The Blood Dimmed Tide (8 page)

A splashing sound from the side of the house made Denver kick off his horse. Cautiously we moved through the undergrowth. Someone had pulled tapestries and curtains half-way through a broken window. The figure of a young man was bent over them, emptying the contents of a tin of paraffin.

‘There he is,’ whispered Denver. ‘The enemy is in sight.’ He pulled an oily rag from his pocket and unwrapped a revolver. He balanced the weapon in the palm of his hand, stretched his arm out and squinted down the sight.

‘You can’t go shooting people for trespassing,’ I whispered back.

Denver bristled like a thwarted hero. ‘Can’t you smell the paraffin? He’s trying to set the place alight.’

‘I didn’t realise I was riding with the local militia.’ My voice was tense.

‘Someone must uphold law and order,’ he said regarding me with scorn.

He then took aim and squeezed the trigger. At the last moment, the horse stepped sideways. Denver’s arm swayed and the gun went off in the wrong direction.

The would-be arsonist turned round and saw Denver take aim again. He dropped the paraffin and leapt through the shrubbery. In one effortless bound, he had jumped onto a piebald pony. A crack reverberated through the air as he struck the animal furiously on its haunches, and the pony bolted off in a burst of mud and leaves. It took the measure of a garden path in one stride and crashed through the trees on the other side. Although the rider was hunched low, I could see he was small and slight, little more than a boy. Denver’s horse barrelled after him, and my horse took off in pursuit, a volley of bent branches whipping against us.

We chased him for half a mile or so, ducking branches and sweeping over ditches, leaning the horses one way and then the other, and then the forest ran out and I could smell the Atlantic. We were on faster, bigger horses, but our quarry was a better rider. He took chances on his pony not even Denver would have attempted in a sane mood. We followed him leap for leap until we were within earshot of crashing waves.

A seemingly insurmountable hedge of wild hawthorn separated us from the sea. The rider turned his animal towards the sound of the crashing waves, slowing a little to size up the hedge. He glanced back at us. A black scarf covered his mouth and a cap was pulled low over his head. Steam rising from the pony’s body hid his features. Nevertheless, I caught a glimpse of a pale, youthful face that resembled the ghost of a truant schoolboy. The rider sped his animal up, leaned out of his saddle, and cleared the hedge as neatly as a salmon leaping upstream. He gave a high-pitched whoop of delight and disappeared across the sand.

My horse faltered back, half-kneeling, its eyes twisting behind. I glanced at Denver’s face as his beast reared into the air. The veneer of arrogance had split, revealing a darker more troubled look.

‘I’m not going to force the horses on,’ he shouted. ‘Something about this beach spooks them to the core.’

We dismounted and picked our way through a gap in the hedge onto a sandy cove. The rider was long gone. Only his hoof marks in the sand remained, and the action of the waves was already erasing them.

We walked to the sea’s edge. The air was explosive with the sound of the ocean. The wind roared, and the surf pounded and sucked back against rocks that were so overgrown with seaweed they resembled neglected tropical gardens.

‘This is where they found the body,’ shouted Denver.

The din of the crowding waves was magnified by the shape of the cove, which curved deeply into a set of cliffs. I could make out the dark mouths of caves, which looked accessible only by thin terraces of rock.

‘The cove is known as
An Sunda Caoch
, which means Blind Sound. It’s always been a haunted place. Several boats have overturned here and drowned the fishermen as they tried to come ashore. They say that at twilight you can see the apparitions of boats battling the waves, as well as strange lights shining from the cliffs.’

I stared at the forward rush of each breaking wave, mesmerised by the sight and sound of their violent crashing. The tang of salt and crackling seaweed stung the air. I thought of Rosemary’s coffin lifted in the palm of those powerful waves, carried high like a boat towards heaven.

‘Come,’ shouted Denver. ‘You haven’t travelled seven hundred miles just to watch waves breaking on a beach.’

