As the weeks went by, her behaviour changed insidiously, with agitation, anxiety, and disjointed, rapid speech, sometimes incoherent. She told her hosts not to be alarmed if she went into a trance, even if it lasted for as long as a week. She was not to be disturbed if that should happen and they were on no account to call a doctor. Not an early riser, a creature of the night, one morning she put in an appearance just before dawn and the crofters noticed the unusual pallor of her face and the way in which her hair, not plaited, lay loose in disarray on her shoulders.
Hysterically, she told them that she had to leave the island immediately. Rambling, she spoke of a rudderless ship that went across the sky. Although they explained carefully to her that it was quite impossible to leave Iona because it was Sunday and the ferry did not run on the Sabbath, she packed up all her belongings in a great hurry and made her way to the landing place. There she stood, a forlorn figure, surrounded by her baggage, gazing out across the Sound towards Mull as if willing a boat – any boat – to appear and take her off. None came and she dragged herself back to the croft, a picture of dejection, and locked herself in her room. (That was when, perhaps, with hindsight, they should have sent for a doctor.)
After a few hours, she emerged, and she seemed to have aged by years, but to have become resigned, passive. She talked quite normally, and perhaps she ate something before going off to bed, but when they knocked at her door the next morning, they found that she had vanished. Whether her bed showed that she had slept at all is not recorded, but her clothing and jewellery were in a neat pile at the bedside. The crofters raised the alarm when she had not returned by noon, and the islanders joined in a search until the light failed early in the evening. (The island covers about 2,000 acres and is rocky on the west coast, which explains the difficulty. Norah’s special hideaway was presumably the first place they went to, but she was not there.)
The night was apparently bitterly cold and the frosted island was bathed in moonlight. At dawn, the search party was out again with sticks and dogs and it was a collie that found her. It barked until they drew close and its hackles must have bristled. She was two miles from the village (which may mean two miles from the croft where she lodged) in a desolate area of peat-bogs. Her body lay spread-eagled on the heather, naked except for a long black cloak with occult insignia, and a black-tarnished silver chain around her neck. Her face was frozen in a rictus of terror. It looked as if she had been running away from something, because the skin of her toes and the balls of her feet were torn, but her heels were unhurt. A long, steel knife was clenched in her hand, and her fingers had to be prised open to take it away. Underneath her body they found the rough outline of a cross gouged out in the turf by the knife. Later, there were reports of blue lights in the area, and there were rumours of a man in a cloak and a sighting of the dead woman on the day when she disappeared.
This, then, was the remarkable scenario and I thought of the stories of MR James and the idea of something that whistled coming at her across the moors. I also wondered how much contemporary journalists had embellished and improved the details of the death scene, and it was obvious that Alisdair Marshall had had his own doubts. Continuing with his account, a doctor gave heart-failure as the cause of the sudden death, although he did state that he had never seen circumstances remotely like it before.
Round about this time, over the dinner table, I mentioned the case to our doctor friend, and, off the top of his head, he suggested poison, but, to my shame, I could not tell him if there had been a chemical analysis of the organs, and I was not even at all sure that there had been a post-mortem! He told me further, that a sound diagnosis of heart-failure cannot be based on external observation alone. I did know that there is no coroner in Scottish law, and that the procurator fiscal for the district, if not satisfied with the findings of the doctor called to the scene, would have ordered a post-mortem.
The crofters built a small cairn on the spot where the body had lain and in due course a modest memorial was placed in Iona’s Reilig Odhrain burial-ground among the carved tombstones of old kings, Scottish, Irish and Norwegian: made of white marble in the shape of a small, open book it bore (and surely still bears) the inscription:
N.E.F. Died 19th November, 1929. Aged 33 years
I could not make out if this was a plain memorial merely commemorating the event or an actual tombstone. If the former, then the implication was that relatives had claimed her body. I was a little concerned about the date – Died 19th November – because, by reference to my reckoning calendar, I saw that the 19th was a Tuesday but the inference from the available account was that death had occurred on the Monday night, even if the body had not been found until the Tuesday.
