The Blood Dimmed Tide (12 page)

I clambered onto the horse. I could feel a slick of warm sweat on its flanks. It had been riding for some time. Clarissa slipped her boots out of the stirrups and I felt them dangle by my shins. With her encouragement, I stepped into the stirrups. Then she handed me a hood to wear.

‘I’d rather see where I’m going,’ I said.

‘It’s in your interests to be ignorant of your destination.’

‘People will think you’ve kidnapped me.’

‘That is the intention. The Admiralty’s spies are everywhere.’

Reluctantly, I pulled on the hood and adjusted my seat. No sooner had the stirrups taken my weight, than Clarissa pushed into the horse’s undercarriage with her free heels and the animal set off at a brisk canter.

I remembered the feeling I’d had earlier that afternoon, the thrill of the chase along overgrown paths. The thrill returned, only this time it was undercut by an incipient panic. In my mind’s eye, the horse’s gallop took us on a terrifying journey past crashing waves full of drowning girls, trees haunted by ghosts and mad soldiers, spies skulking behind shadows. When the branches of a thorn bush whipped my hood, I mistook them for sharp, grabbing fingers threatening to pull me into a bottomless grave.

11

Queen of Swords

After an hour of swift and reckless riding, we reached our destination. I pulled off my hood. We had drawn up to a building that was like a small church or schoolhouse. The windows were blacked out with heavy cloth. My eyes, made keen by the darkness of the hood, picked out the small fluttering passage of bats against a gauzy moon. A bell rang out one o’clock from somewhere nearby.

‘Make the most of this visit, Mr Adams,’ said Clarissa. ‘It will certainly open your eyes.’

She led me to a red door with a heavy brass handle. ‘Wait here,’ she advised, while leading the horses to a stable at the side of the building.

After several minutes, the door opened to the sound of women singing. ‘Ah, my English sorcerer,’ said a voice with a slight hint of mockery. ‘Don’t be shy, Mr Adams. We’re not going to cook you.’ She waved me into a hallway. ‘Men usually feel a little nervous when I introduce them to my handmaidens, the Daughters of Erin.’

My hostess had recognised me first. She had exchanged her Red Cross uniform for a handsome black velveteen cloak and a more theatrical look, her make-up showing to strongest effect her seductive eyes. It suddenly dawned on me that the tall figure framing the doorway was none other than Maud Gonne. She moved back a little but her eyes invited me closer. What I found most disconcerting about her gaze was the confidence that blazed from within. I stepped into the hallway. Her presence seemed to swell and fill the narrow space.

‘What role are you playing tonight,’ I enquired. ‘Devoted nurse, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, poet’s muse or a martyr’s widow?’

‘A woman has many parts to play, many masks to hide behind,’ she replied with a smile.

When she stepped to the side, the first thing I noticed was the communal air that pervaded the building. Young women sat gossiping on the stairs and corridor. In the large room beyond, more girls were seated at a long table, engaged in some sort of embroidery work. I detected a look of wariness on a few of their faces. Not for the first time since my arrival in Ireland, I felt like an outsider.

Gonne clapped her hands as if calling a meeting to order. ‘Girls, we have a visitor,’ she announced.

The Daughters of Erin stopped their conversations, put down their needles, and turned to watch me with mute, questioning looks. In terms of their cosmetics and accoutrement, they were dowdier than their middle-aged mistress, who was dressed and made up, it seemed, to strike a series of breathtakingly heroic poses. By contrast, they wore no make-up and their hair was brushed in simple styles or cut short like members of the Suffragette movement. Their faces were natural-looking, full of youth and untainted, shining with innocence. With their pastel-coloured loose-fitting smocks, they almost looked like prisoners or members of a grim workhouse. The place certainly smelt of one; a mixed aroma of polish and disinfectant filled the air. On the wall above, a large portrait of Padraig Pearse, the executed rebel leader, glared down upon the proceedings.

‘Daughters of Erin,’ said Gonne at the top of her voice. ‘Why do we believe in an Irish Republic?’

‘Because we believe in God,’ chanted the room, ‘and the message of the glorious martyrs he has sent us.’

‘What must we serve at all costs?’

‘The will of the Irish people, who are struggling for freedom.’

‘Daughters of Erin, I say that freedom is never won without the sacrifice of blood. Our chance is coming. Your motherland calls you; she has been the land of suffering long enough.’