8

King of Wands

AFTER working from his bed all morning on his latest manuscript, Yeats rose shortly before noon and lunched on cold beef, cheese and claret. Keeping in mind his doctor’s warning that his body, like a singer’s, was an instrument of his art and needed to be rested accordingly, he returned to his bed for an afternoon nap.

He woke again in the early evening. Confident that he had built up enough strength to see him through the coming ordeal, he slowly pushed himself further up in his bed. With his head supported by a pillow, he began his breathing exercises. Then he rotated his feet clockwise and anti-clockwise, and did the same to his wrists. The final ritual of his daily resurrection involved consulting an astrologer’s chart. When he had reassured himself that the omens were favourable, he climbed tentatively out of bed.

He dressed in a soft green jacket with a yellow shirt and dark bow-tie that were colourfully out of fashion, and with a sense of gathering urgency, said goodbye to Georgie at the front door. A few months ago, she would have embraced him but now she merely offered him a cheek to kiss.

‘Promise me you won’t stay out after midnight,’ she pleaded.

Yeats stooped to kiss her. ‘You worry too much, my darling.’

A hackney cab brought him from his door to a terrace house in a quiet part of East London. A mongrel dog lapping from a puddle was the only sign of life in the street, half of whose buildings were boarded over or crumbling into rubble and weeds. The sweetish smell of horse dung hung in the air. The dog regarded him warily before padding down a side alley.

Yeats opened a gate into an empty, grass-filled courtyard, which looked to be a nightly haven for vagrants. At the opposite end was a weathered black door leading to a shuttered house. The most secretive meetings of the Golden Dawn were sometimes held in this anonymous building, although they were never called meetings. The society’s occult rituals and rules made its gatherings very different from the conventional social meetings of gentlemen’s clubs and literary circles. The Golden Dawn had been formed in London in 1888 as a secret society of mystics devoted to the practice of medieval and Eastern rituals of magic. Through carefully guided steps, divided into nine sections of three degrees or orders each, its members were encouraged to advance to the highest levels of wisdom, from the earthly to the heavenly, where the darkness disappears and the golden light of understanding shines through.

The order’s origins were linked to the discovery of a coded manuscript, claimed to have been lost for centuries, which turned up on a bookseller’s barrow in Farringdon Road, London, in 1884. Yeats was particularly captivated by the idea of a powerful lost book, as well as the order’s cabalistic, Masonic and astrological symbolism. He had successfully progressed to the highest inner levels of the order, and hoped to attain the title of magus or priest, which would recognise him as a human conduit of wisdom from the supernatural to the natural.

A man dressed in the uniform of a butler ushered Yeats upstairs into a room on the third floor. The five men seated within were used to assembling in more luxurious environments, in plush sitting-rooms overlooking the Houses of Parliament, or fine manors in the countryside where the extensive parkland provided a necessary buffer against prying eyes, and the more adventurous members of the Order could entertain the society’s female novitiates.

The room in which they had gathered was so secretive only a handful of elders within the Golden Dawn had ever set eyes upon it. The library shelves and walls were masked in dark tapestries embroidered with iridescent symbols and Latin words woven into Celtic knots. A series of allegorical pictures ran the length of the room, depicting a man torn in two by an eagle, wild beasts, hunchbacks and jesters with gaping smiles. The central tapestry depicted a large diagram in the shape of a wheel where the phases of the moon were intertwined with a golden apple, an acorn, a silver cup and a wooden wand. Upon the ceiling was an immense rose wrought in mosaic and coloured with red and black petals.

The five men were seated on a platform lit by candles in the middle of the room. At the centre was a hollow, in which an opened coffin lay. When Yeats entered, the men were muttering together. The mood was not good-humoured.

The eldest of the men, who went under the title Ruling Chief, rose with the help of a walking cane, and greeted Yeats. He had a trimmed white beard and shining eyes, and his hand gripped the ornate ebony head of his cane. He seemed eager for the poet’s company, while his companions remained in the shadows cast by the bright oval candle flames.

