The Blood Dimmed Tide

by Anthony Quinn

  The rest of the court kept watching Grimes, expecting another outburst from the clearly angry Inspector, whose eyes were very much on me, his mouth twisted in a sneer.

  ‘Your police work, no matter how pressing, must wait until the end of this hearing,’ the judge admonished Grimes.

  Ignoring the tension within the courtroom, the judge spent the next half an hour berating the Daughters of Erin for bringing scandal and social turmoil to Sligo.

  ‘You are even more of an abomination to Ireland than we had dared to suppose,’ he said. ‘Not only are you traitors to your country and your class but also to the fairer sex, and a disgrace in the eyes of polite society generally.’

  A hiss of indignation rippled through Clarissa’s supporters. The judge then lectured the jury on their role and warned them not to read certain newspapers, which were intent on covering the trial in the most sensationalist manner possible.

  Time seemed to stretch as the judge spoke on about some obscure points of law. I began to sweat and cough, while Grimes’ face appeared to cool and grow at ease; across the crammed room his features were utterly calm. I was trapped within the very heart of Sligo’s judicial system, next door to his gaol, with his police officers likely filling the hall outside the courtroom. He stared at me like a man who knows his quarry has reached the end of its running.

  The judge adjourned the trial until after lunch and the court rose as one. As soon as the judge disappeared through a side-door, I produced the folder of documents and made a beeline for the defence counsel, a young man whose side profile looked oddly familiar. From behind, I could hear the thud of heavy feet as Grimes pounded towards me. However, I was confident he was too far away to reach me in time. I was within touching distance of the solicitor when a pair of court guards blocked my path. I tried to push them aside, but they promptly grabbed me by the arms and threw me against a wall.

  The solicitor turned and eyed me with surprise. Recognition dawned on both of us. He was one of the freed Republican prisoners I had talked to in the hold of the mail boat.

  ‘Let him through, officers,’ he said. ‘I know this man. He is an Englishman charged with an investigation in connection with this trial.’

  I hurriedly explained the importance of the folder to Clarissa’s defence. His young face creased in puzzlement as he flicked through the papers. Grimes spotted the documents and for a moment staggered as if he’d been struck a physical blow. He almost fell to the floor but then he pulled himself together. His voice rose to an hysterical pitch.

  ‘Whatever he has handed you, I swear it is a lie, on my honour as a gentleman and an officer.’

  ‘If you are not aware of what is in the folder then how can you be sure it is a lie?’ said the solicitor. He turned and examined me. ‘I shall be making an application to have this man made a witness of the court. He will come under its protection and be exempt from any harassment. If you try to arrest him, I will have you charged for contempt of court.’

  Grimes face showed the strain of a man making fresh calculations, working out the odds, trying to determine if there was another way of levelling the playing field.

  ‘This is a British Court in the British Empire,’ he declared. ‘You don’t have proof of anything.’

  But the solicitor ignored him. My sense of time returned as I was led into an antechamber and asked to recount my tale in front of the judge. Even though there were discrepancies, mixed-up dates, shadows lingering around some of the events in my account, for the first time since landing on Irish soil, I felt a sure sense of knowledge and control in what I was saying. I no longer had the sensation that I was floating through a plot created by others, chasing invented ghosts, half-waking dreams and dead silences. Ireland itself grew less dark and secret.

  As I spoke, I could hear the protesters outside the courthouse. The square rang to the sound of their voices; they were in victorious mode, singing low heroic chants, confident that their country’s destiny now lay firmly in their hands. For too long Ireland had been a ghost-country, appearing and disappearing in the great cycles of time, hovering in between remaining a loyal colony and being born as a glorious Celtic nation. It had haunted the minds of its people with its tragic mythology for long enough. The Easter Rising had been the revolution to end all that. Everything was changing utterly, because the country had finally encountered blood and reality, and now the modern forces of democracy and the social conscience of political leaders would help a new nation be born. Ireland’s exile from the land of faeries and enchanted dreams was just beginning.

  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

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  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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