In his discussion, Alisdair Marshall went on to say that the world of the occult was in ferment and ‘psychic murder’ was mooted. A leading figure, Dion Fortune, pointed out that the body had been badly scratched (but was this so?) and that the aforesaid Mrs Mathers had been linked to known cases of ‘astral attacks’, the victims of which always bore scratch marks. Marshall had previously noted that a ‘current of will’ was supposed to make an offender against the Golden Dawn’s oaths of silence, secrecy and loyalty fall dead or paralysed, as if blasted by lightning.
By now, without making any great claims for originality, I was beginning to see Norah Farnario’s mental state as the key to the mystery. I could not help wondering if she had a history of mental illness as suggested by the flight to the island, strange behaviour, and withdrawal from society. On the other hand you might say that she was a typical, archetypal hippy, festooned in beads, drawn to nature, although really from a sophisticated metropolitan background. Even so, as she became increasingly incoherent she could have been entering into an acute attack of paranoid schizophrenia, perhaps not her first such illness.
I think we must accept, however, that a person accustomed to rituals and spells designed to raise up spirits might reduce herself to a state of terror not associated with the disordered thinking, delusions and hallucinations of actual madness. There is a whole literature attached to the connection between psychic beliefs and insanity. In the 1870s, Dr Forbes Winslow caused consternation by claiming that 10,000 lunatics were held in American asylums as a direct result of their dabblings in psychic matters. This figure was found to be entirely false, and the doctor spent the rest of his life eating his hat!
Turning now to Richard Wilson’s Scotland’s Unsolved Mysteries of the Twentieth Century (Robert Hale, 1989) I was impressed and delighted to find that he had managed to interview Calum Cameron, then in his seventies, the son of the crofters with whom Norah had boarded, and still living, apparently in the same cottage with its four dormer windows looking out over a sandy inlet. He was twelve years old at the time, a good age for the preservation of memories. As is quite usual when there has been a mysterious death in remote surroundings – how much more so on a holy island – the local inhabitants resist our need for myth-making and pooh-pooh our suggestions that there must be more to it. Turning his weather-beaten face away from the questioner and ‘looking to the heavens in exasperation’, Cameron was out to deny and minimise. It was just an ordinary kitchen-knife, harmless, and there was no cross carved in the turf. ‘She was just digging in the ground, maybe trying to get to the fairies inside. She was a disturbed woman, that’s all. And she died of exposure as the doctor said.’ I was reminded of an expedition to Lower Quinton, Warwickshire in the early 1960s, when my husband and I were received with caution and our questions about the death of Charles Walton on Meon Hill in 1945 were parried with practised incredulity. His body had been pinned to the earth by the prongs of a hay-fork and black magic had always attached to the case.
However, Richard Wilson’s interviewing and research made a substantial contribution: Norah’s father was an Italian doctor, and when she first came to Iona (he too says in 1928) she was not alone, but accompanied by an unnamed woman friend, who did not stay. Her motivation for the pilgrimage to Iona was her
belief that she had been there in a previous reincarnation. She had two lodgings on the island: first, with her friend, she stayed with a Mrs Macdonald, and then when she was on her own, she moved away to Traighmor, the more isolated Cameron croft about half a mile from the village. She was often seen sitting down by the shore, writing. By night, she went out on lonely walks to study the mounds and stones. ‘She seemed, almost, to be asking for trouble.’ Her favourite haunt was, in fact, Fairy Hill, a large green mystic mound. Here, Richard Wilson’s admirable historical research brought up the story of a prying monk who witnessed St Columba in communion with angels – ‘Clad in white garments, they came flying to him with wonderful speed and stood around the holy man as he prayed.’
A housekeeper, Miss Varney, was traced after the death, to the ‘family home’ at Mortlake Road, Kew. Two days before that death, she had received a note from her mistress in Iona, which read ‘My dear Miss Varney, Do not be surprised if you do not hear from me for a very long time. I have a terrible healing case on.’ The housekeeper further said that her mistress used to ‘moan and cry out piteously’ if prevented from healing a person whom she thought she could cure. Sometimes she went off into trances for several hours, and once she embarked on a 40-day fast, but was persuaded to give up after a fortnight. She had no time for orthodox medicine – possibly because of some difference with her father, Wilson suggests.