‘My dear Willie, we were beginning to worry you had been kidnapped.’ A smile played upon his lips.

‘Why would that cross your mind?’ asked Yeats.

‘These are dangerous times, you know. Troublemakers and spies have overtaken the city, while abroad good men are dying in their thousands. Killing on such a grand scale is very contaminating and strenuous on the collective consciousness.’ He tapped the cane on the floor. ‘Are you ready for the ceremony?’

‘Ready enough.’

The leaders of this occult movement set their own rules of conduct, devised their own rituals, but sometimes they went a step too far. The last ceremony Yeats had taken part in, the enactment of a fake hanging, had left him so overwrought that afterwards he had to rest in a chair for two days without reading or trying his mind in any manner.

‘Enacting one’s death is hardly an experience one looks forward to,’ murmured Yeats.

‘You should think of Lazarus who was four days dead before being miraculously raised.’

Very slowly, because beginnings are more difficult than endings, Yeats undressed the upper half of his body. The old man slipped a hood over his head, and with the help of the butler, Yeats laid himself out in the coffin. A bell tinkled, and a stiff curtain of tapestry that had been concealing an inner door shifted and into the room slipped a young woman wearing a white dress bordered with a hem of red roses.

‘I hope you are not afraid of ghosts, my dearest,’ said the elderly man.

She smiled weakly in the flickering candlelight.

‘More afraid of flesh and blood,’ she whispered.

The Ruling Chief understood her comment as a reference to the fate of the last handmaiden, a sixteen-year-old girl called Celestine.

The old man’s voice sank. ‘That was an unfortunate accident. Caused by an excess of zeal from a member who has since been banished from the society.’

The girl moved to the centre of the room. Her dress was bound tightly around her body, hiding her legs in a long winding fishtail.

‘This is the last time I shall say this,’ said the elderly man, addressing both Yeats and the girl. ‘You may leave now if you wish, but not afterwards.’

Yeats remained silent.

‘I don’t wish to leave,’ said the girl. ‘I only wish to understand.’

‘There is little to understand, only the pleasure in forgetting. All you have to do is surrender yourself to the mysteries of the Golden Dawn.’

If the girl felt any fear, it was hidden by the look of devotion that fell across her face. She picked up a dagger that lay beside the coffin.

‘I am not a coward,’ she said.

‘And neither is Mr Yeats, our new guardian and resident of the coffin.’

The girl’s face was flushed with concentration. Wielding the dagger, she traced the sign of a pentagram in the air above the coffin. The room was hushed as she drew the shape of a cabalistic cross on Yeats’ torso, and then covered his upper body in a white sheet. Her eyes were glazed yet still in touch with what was happening in the room. She wore the gaze of someone simultaneously exhilarated and admired, afloat on desire and reverence. The intensity of her face made her seem full of light, while the men in the armchairs looked drained, opaque in the shadowy darkness. For a moment, the roles were reversed. Now she was the master of the ceremony.

‘You are the angel wielding a flaming sword,’ breathed the old man. ‘You have been entrusted with the closing of the lid.’

It made a heavy creaking sound as she brought it down over Yeats’ body. Shaking slightly, she climbed on top of the coffin and stretched her slender form along its length. She stared at the ceiling and its rose mosaic.

The old man stepped towards the centre of the room and raised his hands over her body.

‘Mr Yeats has climbed the Order’s ladder of knowledge,’ he intoned. ‘He has mastered the alchemical principals of sulphur, mercury and salt, the suits of the tarot pack, and the symbolism of the Cabala. He has applied himself with distinction and diligence, extending our knowledge of the pre-Christian hermetic rituals of swords, passwords and paces.’ He paused dramatically. ‘Let him arise again.’

A bell chimed, and the girl rose and lifted the coffin lid.

Once Yeats was out of the coffin, he was made to stand with the hood still on his head, while the girl tied three strands of golden rope around his waist.