Then they launched into a round of prayers.

‘Good,’ said Gonne when they had finished. ‘Now, return to your tasks.’

‘What happened to your invalid soldier?’ I asked as she led me on a tour past the table of seamstresses.

My question disconcerted her. ‘That was my son, Sean,’ she replied. ‘In disguise. The War Office had barred us from returning to Ireland. Sean’s in Dublin now, training with the Fianna, the Republican brigade for young men.’ The note of maternal concern in her voice sounded genuine.

‘Is that why you’re back? To start a war?’

‘I came back because of politics. Irish politics. Which pulls you in, bit by bit. Until you forget everything else.’ She spaced out the words for dramatic emphasis, back in performance mode. ‘Look around you, Mr Adams. The Fenian leaders had no idea how popular our movement would be among the women of Ireland.’

Like a drilled regiment, the girls bowed their heads before us and picked up their cloths. Their fingers were on the move again. Needles dipped and glinted in the gaslight. Thimbled thumbs moved across the grain of the emerging embroidery. I watched transfixed as a wrinkle of thread seemed to veer off from the round nimble fingers of a young girl and grow into the shape of a rose.

‘The men of the Easter Rising thought it impossible to convince the fairer sex that bloodshed was necessary,’ she continued. ‘When I started the society, I thought it would take at least a generation but the thing was a runaway success from the start. For the first time, we had the scent of power in our nostrils. It has made us fanatics.’

A sinister quiet fell over the room. Staring at the obedient rows of pallid-faced young women, it struck me that Maud’s society seemed twenty years out of date, redolent of the Celtic twilight, rather than the new dawn of women’s liberation and political revolution. I wasn’t sure if the Daughters of Erin were political pioneers or reactionaries, living in the past or the future.

‘We know our strength now,’ declared Maud. ‘Our soul has grown large, and it will continue growing. We’ve discovered our courage, and that will be enough.’

‘Your rebels are producing very pretty embroidery.’ I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. In spite of the concentrated effort of the seamstresses, I had the impression that the gathering was more about performance than industry.

‘This is only a very small part of our operation,’ explained Maud. ‘I have forty girls here. Most of them are farmers’ daughters, or servants at the big houses. We get the odd retired schoolteacher volunteering to take classes. The girls start in the crafts room, making gifts and artefacts to raise funds at our shop in Dublin. Then they move on to intelligence work, devising coded letters and signals.’

She escorted me into another room, where a magic lantern show was projecting images of evictions and tenant persecutions. An audience of young women watched bailiffs set light to thatch roofs while shabbily dressed survivors with grimy faces huddled like families of scarecrows in lanes and hedgerows.

‘The photographs were taken in Donegal at the end of 1894,’ Maud informed me. ‘I witnessed the persecutions personally while on a riding tour with my cousin and my faithful great Dane, Dagda. The weather was cruel and the going hard for two young women and their pet dog. Poor Dagda’s paws were cut to pieces by the sharp stones.’

The projector made a crackling sound as the images flitted across a gauze screen. From a gramophone, a voice, thin and faraway sounding, recounted the miserable statistics of Ireland’s brutal landlord system. I could detect a wave of rage building within the audience. Their dresses rustled as they shifted with agitation, like the sound of a dry wind rising to fan a fire. I had seen charlatans use magic lanterns containing photographs of dead people to imitate ghosts and induce terror in unsuspecting relatives, but I had yet to see one used so dramatically for political purposes. The lantern was initiating a new battalion of recruits, one that might not be content organising rummage sales and knitting uniforms for their male counterparts.

Maud led me out of the room and into a drawing room where a frugal tea was being served. She turned her head towards me and a smile floated across her face. Her eyes shimmered. Our tour of the building was not as tricky as the terrain we were about to negotiate in words. Maud was using her charm like a serene beam of light to steer me across both. She was a political activist and a self-styled rebel leader, but it was clear she had learned all her posing on the theatre stage.

‘Do you approve of what we are trying to create, Mr Adams?’ she asked. ‘The revolutionary changes in Irish society?’

‘Only if they work,’ I replied. ‘But that’s the problem with revolutions. They often fail, don’t they?’

‘Only because they are sabotaged by the opponents of change.’ She examined my face with a frown. ‘I fear you feel no sympathy for our struggle.’

