The Blood Dimmed Tide

by Anthony Quinn

  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.

  ‘Is everything alright?’ I asked.

  ‘Do I look alright?’

  ‘You don’t sound too worse for wear.’ I enjoyed the comical sight of the celebrated poet and dandy upside down in a ditch full of mud and dandelions.

  ‘Just smelling the delightful hedgerow flowers,’ he said, picking himself up.

  He looked a little shaky so we changed mounts, my horse being the more restful of the two. A short while later, we met Grimes and his men emptying the contents of the barrels into a road-side stream. The policemen had been working hard. Their beards were matted with sweat, their uniforms covered in dust and straw, evidence that they had been rummaging deep in hidden corners and crevices. Behind them, a tall lean figure stood urinating into the hedge. The yellow stream sprayed over foaming branches of whitethorn blossom. The figure turned and did up his buttons. It was Wolfe Marley, his collar raised higher than usual against the fresh mountain winds.

  ‘What are you searching for?’ inquired Yeats.

  ‘Barrels of buttermilk,’ said Grimes.

  ‘Why the show of strength?’

  ‘Because they belong to the devil.’

  Marley grinned. ‘Inspector Grimes is an Ulster evangelical. To the true Bible Protestant, the devil’s buttermilk is whiskey and porter.’

  ‘We’re rounding up illegal contraband and smugglers,’ explained Grimes, his eyes burning with the fire of the zealot. ‘The coves and creeks of this coast are ideal for smuggling. On moonless nights, a train of ponies climb the local cliffs laden with gallons of brandy and chests of tea. The contraband is concealed throughout the country in run-down houses or hidden in haystacks. Sometimes buried in graves, painted black and disguised as rocks, or dug into holes in gardens and meadows.’

  The Inspector examined the horses carefully. I could see his eyes searching for illicit goods, hidden weapons, a secret stash of brandy. His eyes lighted on the wooden instrument case strapped to Yeats’ saddle. Exhibit ‘A’ were the words about to form on his lips.

  ‘We carry no smuggled goods,’ said Yeats. ‘And have declared our dutiable merchandise. Good day to you.’

  He squeezed his horse through the policemen. Marley and Grimes stepped back quickly. They watched us intensely as though convinced we were wrong-doers, as though we might be loaded with a supernatural cargo that could not be confiscated.

  We drove the horses over haggard bog land scarred with turf-diggers’ trenches. A few dead trees raised their heads like the antlers of tussling stags. We trotted to the crest of a hill from which we could see the silver strand and black cliffs of Blind Sound hovering in a sea mist. Nothing moved in the soaked landscape. Yeats’ face looked exhausted, shot through with the fatigue of the previous evening’s spiritual trials. He hunched forward as if about to nod off to sleep.

  ‘Tell me, is Georgie aware of what happens during a séance?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ His answer was curt. After a few paces, he elaborated. ‘While the spirits’ critical powers are awake, hers sleep. She is quite literally a medium, the conduit through which the spirit guides deliver their instructions.’

  ‘Instructions?’

  Yeats flinched. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought their messages were a font of metaphors for your poetry, the foundation of your philosophy on the afterlife.’

  ‘Yes. But, unfortunately, the spirits have proved highly inefficient,’ he said ruefully. ‘Three-quarters of what they deliver is devoted to matters so personal it is completely unusable in any book of philosophy or poetry. At least one that will pass the censor’s eye. When I press them on intellectual matters, they tell me I am not yet ready to know the truth. They say it will take time.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘A thousand years,’ he said with a despairing sigh. ‘In the meantime they are strangely preoccupied with the marital bed. In fact, if they were alive I’d suspect them of being avid proponents of the theories of Marie Stopes.’ Yeats’ gaunt throat twitched a bitter laugh that never reached his lips.

  The horses stopped and scuffed their hooves on a narrow bridge over a stream running wild between black rocks. The play of shadow and reflection agitated the animals. They sidled nervously. Yeats opted for a few calming words of poetry, reciting several times ‘Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play’, until we were able to steer the animals across. Unfortunately, he was unable to cure himself of a similar affliction. The note of protest in his voice expanded.

  ‘After the first few dazzling days, when great truths seemed to emerge from their messages, the negative spirits began to take over the séances. And then our marriage bed.’ The horses stopped unexpectedly, ears twitching. Then they moved on.

  ‘For instance, at a particular time of the month, they order us to make love twice in a certain position, so that a child might be conceived. They have promised me a boy, a reincarnation of a Butler ancestor, as long as I keep satisfying Georgie. As long as I love her and don’t leave her. As long as I stay with her and ignore the distractions of Maud and her daughter Iseult.’

  I had seen Georgie furtively reading reports on Marie Stopes’ research in the hotel sitting room. Her theories stressed the husband’s duty to give his wife sexual satisfaction. Yeats was too much of a scholar, I feared, to ever become a happily married man or a devoted father. He needed clues, signs and instructions, even in his relationship with women, but in home life there were none.

  Georgie’s bouts of magical writing were a ghostly form of therapy, I began to suspect, a cunning wifely strategy to ensure that her sexual appetites were being met by her middle-aged and reluctant husband. It was no secret among occult circles that Yeats suffered from sexual inhibition and shyness. I had often heard him after several glasses of wine refer to the female’s nether regions as ‘those dark declivities’.

  ‘Shouldn’t a marriage be based upon freedom rather than coercion?’ I asked.

  ‘Precisely. But I am being suffocated by these spirits. I shall not submit to their authority any longer. I don’t care what tactics they deploy, what warnings or threats they issue. And I refuse to submit to a woman, to be a slave to her demands.’

  His cheeks were flushed with colour. At first, I thought that his vigour was returning but then I worried for the state of his mind. His emotions were threatening to well up and overpower his reasoning.

  ‘I want the life I had before marriage. I want to be able to make mistakes, to have faults, to be selfish, to be human.’

  We were passing Lissade
ll’s stables and the high whinnying noises of horses recognising each other filled the air. Our mounts snorted and stretched their necks, their tails afloat behind. We leaned forward and with considerable effort managed to settle them.

  ‘I think her spirit hates me,’ said Yeats. ‘She is full of anger. Female anger.’

  ‘Whose spirit?’

  ‘Rosemary O’Grady’s.’

  ‘She entrusted a vital mission to you.’

  ‘Why me? What do I know about her life? What do I know about murder?’ He laughed bitterly. ‘My country is descending into chaos, my wife is desperate to conceive while I am not, and here we are forced to play the roles of Sherlock Holmes and Watson. We’ll be lucky not to end up with knives in our backs.’ A sick look came over his face as if he were suddenly suspended over a precipitous cliff. It struck me that since he had fallen from the horse he had been unusually garrulous and forthcoming on personal matters.

  ‘How do you feel from your fall?’

  ‘What fall?’

  ‘You came off the horse about twenty minutes ago. Abruptly. You must have struck your head.’

  He glared at me indignantly. ‘But we’ve been riding splendidly all afternoon.’

  ‘We changed horses after the fall. You’re on the quieter beast.’

  Yeats examined his horse’s head. He closed his eyes and went deathly pale. I pestered him with several medical questions and diagnosed a mild concussion. I advised him we should head back to the hotel immediately.

  ‘Nonsense,’ he replied. ‘I’ll walk it off.’

  He dismounted and pressed his head against my saddle. ‘Are you alright?’ I asked, my anxiety for his health rising.

  ‘Of course,’ he replied. His long arm reached round to check that the wooden box was still in place. He unslung it and tied it round his shoulder. We secured the horses to a tree and walked the final stretch to the beach at Blind Sound.