As the strange lodger became more agitated and incoherent, she did not draw her curtains because she believed that she could see the faces of previous patients of hers in the clouds. She would write voluminously (nonsense?) by the light of the two oil lamps far into the night and be so exhausted by dawn that she would go to bed for the rest of the day. The Camerons did want to call a doctor but she would not let them. Some of the villagers were sympathetic and thought she had a ‘persecution complex’ but, says Wilson, some of their guesses ‘were, and still are, less than respectful.’ (Interesting.)
Calum Cameron had some good recollections of Norah’s last Sunday and Monday. ‘She was a’right on the Sunday night’, but when his sister took up breakfast to her room there was a smell of burning, and the grate was filled with burned papers and pamphlets. The oil lamps near her typewriter were still alight. The bedclothes were ‘turned down from the pillows.’ Nothing appeared to be missing. All her clothing was still there and her watch, rings and hairpins lay neatly on the dressing-table. The Camerons immediately searched the neighbourhood and ‘whistled for her along the shore’. After Monday’s fruitless search, on the Tuesday, the police on Mull were involved.
Richard Wilson quotes from the Glasgow Bulletin a report which describes the body as lying in a sleeping posture on the right side, the head resting on the right hand. A knife was found a few feet away. There were a few scratches on the feet, caused by walking over the rough ground. Otherwise, there were no marks on the body. (Whether or not the body was naked is not clear, from this report, but there is such an implication in Wilson’s narrative.) The Bulletin states that ‘The doctor who was called gave it as his opinion that death was due to exposure.’ The Oban Times states that ‘Her body, which was unclothed, was discovered lying on a large cross which had been cut out of the turf, apparently with a knife which was lying by... ‘
Wilson’s findings were that Norah was interred three days after being found, in the graveyard at St Odhrain’s chapel in the grounds of Iona Abbey. Therefore, the small open book memorial does mark a real grave. Through a reading of some papers found in her room, an uncle and aunt (with no mention of parents) were contacted in London but no relative was able to undertake the journey to the island, and a solicitor was sent up to make the necessary arrangements, very much as in a Sherlock Holmes story. ‘Practically every soul on Iona attended her impressive funeral’. (A post-mortem was seeming even more unlikely, although the doctor could have made an investigation in some shed on the island. I did not know how ‘local’ the doctor at the scene was – he could have come from Mull or beyond – or if another doctor was called in from Glasgow later on.)
Brian Lane’s The Murder Guide (Robinson, 1991) was next out of the Whittington-Egan stacks (I was relieved to see that he preferred the later date of 1929 for Norah’s arrival on the island – such details fret when unresolved) and I saw at once that he was most interested in the occult aspect of the case, with a knowledgeable realisation of what she had been up to in London. He asked rhetorically if she had broken some vow connected with the Alpha and Omega order, or if she had been engaged in some rivalry with an Adept more powerful than herself. He described the evolution and the history of the Golden Dawn, its infiltration by Aleister Crowley, the ‘Great Beast’, and a psychic struggle between Mathers and Crowley, which involved the setting on of a baying pack of ‘psychic bloodhounds’.
Although she appeared to know the members of the Golden Dawn, Norah was said to be a member of an offshoot, the Alpha and Omega, where, I felt, more material about her must lie. This temple seemed to be little documented, but my husband was able to produce The Magicians of the Golden Dawn, by Ellic Howe (Routledge, 1972), not by any means an easy book, although very interesting. There was one reference only, to a Brodie-Innes who ‘became Praemonstrator of Dr Berridge’s Alpha and Omega Temple, which was under the Mathers obedience.’ We appealed to our friend, Melvin Harris, author and repository of esoteric data, and he advised me to get in touch with Robert Gilbert, antiquarian bookseller of Bristol, who has himself actually published on the Golden Dawn, and he very kindly sent me some references.
