The Blood Dimmed Tide (2 page)

After a few yards, he made them stop. A strange sound came from within the coffin, as though a set of fingernails were scratching the wood. Now that they were beyond the roar of the sea, the sound grew more distinct. He leaned closer to the coffin’s damaged corner and listened carefully. He realised the sound was too regular to be that of a living thing. Something mechanical and frail, a gadget of some description, constantly scraping out a message, a code, with the same two sounds. He paused, realising what it was. An icy finger of fear touched his heart. A clock or a pocket watch, he thought. Still ticking, still telling the time. But what was it doing inside a twenty-year-old coffin?

‘Set it down and open the lid,’ he ordered the men.

Their rifle butts made a dull, sickening noise colliding against the metal clasps, gouging the wood. They kept hitting, harder and harder, until the clasps clattered free. The sentry lifted off the lid and they all stood back in surprise.

The captain smelled a combination of the ocean’s salt, rotting sea creatures and a stench of death that drove deep into his nasal passages. The chamber within was lined with disintegrating velvet upon which lay the slim body of a woman in a dress, her face covered in a black hood decorated with a hem of red and black roses. He removed the hood. It was a real face staring lifelessly upwards. Not the face of a nightmare or a decomposed corpse but that of a pretty young woman. From a fold in her dress, a pocket watch slipped out. It had Roman numerals and a moon face on the front. The captain checked his own watch and noted that its time was accurate.

‘Dear God,’ said one of the men. ‘It looks like Rosemary O’Grady. I danced with her two nights ago.’

The sea seemed to move far away, stunned by the sight of the dead girl. The roar of the waves receded. The captain’s eyes swam over her body. Blood had seeped from wounds to her hands, dark red rents in her translucent skin. He had also seen her, a few nights previously, wading out with strong strides into the sea. It was the servant girl from Lissadell House. A feeling of deep unease made his stomach queasy. What was he to do now?

Minutes passed. No one moved. The sound of the pocket watch filled the air.

‘Suffocated in the coffin or murdered first?’ asked the sentry, lifting a perplexed expression to the captain.

‘The slash marks to her hands might suggest suicide,’ he replied, avoiding looking at the girl’s face.

‘Suicide or signs of resistance?’ The sentry squinted at her bloated hands.

‘Suicides and murder victims aren’t generally found in coffins.’

‘Coffins aren’t generally found washed up on beaches.’ He glanced at the captain. ‘An inexplicable tragedy.’

‘We’ll have to leave the body here for the police.’

‘We can’t leave it here like a piece of driftwood.’ This time he stared into the captain’s eyes. ‘We should take her to the priest and have her body blessed.’ Gone was any trace of the deference he should show to a superior officer.

‘You shall do whatever I say.’

The sentry’s dark eyes emptied as the captain pulled out his revolver and levelled it at him.

2

Ace of Rods

IT was because of an eccentric Irish poet residing in London during the third year of the Great War that I became a ghost-catcher, a post that had me alternating my evenings between titled hostesses’ dinner parties in Mayfair and Chelsea, and hushed séances in the grimy parlours of the capital’s more humble streets. Both worlds had their own ingrained horror. At that time, London was in the throes of a supernatural paroxysm. While gigantic towers called skyscrapers soared into the air one after another in bright cities on the other side of the Atlantic, across the English capital fantastic energies were equally at work, only on a more ethereal plane. After more than one thousand days of war, grieving wives and mothers were turning in their droves to séances and a host of different spiritualist movements, searching for messages from their lost husbands and sons.

Less than seventy miles away in France, men with grimy uniforms exhaled their final breaths in foxholes and filthy burrows, while back home lights were dimmed in sitting rooms as anxious relatives took up their listening posts. Mediums, mesmerisers and hypnotists emerged from the back-streets with all manner of theatrical props: Ouija boards, moving tables, listening trumpets, mysterious lights, magic lanterns and crystal balls, all to help the population confront its grief and feed an insatiable desire for contact with the otherworld.

London at the dawn of 1918 was a city burdened with grief, while I was a twenty-four-year-old medical student given that rare chance afforded to unhappy youth, the opportunity to follow someone who believed in the extraordinary. After studying the human body and all its known diseases for three years at the city’s University College Hospital, I longed for the magical simplicity with which I had seen things at the age of five. I mourned the ignorance I had left behind and all that I had barely understood before my world had been blinded by the rigours of science and all its enshrined explanations of the universe.

The object of my devotion, my leader in this spiritual quest, was a celebrated poet and mystic, who at that time presided over a shambling crowd of artists, spiritualists and mediums that congregated in the dusty halls of the British Library and drab clubs along Kingsway.

