireland’s freedom.’

  Georgie and I dragged Yeats along the platform. Behind us, a porter struggled with their substantial baggage, a collection of portmanteaus , boxes and trunks.

  ‘How did you spend your time in Galway?’ I asked and immediately saw some of the light depart their eyes.

  ‘By your disappointed expressions, I suspect your experiences were less than fascinating.’

  Georgie spoke for him. ‘We sat at countless séances in servants’ quarters, listening to blind old women say in Irish that the dead do not yet know they are dead.’

  Yeats’ words were tinged with a note of petulant complaint. ‘Unfortunately, gathering evidence that the soul lives on demands many lines of investigation. And many encounters with terrible frauds.’

  ‘Some mediums try to fool the world,’ I said. ‘Others just fool themselves.’

  ‘But I intend to put some distance between myself and this country’s charlatans.’ He stared at me, eyes glinting. ‘I have come straight to the source. What have you been up to, Charles?’

  ‘Peering into coffins and the minds of deranged Irish men and women. Do all your compatriots suffer from a monomania?’

  ‘Only the interesting ones.’ His shining eyes lighted on me and then darted away. ‘What about the scenery?’

  ‘I used to think I was a dedicated Romantic, but I’ve seen enough windswept beaches, brooding cliffs and enchanted forests to last me a lifetime.’

  ‘Any sign of our ghost?’

  I hesitated for a moment. The departing train, packed now, shuddered and began to slide along the platform.

  ‘A few clues and scattered traces,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Do you believe her soul has returned?’

  ‘I’m an occult investigator. What I believe or not is irrelevant.’

  Yeats nodded as if in agreement, but his attention was distracted by the sight of a new-looking cast-iron lamp post beside the station house. He became very heated on the subject of municipal lighting and the lack of ornament to the lamp posts that were springing up all over Ireland.

  ‘A curse on the municipal planning office,’ he declared. ‘What is the point of all this lighting, if everything it shines upon is ugly?’ He stared about him ruefully. ‘There was once a fine avenue of lime trees planted here. A curse to anyone who cuts down a tree or raises a building planned in a government office.’ Then he grabbed my wrist and looked at my watch. ‘It’s time we thought about dinner. There will be eggs and fresh butter at the hotel, but I wonder will we have meat. I shall insist that our ghost-catcher should dine on the finest roast beef.’

  We progressed through the crowd in fits and starts. Everyone seemed to be in our way. I spied a familiar figure leaning into a doorway that provided little cover, a tall, sinister sketch of a man with a black cap and a belted raincoat that flapped in the stiff Atlantic breeze like a warning flag. I felt a sudden stab of anxiety at the thought that I had become Wolfe Marley’s latest assignment. I fought the sudden impulse to flee to the nearest library and bury my head in some tome on ancient civilisations, anything to hide away from this world of intrigue and constant surveillance. I glanced back when we were a little further down the street, and caught his gaze in the reflection of a shop window. He watched me intensely, as though I were a thief mingling with innocents.

  When we arrived at the hotel Yeats and Georgie went up to their room and did not come down for lunch. I ate at the table alone, and after a further hour of waiting went upstairs in search of them. I knocked on the door of their room but there was no answer. I pushed it open. The dishes of the lunch they had ordered lay on the table, most of the food untouched. A cloud of incense wafted from the adjoining bedroom. Through the half-opened door, I made out the shape of Yeats kneeling in front of his wife. On the floor lay many loose pages of writing. His hands fluttered over the leaves, searching for a word or phrase. Now and again, he stared up at Georgie with pursed lips, his parchment cheeks glowing with two red spots of excitement.

  I stepped closer, not making a sound. There was something different about Georgie. An attentive wife, usually she and Yeats were in constant conversation. Even while engrossed in books, they would regularly stop to read each other favourite phrases and passages, like-minded companions on a quest towards spiritual and intellectual enlightenment.