The first thing that I learned was that we all had the name wrong: it should be NETTA FORNARIO. (’More Italian-sounding,’ said my husband.) Dion Fortune, in her Psychic Self-Defence (1930), ‘knew Miss Fornario intimately’, and could say that she was of unusual intellectual calibre, especially interested in the Green Ray elemental contacts, ‘too much interested in them for my peace of mind, and I became nervous and refused to cooperate with her...it appeared to me that “Mac” as we called her, was going into very deep waters. She had evidently been on an astral expedition from which she never returned. She was not a good subject for such experiments, for she suffered from some defect of the pituitary body.’ Had her body, ‘of poor vitality in any case’ become chilled lying thus exposed in mid-winter? (If true, and it is vague, this is a revelation, an important part of her medical history, probably not known to the certifying doctor.)
Francis King, in Ritual Magic in England (1970), says that when Miss Netta Fornario left London in the autumn of 1929 she took with her to Iona a number of packing-cases containing enough furniture to equip a small house, and clearly intended her stay on the island to be a lengthy one. She ‘hated’ her father. She boarded throughout with a Mrs MacRae. (?) The body was naked ‘except for the black cloak of the Hiereus (an important officer in a Golden Dawn Temple)’. Francis King thinks it certain ‘that either Miss Fornario was the victim of some sort of magical attack, or, and most people will believe this to be the more probable explanation, was suffering from an acute attack of schizophrenia and believed herself subjected to such an attack.’ Francis King says that Dion Fortune actually accused Mrs Mathers of the psychic murder of Netta Fornario.
However, in Sword of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn (1975), Ithell Colquhoun notes, that ‘As the incidents leading to Miss Fornario’s death did not take place until some 18 months after Moïna’s [Mrs Mathers’] own, the charge is scarcely worth refuting. Even if the latter had been living, the scratches found on the corpse are less likely to have resulted from an attack by Moïna in the form of a monster cat, than from running naked in the dark over rough country.’ The same author defines the Alpha and Omega Lodge as established by Mrs Mathers in 1919 when she returned to London after her husband’s death, and the name ‘Netta Fornario’ is clearly listed with names of other members. It was officially closed on the outbreak of war in 1939.
Alan Richardson, in Priestess: the Life and Magic of Dion Fortune (1987), has new informati
on: ‘One of Dion’s best friends in the late 1920s was Netta Fornario, who wrote many articles on occultism under the name Mac Tyler. Miss Fornario was something of an artist and one who (rightly) felt that Britain had gone wrong in the 7th century in choosing, at the Synod of Whitby, to follow the Pauline Christianity of Rome rather than that of Columba in Iona.’
There ended my extra, psychic material, as I might call it. I longed to discover an old painting – of faces floating in clouds, perhaps – signed N.E.F. Contemplating the notion of poisoning, it occurred to me that Netta’s luggage could have held any strange substance. Thinking about hallucinogens, (and Italian women are wise about fungi) I wondered lightly if the psilocybe species perhaps, or the fairy toadstool, Fly Agaric, grow on Iona in November. I can take the Corvine quest no further, and offer this tentative essay to my fellow writers in the hope that one of them will go on to produce the book that is surely there and ought to be written. We rarely leave the illusory safety of our home in the hills, these days, and I have no desire to take that route over the sea to Iona.
CHAPTER 18
THE STOCKBRIDGE BABY FARMER
One October afternoon in the Stockbridge district of Edinburgh, a group of young boys were larking around in Cheyne Street. There was a longish parcel, dirty, scuffed, lying out in the open on a bare, so-called ‘green’, and when they kicked it open, hoping for a lucky find, such as a discarded pair of boots, the dead body of a baby unrolled in front of them.
Scared, the boys ran for a policeman, and came back with Constable Stewart, who timed the report at 1.30pm, Friday, October 26th, 1888. He saw that the body was badly decomposed, and bore it off straight away to the city mortuary, where, the following day, Dr Henry Littlejohn examined the small corpse, which presented a mummified appearance, and was tightly wrapped in an oilskin coat. It was male, weighed 11lb 4oz and was 29 inches in length, and the child had been about one to one and a half years old, in good previous health. A ligature – an apron string, probably – had been applied twice around the neck, drawn hard, so that it was embedded in the skin. The only possible explanation for its presence was wilful strangulation.
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