The Blood Dimmed Tide (18 page)

18

King of Pentacles

ON his home turf, Yeats was a master in the theatre of disorientation. His figure ghosted through the alleyways and side streets of Sligo town with an apparently aimless sense of direction, as though he were running blindfolded through a labyrinth. In reality, he was following a series of secretly rehearsed markers: a broken water pump, a tiny windowpane filled with the vivid greenery of shamrocks, a flaking statue of the Virgin Mary holding vigil in a damp gable wall.

A thin drizzle had been falling since we left the séance, thickening the visibility and soaking the spirit of the town’s inhabitants, forcing them to retreat within their shuttered houses. I hurried after Yeats, my brisk steps faltering at every watery crossroads, more alleyways spiralling off into the sodden gloom, my feet crunching and slithering as the cobbled pavement gave way to slops of manure and household waste.

At points along the journey, I glanced behind, looking for a telltale shadow, the sheen of a policeman’s uniform, or a face hidden beneath a low-brimmed hat. I kept imagining the lanky figure of Marley standing in darkened doorways, patient as a heron waiting for the right moment to strike at its prey, but the only form of life I saw was a solitary cat, which fled at my approach, a half-eaten fish head trailing from its mouth.

Yeats pushed on until he spotted the final mark, a small thorn bush growing from a rotten chimney. We turned the corner of a building that looked frozen in the act of collapse, and found ourselves in a narrow street of shops, dumpily built, their walls bulging like the sides of a boat, the eaves of their roofs barely at head-height. I stared into windows so dark they looked as though they had absorbed a century of shadows. A visitor unused to Irish ways would have glanced over the several dusty jars discreetly displayed behind the glass and not realised the buildings were shops at all.

A shout answered Yeats’ knock on the third door, and we stepped into what appeared on first impression to be a long, tightly packed wardrobe of unstitched greatcoats and brightly coloured dresses, but turned out on closer inspection to be a small but gruesomely packed abattoir. We pushed through the hung carcasses of sheep and pigs, sodden rags of flesh brushing against our heads. The sawdust-covered floor carried the imprints of bloody boots; offal smeared the distempered walls. The pungent metallic smell of something that was not quite organic hung in the air, which, mixed with the bloody smell of meat, made a sickly cocktail that had my stomach retching.

‘Why have you brought me here?’ I enquired between gasps.

‘To prove that Georgie is not the only one who can eavesdrop on ghosts.’

I miscalculated the height of a step and fell against a row of carcasses. They parted like a grisly curtain and revealed what appeared to be a keg of gunpowder, the source of the unusual metallic smell. Hurriedly, I followed Yeats to the back of the room, trying not to show my surprise. Yeats appeared ignorant of what lay concealed behind the carcasses.

The head of a little old man appeared from behind a butcher’s table with a ruffled look of surprise, like that of a priest disturbed from the inner sanctum of his confessional. His hair was stiff and wild, and his eyes had a slightly haunted look, as though the invisible world was enacting its strange myths just at the corner of his gaze.

‘My dear Mr Yeats,’ he exclaimed, rubbing his hands. He hurried to the door, hung up a ‘CLOSED’ sign and turned the key. ‘I have exactly what you’re looking for.’ He led us into a back room that was even smaller than the one we had left.

‘Who’s this?’ I asked.

‘Owen Ahearne.’ Yeats practically cooed when he said the name. ‘A butcher by trade, but he’s also Ireland’s greatest expert on phantasmal acoustics. In his youth, he studied under Madame Blavatsky’s guidance at the Theosophical Society. Last year I invited him over to London to instruct the Golden Dawn on his latest research on metallic mediums; man-made devices which can tune into celestial conversations.’

The back room was so small that standing in its middle, Ahearne could reach all the shelves that lined the walls. They were filled with Victorian apparatus and curiosities, new-fangled radio devices, and trumpet-like instruments, which collectively gave the room the impression of a secret listening station. The upper rows displayed books on magic, packs of illustrated cards and glass cases containing daggers and other heraldic weapons. From a lower shelf, Ahearne removed a long wooden box.