Guided by the old man, Yeats intoned the oath.

‘I solemnly promise to persevere with courage and determination in the labours of the Divine Science. If I break this, my magical obligation, I submit myself, by my own consent, to a stream of power, set in motion by the divine guardians of this order.’

The girl dipped the dagger in wine, and held it before Yeats, as he swore to keep his role as guardian secret all of his life, and never to reveal any of the Order’s teachings to a non-initiate.

The old man rose and kissed the girl’s hand. ‘You were marvellous my dear,’ he said. ‘You may return to the inner sanctum. The Order wishes to welcome its new Frater and Adept Major.’

He removed Yeats’ hood and helped him to an empty seat in the shadows, where the four men surrounded him. A judge, an admiral, a doctor and a professor; each of them representing the highest levels of their professions.

The Ruling Chief handed a glass of brandy to Yeats, who took a drink with a trembling hand. The Chief raised his glass and proposed a toast to the newest guardian of the Golden Dawn. The men clinked their glasses and waited for the colour to return to Yeats’ face.

‘What message do you have for us?’ asked the professor.

All five believed that Yeats was a world-master at fantastical imaginings. Their experiences had taught them that messages and images could well up from a source deeper than the individual memory or subconscious, from a universal store they called the
Anima Mundi
, the soul of the world. The pool of wisdom offered guidance toward resolving personal dilemmas, as well as bestowing a rich source of imagery for poets, writers and painters.

‘The spirits revealed an image to me,’ replied Yeats. ‘A man whipping his own shadow while a blood-dimmed tide advanced towards him.’

‘What does it signify?’

‘The imminent destruction of civilisation.’ Yeats’ words were hushed but they filled the tapestry-lined room.

The others fell silent.

‘What do you mean?’ asked the professor.

‘Isn’t it obvious what is happening to society? Last night, for instance, I was set upon by two vagabonds. Only the quick assistance of a passing policeman saved me from a violent attack. Further afield the situation is worse. Much worse. Europe is reeling from the effects of war, while in Russia the threat of Bolshevism is on the rise. War has broken out between the sexes. Not only are women doing the jobs of men, but millions will never have husbands. Ireland is on the brink of rebellion and the Protestant Ascendancy has lost its grip. Civilisation and the old order are dying.’

The five men remained silent. Yeats was a poet, respected for the intensity of his vision. Sometimes, however, the fervour of his words verged on intellectual intimidation. They studied the poet as he sat slumped in his chair. His face was still very white and his eyes had a look of dark desperation. Perhaps the initiation rite had taken its toll on his delicate sensibilities, they decided.

The professor changed the topic of conversation. ‘We have read your essay on the dissensions of the Greeks and Romans, and we have made our corrections and amplifications.’

‘Then you should understand the threat posed by the coming chaos,’ replied Yeats. ‘All civilisations come to an end when they have given their light like burned-out wicks.’

‘Forgive me,’ said the admiral. ‘But what does a poet know of the modern age and these threats to society.’

‘Poets can see things others can’t. Elements falling into place. A design. A shape in the chaos of the age.’

‘And what have you discerned?’

‘That after an age of truth, mechanism, science and peace comes an age of freedom, fiction, evil and war. Our age has burned itself to the wick.’

‘What do you propose we do?’ asked the judge.

‘That is a question I keep asking myself.’ Yeats’ eyes glazed over as his thoughts turned inward.

‘Perhaps Mr Yeats is correct,’ said the Ruling Chief. ‘Perhaps we should consider the terror that is to come.’

The doctor interrupted. ‘I fear that we are too timid at wielding our influence and embracing these unfolding events. Like a deferential husband reluctant to consummate his marriage.’ He glanced pointedly at Yeats. ‘What I see in society is not an end but a transformation. This is no accidental pattern. We are witnessing the growing pains of democracy and social conscience. The Order should support these changes, such as the cry for political reform, rather than oppose them. We must join the modern world rather than hark to a dim and glorious past.’