I was now certain that this was more than a propaganda visit, and that Gonne wanted something from me, something that she herself realised might be difficult to extract.

‘As far as Irish politics is concerned I’m impartially curious,’ I told her. I wondered in what possible way she believed I might serve the interests of a women’s militia.

‘If you’re planning to stay in Ireland, you must choose a side. Or do you have the modern compulsion that demands you should please everyone?’ She was so close I could feel the heat of her face.

‘If I take sides, I’m less likely to discover the truth.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Political activists are easy to cheat and fool. They’ve already bought into a cause, a fixed set of heroes and villains. Their objectivity is blown. For instance, they cannot afford to believe that one of their own might be a murderer. A neutral doesn’t care one way or another.’

‘How can we trust you then if you won’t take sides?’

‘You wouldn’t have brought me here if you thought I was untrustworthy.’

She bit her lip. Before she could come up with a response, I pressed on. ‘I need the Daughters of Erin to furnish me with some important answers.’

‘What sort of answers?’ For a brief moment, a cloudiness appeared in her eyes, like the first roughening of the horizon at the approach of a storm.

‘Was Rosemary on a rebel mission the night she was killed?’

She gave me a cold glance. ‘You are forgetting the terms of your instructions.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Willie didn’t send you to Sligo to pry like a common detective. It’s your role to make contact with Rosemary’s ghost. To follow the clues she has left you and identify her murderer.’

‘If you’re concealing information as to what she was doing that night surely that’s obstructing the wheels of justice?’

‘I wouldn’t go that far, Mr Adams.’ She smiled thinly. ‘It’s not up to me to pass sensitive information to you or the police, who are, after all, the agents of the Crown. The RIC is a military force armed with rifle, bayonet, and revolver, and trained to act as an army. They are taught skirmishes, volley firing and defence against cavalry, exactly like an infantry battalion. It’s a matter for the Daughters of Erin to decide what information is released on its operations to the enemy.’

I held my tongue. It struck me how easily a murderer might find shelter within her organisation.

‘Rosemary was as much a martyr as the leaders of the Rising,’ said Maud. ‘That is all you need to know about that matter. She was an important member of our movement. She ran great risks to advance the cause. We believe she was betrayed.’

‘Are you suggesting she was informed on and murdered by the Crown forces?’

‘We can’t be sure.’ Her tone grew less overbearing. ‘But, in the circumstances, there is no other satisfactory explanation.’

‘Who could it have been?’

‘We’re hoping you will help us find out.’

‘The Daughters of Erin is a secret society with rules. Who makes them?’

‘Some are mine. Some were devised by Countess Markievicz. But not all of them. The rules are dependent upon our members. We’re organised along democratic lines.’

The countess had been born Constance Georgine Gore-Booth. A close friend of Gonne, she had been arrested as a sniper during the Easter Rising, and saved from execution by her aristocratic connections.

‘What about initiation rites?’ I asked.

‘We took some advice from the Golden Dawn. From Willie, in particular. He was interested in what we were doing and made some suggestions.’

‘What sort of suggestions?’

‘Oh, impractical stuff. Passwords and swords and ancient symbols of goddesses.’ She eyed me warily. ‘All nonsense, of course. The sort of thing that has become the hobby of a certain type of educated Englishman. A means to hide their nondescript dullness. I used to attend the meetings of the Golden Dawn. I found it comical watching all those drab middle-class men dress up in cloaks with daggers. Then I discovered that their passwords were the same as the Freemasons, and I washed my hands of them completely.’

‘There’s a theory going round that Rosemary was killed during a botched initiation ritual.’

‘Complete claptrap.’

‘You can’t shed any light on the possibility?’

‘Why on earth would the Daughters of Erin put one of its members in a coffin?’ She gave a half-hearted laugh. ‘What would be the point?’ She turned to a tea stove and began preparing a tray. ‘Added to that, if such a ritual took place, nothing would have persuaded a girl like Rosemary to allow herself, consciously, to be mixed up with it.’

‘You said consciously. Perhaps that’s the point.’

A small cyclonic disturbance in the stove distracted Maud’s attention. The hot water began to steam. She busied herself with pouring it into a teapot. I took advantage of the interlude and explored the darker confines of the adjoining rooms.