‘Does it work?’ asked Yeats.

‘I haven’t even opened the box,’ he said quickly. ‘Haven’t had a moment to see what’s inside.’ His repetition made me suspect that he was being less than truthful. ‘It arrived yesterday from the manufacturer in Germany and I immediately stashed it away. I was afraid the British War Office might orchestrate a raid on my shop.’ Ahearne’s face changed again. His eyes darkened. ‘Did you make sure no one followed you here? Did you take the roundabout route, the one with the secret markers?’

‘Yes, yes,’ reassured Yeats.

Ahearne eyed me closely. ‘Who’s your companion?’

‘This is Mr Charles Adams. He’s come to Sligo to clarify the circumstances of Rosemary O’Grady’s death.’

He turned to me with brightening eyes. ‘And what have you clarified so far?’

I divulged my findings. ‘That the police have yet to find a crime scene, locate any witnesses, or establish a credible murder suspect. Which is very discouraging.’

‘It suggests to me the police have no interest in solving the crime.’

‘Worse. The police say Miss O’Grady was an arsonist, a smuggler, a rebel, a woman of loose morals who was the victim of a botched initiation rite. They have suggested she might have been killed by a secret coven of her comrades who employed the sea as their efficient undertaker.’

Ahearne’s breathing grew shallow, his voice agitated. ‘I hope you’re not going to peddle this conspiracy and hide the plain truth.’

‘Which is what?’

‘That British agents were behind her murder,’ he wheezed with anger. ‘In the same way that they are behind everything sinister that happens in this country, from the smuggling along the cliffs to the spreading of propaganda that a German invasion is imminent. The only thing they don’t control is the movement of apparitions and faeries. At least not yet. Mr Yeats is trying to ensure that the land of spirits remains loyal to Irish nationalism.’

‘A revolution always needs its recruits,’ replied Yeats with a weak smile.

‘I have a well-placed informant that is involved in this case. He tells me that the Constabulary are planning a massive round-up of Republicans. Are you quite sure no one followed you here?’

‘Not even a cat,’ replied Yeats.

Ahearne’s reference to an informant puzzled me. It suggested that a British agent based in Sligo was in collusion with Republican networks. His use of the phrase ‘well-placed’ pointed a finger of suspicion at Grimes, or perhaps even Marley. In a way, it made sense that Maud Gonne and the daughters of Erin were operating under the protection of some influential individual with the British forces.

Ahearne eyed us suspiciously. ‘My confidant tells me that every second person in this town is in the pay of the British King,’ he muttered, ‘including you and Gonne. Or have you forgotten?’

‘If you mean the pension in recognition of my literary achievements, it’s hardly a fortune.’

‘But enough to ruin your reputation as an Irish nationalist.’

‘I’m not bothered about reputation. I’m more interested in character.’

‘If by that you mean contradictions and flaws then you have an abundance of character.’ The dry skin of the old man’s face wrinkled as he smiled.

‘Now you’re being cruel.’

‘I’m only insinuating that you might be human after all.’

‘And what about Maud? I don’t believe you understand her predicament.’

‘I understand she’s a rich Englishwoman still receiving her father’s war pension. Since the English shot her husband, she’s been dressing up in black and playing the martyr’s widow. The plight of the Irish is her hobby-horse, an adventure that keeps her from settling down to domestic life. Besides, I have it on good authority that she can’t be trusted.’

‘Who told you that?’ Yeats was indignant.

‘Her husband, Major John MacBride.’

‘But he was killed for his role in the Easter Rising.’

Ahearne grinned.

‘You haven’t tried to make contact with him, have you?’

‘I didn’t contact him.’ Ahearne tapped the wooden box. ‘He contacted me.’

It took a moment or two for the implication to sink in. The revelation brought colour to Yeats’ cheeks.

‘You’ve been using the listening device,’ he said. ‘You told me you hadn’t opened it.’