  Sitting supine in an armchair that afternoon, she seemed to belong to no one, not even herself. Her hair had been untied, and fell about her shoulders. The skin on her temples shone translucently, and her eyelids were closed, the long lashes fluttering as though she had surrendered herself to some sort of trance. A page
full of writing fell from her hand. Yeats quickly placed a blank one in front of her and she began to fill it with a strange jerking scrawl. While one hand wrote, the other sat on her lap, opening and closing. She was whispering to herself in a voice soft and without any form of emphasis, in the tone of someone reciting a text by rote. At times her writing switched directions, looping backwards in lines that ran off the page. Something was being written through her; I stared in fascination. It was the first time I had witnessed the remarkable practice of automatic writing, a phenomenon that investigators believed was either a feat of free association or a mysterious communion with the spirit world.

  Yeats did not notice me as I entered the room, so engrossed was he in studying her handwriting. I lifted up a handful of stray pages and read a tangle of riddles, promises and entreaties interspersed with references to a collection of ancient mythologies. I found it impossible to decipher any meaning in this Byzantine puzzle of words, but I noticed how Yeats raked through the scattered pages, practically grovelling at the feet of his beloved, as though she held the crown of his poetic genius.

  Midway through some sort of astrological prophecy, Georgie stopped speaking and writing. Silence filled the room. Yeats stared at her with the look of a man abandoned in a labyrinth without a map.

  A light breeze wafted through the curtains of the window, unsettling the pages on the floor. The air smelt of the sea. A sheet fluttered against my foot. I picked it up and read what seemed to be a stream of gibberish. Then I noticed something else. At first, I thought I was mistaken. When I was convinced I was not, I folded the sheet and slipped it into my breast pocket without Yeats noticing. Its style closely resembled another sample of handwriting that was fresh in my memory.

  ‘No use having a theory if it tires you,’ intoned Georgie, her eyelids still closed. ‘The fatigue is the safeguard against excess.’ Then she began snoring softly.

  ‘Are you alright?’ I asked Yeats.

  He rose to his feet, waving the incense smoke away from his face. ‘Mr Adams, you must tell no one about what you see before you. Since you and I last met, Georgie has been blessed with a stream of supernatural messages, which come in the form of automatic writing. This afternoon, I have been priming the pump with the most difficult spiritual questions.’

  He sat down suddenly.

  ‘You don’t look well.’

  ‘Indigestion.’

  ‘From what?’ I glanced at their uneaten food.

  ‘The supernatural world. Georgie has filled thirty-two pages this afternoon alone.’ He picked himself up, unable to hide a smile of satisfaction on his weary face. ‘I never imagined that my young wife would become a conduit for hidden truths from the unseen world.’ He lowered his voice in a confidential tone. ‘Not to mention a fount of metaphors for my poetry.’

  I was stunned. Here was evidence beyond doubt that Yeats had successfully switched muses from the untouchable Maud Gonne to his sophisticated city-born wife. Yeats had made Gonne into a living legend with his poetry, the ‘perfect beauty’ with ‘cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes’. He had dared to dream that she might marry him; on several occasions he had proposed to her, and she had made the excuse that there were secret reasons she could never marry, before trampling on his ardour by marrying Major John MacBride, a nationalist hero in Ireland. However, Maud’s rejections had not prevented Yeats from arranging an astral marriage with her spirit, and in lectures to fellow Golden Dawn members, he claimed to have met astrally with Gonne during sleep, once appearing to her as a great serpent.

  ‘Come into my study,’ he said, leading me back into the main room. Any space in which Yeats emptied his trunk of books and manuscripts he called his study.

  ‘Let me offer you a glass of wine from the Pope’s own vineyard at Avignon.’ He beckoned me to an armchair and filled two glasses from a bottle he had ordered from the hotel cellars. He passed me a glass and sat in the armchair opposite. Raindrops twitching upon the windowpane filtered a sombre light across his face. I recounted my adventures since we had last met, including the sea journey to Ireland and my midnight meeting with Maud Gonne.

  Yeats’ pale face bore the touch of an old ghost. He ignored his glass of wine, and observed me with his hands clasped across his chest as though in solemn prayer. From time to time, his eyes shifted to the ceiling as though he were composing a poem from my jumbled narrative, picking out words here and there to weave into a flowing verse. Each time I stopped, he chewed his lips in concentration and then beckoned with his long-fingered hand for me to resume.