I had grown tired of my fellow students and their indifference to the mysteries of life, heartless men who would never learn to see that life was magical, so obsessed were they with their material possessions, their occupations and their expectations of city life. So when this free-thinking genius of an Irishman spoke one evening in a university reading room and described how it was possible for the mind to travel through space without leaving the body, that he had observed dark towers and the bodies of holy men and women adrift in the air, that the stars and the phases of the moon told secret stories of the human heart, and that our spiritual companions floated beside us in an aquamarine sea of ether, I seized the chance to pledge myself to his secret society devoted to the occult. I had witnessed enough bodily suffering. Instead, I wished to feast on the beautiful terrors of the invisible world.

My days at University College had been numbered since the death of my close friend, Issac Wilson, during an end-of-term examination. He had complained to me of nausea beforehand but had dismissed it as indigestion, utterly unaware that it was a warning sign of a heart attack, and that he was about to die. His last memory of this life was of a stuffy university hall, the afternoon light shuttered by heavy curtains, the scratch of pens churning out the lurid horrors of human disease and decay. I wondered how unhappy his dying senses must have felt with what he could still see and hear, and then it struck me that perhaps he had felt the opposite, perhaps he had experienced happiness at his release from this silent suffocation.

For several nights after Issac’s funeral, I awoke in a cold sweat to see the figure of my dead friend standing at the foot of my bed, gazing at me with a melancholic smile. In each of the visitations, he raised a glass of wine and toasted the disappointments and defeats of the life that lay ahead of me, the mistakes I would make, and the ignorance of my heart. The note of tenderness in his ghostly voice did not reassure me; in fact, it terrified me. In the weeks that followed, I was afflicted by fainting fits and night terrors. I tried to get a grip on myself, but found it impossible.

I saw the tragedy of the professional life Issac had managed to escape, where everything loses its originality and repeats itself from day to day. From that point on, I began to regard my professors as men who had lost their vitality and curiosity, a school of scientific fanatics, who made their students’ lives unnecessarily tedious and dry in the name of intellectual advancement while secretly serving their own vanity and conformity. I began to labour against the taboos that restricted the range of permissible enquiries within their laboratories and tutorial rooms, the institutional inertia that imprisoned our imaginations and stifled creativity.

I stopped going to my lectures and began researching the existence of ghosts, and the possibilities of the human spirit travelling on astral planes. One day in the British Library, I stumbled upon the vast literature that underpinned occult societies such as the Order of the Golden Dawn. My reading of how the Christian Cabbala and Eastern religions had traced the pathways between the individual consciousness and the cosmos appeared to support the ideas that I was developing through my own private experiences. The hunger to explore life’s greater mysteries became so intense that it gnawed at my insides, but my professors dismissed my interest in the spiritual world as an excess of youthful morbidity, and an unfortunate waste of my intellectual talent.

‘Why do you want to study ghosts, Mr Adams?’ they asked. ‘Is it to evoke the memories of those you mourn?’

I told them it was to help formulate a theory of life and death, one that might marry scientific research with the latest discoveries of psychic phenomena, but secretly, in my heart, I carried a more selfish desire. I wanted a great adventure, to take a gamble in life, to gain secret knowledge of the universe and the human heart, not by the well-worn path of scientific study, but by walking the bridge that joins the visible world to the invisible.

This was how on the 12 February 1918, I and Edmund Dulac, the painter and fairy tale illustrator, came to be hurrying after the tall, animated figure of William Butler Yeats, as he dissolved into the murky vapours of a freezing London evening. Perhaps it was my overheated imagination, but I believed I could detect the sound of invisible wings beating around us as we hastened along Holborn Street.

A thick fog had descended over the city’s great river and its environs. Dimly lit lamp posts loomed before us like the blackened stumps of trees in no-man’s-land. The clatter of cantering hooves sounded close by on cobbles, but their source was invisible. Even the dogs we met were huddled together for comfort. I ran ahead of Dulac, anxious that the poet might disappear through a door into a mystical world and leave us behind in a city that in its grief had succumbed not just to fog but to a collective blindness.

However, Yeats walked faster than I had ever seen any person walk, so fast he seemed more a wraith than a man. He did not need to consult a map. He seemed to know the murky side streets of the city the way a boat’s navigator knows the backwaters of a river. He knew by instinct where the dark banks of houses twisted left or right or plunged completely from view into rubbled wasteland or rat-infested marsh. For him there was no fog, just a bright sense of his own elation as he hurried towards his destination.

We struggled desperately to stay up with him, especially Dulac, who was neither lean nor tall, but the mist kept congealing around Yeats’ shadowy figure.

