The Blood Dimmed Tide (25 page)

28

The Moon

THE SCENE around me changed completely. Gone were the protesting crowds, the narrow streets, the dark throngs of policemen, the severe political speeches, and the glowing-eyed presence of the captivating Maud Gonne. I was standing in a bathing costume, half-immersed in the icy waters at Blind Sound, enduring the slap of the waves against my belly, and gazing in cold amazement at Clarissa as she emerged from a vigorous swim.

‘I thought you wouldn’t come,’ she said. Her eyes were bright with exhilaration.

‘Neither did I.’

She beckoned me to wade in further but the cold had rooted me to the spot. In addition, I felt a natural reluctance to follow her signals. This black rose and her sister rebels had not only fooled me, they had almost led me to my death. I had mistaken them for angels, but in reality, they were soldiers.

‘I still haven’t got over how you deceived me,’ I complained.

‘Life is full of deceptions.’

‘If you want to leave Sligo, I can take you with me. Just give me a day or two and I’ll arrange your passage to Liverpool.’

‘You know very well that I wouldn’t survive long, so far from home.’

‘Longer perhaps than in a country swathed in blood.’

‘I’d rather die happy, fighting for what I believe in, than pine away in a foreign city.’

In one swift, agile movement, she plunged beneath a breaking wave and disappeared from view. I envied her sense of destiny and political vision. Now that she had been released from prison, she had no special interest in the supernatural, or in reaching new levels of consciousness. She knew who she was, and her role in the fate of her nation. She also belonged to an enchanting corner of Ireland, one that I was reluctant to leave, this south-roaming beach, the slow-paced sea, the great hanging slab of Ben Bulben.

I turned to look back at the shore, and made out the figure of a young man standing by the rocks. He was wearing clothes like those worn by my fellow students at London University College. For a moment, all I could think of was the journey I had made from the drab examination hall where my fellow student Issac had died to this remote, western shore. Once, my friend’s appearance would have filled me with fear and despair, but that time was over. The figure waved once, twice, and then disappeared.

I turned back to the grinning young woman as she re-emerged from the waves.

‘You still have one more ceremony to complete,’ she said.

‘What are you proposing? To initiate me into the Daughters of Erin?’

‘Close your eyes,’ she ordered.

I obeyed and felt her hand push my head under the next wave.

‘It’s time you left behind the spirit world for good, Mr Adams,’ she said. The surf engulfed me immediately, and I encountered the deepest of underwater silences. I opened my eyes to a flash of contained luminescence, my arms and limbs flailing, creating spirals of bubbles, which twisted like smoke into ever changing shapes. I experienced a sense of weightlessness and peace, as though the sea were spinning an illuminated web around me, one that encompassed the haunted, sweet netherworld of the moon, the ebb and flow of its tides, and all the intersections between the visible and invisible worlds. Their forces combined to drag me downward like a funnel, a whirling gyre, but then, just as I thought my lungs might burst, the tumbling ceased, the swell abated and the sea loosened its grip on me.

When I resurfaced there seemed to be more sunlight dancing on the face of the waves. I gulped for air, my blurred vision taking in Clarissa’s sloping shoulders, her pretty eyes and mouth, the skein of iridescent crystals covering her skin. For several moments, we floated in a silk-like sea of aquamarine that looked as though it might hold us together for an eternity. I felt a quickening in my heart, as if my soul had returned to my body, pulsing with enthusiasm to live. For months, it had been lost, a captive of dark labyrinths and tunnels, searching for other wandering souls, other wounds.

‘The ceremonies are no more,’ she shouted, just as another wave caught our bodies, lifting us in its long rolling roar of thunder, and carried us towards the dark shore.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

After leaving Sligo in the early Spring of 1918, William Butler Yeats and his wife travelled to Galway where they supervised the reconstruction of Thoor Ballylee with the intention of turning it into their family home. Over the summer, they filled it with hand-hewn unpolished furniture, designed by a Dublin architect, as Yeats was determined his castle should be free of ‘ugly manufactured things’. They also settled back into serious spiritual work, devising the philosophical system that would underpin his most famous later poems and form the basis of the book
A Vision
.

In a burst of sexual exuberance, Yeats abandoned contraception and began showing his young wife the ‘Mars’ in him, as he euphemistically put it. With pregnancy hanging in the air, they undertook urgent horoscope casting, and soon Yeats was contacting the spirit world again in the hope of securing his male heir.

On February 26, 1919, Georgie gave birth to the first of their two children. Yeats wrote of the news immediately to his closest friends. He recounted proudly how Georgie had not cried at all through the pains. She had burst into tears only when told it was a girl.

Yeats exhorted his spirit guides for an explanation, but they were unavailable for comment.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my agent Paul Feldstein for his tireless work, Ion Mills, Claire Watts
, Frances Teehan
and all the people at No Exit Press for doing a wonderful job in bringing this story to life, Martin Fletcher for his helpful suggestions, and Adrian and Fiona McFarland for helping to provide the inspiration for the book’s horse-riding adventures. I’d also like to acknowledge my debt to various biographers of WB Yeats and Maud Gonne, in particular, Susan Johnston Graf for
WB Yeats: Twentieth Century Magus
, and Brenda Maddox for
Yeats’ Ghosts
. My knowledge of Yeats was also deepened by reading Richard Ellman’s
Yeats:
The Man and the Masks
, Roy Foster’s
WB Yates: A Life: Volume 1:
The Apprentice Mage
, and Margery Brady’s
The
Love Story of Yeats and Maud Gonne
. I should point out that any errors or outright lies woven into the story are purely my own. I’d also like to thank Damian Smyth and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for their financial support and assistance. Finally, I extend my deepest gratitude to my wife, Clare, my children, Lucy, Aine, Olivia and Brendan, and to Paul and Kerri – the beaches are eternally for you.

Copyright

This ebook edition first published in 2014

by No Exit Press,

an imprint of Oldcastle Books,

PO Box 394,

Harpenden, Herts, AL5 1XJ

www.noexit.co.uk

All rights reserved

© Anthony Quinn 2014

The right of Anthony Quinn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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ISBN

978-1-84344-465-7 (Print)

978-1-84344-466-4 (Epub)

978-1-84344-467-1 (Kindle)

978-1-84344-468-8 (Pdf)

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