  ‘A few things in your account have caught my attention,’ he said at the end. Producing his pack of tarot cards, he laid a few suits before me. ‘I discern the hand of the Two of Swords, the blindfolded maiden. The blindfold represents your story’s complication and confusion, while the rippling waters suggest the need for intuition and perception.’

  I interrupted him. ‘A young woman has been murdered. This is not an exercise in reading the tarot cards. We should be looking for a motive and a murderer, not a suit of symbols.’ My voice was sharp and accusative, and he looked hurt.

  I went on to tell him about my strange encounter with Captain Oates, who’d seemed to be sitting down to dinner with a hallucination. Yeats nodded as I described the captain’s bizarre behaviour.

  ‘The captain is eating and drinking in the spirit world. This is promising evidence.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He is being driven to satisfy their hunger. Did the spirits leave any physical trace? Did you notice any manifestations of light, or strange smells?’

  ‘I noticed nothing like that. I believe the strange ritual was just a function of his delirium.’

  ‘Delirium? How can you say that?’ Yeats’ back straightened and his face grew paler. ‘If Captain Oates communes in such an elaborate fashion with a ghost might that not be evidence of its existence?’

  ‘It is not evidence if only Captain Oates hears and sees it.’

  ‘Who are you to determine what is evidence and what is not?’ His voice grew shrill. ‘You assume that Oates is suffering from madness and therefore you discount his evidence. Just because you are unable to witness such phenomena does not mean they do not exist.’

  ‘I accept that. But how can we verify Oates’ vision in an objective and scientific manner? Words can argue anything, but they do not make an unreal thing real, or an untruth truth.’

  ‘The universe extends far beyond the realm of human perception and scientific explanation. All we can do is grapple with symbols to dramatise the reality outside space and time.’

  ‘What kind of symbols?’

  He paused momentarily. ‘Let us say that for the sake of an analogy, Captain Oates observes a rainbow and comments on its splendour to his companions. Where does that rainbow come from?’

  I blinked with uncertainty. ‘We know that rainbows are formed when sunlight hits water spray in the atmosphere.’

  ‘Yes. But where does it come from? It doesn’t just appear out of nothing.’

  ‘From the rain and sunlight.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are we talking about a higher deity?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I’m at a loss, then.’

  ‘What we can say is that Captain Oates’ rainbow, like his ghost, is the coming together of certain conditions at a certain place and time. Water vapour, light, his eyes and his consciousness. The same is true for his ghost.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘You understand perfectly. Rainbows and ghosts do not really exist in the physical world, in the sense that they can be touched or contained in any way. They have no existence independent of the set of conditions that make them visible to the beholder. Do you understand that? If there are five people observing a rainbow, then there are five rainbows. And if they all turn their backs, all five rainbows
will cease to exist. The same is true, I hold, of ghostly manifestations.’ The heat left his cheeks. ‘Now, are there any further points of mystery in your narrative that you would like me to penetrate?’

  I handed him Rosemary’s notebook, but kept the photograph of Gonne in my pocket, not wishing to distract him. I explained how I had found it hidden in her room. He took time to flatten out the crumpled, slightly damp pages.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ I said after a while.

  ‘Obviously she is trying to hide some secret information.’

  ‘What sort of information?’

  ‘Unfortunately at this point we do not possess the cipher to translate the code.’

  ‘How shall we obtain it?’

  Yeats shrugged. ‘I have come across many ciphers designed to protect the secrets of the ancients and their Apocrypha. What I have learnt is that codes are usually assimilated from the environment of the code-maker. Until I learn more of Rosemary’s environment I am powerless.’

  ‘The list of names sounds like code words for people or places.’

  ‘I’m not a horticulturist but the first two are names of roses. Perhaps they were the secret names of her lovers.’ His brow clouded as he stared at the page. ‘Indefinite possibilities emerge.’ He tapped his fingers on the open page and stared into his glass of wine for a long time.