He stopped repeatedly, but as soon as we caught up with him, he would take off before we had time to catch our breath.

‘Stay with me, Charles and Edward,’ he shouted.

The frenzy of the supernatural pursuit had entirely consumed his patience. He had the look of a man prepared to knock on every door in the city in search of a portal to the otherworld.

Our eyes led us towards the myriad lights of Regent Street, but out of the darkness, Yeats shouted ‘no, not that way’, guiding us down through Edgware Road and its rows of trees coiled with fog. He stopped and regarded us with his elegant, gaunt features. Spidery shadows of twigs and branches formed a tapestry on his face. I realised he had left the house in such a haste he had forgotten his hat.

‘This is not the time or place for a leisurely stroll’, he said, his face wearing a wounded look, as though we had disappointed him.

Dulac complained that Yeats was moving too quickly for his less athletic companions. ‘One who is born in mist always feels most at home in it,’ he grumbled, referring to the poet’s cherished Sligo childhood.

Instantly, Yeats’ scowl vanished, and a smile returned to his soft mouth. He stared at us with amusement.

Dulac pleaded with him. ‘Talk to us about the joys of married life and give us half a chance to get a breath.’

A few months previously, the poet had married Georgie Hyde-Lees, after a whirlwind romance spurred on by the rejections of his lifelong love and muse Maud Gonne and her twenty-three-year-old French daughter, Iseult Gonne.

‘A case of young love,’ said Yeats with a glint in his eye. ‘Georgie has miraculously helped me recover my youthful bloom.’

A foggy London night can make acquaintances feel as though they have been known to each other since boyhood. The open look in Yeats’ eyes gave me courage to pry further.

‘But what of your greatest muse, Maud Gonne?’

‘Sadly our paths diverged the more I became involved with the occult.’

Something in Yeats’ soul seemed to have opened. His face looked suddenly vulnerable, in spite of his superior age and position in society.

Dulac pressed further. ‘If it had not been for your spiritual investigations, would she have agreed to marry you?’

‘I’m not sure,’ replied Yeats. His shoulders slumped a little and his chest shook slightly. ‘My worst failing in life has been my timing. When I finally gathered the boldness to propose to Maud, it was already too late. For three decades, I have kept my passions fixated on her classical beauty, in the belief that by limiting the number of women who arouse me, I might eliminate the potential sources of frustration. But Maud’s charms have weighed heavily on me, trapping me in a trance of longing. Now I look back on all those years of restraint and wonder why? At the age of fifty-two, am I finally discovering the excesses of youth?’ He waved his hands helplessly. ‘Maud was right. If we had married, it would never have worked for either of us. We only understand life when we find our true spiritual soulmate.’ A volume of condensed air erupted from his mouth in a sigh of frustration. ‘Anything can be endured if that is the case.’

‘And have you found yours in Georgie?’

‘That is a question I mean to ask the spirits tonight,’ he said, and then he was off again, lurching into the fog, leaving Dulac and myself surrounded by closing walls of opalescent grey and our own muffled breathing.

The fog instantly absorbed the poet’s retreating footsteps. Unable to distinguish much in our surroundings we ran blindly after him.

A few minutes later, the sharp sound of someone knocking at a door brought us back to our bearings and senses. We were at a rundown terrace in a side street somewhere behind the culverts and warehouses of Spitalfields, the sort of street where no gentleman should allow himself to be seen, especially at night. The fog cleared just enough to reveal Yeats’ tall figure standing at a door, a light from within illuminating his face.

‘Where is the spirit room?’ we heard him ask in an urgent whisper.

‘Follow me,’ replied a woman standing in the hallway. She was tall, and dressed in a simple black gown. We followed the poet into a hall dominated by a wrought iron stairway. The shadows inside were different from those on the fog-bound streets. Unattached. Transient in the flickering gaslight. They appeared to have a life of their own as we followed the woman up the stairs. The rooms we passed were empty of human life and so quiet we could eavesdrop on the rest of the terrace. Through the walls we heard the voices of defiant children and scolding women running their impoverished households with shouts and slammed doors.

The woman led us into a room on the third floor and sat us at a table lit with candles. She wore no make-up and no jewellery apart from a metal cross with a cluster of red gems in the shape of a rose. Her hair was the colour of polished silver and tied up without a single loose strand.

We followed the sceptic’s precautions of not giving our names or asking for any particular spirit. Yeats offered to use his set of mystical cards to clear the room of any negative influences, but the woman declined.

On the table before us lay a case made of Moroccan leather. A set of small phials nestled within, containing, I suspected, laudanum. Dulac leaned forward enthusiastically and drank from one of the bottles.