Ahearne blinked slowly like a preening cat and looked at Yeats with an insolent expression. ‘How could I resist?’

Yeats turned and gripped the door handle. ‘We must be on the move,’ he declared.

‘Where are you off to now?’

‘To Blind Sound with our German gift.’ He patted the wooden box. ‘By the way,’ he addressed Ahearne, ‘you shouldn’t believe everything the spirits tell you. Especially a vainglorious lout like Major MacBride.’

Early the next day we rode out of Sligo on two horses provided by Lissadell Estate, the wooden box strapped to the back of Yeats’ saddle like a cowboy’s rifle. We still kept watch behind us, and turned every time the horses twitched their ears. The only sounds we heard were the steady clop of the horses’ hooves and the trickling sound of water, which filled the high spring hedges like an immense whispering whose throat was every dripping bud and thorn. After half an hour of riding, we began to feel reassured that no one was following us.

‘Marley thinks Georgie is only pretending to contact the otherworld,’ I said. ‘He fears you have spent so long pursuing the spiritual that you have lost your common sense.’

‘Marley is infected with the Anglo-Saxon mind,’ replied Yeats dismissively.

‘What do you mean?’

Yeats stared at me and composed his reins. ‘We Celts and you Anglo-Saxons might look much the same, but we see things utterly differently, and we each live in our own worlds. The English have a tendency to analyse and simplify the world, which is why so many great men of science come from your stock, but you run the risk of turning the world into a children’s story-book with everything reduced to the simplest terms, everything separated and spelled out as clearly as possible. I suspect it is the result of your great need to explore and colonise primitive civilisations.’

Yeats had taken his mind off riding, and his horse seized advantage, pulling at the thick grasses that grew along the roadside. He yanked his reins, flicked his whip along the animal’s shoulder, and we ambled on.

‘The true Celt is magical by nature,’ he continued. ‘He does not try to reduce the mysterious to predictable laws. Nor does he lose sight of the pure, the elevated, and the spiritual. His world is a realm of changeless beauty and sensual ecstasy, a garden flooded with brilliant sunshine.’

I stared at surroundings that hardly belonged to the realm of the gods. We were in the gullet of a wet valley, the air thick with drizzle, the fields and hills turning several shades of green darker than anything I had witnessed before. Our sodden horses moved in a slow mechanical way, reminiscent of a dream, as though we had strayed into a rain-lover’s hallucination. The flowering blackthorn hedges floated by as high as our thighs, the white flowers lighting up the dismal scene. For a while, the only sound was the swishing of the horses’ flanks through the overgrown verges.

Yeats stopped ahead of me, and I was grateful for the rest.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, seeing the look of alarm on his face.

‘The horses are spooked.’ Beads of perspiration, not rain, formed on his brow as he struggled to keep the reins low on his agitated mount. The beast backed nervously into mine like a stubborn pony.

I saw what had made his horse stall. Over the hedge, a cordon of policemen were moving stealthily towards a dilapidated cabin in the middle of a stone-walled field.

‘Stay at ease,’ he said to me, as though I was the one getting fidgety and not the horses.

I turned my mount round and stared at the police raid unfolding before us. I recognised the burly figure of Inspector Grimes disappear into the darkness of the cabin and emerge moments later, rolling in front of him a train of wooden barrels. One of his men lit a straw torch and threw it onto the cabin’s rotten thatched roof. A flickering glow took hold. The crackling sounds of fire caused a fresh wave of agitation to pass through the horses. Yeats’ mount stamped its feet, swung its hindquarters round, whinnied and lifted its forelegs high into the air, its eyes widening with terror.

‘Give me some space,’ growled Yeats, fighting to control the animal, but he was losing the struggle. The animal bucked with its hindquarters and swung its powerful long neck to the left. Yeats slipped to the side, clung on for a moment, and then, in a moment of desperation, pushed himself off the rearing animal. He fell backwards into the ditch, his head swinging back sharply as he hit the ground.